At least I'm clothed and have pencils, I guess.
I am normally fairly good to my voice. I mean, I don't make a habit of screaming excessively or anything.
I blame it on the Spanish. The language, I mean, not the people. I spent the last 5 weeks of the summer biking around Cuba and learning Spanish in a haphazard sort of way, which means my vocabulary is pretty limited to bike parts, survival words (house, bed, meals and sleep all figure in prominently), and ice cream flavours (Cubans LOVE ice cream and so do I).
To give you a sense of exactly how steep my learning curve was, my pre-trip knowledge of Spanish could probably be summed up with just one phrase: "Dos cervezas por favor." Knowing how to ask for two beers in a foreign language is never a bad skill to have, but it didn't do much to prepare me for a country in which 95% of the people I met did not speak English.
I spent the first week in total damage control mode - trying to figure out how much something costs, whether I needed to pay for it in tourist or local currency, why I was being reprimanded in Jose Marti park (no bikes allowed), and so on. Luckily, by the time my mom joined me for the last 10 days of the trip, I was beginning to get a decent handle on things.
Unluckily for my voice, my mom likes to chat. A lot. And apart from some very rusty high school memories, she doesn't speak Spanish. So in addition to doing the survival and basic conversation with people we met, I suddenly found myself being asked to translate fairly complex ideas in a language I was only a month into learning.
Not that my mom didn't try on her own.
One morning when I was still recovering from two days of excruciating food poisoning, I woke up to hearing my mom agree to rent a car to Trinidad (the city, not the island) and got dressed just before our host called her taxi driver friend.
But my favourite example actually happened when I stepped out of the room, but was still within earshot of a fascinating conversation she had with another one of our hosts. It started innocently enough. Our host told my mom she had lovely skin, somehow the two of them established that she had varicose veins - and she was impressed that my mom didn't. She concluded that it must be because my mom was so active. By the time I came back, my mom was trying to explain (using a combination of gestures and choice words from her Spanish-English phrasebook) that sports might not be directly related, that she had a friend who was very active and still had them, and that said friend refused surgery for fear it would interfere with her fitness.
Let's just say my Spanish skills are not quite at 'nuance' level yet.
Whatever the cause, by the time our plane took off from Santa Clara last Saturday night, my voice was no more than a low croak. By Tuesday morning when I showed up at school, it wasn't much better, and when I finally dragged myself over to Health Services Thursday afternoon, they told me I'd better stop talking altogether or I'd do permanent damage to my vocal chords.
I figure I've probably already damaged them, but I took their advice and am hoping I halted the damage at a sultry Barbara Budd - before it skidded downhill to a crusty Tom Waits.
So it was that Friday evening, whiteboard, dry-erase marker and chocolate cake in hand, I showed up at our grad school potluck as a complete mute.
Fortunately, my 25 or so new classmates have turned out to be phenomenal people, and I am still amazed at the number of fairly in depth conversations we managed to have: me scribbling away on my whiteboard and them chatting back casually.
But I've just about had enough of this. If I have to be the one reporter in the parliamentary press scrum flailing my arms around clutching a whiteboard with my question scrawled across it... well... I am going to have a more challenging career than I was expecting.
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