As I was talking to my dad and my sister in the car today, I said everything in German and in Farsi, like I have been doing whenever the 3 of us are talking together. My sister said "You just said everything in German and then in Farsi. Do you see how much of a waste that is? We could have had so much more conversation."

Then I came home and got a message from my aunt saying that I shouldn't continue this English boycott just to prove that I can do it, because I could be missing out on a lot of social interactions and not be able to express myself. But I'm not doing it to prove I can do it. I have already known since months before it even started that I could do it. As for social interactions, I talk too much anyway even though I know that only half of what I say is important. Besides, one thing i'm worried about is that the pushiness I acquired while in Germany (which is completely normal in Germany) may be seen as rude here (when in fact I don't think it's rude at all and that the way most people in the US act is what's really rude). So if I can't say "excuse me!" if I need someone to move, I can't be called rude.

And about social situations, I think I have so far been more encouraged to be social than I ever was before, because I am always looking for stuff to go to as fodder for this experiment.

The reason I don't like speaking English is because every time I do, I feel like all people hear (and definitely all I hear), regardless of what i'm saying, is "I'm american and I will probably always have to live here and never be able to move to Germany for good."

I'm not boycotting English in order to prove anything. I'm doing this because i'll go crazy if I don't, and because every time I speak English, something just hurts and makes me feel bad about myself.

English Boycott day 23

The other day, I went to an opera night thing at a restaurant with my mom. Some friends of my mom were there, some who I hadn't seen in awhile who I wanted to talk to, and others who I had never met before who I wanted to talk to. And hardly any of them spoke Farsi or German, and only one of them spoke either of these languages fluently. So talking to people was quite a challenge.

Before the singing started, there was at least a half-hour of talking and holding drinks. It's so surprising how supportive my mom has been about my not speaking English, and how my dad doesn't understand at all why i'm doing this, when it's normally not at all this way with my parents. My mom told each person "this is my daughter, she's on strike and isn't speaking English." I sometimes just spoke German or Farsi with people and they sometimes understood what I said just by my tone of voice. It's a lot easier than pretending to be deaf and writing everything on a piece of paper like I did at the airport.

My mom told everyone about her trip with me in Austria, and also about how difficult it is to get ahold of me because of how often I avoid the telephone like it's a possessed object. One of her friends said to me "See, we're talking about you. Don't you want to say anything?" And funny enough, I didn't have anything to say, even though my mom was talking about me. I just wasn't getting the urge to add something.

Later on, with my sister, however, she suddenly refused to listen to anything I said unless I spoke English. Every time I said anything, she'd say "what?" and pretend she hadn't heard me. But she soon gave up after I continued to say stuff in Farsi.

I have slipped up a few times, so not everything is going perfectly perfect.

Before my sister had to get on a plane and go to Burning Man, she had some clothes to sell. So we went shopping. I avoided speaking English, and even spoke German at a pizza place. But when I went in search of gloves that I had been looking for, the store had them in glass cases instead of on the counter like they did the last time I went there several years ago. I had to ask someone to take the gloves out so I could see them. I decided to do it in English, because I got scared. I have bad memories of this store, because the first time I went there, they accused me in advance of shoplifting, when I have in fact never stolen anything from a store in my life and had no intention of doing so.

I immediately felt guilty for speaking English, and felt horrible anyway because asking for things in stores and buying things is exactly the type of situation that I miss doing in German, and yet it is the most difficult thing to keep doing in German. I can be sure that I won't want to speak English in a store again because for some reason it makes me feel horrible and makes me crazy.

This is how many people are needed in a band for Persian music to have all of the elements it needs.

I went to a Persian music performance with my mom, and every single occupant of one of the 100 seats in the 20 rows of the theatre was Persian. It felt great to be able to tell people to stop taking pictures with the flash turned on, or that they were in my way, in a language other than English, just like in Germany. That's one of the most frustrating things about not speaking English. I can't say "excuse me" if I need to get by someone, so I instead just have to wait. I suppose this is a good thing, however, because the usual "excuse me" or "um, excuse me please?" doesn't work in Germany. One has to say "Entschuldigung!!!" loud and firm, making it perfectly clear that the person in front of you has to move so that you can get by. Having absorbed that piece of German culture while I was there, I did not want to sound rude in the US by saying "Excuse me!!!" Well, there is no need to worry, because this English boycott has actually made me more patient by making me wait for people to move instead of automatically saying "Excuse me!!!" I think if I said "Entschuldigung" to people here, they would just look at me with no clue that I had asked them to move.

Today, my sister Lily came back from an adventure working at an organic farm, and we saw eachother for the first time in 8 months. My dad doesn't speak Farsi, and my sister doesn't speak German, and yet I had no problem talking to both of them, because they both got the gist of what I said in either language. For example, when I pointed to my sister's new nose piercing and asked "ist das neu?" she knew I was asking her if it was new. My dad has been known to understand the occasional thing in Farsi, after 12 years of being married to my mom, who always spoke to my sister and I in Farsi (the other day, I was talking to my mom on the phone, and my dad heard me say "hitchi" and started laughing. After I hung up the phone, I asked my dad what was so funny, and he said "well, you said 'nothing' so I assume she asked what you were doing.")

During my conversation with my sister in the car after getting her from the airport (in which I spoke Farsi and she spoke English), I found myself blanking on the word for "time" in Farsi. I asked my dad in German what the word for time was in Farsi (saying "wie sagt man 'Zeit' auf Persisch?"), and amazingly he knew what it was, which I was not expecting.