Way to have cultural heritage

My awesome Italian phrase of the day: non me ne può fregare di meno. I could not care less. Said while shaking the hands in front of you in a "watcha doin' buddy?" manner. Annunciate slowly to show your utter disinterest. Perfetto!

You know, I've been taking AP Latin Vergil all year, and have talked to Armida a number of times about it, but for the life of me I still can't pronounce Aeneas's name in Italian. It sounds like "Uh-ney-uh" which should be simple enough, but I keep on wanting to put the s in at the end, or pronounce more vowels, or something. I try so hard, but I just can't get it. Armida was telling me about her friend's new dog, named Aenea. I didn't recognize the name (even though we've talked about the Aeneid before), which sounds distinctly more feminine than manly and heroic, so I asked if the dog was a girl. "No, è un maschio!" she replied as though reprimanding me for not knowing who Aeneas was. "Aenea è il nome di un personaggio nell'Eneide!" (Eneide = the Aeneid) Well ok, I thought, I can deal with this extremely femine sounding pronunciation of Aeneas, and added, just to show her that I had in fact heard of Aeneas: "Aenea è il personaggio nell'Eneide." "No," said Armida again. "Ulissea è il personaggio nell'Eneide." What! Woah! You're Italian, woman! You shouldn't have to be told that there's a difference between Homer and Virgil! Virgil is your history, not to mention his ancestors were in the crib when Homer was writing. Unacceptable! Though it makes me wonder how much of my history I'm pretty sketchy on. Probably a considerable amount more than I'd like to admit...

I got Othello - scusate, Otello - today in Italian and English. I'm in a theater group which is daring to do Shakespeare in Italian! Brainfreeze! I have yet to pick the scene I'm doing, but I was thinking of doing one of Iago's monologues. I just hope that I can do that; coming from Westridge I think it's totally normal to let a girl play a guy, but I don't know what this theater director's opinion on that is. I don't see why he wouldn't let me, though; it's not like we're doing the whole play, everyone's picking scenes from various Shakespeare plays. It's looking a little shaky at the moment, though, since we're all stuck on pronunciation and can't really get on to the acting, much less the memorization. The director wasn't helpful, either, when he said rather bluntly, "I would have thought you'd all be better at Italian by now, after almost 6 months here." Ummm... we're trying? I'd like to see you read a string of obscure English words and sound good, buddy. Nevertheless it's going to be pretty awesome. I'm definitely jazzed for this: who knew, Shakespeare in Italian?