On being a mystical interpreter in Scottish courtrooms

Interpreting in court in Scotland I stand beside the booth of the accused. "Milord, could I ask the fiscal to speak slowly so as to allow the interpreter to translate to the accused," I say, interrupting the fiscal and  addressing a judge wearing a neat gray, curly wig and starched white collars. The solicitor defending the accused mumbles through tattered black robes that resemble the wings of an old bat or vampire. When the accused speaks, I say, "I'm guilty" or "I'm not guilty." When referring to myself, I speak in the third person, saying "the interpreter." When the solicitor refers to himself, I say in Spanish, "if I could ask your Lordship to consider..." Etc. I am all the "I"s in the room, my goal is to disappear, to become simply a transparent medium, a facilitator for others' speech. I do not have a name, I am anyone who speaks. There is something truly mystical in being an interpreter, sitting at the heart of all these matters that have nothing to do with me but which become temporarily my own. Becoming many different people, allowing myself to be the embodiment of countless selves. 

Little paparazzis, celebrities to no one

I have a favourite tree in Glasgow. I go and sit in it whenever I feel a bit agitated, or happy, or sad. It works for all emotions really. It is carpeted in soft moss and hangs over the river Kelvin. It's actually two trees intertwined with each other. Beautiful creature. Anyway, one day I was sitting in this tree, gazing over the river and feeling absolutely nothing. Suddenly I turned around to see a Chinese woman flagrantly taking a picture of me with her bright pink smartphone.

Neither of us knew what to do. She stood there frozen for a few seconds holding up her phone. I had turned around really abruptly and directed my gaze directly at her, as if I knew I was being looked at. But I wasn't really thinking of anything, and although I was surprised to find myself being of photographic interest to a random passerby, I wasn't particularly annoyed. But I made no attempt to make her feel better either. She looked absolutely terrified, as if embarrassed for blatantly invading my private moment of contemplation, and very awkwardly put the phone away and continued walking.

It made me think that we are no longer alone in this world. As if suddenly we have all become little celebrities, and can't do anything without the danger of being captured by a slew of cameras. We need to go around under cover, sunglasses and hoods, and try and stay off everyone else's radar. Or we need to be hyper-conscious of how we present ourselves to the world.

I imagine this woman posting this image somewhere (why else take a photo if not to post it somewhere?), with a comment on how romantic life in Scotland is. Something really cheesy that has nothing to do with how I was experiencing that moment. Now I am for ever trapped in this cheesy, unrealistic image of Scottish life, perhaps liked by friends back in China who wistfully dream of going abroad, and doing a PhD at Glasgow University, for example. The picture elicits in these hypothetical friends mixed feelings of inspiration and envy, happiness and self-loathing. The usual Facebook experience. Which makes me think of social media as similar to reading Hello! magazine. Except we are much more involved because it is our real life friends living wonderful lives. How much do we project onto these images, and are we able to deal with it?

The problems with blogging

I need to write. I really, really do. And I miss blogging a lot. It used to be a way to keep me writing. Instantly publishing and getting feedback. What could be better? It's the future. It has been the future for me since about 2003, but for some reason I turned back, experienced some kind of cataclysmic soul-transforming emptiness and lack of success, and here we are back at square one.

I've been having a few problems with blogging:

1. Everybody's reading this, baby. When everybody* started using internet, not just a few hunch-backed geeks and my closed circle of friends but also my mum, my spinster aunties, my work colleagues, my clients, the random dude I met at the coffee shop six months ago... I realised how important it was to maintain a fairly respectable, well-groomed online persona. Like suddenly everything I blogged would be down in history for the rest of eternity, so I'd better not say any bad words or talk behind people's backs or say anything that may be perceived as racist or discriminatory or complain about my work or in general say anything that may be bad in any possible way. This obsession with political correctness sort of crushed my desire to write, like suddenly it was just too much to be normal and polite in the virtual world as well as in the real one. This is an interesting problem that I will address in a future post. 
2. I have some language issues. That should be a good thing for a writer, as it creates many avenues to explore, but I have so much fear of delivering some sort of solipsistic hybrid navel-gazingly Spanglishized mud brew that I often end up not writing at all. 
3. Kind of related to #1 again, and I'm sure many people are experiencing problems in relation to this. What are the rules for online sharing? I'm sure I've broken all of them. I haven't tended to my blog in about 5 million years, I kept an outdated blog template going for as long as I could stretch it, I can't figure out what to do with my Picasa account, I have about 20 online profiles and none of them are consistent with each other, and then I've gone and switched my blog to another language probably alienating my 8 loyal readers for ever. Oh well, c'est la vie, everything is always changing, isn't it. In a world of constant flux, I've decided to keep my old blog address and the old content there too. But with a nice new tweetable, facebookable design that doesn't draw too much attention to the fact that I've been blogging for a decade and nothing has ever come of it.

*All right not everybody - the actual growth I've experienced has been from 4.1% of the world's total population in 1999 (when I first started sharing my writing online) to close to 35% of the world's total population at the moment... if you don't believe me do your research, I refuse to put appeasing blue links on those numbers to make you feel like they're legit!

I'm back for a little while.

Sorry, Spanish-speaking friends, I'm writing in English for the moment.

Maybe eventually I will succeed in my ability to write in English and Spanish at the same time so that nobody ever gets disappointed. Maybe each post can include a little Babel fish that actually relays my voice perfectly in both languages, with all the cultural nuances and obvious poetic beauty (heh) that you would hear from me in real life. Until then, please bear with me.

Artistic practice

Hay que matar al ego todos los días, tener paciencia infinita al no ver resultados, trabajar en silencio y en secreto hasta que un día salga una hermosa flor que pertenecerá a todos menos a uno.

Y luego hay que ver a esa hermosa flor como un producto de alguna misteriosa energía divina o consciencia colectiva, no como el trabajo personal de uno, no como el producto de la propia belleza, inteligencia o habilidades. Ningún mérito se tiene, nunca. Uno nada más se presentó ante la hoja, y dejó que sucediera.

Es la única manera de mantener al ego cortado atrás, como un arbusto de mala hierba. La mala hierba que ahorca la verdad y produce una masa inservible, hasta nociva.

Dicho eso, hay que admitir que a veces es muy difícil continuar. Uno quisiera ver los resultados al instante, que le pusieran estrellita en la frente, que le aplaudieran, que le subieran de puesto. Empleado del mes, tal vez? Pero ese no debe ser el motor de la búsqueda, al menos no para mí, eso siento. Hay que encontrar otro motor: la alegría, el espíritu en todas las cosas. Ser un canal.

Es difícil, le susurro al internet a las dos de la madrugada. Qué tonta.