Die Hard With a Holly Wreath
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post can be seen here. I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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My wife and I have a saying we use quite a lot: “Mexico makes easy things hard and hard things easy.” We experienced perhaps the perfect example of both this past week.
We’ve lived in Mexico for just over six years now and though her Spanish is getting pretty good, I consider myself only semi-lingual. I can speak and read some Mexican Spanish and I used to have a decent knowledge of English, but these days, I don’t feel completely competent in either language. Spanish is more difficult than I’d anticipated and studying it has confused my English somewhat. Regardless of which language I speak, in the middle of a sentence, I often find that I cannot remember the correct word in either tongue so I’ll make up a word just to get my idea across. After six years of study and struggle, I’m beginning to realize that perhaps my strength will be Spanglish.
Accordingly, since today is December 25—or 25 December as the rest of the English-speaking world apparently says—I will wish you all a feliz Christmidad. Or a merry Navimas, whichever you prefer.
When I came to here from California, I got a Mexican driver's license. My California one was for cars and motorcycles, but here they give you one or the other. If you want both, you have to have two licenses. (A minor example of “easy made hard.” A better one is coming.) Since I came here with a motorcycle but not a car, I chose that license, but earlier this year, it expired. Since I sold my bike last year and we now have a car, I wanted to get a license to drive instead of ride.
The friendly man helping me at the license place told me that since I’d never had a license to drive a car in Mexico and no longer had a valid U.S. license, I would be required to take both the written and driving tests. Could I take it in English? No, I could not. They had those same little computerized tests with touch screens that you see in the U.S. and they’re only in Spanish. After only a few minutes of conversation in Spanish, he knew I’d be unable to decipher it, so he offered to translate any words I had trouble with. His English was as half-assed as my Spanish, but we managed to get by with Spanglish. I sat at the desk and began the test, he stood behind me.
I was able to understand the first question but not all of the words in the four multiple-choice answers. I asked him to translate a couple of words here and there and he did. After all that, I chose the correct answer. The first question took me a two or three minutes. It was a 30-question test and we could both see this could easily stretch into the night.
I moved on to the second question. After fumbling for the meaning of the question, my helper said in his broken English, “I think it is three.” By this, he meant that the answer was “C”. I clicked it, it was correct, and I was on to the third question.
This one I had trouble translating so I looked up the entire question in a Spanish translator on my phone. It came back as, “It is considered continuous turns, the turns to the right.” I told my helper that it didn’t make sense in English and was not even a question. He told me the answer was “B”. I clicked it and it was correct. Three questions down and we’d already spent nearly ten minutes.
From that point, things went more quickly. I’d click for the next question and before I could finish reading it, he’d tell me the answer. I finished the test—we finished the test—in less than fifteen minutes and achieved a perfect score. The driving test was next: he accompanied me to my car, and I drove him around the block. I mentioned that driving tests in the U.S. tended to be a little more complicated than that and he very logically said, “I just want to make sure you can drive.” Makes perfect sense. You can tell in 30 seconds whether a person knows how to drive a car. Hard things easy. Viva México!
The “easy things hard” aspect happened the next day.
My wife used to visit the grocery store a couple of times a week but now orders from them online and several boxes of food are delivered to our home a few hours later. Another example of “hard things easy,” but after the pandemic, I assume most big grocery stores have this.
But—there’s always a “but,” especially here, it seems—the picture online showed a package of snow peas and so she chose “1” from the dropdown menu. When our groceries arrived, there was a single snow pea pod rattling around by itself at the bottom of a box of food. Apparently, one needs to know exactly how many individual snow peas one requires.
We knew living here would present difficulties, but properly supplying a stir fry was not one we’d anticipated. Nor had I ever thought a stranger would take a driver’s license test for me, but that’s Mexico. We came here looking for something different and this country has that at every turn.
In my long joke-writing career, I’ve come to believe that surprise is the key to humor. And, since nothing bores me more than predictability, Mexico has proven to be the most exciting and hilarious place I’ve ever lived.
Now let’s see what exciting and hilarious surprises Wayno put under the tree for us in his Christmas week of Bizarro cartoons…
Is it a coincidence that Santa is Satan spelled sideways?
A clever commentator on my IG page said, “Celebrating the 200th anniversary of you asking me this question.”
Just be thankful you didn’t hire Dave MacraméPlantHanger.
He’s still disgruntled about Thomas the Tank Engine breaking up with him.
Same reason the Druids abandoned the first one.
If you’re not on the mailing list for my graphic novel, Peyote Cowboy, I just posted a new episode yesterday. It’s my holiday gift to you. Unless you don’t read it. Read it for free here.
Until next week, if you want to write “years” in Spanish, be sure to put a tilde over the N.
BIZARRO SHOP Fun and cheap!
COMICS KINGDOM SHOP (now with Bizarro products!)
… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels