Awesome.

-Awesome- replied one of my 10 year olds today to my, by now must be growing stale, greeting of -Hi! how are you?- Cool! I thought: I must be teaching them something after all, it’s only taken 6 months for a kid to a) reply to me, and, b) use the word “awesome.”

And awesome’s how I felt today. It’s how I responded this morning to the same question when I was buying olives and feta cheese at El Raco de Ferri, a booth at the central market run by an exceedingly friendly Greek guy with really frizzy hair. -Estoy muy bien, pues…un poco resacado, pero de buen humor. - Translation: -I´m Awesome, but I´ve got a bit of a hangover. I am, however, in very good humour.

Yeah, I had a great night last night. Having a half-empty bottle of wine, I felt obliged to “echarme una copa...o dos” and “terminarla.” I did so in a very civilized manner, while watching the fifth instalment of El Quixote... Then I got drunk and cleaned the house. Had a wonderful time. My rationale for cleaning the house in this moment, if you´ll believe it, was this: since I´m drunk I may as well clean because I sure can´t study Spanish in this condition, moreover, I may even enjoy the cleaning, and then tomorrow, when I´m sobre, I won´t have to waste time cleaning and I can study. The mirror-image of this thinking would, of course, be the one habitually invoked by my mother: “sure I might as well be drunk as I am.”

This kind of fundamentally economic thinking has characterized my decisions more and more of late, especially when it comes to time management. Referred to as “opportunity cost” by economists, it implies the necessary surrender of one choice in return for another. If, for example, I´m reading a book, or speaking in english, I´m not reading or speaking in Spanish; If I spend money on lunch, I won´t eat dinner, and so on. Which brings us back to cleaning the house with a bottle of wine: aside from representing what, at the time, was the best allocation of my resources, it sure is a nice surprise to wake up and find your toilet´s sparkling clean, and you can´t even quite remember why…