#209 Desigual
There is a Spanish brand of clothes that was Janne’s favorite. It’s called Desigual. The translation of this word is complex. It can be taken as inconsistent, unequal, even unfair, but that brand translates to uneven. Clothes are asymmetric and with funky designs. One half of a jacket is different from the other half.
Every time Janne would utter the word “desigual”, I would start teasing her. The natural way for Estonians to pronounce it is with the accent on the “i”, but the proper pronunciation should be at the last syllable of the word. Of course, she would double-down and would imply that a native Spanish speaker didn’t know how to pronounce it.
I am a bit of a geek on the Spanish language. I am probably one of the few people who writes with all proper punctuation as most people ignore it. We still have that archaic sign to open a question, but not many honor it anymore (¿en serio?). Just this weekend, I got triggered by the name of a food truck business and was explaining to a close friend about the grammatical and punctuation errors it had. Then I told the business owner. Janne still got a pass with her “desiiigual” though.
Uneven is a living style for me. I prefer to wear my socks in non-matching pairs. Once, I flew through Frankfurt and was picked for a random check. They asked me to take my shoes off. When the security person noticed that my socks were not of the same pair, she went to call the other three people in the security station to look at my socks and talk about how it is possible for someone to wear different socks in both feet. They didn’t know I understand a bit of German (Janne had a blast when I called her with this story).
Janne and I were not a naturally matching pair. We could have come from different universes. One of us was silence, the other noise. One of us was about transparent feelings while the other was about pushing them deep down. One of us was about non-stop activity while the other one was about non-stop curiosity. We were Pluto and Charon, and as well as those celestial bodies, we were always moving in unison.
We can’t be more uneven now: one is dead, the other alive. Yet, we still keep dancing in sync as one.
