Author: David Diego Rodríguez, Ph.D.

I teach Spanish and I am a standup comedian.

Teaching


World History with Mr. Gibson, Divine Heart Seminary, Donaldson, Indiana

I’m still undecided on whether or not I like teaching. On good days, teaching doesn’t even feel like a chore and I truly enjoy interacting with the students. On bad days, I look at the bright side of things: At least no one shot at me! But I shouldn’t get so dramatic. But that’s one of the reasons I never wanted to teach in the Chicago Public Schools.

I chose to teach college and university students because I would rather deal with adults. All the students are at least eighteen years old. University students have the responsibility to study and do their homework. If they fail the course, it’s their fault for not having studied enough and doing all the required homework.

Actually, I like interacting with the students. We really have fun discussing a wide variety of topics, probably because they’re nowhere to be found on the syllabus. I do go off on a tangent sometimes in the classroom, but then I remember to somehow incorporate something from the Spanish lesson into conversation. And even though I stray from the lesson from time to time, I still manage to teach everything that’s listed on the syllabus in a way that keeps the students entertained while they learn Spanish.

What I do hate about teaching is all the bureaucracy. I hate doing all the paperwork involved. It’s bad enough I have a lot of homework to correct, but then I have to record all the grades and answer to my bureaucratic superiors.

DDR

Pop


My father Diego, 2509 W. Marquette Road, Chicago, Illinois 60629

Pop. Just Pop. That’s what I call my father now. My brother Jerry’s children who are half Irish call him Papa Diego. I still call him Pop because when I was little we only spoke Spanish at home and my parents were mami and papi. When you’re very little, say up to about five or six years old, calling your parents mami and papi is still acceptable. When I started playing at the Davis Square Park, other kids called me baby if they heard me call my parents mami and papi. So, eventually I began calling them Mom and Pop. Definitely more acceptable by my peers of preteens. But I could never write pap because everyone would mispronounce in English. So that’s how he became Pop, just plain Pop.

I remember, once when I was at the park, Bobby–I never did learn his real last name–started a fight with me. I must have been about six at the time. I still had not learned the protocol that if someone hit you, you must hit them right back, or they would forever pick on you. Bobby punched my face and I ran home crying. I got home quickly because we lived right across the street from the park at 4501 S. Hermitage Avenue. Both my mami and papi were home. My father was somewhere in the apartment; how someone could disappear from his family in a four-room apartment is beyond me. Anyway, my mother wanted to know why I was crying. I said, “Bobby hit me!” but in Spanish. “¡Bobby me pegó! My mother thought I had said papi hit me. My mother immediately began scolding my father–who was forced to come out of hiding.

It actually took a couple minutes for me clear up the confusion and prove my father’s innocence to my mother. My father took me to the park to look for Bobby, but he had left. Somebody was probably trying to beat him up for some prior transgression. As I would learn later–mainly because Bobby was always in my life no matter how I tried to avoid him–no one liked Bobby because he was an all-round  troublemaker. Once someone tried to shoot him, but they missed him and shot the person sitting next to him on the park bench. Luckily, the bullet went through the fleshy part of his thigh. Everyone was troubled by the fact that such an act of violence had failed to restore peace to our neighborhood by ridding everyone of Bobby for good.

But back to my father. Pop. When I started calling him Pop, no one made fun of me anymore. One unintended side-effect was that my little brothers stopped calling my parents mami and papi. That was rather sad because everyone knows how cute little children are when they call their parents mami and papi.

DDR

Time


My mother bought this clock in México

Today my brother Danny called me. I can’t remember the last time he called, but I was supposed to help him move some kind of media center into storage. The last time I was supposed to help him I kind of lost track of the time and forgot I was supposed to help him that day. He always forgot to write down my cell phone number, or he would have got a hold of me because all I was doing was shopping for bananas, apples, and oranges. That seemed to take up my entire attention span. Hence, I forgot I was supposed to help my brother.

So, anyway, I get to his condo and I immediately see the Aztec calendar/clock. “Is that the same clock that we had in our basement at 2509 W. Marquette Road?” I asked. “It is,” he said. I immediately took a picture of it with my digital camera that I had brought along for just that purpose. Well, not specifically to take a picture of the Aztec calendar/clock that used to be in our basement at 2509 W. Marquette Road, because I didn’t know it still existed, much less that my brother Danny had it hanging in his living room wall at this very moment.

Lately, I’ve been taking my camera with me to more places just in case I see something worth photographing. Danny tells me that he took the clock hands off because they had somehow broke. Gee, I wonder how? I’m surprised that the clock survived at all because we used to play very rough in the basement. Things were always flying in our basement and caroming off the ceiling or the walls–if not objects that were never designed to fly like pillows, sofa cushions, or books, then human bodies such as my brothers or me.

Now that I look at the picture of the Aztec calendar/clock, I wonder: Who was the genius who thought of putting a clock in the center of the Aztec calendar. I’m not sure where it came from, but my mother probably brought back as a souvenir on one of her many trips to Mexico. No matter how many times my mother went to Mexico, she always brought back more souvenirs. She wanted to move and live in Mexico, but since she couldn’t, she was bringing Mexico back to Chicago, one souvenir at a time.

DDR

Developing pictures


How long ago did we take this picture?

Lately, I’ve been looking at a lot of pictures. Mainly so I can put some on my website and blog. My family in Mexico enjoys looking at them, too. However, I’m not much of a picture taker. And I’m even worse at taking the film in to get developed. I took this picture of my twins when they were one and then forgot to develop the film for what I thought was only a year or two. When I finally got these pictures back from the developer, my sons were already in kindergarten!

The problem with not immediately developing the film is that the pictures always looked rather yellow. My sons always looked yellowish in pictures. (I shall refrain from making off-color jokes here.) Of course, I don’t have a problem developing pictures I take with a digital camera because I love computers and I immediately upload the pictures to my computer. That’s why I love digital cameras. A lot less driving to get pictures developed. And, I also bought a printer that scans and prints photos, so I actually save time and money. So now I have all these pictures to sort through and figure out which ones to use on my website and which ones to share with my family in Mexico. Of course, I get sidetracked whenever I look at the pictures. I start reminiscing about the past and I forget what I had started out to do in the first place. Not that I’m complaining because that’s kind of fun.

DDR

Books


This is only 20% of my library!

I love books. Especially leather-bound editions. I have many leather-bound books of the classics. I like to surround myself with these books while I write. I feel inspired when I do. I feel that my writing should be much better because I’m surrounded by all these great writers. I’ve actually read most of the books I own. Some books I have reread several times, like the humorous ones by Groucho Marx, Stephen Leacock, and Max Schulman.

When I downsized my library (I gave about two-thirds of my collection to the used bookstore when I got divorced and had to sell the house), I kept all my leather-bound books, which cost me a pretty penny. I also kept the books that were autographed by the author. I’ve met some famous writers who came speak at the University of Illinois at Chicago for conferences. I usually take their book that I’ve already read and ask the author for his or her autograph.

I used to love reading humor books (and I still do), but many were out of print, so I would go from one used bookstore to the next where I bought many of them. One day, I saw a book by Bob Hope–I thought Bob Hope was hilarious–and when I opened it to look for the price I saw that Bob Hope himself had autographed it. So obviously I had to keep his autographed book.

DDR