alejandro is marrying arwen

alejandro se casa con arwen

Alejandro

When he’s not building websites, reading, riding his bicycle or eating peanuts, Alejandro spends his time trying to fool people (himself included) into believing that he’s working on a PhD in Computational Linguistics.

Cuando no está creando sitios de Internet, leyendo, montando en bicicleta o comiendo maní, Alejandro se dedica a convencer a algunas personas (y a sí mismo) que está tratando de avanzar en la realización de una tésis de doctorado en lingüística e informática.

Alejandro was born in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia. I don’t know many stories about his early years, partly because (as he often reminds me) he has a terrible memory, so anything that happened to him before the age of eight or so is a blur to him. I’ve seen pictures though… for example, Alejandro at age five or six, running in the backyard of a little red house with a big smile on his face and his suspenders on backwards. Or the one of him maybe a year later, in his living room, looking short but mighty wearing a splendid Batman disguise.

These days, he has no Batman disguise, and no suspenders, but his love of all things unexpected and mysterious has endured.

For example, this decision to do a doctorate in Computational Linguistics. Who’s ever heard of Computational Linguistics anyway? Talk about mysterious… hearing the term makes most people blink and change the subject. For those of you who are still wondering (either because you haven’t had the chance to ask Alejandro about it yet or because you had no clue what he was talking about when he answered), Computational Linguistics is about creating ways for computers to deal with human languages better. That can mean developing better Internet search engines (like Yahoo or Google), making computer-voice announcements/instructions easier to understand, or even helping to develop artificial intelligence. All of this means that Alejandro can often be found in front of his computer, staring into a sea of (to me) incomprehensible code text involving chunklords and algorithms, or consulting previously-drawn sentence charts such as the one illustrating this page.

But when the two of us met, Alejandro had never heard of Computational Linguistics either. He was the new Spanish teaching assistant at Lycee Branly, a high school in northern France where I was the not-quite-as-new English teaching assistant. Since we were both getting to know life in France for the first time, we became friends quickly, sharing our impressions of life in Europe and important new information (such as, how the heck do you get a French library card anyway?).

Boulogne is a fishing village in the far north of France: picturesque and peaceful, but not the most exciting place to be a teenager. When Alejandro and I became more than friends a couple of months later, one of our mutual students spotted us holding hands in the grocery store. His jaw dropped in an expression of utter astonishment, which quickly transformed itself into a malicious ‘a-ha, fresh gossip’ grin. By the time we appeared in front of our students the next day, they ALL knew that the two teaching assistants were dating each other. When my students tried asking me about him, I turned bright red and continued the planned lesson, simply shaking my head at my students’ periodic fits of giggles. When Alejandro’s students asked him about me, he stopped his planned lesso entirely and told them that intead he would answer any question they wanted to ask about me and our relationship—the only requirement being that they ask it in perfect Spanish. The result was half an hour of unusually concentrated effort on the students’ part to formulate personal questions in Spanish! Luckily (as he knew) their vocabulary wasn’t nearly sophisticated enough to ask about anything too personal…

Alejandro loves the visual arts, and two of his favorite hobbies are photography and jewelry-making (he works primarily with silver). He also enjoys languages: he studied Russian as well as French at college in Colombia, and because he went to bilingual Spanish-English schools from age 3 until his high school graduation, his English is nearly native. He reads all sorts of books, but particularly likes a good dark fantasy or mystery with complicated plot twists and a surprise ending that you can only guess if you pay close attention to the half-hidden clues along the way.

He also has a very silly sense of humor, a very quiet voice, and although he is a man of steady, non-rollercoaster-like emotions, I think it’s fair to say that he is very excited (almost as excited as I am) about our wedding!

These days, Alejandro is trying to become fully aware of the extent to which his life has been changing these last few weeks and will continue to change in the weeks to come.

Por estos días, Alejandro trata caer en la cuenta del punto al que su vida ha venido cambiando en las ultimas semanas, y el punto al que seguirá cambiando en las semanas por venir.