False Friend

I’ve said it before but we’re having an unusual spring – much cooler and wetter than normal. It’s fine for me. I don’t think it’s particularly cold or particularly wet. Certainly not by Portland standards. However, this week was a normal week for spring. Oh crap. It’s hot. Not really, but it’s ”afoso, humido cento percento. I can’t stand it. It feels like this maybe a week out of the year in Portland and it's a horrible week. It feels like this maybe five months out of the year in Ancona. Porca miseria! Constantly sticky. Oppressive. I need a shower after walking up the four flights of stairs to the office in the morning. I need a shower after eating lunch. I need a shower after walking home in the evening. My hands always feel dirty. On the plus side, this sort of weather is condusive to thunderstorms and we get some doozies complete with sheet lightning, stomach rattling thunder and fat drops of rain. Fortunately, on most evenings, a breeze usually starts blowing in the early evening and the air clears-up and the temperatures come down.

With the warm weather, life is moving from inside to outside. The night air rings with the sound of people freed from the clasp of their winter solitude, set loose on the sidewalks and squares of the neighborhood. My apartment is in a building that backs onto an open square in the center that is bordered by separate buildings on the other three sides. In a nicer complex, the open square would be a garden or a courtyard but in ours we have a parking lot. Va bè. As life moves outside, the evenings are filled with the sounds of the residents in the other apartments: the couple arguing about something from the day, an old lady singing to herself as she hangs her laundry, two young sisters playing on their porch, a father singing to his baby-daughter as her puts her to bed. There is something to be said for having a house and the space and privacy it affords (and I certainly miss my basement full of bikes) but it’s also charming and comforting to be surrounded by these lives and to share a glance or a smile with a neighbor on a balcony across the way.

I don’t see much of the neighbors who live on the floor below me, but two floors down I know there is an older couple, retired I think. The wife is a whiz of a cook and most mornings, as I walk down to go to work she is already busy preparing the meals for the day and I can smell the results from the floor above to the floor below. On Thursday, it was some kind of roast, the air heavy with the smells of browning meat, roasting garlic and other spices. The memory of those smells left me hungry for the rest of the day and completely unsatisfied with anything I had to eat.

On Wednesday we had a staff meeting to be introduced to the new workflow software that is being installed. I haven’t had to be in a meeting since I started working at PSG, and business meetings are a lot like running. You have to train for them and then keep doing them or you get badly out of shape which leads to serious bodily injury! I had forgotten how exhausting they could be. Add to that the effort to understand and follow the presentation which was being conducted in Italian. The main theme? Check. Details? We don't bother with details. I definitely strained my thought muscle. I did find very interesting the name of the software though: “Nemesys”!

Although spelled differently in English, after seeing how the program works, as they say, the irony fairly drips off the name. I doubt that the creators know, or even care (indeed why should they?) what the name of their software implies in English, but I fervently hope they decide to release it in the US market. It would cause a sensation – at least in segment of the population looking to purchase workflow software with ironic names. You see, what we have here is a case of a False Friend - a pair of words in two languages that look the same but have entirely different meanings. In the sweet language of Italian, Nemesi means “divine justice”. Of course in English it means “archenemy” which this software is no doubt going to be. No matter how you cook this egg it turns up scrambled. While we’re at this, beware the stranger bearing gifts that is Idiosincrasia meaning “a strong dislike” in Italian and in English as Idiosyncrasy, “a peculiar behavior or temperament” . Ain’t it grand?

For this weekend, if I can convince someone to go with me (and by that I mean someone with a car who feels like driving) I hope to catch the final game of the season for the Ancona Dolphins. It’s an 8 game season. The Dolphins have played 7 of their8. They have lost 7. On Saturday they play for pride (more important than any trophy) against the Bolzano Giants (4-3), a fearsome team with a powerful offense but a suspect defense (I made that last part up).


American football in Italy is a real thing. It's little understood, hardly followed, and for the most part poorly played (albeit with passion and enthusiasm) by athletes with little or no previous familiarity with the sport. For those who want more, John Grisham wrote a not incredibly interesting short novel called Playing For Pizza that looks at Italian life, culture and food through the eyes of an American quarterback playing in the Italian league.

Heavy snow is in the forecast in the Gavia Pass tomorrow. Hopefully it's bad enough to make for a memorable day without being so bad that they have to use the alternate route.