Well, obviously...

I receive at least 40 junk emails every day - which is nothing, I suppose, considering that I have altogether twelve business and personal email addresses.
I tend to ignore them for the most part and delete them immediately - but there is a new rash of emails that not only perplexes me, but draws me in in a sort of fascination over their contents.
They don't offer to share the bounty of a twenty-five million dollar inheritence if only I will allow the deposit to make its way from under a mattress somewhere in Nigeria to my bank account, they don't contain any links with vicious worms waiting to attack my hardware, and they don't spout advertisements that assume I'm a man with 'issues.'
These emails come text-only, no images, no nothing - save for a long list of seemingly random keywords, strung together in an odd kind of poetry.
"post-modern neo-liberal war flowers proprietary antidote station...."
Whatever.

The other day, after a solid week of lamenting my fate as a bride in a country where I simply cannot communicate in any meaningful way and worrying over how on earth I'd manage the whole affair, I returned home very nearly to the point of nervous-wreck after topping it all off with a disastrous trip to the seamstress who had made a devastating wreck of a piece of fabric whose import tax alone doubled its price.
Granted, the dress was intended to be some kind of crazy piece of art, and in it's very intention defied the notion of gravity by at least claiming that it wanted to stay ON my body without the aid of shoulder straps.
The seamstress kindly asked me once and again....and again...and again, wouldn't I like her to add straps? (this much I understood) And I replied once and again, etc. (less kindly the fifth time) that no, I didn't want straps, the dress didn't want straps - and the whole thing devolved into a kind of cold war - and in the end I sat working away the now-familiar tears while she promised my mother-in-law she wouldn't make any dresses for me anymore, ever.

It was certainly not my plan to offend her, nor to upset my darling or his family who were simply trying to do me the kindness of creating a lovely gown for me to wear at the after-party for our wedding.
But what started out as a normal shopping excursion wound up with even more tears in the back of the car and a very bewildered mother-in-law.

At a certain point it wasn't the dress that upset me so - it was my inability to say just what it was I was thinking, about any of it. As hard as I tried, everyone ended up upset anyway, and the more upset they became, the more frustrated (and likely to cry) I became.

After escaping from the car and into our house, I dove for my computer, hoping to throw myself into work and therefore forget the entire mess...I was confronted by an inbox stuffed with the usual junk email.
I ignored their subject lines until one in particular caught my eye:
"Obviously, the only solution to your problem is suicide."

Yes...of course...no need to eke out a few new Persian words every day, no need to strain to understand what's going on around me....no need to work my way through the experience of just being here.

I decided, instead, to keep finding ways to talk to people (and to call the seamstress and apologize via my darling and his excellent translation services) and postpone the wedding.

We're married twice already anyway - and the sheer newness (however I've gone on about the normalcy...the language barrier has gotten more difficult to handle) of it all coupled with trying to muck my way through even the smallest efforts required of me in getting ready for a massive wedding, was just - too much.

So there you have it.

In the meantime, everything has settled down and is back to fabulously normal.
And I read those junk emails a little more often, searching for whatever the point is; an exercise probably as useless as agonizing over my distance from the language I'm surrounded by.
It is...justwhat it is, a bunch of words I can't understand:
"lacquered mischief under corporate rose-water justification memory
dove-tailed anger work between motocross staple"