sweetness personified

Josh just sent me this (unedited) email:

Subject: soy sufrido
From: Josh
To: Halloweenlover

donde esta mi esposa? me perece ella no quiere hablar conmigo. Pero yo no se por que? Ella es la amor de mi vido. soy sufrido mucho.

su amor,

mimoso


Some background on this first. In Argentina, we have this joke word sufrido/sufrida meaning "I am suffered" or "I am suffering". It is a noun to describe yourself or someone else as a person who has or is suffering. Not in a bad way, though, more in a sarcastic or joking way. You wouldn't say that a sick person was sufrido, but you would say that a person who has to eat pizza even though she wants Chinese food is sufrida. My cousins and I use it all the time. If one of us complains about something trivial, like being hot or hungry or tired, we will (in a mocking tone) call her sufrida.

I love this word. We need to make something up in English that means the same thing, but for the meantime, we use it a lot. You haven't lived until you've heard my dear law school friend, Monika, with her dark blond hair and not-knowing-a-lick-of-Spanish North Carolina accent bust out with a "soy sufriiiiiidaaaaa". It cracks me up each and every time.

And then Josh's nickname at the end- mimoso, is the word in Spanish for a person who is very loving or cuddly. When we met in college, I was intensely surprised at how shameless Josh was. He would kiss and hug me in public, hold my hand anywhere, yell an "I love you" across the parking lot. A story for another time is about him kneeling in the mud in front of hundreds of people at a college party begging me to forgive him for some infraction. Totally shameless. So I started calling him a mimoso as a tease. He is the most loving person I know, which is ironic since I am not all that touchy-feely.

Anyway, for you non-Spanish speakers, the gist of the email (all spelling and grammatical errors aside) is this.

Subject: I am suffered.
From: Josh
To: Halloweenlover

Where is my wife? I think she doesn't want to talk to me. But I don't know why? She is the love of my life. I am very suffered.

Her love,
mimoso


See? How could I not be sad?