Saturday night

Today has been rather pleasant. :) We slept much later than we expected to and didn't get up until noon. It rained steadily all morning, which I think is why. I'm rather happy about the rain, though. Until the last few days, it's been near record high temperatures here, and I'm ready for some nice weather. Also, we're in the foothills here, and the foothills are covered in trees. This makes for some beautiful scenery (except in winter, when it compounds the dreariness, I must admit, since you can't see a single place not covered in leafless trees, but.. anyway), but never as much as in the fall. Last year, I was near heartbroken when a week of storms stripped the leaves off the trees before they turned colors. M just missed them when he moved here in 2000, but it was the most spectacular year in my memory. There was one particular Saturday that the sky was impossibly blue and the yellow and orange and red trees were incredibly vibrant.. and of course I didn't have a good camera. Figures. Oh, right, the rain. I'm happy about the rain because we've been in like, a drought and stuff, and they've been saying that the trees won't be pretty now because of the lack of water. I hope this perks them up. I can live with a mediocre year, but please don't let it be like last year.. green one week and dead the next.

Anyway, I digress. The afternoon was rather idle, in a very nice way. I've spent the day consumed with practicing my Swedish. Actually, we agreed that I haven't spent so much time on it in a single day before, and I'm in a progress-making stage at the moment, which is pleasant. I've felt stuck at a bleh level for quite some time, but today I've really felt good about things. More on that in a minute, I think. We decided that we were going to make Kroger our speaking-swedish place. My food vocab is fairly good, and this will only make it better. So, from now on (or until we move on to something else, or don't need to anymore, or get really bored with it or something), we only are speaking Swedish when talking about going to Kroger, making a grocery list, theoretically while on the way to the store, and definitely the entire time we're there. And.. WE DID IT!!! You have no idea how pleased I was that it actually worked, as this was one of my ideas from a long time ago that I never felt ready to try. We had a few lapses, and of course had to talk to other people in English when required, but most of it was in passable Swedish! And most of the English was either in explanations of words or phrases, or a couple of remarks that were just too complex to think through while standing in the way of other people. Jättebra! (Incidentally, I sound very Danish when I say that.)

I really suck at being bad at things. I'm not saying I'm *not* bad at things, but if I am, I tend to.. well, not do them. Perhaps this is narrow minded of me, I shall have to ask my therapist. (if I had one..) In any case, I've always made good grades, never really needed to study for anything on a general basis, and always had an answer to any given question.. whether it was necessarily true or not. :) I've always been considered the smart one (booksmart, that is.. I'm the first to tell you that I have no huge amounts of common sense) in the family. I'm not good at, for example, sports. I avoid them like the plague. In elementary school, I was the kid in glasses who wandered around outfield and invariably got hit in the face with a baseball even when trying to stay out of the game. (Yes, this actually happened.) I wasn't particularly good at band. I played the trumpet for a couple of years and learned to cheat rather well, but I finally quit, partially because I realized that I just wasn't first-chair material.. which particularly rankled since my older brother played the trumpet and guess which position he had? In short, I'm a perfectionist.

But I've rarely had to really try to do anything that didn't come naturally if I was interested in doing it. I think this is what happened to my lack of motivation in learning Swedish. It stopped being fun quite some time ago, and it stopped being fun because I was past the point of learning words at impressive speeds and mimicing simple sentences. Then it got to the point where if I wanted to continue, I would have to do so with a real effort.. and the speed dwindled and nearly died. Part of this is due to just plain neglect and difficulty.. M is not a grammar teacher, and when one lives in an area with no Swedish influences other than a husband who's perfectly happy speaking English. I still liked the IDEA, but I didn't like the means. And, of course, there is the fact that it can be hard work and who wants that? :) Anyway. This is getting long-winded.

I guess what I'm getting at is that after over three years (kinda. a lot of that time was occasional text lessons and we really haven't been keeping at it the way we should), I'm still not comfortable enough to actually say things to anyone other than M, because I hate being corrected. I had a hard time getting used to him correcting me, but now it doesn't bother me so much (unless he's mean, which he usually isn't.) And therefore, I've been very easily discouraged and pessimistic and altogether sure that I'd never be fluent.

I woke up this morning thinking about all this and putting it together in my mind in just this way (well, maybe a little more detailed in my head, but I'm trying to make this a short novel instead of the tome it's headed for.) Anyway, I've finally realized a few things.

1. No one can reasonably expect me to be perfect at something I've never done and never expected to do (except for me).
2. My biggest weakness is pronounciation, and it's apparently good enough that most anyone would understand what I was saying almost all of the time. I even said sjö perfectly earlier, something I spent literally hours trying two years ago during rousing bouts of Finns i sjön.
3. I will always have a strong American accent. My talents do not lie in that direction, and God help the first person who complains.
4. It will be a while before I get over my fear of speaking Swedish to someone other than M, but.. I'm not on a deadline, so who cares?
5. I speak Swedish much better than I ever spoke French.. and I took three years of that in high school and tested out of six college credits.
6. I speak Swedish approximately better than Magnus speaks German and at least as good as his Danish. He has those on his resume.
7. Magnus has been working on his English for SEVENTEEN years. It's okay if I don't get to where he is overnight.

I feel better now. :) And I've since been working on it most of the day, and I've been enjoying it again. Even if it's not easy anymore. Wonder what my imaginary therapist would think about that, eh?