language, random stuff, etc.

I came home early from work yesterday, and I'm pretty sure it saved my entire week. I don't really have leave time to throw around willynilly, so I had to think carefully about calling in sick, and in the end decided to suck it up and go to work. I left at 1:00, and after a couple of hours of resting at home, I was feeling much, much better. Still sick, but the demons left my brain, at least, and even allowed me to get quite a few non-strenuous things done. And today, I went to work thinking that I could come home early again if I felt that I needed to, but I somehow managed to stay there all day, even though I had given myself permission to leave. I am very proud of myself for that. Now I just have two more nasty days to get through, and then it's the WEEKEND and not only do I have three days off, so does M. And we have NO PLANS. NONE! We don't have to do anything we don't want to do! And, it's M's birthday! Good times! Except he won't tell me what he wants to do, and we don't really want to go anywhere because it will be all busy and stuff. But still.

I got an extra kick to my motivation last night with the whole Swedish thing. I was doing my "homework" to turn in to paradisecowgirl, just a wee bit late, and reading aloud to myself all of the examples in the chapter. M wasn't home yet, but I could hear that my pronunciation was better than ever before.. enough so that I even mentioned it to him when he got home. He made me read something to him and was equally shocked at the sudden improvement. Since my sad mangling of the Swedish language is one of the things that can get me down, it was nice to see that I am getting somewhere. It's funny how you can sometimes make striking improvements after a break.

My third year of French in high school saw such a leap. (What, didn't know that I took three years of French?) I had never been an astounding student. I always made an A or B, but I tended to not pay attention and spend a bit of time sitting in the back row writing notes to my best friend, studiously not flirting with Josh, and fawning over the foreign exchange student along with the rest of the class. (Ricardo? Eduardo? Why do I see myself running to find a yearbook when I stop writing this?) Anyway, the third year was totally optional, and our first big assignment was a mandatory (?) extra credit project involving a translation, English to French, of a fairy tale. It was pages and pages and hours of work and it sucked miserably. I had never been good at that sort of thing. Except, she handed it back with a limited number of glaring red marks, and told the entire class that mine was really good. I did really well for the rest of the year, with just slightly more effort than before, and I ended up testing out of six hours (two semesters) of French for college. Actually, I started college with a full semester's worth of credit, but it still took me four whole years to finish. That's what happens when you don't know what you want to be when you grow up.

I had already forgotten quite a lot of my French by the time I met M, and I've lost basically everything since I started learning Swedish. I never think of it anymore. I barely even remember that I studied another language at all. Actually, the only time it tends to come up in conversation is when comparing it to my Swedish. My Swedish is a hell of a lot better than my French ever was.. sadly, this says absolutely nothing about my actual skill at Swedish. ;) It was interesting, though, because I rifled through my brain this afternoon looking for a Swedish word and came up with the French one. I am totally fascinated by how the brain deals with language. How can something be utterly forgotten, and yet, somewhat accessible?

Quick! Look over there! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's the spontaneous end of this post!