It is a good thing I put off posting until today, because if it had been yesterday it would have been all about how much I hate Arabic, how this is the most boring, frustrating, hermit-like summer I've ever had, and how I don't know why I'm doing this. Now, those feelings are still there a bit, but I've calmed down. Because here is the thing--I'm understanding it, bit by bit. I now know the alphabet, and my professor has been speaking to us almost constantly in Arabic--I've mostly had no idea what he was saying until he gestured, but today I totally got, "turn in your homework, please," "write with your pen or pencil" and "are there any questions?" and I was really excited. We started our second textbook a few days ago, so I'm getting used to that, too. Texts are usually unvoweled, as all of the short vowels are shown through diacritical marks over the words and not as actual letters, and suddenly the vowels are gone. So I was totally freaked out yesterday. I couldn't read our syllabus (which is suddenly all in Arabic), homework took me eight hours, and I just felt stupid. But then I got to class and most other people were just as baffled, so that is reassuring, in a way.
The thing of it is--I really do genuinely refuse to be stressed out about school. I like to get good grades, but if non-great ones sneak in there, so what. But the stakes are a bit higher now than they were in the past, and I don't want to totally wreck my GPA, and I would LIKE to pass. Well. I'm hopelessly Type A (I'm sure you're shocked to learn this, ha ha), although certainly not as bad as a lot of academics, and I'm just trying to loosen up and have fun with this. I try not to stress out about school, but I stress out about stressing out about it. Does that make sense? I don't like how I feel when it takes over my life. Nine arduous weeks is not very long in the grand scheme of things, and I am having fun, even though all of my daily details are completely uninteresting, which does not a gripping blog post make. I'm serious: my only two pieces of "news" when I talked to my mom tonight were that I've been really good about drinking milk (she harasses me about calcium) and that I used my dishwasher for the first time ever and didn't flood my kitchen with suds.
But, as I said, fun is had. We went to an art fair this past weekend and I got a small print--I'm not usually big on impressionism, but the way this artist had applied paint it was almost 3-D, which was cool. Then we got delicious Thai food and stopped at the best chocolate-bakery here for a truffle each. Tomorrow we're celebrating a friend's birthday, then one of the girls in my class is having a dinner party Friday, or there might be birthday celebrations for another friend, and then Saturday there is the Farmer's Market, then maybe a lunch-session with the other members of the art history association exec board (I'm treasurer for next year, despite not having the greatest track record with math), THEN My Fair Lady at one of the theaters downtown. Sunday I might go looking for a used-bike.
So, goals: keep perspective. Memorize the stack of vocab that I have to for a quiz tomorrow. Read some for fun before I go to bed (although does Anna Karenina count as fun? I'm dubious. Another goal: finish that). Speak more at our language tables. And learn some stuff. Doable? Doable.
Oh, ACK. I'm lying on my living room floor (just so you get a sense of this) and a big ol' spider is shuffling along my baseboard, so I'm going to go usher him out now.
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