Thank You For Riding the Pain Train

I'm done-done-done-done with Arabic, as of about 4 hours ago! Since then I have: made a tomato and basil salad for iftar tonight (my professor is having us all over for when he and his wife break fast for Syrian food, awesome), watched Moulin Rouge while lying on a friend's floor while we ate chocolate chips out of the bag, and walked around downtown. Now I'm lying on my couch, listening to Mack the Knife on repeat and writing this. It is perfect weather right now, blue skies and high-70s, with only a few clouds. Lovely.

I think I passed, but more importantly, I'm DONE (done! did I mention that I'm done?) Not just done, though, but mentally checked out. One thing about intensive language courses is that they do not leave much time for anything else. Yes, I was at dinner and a bar for a friends birthday last night when I maybe should have been studying (whoops, but I have my priorities straight!) but by and large my summer has been reading, thinking, speaking, and writing Arabic with a good deal of socialization thrown in for good measure. I had grand plans about doing PhD research, reading some faculty books, starting cover letters, updating my resume..none of which happened. I did read two chapters of one Venetian art book, but that's nothing to write home about, is it? I meet with my supervising professor tomorrow and the other AI tomorrow (I'm an associate instructor for Renaissance to Modern this fall, ye gods) and I keep forgetting that I have to teach in 2 1/2 short weeks! Gahhh. (excited!! but gahhh.)

In glancing over this I see that I am abusing exclamation points a bit, but I'm actually pretty impressed that I can still write semi-coherently. I've been having trouble forming sentences (even more so than usual) over the past week or so, which shows how much brain drain I've been feeling. For instance, two days ago I was on the bus and tried to say "heated seats" and instead said "seated heats." I've taken to gesturing a lot and just believing that people will figure it out. (they usually do, but not always.) And it's not just me--my entire class and all of my friends in language classes this summer have sort of been unspooling lately. This conversation happened last night:
Friend: My paper is all wet from that..you know...
Me: Spill? What?
Friend: Starbucks juice...
Me: What?
Friend: Starbucks water..on the glass.
Me: Sweetie, what are you talking about?
Friend: ...CONDENSATION!

Rather stupidly, we've also been doing a lot of crosswords lately--we attempted one while watching Moulin Rouge and got decently far into it, but my brain just needs a break. I've been trying harder Sudoku lately too and may need to lay off that for a little while.

So anyway, the Pain Train has pulled into the station and I have disembarked. It's been a pretty fun ride, but I'm ready to be on non-moving ground again. As we say in Arabic, al-hamdu lillah! (it's not super translatable, but mostly means, "by the grace of god." It's very close to Hallelujah!) AL-HAMDU LILLAH!