Doubt.

It had to happen. I've got an attack of self-doubt on. Every aspiring evil overlord gets them once in a while. They should make an anti-self-doubt inhaler like Ventolin only for, y'know, self-doubt.

It started as I was coming out of Spanish class. I'm liking Spanish, but although its mostly "New toy! New toy! WEEEEEEEEE!" there's a teensy pinch of "Argh. Learning. It's all hard and stuff, argh." And I was reflecting on how I'm going to be unable to dazzle, conversationally speaking, for quite some time after I move out there. This is not a new topic of reflection. In fact, I thought I had made my peace with the whole "Oh crap, I'm going to look utterly gormless for months" thang. However, after going three falls and a submission with some tricky transitive verbs it reared its ugly head.

Every so often, the stress of living with your unconscionably petty and confusing species gets too much for me and I find it hard to get out and be around you. You bother me. You get all shirty for no reason, you get drunk before noon and come and slur at me incomprehensibly, you try to talk to me about soap operas that I don't watch and then you get all hurt when I tell you I don't watch them. You make me all confused and headachey. Now I have to be all confused and headachey and foriegn. The prospect does not please. (Yes, I know I don't need transitive verbs to mop the goddamn floor. That's not the point.)

Maybe I won't seem gormless. Maybe I'll seem... mysterious. Enigmatic. Sphinxlike. Yeah! That's me-- Sphinxlike.


Anyhoo. You know what? Back in the day, when I was a teeny weeny homeschooled freak, I taught myself a fairly respectable chunk of Latin. Of course since my education at this point was a purely voluntary and unsupervised deal, I eventually got discouraged and dropped it. And forgot everything. Like you do. But now large chunks of it are coming back to me, hauled from deep within the scrapheap of my mind, to aid me in my hour of need and confusing verbyness. You'd have laughed at me, an eleven-year-old Latin learner. You would have mocked me, and quite possibly kicked sand in my face. "Geek!" you would have cried. "Nerd! Spanner!" But my oh-so-quaint home-ed Latin studies are bearing fruit in my Spanish night-class, years after I put aside my amo amat etc.

So who wins, eh? Who wins?