Muy Embarazada!

I am studying Spanish. Hola!

Studying a language, while mostly a tedious task in repetition and mundane phrases inapplicable to real life ("The man is wearing shoes and socks in the park!" "Look at the girl eating cheese!"), is a pristine opportunity to pretend. To pretend that I might travel, or live in exotic locales, or marry an attractive cabana boy, and spend the rest of my days on the beach ordering margaritas from los servantes. To pretend that I actually have the stamina and dedication to keep studying beyond the basics. To pretend that I haven't mastered introductory phrases in Thai, German, French, Spanish, American Sign Language, and Kiswahili, only to give up before getting anywhere near conversational ability or fluency.

But mostly, I pretend that I'm not living out one of my very worst nightmares - a return to being a high school student.

You see, in order to graduate with a BA from my university, you had to have completed at least Grade 12 of any foreign language. I started out studying sciences, and so when I transferred to a BA program in my third year, I realized with a sickening thunk of my stomach that I'd only studied up to Grade 10 French, and had slacked off at that. So I took a summer course in Spanish which was the equivalent of the first half of Grade 11, and planned on following up with a second course the following semester.

I showed up for only one class of Spanish 102, during which the teacher made no less than three students cry. I don't remember any of the content, only my rising sense of petrification. I dropped the course the next day. A meagre attempt at German, a lot more dropped courses, and my eventual dropping out altogether in order to preserve my literal sanity, and...Hola! The waking nightmare of student life has returned.

I've spent time perusing different courses I could take, online, mostly out of boredom, but ultimately my fear of being a student, as well as tuition meets poverty, kept me away. Until I discovered that anyone within the province of British Columbia can take any course offered in high school, online or in person, absolutely free. In fact, those that register to study Spanish are sent a Spanish-English dictionary, for free, to keep, just because. I like free things. Plus by taking my language credit through a high school, instead of university, I'm taking about two thousand dollars of future tuition away from my university...and I like the thought of that. And the online language courses are often via Rosetta Stone, which is a very, very expensive language software, most often used by adults to study on their own...free!

So...I somehow registered to become a student of the North Vancouver Island School of Distance Education. And I am studying espanol. Except that my teacher isn't marking my work this week, because he's on March break. Did I mention that sometimes, I wake up in the night in a cold sweat, because I've just had a dream where I somehow needed to upgrade a math course and through a series of administrative decisions was placed back in the tenth grade, just in time for exams? No? Because...I do. School haunts my dreams, still. Maybe this is a kind of desensitizing therapy...

Oy! Es diablo!
Mi madre no come la leche, porque ella es lactose-intolerente.