Yo estudio...sort of

It's Sunday and I am doing homework.  Well, I'm taking a break from homework because obviously my blog does not count as Spanish homework.  Unless I wrote it in Spanish.  That will not be happening today, or even next month, so a break from homework it is.  And since I am a stupendous procrastinator, it may just turn into finishing the blog entry, taking a run on the treadmill, feeding the girls their dinner, eating dinner, showering and then - and only then - finishing my homework that is due tomorrow. 

For those of you who went to school with me, you know that I just don't study well.  And on a Sunday, I just wouldn't have studied at all.  Don't get me wrong, I have always been good student and I have always gotten what I considered to be good grades.  They could have been better, if I had only had the inclination to study.  I did what I had to do to get by and nothing more.  See, I was a great A/B student all through school, but I was also a procrastinator and a crammer.  Test on Monday, Sunday night would find me in front of a textbook.  Homework on Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday morning would do just fine to finish that up. It got me through college and even got me on the Dean's list once or twice but the problem I have found is that it works in the short term.  I do very well on the homework, the test, the final and then the information just deletes itself from my hard drive.  The hard part for me right now is that I can't really do that when learning a new language.  I can't cram the information into my head, and then forget it almost immediately.  I actually have to learn it.  And by learn it I mean backwards, forwards, inside out and upside down.  And I am finding that is harder to do as I get older and have more responsibilities.  So it means homework on a beautiful, sunny fall day (don't get me started on the fact that it is fall in May...) and B is out running with the puppy, the littles are sleeping and I am sitting in a very small office with almost no outside light, at a desk, conjugating verbs.  Which I never liked doing in English and the same can be said for doing it in Spanish.  Actually, I like it even less in Spanish because I didn't really learn to do it in English (see cramming, above).  I know I did it in high school, and at some point in life I knew what a modifier was and what a reflexive verb was but that time is far behind me.  Now I feel like I am learning it all from scratch and it is frustrating at times.  Not because I can't learn it, or that it is so very difficult but because I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort  by just paying attention and really learning it the first time.  Wish I could talk to my 16 year old self and tell her to just study already so she could make it easier on me today.  Then again, if I could talk to my 16 year old self there are probably more important things we would need to discuss - like the attitude and the self importance and even the hair.  Especially the hair. 


That's me, 2nd from left.   Yes, those bangs are about all the hair I had.
And yes, I remember being able to see through them.

All right, procrastinating over.  I do have to answer to my teacher tomorrow (and by answer, I mean answer.  Probably 100 questions asked of me in Spanish in which I have to answer correctly in Spanish, right verb tense and all) so I better get back to it.  But maybe just a quick run first...