Learning the language

Home leave was fun while it lasted.

Well, not really, but it is over. I accomplished very little but had a little bit of fun. Saw some extended family – trips to S.C. and La., plus visited St. Augustine and saw Scotty Emerick. Those were the highlights.

Lowlights were in abundance, but there’s no point in dwelling on them. Batgirl was appreciative of a couple extra hands for the tummy rubs, so I’ll cling to that. But home leave’s over now, and I’m parked in D.C. for the time being.

 It’s only the first week, so I’m still settling in. One more Target run and I think I’ll be good – I forgot a couple things on the first pass-through. So far, I’ve been to Harris Teeter, Target, Amazon Fresh and Trader Joe’s, plus put in an Amazon order. It’s amazing the amount of crap you need to start off, only most of my crap is food. I did buy a silicone trivet/microwave shield and some reuseable silicone baggies, but everything else has been food. I’m starting from zero and should be here several months, so there were lots of staples to acquire.

 Since I’ll be going to campus daily and there’s no much around, the plan is to bag lunch. I’m essentially a middle-school student when it comes to bringing lunches. So far, I’ve brought peanut butter crackers. Since I’m coming from the land where caramel M&Ms and WintOgreen Lifesavers have flowed freely, I’m trying to cut back on sweets. There’s been early success on the ability to do that, but unfortunately, the scale added a pound rather than deducted one.

My temporary apartment is fine. There was a list and the orders were to pick four and they’d get me in one. I remember my first pick and this is not it, but it’s next door and they’re all the same anyway. The only difference between this one and that one is that this one has an outdoor pool instead of an indoor one and the other one doesn’t allow dogs. I swear in some of the paperwork, it sounded like this one didn’t, either, but the barky little dog down the hall begs to differ.

 But the digs have everything you need: a washer and dryer, biweekly service, a gym and a concierge for when the Amazon packages arrive and you’re out of town. One thing it doesn’t have is a pull-out sofa, which surprised me but I’ll deal with it.

I’m almost done moving in, which basically means I finally figured out where all but one of the light switches go to. There’s a lamp I thought was broken, but after much experimentation I discovered the control diagonally across the room, no where near it. I’m not sure I’ll ever use that lamp, but it’s good to know where the power is.

Probably the smartest thing I’ve done here is get an Arlington library card. Now, I love me my Leroy Collins Library, but this Arlington library – woo-hoo. It’s fantastic and barely two blocks away.

The job itself is going to be brutal. I’m learning a language, which sounds super cool but it’s not my strength. However, I really, really want to be successful and hope that I can land on some method of study that works for me. I’m just not one of those people; my strengths lie elsewhere.

There’s a test to evaluate language aptitude, and I took it this week. Although the official results aren’t in yet, I can pretty much guarantee I know how it ends: I suck. There were five sections and I only felt comfortable with one of them. It was where you were given an abbreviation of sorts for a word – think messaging. You were supposed to define the word. So if it was SCRBL, you might select “mixed up.” That section had a bunch of questions and a short amount of time; I got the impression no one was expected to finish. I didn’t, but I got pretty far despite leaving some blank.

The test isn’t graded for credit; it’s a measuring tool. We’d been told guesses didn’t count against us, but since this was to measure something, I felt it was more honest to leave blanks. And boy, did I. The last section was basically a short-term memory test and I only answered about three out of 20-25. Two had been used as examples in the instructions and one was the word for “wolf.”

So now begins a slog in which I have committed to doing something completely out of my wheelhouse. I am pretty freaked out over it. Lots of people take language and the classes are small. Mine has four people. The teacher asked us what our goal was and what we considered our biggest fear. The others said something like “mastering the language/speaking well” and “messing up” but when it was my turn, I told them my goal is to manage my expectations and my biggest fear is holding up the class. It may be a very long spring/summer.