Back to Banality

So I'm going to have a boring blog, so Kaleena, feel free to skim. I'll make a point to mention juicy details at the top of each blog, and highlight or italicize important sections to facilitate skimming (don't feel bad, the first time I see a new post, I skim too. It's only after certain individuals don't post after a few days [ahem, to everyone, really] that the accumulated skimming results in an actual read of a column).

Actually, everyone could pretty much skip this section completely, because it's going to be a list of basically total boredom about my incessant need to punish my brain by pounding it with high levels of intellectual stress to cope with the seeming emptiness of that which is my life.

If you would rather spend the next minutes enjoying yourselves, please select one of the following links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFU1Y7zuyw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwBQC728v5s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGrjJ-9KwIY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCUebdSbBlU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BJKChK8ZTM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohSzvBr4cA&feature=related

Any and all of those (from my favorite show on the toob now, So You Think You Can Dance) would probably be better than anything I have to offer in these few words ahead. Plus, as many other addicts I can get to the cause will be WORTH it. By the way, I would totally give a leg to be able to dance like that, except I only have two, and it's hard to dance with only one leg...

First of all, I must say that Latin music totally makes my life better. I coul see myself someday sitting in some smoke-filled and run down cafe in San Jose or Havana (die already Castros) downing a local cerveza, listening to the rhythms flowing through me, and watching the young lovers dancing the night away. (Yes, I have been thinking about going to these two cities too much recently). I really badly want to go to Cuba for some reason. There's some mystique of tha old 1950s Havana that I think I'd be looking for, when for it I probably should be going to Miami instead.

I am so glad that I really invested the time in my life to learn Spanish, because it's one of those few real languages out there. A lot of language is stuffy and uppety. I take a LOT of pride in speaking Latin American Spanish and never learned the style of the Spanish of Spain. Spaniards are the uppety assholes who look down on the American speakers of Spanish (I'm speaking pan-American, not just US) because their style is corrupted by local dialects and has become the langauge of the "low-worker". Many Spaniards who come over to the Americas lose that VERY quickly, and it's because Hispanics are real people. When I get the chance to speak in Spanish to Latinos (especially those who speak almost no English), it's really great.

Speaking of Spanish, I'm all reviewed for July. I bought this grammar book to review grammatical rules (I don't really need the structures, I can still remember that If only I could...blah is translated as pudiera, but I really could use the help remembering when to use those structures). Once I finish it, I have two books in Spanish to knock off, one by the great Paolo Coehlo (he's Brazilian, I can't spell his name...I don't speak that language yet), the other is DonQuixote. I plan on getting a couple of Marquez books in Spanish, although I own most of them in English already (except Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the ONLY book I liked reading in English class....ironically...).

I'm also reviewed in Latin through this month already, as my aim was to get back to first semester proficiency, so next I get to push into my second semester of Latin. I'm starting to pick up on a lot of the ancient things (reading Cicero right now), so I'm hoping that I'll be able to read some Latin.

Of course, I've sacrificed a bit of my other langauge training, as I haven't really cared about French, Italian, or Greek for the last several days. I only have like 2 chapters to go in French until I reach my goal for the month. I have to go over negatives (totally a pain in French, Spanish and English win on this front) and then prepositional and colloquial phrases. My aim was to finish my Italian book, but I see I need a LOT of review on the semester and a half's worth that I've already finished. It's kind of cool because in one month I learned present, past, imperfect, and imperative verb forms in Italian, and I think I know already how future works. If I study a LOT of vocabulary and grammar over the next 6 months, I'll probably be fluent in Italian. Greek on the other hand, I need four more chapters before I reach my month's goal. I think I can hit it, especially since it's currently review for me. I know I have to go over the present progressive participle...

Having finished a couple of my goals for the month, I can spend the extra time finishing accounting and homeland defense. I'm going to start writing my final paper tonight for homeland. Then next week, I have two finals to take, and I'll be done with summer classes. Fall is somewhat simplified as I decided instead of jumping into the Slavic language family, I should knock off the rest of the major Romance languages---Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan---first, and establish myself in the Germanic langauges better than I have (REVIEW GERMAN), and really try to learn my Celtic ones. On top of all of that, I am entering my first non-Indo-European language (Arabic) in August. I'm really going to have to get used to a whole new langauge structure and family, however, once I adapt, I might be able to hop into something like Hebrew.

Basically, this is how I see my future language development by the end of 2010:

Fluent: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese (Five Stars)
Competent: German, Greek, Latin (Four Stars)
Conversant: Arabic (Three Stars)
Intermediate: Gaelic, Romanian (Two Stars)
Beginner: Catalan, Dutch (One Star)

I actually may already be near that one star in Catalan, because I can translate most of it if I read it.

Ok, so my life is boring, deal with it.

At least I'm going bowling today before work.