Moving furniture and learning Spanish

My father often lectured us on the importance of having both long-term goals AND short-term goals. The distant objectives were to keep you from becoming bored with life, so you'd always have something really big in the far-off future to be looking towards. The in-the-now goals and the accomplishment of reaching them, then replacing them with new short-term benchmarks, would keep you motivated and optimistic.

Obviously, both goals have been the same for me since this started. Beating cancer has to be the "Really BIG Goal" in the near and far future, but I awoke this morning thinking that I need something a little more interesting to keep me going, something besides that big dark monster that lives in the closet and wants to kill me.

So, today my short goal is to get the house cleaned up and organized enough that I don't have to think about it for a year--hey, there's a positive, no house cleaning for a year! Yea! Today we will move our bed downstairs and guest beds upstairs to the loft, and maybe I'll even get the computer moved down too.

Bill and I are already started on what I want to be my long-term goal--learning to speak and understand Spanish. We have been listening to language lesson CDs on our drives up to Charlottesville, 1 lesson per trip. (We just finished numero 9, but Bill says he has to repeat it because he got confused. I had the same problem with numero 7). We've been using something called "Pimsleur" from Barnes & Noble, and it's been pretty good, very non-threatening for beginners, very easy to follow along. But it's very formal Spanish, very "Castellano," not this-side-of-the-ocean Spanish. I also get very frustrated with the lack of an accompanying written text. I have to "see" words mentally before I can register them in audio or even speak them.

For instance, customer service phone calls from New Delhi are a complete mystery to me--none of the syllables I hear in that Indian or Pakistani accent can be translated into visual words I can picture in my head. I keep waiting for the cartoon balloons to appear overhead, translating the gibberish I'm hearing into a logical sequence of English words. (And I confess, sometimes the Tennessee accent does this to me too--I stand there like a slack-jawed dolt, listening to someone talk at me, waiting for the translation to percolate into my brain. People here suspect I'm a little slow when I do this).

And speaking? I have such a jumble of languages I have learned over the years in my brain, I can't sort them out anymore. Four years of high school French, growing up hearing my father's German, a smattering of Mandarin Chinese and self-instructional Spanish in college, some Italian and Yiddish standbys in the family lexicon, and somehow I neglected to put each one in a separate folder in my brain. They're all in there, overstuffed into a big file labelled "FOREIGN" and when I go to say something in a different language, almost anything falls out of my mouth. I've been appalled to find myself speaking French in Mexico and Spanish in Quebec.

But I digress. We're going to run out of Spanish CDs soon and need to move on, and I've been researching various language programs for our continued study. I think we need something called "Learning Spanish Like Crazy." LSLC is supposed to be a faster-paced, more intensive program, that teaches idiomatic expressions and Latin American accents for speaking, while also training your ear to hear the faster, more informal, everyday Spanish of Mexico, PR, and other new world places. Sounds like just what we need, along with more verbs and some form of written grammar text so I can see the words I'm learning by rote.

I figure if I'm going to be sitting around in the chemo clinic, being infused for hours, then being sedentary and fatigued at home, (and not cleaning the house because I'm already so organized), I should spend that time learning something useful and productive, right? Then Bill can whisk me off to Mexico when we're done with this highly annoying delay in our lives. (Or at least out to El Pueblito for dinner, where we can say "Una mas cerveza, por favor," with verve and confidence).