Thursday, August 03, 2006

It Comes Before A Fall

I am wont to feeling pleased with myself. I can't help it. Despite the complete hideousness of astrology, I like to blame it on being a Leo. Laziness, failure to take responsibility, egotism - yes, you may accuse me of all these things and more, reasonably accurately.

However, today I have a very good reason to do so - I have a monster seventeen page document, in Spanish. My doing. We went through it this morning, and you know what? It wasn't too hideous, cringe inducing. Given that my Philosophy of Science supervisor used to sit and read aloud our essays, I know how to deal with the horrors of hearing your gauche, inaccurate (laziness again!) and horrible turns of phrase repeated genuinely ad nauseam. After the horrors of legal writing this year, experiencing more red pen than an insecure law student's psyche should have to deal with, I am accustomed to the corrections and while the pain of immense quantities of tracked changes on word continues to cause suffering, it's better than the scarlet biro.

Of course, there were several phrases where I thought, "ooh, that sounds great - I AM clever." Then I realised that the author... well, "No. Fui. Yo." (This is also the translation of Bart Simpson's most famous phrase, "It wasn't me".) Still, if I have achieved nothing else this summer, I can now lay claim to being able to write fairly well a legal document in Spanish. I am learning so so so much - I have already absorbed much more than I thought about a week ago when I started panicking over what on earth I was going to write. WOWSER.

I think my mother was telling me off in my dream last night in Spanish. Not bad - did you know you could do that, Mum? Well, you can.

And enjoy the pictures of the flores and dragonfly (libélula en español) from Mayela & Ricardo's garden in Punta Morales. Yes, Lianne, owe the plant porn idea to you. However, I do find the flora here incredibly interesting - everything is so bright. At the UCR there is an incredible, convulvulus type plant, which isn't covered with white flowers but RED ones. Extraordinary.

Going to do myspace updates, by the way, so please check out the stupefying embarrassment as I try to do "yoof" there.






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