impossible to ignore you

[cimorene]

this exam today kind of turned the tables on me by presenting me with an essay question where i was more than confident of the content, so my main concern about it was my ability to use language.  which is of course exactly the opposite of what i'm used to:  i'm used to skating by when i'm uncertain on the strength of my writing.  using swedish isn't just like i don't have the practice/vocabulary yet; it isn't even about the mistakes i might make;  it's like having a shoulder and some fingertips connected by a handful of wires instead of by an arm.  i have to think in swedish and to an extent the swedish just isn't there yet, so my thoughts are spotty, elusive, insubstantial.  --also i feel i should apologise in advance to the instructor because i was forced to rush, so i have a feeling there are going to be a fair number of nerve-grating mistakes that are more or less the equivalent of subject-verb agreement mistakes in english.

so i spent most of the afternoon trying to unwind with mind-numbing lj layout issues. 

when i was settling down for some nice sociology reading and glanced at my syllabus i just about had a heart attack because it said "exam!" with an arrow pointing at tomorrow.  "i haven't heard anything about this!" i was saying.  so i checked the website and it seemed to confirm the horrible findings.  cue panic attack while perhael and kitten_head stood by looking tentatively sympathetic and tolerant.  because, i mean, honestly, an exam when you don't even know what it's on?  just imagine my righteous outrage!

...then i realised the website said 27.10, not 09.  okay. yeah. 

and boy, if you could bottle that light-headed dizzying rush of relief...!  it felt sort of like a shot of alcohol, without the physical heat.  yeah. hmmm.

i like this song for longing!sheppard.

Comments

[special-trille.livejournal.com]

I can't remember what I was going to say, because I'm distracted by your adorable, adorable layout. This layout is my host family's kitchen in Germany, and I'm buttering bread for breakfast and sipping at some tea and mangling the language and it's just freaking adorable.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

mm, yeah, i downloaded a lot of antique and reproduction wallpaper patterns like a month ago and i just had to use some--my brain would've exploded if i'd tried to consider all 100-something i downloaded, so i had to use the first one with good colours. and actually i was thinking swedish country decoration--i saved a magazine cover from a swedish museum or something with wallpaper a lot like this and the cutest bright blue grandfather clock covered with hand painted folkart designs... um. hi.

[special-trille.livejournal.com]

The only Europe I've been to is Germany, so you've shown me textbook Swedish design and my mind has automatically gone "Germany! Meat for breakfast! The bizarre grandfather!" and started playing a slideshow of exchange memories. Including *hospitalisation* and having to watch a movie involving a chimp with shorts on. It wasn't a funny movie.

Turns out, I still have hospital roommate issues.

uh. hi.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

my exchange experiences were eight days in japan and six weeks in japan. and a norwegian exchange student when i was 14 and a japanese one of exactly my age when i was 17.

i used to think that i wanted to be a linguist in high school through a combination of loving everything related to english and having fun/being better than everyone else when i studied spanish and japanese. so i wanted to learn lots of things but german was one of the very few that i never did want to learn--partly because i thought it sounded silly.

i'd never seen swedish design either until that website at the wallpaper site, but really, see: