Up and then really down

You know that feeling. That great feeling you get just before you realize how much you suck at something. It is almost necessary, in fact I might say it is necessary, for the giant sound of sucking to be preceded, if at least extraordinarily briefly by an exhalation of ego. Otherwise how might I know how much I really suck.

Let me explain a bit more in the context of my current situation: learning spanish.

[our little house] Megan and I checked into San Cristobal de las Casas about two weeks ago. The grand plan has always been to make it to San Cristobal and to live here for a month. It is an opportunity to get off the road for a bit, to feel like we are part of a community, and to study spanish like our lives depend on it.

[my language school] Upon arriving in San Cristobal, we found language schools to attend (for reasons of marital bliss, I go to one and Megan goes to another) and very quickly located what has to be the cutest little house in all of southern Mexico. The fully furnished house is cheap- $350 for the month. It has an adequate kitchen which is great because with all the amazing looking ingredients around here, it is fun to cook.

[that's San Cristobal in the background] But back to sucking. For the past two weeks, I have been taking Spanish lessons for 3 hours a day and adding classes whenever I can (Megan has too, but she doesn't suck as much as I do, so I will leave her out of this). I study all the time and I feel like I am getting a jist of the concepts pretty well. My spanish went from not being able to conjugate the verb "to be" to being able to carry on a very simple conversation with parking lot attendants- in present tense- about my motorcycle and our trip. (I measure my spanish ability with units of how well I can talk about my motorcycle).

[our buddy Alejandro on an unnamed 5.10+] After a weekend of climbing last weekend, I came back to school on monday all fired up to learn more. We jumped into some more tenses, I studied my flash cards and I started to feel like some of the words were starting to stick in my head. It was great. On tuesday it really started clicking. I met with a woman, Martha, with whom I do intercambios (1/2 hour of speaking english and 1/2 hour of spanish). I was excited about how much more I could say to her vs. the previous week. I was really getting the hang of this spanish thing.

Then Wednesday hit. I'm not entirely sure when the enormous vacuum cleaner was switched on that caused such an amazing sucking, but I think it was somewhere between the preterite and the indirect object pronoun. However, it was certainly switched on.

All of the sudden I couldn't speak a word of spanish. I'm used to this type of tongue tying with Thai, but normally I could just give it a minute and it would come back. Ok. Drink some coffee and relax. Nope. Now I was just a strung out spanish babbler. Take a little break and drink some water. Nope. Now I just had to go to the bathroom in the middle of class. Relax and envision myself speaking spanish. Impossible. My brain felt like a small mouse had gotten inside there and was in middle of a major rewire job, using scrambled eggs as the solder.

This feeling went on the entire day. I just couldn't recover. We tried in the afternoon to go see Avatar in Spanish, but for some very strange reason Avatar wasn't playing that day. It was playing the day before and the day after, but not that day. I tried to figure out why, but as I have already said, I no longer could speak spanish.

Finally, after a long day, we sat down to an early beer at around 6 o'clock and the world started to improve. Four beers later and I didn't care anymore. I could soon go to bed and the day would be over.

Today was a little bit better. From teacher school, I know that in order for learning to really occur, one needs to slip into that land of sucking (or confusion as it is otherwise known) for at least a little bit. It remotivates and it means that I have gone deep into the yellow zone.

Think about it though. In order to realize sucking, you have to first know what non-sucking feels like. Think of the times in your life you were starting to feel like you were on top of something that you really wanted. I bet it was quickly followed by a hubris crushing realization. However, once you recover from this, the place where you land is somewhere between where you were and where you want to be. Not so bad really. It is better than never having had the opportunity to suck.

So... lets toast to when the world feels like a huge orifice pulling you down as far as possible. I'll drink a few beers to that.

[For those of you who know me well, you also know that another I suck at is posing for the camera. Right Tim?]

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