Thoughts

Who am I?

I've always thought I loved learning...but looking at my habits...do I? I tend to do enough in my classes to get by...getting by might mean an A for me most of the time, but that doesn't mean I actually ever delve into the material. I always have ambitions and talk big about how much I enjoy one thing or the other or some subject....and then I find myself writing my paper last minute, knowing that if I had spent more time on it not only would it be easier to write, but I would understand my subject and the paper would reflect that, rather than being a sad attempt at clever choices of filler words with just enough subject matter that the emptiness either isn't noticed or is generally overlooked.

And when I start out to learn something that isn't in a class...well, there isn't much to say there. I start and then it just becomes a lower priority and drifts off into forgotten plans... This spans from Koine Greek to knitting, origami to pie baking, gardening to sewing and any number of things in between.

Even Spanish, which I really enjoy...I don't work at to learn. Thus, my grammar is terrible... I know enough for people to understand me in conversation and to write a paper, as long as I have someone edit it before I turn it in, and to watch a movie or read a book. But there are so many things that I should have learned so long ago...I even remember doing worksheets on them, but I never took the time to actually learn them well enough for the knowledge to last. And, I know this and have a grammar book from classes past across the room in my bookshelf...but there it stays.

In conversations, I tend to sit and listen to what everyone else has to say, maybe adding a short comment every once in awhile. While this is more excusable here in Spain as it takes more energy to follow the conversation in the first place, thus rendering responses less obligatory, I know that I do it in English, too, most of the time.

I feel like I'm empty of things like knowledge and ambition and motivation and opinion... I know that it's not completely true, but it's truer than I would like for it to be...yet with the lack of motivation to finish things that I start...it doesn't get me very far. How do you fix a habit of not finishing well? Or rather than "finishing", continuing? Hmm....

Anyway, for now it is time to sleep. Cooking tomorrow. Peanut butter chocolate balls and some sort of cookie. I'm excited. I want to buy cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and vanilla to make the house smell like Christmas. Baking bread earlier today helped... They don't drink hot spiced apple cider here, so I'm also on a mission to teach that to my host family. Unfortunately, the mission was thwarted for the day by something called a holiday...something like Constitution Day or the like.... Anyway, all of their stores, with the exception of some restaurants, actually close on holidays (and every Sunday), so food was not to be bought today. Maybe tomorrow.

See what I mean about continuing though? I can't even write a contiguous blog post... I start pensative (or whiny, as you like), and have to add in a happy bit about baking. Oh well...