I am kind of afraid that I am going to jinx myself...

because I do still have one class left to go to, but as of now...

I love my classes for this semester.

This is probably going to be kind of a boring update on my life, but just for the record, I have been stressing about how to graduate on time since... well... I started college. Because I went from being "undecided" to "undeclared" to "English" to "American Studies" to "French," which makes me sound like an academic flake, but it wasn’t that at all... At first I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college, then I decided that didn’t matter because I wanted to take classes like my American Studies seminar on rock music for the rest of my life, then I realized I couldn’t take classes like that in France... blah blah blah, the point is that, though I have taken at least one French class every semester since getting to college, only two of the ones I took before arriving here actually counted for anything. And I thought this whimsy-based and slightly capricious decision to stay here all year would mean major overloading both semesters of senior year. If I play my cards right and the administration is on my side when I go back, I’ll only have two French classes left, though I will still have to take three PE classes (Nothing in my life ever changes, in high school I dreaded the one that I had to take enough to put it off until senior year... I spent all of college denying the requirement of Emory to have three PE’s, and now here I will be 22 years old and doing freaking yoga at 830am two days a week just to be able to someday have a degree from Emory U on my wall. Dagnabbit, why can’t they count cave-exploration and the conquering of Wolf Pen as academic credit?) And also I still have a lab science to do, but since I’ll be a senior, all of these can be registered for easily... and I’ll still have enough time for an internship and will be able to graduate in four years simple. I’ll be the first in my immediate family to do that I think...
But the real point of this is that, for the first time, the end is in sight and I am not dreading it...
And get this: for the first time in EIGHT YEARS (that is over 1/3 of my life) I AM NOT TAKING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE GRAMMAR CLASS. Granted, I am taking all of my classes in a foreign language, but that is different. Really, it is. Because I have spent at least four nights a week for the past EIGHT YEARS doing grammar homework out of those stupid workbooks, doing exercises in direct objects and verb conjugations and fake conversations with sentences like, "Yes, Pierre, I would like to go to the movies tonight," and "No, Jose, I do not want any more paella," and "Only the good die young, Aeneas." First in Latin, then in Spanish, then in French... and though the only Latin I remember is "agricola" and "vir," meaning, respectively, "farmer" and "man," it probably was a good base for the 5 years of Spanish that came next (and of which I remember much more, like "un sapo verde eres ti," or "you are a green frog," which we sang to the tune of "happy birthday" every time someone had a birthday. I don’t know if my 21-year-old Spanish teacher that year made it up, but I do know that if it weren’t for that song I never would have learned the Spanish word for frog). And that was a good base for attempting to become a green frog here in France.
But no more listening to those stupid tapes and trying to respond quick enough to not fall behind...
No more vocabulary quizzes...
No more making up and performing lame skits...
No more memorizing poems in another language phonetically and never really understanding what they mean...
No more diagramming sentences...
Because now I have conversations in which I have to try to respond quick enough to not fall behind. And every trip to the grocery store is a veritable vocabulary quiz. And every attempt at conversation is a lame but hilarious skit. And now I read the poems posted in Metro cars for practice. And... well... I can’t think of anything that bites as much as diagramming sentences, except for living in a building with roaches that live in the bed with you, and I don’t have to do that any more either.
Blair (proper noun used as subject) is (3rd person singular conjugated present tense verb) happy (predicate nominative modifying subject).
~B