Measly piddling puny

I guess I probably am one of those people who's always complaining about my job, no matter what I might claim to the contrary lately to anyone who will listen. Regardless, whiiiiine my job is hard and whiiiiine the students are a pain and whiiiiine I blow at it and whiiiiine it's too much work.

I pretty much knew what I was getting myself into, so if nothing else none of this should come as a surprise. And it mostly doesn't. Except that somewhere, buried deep down under all my language insecurities and inadequacies, is this little counter-current that believes, or wants to believe, that all these years of Spanish communication failures and blank stares and stutters and saying things like "Will the shrimp be wearing their jackets?" because I don't know how to say shells, that all of that was just kind of one big long extended bad hair day and I really do speak fluent Spanish, that I just need to relax or focus or drink more or drink less or something like that, and then good Spanish will flow effortlessly from me and I'll understand everything and, while I'm at it, there will probably be puppies. And when those thoughts raise their dumb stupid head, it feels a little surprising that it takes hours and hours and hours to prepare for classes that my colleagues have basically already planned out. So anyway, I spent Sunday at the office, which in the grand scheme of things is not so pathetic, but my particular office isn't heated on the weekends. And even though our little cold spell here isn't all that cold, Barcelona isn't all that insulated. So I spent Sunday at the office hunched over the scariest space heater ever, the kind with wires that turn bright red, feeling very lucky to even have that scary space heater, hoping my shoes didn't start to melt, and that felt legitimately pathetic. Whiiiiiine.