Oh fuck it, you win

The sun came back, and joy spread throughout the land.

...except that it's my blog, dammit, and I'll whine if I want to. I've had two bad Spanish days in a row. Sometimes it just doesn't work when I try to talk and sometimes when other people talk it just sounds like garbled noise (some of those times they're speaking Catalan so then it's not really my fault, but only some of the times) and sometimes both of those things happen in the same conversation and I wonder why I didn't admit defeat long ago. Whine.

A lot of people here talk a lot. I usually don't talk all that much even in English, so sometimes I end up listening to monologues. It's almost never as boring as it would be in English. But sometimes I'll be listening to a monologue, understanding it, nodding along genuinely, and then the monologuer asks me some question that I don't understand. I hate it when that happens. "But I understood everything else you said!" I want to yell. "I wasn't just nodding along not understanding; I wasn't." And fuck you, brain, for picking now to flake on me. It's like the conversation just turned pass/fail and I failed and I really think I deserve some partial credit.

I know I overthink this shit, but it's really hard not to. And it's also sort of interesting, if confusing and maddening. How come sometimes I can have actual conversations about Catalan politics or religion or the joys of Basque cider and other times I have to ask What? three times before I realize I'm being asked whether I studied here in Barcelona or somewhere else? (The inconsistency is partially explained by the attractiveness of the other member of the conversation, but that only explains a little of it.) Even within a single conversation with the same person, the things I don't understand are not necessarily more complicated than the things I do understand. It's all such a crapshoot that it's hard not to think that I'll never learn.

Sometimes I really want to try and explain to people that I'm smart and funny, just not in Spanish, but I bet it would sound a little too much like a loud slurring person trying to convince you she's not drunk. Which I'm not, by the way.