The Time Is Now, Why Do You Ask?

Some time ago the strap on my watch broke and I thought to myself 'Dang, I need a new watch, I'll get right on that'.
Of course this apparently straightforward 'problem + solution = win' equation failed to take into account who I am (me) and what I would actually do (not get right on it, not get right on it at all).

It has now been almost two years and I still do not have a new watch.

I am now one of those people who check their mobile phone when they want to know what time it is.
This is just adding to the categories of 'one of those people' that I find myself qualifying for.
I am also - due to my crappy earbud headphones - one of those people who can often hear less of their music than everyone else can.
I plan to fix this by buying a better pair of headphones...
I think you can see where I'm heading with this.

All this considered it is quite a surprise then to find myself signed up for an Italian class, something I vowed to do a mere couple of weeks ago.
Of course I vowed to do it electronically which has been proven to have a motivating effect but... I still had an entire year to technically not fail on that point and yet here.
Weird.

Now that the shock and smug back-patting is subsiding I'm moving back into more familiar territory - freak outs.
I haven't studied Italian since 2003 and haven't spoken it conversationally in any useful way since 2006. My vocabulary has evaporated and left behind a jumble of the more esoteric verb conjugations and a scattering of the more interesting aspects of sentence construction.

Brain, you and I have got a hell of a lot of revision ahead of us.
I'll get the coffee, you see if you can remember anything beyond 'Non voglio sposare un mammone!'*

And yet, despite my lovely paranoid imagination trying to insert visions of forgetting words and not having answers and standing up in class and realising that my shirt is inside out or something ridiculous like that it is slowly dawning on me that this might actually be fun...

Huh.



*Translation: "I don't want to marry a mamma's boy!". You wouldn't believe how useful this phrase is when you have elderly Italian rellos** who are eager to find you a nice local boy each time you visit.

**relatives.