Late night Spanish and a side of stress


This evening I had a Spanish class that concentrated on past tenses, which provoked lots of talking, because we got to discuss historical events like the building of the Berlin Wall ("¿por que?" "¿como se dice ‘something for David Hasselhoff to stand on while singing City On Fire’?"), la guerra de las Malvinas, the invention of el teléfono móvil, and more besides.

I also has the frightening experience of talking to people who started work ten years after I did, who had never learned dates in history (did they have ipads even back then, to look up historical events in rather than have to remember them?) and who looked at me like a very old dinosaur. A gerontosaurus, perhaps.

However, I’m cured of my fear of conjugating past tenses. As the present and past tenses are sometimes the same (for vosotros and nosotros) there’s less to learn than you might first think, and yes, it is complicated when all the irregular verbs appear, but then that’s tough: if it was all easy to learn it wouldn’t be a useful mental exercise.

That said, I wish I’d remembered how to conjugate the indefinido tense a few weeks ago when we had our test.

I came home rather tired, and there was only cupcakes to eat. I shouldn’t complain, but when you have a heavy head from thinking all day and all night, you need something more meaningful than a fluffy confection of sugar and flour. My wife saw the state I was in and swiftly made me some pasta. Well, she warmed up some pasta and sauce that was meant for La Serpienta Aquatica Negra. As easy as taking pasta from a baby.

Pasta eaten, I had to attend to my appraisal for the last six months. I hate few things as much as appraisals, and the form our company uses is a bastardised PowerPoint template which looks nice until you try to fill it in and find the boxes are too small to write anything meaningful in. Of course, that doesn’t matter because due to some horrible bug, the boxes I type into ignore three out of every four presses of the space bar. Every letter is fine, and the space bar works perfectly apart from on this one form, but the combination of fatigue, something I didn’t really want to do at ten at night and then the internet making everything harder than it needed to be had me so frustrated I was ready to fling the computer out of the window.

Which would have been a mistake, because it’s my personal computer, and there’s a stiff penalty for high-rise littering, as the signs in the lift lobby made clear when we moved in. So my wife rubbed my back and we hoped it would be ok, and I ground my way into the self-incriminating world of the 360 appraisal.

I think this may mean I am ill-suited for the world of work. I don’t like forms. Filling forms in that seem to ask you questions that don’t apply to what you do every day, to lock you into a tiny box that bears no resemblance to what you have to do each day, seems pointless, futile, the action of an unkind tyrant seeking to demonstrate power over you by forcing you to do things you don’t want to do.

Or maybe I just need more sleep.


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