Brain stretch

It has been a long ass time since my brain ached. Proper eyes blurring, head numb, justonemoreandthenI'lltakeabreak, ache. And it is the best feeling in the world. I love it. Class yesterday was good -- I am one of six students, and while my Dutch isn't the best, it isn't the worst, though my lack of vocabulary is shocking to me. How I thought I could learn an entire dictionary of words by osmosis and sporadic "classes" is beyond me. The reality of learning and the effort required to do it, came back with a vengeance yesterday as I spent four solid hours on homework with a grin on my face. Fantastic. Honestly I was the happiest student in the world! I went to a cafe, spread my books out over a big table by the window and proceeded to translate every single word I didn't know before filling in the blanks or circling the opposite adjective on the worksheets. It took a long time and produced four pages of Dutch words and their definitions -- all written in a newly purchased notebook and with a newly purchased pen, which I think will help me learn faster, don't you? Now I can say things like, "Rustig aan!" and "Heb je een goedkoop trui?" which are not complex sentences, but use words I didn't know yesterday morning when I got up. And that is why I love learning so much; my brain will have new and different things in it tonight that it has never had in it before. The only big difference between today and the last time I was a student of anything but life and shoe trends is it takes a bit more time to make my brain remember what it learned today, yesterday, last week, an hour ago, or five minutes from now. Oh well. It just means I will be keeping myself in new notebooks for a while, which is never a bad thing.