Pahlay Vooo Frenchy?

I'm a pretty lazy guy generally and I think it's only now that I'm officially an old fuck it's starting to dawn on me how many things I've just let go (and I don't just mean my fat ass either. HEY-OHHH!). One of the things that I've always wanted was to be fluent in another language. I know a bunch of people who not only know more than one language (sometimes several languages) but can switch between them so effortlessly that it blows my tiny mind. I guess cuz I don't have that skill set that I had assumed that it would be more of a huge gear shift to go from say Spanish to English or Hindi or whatever than it seems to be for them.

Back in high school I took 4 years of French. Why French? I don't know. I guess I'll just point out that most of what I do is not really very well thought out at all. My older sisters had taken French so I went with that. I think my younger sister also took French but I can't remember. And so, after 4 years of high school French, did I walk away wowing the babes with my frenchy-french-french talk? Nope. I can kinda understand someone speaking French as long as they speak slowly and with a Malden accent. Otherwise, I'm pretty much lost. Why didn't I take Spanish for jeebus' sake? I don't blame anyone for this other than myself by the way. I'm not here to slag off on the wonderful free-ish public education that I received. They tried their best but I'm a giant dope and the information just couldn't find a hold in my noggin. My brain was too occupied with girls and why they wouldn't talk to me (hint: I was terrified of them and high school girls can smell fear).

A couple of years ago after getting tired of listening to me lament not learning a language, the Wiff bought me that Rosetta Stone software for my birthday. She got me the Spanish version and I was totally psyched as I had completely bought into their ads on TV. "Used by blah-dee-blah to do yadda yadda." It sounded good enough for me. But have I used it? Um, no. Not really. I started to for about two weeks (even going to the extent of scheduling time at night for my "classes") but I soon got distracted by the interwebs or whatever and I started skipping classes. It was like college all over again. I'm the worst fucking student ever. Now whenever I go into my little computer room upstairs at home the box sits there on the shelf and silently judges me. I can hear you Rosetta Stone (but I can't understand what it's saying cuz it's in Spanish. Zing!). I know I'm a slacker. I get it.

This is not the only example either. There's the time that I thought I'd really like to learn Flash so I went and bought the suite (this when Macromedia still owned it and the motherfucker was NOT cheap). Again, I set up times to teach myself since at the time I had been laid off from ZDNet (this was what? 2002 maybe). This was really the most opportune time to teach myself this software but again I just stopped pursuing it. I dunno why exactly. It's not like I got super busy or anything. I just lost interest. Now I have this expensive software package calling me out as a punk-ass every time I open the top drawer to my desk.

Did I mention the bass guitar? Of course I have. My friend Gary gave me his old bass late last year in the hopes that he'd help re-kindle my interest in learning how to play (and then perhaps we'd get together in his living room with some other guys and play songs while pretending that we're not a bunch of ridiculous middle-aged dorks). It worked for about a month or so. I went out and picked up a strap, a cord and some picks and set out to teach myself how to play. I had an old bass amp that I dragged out and plugged in with "learn bass guitar" video on YouTube playing in the background. I don't know why but I didn't even get through the first hour of practice. Pathetic. Why can't I commit to a hobby? What is that all about? Quite frankly I'm surprised I've kept this blog thing going for as long as I have.

So this is me saying that I'm going to pick up where I left off on these activities and start over. I don't have kids or even a dog that needs walking so in theory I have plenty of time to learn. I think I need to get out of the "this is school" mindset and just do it cuz it's fun to learn new shit. Let's see how long I can keep this up (insert hacky Viagra joke here...HEY-OHH!).