Nervosity

I can be a wimp at times. Things get stuck in my head, and I find it hard to dislodge them.

Take this dental surgery tomorrow. It's really not going to be any big deal - in fact, the guy was going to do it with just Novocaine (or whatever they're using, these days), but decided that since he would have to use a lot of it to numb the two areas, he'll just use a light anesthetic. They've done this before. The way they describe it, they knock me out completely, then bring me partially awake for the procedure. I'm not nervous about that. What I'm nervous about is the amount of pain I'll feel afterwards. I'll have drugs (mostly OTC stuff, but I still have some heavy-duty ones), so its not a big deal - except in my mind, where I remember the one time he did some suturing in there and nicked a blood vessel. Two hours after getting home, my mouth was still bleeding. Only happened once, ten minutes back in his office, it was fixed, but still: juddering feelings. So I'm nervous about that.

And I'm a little grumpy about my progress in French. The other day I actually exchanged a note with the French kid, and I wrote it in French. I also wrote it in English, and used Google Translate to convert it, so that she actually got three versions -- English, GT, and my version. I compared the last two, and, at least to my eye, it wasn't that bad -- I got about seventy percent of it right. Still, I want to be able to just say things. For example, this is an image from a checkpoint this morning in Rosetta Stone:

The idea is that they give you a blank 'say this' box; you look at the box to its right to figure out what the response was, and that tells you what you want to say. These kids are saying "Yes, we're on the same football team", so you know that you want to say "Do you play football", or something along those lines. And I just draw a blank. Eventually, I think Um...Sommes Usted....and then I stop, because Sommes is we are but I want you are. And Usted is Spanish, not French. Dammit! Then RS pops the phrase up for me to just read (coincidentally counting it as wrong because I said nothing at all that the speech recognition engine could recognize as any of the words it was looking for), and I think Oh, yeah, right, Are you on the same football team, that's what I wanted to say. Why can't I just do that yet, dammit??? It's been THREE MONTHS!!!