Channeling My 10-Year-Old Self

I don’t want to do my stupid, SMELLY Latin homework.  The teacher goes too fast and all the other kids are SMARTER than me and I hate it, hate it, HATE it.  I’m gonna get an “F” and then it will ruin my bright, shiny GPA and I will have gone to school, lo these many, MANY, TOO DARN MANY years for NOTHING, and everyone will point and laugh at me while whispering behind their grubby little pencil-stained hands, “Look, there’s the girl who couldn’t conjugate a third declension noun if her Imperfect Passive life depended on it” and I’ll never get a job and I will have to live first in a faded, dilapidated trailer, then downgrade to a very nice, only slightly used refrigerator box and it will be very, VERY, “movie-of-the-week” sad.  You would probably shed a glistening tear if you happened to drive by my charmingly (but frugally) decorated refrigerator box on your way to work at the job YOU have because YOU probably did YOUR homework.

In case you don’t know me from Publius Terentius, I’m a 50 year-old mother of four in my last semester of college.  I’m on track to graduate in December, God willing and the creek don’t rise, and assuming that an interrogative pronoun doesn’t sneak up on my Pluperfect Active tense self, tie my shoe strings together and then laugh hysterically as I writhe around on the floor while the big kids graduate with honors.

So here’s the thing:  I LIKE Latin.  I went through two semesters last year with destined-for-sainthood Mrs. Clouse and it was FUN!  LIVELY!  INTERESTING! Sometimes there were MOVIES!  And then Mrs. Clouse had the nerve to think that just because she had put up with untold legions of obnoxious students for a LONG TIME that it was OK for her to prance off into the Florida sunset and now Latin is not-so-much-fun.  The not-so-much-fun is compounded by the fact that I am taking not ONE, but TWO Latin classes in order to fulfill the language requirement so I can graduate with the big kids.  My second Latin class is a 4490 level Latin Historiography class, which is a fancy uppity way of saying that we’re studying the body of Latin writings, so we’re reading Caesar and Livy and Suetonius and we’re reading them IN LATIN.  I don’t know why it did not occur to me that this might happen.  I am hopelessly out of my depth. 

But here’s the real problem (and don’t bother telling me that this isn’t a REAL PROBLEM – because at this 11:18 moment on this Friday morning, it is MY real problem): 

In a normal semester, if I were to get too overwhelmed, I would just drop the class and pick it up another semester, when my head was more prepared for it, or my schedule would allow more time for it, or a Latin-loving Lothario would move in next door, be smitten with my clever wit and sexy subjunctive case and offer to tutor me daily until I was spouting “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” like Horace with his hackles raised.

But this ISN’T a normal semester.  It’s my LAST semester and if I drop, I can’t graduate with the big kids, and my HOPE scholarship money has run out, so I would have to pay REAL MONEY to take the class again, and the stubborn, mule-headed part of me (that my mother says never really went away) can’t stand the thought of letting a class get the best of me, so I keep showing up and looking bewildered, while making a valiant effort to read a language that is DEAD and that no one actually SPEAKS.  Just to add insult to injury, when I AM able to read it, it’s all about WARS and the HELVETII and Caesar bragging about bridges he built and Gauls he vanquished, and I’m pretty sure that if I were to occasionally stumble across something FUN or ENTICING, like maybe those muscular, buff Gladiator guys, 

or even some Gladiator sandals, 

I would be EXTREMELY more interested. But so far, ALL CAESAR, ALL THE TIME.   

And in addition to these two Latin classes, which aren’t as FUN! and LIVELY! as Mrs. Clouse’s class was (just sayin’), I also have a Senior Seminar class on John Milton (who was never, EVER, NOT EVEN ONCE, ever accused of dwelling anywhere even CLOSE to the neighborhood of FUN and LIVELY) and a class on Jane Austen (which IS fun and lively, but not with capital letters) and a Hebrew Scriptural Literature class (awesome) AND a Rhetorical Theory class, where our last reading was Plato’s Phaedras, an imaginary dialog between Socrates and Phaedras , involving a lot of horses and feathers and argument about which is better, the non-lover or lover, and I still haven’t figured out what the horses and feathers had to do with ANY of it, so there’s just enough brain-swirly stuff on my plate to make me forget the real problem.  

The real problem is that I don’t have a choice anymore.  I don’t want to delay graduation for a WHOLE ‘NOTHER SEMESTER for ONE STINKING class, so I really have to take it this semester, which means I’m just going to have to BUCKLE DOWN and PUT MY MIND TO IT and STOP BEING A CRYBABY and all that other crap I tell MY kids to do when they complain. 

THAT’S the real problem.  I hate not having a choice, and the thing I pretty much enjoy the MOST about being a grown-up is being able to do WHAT I WANT when I WANT, like eat Talenti Caribbean Coconut Gelato for breakfast, or purchase MANY sets of extremely high thread count sheets for my bed, even though I have 11 sets and REALLY DON’T NEED ANY MORE. 

My 50-year-old self realizes there is some faulty reasoning at work here, because I could still choose to drop the class, but I would have to pay the consequences.  So the 10-year-old in me is just going to put my hands over my ears and say, “la-la-la-la-la” until those rational thoughts go away, and then MAYBE I’ll do my stinking homework.  

Wow, I always wanted to be a TEN; I just thought it would be my pants size, and not my emotional IQ.