Mood: Sleepy, grumpy, sneezy. Only three of the Seven Dwarfs.
Music: Computer is DOA, so no music. A funeral dirge would suffice.
Mind: Espanol es el diablo, verdad?

Last week, I was really feeling sorry for myself because I had to take this intensive 2-week Spanish course to graduate in August.

Well, Sunday morning, I quit feeling sorry for myself.

When I signed online about 9 a.m., I wasn't expecting another soul there. Not too long after, I received an Instant Message from a high school buddy named Jeremy Garver. Jeremy is in Charleston, S.C., now because he is studying to be a nuclear engineer on a nuke submarine.

(Mild digression: This is such a Jeremy-type job. The aesthetics have changed -- I hear he now hangs up his clothes instead of piling them into gopher-like mounds. However, he seems to have a bit of a masochistic streak, and this suits him just fine.)

Anyway, I started telling Jeremy about how sorry for myself I felt because I had to spend three hours a day in a classroom studying a semester's worth of Spanish in two weeks. And then Jeremy told me that the military makes you learn an entire year of material in two weeks. His class (singular) is nine hours a day, followed by five hours of study and about six hours of sleep.

So I quit feeling sorry for myself.

Briefly.

After two days of class, the only word describing my condition is exactly the same in Spanish and English: Miserable. Some of the people in my class are perfectioninsts. Some are real ... stupid, to put it bluntly. Three, including myself, will graduate in August. The rest have at least one semester left; a couple have at least two years left.

Which begs the question: Why sit in a classroom for three hours a day being made to feel stupid by an impatient, crusty, cursing, smoking professor from Spain? There's simply no good reason, short of prolonged assisted suicide at the hands of Dr. Antonio Something-Hyphenated.

Every event in my life has become a countdown. Seriously.

5 days until my 22nd birthday.
9 days until Paul's 22nd birthday.
11 more class periods of Spanish.
12 days until we sign on the apartment.
15 total days until the Spanish class is over.
61 days until the wedding.
62 days until the honeymoon.
84 days until I graduate from college.

And now that you're completely updated on the status of my state of mind (along with la cuenta de cuando todos sucedera), I'll give you one more stat.

25 minutes until I leave Paul's office. Then it's time to eat, drink and be merry. Or something like that.