Fed up

It's a good thing the war is almost over. I'm tired of the whole thing. Today there's only one more city left to conquer -- Tikrit -- and the news media is treating it like the Super Bowl, using words like "showdown" and "last stand" and so forth.

Meanwhile, as "saltyvicar" pointed out in his eminently readable blog, 3.3 million people have been killed in fighting in the Congo. (I first typed "ethnic fighting." But who the hell knows why they're killing each other? There's not a single U.S. news organization covering the war there, as a google news search will quickly show.)

So I'm giving up on war coverage for a few days. Today I'm going to try to write a little, and tomorrow I'm going to Phoenix for a few days to visit my aunt. Meanwhile Cris will also leave tomorrow for another 17-day vacation, the second half of her "sabbatical."

She's been speaking longingly and half-jokingly about going to Paris again, where we went a year and a half ago for her birthday. So last night I had a dream about having dinner with her in Paris. The restaurant had this odd split-level arrangement where we had to sit beneath a pane of glass where others could look down on us. That's probably because I've lost all ability to speak French, an ability I never had much of in the first place eighteen years ago, when I learned it by laboriously going to Saturday morning French classes at City College for two semesters. This left me with a bare conversational ability that quickly left me as soon as I came back from a three-week trip to Europe, the purpose of the studying.

I've always been terrible at learning languages. I lived in Japan for 22 months and never learned to speak the language aside from the kind of shop and taxi language I learned in the first two weeks. And I took German for three semesters in college, to fulfill a requirement, and almost nothing remains of my near-conversational ability in that tongue, either. Now the whole time it turns out I should have been learning Arabic. Then I could get a job rebuilding Iraq!