If there is one thing massive international upheaval has taught me, is that in order to survive one must remain flexible. Living and working in England is not a total cakewalk. There are standards I don't quite meet or understand, and times when I feel lost. Somedays I just wish I was home, but then things would pretty much be the same as England, but with words I understand and a massive heat index.
Words suck. Seriously, there is something to be said about those people who got together and decided to build the Tower of Babel. It would be nice if we could all just speak one language and get on with it, but even when you speak one language you can get tone wrong or not be descriptive enough and *poof* things can still come crumbling down.
I'm particularly good at that. I have a note that sits on my computer that says, "Read it again." Not that I do, but there is a note there. I am particularly bad with words at times, and even worse as a reader who generally skims.
Despite, I know that I'm still willing to struggle. Willing to pour over words like 'fine' and 'quite' and 'pants' and whatever they are willing to throw at me. To not want to scream at them when they tell me how cute it is when I say 'awesome.' Willing to read it again, to try again, and to hope that one of these days I finally master it. I'm just frustrated right now. Frustrated and feeling acutely foreign.
But I don't know how long I'll be here in England, so I have to take the good with the bad.
Anyways, I just got my super duper special members tour thing for the Royal Palace somethingorother I just joined. I can climb scaffolding next to stuff older than America. Seriously. So I gotta take the bad, because stuff like that is really 'awesome.'
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Reminds me of when I lived in the US for a few years. It didn't take too long to learn to say wrench rather than spanner, sidewalk instead of pavement, etc. In fact, I still sometimes talk American by mistake! But I did sometimes get irritated by people telling me that they loved my accent, and really irritated by people who asked me to repeat things they found especially cute!
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