Alright, so I'm back in school.

I have to say, I'm enthused. My schedule quite reflects my warring left and right brains -- English for Brainiacs and Math for Dummies.

In my Math for Dummies class I am peopled with a group of individuals from all over the globe -- Brazil, Peru, Yemin, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Norway, The Bronx. None of these people are stupid, they just don't understand numbers. Like me. I should have paid more attention when The Count was painting numbers on umbrellas on Sesame Street.

So, I'm getting a pretty cool submersion in graphing trinomials and world cultures all at once. We're even studying together, this group and I.

Now, call me crazy but, what are the chances I might not understand their language? We have to provide an extra hour of group study time just to make sure we're hearing each other correctly. Because in Brazil, math operations are performed exactly opposite of how they're performed here. Norway ... hmmm... ya ... Yemin - reads right to left ...

This brings me to my English for Brainiacs class. The professor seems a bit... ambivalent. To his surprise, he was teaching World Lit not American Lit. So he failed to show for the second class meeting, but sent someone in his stead to put in the video and have us take "serious notes for discussion" during next class period. The video was an ancient Dutch film full of gloom and doom and lots of fretful women with tears (and fire) in their eyes. But no subtitles. That's right folks -- nary a language on the screen but for the scroll of original language ala circa 1623 in the very beginning that no one in the class knew how to decipher.

But for the young blonde sitting next to me who said, "For some reason I can understand what they're saying."

All the tharn-eyed deer turned her way.

"I don't know *how* I am understanding them, but...strangely... I can."

She needs to come with me to my psycho 101 class where THAT teacher promises to use the Tarot on us by the end of the course. I really *really* want to put the two of them together and see what happens.

If nothing else, I have learned that I can no longer afford to be monolingual. I need to pick up Spanish out of necessity for the community I live in is fast becoming predominantly Latin American. French is a must in order to understand the natives when I venture over the great big pond between us. And Tarot is necessary to better understand the lessons nature sends each of us, sometimes in the form of psychic premonition, sometimes in the form of seemingly thoughtless academics.