Broken Brain

I had another broken brain moment the other day. Which is nothing new, really, but unfortunately this one happened during an exam. Usually this frustration arises when I have to write in Spanish or in Dutch but this time it happened while I was writing in English.

I’m 3 exams down with 3 left to go. I focused a lot of my attention on the first two exams since I anticipated that they would be the most difficult. I always realize that trying to grade the presumed difficulty level of exams is a mistake… and usually I realize this too late.

Anyway, I was preparing for this exam in a frenzy a couple of days before it was to take place. The information always seems to blur itself together, dates seem to go behind your back and reproduce themselves until they’ve acquired a population that is beyond hope of being controlled. The material takes on a life of its own, growing in reckless fashion like the ivy in our backyard; it rains once and then the other plants are caught in the hopeless green grip, unable to breathe. The sheer enormity of the information waiting to be learned can be overwhelming and sometimes it can make you lose your hold on reality. You start to second guess yourself, changing numbers around, making historical events occur in completely illogical time frames. It was this kind of frazzled environment that led up to the day of the exam.

My answers were a mixture of surety and nonsense; hopefully more of the former than the latter. I was writing the very last essay, one which asked for

my opinion rather than facts and that was when my brain apparently reached its linguistic identity crisis of the day. I couldn’t remember how to spell ‘category’. I first wrote ‘categorie’, the preserved American part of my brain said, “Hey, wait a minute.” I floundered, looked at the letters a while and then swiped down a ‘y’ – ‘ie’ hybrid. It is a quick grade school-aged trick that fools no one but we all seem to continue to attempt it.

I left the exam not knowing if the correct English spelling of the word was ‘categorie’ or ‘category’.

Just another day in the confusing life of an American living abroad.