I Woke Up at One Today
I woke up at one today. I set the alarm for 9AM. It went off at 9. It sounded like a plane crashing into our house. I knew exactly what it was. I hurriedly made my way across the room and pounded the snooze button until it shut up. I turned the volume down, and, not thinking, switched the alarm to off mode. Then back to on mode. Why did I do that? I wasn't thinking, that's why. When I finally woke up again, I looked over at the alarm clock. Squinting my eyes, I saw "1:09," but the 1 and the colon kinda formed an eleven. "Shit! No! Please be eleven and not one!" I grab my glasses: "1:09." Damnit! Five hours after I got up, it will be time for work. Damn, that's not long at all.
I have two semi-big assignments due on Monday. The first is for German. I have to describe, in detail, three different outfits of mine (i'm just making up random outfits), cut-out pictures from magazines or whatnot that show these outfits, and put it all together in a nice booklet type thing. Meine Garderobe.
The second is for English. For the past week or so, we've been writing a paragraph. A whole week for a paragraph? Yes. I thought you were in Honors English? I am, now bugger off. For the past two weeks or so, Mrs. Szmigiel has been lecturing us on style. This paragraph, then, is an exercise in style. She's grading us not on what we say, but on how we say it. Oh, and if there's any passive voice (use of the verb "is" and an "-ed" verb), we fail.
I've technically got more done on the paragraph than I do on Meine Garderobe, but I'm more stressed out about the paragraph than I am about Meine Garderobe. All I have to do is revise the paragraph a couple more times, change some sentence lengths, etc., and I'm good. For Meine Garderobe, I still need to finish the second description, do a third one, finish my third outfit (finding articles of clothing), and finally put it all together on construction paper and make a nice booklet out of it.
Meine Garderobe involves much more work that the paragraph does. The descriptions of the outfits must be nearly perfect (then again, the paragraph for English must be perfect). My adjective endings all have to be correct. Word order must be correct. I must be using the correct cases (nominativ, akkusativ, dativ). Only recently, however, have I started to understand all of this stuff better. Throughout this whole year, pretty much, we've been focusing on adjective endings over and over and over again. We're reading a novel now (we've finished what we were supposed to do in class this year), and Frau said that it's really to help us with our adjective endings. They're just that important. I was always a little lost when it came to the cases and such, but I think I'm getting a better grasp on the whole concept. Sure, I need help and therefore look at my notecard quite a bit, but as I do so, I burn it into my brain. I start to remember that mit is dativ and therefore a sentence should look like this: Ich trage diese gruenes T-Shirt mit diesen blauen Jeans. OK, that was a bad example. Die Jeans is plural, therefore it has the same adjective endings for all cases.
Anyway, I have to go to leave for work in fifteen minutes. Or.. auf Deutsch: In funfzehn Minuten muss ich zu Arbeit gehen. Ja. Ich liebe das Deutsch, es ist einfach.