For the last year or so, I've felt rather down about myself. I'm a decent waitress; but my continual failures in school and suckitude at things like keeping my house clean made me feel rather crappy about myself. Not all the time; and it's not like I think I suck in general, just that I'm not good at anything in particular. Which isn't really true; I was just trying to do the wrong things.

I've made it through my first round of exams. I've yet to get grades back for the two history exams, but I'm sure I did well on them. I have gotten my French exam back, with a score of 89.5%. Would've been above ninety if I'd remembered how to spell paresseux. Anyway, the exact moment when I realized how much better this is happened in my French teacher's office (she's a resident instructor, so not a prof).

There were two other people there also looking at their tests; one is a girl I sort of feel sorry for, because she just can't seem to wrap her head around any of this stuff. She sits next to me most class periods, and I try to help her, but she just doesn't follow. Because of that, she was pretty much monopoloizing our teacher's time. The other guy, whose name I can't remember, was looking over his test. I don't know if he saw my grade, or if he just noticed how I rarely shut up in class, but he started asking me questions about the things he got wrong on his test. I knew the answers, and at one point our teacher looked over sort of smiled and winked at me.

I got the same feeling I get when I help someone at work with some random bit of knowledge, or when I got called at my retail job to run across the aisle to my other retail job to help them with their computer. It's not just about being needed; it's about feeling that I'm capable. Maybe being capable and knowledgable about history and/or French isn't the most practical, useful, concrete skill--but it's better than trying to do something I'm not capable or interested in.

I was telling this to my mom today, and she was as always happy and supportive. I still haven't told my dad about my change of major .... I'm just going to wait on that until the end of the semester. Then I'll show him my final grades, which I anticipate will be great, and hopefully seeing that end result will temper his immediate reaction of "well that's a useless degree!"

Originally, I was thinking I wouldn't tell him until I was nearly done, but that's not going to work. I'm going to slip and mention one of my classes at some point, and then have to explain; or he'll pick up on the fact that I'm being all vague and weird, and then I'll have to explain. Plus I don't really like keeping secrets.

I wandered a bit there, didn't I.