Do you know how lucky I am to be here today?
Last summer was a nightmare! I’m not certain how I made it through.
Let me tell you a little bit about what happened. It all started when I was studying to pass the Eiken exam. I was learning many new words. Little did I know how many English words there were! I thought there were only four shades of green! Light green, dark green, emerald green, and regular green. Then I found out about viridian, jade and celadon! Also, instead of a simple word like jump, we can use hop, bound and spring! And that’s before you even get to irregular verbs! Bound, bound, bound and spring, sprang, sprung! I was in way over my head!
I studied words every day – learning more and more at a faster, incomprehensible pace. I was learning words in the shower, when playing basketball, and even in my sleep! You might say I was a little obsessed. Every day I spent hours and hours writing them down. I wrote “lumberjack” a thousand times until my fingers split. I recited “cerulean” until I went blue in the face. I learned and practiced so much that eventually, I had nowhere to put all of these new words!
Every morning I would wake up, and have to pick up all the words that escaped while I was snoring. Words were falling out of my pockets when I walked down the supermarket aisles. They burst from my wallet at the Italian restaurant. Hippopotamus and rhinoceros blasted from my nose when I sneezed in the library! It was terrible! I had to keep picking up all my lost words.
Eventually, I decided I needed to fix the problem once and for all! I bought some super glue and stuck all the words to myself. I had tragedy and failure glued to my knees, escape and insanity attached to the back of my head and delusion stuck on the end of my nose! I even tried attaching disaster and trouble onto my eyelids, but then I couldn’t see, or move, so I had to think of a better solution.
So, what I did was I concentrated as hard as I could to hold all of the words in. I was like a shaken-up soda can dictionary, ready to explode!
Then one afternoon, my mother was driving me home from the library. Suddenly, words started pouring out of my sleeves, ears, nose and even my mouth! They began filling up the car, higher and higher and higher! I was up to my eyeballs in angst, apathy and regret, literally! The words enveloped me.. and just when I thought it was all over… My mother said these three simple words…
“Let’s get ramen.”
The words stopped filling up the car, and all suddenly vanished… everything was silent… I took in a deep breath. My mother was smiling at me in the rearview mirror, and I said, “Great idea!”. I realised something important. I don’t need to know every word in the dictionary. I just need the ones that matter most! Ramen is an added bonus!
Thank you very much for listening.