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 about it. It all started when I was learning English words to pass the Eiken exam. 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 sneak, we can use lurk, creep and tiptoe! And that’s before you even get to irregular verbs! Sneak, snuck, snuck and creep, crept, crept! 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, playing volleyball, 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 the 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!
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 hospitality and emergency glued to my knees, confusion and laughter attached to the back of my head and delusion stuck on the end of my nose! I even tried attaching catastrophe and refrigerator onto my eyelids, but then I couldn’t see, or move. I had to think of a better solution. So, instead, I held all the words in 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 were swallowing me up… and just when I thought it was all over… My mother said these three simple words…
“Let’s get ramen.”
In the blink of an eye, all of the words vanished… everything was silent… I took in a deep breath. My mother was smiling at me in the rear-view 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.