piano, piano

(The following is another excerpt from an email to Katy, this time senza fotografi)

"School.  Before I came here I knew two things about myself: I love learning languages and I have a lot of language-learning self confidence, as in: I'm pretty sure that given certain amount of time, I can do this.  Well, I think it was Socrates who once said (wait, do you know the Steve Martin bit where he says, "In the immortal words of Socrates, 'I drank what?'" very funny, that.  I do miss laughing with you...) Anyway, Socrates once said something to the effect of the wise man knows that he doesn't know eveything.  Well I am currently intimiately aware of what I DON'T know and it's kicking my butt.  I can understand 99% of what my truly gifeted teachers say in class, but depending on the circumstances, I might only get a tiny bit of what real, everyday Italians are saying to me in other situations.  It's embarassing and frustrating.  I feel sorry for our nice landlady who gets to see my miserable, confused face regularly.  Dino, our landlord, Gabriella's husband, asked my how the first week of classes went and I tried to tell him in Italian that my head was spinning and that I didn't feel like I was making good progress.   His reply was "piano, piano" which means more or less in this case 'little by little' but I'm laughing now because this reminds me of Ms De Vries' (the kids' piano teacher) famous saying, 'life is easy, now PIANO, that's hard!'   And that's how I feel, it's so hard it's making me sick.  OK, it's either that or all the cheese I've been eating (or maybe a little of both).  But I have been a bundle of nerves and feeling tight-throaty all week.  A few hours of hard labor in the garden yesterday helped a lot.  I bet it will take a while to really see progress, but I suppose I can see some if I calm down a little- like the fact that I'm often thinking in Italian, that I've switched to writing in my journal in Italian (for now, anyway) and the fact that I can understand more of Harry Potter no 1 (the movie) in Italian than when we watched it a few weeks ago. I spend plenty of time thinking of what I should have said in whatever Italian conversation situation I just made a fool of myself, constructing cleaver responses.   I know I come off as pretty dim, and I just want to scream, 'I really am a reasonably intelligent, interesting and witty person, no really I am!' I hate feeling so incompetent, but I bet it will be rewarding to notice my progress, piano, piano..."