Possibly Taking This Back To School Thing Too Far

I recently (as in, last night) got this bug in my ass to learn Irish Gaelic and Welsh.

Yeah. The hell if I know either. Ok, well, in all fairness, I was dinking around online listening/watching various things on YouTube and it got me to remembering the five erstwhile weeks of taking Gaelic classes in middle school through the Toronto Board of Ed's "Saturday School" program (I'm sure many of you remember this - just about every language you could possibly think of and for the most part they were attended by kids actually of that cultural persuasion who were generally frogmarched there by Mom, Dad, Baba, Papou, whomever). My friend Catherine and I were somehow all fired up about this whole BEING CELTIC WOMENZ thing and so we made a pact to go together. And learn Gaelic. Yeah, so, five weeks. I do remember how to pronounce dubh and what it means (black, for the record). And that we ran into Kiefer Sutherland eating pizza by himself at a local cafe after class once.

The thing is - I'm starting grad school in the fall. None of my classes, as far as I can tell, will be in either Irish or Welsh. I started spinning this elaborate justification in today's runaround about how, well, I want to be an archivist and HEY who says there aren't any documents in Irish or Welsh that need, um, archiving. Yeah, maybe not so much in California, huh?

On the other hand, it's kind of nice to have a jonesing for something completely random and yet vaguely cerebral. Plus if I did make any headway whatsoever in either language, it's kind of like having a secret language. Sort of. I think I will also put forth the 'getting older, feeling it good to maintain a connection with whatever cultural heritage I have' as a rationale for this completely batshit idea. That being said, if you look at written Irish or Welsh as you are listening to it, it is a complete mindfuck - maybe I have this desire to challenge myself by breaking a 'code'. Honestly, I really have no idea, but I'll keep y'all posted. Because I know you're all dying to hear me count to ten and tell you the days of the week and "Padraig and Angharad go into the shops. They buy one (ten) cartons of milk (beer)"