all or nothing

Someone with a Cyrillic name liked one of my tweets earlier.  I noticed his little bio was in Russian - and that I could read it.  It was only two and a half words, but still.  That was kind of cool.  "Всё или ничего!"  I'm more of a "little bit's fine too" sort of person.  Some things just work so much better that way.  I don't know why people are such absolutists about everything.

I think if I were to be tested on my Russian, I would fail.  Before I gave up on school, I got lots of failing grades.  I wasn't engaged, I was miserable, I didn't give a fuck.  If I'd have been able to concentrate better, that might have helped.  In short, I don't seem to be очень хорошо студента.  Or something like that.  Duolingo constantly dings me for getting details wrong, but I just pretend it's congratulating me on being close enough.

The point is to keep doing it, right?  I can delve into that whole other quagmire of why I'm doing it, but that's not really the point, either.  I always think back on that MIT campus, visiting someone there, my backpack full of clothes, imagining that they were books.  I wish I'd had the chance to at least try.  I couldn't even get through high school. 

I can blame the system, or my parents, I can blame myself.  It doesn't really matter.  It's all the same thing.  Circumstances.  Sometimes I still just wish I'd perservered though.  I wish I'd understood how to do that and why it mattered.  Doing well isn't nearly as important as doing it anyhow.  The main reason I failed out of school had something to do with how I'd stopped going to all my classes.

Now, I don't know what the hell to do with myself.  Try learning a random language?  Yeah, that'll make a huge difference in my life, but whatever.