Today at TempLand I had to call all of these foreign companies to try and schedule this stuff (I could go into detail but why should you be just as bored as I am?) and it left me feeling like such a dipshit American. The companies were in Italy, Germany, Poland, France, Finland and Sweden, and a lot of places the person who answered did speak English and was able to help me out pretty well. But at some places, even though they didn't speak English, they would try speaking to me in like three other languages, and I was completely useless every time. I could determine the language but I couldn't understand anything, of course, and I kept having to say, "I'm sorry, I only speak English." It made me feel so dumb. I mean in my defense I do speak excellent English. English and I go way back. But I took French for 3 years and I just took a Spanish class at the end of last year - yet I am completely useless at any actual communication.
I could get into a whole thing about how the American educational system completely leaves us hanging in this regard, by not making foreign languages a requirement until high school, which is really way too late. If you start teaching kids languages as soon as they start learning to talk, there is no end to the information they can absorb. But I'm not going to get into that whole thing, because I have known for a long time about that particular inadequacy of our learning institutions, and so I really have only myself to blame for my failure to progress in this capacity. I just wish there was a thing like in The Matrix, where I could lie in that dentist chair and Ike Turner could just hook my brain up to the computer and upload knowledge and then I would just instantly know jujitsu and Portuguese and stuff.
I would go on, but I think that analogy sufficiently illustrates my culture's inherent lack of industriousness far better than I could put further into words.