English, Spanish, or Lullaby, oh my

An (ex) friend of mine stateside just pointed out my previous spelling of ´pastime´as ´past-time,´and I realized that I must ask for your forgiveness for the faulty English of a certain number of previous posts. I can barely remember to change my clothes, let alone figure out the more complex tasks of conjugating verbs in my native language or remembering the structure of noun phrases. I have spent the past week and a half speaking a very broken Spanish and listening to others´ very broken English. Now my English is resembling theirs more and more and when alone, I find myself attempting to conjugate my thoughts into Spanish, before I realize what I´m doing, stop, shake my head, and resume them in broken English.

Also, let me point out for a moment how bad my Spanish is, despite years of study, a transcript about five years too old to do me any good: when I tried telling a friend that no, I knew no songs in Spanish but I knew one in French (Frere Jacques), I found myself in the difficult situation of having to explain why almost everybody in the U.S. knew one song in French thanks to the lullaby (whose repertoire apparently we need to expand to include a Spanish song). To explain ´lullaby,´a word I did not know in Spanish (it´s ´nana,´in case you´re interested), I said roughly this: ¨a song for babies for to sleep them.¨ That´s right, folks. A lullaby is a song for babies for to sleep them. Sra. Park, I´m sorry. I don´t know what happened to those straight A´s so many years ago. Apparently in the years since, I have been too busy with my past-times and for to sleep me too much.