Amazing Skills

I tend to view the relative difficulty of things solely with regards to how difficult I find them. So, for example, I find scientists to be essentially super-human. By contrast, I have trouble grasping that any professional in the fields that I'm good at might possibly not know something that I do. If I go to a talk or roundtable on a topic, and I have a thought or objection that isn't voiced, I assume that it is so obvious that it goes without saying (because how could a law professor not have thought of it, if I did?).

But yesterday, this instinct reached an absurd degree. I was in the bathroom, and two Hispanic members of the catering staff were speaking Spanish. And I caught myself absolutely marveling at how smart they were, because they spoke Spanish. Now, for me, a former failed Spanish student, that would have been an impressive accomplishment, but for these two guys Spanish was clearly their first language. It would be one thing if I was marveling at them being bilingual (which is a real notch in the belt), but that really wasn't my thought process. It was a simple objective belief that I had that Spanish = difficult.