There once was a girl in Bordeaux...

A few limericks I found while going through my old French notebooks. My friends Rachel, Becca and I went on a trip to Ireland, and since we were planning to make a quick stop in Limerick, we all decided to write down some limericks of our own to recite when we got there. We never made it to Limerick, but we were quite successful at creating beautiful, romantic Irish poetry. These were all written during class:

In Ireland I'll look for a redhead.
One who's cute, tall and well-fed.
I can explain no tale
For why I like them so pale,
But with one I'd quickly to bed.

Rachel really has to pee.
I'm kind of glad it isn't me.
She's hoping to take,
A five minute break
But she's not gonna get one, tee-hee.

It's time to go home today.
After all, it's Valentine's Day.
I've got nothing to wear
And I have too much hair.
But I have no date, it's OK.

Limericks are really great fun.
Without them, from lectures I'd run.
They're something to do
And when I'm all through
The boring professor is done.

There once were three girls in Nice.
(The flights were 1 centime a piece.)
In Dublin they'd drank
And now they were tanked,
They could sleep for 3 days at least.

I once had a puffy jacket
It made quite a racket.
At least it was warm
And hid my form
It'd been worse had I lacked it.

Ronsard est un poète etrange (Ronsard is a strange poet)
En fait il me dérange (Actually he bothers me)
Il aime Hélène (He loves Helen)
Elle semble putaine (She seems like a bitch)
Dans l'amour il faut qu'il change. (He needs to change with respect to love.)

They say that it's currently spring,
And yet rain is all that it brings.
I hate this day.
I'll run away.
And leave behind all of my things.

I feel really quite nauseous.
I should be rather cautious
Of not throwing up
All over my stuff
While of my classmates watches.

In class we're writing scenarios,
The purpose of which no one knows.
They're reading aloud.
The prof is not wowed.
But that seems to be how it goes.

I'm wearing bright colors today,
The French people say "pourquoi fait?"
The sun's at my back,
I'm tired of black,
And I just feel like it, OK?

I'm sitting in scenario class,
I'm hoping these four hours will pass.
I can't understand
The topic at hand,
I want to be in Ireland at last!

Wow, some of those are real gems ("I once had a puffy jacket" is one I'm particularly proud of.) I'm so glad I spent class time writing them instead of doing something else like taking notes or paying attention.

La Confiance

When a non-native speaker asks a French person a question, the response is typically a pause, a smirk, and then a correction of the question with perfect and fully-confident pronunciation. Of course, they have something to be confident about; their language is relentless and they're masters of it, yet seems to be an inherently French thing. You rarely see an American feel so haughty about being able to speak their own language well...well, not a nice American. So where does this confidence come from?

The only place I can think of is from the depths of Hell: L'Université de Bordeaux (or any other French school.) Mais pourquoi? A little something they like to call "un zéro", or the lowest grade possible on their 20-point scale. In American schools, a completed assignment is likely to receive no lower than a B-, assuming it was turned in and not done by a rabbit. On a 20-point scale, that would be around a 16, or 80%. In French schools, a 10, or what they call "le moyen" is what students shoot for. Around half of them get this grade. And of the rest? A simple bell curve is incapable of drawing out the range typically doled out by professors. From stealing glances and hear-say, I'd conjecture that the vast majority of the rest of the students receive an 8 or a 9 with those fortunate enough to receive an 11 or 12 what we would call "curve-setters". Those who receive other grades are typically lower, often much lower. And what of "le zéro"? Well, I don't think it's given out much, but I have seen a 5, that's a mere 20%, and considering the entire assignment was completed, I thought a bit harsh. In fact, I had a professor say that as she could not give us foreign students less than a 1, because that would be cruel, so she opted to give us global grades, taking into consideration our inferior language skills. But what I think is more important even than the grade of 0 is the fact that the term can refer to the person who receives it. And boy do professors like to announce the grades out as they give them out. Each student has his or her grade stapled to their forehead while the professor tells them, in front of the class, what they did wrong.

So what does this have to do with confidence in oral communication skills? I think that the ruthless grading system in schools actually forces students, and as a result people, to shed their sensitivity about their shortcomings and to don thick skin. When they're right, they know it and are proud to show it. When they're wrong...well, they're so rarely wrong. The moral of this story? If you want confidence, you have to allow yourself to be cut down, demoralized, and humiliated in front of a classroom of your peers. Only then can you truly understand the thrilling sentiment of hearing an American butcher your language.

Vacation

Oh man. I wish I could be on vacation right now. Somewhere warm preferably.

I'm on a conveyor belt waiting to be taken.
To an exam.
To an airport.
To a relative.
To a school.

But what about vacation?

It's approaching but I can't seem to see to it.
I could be in it right now.
I want to read. Ooh....sleep. That sounds good.

Eating Veggie Burgers in the Dark

My aunt called me a couple days ago to let me know that she had had an epiphany: It’s better to eat veggie burgers in the dark. A hippie my aunt may be—she’s a vegetarian, she partakes of protests, and she believes that if the moon is in Sagittarius then you should light a candle by your money tree—she had taken logical steps to reach this particular conclusion. Veggie burgers, she noted, were messy and typically dripped and crumbled all over the eater and said eater’s surroundings. If one eats his or her veggie burger in the dark, therefore, one knows not the mess created. A logical person might argue that even if no one hears a mess fall, it still makes a sound…or am I confusing my proverbs? The point is that as soon as the lights are turned on, this methodology no longer makes sense, the crumbs are still present as are any condiments. Her point? I think what she was trying to say was that messiness happens and if I have to close my eyes while it does, so be it. I can always deal with the mess a little later, perhaps after an enjoyable meal.

Pirates and Priming

I recently read an article about the mind and priming which stated that the human mind is extremely susceptible to subconscious influence. I had heard this before but had never actually experienced it until yesterday. As I was re-writing my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel (well, half-novel) I noticed a strange motif. Along with my plot lines that went nowhere and my overuse of pseudo-French names, I mentioned pirates in three unrelated scenes. And it wasn’t even like my half-novel had anything to do with pirates, instead, I remember writing the last reference and thinking to myself, “I have a genius idea, I’ll mention pirates for some texture!” Why I forgot my prior mentions eludes me to this day, but I did think (aside from worrying about my obvious obsession with naval marauders) that perhaps the power-hungry child hypnotists down at Disney had finally done it—they had brainwashed me with swashbuckling and witty pirates. Something about drunks who steal for a living and rarely bathe had become sexy and interesting. But this wasn’t the first movie (well it was the first trilogy) to exploit the mystère of pirates, so I started thinking that it wasn’t Disney, but some other, more devious (is it possible?) source who began to turn the negative connotations of stealing and ravaging into sizzling Johnny Depp. Was it, in fact, the human mind, in its never-ending quest to understand the unknown, that turned danger into something else. Was my mind trying to tell me something? Was my life (or my half-novel) so boring that I needed to inject it with cliché allusions to danger? Whatever the reason, I’ll be pay more attention to my mind's dirty little secrets when I try to write in the future.