My first week of school

Saturday November 15th

They say Paris is for lovers.  I would argue that is simply more for the passionate.  Seems a bit more inclusive to me. When I woke up this morning and considered how to spend my day, I could think of nothing more amusing than taking a walk in the park. No park in particular. I simply wanted to sit somewhere beautiful and reflect on my amazing good fortune. So here I sit in the Luxemburg  Gardens on a pleasant, typically grey, November day in Paris, writing this blog entry.

I mean, really, who gets to do something like this?  “Whose life is this anyway?” I ask myself this almost everyday.  Even when I had a mini melt down earlier in the week, I was able to take a walk down the Seine and have a good cry.  Kind of puts things in perspective doesn’t it? Talking a walk down the Seine? Come on!  

The origin of the meltdown you ask—language woes.  I’m not exactly sure why I thought going from speaking French  1 hour a week to 12 hours a day was going to be an easy transition.  But in fact, that unmet expectation seems to have been the source of my frustration.  I thought my head was going to spontaneously combust and fly off my shoulders.  Holy #@$!!!

Anyway, thanks to my amazing professors/therapists, I was able to loosen up a bit and get back to work.  It seems that my expectations for improved fluency have been about as high as those of the world toward Obama.   Things are much better now that I’m starting to practice what I preach—breathing.

As for the language, suffice it to say that I understand much more than I am able to speak. It doesn’t matter though, because I speak to almost anyone who will listen.  I even make up things so that I can talk to people. But my new favorite thing to do is that when I learn a new way of saying something, I interject it into a conversation as much as possible. Kind of like Eddie Izzard in his “Dressed to Kill “act.  For instance, I was so proud to have successfully told Lucy, my hostess extroidinaire, that I couldn’t figure out how to work the coffee machine.  So I tell everyone I can,” Je n’ai pas reussi faire fonctionner la machine du café ce matin. “  You’d be amazed at how relevant to the conversation I can make that phrase.

Alas, French is like a symphony to me. I just love how it sounds, how it flows, how it moves me. Even how at times, frustrates me.   It’s truly a language of passion.