Sunday, April 13, 2008

I’ve been listening to podcasts lately teaching me rudimentary French. I’m not sure why this trip to Paris has brought on the urge to go with some language skills. Maybe it’s the perception that my background in English and German will not exactly win me friends in France. Maybe it’s because I will be alone for at least part of the trip, and I hate appearing to be a tourist. Whatever it is, I’m preparing more now than I did for traveling to Eastern Europe, or even to Spain.

I think part of it was that I took French, and I liked it, more or less. Granted, it was middle school, and not that difficult, and Stephen B. kept throwing our textbooks out the window and the teacher had no control over the class, but it wasn’t bad. I could never get the r right, but I managed to retain the ability to count to four and your basic manners- please, thank you, hello and goodbye, the toilets please?, very bad, tough shit.

Listening to these podcasts, it doesn’t seem to be sticking like it ought to, like I feel like it did for German (I’m pretty sure I’m glamorizing that). I keep mixing s’il vous plaît with prosim, and thank you with köszönöm (like kissidem), the few words I picked up in Poland, Prague and Hungary. Prague makes sense- I liked the language, and I’d like to learn more of it. 

I wonder sometimes if we overfill our neurons. I have this vision in my head of nerves like diving boards, everything, all the information crowded on edges and then flipping from one to the next, springing on and on and then splashing down on our tongues and fingers and telling us what to do- making our muscles move. And then sometimes, the diving boards are full up, information crowding down to the backs, so nothing can get a decent jump going and instead it all just belly-flops into primordial mush and grey matter.

I wonder if other people break their bodies down this way, into images and similes instead of accepting that each of my fingers has millions and billions of smaller parts too many to think about and that each piece is straining and pulling away from me, that I’m losing parts of myself everywhere and leaving myself behind on everyone and everything. That makes me think of crime scene TV and how if there was only a swab small enough, advanced enough to be able to collect those chunks, to remold them back into images of ourselves- two sides and translucent, newly born and shaking legs, ready to hear our advice and heed none of it, to start living and breaking apart again.

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posted by Courtney at 7:58 AM |

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