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.

Labels: body parts, language, paris, travel

iTunes has free language podcasts?! Why has no one told me about this? There is one devoted to GERMAN GRAMMAR. I could have made a world of a better impression on countless (ok, 4) German professors with that information.

I think that might be the future of my education. I took the bit step today and canceled my tourfilterBoston account, and opened up a tourfilterNYC. I think I'm leaning towards taking the fall off and working up money, and by leaning towards that, I mean I'm anywhere near financially stable and will have to.

I'm fine with it. I've gotten sick of higher education- the sheer bureaucracy of all of it. Maybe I came into university with too high expectations, imagining some place where suddenly all the quirks of my mind and my tangential interests would find a place to be nurtured and encouraged, and getting required maths and program lines just failed to compare.

I suppose I can chalk it up to growing up. While it's not quite " 'One day you will do things for me you will not want to do. That is called being a family.' What she does not understand is that I already do things for her I do not want to do. I listen to her when she talks to me. I resist complaining about my pygmy allowance. And did I mention I do not spleen her nearly so much as I desire to? But I do not do those things because we are a family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom the hero taught me." (if I got the quote wrong, sorry. It was all memory). And it's not quite the old guy putting down his beer and saying, "son. I am going to tell you something the like of which has never been told" either.

What it is getting a better feel for Grace, and grace. Understanding Rose better. It's not freedom. It's nothing like freedom, or even security. It's just sort of an understanding, and it only sounds trite when I explain it.



Budapest photos.

Labels: budapest, dublin, education, language, photos