Accouche!

Coucou mes lecteurs!

My recent purchase of a used book full of day trips in the outskirts of Paris has proved a rich source of escapades, none of which I have yet shared with you. Hundreds of pictures document these excursions, as well as sojourns closer to home and, most recently, a weekend trip to Bordeaux. I even thought of you, dear readers, as I sketched in my mental notes and framed my photographs.

As I contemplate the task ahead, I am reminded of an expression in French: Alors, t'accouches! Roughly the equivalent of "spit it out," it literally tells the listener to give birth.

Which in turn reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with my thesis advisor. A beautiful, passionate Frenchwoman with whom my classmates and I all have devastating crushes, she is always telling us ne vous inquiétez pas, don't worry. She had just finished forbidding me to worry (again) a few weeks ago, when I'd only drafted a page, but I wanted to assure her quand même that I'd done plenty of research, that I just hadn't yet gotten the chance to transform what I'd gathered into written pages.

C'est comme si j'étais enceinte (It's as if I were pregnant), I tried to explain. In marked contrast to our first dogged communications, we can now converse fluently and spontaneously, which leads to debates about the feminization of French métiers and the etymological evolution of spelling. But now and then I still make weird mistakes, and the flicker of confusion in her brow told me she suspected this was one of those times.

Enceinte? she repeated. Vous ne voulez pas dire... enceinte (You don't mean, pregnant)? She made a hand motion to indicate the shape of a pregnant belly.

Si, I insisted. Je me suis remplie de pensées, et maintenant il ne faut qu'accoucher (I've filled myself with thoughts, and now I just need to give birth).

Ah, je comprends, she laughed. And after I sent her several pages with translations four days later, she remarked that I'd fulfilled my promise.

Today I found out that Proust used the same metaphor when discussing his novel. A metaphor that's good enough for Proust is certainly good enough for me.

So I promise to you, mes tulipes, very soon, an accouchement. The labor will be intensive, but I hope the results will be worth all of our trouble.

Meanwhile, here are a few miscellanous Paris pictures to tide you over, with flighty, springtime-appropriate commentary, possessing neither continuity nor cohesion.

Des Pensées Academiques

This is the first of several posts for tonight. I've been busy, but the fruits of my exploration are ripe for internet harvest. My blog is one of feast and famine, mes petits. 

First: the results of my placement test, and the events that followed. The whole thing was rather a shock to my system, and a contributing factor to the latest delay.

With my kindergarten-level street French and very short career of study, I was pretty confident of what to expect. I certainly didn't expect to be at absolute débutant level, nor were the upper reaches of avancé orsupérieur in my line of sight, but I was rather worried about whether I would place in elementaire or intermédiare. You see, without going into too much depth, one's niveau affects what kind of classes one can take. I had signed up for civilization lectures open to intermédiare students, hoping that I wouldn't score too low to take them.

On Monday, shortly after I posted, I reported to the secretariat to claim my classes. When the man who was handing out the class assignment cards and inscription sheets slid over mine with the word supérieur, I think I stared at it for about a month. Surely, I thought, they must have made a terrible mistake.

But of course, I'm human. So as I strolled down Boulevard Saint-Michel, giggling now and then like a crazy person, it began to feel right. I adjusted my self-image from someone with atrocious French to someone with atrocious spoken French. 

Long story short: I went in to change classes, took a three-hour-long essay test, and was admitted into the French literature Masters preparatory program. It's very exciting.

Still--it doesn't do to get too cocky. After writing an eight page essay in French deconstructing the use of tense and leitmotif in Proust, Colette and Duras, I left the building and walked to an Orange store to try to sort out a problem with my iPhone (which is currently functioning as a delightful iPod Touch rather than a proper phone), where I struggled with relatively simple sentences like: "The 3G reception seems to be working, but I can't make or receive calls." And when employees at several Orange boutiques told me to call the help line, and I asked how I could call a help line when the whole problem is that I'm unable to make any calls, I prayed I sounded indignant and not confused.

Well, learning a language is a process. So is French bureaucracy. With work, I hope to become fluent in both.