Thanksgiving Day, 1988: The first one I've ever missed -- I've missed a lot of family things in the past year -- beach, I don't know what else. I called home this night. (It's strange how the two languages start to mix: 'this night' -- an involuntary mistake.) Anyway, I don't know if I like this business of calling the whole household all at once. Everybody lined up and stuttered a few words like 'how's everything?' and I said the same generic thing to everybody, except Michael. With him, I didn't even hesitate in jumping right into a political debate (at least on my side) over the term 'political science.' He, much to my disappointment, no longer remembered what he had written in his letter which gave me such alarm. There you have it, one extreme or the other -- (my cousin) was surprised that the French don't celebrate Thanksgiving, which represents another sort of extreme.
I really like this pen, it forces me to write clearly. I don't know why, but I just thought of my first French teacher, Mr. M_____. I gave him a French translation of a 'Peanuts' comic book once, and he never gave it back. I'd really like to have it now that I would probably understand what was going on. Today in acting, we did this exercise where one person would have to sculpt an idea or scene or whatever using two or three other people as material for building. First I had three people stand back to back -- 'Dependency' -- Susu understood first, she's really quite smart underneath her southern facade. Anyway, the next time I went, I had to do something with religion. I had Andy beating the shit out of Shawn while Susu walked by looking down, hands in a prayer position. Susu was 'l'eglise,' Andy 'la realite' et Shawn 'le peuple.' It actually worked pretty well.
There's this girl L___ in my class who's kind of strange. She's always so goddam friendly and interested in everything everyone's doing. Today, she said that she had this letter from her 'brilliant' cousin and I could read it if I wanted if I wasn't receiving much mail. I looked at it and saw some some stupid sentence like 'The sun peeked out behind the clouds' and lit up this famous building or that monument, whatever. He also wrote the word 'Jolly.' I didn't have to read much, needless to say. I told her that I didn't like typed letters anyway, which may have offended her, but only until she could think of some other social question to ask. Actually, I'm being a bit harsh here, she's nice, if a bit nauseating, as Nadia would say. I really hate it when I'm talking to someone and they talk about how this person or that person who they know is brilliant, or the smartest person you could possibly imagine, or the best guitar player in the world, or whatever. It's like, why don't you realize that you're talking to someone right now who is potentially brilliant or amazing. I mean, some people never realize where the hell they are, always talking about this or that somewhere else. I would bet though, that two times out of three (at least), when these people are actually with these other brilliant people of whom they had talked, they don't even pause before telling about some other brilliant person that they know.
Holly was right when she said that a lot of times it's stupid talking with French people because we often share nothing outside of my desire to speak French and their knowledge of the language. Therefore, even the most uninteresting French person can seem to be great, until you go out to dinner with them and realize that you don't have much to talk about. Maybe that's why no one talks on the Metro.
The other day as i was walking to the bus I spoke to somebody I didn't know because I thought they looked interesting. Despite my best efforts it degenerated into small talk and eventually staring out the windows awkwardly away from each other. Yeah, that's why no one talks on the metro.
Posted by: stefan | 09/17/2009 at 09:14 PM
Perhaps if it had been in French, it might have been better! (Seriously,
props to you for trying, though.)
On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 9:14 PM, wrote:
Posted by: Matthew Gallaway | 09/17/2009 at 09:57 PM