Gang aft allay (sp?)

This morning I got out of bed and made a list of everything I needed to do and how long it was going to take. Then I drew up a schedule of exactly what I was going to do and how long it was going to take. I even started taking notes on what was causing things to take longer than they should, like not being able to find my shoes and staring off into space for 10 minutes because I don’t feel like getting all my laundry together. But you just can’t control for everything. Things just happen. Like having to pray through a mini crisis of faith when you manage to put the host in your mouth before you’ve asked the Lord to “only say the word” so you can be healed, or having a basket load of groceries checked out before you realize you can’t find your check card and walking 20 minutes back to your apartment only to realize that it was in your purse the entire time, or going to do your laundry and having to work your way around a movie being filmed in your Laundromat.
When things don’t work out exactly as you’ve planned, there are then opportunities that you didn’t have before, but those opportunities take more time. Today, as I was not then wearing my teacher hat, I decided to be a reporter, and I interviewed the teacher and some of the lycée students who were filming the movie, and took lots of pictures and made lots of notes, remember that an old teacher had told me I should write an article on youth in France for this one magazine. Why not? What better opportunity would I have to examine the unique opportunities of French youth than right here, getting in the way of my preordained prescribed daily routine?
Apparently this was a class of terminale littéraire students, working on a movie which would be shown as part of their baccalaureate, the big test high school students wanting to go on to higher education have to pass. There are three main paths to your bac: littéraire, sciences, and economics/sciences. Each path has different concentrations. I so would have gone for a bac littéraire (and apparently my parents would have tried to talk me out of it, as sciences is seen as the most challenging and the best for future studies/careers by parents, though this is not necessarily the case.) Anyway, in this particular school, instead of studying the usual mix of art and literary subjects, the students have the opportunity to study film, including theory and all the practical aspects. Each student had taken a different role in the production in my Laundromat. I sat and chatted with the caterers (they were delighted with the English word.) One of the students had written the piece, a sort of study on ennuie focused on an encounter between a modern museum curator and Blaise Pascal. (At first I thought they were shooting a news report, and when I saw Blaise hanging out in his long wig and ruffly poofy shirt, I couldn’t help but think that people involved in audiovisual endeavors in France were awfully daring in their fashion tastes), another was directing, another was shooting and another was in charge of the sound. It’s great they’re getting practical work experience, the ability to fulfill their role on a team and whatnot, in addition to all the academics. I have the caterers quoted (as I translated them) as saying “ It’s great we get to do something out of the ordinary that a lot of lycée students don’t get to do,” (apparently there are only 4 schools in the Academie de Rouen with this sort of program)

I later put on my PR hat to deliver a poster for Anne and Cristophe. The person at the Catholic book store I was told to go to apparently was not the one she talked to about putting the posters up. But he did anyway.

After more commotion I got home and put the teacher hat back on to figure out what to tell my secondes about immigration in the United States and spend a long time selecting scenes from Napoleon Dynamite and making a list of vocabulary, including “sweet,” “buttload,” and “bowstaff.”

Lessons of the day:
If you spend a buttload of time preparing a lesson which requires your computer, put it in front of the door, so you have to trip over it before you leave. Otherwise you will forget it and have to think of something else to do for an hour.
If you can’t find your bankcard, find a quiet, secure, comfortable place to empty out your purse one more time before going home and looking for the card.

Français du jour:
Boquiner: spend quality time with a good book (familiarly known as a bouquin)