Does anyone else find this disturbing?

In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie...

When I saw this I recalled that I'm in the market for a men's wedding ring...then I decided it might be nice to see my love once we're married...

Battle of Jaricot

Hannah being the great sport she is, we went to a musical entitled “Pauline,” put on by a group of youth from Dijon- and their priest (I think). I’d love to see the same youth do Godspell…with a little better direction. But I learned all about the venerable Pauline Jaricot from Lyon, a rich young woman from a good family who abandoned everything to found some order of Dominicans and a society for the propogation of the faith…by asking a bunch of her poor worker neighbors to each donate a sou (cent) and pray for the missions and to also ask ten people to do the same…The new evangelization two hundred years early?

She also formed “living rosaries” out of her worker neighbors by having them each draw a mystery and pray a decade of the rosary each day, meditating on that mystery, so that between them they were saying all fifteen of the mysteries every day.

I think towards the end of her life someone else took credit for all her work and she was humiliated and poor and alone… St. Thérèse was to expound on those themes later in the century, though…

We all got a tiny jar of mustard seeds with a picture of Pauline’s portrait on them, bearing the legend: “J’ai aimé Jésus-Christ plue que tout sur la terre” (I loved Jesus Christ more than anything in the world), again something St. Thérèse would later explore in her own life.

Notre Dame de la Paix, Notre Dame des Neiges

I had a dream this morning that they were about to pump our school full of this chemical called phosphore blanc that burned people’s skin, and their lungs, if they breathed it in. Siatree and I were in one of the bathrooms. He was putting on all sorts of equipment, getting ready to fill the school with this chemical so as to get rid of secret hidden enemies and I was begging him not to do it. Then I realized that it was only 6:30 am and that I still had time before my classes to ask the proviseur if I could leave before the dastardly deed, and he said yes.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Which is kinda disturbing, as it didn’t really bother me that the students still had to be there (though I’m sure if it was a huge problem they would go on strike). But even more disturbing was waking up at 6:30, half an hour after I set my alarm, and realizing they’re talking about this phosphore blanc on the radio…I’m not entirely sure, but I think we used it in Vietnam, and everyone’s talking about how they just found out we used it in Iraq too…I’ll have to find a paper to see if I can figure out what the deal is…Any of you heard anything?

It snowed today. Not enough to seriously change anyone’s plans or even really cover the ground but it was pretty while it was falling. All the kids were acting crazy…I tried singing "Let it Snow," inspired by the weather, and all the girls in my insisted the bell had rung while we were singing (it hadn’t) and ran off. I called them all back and one asked if I was going to chew them out…I told her no, but if we’re going to be this crazy we can’t do fun stuff…like the dance I was going to show them to go with the song…but no, nope, no time now…everyone was quite willing to go back into the classroom after that…even to stay after the bell. I showed them the Dean Collins Shim Sham…But they’re still clamoring to learn something more modern, like a rap song…what can you do?

All I have to bring in is "Peachtree City Ghetto," "The Suburb Streets," and "Golf Cart Thugs" by the inimitable PTC Gz. But I think they want to learn one they already know.

Overheard at lunch…one of the teachers is married to a Muslim guy and has kids whom she was obligated to raise Muslim…only apparently neither she nor her daughter, by virtue of their femininity, are allowed to visit Mecca without a male escort…Never knew that before…

Also overheard at lunch… You know that people with black eyes always tell the truth and the people with blue eyes (like Isabelle) always lie…you’re talking to three women behind a curtain so you can’t see their eyes. The first one says something in Japanese and you don’t understand it…the second, translating for the first, tells you the first one said she has blue eyes. The third one tells you the first one has brown eyes and the second has blue…who is what?

Request: does anyone know of a more or less legal way I can get hold of "The Teenage Guide to Popularity" or a fairly simple but not infantile version of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer"?

I 'ad zee time of my life

Hqppy feqst of St. Cécile…

Ok, I’m back. My essay submitted…one down, five more to go...

Saturday was fun and interesting and I wqnt to co;;ent on it…darn French keyboqrds again…I have to leqrn to type in tzo different languages…

I woke up just a little too late for morning mass across the street…I discovered some sisters of notre dame with a chapel with nine thirty mass everyday but Sunday…and turned on the TV expecting to find cartoons…(still wondering if the prince with the burned face has caught up with the avatar and his friends yet…) and they’re playing a…mass…of all things. And commentating on it. That guy in front in the hat is the Prince somebody of Morrocco. The woman with the big feather thing on her hat (really frighteningly fashionable, as in its frightening someone would wear something like that) is the first lady of Greenland, the lady in red is Princess somebody else of Sweden (did you know Sweden still has royalty? I didn’t.) And then the guest of honor arrives, followed in hierarchical order by his family.

Prince Albert II of Monaco is bald on top, and his hair is closely shaved everywhere else. I think the red striped navy blue pants with his military uniform were his mothers’, Princess Grace’s idea…His mouth was firmly set, as if determined not to cry. Toward the end of the mass, his sisters Princess Caroline and Princess Stéphanie were crying quite a bit. Surprisingly, the national three month mourning period wasn’t long enough for any of them to get over their father’s death.

Princess Caroline’s oldest son, next in line for the throne after his mother, as apparently Prince Albert has no children., gave the first reading, about Solomon’s request for the wisdom to justly govern his people. The Archbishop of Monaco (or maybe he was just presiding and a deacon took over) read from the Gospels about the leader being the servant of all.

It’s a little weird to think of coronations going on in this day and age. (Heck, I was surprised they still have wild boars roaming the woods here. And getting run over on the highways, for that matter... ) In all the movies it seems rather grand…and y’all know what a sucker I am for movies where random American girl marries a prince or finds out her father is royalty or something….but what is royalty now, anyway?

I finished my wonderful wonderful French book “Ensemble, c’est tout” (Together, that’s all.) about an ailing old woman hopelessly devoted to her house in the country, her tough, macho, obscenity spouting grandson who spends virtually all his time working as a chef, a starving (literally) artist girl and a nerdy French marquis who stutters and sells postcards. At first you get little lines of their stories seperately but by the middle of the book they're all living in the Marquis' appartment in Paris...I wish I could recommend it to everyone but you'd have to learn French first...I'd start translating it sur le champ right here if I knew it was legal...what do you think, Ms. Lawyer?

In other news, I went to a Karéokée party at Annemarie's the other night. I discovered les inconnus, this French comedy troupe from the eighties...the great minstrals who sang:

(you have to imagine the cheesy eighties music in the background)

Isabelle a les yeux bleus
Isabelle a les yeux bleus
Isabelle a les yeux bleus
Bleus les yeux Isabelle a

Isabelle lorsque je t'ai rencontrée pour la première fois
t'avais les yeux bleus
Et lorsque tu m'as quitté
Tu avais toujours les yeux bleus

Heu, c'est normal

(Isabelle has blue eyes
etc.
Blue the eyes Isabelle has.

Isabelle, when I met you for the first time
You had blue eyes
And when you left me
You still had blue eyes

Thats the way it usually goes)


Not to mention this video where they're all dressed up like a hair band romping around in a cow field singing these lyrics full of big words that I'm pretty sure mean nothing together... see if you can tease something out of them, Adam If you're reading

Mais tu dis [mais tu dis]
Que le bonheur est irréductible
Et je dis [et il dit]
Que ton espoir n'est pas si désespéré
A condition d'analyser
Que l'absolu ne doit pas être annihilé
Par l'illusoire précarité
de nos amours [Dest...]
Et qu'il ne faut pas cautionner l'irréalité
Sous les aspérités absentes et désenchantées
De nos pensées iconoclastes et désoxydées
De nos désirs excommuniées de la fatalité
Destituée
Et vice et versa
Et vice et versa...

supported by the fact that the band members keep shooting eachother these lost looks when one of them sings something particularly obtuse... oh yeah, and there's the guy rolling around poetically in the cowfield who ends up with his face in a cow pie...

(ps playing apples to apples with a group I asked them what a cow pie was...they all thought it was something you could get at McDonalds... hmm...)

but funnier than all these...nine French people trying to sing Bohemian Rhapsody...
Or heck, me trying to sing Bohemian Rhapsody...

Joyeux Jour de Merci Donnant

You're right, Ms. Ruin, I'm not sorry!

I know I signed up for this...I'm just saying...I want some pumpkin pie!!!
Just another Jeudi here...ho hum...

Anyway, I'm thankful for all of you reading this (heck, even if I don't know you) as well as the opportunity to be here in France...and then there's my family and all the friends who aren't reading this... and a certain purple dragon...and all the great people I've met who are taking care of me etc etc etc...

Y'all aren't going to believe this...

but I've got to go find some Turkey now.
Ciaou!

http://www.people.virginia.edu/%7Epm9k/Writings/artrech.html

u of pitts, take two

493 words. what do you think? (qu'en penses-tu?) is the ending too cheesy?

We are currently faced with harnessing an unprecedented wealth of information, and to ensure our children’s academic success, we must also teach them to do so. In recent years, my experiences have led me more and more directly to pursue working as a CHILDren’S LIBRARIAN, enabling the next generations to use OUR BURGEONING INFORMATION STORES, and sharing a passion for a form of information that is sometimes neglected as such- Children's literature.

Fiction allows us to step outside ourselves, to critique ourselves and our society. Children's fiction captivates ME BECAUSE IT addresses a population in transition that has leisure to explore that transition. Thus FOR MY undergraduate senior honors thesis, I wrote a section of a children’s novel, having gathered quantitative and qualitiative information from books and journalS on issues related to my plot. I also included my own reviews of children’s books that had inspired my work. However, it was during my SPEECH language PATHOLOGY graduate studies that I first considered a career in libraries. I was amazed at how fellow students tended to consult only on-line articles for research projects, ignoring more specialized databases that referenced journals available in the library and often limiting themselves to secondary sources of information. I began to realize THE potential for mismanagement and misuse of information THAT accompanies immediate access to it. For many projects, I found myself more concerned about THE CORRECT HANDLING of the information than about the information itself.

As a student clinician, I combed the children’s sections of CLEVELAND’S public libraries for books to use in therapy, consulting children’s librarians for books on various topics. These trips also INSPIRED ME TO read and re-read childrens' literature for myself, and I discovered both NEW TITLES aND books I missed as a child.

Inspired by "The Read Aloud Handbook" by Jim Trelease and my language development coursework, I expanded the reading program at my summer daycare job, allowing children to track their reading progress, selecting books to read aloud, and experimenting with storytelling techniques. By the end of the summer, children who had shown no independent interest in books were bringing them to me to read and requesting favorites from the library.

TO PREPARE MYSELF FOR THE LIBRARY SCIENCES, I volunteered in a media center in a school for children with disabilities, cataloguing new items. In addition to gaining experience using collections management software and the World Cat database, I was introduced to both standard and specialized classification systems. Currently, I plan to use my experience to develop a cataloguing system for a library belonging to a small student organization in Rouen, France as I continue to seek experiences that will support a career in children's librarianship. I AM CONFIDENT THAT the UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH WOULD provide ME with THE REMAINING TRAINING I NEED TO provide children the means to effectively pursue the facts of life and the truths of fiction.

(stuff in caps courtesy of siatree.)

this and that

Fascinating conversation at Lunch today I actually participated in…about native languages versus standard languages. Apparently in Spain there are a lot of languages spoken by very small groups of people in very specific regions…and some of these languages differ from eachother mostly because the speakers of these "languages" say they do. Like they sent delegations to the European Union meetings and they issued official documents in "Catalan" and "Valencia" that differed by a whole three words. The people involved in the conversation where obviously French Teachers, as they were also lamenting the use of certain regionalisms (from Normandy) in their student’s writing, such as "comme même" for "quand même" (even though, still), and confusing "falloir" with "valoir" (cela faut mieux instead of cela vaut mieux, which is weird because falloir is used almost exclusively with "il" and a verb in the infinitive (Il faut danser- it is necessary to dance. Il faut aller à pied- we or one has to go on foot. Il ne faut pas chialer: you/he/she/one shouldn’t blubber) also saying "You would be better to do something" (tu serais mieux de faire qch) instead of "you would do better to do something" (tu ferais mieux de etc.) Apparently they’re concerned about the correctness and standardazation of their writing as well as how these students are going to sound when they apply for jobs. Sounds familiar…I’ve heard this song before…
Got on the bus this afternoon…who should greet me but my friend from the first day? The one who saw me crying and drove me half the rest of the way to school. Apparently he’s Portuguese but has been living in France for twenty years, and has been to Brazil, Mexico City (twice), India, Cuba, and Burma…and who knows where else. And he speaks Portuguese, Spanish, French, and a little Italian. He taught me how to count to ten in Portuguese (um does tres quattro sinco seis septe oine nove des, roughly), as well as basic greetings (buon dia, buon tarde, origado (thank you) ) titles (senor and senora, like in Spanish) and days of the week (secundofera, triesefera, quatrofera, quintafera, sesafera, sabado and domingo, I think…very roughly). Portugal isn’t a particularly prosperous country, he tells me, and he makes a lot more money here than he would there. Which makes sense… I remember the R’s maid (don’t think they have one anymore) was Portuguese too.
I just turned on the radio and they’re playing Mary Poppins. Apparently they’re doing a review of American movie musicals. They also played "Old man river," the "Good Morning song" from Singing in the Rain, and "Oh what a beautiful morning." From Oklahoma. They closed with:
Up where the smoke is all billowed and curled
Twixt pavement and stars is the chimney sweep world
Where there’s hardly no day, and hardly no night
And things…half in shadow…and halfway in light
On the rooftops of London…Gaw, what a sight!
Oh, I think we’re back to Opera or Latin or something now… I never know what I’m waking up to in the morning.
Life lessons: A guy who asks just one girl to have a cup of coffee with him rarely has motives that are purely platonic…we need a polite codeword that says "I’m spoken for…" Suggestions?

u of pitts, take one

here's the essay as it stands now...what do you think?

yes it needs to be a lot shorter

5. University of Pittsburgh
statement of nor more than 500 words outlining your career goals
relevant experience in libraries, archives and/or information center sand other relevant work experience
relevant experience using information technology
goals: work in children’s services in a public library, become expert on children’s literature.
To say merely that information production and use has been revolutionized over my lifetime would be a gross understatement. The quantity of information available to anyone through the World Wide Web would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, as would the challenge of sorting through that information. Harnessing this capability to produce and access information is the challenge of the century, as is teaching children our children to do the same and thus ensuring their academic success.
A particularly important and sometimes neglected form of information is fiction. In an age when anything from a telephone number to baseball statistics are available within minutes from any computer, fiction allows us to step outside ourselves and examine what we are doing with all the knowledge we have, and why. We cannot afford to lose the truth available only through fiction. Children's fiction exerts this power on a population still becoming who they are, and who still have enough leisure time to explore this (at least outside dance lessons and soccer practice.) I still return to the books I read as a child to remember who I want to become. It is not necessary to explain here how great an impact education has on quality of life and, in the grand scheme of things, the advancement of a society. I am willing to accept the challenge of making our burgeoning information stores a real tool to be used for the next generations, so they are not left grabbing at any information source they may find for their term paper or senate report. Through my contact with the Cleveland Public Library system, my work, research, I have kept abreast of my favorite children’s authors' work, and discovered more current work as well. These experiences, along with my academic and volunteer work as well, have lead me to seek expertise in knowledge and familiarity with the body of children's literature, and pointed me toward my goal of helping children harness information through the resources of the public library.
During my graduate studies at Case Western Reserve University, I discovered the Cleveland public libraries. Their children’s sections offered everything from reading nooks to windows looking out over waterfalls. I could never go anywhere without discovering a new branch. The millions of titles at my disposal throught the CLEVENET system dumbfounded me. The superior children's book on CD selection, over the legnthy car trips I made for clinical assignments and work, exposed me to much of the newer children's and young adults' literature. I discovered Kate di Camillo's Tale of Despereaux and Christopher Paul Curtis' Bud, Not Buddy. I also caught up on the books I had missed as a child, such as "The Chocolate Wars" by Robert Cormier, and The Diary of Anne Frank.
This contact with the library, in addition to supporting my own reading gand library use habits, supported my professional life . As a student speech language pathologist, I was expected to use children’s books in my therapy, and as often I was discouraged from returning to the old standards by supervisors who had already read and re-read them to clients. I spent many hours in children’s sections of public libraries, consulting children’s librarians on books on a number of topics.
I also spent a summer working at a day care in order to support myself during my studies. Around the same time, as I was researching options for crafts and activities for a diverse group of six to ten year olds, I stumbled across a book one of my professors had recommended to me earlier: The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. The research and stories illustrating how important reading, and especially reading aloud, is for children shocked, captivated, and challenged me. It supported much of what I had learned through my coursework about child language development as it relates to academic sucess. More importantly, it provided practical solutions for current academic dillemmas, and pointed to the public library as the heart of those solutions.
The librarian who visited my daycare each week to read aloud and present prizes to the children for their reading kept their charts, as well as the books she brought them, in another room, where the children could not see them and could rarely access them. Inspired by my reading, I extended her work our classroom. I had the children make their own charts, let them keep track of their own reading. I also had up to sixty books, magazines, and comic books checked out on my own card, which I selected with the help of the children’s librarians in our public libraries, available to them in our classroom. I selected books for reading aloud and experimented with storytelling techniques, even bringing in a guest reader. I was also careful to talk to the children and select books relating to their interests . I began to measure my sucess by how the children read and enjoyed reading. By the end of the summer, children who had shown no interest in books on their own were bringing them to me to read and requesting favorites from the library. While many still required prizes to pique their interest, and they never managed to sit still with a book as long as they did with their video games, I felt I had achieved something.
In addition to my work directly with children and books, I have been fortunate to able to combine academic research and reviews of children’s literature through my undergraduate senior honors thesis, in which I wrote a section of a children’s novel, having gathered quantitative and qualitiative information from books and journal articles on issues related to my plot. I alsoas wrote reviews of children’s books that had inspired my work.
My two years in graduate school for Speech Language Pathology also provided ample opportunity to explore information technology. Although we were required to take a course in research methods and had to complete many research projects, I was amazed that virtually none of my fellow students ever used the library, relying solely on online databases for their research. As such they were obliged to rely on secondary sources for a good deal of their information. Observing them, I began to realize just how much potential for mismanagement and misuse of information came with our immediate access to it. I found myself often more concerned about the sources, organization, and presentation of the information in our group projects than I was about the information itself, which might have been my first indication of my suitability for a career in information sciences. I knew how to find full text articles online, of course, but I also knew which databases to search for older articles, how to find those articles, and how to find the articles that supported those articles. It astonished me that people would limit themselves to what was immediately available online, shunning the short trip that would place information that more precisely suited to their needs at their fingertips.
I have also had the opportunity to explore smaller, more specialized collections. I worked as a volunteer, cataloguing new items in a small media center belonging to a local county board of mental retardation and developmental disabilities, providing educational resources for people with developmental disabilities, as well as for their parents and teachers. In addition to providing me with experience using World Cat and collections management software. My mentor introduced me to the main classification systems and also to her own for use with this particular collection. I plan to use my experience to develop a cataloguing system for a small library I have volunteered to organize belonging to a small religious student organition in Rouen, France.

mes excuses

Sorry I haven't been writing much. I've been trying to concentrate on my application essays....

I managed to slice my finger open opening a can on Saturday and I've been going around with big impressive bandages on it. Not that I've been waiting, but I find it funny no one has mentioned it, even though my entire right hand is now stained bright red-pink from iodine abuse. Now if someone at your work was walking around with a big bandage on, you'd ask what happened, right? Just as a matter of conversation. I'm not offended...I'm just wondering if there's some French conversational rule about not mentioning such things. I'll keep you posted.

Vocabulaire:
Montfortière- hot air balloon
Saute élastique- bungee jumping
taboulée- tabouleh
éosine-iodine
aïe!- ouch!

Life lessons: If the ring breaks off of your can, use the can opener. Don't try to pry it open with a knife. Not without wearing leather work gloves.

A German, an Indian, and two Americans walk into a café…

Today, after gathering together from the eight Theatre des Arts bus stops by the metro and the bridge the eight people who responded to my invitation, we set out to explore the Foire St-Romain. It was erected along the Seine on the Left bank not long before Toussaint. At night coming down the hill from school its colored lights whirl like sparklers on the horizon. Today we saw it from the inside.

It was much the same as any American fair. Fun houses. Kiddy rides. Scramblers. Games with big ugly stuffed animals as prizes (meaning no offense to Heathcliff or the Blue Kangaroo, bro). Only take your average county fair and multiply it by forty. Add a few roller coasters (les montagnes russes) and a large Ferris Wheel (la grande roue) into the mix…big enough that you wonder how you can set it up in a night, take it down a month later, and it still be sturdy enough to, well … and lots of dead animals roasting over open fires. And enclosed sit down restaurants in tents. And coffee vending machines every fifty feet between the coke and orangina machines. And every twenty feet- a kebab (they have these on every block in Rouen. Greek in origin, they usually feature a huge hunk of meat rotating on a vertical spit- usually lamb, but usually cone shaped, not identifiable as any particular part. The meat is shaved off onto bread for sandwiches) selling saur kraut and fries as well. And every ten feet—long long counters under canopies lit up like new automobile showrooms, featuring crèpes, ice cream, these things like fried funnel cake dough only twice as greasy, apples on sticks decorated with every conceivable combination of chocolate, sprinkles, and dried fruit (les pommes d’amour), homemade lollipops twisted and twirled and chunked, and something which hung in huge hunks on hooks in every color (la guimauve). Anastasia had told me about it. She’d looked it up in the dictionary and all they had was "marshmallow" for a definition. But it was really more like thick taffy, which they drew out from the hunks and cut with huge scissors, twirling it around a wooden stick like one of those old fashioned unicorn lollipops. When you pulled it off to eat it it turned shiny, like pink package ribbon. There was something else too, called "la reglisse américaine," I think. I’ve never seen it in the states. Something like a long rope of licorice or chewy, flavored vinyl with a marshmallowy core. Not bad.
(it’s really hard to write about this without wanting to go back and sample more…)
After that, Hannah, Hans, and Patel had coffee (sorry, it’s the only Indian name I can think of. Besides Apu.) Hannah and I had met Patel at the Catholic center. We had a long difficult conversation in which Patel told story after story about how awful the American government can be, looking me hard in the eye the entire time, insisting he’s not blaming us personally. Persecution complex twitching, but I’m conflicted. I can’t say I agree with the war we’re in. It still makes no sense to me.
Not that we didn’t have a great time together. And not like other countries weren’t implicated in the world’s problems. I learned some really disturbing things about India. And Hans had the courtesy to talk of "us" exploiting Africa, not "you." All and all I’m left with a sense of how much evil is spread about the world at large, how little I know about anything and how much I want to do something- anything- good for the world. But it seems I can only be certain of how I am, I can only have power over me, and sometimes I’m not so sure of that…
At least I can make progress towards dispelling the monolingual American stereotype- Hans has agreed to teach us all German. Das ist gut, jah?

I lost an hour yesterday morning. I’m still looking for it. I don’t know how to describe it to you, having never met it. I arrived at the bus stop, expecting to have it, but when I looked, it was gone. My watch said 11:40, not 10:40, and I still don’t know why or how. I thought at first it must have been set wrong, but the guy next to me agreed with it (after I made him understand it was the hour I wanted, not just the minutes.) If it shows up at home, do you think you could send it this way? Or keep it there if it won’t come back…I’m sure I’ll be able to use it later. Maybe it’s another one that comes back half a year later. Who knows?
The missing hour opened up a strange sort of rabbit hole. I met another American assistant at the meeting I was an hour late for (which wasn’t unusual- it was for French university students and English speaking assistants). We had lunch, and it came out that she had been really bored all this time, not being able to find anything to do. I don’t know if I can help you, I said. I end up doing all the Catholic stuff, and I don’t know if that will interest you. What do you know, she happens to be Catholic. And so bored she doesn’t mind wandering campus with me begging for library work before going to mass and a discussion at the Catholic center there that evening.
After walking around in a big circle looking for the right road, we stumble across the buildings we’re looking for. The first isn’t actually a library. They send me to the main library. The guy at the main library, after making me wait for ten minutes while he attended to other things, told me they had too much to do taking care of their own business to handle new people who weren’t entirely sure of what they were doing (and perhaps speaking imperfect French was implicated as well, but he didn’t say anything outloud about it). He sent me to another, smaller library, assuring me he wasn’t just getting rid of me, that he thought this lady might really be able to help me. Though perhaps he’s warned her, because I haven’t managed to find her in her office yet.
We let it go, I introduce her to Cristophe (he works in a bookstore on campus), and we take a pause-café. I have a hot chocolate and a big slice of chocolate flan. It’s hard to describe flan. Kinda like congealed pudding in a piecrust. The hot chocolate comes with two sugar cubes and I actually use one…it doesn’t come overly sweet. It also comes with a dainty gingerbread biscuit I eat later. The flan is almost black and as rich as cheesecake. My American friend, we’ll cal her Gretchen (her real name is that of Gretchie’s predecessor, Mom) had to help me finish it. We talked for quite awhile. She’s interested in writing to and wants to write a book, but she seems to take the opposite approach to mine. I will spew words as long as I possibly can and prune them down later, whereas even in speech she considers carefully what she wants to say before she says it. She says the people at school make fun of her for this because they think she’s always searching for the French words to say, but she keeps telling them its like this even when she speaks English. She also likes dancing and wants to take African dancing, which I might do with her. She’s also coming to the fair with us today!
She takes me home to her place. She is staying with a French family, who must also be Catholic and a little over-protective, as every activity she wants to get involved she either "doesn’t want to do" according to her French mom, or is in too poor an area for her to consider going there. Her French mom is in the process of getting her info for L’Ecole de la Foi, oddly enough, so I may soon lose my status as sole and only américaine there.
We return to the Christian Student Center (aumonerie chrétienne) for mass and a discussion on Hope. Someone seems to have lost a little two year old boy over the course of mass, as he was wandering all during the chapel the entire time, and I couldn’t figure out who was his mother. Between nearly overturning a large vase in the corner and running around noisily on the bare floor, he seemed quite involved in what was going on. During communion he reached up to the priest for the Host (and got a blessing for his trouble). He also followed right behind the priest, imitating him perfectly, as he bowed to the altar and left the chapel. The boy must have a vocation.
The French have two words for Hope. Espoir is your every-day garden variety of hope, like your hope that it won’t rain today or your hope that you’ll find your lost dog, or even your hope that you’ll get through law school. Espérance, they explained, has a big more of a final connotation to it. It is the hope of the triumph of good over evil, of eternal life, of the fulfillment of God’s promises. It’s also the name of the theological virtue. Père Andre asked us what the English version of the two hopes would be, but I of course only had one word to give him. Apparently it’s the same in German. Interestingly enough, espoir is masculine, and espérance is feminine, although maybe the French don’t read anything into this (although French feminists always seem to be fighting for feminine versions of professions. Like writer, écrivain, is masculine, but many people also use écrivaine, a feminine version, even though the Academie Française refuses to recognize it. I met someone studying Linguistics there…I’ll have to ask him.)
But I found quite an answer to my espoirs there. They’re just renovating their library, and they don’t have any kind of system to organize the books, and the lady in charge of the whole operation wasn’t too set on doing it, so she said I could organize it and set up a check-out system! I’m so excited! The lady I worked with over the summer said she’d give me any help she could (and also said she’d be happy and honored to write me letters of recommendation)

Oh happy day...

Who knew a dial tone could be so beautiful?

My phone is up and running.

No more cabines de téléphone with dog poop encrusted in the grooves of the floor. No more wondering whether the last person to use the telephone before me had the bird flu (for a planet full of public telephone sanitizers, we have very dirty telephones. If you don't get it, don't worry about it). You can call me direct. Everyone's getting phone cards for Christmas!

If you didn't get my number in your email, send me one and I'll put you on the list.


Things they never taught us in French class:

The proper way to eat a grapefruit

How to get rid of random French guys on the street who feel like striking up a relationship with you right then and there

How to bathe oneself with a showerhead attached to a hose with nowhere to fix it (without flooding the bathroom)

How to drink your morning coffee out of a bowl (with or without cereal floating in it)

How to detect unwanted ham in your boulangerie pizza

How to cut a baguette without getting crumbs everywhere (actually, judging from the tables after a meal, it can't be done)

L’agneau de Dieu, qui enleve les péchés du monde, a pris pitié de moi…

A house of the community of the Beatitudes is located about twenty minutes by bus from Rouen. It houses brothers, sisters, a few single men and women, and one family (who is currently hosting another family, from Russia), as well as a very old dog, a shy cat, two donkeys, an elk, three goldfish, two birds, and a few goats.

The community was founded in the later part of the seventies in France by two protestant couples, as I explained earlier. Apparently they came up with the idea over pizza and ice cream, which is why the houses still celebrate the feast of the community with pizza and ice- cream every year, and they all eat pizza on Saturday nights.

You would expect something founded in the seventies over pizza and ice cream to be more commune-esque. Bright flowered broom skirts. Granny Squares. Pottery. Poetry. Dread locks. Buddy Jesus in the chapel. And indeed there were bongos (in the chapel) and dancing (not, thankfully, in the chapel). And the livestock, as mentioned before. But there was also traditional, reverent Latin chanting, offices, the rosary, fervent Eucharistic adoration, incense (not to cover up any “herbal delights”), combined with Eastern Catholic practices and Jewish practices, in a way that never seemed to lower the more traditional western Catholic practices to mere preference. Every tradition, every practice seems carefully selected. They don’t recognize themselves in union with, but they want to seek union somehow with their “elder brothers,” the Jews. Their chapel and their way of conducting themselves is western European, but they acknowledge and celebrate “the other lung of the church” as well.

Every Friday night, after fasting all day, they celebrate with a Jewish Sabbath meal, during which they wait, together with their Jewish brothers and sisters, they say, for the coming of the Messiah. Saturday is low-key, both in recognition of the Jewish Sabbath and the day Jesus spent in the tomb. They celebrate a Byzantine office on Saturday, before twin Eastern icons of Mary and Jesus. And after this office, they give the French “bisous” to one another, a kiss of peace, letting each other know “Le Christ est résucité!” (Christ is risen), almost as joyfully as if for the first time, as if this really were joyful, astonishing news. And they mean it; it isn’t play acting.

Then comes the Pizza dinner. And then the dancing. Yes, white veiled sisters and white robed brothers, Kate in her white skirt symbolic of the resurrection, laughing and whirling to Jewish music. With the dog running around barking at the dancers (he had to be occupied…his desire to join in was thwarted by the presence of two many careless feet. Kate says he loves being where everyone is together, and if you say “Community room! Community room!” to him in a high-pitched voice he will bound barking to the community room and wait for everyone. At 13 years, he has been part of the house longer than anyone there).

BF (that’s best friend, not boyfriend), we started with Mayim. And they explained the symbolism, going up to the mountain of the Lord and drinking the waters of salvation, then coming down and dancing for joy. There was another I really want to learn and teach your mom- incredibly simple but lots and lots of fun. Their “Shepherd,” a thin, graceful German sister maybe in her forties (but one of the priests, who looked about thirty, confessed he was actually 52, swearing up and down he was not joking, so who knows?) led the dances, with Kate reminding her of steps she’d forgotten (Kate apparently didn’t miss her vocation- she was on the dance team in college, and wowed everyone by breaking out into spontaneous liturgical jazz dancing during a particularly beautiful Hebrew song). Apparently they invent a lot of their dances, and while lots are easy so that everyone can join in and learn them quickly, some are very difficult and elaborate.

Their chapel seems to match their community perfectly, although Kate said they inherited it from a group of Redemptorists (I think). There’s a gorgeous mosaic of Mary’s assumption behind the altar, with the Holy trinity waiting to crown her towards the ceiling. Saints reach out to her on either side. A tabernacle like a mini wooden Cathedral is to the left. Pointed stained glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible line the plain painted walls, with a few icons of various saints including Ste. Therese (She’s apparently a big patronne of the community. They have a photo of her as Jeanne D’Arc on the wall going up the stairs) and St. Louis de Montfort clustered close to the tabernacle. (By the way, I’m not sure, but I think this Montfort might be on the train line between here and Lisieux.) There are a few pews, but the brothers and sisters sit mostly in low wicker chairs with high backs, often used around here in place of kneelers. The mass is largely chanted, in Greek, Latin, and French. During the parts where the priest is doing his part alone, the community often hums or sings a sort of harmony on a sustained vowel, not intruding or completing the priest’s duties with him, but seeming to support him. We sang some of the songs I used to sing Wednesday nights in college (translated into French. No, we didn’t do Awesome God. That was last week. And you’ll be happy to know, Dad, that the “awesome” translates to “powerful” in French. And they only sang the chorus, so there was no mention of “puttin’ on the Ritz.”) They’re both the only congregation I’ve met so far in France that claps in time to the music and the only congregation to actually follow Rome’s orders on how to distribute the Eucharist (I think…all the other churches have people dunking their host in the wine because apparently, as the nice man after mass explained to me the other day, everyone is afraid of catching AIDS by drinking out the chalice. I said I didn’t think AIDS could be spread that way. (Je ne pensais pas que le SIDA pourrait être communiqué comme ça. Communiquer is also, I think, the verb for receiving communion. The guy seemed a little confused. I’d made a great pun without even realizing it.)

All in all, I never imagined such a marriage of the freedom and responsibility, innovation and tradition, outreach and identity, newer practices and passion for the sacraments, open-mindedness and uncompromising loyalty to the church, was possible. Their spirituality is very focused on living out the ideal of Vatican II as expressed by the actual council, not the common interpretation of it (which at times seems to fall into “yeah, whatever, man.) And they seem to be doing a bang-up job.

And they said I could come back!

Countries represented in this particular house:
France (of course. It was evident in the goat cheese on the pizzas and the bowls we drank our coffee out of in the mornings.)
US
Germany
Peru
Brazil
New Caledonia (It’s near Australia. I didn’t know either.)

Countries that I can remember that have houses of the Community of the Beatitudes:
France
Canada (Quebec)
US (Denver, Colorado)
The Phillipines
Democratic Republic of Congo
New Caledonia

(did you know all the people from France and Germany and also the people from South America learned there were five continents? Apparently they count North and South America as just “America.” Kate argued that if the Suez Canal was enough to cut Europe off from Africa, the Panama Canal ought to be enough to separate North and South America.)

pour en savoir plus: http://www.beatitudes.us/

French Television

Ringo let me borrow an old television and a truly spectacular antenna. There seem to be a fair number of American shows on, but not as many as you might expect. A sampling of French TV shows:

Star Academy: Like a cross between American Idol and that dance show. Contestants take classes in the entertainment business, perform, and are voted off the show one by one. This seems to be on every time I turn on the tv.

C’est du propre: Another reality show. Béatrice and Danielle raid the homes of people who live in filth, teach them to clean up, leave them with a spotless pad and come back unannounced later to inspect the place. It was sad…I know my apartment has looked like the bedroom of one of the guys on the show (he lived with an Italian roommate who kept her room spotless. She said she didn’t mind the state of the rest of the house as he was such a good cook and that was more important. Though how he managed to cook anything I don’t know…) Luckily, I’ve never smoked or had a cat…so that eliminates half the mess right there. They also give you tips for keeping things clean and in order…like wiping the leaves of your plants with water and beer on a sponge, and sprinkling pepper in the dirt so your cat isn’t tempted to pee in it. Or putting sachets of chamomile around your house to keep fleas away. Or rubbing rust spots in a bathtub with a mixture of salt and lime (they played “Tequila” in the background).

(Yes Mom, I’m taking notes.)
(Do we have anything like this?)
(I’m wondering whether the Power Puff girls know someone stole their theme music…)

Saturday morning:

Some cartoon dealing with these three kids, one of whom is bald and wears orange Buddhist monk-ish robes. They try to discover the secret of an ancient grudge between two tribes, one of thick, pelt covered Neanderthals and another of thin, robed, elegant Asian looking people, who are forced to cross the Grand Canyon together (how did they get there? I don’t know, I didn’t see that part.)

Some live action TV show à la Nickolodeon (but definitely originally in French) about a boy who periodically turns into a girl, with only the tingling of a scar on his arm as warning. Apparently a group of girls (headed by shim) is pitted against a group of his (her?) guy buddies in a hockey match, which the girls managed to win with the help of the coaching expertise of his/her grandfather (who trained in Quebec!), and the fact that his/her athletically hopeless father and brother were forced to join the boy’s team after a series of contrived “accidents.” I couldn’t help thinking Ranma should have been involved, so they could have played Martial Arts hockey (anything goes). But that might be difficult with real actors.

(Why are there no TV shows about girls who periodically become boys?)

Saw something briefly on the television today about the riots, but I didn’t get it all. Apparently they’ve progressed to my corner of France, but they seem to be focused in the poorer side of Rouen, on the other side of the Seine. In case you’ve missed this, some French politician, the secretary of the interior, I think, said something really idiotic about “wiping Paris clean” of the riff raff (ie immigrants) and they got really upset and are now going around burning lots of cars and vandalizing buildings. And recording their exploits in Blogs, apparently. (No, I don’t have the link.)

It seems desperate people are wiling to take desperate, fruitless measures when the opportunity presents itself…in the US and in France. What do you do? If you apologize and trying to make things better, you’re rewarding destroying other people’s property, and if you don’t…well, they have a reason to be upset. And they won’t just stop.

Wash my mouth out with soap

None of my students want to speak English. It really isn’t the most popular subject it seems. You’d think they’d want to learn it so they could understand the lyrics to all the songs on the radio…but no, I had boys next to me in class whispering “Je m’en fouts, je m’en fouts (I think that’s how it’s spelled.) C’mon guys, I know that much French (for those of you who don’t, it translates roughly to “I don’t give a d**n.” ). So when one of the terminale students asks me the correct pronunciation of “hoe,” I’m so excited he’s actually asking me in English and interested in something that I go ahead and tell him, no questions asked, though I try to advise him never to use the word in polite company. I should have asked him if he was interested in farming or gardening…

But the students aren’t the only ones interested in American profanity. Ringo picked a particularly colorful scene for theater today. It’s from the movie Jungle Fever. The black main character’s racially mixed wife has just discovered that he has been cheating on her with a white woman. She isn’t happy. And she’s not bothering to be polite about it, with regards to her husband or the entire neighborhood (though she is encouraging her neighbors to avail themselves of her husband’s belongings, as she is throwing them out the window.) Guess who gets to model her speech. I’ve never used the f-word so many times in my life as I had to Friday! I don’t think I’ve ever used it half as many, a third as many times in my entire life combined as I did Friday. And I think Ringo was getting a real kick out of me saying it, particularly as I was trying to say it with some feeling, as our students tend to be a little reserved and it wasn’t going to help much if I’m modeling a dead-pan “the white b**** you f***ed, you motherf"@§!%.” And what’s more, everyone gets to memorize it and have it ready for next week. I mean, is this really helping anyone’s English? All the French people know that word already. Might it not be useful to act out a scene with a little bit broader vocabulary?

I need a bath.

On the day of the dead when the year, too, dies…

It’s been dark and gloomy and rainy all day. The brown and yellow leaves are all wet and stuck together on the sidewalk. I can believe it’s two days after Halloween. Our nice long Indian summer has about run its course.

I can get up early enough to stand in line for my titre de séjour; the problem is I’m not big or tough enough to keep my place in that line. The crowd that gathers there isn’t the most genteel or polite. I guess the guy behind me was nice enough. He was all handsome and suave, as if he’d just come out of some Morrocan Mafia movie (if such a thing exists), slicked back shiny black hair with impeccably neat sideburns tailored to tiny points, a black jacket, and a shirt just the right shade of orange to be original and trendy but not ridiculous. He apologized to me sincerely enough when one of his agitated gesticulations hit me in the back. But he too started to push when it came to shove. Oh well. I can hardly blame them. I felt like taking it out on someone when I found out they had no more spots left for the day. And I’d had a good five hours of sleep. I can’t imagine what state the people who had been there all night were in. And who knows how many times they’d tried. Last resort: see if I can get an appointment through the rectorat, somehow, somewhere up there, my boss, hopefully sometime in December. Keep your fingers crossed.

Offusqué: offended
Tabouret: stool
Brancard: stretcher
Caler: to wedge
Gueuler: to bawl? (vulgar)
Continuer un monolougue dans sa barbe: to keep talking quietly to one’s self?
Triturer: to grind or to fiddle with
Lisser: to smooth
Caresser: to caresse, to stroke, to cherish (a hope)
S’echiner: wear oneself out doing something
Limaces: slugs
Traînée: streak (of paint, ashes etc.) or a tart (prostitute)
Songeuse: thoughtful, pensive
Se moucher: blow one’s nose
s’étrangler: to choke (food or with rage)
brancardier: stretcher bearer

From Ensemble: C’est tout by Anna Gavalda (Anasatsia lent it to me…)

"Wishes can come true, whistle while you work...so hard...all day..."

I was going to forget about a blog for today; nothing much happened. But every day is a gift (even for vampire slayers brought back from the dead), so this one can’t just pass without comment.

Read most of Perelandra today. English is too tempting. I have all my books stored right here by my desk…maybe that’s a bad idea…they’re always in view, waiting for me to pick them up. But I feel refreshed after Perelandra…a homecoming, to a primary author of my youth…I remember who I wanted to be when I was twelve and try to commit myself again to becoming that person. And there is always something I missed before, though this time it’s mostly Lewis’s less-than-equitable view of women…I mean, he tries…but when this book was written he hadn’t been “surprised by Joy,” namely (literally) his wife, hadn’t had the epiphany that “wow…it’s a bit chauvinistic to consider such things as “courage” to be male traits!” rather than realizing there might be manifestations of courage which are more masculine or feminine. As far as I can tell, he had only an academic knowledge of femininity, having lost his mother at an early age and never gotten beyond hormone driven adolescent encounters with girls his own age, which he seems to have given up upon seriously starting his academic life.

(Tolkien wasn’t too happy with the whole business, as Joy had been divorced before she married Lewis (both the first time when it was just to stay in the country and the second time after he realized he was really in love with her after all), but I imagine, as Joy’s first husband was this abusive alcoholic type, there had to be grounds for annulment somewhere in his makeup) (and there I go, using her first name and his last name…but I don’t know her last name…and I just can’t call him Clive Staples!)

Oddly enough, that night he had the dinner party, Pierre lent his copy of Perelandra (as ancient as mine I think…) to Maude. Do they realize how unapologetically Christian its inspiration is? Is it ok to recommend something like that to a colleague? Obviously…so what is permitted and what isn’t? Is it like a code? As long as you don’t do or say anything too overt, it’s ok? I guess by the same token we discussed The Da Vinci Code, but mostly its inaccuracies as they relate to the layout of Paris. (The R. parents had more to say about other inaccuracies)

But anyway… life is good.

So is brioche.

But not in the same way.

Tomorrow I fais le queue to get my titre de séjour, which should give me ample time to start my FRENCH reading, as well as a feeling of accomplishment when I finally have it out of the way (while standing in line for my titre, I plan to be reading French for awhile.)
Lessons of day:
God is good.
Don’t worry, you don’t carry the merit of doing________. You’re still little.
Take the good that is given to you. And don’t wish for it again.
If you’re a frog on Venus, steer clear of white men with long fingernails.
Brioche: it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, though nearly indistinguishable from it.

All Hallow's Eve

Groups of little and not-so-little kids dressed as ghosts and clowns roaming the streets.

Cashiers in witch garb checking out candy.

A city square filled with teenagers dancing while man with long dreadlocks growls about God’s mercy into a microphone next to a modern- looking church where the Blessed Sacrament is being adored.

Yes, this all happened in France.

On the same day.

Apparently five or six years ago, Halloween became very trendy in France, particularly its darker side. The custom is now supposedly fading (though you’d never know it from the shop windows…every chocolatier is selling pumpkins wrapped in orange foil with “Happy Halloween” stamped on them.)

I’d really like to get a copy of Spear Hit’s CD so I can get all the lyrics (the ones that weren’t in English). French Christian Reggae- without references to pot (that I could discern.) Who knew?

I spoke too much English tonight. It’s not easy trying to speak a foreign language over a concert’s ground vibrations. And Kate, the girl from Colorado was there with her community. She didn’t get into it much (she said she couldn’t understand any of the lyrics, and besides, she prefers country music. I don’t think France is quite ready for a French Christian country band…) but she endured it courageously. I also met Hans, from Germany. Apparently in Germany you’re consigned to a year of either military or civil service, and he chose the civilian route. Not sure why, but this requires him to be in France. He’s been here two weeks, and has only studied French for two years…but having spent a year in Wisconsin he was quite happy to talk to Kate and me…and I hardly noticed he even had an accent…Maybe that will be me by the time I leave…if I can get to work!!!
Also, Kate told me she didn’t know any French when she came here two years ago. Can you imagine? Here, go to this community, learn this language…wow…

It never occurred to me…but we have Germany…Allemagne…Deutschland…all for the same country. Where did these names come from anyway?

Also something I never noticed before today…the very modern Église de Ste. Jeanne D’arc where we had mass this evening with the bishop has awesome acoustics. They were putting away the Blessed Sacrament and everyone began to sing the name “Jesus” very simply, and there might have been some harmonies going on…but it sounded like an angel choir.

That’s another really cool thing I’ve noticed about France (I’m trying to focus on the strengths of our two nations now, instead of always complaining about the weaknesses!) It seems like a lot of people must get some pretty sophisticated voice training, because it’s not uncommon for a lot of the congregation to break out into two and three part harmony (with feeling) during mass, without even having printed sheet music to look at. I don’t know how they do it. But it’s beautiful.

Vocabulaire:
Justicatif: receipt?

J’habite Rouen. Je suis sur Rouen. Je travaille dans un lycée.


Number of groups I saw out trick-or-treating: 5 (one was comprised of two men about six feet tall. They were out in the middle of the day, soliciting stores. I don’t think they were having much luck.) (and I’m not sure whether they said “trick or treat” or were just asking for candy.)