"A day without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye."
~French proverb

This morning I went to tutor Fabrice... and for the first time felt really stupid while doing it. We spent almost the entire hour asking each other questions so that he could practice– because in our stupid language instead of doing inversion like in French or just adding a question mark like in Spanish, we have to make things all complicated and stick the subject in between the two halves of the verb.
Example: What is she doing in the kitchen?
Try diagramming that sucker and you’ll see what I mean.
And so I keep making up answers to imaginary questions, and Fabrice keeps formulating questions like "What she is doing in the kitchen?" Or "What is doing she in the kitchen?" Or sometimes "Where is she doing in the kitchen?" And as unqualified as I feel about this job, the truth is that, considering I am completely uncertified, I am still remarkably qualified to be teaching him this, because I know now what it is like to struggle and struggle with syntax, making the sounds that your tongue just can’t seem to form, or untranslatable concepts like the
word "dont" in French. So I am always patient with him; I kind of feel like when the two of us work on grammar, if anyone has the right to be impatient it’s him, with my simple-minded
explanations of complicated concepts. The problem with learning a new language is that you have to know your own backwards and forwards before you start on another. It is absolutely
crucial that you understand the grammar of your language– the reasons you say what you say– before you attempt to figure out a new one. Learning French has drastically changed the way I
write formally. When I write letters now, or papers, or whatever, I write much more properly– if I can’t figure out how it ought to be said in French, I rethink the whole sentence until it can be put into another language. Which is good. It rids my writing of idioms and stupid things that shouldn’t exist anyway, like dangling participles and the passive voice.
But enough grammar– this is what happened at Fabrice’s: He has this sheet with pictures of a bunch of animals on it, and the names of the animals in English so that he can learn them. I am supposed to be quizzing him on them. But since I only learned French in college, my animals are not as good as they are in, for example, Spanish. Having lived here this long, I am still fairly proficient in the basics, but his sheet has a picture on it of a giraffe (???) and... get
this... a camel. So I leave those two till last, and then point at the giraffe and make him tell me the word in French and English. Fortunately, he knew it. Then I point to the camel and ask him the word in French, and he says, "chameau," and then rattles off about sixteen sentences in this mumbly middle-school voice of which I understand only about two words. I ask him to repeat the small chronicle he has just founted, and he says, again, in French, "I think it’s chameau, but that might be the opposite, chameau might be the kind with only one hump, and this animal has two, so I can’t remember what it is. What is it in English, Blair?"
If my life were a sitcom, which I am often suspicious that it may secretly be, this is the part where I would turn to the camera, AC Slater-style, and wait for the laughtrack to subside.
Does it look like I am going to know the answer to this? No. No. No.
First of all, I didn’t know there were animals with only one hump, and if I had seen one standing next to a two-humped one, I probably would have just thought they were both camels and one of them had a goiter. But Fabrice is looking at me expectantly, awaiting the name, in French, of a one-humped mammal, and all I can think of is "dromedary."
Dromedary.
What is wrong with me? I mean, I realize that it is a word that kind of applies in this situation, but who in their right mind has that pop into their head? And I am not about to use the word dromedary to an 11-year-old foreigner, so finally I say "uhhh... Llama?" And he goes, "Isn’t that a whole different animal?"
Just for the record, I realize that llamas have no humps, unless they have a goiter or a small child in their dorsal cavity, but what else was I supposed to say?
So if you know the name of a hoofed mammal, preferably that fits into the genus dromedaria, please let me know. In any language, I don’t really care.
Then we get to this sentence that says something like "What would you like to drink, sir?" And Fabrice says, in French, "Is that a title, Blair?" And I was like, "Well, yes...? I mean, what do you mean?" And he says, "In English doesn’t ‘sir’ mean you are a knight?" And I said, "Well, in this case, it is just a term of politeness, like saying ‘Monsieur’ when you speak to someone."
"But Blair, how do you know? Maybe the person is a knight!"
"You’re right, he might be a knight, but the thing is that I don’t really know much about knights because we don’t have them in the États-Unis."
"Yeah, we don’t have them here either."
"So I guess in general, it could be a knight that they are speaking to, but probably it is just a normal person– you know, an adult man."
"Whatever you say. English is so difficult..."

Eventually I left his place to go wander the gardens of Luxembourg till class; I passed a man who told me I needed to find God, and the only thing I could think of to respond with was, "Look, Mister, I’m just trying to find a café in the Latin Quarter that will sell me a coffee to go without making me pay extra for the paper cup."

I didn’t think that was the response he was looking for, so I decided to keep my mouth shut.

I went to class afterward... I had my architectural design class today, and as always I spent the entire hour and a half praying the prof would not come over and pick up my paper to show to
the class. So far I have lucked out. Today, not so much.

[I have this insane fear of this because last spring, I took an upper-level French class at Emory for which I had not taken the prerequisite, and the administration made an exception for me so that I could take the class and go abroad in the fall semester. But the prof was totally against them making the exception and didn’t want me in the class (she told me this on the first day). She was completely intimidating; once called me out in the middle of class, in front of everyone, for yawning– mouth covered. I was so upset if I had known the words in French I would have ranted at her about how if she had been up since 7am that morning after writing a paper in another language until 330am the night before and was going to have to go nanny four children across town immediately after class let out, I wouldn’t complain about her yawning but instead just be glad she had shown up at all. Anyway, she used to always put up our papers onto the overhead projector with the names crossed out and make the rest of the class correct them anonymously. She would only pick the really bad ones with lots of obvious errors, and since I was a semester behind everyone else in the class, guess whose always got picked? And twice, TWICE after ranting at how bad my grammar and spelling and analysis of Proust’s work (read in the original French) was, she moved the paper around and realized she had forgotten to cross out my name, and the whole class saw that I was the stupid one. So now I have this (quite rational) paralyzing fear of French teachers showing my work to the class.]

He walked past my sketch pad (I spent 10Euro on a sketch pad to do work I don’t even want to do for this stupid class. If I could have found a gum eraser, I would have bought that instead. Way more fulfilling.) and looked down, and of course my left hand has smudged up my lines, so it’s not as clear as it should be, and he picks up my pad, heads to the front of the room, and points out something about my weight-bearing walls and how the window is cut out too much so it looks like a hole in the wall. Then he picks up another girl’s pencil, who sits in the front of the room where he was standing, and darkens the space for me. This wouldn’t have been so obvious that it was mine except that there are only about 14 people in the class, and everyone witnessed the whole thing. A few minutes later, he walked by again, and this time decided that
if he colored in part of my design in pink chalk, it would help me understand... something... better. Your guess as to what it would help is as good as mine. But again: I am left-handed. And I have never learned that complicated boyishly left-handed way of holding my wrist all crooked to avoid touching the part of the paper I have just written on, which means I’ve never been any good with pastels and as soon as he colors it in with his stupid pink chalkboard chalk, my whole design is, pretty much immediately, tinted rose because I can’t keep chalk in one place
to save my life. He came back again later and mumbled something about how the point of the chalk was to emphasize the area where he put it and not the whole drawing. I wanted to ask if the purpose extended to emphasizing the lower three inches of my left-sleeve, but refrained... mainly because I couldn’t remember the word for sleeve at the time.

But I feel like my designs are becoming better, though I still have no idea what I am doing– but at least my lines are straighter and I have a better grip on perspective now... I think.
~B

P.S. I find it strangely comforting that the art history professors in France don’t know how to use the slide projectors and LCD machines any better than the ones in the US.