Virtually Home

Apparently that tempest, which barely inconvenienced us in downtown Bordeaux, destroyed a lot of homes and lives and knocked out a lot of electricity elsewhere. Always important to look at things from other perspectives. Or maybe just read the news, which I am notoriously bad at. I just tend to really hate the news, though I occasionally do like to know what's going on. This is a really silly contradiction, but I live with it. Last night, one of our roommates moved out, and we spent the rest of the night cleaning up the apartment. I got my room organized and we bought a new shower curtain. I wish I had more interesting things to report on that front, but I really don't. Tonight, I must read The Illuminations in its entirety. I was supposed to have done this before, but it's daunting with all of its vocabulary I've never seen. I think I'm reading more of my translation dictionary than Rimbaud, at this point. I tell myself I'm learning things, but in reality i...

Sophomore year at OU, I was assigned a 20 minute exposé for my French class about French music. I chose, more specifically, to talk about French rap. I played some MC Solaar and got in a bit of a sticky situation explaining NTM's "Pose ton gun". I thought this was an exercise in speaking for a prolonged period of time, since we were all there to learn a foreign language. Little did I know that it was, in fact, just the way French classes are taught. Each class assigns exposé topics. Without fail. And then the student is responsible for gathering information and presenting it to the class. Your teacher might interrupt numerous times to correct your grammar, or your facts, or tell you he/she just didn't like the order in which you made your points -- or your opinion on a certain subject. In fact, opinions are discouraged, though I think this stance would probably have a lot more weight if it was ever the professor who was responsible for conveying information. We sp...

Today I woke up feeling listless, and then I remembered I had a bunch of homework, re-evaluated what  "bunch" of homework meant based on my experiences this year, and felt rather like a letters major. Or, what I imagine letters majors should feel like when they're complaining about the homework they have to do. So this afternoon I've been reading some about the reign of Louis XV on the internet, and I've just started reading Rimbaud's Illuminations, which I'm supposed to finish by our class on Thursday, even though she's told us we're only going to discuss one of them that day. I'm not sure what etiquette on homework here is, as I never figured out in the linguistics department when the homework, which always seemed suggested, was really just suggested, and when it was actually taken up. This wouldn't make much of a difference on my quality of work, were I writing in English, but the difference between taking French notes for my benefit a...