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Adieu

We leave for France tomorrow. Normally, around this time—while I’m frantically tossing clothes into a suitcase and daydreaming about crisp baguettes—a wave of guilt hits. I feel sheepish for returning to my husband’s homeland with no more command of the French language than the last time. But this time feels different.

Last month, I had an epiphany: I genuinely want to speak French. It wasn’t just another item on my list of things I should do, like eating more kale or reading financial advice columns. It was a revelation, much like the one I had when I quit smoking—it had to be something I decided I wanted. For three years, I’d told myself I should learn French. The social pressure was constant. Friends and family would ask, “So, do you speak French yet?” I went through the motions: adult education classes, language CDs, French movies, even that Bastille Day street party that did absolutely nothing for my language skills.

But one cannot learn a foreign language from occasional exposure and half-assed commitment. It requires immersion. And though I can badger Mr. P to speak only in French to me, he will understandably refuse when I can neither understand him or respond in a timely, coherent, or pleasant manner.
So I am finding other ways to immerse myself in French.

First, I bought a set of CDs called SmartFrench. “Learn French from native speakers,” the tagline on the package says, which I showed to Mr. P. “Look, I bought CDs so I can learn French from native speakers,” I said wryly. The goal of SmartFrench is to increase listening comphrehension. It essentially plays the same excerpt from an interview six times, instructing the listener to listen, or repeat, or follow along in the booklet, or take note of particular phrases. SmartFrench is teaching me very little vocabulary, but it’s tuning my ears to pick up words in French conversation.

Second, I started downloading French language podcasts onto my Shuffle. No more music for me: It’s always Louis with my daily French Pod, or the French Coffee Break, or the French Word of the Day. The podcasts are improving my vocabulary. Like, for the past week I’ve been listening a podcast about the people in Amsterdam who hid Anne Frank’s family. “Je cache et aide les jeunes filles juives.” I announced this morning to a startled Mr. P. (Translation: I hide and help young Jewish girls.)

Third, I’m back on the flashcards. But instead of writing “Shoes” on one side and “les chaussures” on the other, I’m writing entire sentences, dialogues, and famous quotes, like “Dans toutes les larmes s’attarde un espoir” (In all the tears lingers a hope, Simone de Beauvoir) and “Le jour est paresseux mais la nuit est active” (The day is lazy, but the night is active, Alphonse Daudet).

And finally, speaking French to Mr. P. I realized that if I wanted him to engage with me in French, I’d have to lead by example. He still answers me in English most of the time, but he corrects my pronunciation and grammar. And as I improve, I hope it’ll feel less like a linguistic novelty to both of us and more like the natural exchange it’s meant to be.

So, tomorrow we’ll step off the plane, and for the first time, I’ll feel like I’m carrying more than just a suitcase. I’ll carry phrases, fragments, and a real desire to engage, not just exist. I may not be fluent, but I’m ready to try. Because maybe, just maybe, this trip will be the one where French becomes not just his language, but ours.

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By Meredith – February 25, 2009

Roll-on? Hell-no!

A few months ago I was prowling the aisles of CVS when I spotted a shelf full of roll-on Lady Mitchum deodorants marked with special clearance price tags. Lady Mitchum happens to be my one and only brand for underarm odor and wetness protection. I am totally devout Lady Mitchum. So I grabbed one roll-on dispenser of Lady Mitchum. Only one? These are hard times, and if a body can save a few bucks by buying in bulk, why not two, three, or even four?

Well, the roll-on dispenser gave me pause. I prefer compressed powder, although clear gels are also acceptable. I haven’t used a roll-on in over a decade, and frankly, I was disturbed by what I perceived to be environmentally-unfriendly product design. Yes, I know that commercial deodorant as a concept is not exactly Green, but there is something especially evil about choosing a deodorant dispenser featuring a plastic ball whose sole purpose is to evenly distribute the creamy product throughout the armpit area. It seemed egregiously 1980s in its wastefulness. So my inner miser had to content itself with merely one roll-on Lady Mitchum deodorant on sale.

After weeks of use, I have discovered several fatal design flaws in the roll-on deodorant concept.

For instance, how can the user comfortably tip the bottle so that the roll-on ball is adequately infused with deodorizing cream? I understand that roll-on deodorants function much like ballpoint pens, which must be held upright. Easy to do when writing with a pen, but how so when applying deodorant?

How can the user tell how much liquid deodorant is left in the bottle? More vexing, how can the user tell when there’s no more deodorant left? Yesterday I was getting ready for bed when I caught a whiff of my underarm. Woo-ee, my deodorant failed. This morning, I discovered that it failed because there was no more left. I had been rubbing a dry roll-on ball under my arms, possibly for days or even weeks. Who knows how long, because as Sarah Silverman points out, you can’t smell yourself.

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By Meredith – February 24, 2009

Not-so-Well-Endowed

Conventional wisdom holds that our most venerable higher education institutions are immune from economic downturns, because even the most impoverished financial magnate, industry titan, or political power broker can pony up (or Ponzi up) a few hundred thousand dollars to send Junior to the Ivy League.

But it turns out that the financial crisis has humbled even Harvard University, which may lose over 30 percent of its $36 billion endowment by June 2009. Since Harvard derives about 1/3 of its operating income from its endowment, the university is forced to shore up some more cash. Aside from the token layoffs, pay freezes, and tuition increases that will hit most other private colleges, Harvard is reconsidering its expansion in the Allston neighborhood.

This reversal of fortune comes after years of buying up chunks of Allston real estate, often secretly and without community input, in pursuit of a grandiose 50-year plan that involved basically devouring Allston. Harvard won over outraged Allstonians with a flurry enticing amenities like bike paths, cafes, boutiques, theaters, and gardens.

But last week Harvard announced that the university has halted construction work on the science complex due to the economic crisis, leaving Allston blighted with empty property and in doubt about their neighborhood’s future. Residents are suddenly desperate for Harvard to come to town with the promised public art installations and spraying fountains.

It’s tempting to smirk about Harvard’s financial woes, but I really only pray for the miraculous recovery of their ridiculous endowment. I miss the sense of security that living down the road from Harvard confers. I always reasoned that even if my career imploded and my professional prospects dimmed, I could always show up at the Harvard employment office and get a job, say, as a silver-ware polisher in the dining services, or as a chambermaid in the dormitories.

Incidentally, during his stand-up act last Saturday, Norm MacDonald mentioned that he used to be intimidated when he worked with Harvard alumni on comedy shows, but then he realized that most of them weren’t smart, they were just rich. “If I was born stinking rich and I never had to do any work and I still had all this money, I’d think I was pretty fucking smart, too.” So now, maybe Harvard’s feeling about 30 percent less smart.

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By Meredith – February 23, 2009

Norm MacDonald’s Stand-up

Last night we saw Norm MacDonald at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. Norm was introduced to the rowdy crowd of mostly 20-30 something white dudes as “the greatest Saturday Night Live Weekend Update anchor ever,” an assertion that I take issue with, although I cannot deny the excellence of his Bob Dole impression (that episode when Bob Dole becomes a member of the Real World is one of my all-time favorites.)

So, what’s Norm MacDonald like these days? Older, predictably. He talks slower, almost slurred, sometimes not in full sentences, a regressed parlance that even native English speakers found incomprehensible at times (let alone the poor French). Sometimes Norm would get lost in his own discourse, hilariously. He cursed quite a bit. “When I was little, my father said that people curse because they don’t know a lot of words, so I started cursing, because it was just easier, easier than reading a dictionary.”

The subject matters of Norm’s act were random, but the prevailing theme seemed to be stupidity: Norm’s stupidity, the media’s stupidity, America’s stupidity. Yet Norm was never angry, just… confused. “Why do we behave differently when we eat in restaurants?” he rambled. “When I’m cooking a pork chop at home, and I’m waiting for it to cook, I never start eating bread… from a basket… with butter.” The audience was in stitches.

Another bit: “My friend’s an alcoholic, and he says he has the disease of alcoholism. Well, I have to say, out of all the diseases that you can get, alcoholism is a pretty good one. It’s the disease that means you’re drunk all the time. It’s better than, like, bowel cancer.”

And another: “Boston is one of the six good cities in this country. Every where else is a shithole [crowd cheers loudly]. You go to some of these places, and you ask, ‘what is there to do here?’ And they say, ‘Well there’s the Galleria.’ I know what’s at the Galleria to the square foot. They’re so proud, ‘Oh we have 4 Gaps.’ So proud! ‘4 Gaps? I’ll alert them back East.'”

And my favorite: “What’s with that word, ‘ID’? The I stands for ‘I’, and the D stands for ‘Dentification.'”

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By Meredith – February 22, 2009

Today’s Teens: Still Getting Drunk

It’s February vacation, a week-long holiday for schoolchildren that is especial to Massachusetts. I’ve never heard a satisfying justification for February vacation. “Kids need time to be kids,” says a co-worker. “You know, do other things aside from school.” I wholeheartedly agree that children should not be overly-confined to classroom, but isn’t that what Winter vacation was for, only 6 weeks ago? Or Spring vacation, only 6 weeks away? And what about the 3-month long Summer vacation? Come on Massachusetts, isn’t February vacation just an excuse to take the family skiing?

Perhaps my unfavorable opinion of February vacation is influenced by the hordes of teenagers who swamp Boston during this week, wearing their most fashionable gear and just generally acting like children in an urban playground. I see them piling into train cars, all the girls talking in giggles, all the boys talking in grunts. I’m so bothered by their sheer youth.

On my evening commute:

“I, like, so don’t want you to go over there tonight,” a teenaged girl with shiny long straight brown hair, tight jeans, and super-bulky Uggs confides to her slightly-superiorly preened clone.

“I know, but, like, it’ll be okay,” the Alpha girl says.

Beta sighs. “I just don’t want you to be at that apartment without me. Like, something really really bad could happen, like last time. I’m going to be so worried about you all night.”

Alpha is not having it. “Last time was totally different. Like, I’ll be okay, I swear” she says.

Beta sighs, again. “God, I’m going to be so worried. Just remember, I have my car, so if anything, anything goes wrong, please call me! Please, please, please call me! And if I’m not too drunk, I’ll totally come pick you up.”

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By Meredith – February 20, 2009

Fiber Bomb

Day 4 of my heart-healthy eating plan. I constantly feel both ravenously hungry and completely stuffed. I start the day with 1 cup of oatmeal topped with 2 tablespoons of ground flax seeds and a handful of blueberries. It’s like eating visious brick. My stomach is accustomed to toast, jam, neufchatel, perhaps a banana… and suddenly it’s being hit with this bomb of insoluble fiber unlike anything it has ever known.

Insoluble fiber is indigestible, meaning that this titanic bowl of oatmeal contains a comparable number of calories to a plate of well-slathered toast (about 450). The difference is that I’m not interested in food until noon, when I’ll eat a plate of beans, barley, and veggies along with a banana and yogurt. Again, comparable calories to my former lunch (about 550), but the sheer amount of fiber has my stomach stuffed and uninterested in snacking.

Yet my active body needs more calories. It’s so confused. I’ll stare at my snack stash of nuts and apples, uninterested and frankly repelled by the idea of adding more heft to the material that’s churning its way through my digestive track. My intestines groan. My stomach puckers. Next thing I know, I’m visiting the co-worker on the seventh floor who keeps the jar of candy on his desk and grabbing a fiber-free Dove chocolate to appease my hard-working innards.

Seriously, do people on diets know about the power of fiber? Anyone who claims that an apple can’t satisfy their appetite obviously doesn’t have a gut full of oatmeal and beans.

My stomach will have a bit of reprieve in one week, when it will accompany me to France and England, two countries that deem oatmeal suitable only for horses and Scotsmen.

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By Meredith – February 19, 2009

Tales from the T

Out of all the Monday holidays on which I must work, President’s Day is the loneliest, for it is a rare office that is open on President’s Day. Last year was the first President’s Day that I had off in 7 years, and when I returned to work on the following Tuesday, I got laid off. So with that memory still fresh, I worked on President’s Day yesterday without complaint and without feeling too guilty about disrespecting Lincoln’s legacy.

At 6pm I board a Red Line train at South Station. On Monday holidays the T runs on a reduced schedule to accommodate the light crowds of tourists, travelers with wheelie-luggage, and the rare commuter such as myself. Still, fewer trains means fewer chances of gridlock. We glide through Park street, over the Charles River, and into Cambridge. I mentally purr about the quickness of my commute.

Then, in the tunnel just before Central Square, the train screeches to a halt. We sit unmoving and my neck muscles clench with that familiar grip of T-induced stress. At the other end of the train car, a small group of articulate 8-12 year olds lament loudly the T’s lousy service throughout their big day in the city. The accompanying in loco parentis shush their excited charges in vain. They are at a very loud age: Old enough to be able to express themselves with confidence, but not old enough to feel self-conscious about publicly expressing emotion.

Then the lights and power on the train shut off, and the conductor gets on the intercom. “We are very sorry for the delay!” she says in a murderous South Shore accent. “But there is an individual at Central Square who is on the tracks! We have cut the power on the train, and we cannot move until the individual is apprehended!”

“Did someone die?” one of the prepubescents shouts.

“No, stupid,” another sneers. “‘Apprehended’ means caught. It’s a robber, making a getaway on the train tracks!” All of them turn to peer out the windows.

5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. This is a first for me, being delayed because some batshit loony is running around on the tracks. I have a hard time not resenting the T for this delay. Still, when the conductor announces at minute 15 that “The T police have arrived and are apprehending the individual,” I am outraged that it has taken 15 minutes for the police to arrive.

I close my eyes and wish I could sleep on the dark train, but the prepubescents grow rowdier with each passing second, and so I stare at my darkened reflection in the window across from me. I grow meditative. After 30 minutes, the lights come back on. The individual has been apprehended, and the train begins to move.

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By Meredith – February 18, 2009

The Pencil

My brain was more busy than a laboring spider, to cull Shakespeare, but instead of plotting a claim to the monarchy, I was writing a computer manual, hoping to ensnare user comprehension. Oh, retch, I need to take a walk.

A 10-minute power walk under a blue sky always revives my flagging intellect and castigates my soaring imagination. The unwelcoming cool wind was tempered somewhat by sunshine. Annie Dillard said, “There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.” I would reverse her adjectives — the Bostonian wind is a very muscular, brawny entity, and sunlight is divine — but in any case, the day was charged with energy.

I fell into step behind a young man with a pencil stuck behind his ear. He was a normal guy in his 20s, lanky, dressed in office casual, with cropped brunette hair and ear lobes that strayed a bit too far from his body. And tucked in this commodious rift was a pencil.

The pencil was an old-fashioned wooden pencil, painted schoolbus yellow, with a pink eraser burgeoning above a filament of green metal. The point of graphite jutted sharply from the plane of exposed wood. It was beguiling, a quaint talisman of dexterous ingenuity, a throwback to a time before men carried Blackberries and purses. The pencil was not quite full-sized. It had been sharpened at least once, maybe twice. Likewise, the eraser was rounded, not conical. Mistakes have been made.

I liked this pencil. I liked its essence, its modest stillness behind an ear.

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By Meredith – February 18, 2009

My Friday the 13th Horror Story

I almost got killed on Friday the 13th. The villain did not attempt to slash me with a knife as I cavorted wantonly at Camp Crystal Lake with my fellow nubile camp counselors. No, that would be too cool of a demise for me. (Please excuse the feeble attempts at humor, which are meant to cushion the utter seriousness of the fact that yes, I really did almost get killed yesterday).

The method of my near-execution was boring, predictable “pedestrian killed by inattentive car driver.”

All my attempts to describe my near-death experience in written word have been pretty upsetting, so I will resort to a pictorial combined with dispassionate use of the Third Person. (I apologize in advance for my exceedingly lame Illustrator skills).

#1 Friday, 6:45pm, the well-light intersection of Palmer Street and Broadway (a residential neighborhood).

accmap1

#2 Pedestrian judges it safe to cross street

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#3 Car accelerates towards Pedestrian.

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#4 Pedestrian is saved by quick reflexes.

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#5 Pedestrian reacts loudly.

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#6 Pedestrian is traumatized.

accmap6

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By Meredith – February 14, 2009

Ne M’amuse-Bouche

I was conflicted over the news that Pfizer is acquiring Wyeth to form a mega-pharmaceutical behemoth, and that 20,000 jobs will be adversely affected in the upcoming years due to corporate synergies. Oh, those double-edged synergies!

I managed to put aside my lingering intellectual resentment for the pharm industry, for how they profit from pumping the populace full of chemicals to treat market-driven lifestyle conditions, and feel devout sympathy for the workers who will be affected by this massive layoff. Except for one Wyeth engineer who I am meanly hoping will lose his job: Larry.

Larry was in my French Beginners Level 3 class at the adult education center last year. At the start of our first class, we were instructed to introduce ourselves to the class. Most of us strung together 2 or 3 sentences of basic personal information. Larry gave a lengthy, articulate introduction using perfect pronunciation and advanced vocabulary (that’s how I found out he was an engineer at Wyeth. It was all I understood).

“Perhaps you would like to go to a higher level?” the teacher suggested when Larry finished. In fact, she suggested it repeatedly, constantly, for the first 2 classes, but he demurred, modestly, saying he felt comfortable at this level. At first I thought he lacked self-confidence or just found the class time to be convenient to his schedule. Later, I suspected that his intentions were more sinister, that he wanted to lord his mastery of French over a bunch of beginners.

Larry proved to be very… consuming. He volunteered answers, often without raising his hand. He asked long questions in French, which the teacher repeated in English. He was always trying to take a simple lesson to the next level (like when we struggled with basic past tense, he asked questions about conditional past tense.) But wasn’t just Larry’s superior French ability that earned our contempt. It was the way he seemed genuinely perplexed and confused whenever one of us tried to speak French… just like a real French person!

Larry seemed oblivious to our annoyance. More than a few of my classmates lost patience with him. “I don’t know what he’s saying!” one kindly woman burst out one day, interrupting him as he read his homework assignment aloud (we were tasked with writing a paragraph about a current event; Larry wrote a 500-word detective story).

Believe it or not, I was one of Larry’s only allies until towards the end of the semester. Silently I loathed him, but he struck me as being innately socially awkward, maybe with Aspergers tendencies, so I refrained from shooting him nasty looks and sighing whenever he opened his mouth.

Then, one day, I was on a crowded, silent Red Line train when Larry materialized out of nowhere. “Bon soir!” he said heartily.

“Bon soir,” I said.

“Como ca va?” he said.

“Ca va bien. Et vous?” I said.

He began talking French, long sentences punctuated with little laughs and gestures. I kept nodding. Then, he asked me a question in French.

“Um, what?” I said.

He repeated it, louder and slower. I shook my hand. “Sorry, I just don’t understand,” I said.

Larry persisted with the French. It was like I wasn’t there, like he wanted a valid reason to be talking loud, insistent French on the subway. People stared at him. I stared at him. It was the longest subway ride of my life, and by the end, I wanted to punch Larry in his bouche.

I suspect Larry’s the type of guy who can’t survive a layoff, like his supervisor and co-workers have been waiting for this opportunity to unload Larry for years. C’est la vie, Larry, and bonne chance.

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By Meredith – February 12, 2009