L'enthousiasme

Long time, no see! Have you lost weight? New haircut? I dunno, something's changed...

Oh, me? Not much. I successfully avoided posting about Charlie Hebdo. Plenty of people had more informed, thoughtful, poetic things to say than I did. Happy to let their collective impressions stand in for mine in lieu of contributing to the white noise.

Moving on. I spent what felt like all of January prepping for, taking, and recovering from exams. (That last stage is actually misleading, it took about .5 milliseconds and some wine/beer/coffee.) Anyway, it was two weeks of me failing practice exams and butting heads with my professor who was selective in when she could pretend to tolerate me. It was literally waking up, 5 hours of class, going home and spending a few hours with a text, and then a few more hours trying to tease logic from some essential grammatical concept that after 7 months I had failed to make a dent in. Good times.

Eventually, the dark morning came (dark because I woke up at around 6 am) when I rolled out of bed and onto the deserted streets of the quartier Latin, making my way for the somehow more deserted RER (suburban train). I rode that vessel out of the city to a testing center, which was, I believe, built based on a composite of the nightmares of college juniors taking the SATs. They didn't let us in the gates until about half an hour after our hopelessly lost professor told us to be there, and then we weren't let into the room until the very moment we were originally told the exam would start. Vive la France.

But, in the end, the exam was fair and I think it went fine, (and in the beginning I was too nervous about failing to care about the bureaucracy) so all was forgiven. 3 hours later I was free to cafe hop to my heart's content.

This was Saturday, and then Sunday I spent holed up in a cafe reviewing for my oral exam, the decided dark horse of the two. The scene: a professor who hates my Anglophone ways and a complete stranger posted behind a desk, ten pieces of paper with ten French texts scattered, face down. Me, the student, entering nervously, fearfully, selecting one from the tumult and after a few minutes of preparation rising from the ashes and delivering an eloquent, complete, correct response to an elementary question concerning the text. So, in short, a piece of cake. Laced with rat poison.

The preparation stage was only difficult or frustrating because as we prepared ourselves to discuss these texts, all of them, we knew that we would only have to discuss one. Meaning that roughly 90% of the work we were doing would be a complete waste in 24 hours. Not an impossible mental block to overcome, but also not a state that makes studying any easier.

So I went early, in hopes of getting it out of the way. I reread all the texts and the in class notes and my own summaries. Twice. I ended up going later than my originally scheduled time, but that didn't make much of a difference. I got into the room and my Americanness took over me. I greeted the procters and selected my text ("memoires d'une jeune fille rangee" de Simone de Beauvoir) as gregariously and warmly as I've ever done anything in my life. I set to work, outlining my argument, something esoteric about how Simone was writing about the sense of community in academia to make an argument for solidarity in 1950s French feminism, which is when the book was published. Blah blah blah. More successful as some moments than at others.

But, gosh darn it, I was enthusiastic about it. When I read my assigned selection aloud I adopted the voice of a PA announcer.  I made lots of eye contact and hand gestures and smiled more than was necessary. I talked about what I knew I needed to, but also what we had never discussed in class, meaning the facets of the texts that were genuinely interesting. I finished, having spoken too long to leave any time for questions, and the professors asked me a few questions about my plans. They offered some advice and summarized the general sense of my exam with a rollercoaster motion with their hands. Up and down. Great, then terrible. But, I was enthusiastic! And that counted for a lot. Their parting words were to hard my enthusiasm, to hold on to it. Whatever my other failings may be, this energy could curb them. A worthwhile trait.

Learning French has been exhausting and terrifying and incredible. This is about to get braggy, but it has really been the first time I've had to be bad at something. When you're learning a language, even when you're really good, you're bad. And I'm not that kind of bad, I'm just bad. And it is a shaking experience, but also thrilling. Throw off the bow lines and head straight for the iceberg my friend! I still have strong cravings for gold stars, but in general, being completely devoid of aptitude and skill has left me looser, calmer, and happier. C'est la vie! Que sera, sera! I don't know why why we want to say these sentiments in French, but there's certainly a strong link for me now.

In a language that is no rules and all exceptions, it has been liberating to fail. It has been fun to struggle. And it has been rewarding, not just in language learning but in settling into a new and different life, to remain enthusiastic.