blog/blaguer

Bordeaux.

In French, the verb blaguer translates to joke. It is pronounced much like (though not entirely) the word blog in English, which means to create a website in which one recounts various findings and thoughts about the world without having any need for credibility, accuracy, or intelligence. I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about blogging and about blagueing, mostly in my discoveries of what it means to be here across the ocean and the sorts of things that I want to accomplish in my time here in France. Aux Etats-Unis, I like joking around. I love to make jokes, I love to make people laugh. I am especially fond now of telling people that I have dogjaw, as it seems to provide a good laugh for a few moments, until one realizes just how ridiculous the entire joke is. It requires support from those around who know the joke, a mutual understanding of what is there and what will follow. I cannot joke in French yet. I do not have a good enough understanding of the language, a good enough understanding of the people, to find the lines between funny and not, polite and impolite, and cultural (mis)understandings that may seem drole to one culture and bizarre to another.
I can, however, and do, watch plenty of French television. Each night my family watches the weather, probably six or seven times. No joke, I don’t know what it is but they fucking love to talk about the weather here. It’s not complicated stuff, either. It’s not cloud type or cloud formation or precipitation in other regions. No tornadoes in Kansas. It’s simply “It’s raining.” “It will rain.” “It’s hot.” “It will be hot.” At first I thought that it was just because they thought I only knew words for weather. But then the cousins came over, and the extended family, and the neighbors, and with each visitor it was the same thing. “It’s raining.” “It’s going to rain.” Damn, guys, you really like the weather, don’t you.
When we’re not watching weather, we watch the news. It is by watching the news that I realize how much my comprehension is already improving. I can understand the news so much better now that I’ve been watching it regularly. They talk quickly but I can follow more now than I could on Day One.
When we’re not watching the weather, we watch reality TV. My French Family really likes reality TV and it ranges from shows that are like Survivor and shows that are more like MTV’s CRIBS. Apparently, there aren’t limousines in France (says my French cousin), and millionaires/people who ride in limousines are especially fascinating to the French. I thought that it was only an American culture thing that we are so obsessed with celebrities/millionaires/peoplewhodonothingandmaketonsofmoneyforit. At least my family, I think seems more willing to judge these people for their complete lack of talent/additions to society, but that does not stop them from being fascinated by them.
And when we’re not watching the TV, we’re watching the neighbors. During dinner, my French mother (who is simply wonderful) likes to get up and go into the kitchen to bring out the next courses. As she does, she’ll pause by the window and check out who is passing by. Perhaps if there is even a pause in the conversation and she hears someone cough from across the street, she checks to see who it is, what dog they are walking, whether or not they are someone familiar to her or perhaps someone new. Either way, my French father says sternly but politely, “My dear, sit down please. We’re eating. Please.” It is hilarious and sweet and ridiculous all at once.
One night she tells me about the man who lives across the street with a 19 year old dog, a massive dog, who has to take 14 different types of medications and who has paid walkers who come by periodically throughout each day to give him his medicine and to walk him down the street. Because the dog is going blind and is deaf and has major problems, well, moving, the walkers are there because they have more patience than the dog’s master. Yet, the dog’s master is not willing to let go of this poor suffering (and apparently unfriendly) animal and thus the walkers come. If you watch during the day, you can see them periodically stop by and the old animal coughs a little and hobbles down the road. While the walkers take him, the man sits on his balcony and smokes a cigar. Sometimes, when the dog is not being walked, the dog will sit with his head through the railing and breathe fresh night air as the man smokes his third cigar of the day. She tells me all of this one night after dinner and I listen intently, learning more and more words, and absorbing all that I can so that perhaps, one day, I can say something witty or funny or even remotely intelligent about a man who pays people to walk his dog so he can smoke his cigars and have his old furry friend.
At night, I dream bilingual dreams where my friends and family shift in and out of English and French without noticing that there is a difference between the two. Ian works at Narberth Video and speaks French to a couple of French men who walk in, and explains to them the price of all the furniture (as my French mother loves IKEA and talks about it all the time). There must be something to that, some change in the way I am thinking, the way I am forming both consciously and otherwise, that my language is shifting back and forth and back and forth. It’s a start, perhaps, a step towards a better blog and a better blague.
(And yes, for those of you who were worried, I bought an umbrella. It was tres cher but it will do.)

the umbrella.

Bordeaux.
My adventure begins with an umbrella. Or rather, with a complete lack of an umbrella. My mother and my step-mother, I’m certain, will be annoyed to know that despite both of them advising me to bring an umbrella, I forgot. It’s not such a big deal. I am living in a city, a very beautiful city, with plenty of magasins for buying such a thing as that. And though it will cost more here, as everything else does in what is known as the-other-side-of-the-Atlantic, I will purchase one tomorrow.
This morning, I walked to school. This may not seem terribly exciting for those of you who ever walked to school, but I never did. It was always Mom’s car or Dad’s car or the school bus or later the Coro, but today I realized that I was living in a true city because I walked to school. I walked to school along a route that my French family showed me yesterday during our 2.5-hour promenade throughout the city. And what a city it is. Although I cannot help myself from using the same three French words over and over again to describe the sites that I see, I can say in English that this city deserves all of those words and more. It is pretty. It is beautiful. It is magnificent. The streets are all made of stone, the faces of the buildings are the same as they were many centuries ago. The people are friendly. My family here could not be more welcoming. My French mother works for an organization which arranges language immersion programs in other countries; because of this, she knows some English and enjoys asking me the occasional grammar question. She also enjoys correcting my French, a hobby/past-time/all-the-time-habit that I actually adore about her. I need the help and she is more than happy to give it. I’m not entirely sure what my French father does, but from what my French mother described to me (and showed me the building…it’s a government building in the middle of the most beautiful park I’ve ever seen…imagine every romantic French moment in a park and, well, put it in this garden, couples everywhere kissing and holding each other, children playing, people laughing, no one apparently going to work)… he works for The Man. Dad will be sad to know that I am living with a true worker for The Man, as I’m fairly certain that he is in charge of the people who are in charge of making sure that the taxes of the city are all paid. It’s not just that he works for The Man; he works closely with The Man. However, he has very good taste in wine and cheese, thus perhaps Dad can forgive him.
The house is lovely. Just a ten-minute walk away from the school where I will be going each morning and afternoon, five days a week for two weeks. I should now apologize for two things. 1. The exposition. I don’t really want to be writing so much boring exposition about the places that I am seeing. But it’s the first entry so I need to get grounded a little. 2. My grammar. I feel like I’m typing in a foreign language. If my wording is a little funny or my typing is a little off, it’s because I am trying my hardest to truly immerse myself, even if it means watching James Bond movies in French (Permis de Tuer was on tonight…watched it a bit with Phillipe and thought of Ian). Basically, no matter what language I am using, I feel awkward and trite.
Anyways, the reason my thoughts for today began with an umbrella are this. Today, as I walked to school, in the rain, cursing in something that was neither English nor French but vraiment franglais, I thought of that damn song that was so popular this summer Aux Etats-Unis, “Umbrella.” I was thinking about this song not just because I was missing Friends Camp a little, and missing American culture a little, and missing the moments where everyone everyone everyone knows just exactly what you mean when you sing something so ridiculous, but because the song simply does not translate. Imagine the song, for those of you who know it, but instead of the familiar, “Umbrella-ella-ella-ey-ey-ey Under my umbrella” as “Sous mon parapluie-uie-uie-eeee-eeee-eee.”
As you can see, it doesn’t work.
Then again, I’m not convinced why it works so well in English. Does anyone else feel just a little ridiculous singing this? If so, you can join me sous mon parapluie. That is, if I actually buy one tomorrow.