Yesterday I discovered that my grasp of French grammar has, in the past year or so, inadvertently defenestrated itself onto a detonating explosive and been killed in a shooting accident. The class I switched over to is going through stuff I know, and that I know I know, but that I can’t seem to do. I know when to use the imperfect and the past-perfect and the simple past and all that, but it seems I can’t do it anymore. I managed to get 7 out of fifteen problems wrong on our in-class exercise: 3 because I used the wrong tense, 3 because I had the right tense but couldn’t remember the right word to use, and 1 because I used a conversational rather than literary register. At least we weren’t being graded on it or anything, but it was rather demoralizing.

I appreciate English a lot right now. It’s nice to spend most of one’s time dealing with a language that only has two tenses ( the “future tense” is really indicated by the conditional mood. I understand this is supposed to be a common feature of Germanic languages. Thank you, Eng 331, for teaching me such useful trivia) and doesn’t have single-word infinitives. This does mean you have to use a lot of different arrangements of the same words to convey different ideas, but you don’t have to remember so many different forms for each word (French, to make things even more fun, loves having different forms of a given word sound just about identical to one another, mostly because some genius at some point decided that the letter e followed by just about any other letter should be pronounced [e] or [I]).

My project team for the Discovery of Paris course was trying to meet this afternoon to walk around the Bibliothèque Nationale and its environs. We tried to coordinate via email, in French of varying proficiency, and in the end 2/4 of us went there, and were there at the same time, but failed to find one another (cell phones didn’t cooperate, and we were going to meet at the metro station but it turns out it’s a huge station). Nice neighborhood. I’ll upload pics. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about it for our project, mostly from an urban-planning perspective, fun comparing this recent development of the area to Haussman and to Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in New York. Not inventive enough to make a project on its own, of course, but after specializing, through two semesters of honors seminars, in studying transportation in urban planning, I tend to automatically evaluate places by their transportation infrastructure, whether they’re structured as paths or destinations, pedestrian friendliness, emergency access, etc.

I finished my box of couscous today. In memoriam, I offer these recipes:
Couscous with beef bouillon.
Couscous solidified, refried.
Couscous left on stove too long, slightly dehydrated, stuck to pot.
Couscous added to frying frozen hamburger.
Couscous with peas.
Couscous added to frying frozen hamburger with peas.
Couscous with peas added to frying frozen hamburger.
Couscous, peas, and fried hamburger all prepared separately but put in one plate.
Couscous with peas with hamburger fried, broken into little bits, and added to pot.

Pictures to upload tomorrow. Sorry, I’m lazy.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.