Le Projet Français/The French Project: 23 Jours/Days, 55% Fluency/Aisance

Je suis au dessous un ciel fumé comme j’écris ce soir. Il y était une été sans ambition pour moi d'etudier une autre langue. J’étais fainéant cette fois-ci. Il est parce que français est une langue que n'est pas tellement une nouvelle langue pour moi, et la noveltie d'apprendre quelque chose different du cela n'est pas vraiment plus là, et ceci m'ennuie. Donc, je me challengerai à composer et écrire cela sans l'effort d'étudier plus de français. Je dois à prouver à moi mème que je peux me souvenir l'encore. Je suis satisfait qu’il suffit que je peux comprendre une niveau intermédiaire; je pouvrais rechercher la reste facilement, si ou quand j'ai le besoin.

Translation: I’m underneath a smoky sky as I write this evening. It was a summer without ambition for me to study another language. I was lazy this time. It’s because French is a language that is not so much a new language for me, and the novelty of learning something different from it is not really there anymore, and that bothers me. So, I will challenge myself to compose and write this without the extra effort of studying more French. I have to prove to myself that I can remember it again. I’m satisfied that it’s enough that I can understand an intermediate level; I could easily research the rest if or when I need to.

I am also writing through a state of depression it seems: as I close this chapter of re-familiarizing myself with French, as this reminds me that this would have been the time I would have been flying to Montreal right now for a proper vacation if other life circumstances hadn't interfered and defunded me from doing so this year. I would have been actually using my wits to use and practice the language thusly. I wouldn't be speaking like a Quebecois though. It appears that when I speak French my accent trails off into being more European it seems, though much less nasal. That's OK by me. Montreal demands that I try out my French and tour the out of the way shops: the fromageries, boulangeries, chacuteries, and micro-brasseries. I wouldn't need to use a restaurant at all; I could live off the local cheeses, bread, deli meat, and some of the odd local beers. 

I'll skip a more lengthy treatises about difficulties and interesting words as I had done with my last few language project reviews. The French language for me is generally a summary for being able to express all that is good about gastronomical adventures: from cooking techniques, to making things that would ordinarily make us squeamish sound more palatable. To be able to 'julienne' and 'sautée' a carrot makes you sound like a master chef compared to just cutting it to matchsticks and frying it. Fruits du mer sounds more appetizing than shellfish. Brochettes sounds like a feat of genius and far more interesting than plain old meat skewers, or at least less banal or disgusting than 'meat on a spit'.

The next project: becoming re-acquainted with Spanish, hopefully advancing to a more intermediate level. After that, by process of elimination, beginning in November: Russian. The hardest of the bunch I committed to learning.  

5Q5A: A Sort of Homecoming

And you hunger for the time

Time to heal, desire, time
And your earth moves beneath
Your own dream landscape …

Lyrics from the song A Sort of Homecoming, from the album The Unforgettable Fire, by U2.

The holiday time that I’m . . . enduring, so far, could be a lot better. It feels like a time where I really need to do some soul-searching. Anger and other anxieties have eating me alive lately, and I’ve noticeably been struggling to keep my composure. Peace has been hard to come by. 

The holiday started well enough, with a return to my old hometown, being amidst the territory I was raised and grew up around. I have not returned to where I spent my boyhood and teen years for a long time, and it was a sobering realization of how long a lapse it has been after a visit there to reunite for a birthday party with my extended family who remain there. I don’t visit there as often as my other brothers, or parents do.

The home where I grew up in is gone, only stuff of dreams and memories remain, and the landscape has morphed in subtly different ways, but still so familiar. It was a shock, and yet a comfort, to know that I’m not completely estranged and alienated from the place, and that in some ways I am still quite bonded to it. Just because I’m from Saskatchewan doesn’t automatically make me a Prairieboy (I’d be rather insulted if you called me one), nor am I a bush dweller. I’m a Parkland boy. The geography of the place is the beltline in between the prairie and the boreal forest. It’s interspersed with sloughs, deciduous groves, pastures, fields, and lakes which are no more than 10 kilometers away from any homestead situated in that region. The place where I grew up was even more unique in that we lived near the coulees. Traveling through them around the south and west of the old farmstead was always soothing to my senses. Trekking through the pasturelands in the coulees, before more bears repopulated the places, was enjoyable too. The rest of this I’ll shorten with 5Q5A . . .

Q1. How tolerable is the Ex this year?

A1. Someone broke into my building and tore open the mailboxes. Mine was untouched, thankfully. That’s the most drastic thing that has happened so far crime-wise. I hope that’s the worse it ever gets. Monday and Tuesday were sleepless, and by Wednesday I was so drained that I fell asleep early, and couldn’t even be stirred awake by the fireworks. The Strumbellas play tonight at the grandstand, and I should at least enjoy that concert from afar here on my balcony.

Q2. Fiction Book?

A2. An old sci-fi classic, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Knowing that Huxley was a respected colleague of his philosophical contemporary, Alan Watts, plus his experimentation with psychedelics and the curiosity as to how it impacted his prose composition was an angle that intrigued me to pick up this book. Feeling like I’ve been stuck in what seems like a dystopic atmosphere is probably another reason I’m giving it a perusal. It’s also to help draw out answers to that question of what my own personal form of ‘soma’ is: that mechanism or pattern I retreat to for coping with the insanity of this world. It's also significant because we've reached this point in history where it is technically possible to custom design people genetically. It’s next best novel to read after 1984 if dystopian philosophical classic science fiction turns one’s crank.

Q3. Non-Fiction Book?

A3. I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m just making it a point to regain some focus, so I’m just doing one thing at a time with intensified concentration. Writing like this is a good exercise for that too. I’m making it a point to avoid all forms of negativity, including watching the news . . . however . . .

Q4. Brad Wall announced his retirement today . . . thoughts on that?

A4. Mixed emotions, one being “Yeah! At long last!” with the reserve and caution of wondering how really buggered up things are going to be coming down the road, which he is tucking tail and running from, in order to distance himself further from whatever that is. It’s pessimistically suspicious, but that is what happens after working in healthcare and care facilities and living under the ridiculous dictates of this government for this long. It might be such that whoever takes over leadership in the Sask party may be even more incompetent, corrupt, and callous than he was. He claims that he has no immediate plans after he steps down. I don’t believe this for a second. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he automatically took an executive position with any one of the crony corporations he invited into this province through his anti-union privatization schemes shortly and soon after he steps down as premier.

Q5.  Next holiday at this time next year?

A5. As nice as homecomings are, I’m definitely getting out of this province. I don’t even care anymore if I have to go into debt to do it. One can’t expect stuff to change or be enlightening by doing the same thing over and over again; staycations apply to this as well. The political madness that might ensue after today might make it worth doing.