Testing a style

     I've been working on something in my off time, and while it's still in its infancy, I'd be interested in getting some feedback. Click here (it's a blog post, safe for work, no popups or noises) to check it out. Thanks!

Reasons why I love French

     In an effort to retain (and expand) my French abilities, I bought a number of random books in French from a used bookstore. One of them, a collection of letters written by the second wife of Louis XIV, might sound horribly dry, but is of particular interest to me, what with the French play I was in about how she came to be queen. The play was fantastic, if slightly stressful, and made history all the more fun to learn.

     In reading the book, a number of things stand out. For one, people at that time used to write a lot more about their feelings, their thoughts, and their affections for each other. This is probably due to the tediousness of writing with quill and ink, and the fact that a letter took hours to write, and days or weeks to be delivered. If that was the only way to stay in touch with people, you would naturally want to give them insight to who you are and how you feel, rather than just facts and getting up-to-date on what's going on. While I see how it is probably not everyone's cup of tea, it is absolutely beautiful in French, and makes one feel calmer and more at peace in a world where beauty and joy are often overlooked.

     One of the phrases she uses, in speaking of her solitude and loneliness in a cloister after the king's death, comes when she mentions that food is no longer of particular interest to her:

Il faut nourrir la machine quand c'est le coeur qui meurt de faim.  

It is necessary to feed the body, while the soul dies of hunger.

Unfortunately, it loses something in translation; the word she uses for the body- a machine- implies the separation of the clinical physical needs of a being from the boundless passions of the heart and soul. When you consider that this is a woman who lived in Versailles at the height of French fashion and modernity, yet loved the king so much that she advised him against marrying her, for the sake of his political position, it speaks volumes about the importance she placed on physicality vs passion.

     When people learn that I am a polyglot, one of the questions they inevitably ask is "which is your favorite language?" Without hesitation, I always firmly reply, "French." They frequently seem shocked that I don't even have to stop and think about it, but I have yet to meet anyone who speaks French and another language who didn't love it. Don't get me wrong, Arabic has a rich history, Russian is pretty (in it's own rough way), Gaelic is comforting, and sign language expressive, but French just has a passion for life that I haven't found anywhere else. Whether good or bad, full of suffering or elation, the French language just seems determined to grab life by the throat and wring every drop of passion out of it as possible. 

     Perhaps that's why we've stolen the phrase "joie de vivre" from them: because no one else is so full of life. Cheers!

Pictures vs words

     A gentleman came in to where I work recently, and struck up a conversation while he was waiting. After a while, it turned to the fact that I used to drive tow trucks, which means I try to drive more safely, having seen the results of reckless (i.e., wrecked) diving. That, of course, set off a chain reaction in my head which lasted most of the way home and ended up here.

     They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and while that may be true, I would argue that those thousand words are neither cohesive nor compelling. Consider this picture:

Looks ugly, huh? You can tell it was a pretty bad accident, and people probably got hurt. If you have enough time, you could probably tell the picture was taken in a dirt lot where other wrecked cars have been bought and stored. If you're a connoisseur of tow trucks, you might even be able to tell how it's hooked up to the truck that's dragging it. BUT. There's a huge story that you're missing out on, and that's where the human element comes in.

A new concept on work

     My boss at the new job surprised me today, the third day of working, when she seemed very concerned about how well things were going for me. I'm used to being thrown at a pile of work, and told to sort it out, so I was a little curious exactly what was going on. The coworker who was showing me some of the ropes I'll be working with waited until the boss left, and enlightened me. She said, "The boss just wants to make sure that you're settling in, because she's going on vacation in two weeks, and doesn't want people coming and going while she's gone. If you decide this isn't the job for you, she'd rather know now than when she's not here and has to struggle to find a way to cover what you do."

     This, honestly, blew my mind. My attitude towards work has always been such that, once you accept a job, you're there. You've decided. You're sticking with it. Unless things were grossly misrepresented to you (something that has only happened twice to me), you've accepted the position and have a decent idea of what it entails. More so because my current job involves... clerical work. Paperwork. Some phone calls. Filing. More filing. Learning codes. More filing. Get the idea? Not difficult or hard-to-learn work. It's day 3, and I feel like, if everyone else got sick tomorrow and couldn't come in, I could do a decent job holding down the fort with a minimum of "crap, what do I do next?" phone calls.

     So to me, the thought of just... giving up on a job after three days is totally foreign. I've worked jobs that I don't particularly care for, or that aren't my forte or goal in life, but I've only twice hit the point where I've given up on a job: the first time because I was flat-out lied to about the position I was being hired into (they gave the temp secretary the job I interviewed for, and stuck me at the front desk instead), and once because "weekends off" meant- to me- that I didn't work weekends at all, while to the boss, it apparently meant you go home Saturday morning and be at work Sunday night. So far, the only thing I've run into at this job that isn't what they told me is that everyone is super nice, and very patient with the new chick who knows absolutely nothing about medical billing. Truly, a fate worse than death.

Good news/ bad news

     One of my friends wrote me an entire three-page letter like this once. It's since become a pattern in my brain, because it lets me work through what's going on in my life, it doesn't matter if there are lots of random tangents, and whichever one you end up with more of, usually gives you an idea of how well things are going.

Good news: I got a job!

Bad news: It's part-time.

Good news: It fits in well with my school schedule!

Bad news: It doesn't actually pay all my bills.