Illustration by Jane MountYesterday Séb and I decided that we needed to start organizing our things as our clothes for the past two weeks, shopping bags and gifts were piling up in my bedroom at my mom's house and starting to creep into den. The plan of action was that he was to tackle my bedroom while I started on the den, getting rid of wrapping paper, storing bottles of wine that have been given to us and neatly lining up our boots and my endless collection of ballerines in the hallway closet.
My room, where Séb was supposed to be hard at work seemed suspiciously quiet. It hardly sounded like someone was tidying up, folding blankets (although that doesn't make much sound), hanging up clothes and/or organizing - at all. All I heard was silence and then a roar of laughter. Oh no, what did he find? I was sure that he found my box of ugly high school pictures where I tried to rock the Drew Barrymore/Courtney Love 90s babydoll look but just ended up looking like Betty Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?". Picture it, an Italian girl with fried white hair (what a joke), braces and unshaped bushy eyebrows wearing a three sizes too small communion dress posing in a suburban backyard with a Pontiac Grand-Am in the background - truly frightening. The sad thing is that when I got these photos back from Genovese 1 hour photo service, I actually thought I looked "sooo" cute.
While I'd say that I lucked out that he didn't find my creepy "modeling" photos, what he did find was equally embarrassing. He stumbled upon my old French notebooks and homework from Alliance Française. Whenever I thumb through them, I cringe at how fucking cheesy I was due to the fact that I was so eager to learn. I used to write the stupidest shit where my homework essays were always bleeding with corrections from my teacher Grégoire because I overcomplicated sentences with advanced vocabulary, tenses and sentence structures that were levels beyond where I was at. I hate looking back at my early French-speaking days - in plain, I was really annoying.
Séb was literally rolling on my bedroom floor laughing at my essays. One assignment in particular, was to write a letter as if you're on vacation to a friend and tell him/her about the city you are visiting, make comparisons and describe the culture. For some reason, I chose to be on vacation in Nice and was living in Paris. The problem was that I had no idea what I was talking about because at the time, I had never been to Nice and was not living in Paris so I sounded like an idiot. My "observations" of Nice were completely inaccurate as well as my comparisons to Paris and can only imagine what my teacher was thinking as he was reading this fallacy. Séb on the other hand was wildly amused, especially when I wrote that the food in Paris is so much better than the food in Nice because it comes from local organic farms in Clichy-sous-Bois. Anyone who is familiar with Paris proper knows damn well that there isn't a community of organic farming in the rough Clichy-sous-Bois.
Coming back to New York always reminds me of how far I've come since my first days at Alliance Française where words, phrases and expressions are now second nature and I am able to articulate myself. In Paris, I am unable to recognize my growth because I'm surrounded by native speakers or Americans who have fancy degrees from les grandes écoles or have been learning since childhood who kick my ass when it comes to speaking. Learning French was the big resolution of 2009 and while it took longer than a year, I'm proud to report that I succeeded and persevered through the challenges of learning a second language (on a budget!) as an adult and I can finally admit that I do in fact, speak French. Saying that, there is definitely room for improvement....damn you subjonctif!
