Grammar Makes an Ass Out of Me and Out of You...Sort of

I have had the exact same conversation with Don Julio the last couple days, and it's starting to piss me off. It's boring, nothing gets resolved, and I inevitably come off as insecure. I know if I keep talking about it, he'll start to believe what my perfectionist brain is spouting, and that will be the end. Plus, it makes me leave him aggravated instead of happy to have spent time with him. I'm going to tell him this afternoon that I never want to talk about it again.

What, pray tell, is this dreaded conversation about? Why, how I'm crap at French, of course.

He showed me a clip of Jodie Foster speaking French with a Parisian reporter. Beyond a slight accent, the woman speaks perfectly; no gender mix ups, an easy flow of complicated grammatical constructions, and a fabulous cadence. I literally slumped down and let my head fall, defeated, into his lap. 'Oh, you poor thing!' He laughed. 'I'm mean! I'm mean to show you that. But stop. You speak well!' I lifted up my head for a few seconds, glared at him, then plopped my head back onto his thighs. 'Oh fine,' he said, exasperated, 'You speak terribly and no one can understand you.' I reared my head back up and we talked a little bit more about Foster's background - how she went to a French international high school in LA, and about how language is processed by the human brain. 'But you need to accept that you'll always have an accent,' He pressed. 'Even if you speak the language perfectly otherwise, you'll never completely lose your accent. Even Jodie Foster has an accent, although it's a small one.'

I tried to figure out during the half-hour commute why I'd been making so many mistakes lately. I realized that I need to take my time. I rush myself in every sense of the word; the nouns and verbs and adjectives come tumbling out before I've had time to think about how they ought to be arranged, and I hate myself for making the same mistakes, even though my brain knows it's totally normal and forgivable and actually a natural step towards improvement. I expect myself to speak with a fluency that's frankly impossible at this stage. 'The first three months are really about listening and hearing things,' I reasoned aloud to Don Julio in the car this morning. 'It's only after that I can really start progressing in my speech. I know that rationally...' I paused and he shrugged. 'But you're impatient.'

I hate this conversation because it emphasizes a divide between us, and one that I believe I feel more than he does. And why do I dwell on it, when it's so clear - through his patience, through his painstaking explanations of song lyrics or scenes in movies, through his intermittent use of charming English phrases - how much he wants to communicate with me?

Why do I dwell on it, when he forgives me, and even delights in my weirdest behaviour? I nearly destroyed his guitar twice in the span of two minutes (once by accident, the other by joking about the accident and nearly causing another one) and instead of flipping out, he mock cowered on the couch until I approached to comfort him - whereupon he swiftly pinned me down, and cried amidst bursts of laughter: 'Don't move! My god, is this why they sent you to France? Your mother got sick of you breaking crap in the house? 'Get out! To France with you! Break stuff over there!' Jesus Christ!'

When I realized my pants wouldn't dry in time to catch a coffee with his friends, I pooh-poohed his weak radiator and decided to dry out my pants in his stove. (It was way faster, I assure you) It was lunch time, but I had to stay by the stove survey my jeans, turning them and making sure they wouldn't catch fire. Don Julio abandoned all French protocol and ate standing up in the kitchen just to keep me company, laughing at me the entire time.

We watched a classic French comedy last night, Le Diner des Cons, and at the end, he pumped his fist in the air and cried 'Tell me you are ashamed to be American in the face of such brilliant French comedy! Say it! Say you're ashamed! Vive La France!' It struck me as so absurd that I couldn't stop laughing - for fifteen minutes. You've all seen me. This was a class A laugh-a-thon, friends. I guess he has a high tolerance for crazy.

We were sitting on the couch together watching the news, and I started talking about some of the other assistants. One of them wanted to renew, and I spoke a little about some of the people who I knew had already done so.
'And you? What do you want to do?' He looked at me.
'About renewing? Um...I don't know.'
There was a silence and we started talking about something else for a minute until he saw he was preoccupied. 'What's up?'
'Oh, I'm just thinking about how I don't want to think about what I'm doing in a few months - about afterwards you know. Ugh. On verra.' (We'll see)
He smiled. 'Oui, tu verras bien.'

All these nice moments, and all I can think about are my limitations. I’m trying to change this way of thinking, though. I’m going to write down all I want to say to him about my language usage, and hopefully I can memorize my little speech to him by the time he comes by. Basically, I’m going to tell him that I don’t want to talk about it anymore, even though I brought it up. Thinking about it keeps me from enjoying my time here. I need to take his advice and stop thinking so goddamn much about everything, or I will become paralyzed. Breathe and live in the moment, HT. Easier said than done.