I had to get up a half-hour earlier a cause de la putain de greve ("because of the fucking strike") to make sure that we got to the place on time. Between the studying the night before and everything, this meant I wasn't running on that much sleep.
Anyway, most of the train lines were running again, though many at diminished capacity. Ours, I guess, wasn't doing too bad, though there were substantially more people waiting for it when it came in the morning. As the ride progressed down the line, things got successively more and more cramped until about halfway through we were utterly compacted into the car. Once again, it was awkward having a giant backpack bulging with school materials and probably taking up space a whole other person could have occupied. After my brush with attempted theft (I think) on a prior occasion, as well, it made me rather nervous, though I reassured myself with the fact that were was really nothing in the backpack that could be stolen without my knowing it (i.e. the computer) that was of any value.
Anyway, the second line was running fine, since it was automated, and, like I said, I thank god for mechanical outsourcing. We basically got to the center in the same amount of time, which meant we were like a half hour early, so we stopped and got some delicious pastries at the boulanger around the corner and ate and studied and freaked out.
The test itself didn't turn out to be so bad. Eight definitions that, thankfully, I basically all knew, and an essay the topic of which we had been given partial warning of and ended up perfectly anticipating. So I was well-prepared with examples and whatnot, though as usual, I second-guessed my formatting as I was writing it. I'm sure it will be fine, though. Things generally are.
Anyway, after that ordeal I treated myself to a lunch at the Boulanger Eric Kayser, whereat I had eaten my breakfast pastry earlier. Instead of the usual formule of sandwich, soft drink and pain au chocolate (chocolate croissant) that I eat first when I buy the formule on mid-class break, I got some sort of formule deluxe that consisted of a piece of quiche, a drink, and a selection of fancier desserts. I'm clearly moving up in the world. Finally, though, I had a chance to try one of those delicious-looking lemon meringue tarts that I'd been eyeing. They're really pretty. It was almost a shame to eat it.
Then I had a good four hours left to wait until my required corrector appointment, so I parked my ass and my laptop in the computer lab upstairs and did all the numerous, numerous corrections to my paper over the course of several hours. Then, still having several hours, I wrote a blog entry for Faits Precis that I will link to when it's up (here).
Now, my corrector. All right, I kind of hate this guy, as do the other people who have him, so I know it's not just me being...snippy. First off, his corrections on my paper were really lame, rarely offering suggestions for correction but rather just highlighting errors, which meant I had to ask other people for advice. So anyway, that made the correcting of the paper difficult. Anyway, when I got into the meeting with him, he justified this (and his being similarly unhelpful there) by saying that they had been instructed not to write things for us or alter our thoughts. All well and good, I agree, but I don't think they necessarily intended necessary grammar corrections to fall under the purview of that statement. I mean, the point of being here is to learn the language, and the only way we are going to learn these weird exceptions is to be told them and then to try committing them to memory. We are certainly not going to be able to guess them very efficiently, and that's all it is, guessing. So yes, that was annoying.
Other grievances. He's a little weird and kinda spastic, sputtering along on one train of thought for a while and then violently wrenching toward another. Also, as my fellow correctees have pointed out, he's kind of condescending. He'll explain a simple grammatical point and yet, oblivious to our nods and ouis of understanding, will then illustrate it with like seven pointless examples from the top of his head, while we are left to sit there nodding like morons and muttering "oui...oui...oui...," our glassy-eyed stares leading him to think that we still don't understand and provide further needless examples. Even a "je comprends" can't faze the bastard...he just keeps explaining and explaining! Several others have expressed a certain annoyance, as well, that he apparently has a kind of "why the fuck did you do this" attitude when he recognizes a mistake in one of the papers, despite the fact that...what can I say? It's a mistake. But I've found this to be less of a problem, I have to say. Nevertheless, when he does point something out that's fairly obvious, I generally under up sputtering on in a Ben Troutman-esque ramble of poorly-formed excuses. This trip has given me the horrible understanding of what it's like to be a C-student. (Except we're all C students! Also, the equivalent of ESL, which is also no fun.)
Anyway, the 75 minute ordeal (and I do mean "ordeal") consisted of re-reading the corrected draft of my paper and finding still more questions and concerns. This was generally ok, except when he would get hung up on something utterly insubstantial, like "does Moyen Age [Middle Ages] have a hyphen," which he will then spend ten minutes trying to find examples of by looking through his copy of the course texts. (It doesn't, as did not my paper. My friend Lucas reported that he had been lectured for several minutes in his section as to how it did.) He also gave me a reaming over not putting accents on my capital letters, despite the fact that no French person does this, and he then proceeded to flip about through the course text, finding examples of where this was missing to apparently prove that, indeed, no one does this.
He also went off on a lengthy tangent about the UN which was only vaguely-related to anything. It escapes me as to how we got on it (it was some grammatical issue), but basically he told this anecdote about how like big UN treaty things are drafted in English and French concurrently, making each separate version equally correct and untranslated. Anyway, some committee was doing one that had something to do with Israel, and in the English version it said something to the effect of "withdrawal from territories" and in the French, by nature of the grammar, it specified "all territories." Anyway, since 11 of the 15 people on the committee or whatever apparently spoke English and only like 4 French, Israel, invasion-happy as it clearly is (0.o), forged ahead with the English-version meaning and happily invaded a few territories sans-sanction. The point of all this boiled down to how French was more precise (and, by extension, better) than English because it has so many annoying rules of concordance that you can't help but be sure what someone's saying. "But...But!" I wanted to say. "English contains something like five times the words your language does, and that's by conservative estimate! Its writing doesn't pride itself on being lengthy and strung-out. It expresses itself, generally, fairly clearly and concisely, and if they'd just been smart enough to include the word 'all' you would have nothing to be smarmy about." But what's the point? It's not worth it. But I will say that being in this country has, if nothing else, given me a much greater love of my mother tongue than I ever held before.
Anyway, it was a lengthy and rambling collection (much like its description here), wherein I scrambled to write down the correct things he inadvertently said before he would lecture me on how I should be thinking these things up for myself (despite the fact that I don't fucking know they're wrong). And then it was over and I left. Quickly.
And since no day is truly complete without tormenting me some more, I then had to go to the fucking movies for my conversation session of the week. (I believe I've bitched before about how I wanted to see a Joe Sarno retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise and had to miss it.) Anyway, I headed out with a couple friends hoping to grab a quick dinner before making my way to the theater (which I had to get to, as I had been entrusted with the free-entry cards), but as we wandered around a while we quickly realized that nowhere was open because it was six and apparently people would rather have acid-dipped needles shoved in their eyeballs here than eat before seven. (They are also loathe to open their shops on Sundays and Mondays, which has caused me no end of habitual grief.) So I hungrily got on the Metro. And waited for my train. And waited. And waited. Apparently the line was only running around 30%, which was really a shame. There was a gigantic crowd of people waiting and amassing for a good ten or fifteen minutes (it felt like Chicago again, aside from the great crowd), and when the train finally pulled into the stop and revealed itself to be packed with people, there was a collective groan of anguish. The doors opened and people started flooding in before those inside had a chance to get themselves out, which really made things a bit of a hassle. Luckily, I was standing in the front of the crowd somehow, and so got swept into the train, conveniently.
Inside it was litterally packed as full as it possibly could have been. People entered the train and their force kept pushing me further and further in, until it was shoved up against some poor woman and some other poor asshole was shoved up against me, and still they kept pushing, even as the doors closed, and it felt like the most subdued disaster film I had ever seen, as the doors shut, locking out half the crowd that couldn't be accommodated. And the little lifeboat made its away away from the Titanic.
I rode the relatively small distance to the end of the line and then got on another train that was starting its line. When this, too, was packed to the brim, it took off, and I eventually found the stop with the theater. Unfortunately, it was at something like a six- or eight-way intersection, and where to go was not at all clear, as there was a vast number of crosswalks heading in all directions and I could see a theater nowhere. After walking around for a while, feeling quite frustrated, I finally saw bright neon lights past some sort of beautiful park and old building (I will have to go back sometime and see it and find out its name when I'm not so stressed), and walked toward them and they revealed themselves to belong to an MK2, which is a big cinema chain in France. I walked along the waterfront and looked in front of the theater but saw no one, despite the fact that it was supposed to be rendezvous-time.
The theater, though, was marvelously constructed in order to foster the chances of missing your date, however, since it was actually split in two, with six theaters on the side of the river I was on and six on the other side. To get to the other side, you had to walk all the way back down the waterfront, cross and a bridge, and then walk all the way back again. Apparently during the day they have ferries across the water, which sounds cute. But at night it's a fucking nuisance.
There was no one on the other side, either, and so I walked back to check by the metro stops. No one there, either. After taking the wrong way around the crosswalks at the massive intersection and finding that they basically dead-ended into a bridge-bottom in the other direction, I went back the entire way and to the same side of the theater that I had gone to secondly. My group was still not there, and by this point I was extremely frustrated and constructing all manner of scenarios about them calling it off because of the metro and me not getting the message because I have an American phone and no one has my number and consequently no one could call me. Then finally I saw another conversation group and asked, tiredly and in English, if they knew what was going on and they said they had seen my people over on the other side, so with an irritatedly-muttered "Thank Fuck," I headed back across the bridge again and finally found my people. Thank God we'd arranged our meeting time for a half hour before the movie.
The film was in a rather wee little theater, and I think my favorite part was the previews. They were mostly subtitled previews for American movies, like The Kingdom, American Gangster and so on and so forth. The most enjoyable was definitely the preview of Superbad, as we few Americans sat there guffawing at the thing while the French audience around us regarded it stoically, like something that had fallen from the sky. It was a delightful little "American moment."
The film itself, Un Secret, (don't read this if you plan on seeing the movie if it comes to America) was a frustrating and pointlessly-elliptical drama about a Jewish kid who finds out that he had a brother and first-wife to his father who were killed in the Holocaust. And that's about it. It's mostly about his family, though he narrates it, though the he that is narrating it from the present (in black-and-white) is so woefully under-developed that we have no idea why any of this matters to him. It should have just been cut out and it would have worked a lot better. Anyway, it's a kind of blah romance-drama that desperately wants to be somber and elegant yet just kind of wears the trappings without really telling and interesting story. It also is way too stylish for its own good, and consequentially sends myriad mixed signals, or at least I found it did. The creators clearly loved filming Cecile de France in her bathing suit, and the opening shots of her at the pool, ostensibly seen through the eyes of her son but actually through the vision of the director or cameraman, are so leering that I originally thought the thing was going to be about the young boy's incestuous love for his mother. Then, but a few scenes later, the introduction of some mystery into the background of the family's health-care assistance and masseuse is so blunt and overdramatized, featuring her whispering to him in German during the young boy's full-body massage while the camera zooms in grimly on her face, that I then thought it was going to be some sort of Nazi molestation film. All in all, the first ten or fifteen minutes left me fairly confident that this really was going to be un putain d'un secret (basically, just put putain in front of everything and it means "fuck"--word to the wise), so when it turned out to just be about some dead relatives in the Holocaust, I was rather disappointed. I've got to say, the nazi-molestation-incestuous-ten-year-old plot definitely would have been more entertaining.
Afterward, we went out for a drink at a bar and I got a burger, too, since I was fucking starving by this point. The burger was really good--tiny, but with some sort of exotic French cheese on it and a delicious spicy-mayo sauce, which was also delightful for dipping the fries.
Afterward, as our conversation girl puttered away on her little scooter (we snickered lovingly), we saw three or four cop cars go barrelling down the street right next to us and stop just a little way down, so we decided our Friday night definitely wouldn't have been complete without a trip to see what all the fuss was about. (Also, the first car stopped at the head of the street and two guys got out in the back and went barrelling down the street, running incredibly fast after...what?) The car then sped off after them. Why?
Anyway, when we got there, there were a bunch of people leaning over their balconies to see what all the fuss was about, and I originally figured it must have been some sort of party bust. There was also a crowd of people watching the fracas, and someone being frisked against the wall. We asked this woman what was going on and she said that a cop had seen some guy steal a girl's cell phone, and all this had to do with some sort of small racket of petty street thieves, and we were all like "That's what this was about? On a Friday night, the French police can allocate four cop cars speeding through intersections and nearly getting into high-speed collisions over a stolen cell phone?" What a let down. I was glad I knew, though, that flic means "cop."
Anyway, we headed home on the Metro, which, by this point (around midnight), wasn't that crowded anymore and was a much better experience, if still a bit of a wait. We met up with a guy from the other group, quite by chance, who was hanging out with their conversation guy since, I guess, the other three girls in the group were tired and left.
Anyway, we got back to the dorm and drank away the crappiness of the day, and I collapsed into bed content that I had all this fucking crap behind me, and entirely exhausted. How annoying.
***
So, as the title indicates, if yesterday was hell then today must have been purgatory, as it was pretty much utterly without emotion. I got up around 1:30, delighted to finally feel rested and refreshed (weekends are essential here). My quest to develop a delicious new brunchtime sensation turned out surprisingly well in my new concoction: Gnocci and scrambled eggs with pesto. Could have used a little more of it, though, but I ate and apple, too, and was generally satisfied.
Worked on correcting my paper all day. Originally, the papers has been due at noon today. Thank god they changed that, because I would have been in no fucking mood last night to put up with that bullshit after coming home at midnight. So after my generally lengthy preamble of eating, checking my email, blogs, forums, and DVD-company websites, I finally got to work at around 4:30. Generally it went pretty fast, as most of the corrections were fairly minor. It was the linking ones that took more effort, as it's always irritating trying to shoehorn in more links back to themes and the thesis and whatnot. (Well, not thesis, as French papers don't have them, but, you know, main idea of discussion.) I took a break around 7 to do some grocery (liquor) shopping. Purchases include and were limited to: one (1) bottle of wine (1.04 euro), one (1) bottle of champagne (0.80 euro), one (1) twelve (12)-pack of thirty-three (33) centiliter beers, one (1) carton of milk, twelve (12) rolls of toilet paper (pack), and two (2) two (2)-liter bottles of Coca-Lite. Yum.
Then I worked more on the paper. A terrible feeling that I wasn't going to be able to find anyone to do anything exciting with tonight subsided, quickly replaced by the sensation of doing nothing tonight. I still had more work on the paper to do. I read it aloud a couple of times and was finally satisfied with it. I sent it in. I wrote this blog. I'm making ramen noodles.
On the note of food, it should be mentioned that I kicked dinner out of the fucking ball-park this evening (yeah, I know I mixed that metaphor). Nothing too fancy, but it was just well-executed, if I do say so myself: spaghetti with sauteed vegetables in pasta sauce. Just delightfully put together. (And now my room stinks of fresh garlic.) I'll throw up a picture:
Anyway, hopefully tomorrow will keep up the trend and provide a nice "heaven" day to balance out this trilogy. We're going to the catacombs, so that should be right up my alley and hopefully provide a lot of cool pictures of creepy skeletons and shit. I think they have that down there...
Also, tomorrow's other mission: omelette.
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