Reading: Anna's Lucidity and Shakespeare, Cymbeline

Moving: walked to work! yes! Monday and yesterday, if not today, but I have such a bright shiny excuse: my Walkman batteries died on Tuesday's walk, so I couldn't listen to The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, edited by Antonia Fraser. Okay, maybe I could have charged the batteries Tuesday night, but anyway.

29 August 2001: Frog speak

Tonight was my last French class. For the past five Wednesdays I have attended Conversational French I, offered by Colorado Free University.

I have so many Autocorrects defined that I'm starting to resent typing "Colorado" instead of "CO" and "University" instead of "U." At least I never have to type out Dot Org's entire 40-character name anywhere but at my work computer.

Four weeks ago, I headed confidently out of the house at ten after five heading for the branch near my house. It was beginning to sprinkle, but I was prepared! I was wearing my parka and Tevas! I said hi to Neighbor and NeighBaby, got a hello and a wave respectively, offered another neighbor (on a fixed income with an unbelievably small grocery budget who takes Meals on Wheels) some zucchini, and strode on. I met the partner of the woman I met several weeks ago, knowing it had to be she because of the dogs (two golden retrievers, and I surprised myself by remembering her name as well as the dogs'). I was all grinny and loving my neighborhood. When I passed East High School, a (house-dwelling) resident was yelling at (non-house-dwelling) residents who'd spent an unacceptable portion of the day at a picnic table under a tree on the campus. A little further through the campus, in the lee of a wall that bounds the driveway, I passed by other street residents. I realized one man was peeing into a bush and turned my eyes away as he angled his body away from me. I did return the greetings of the rest and chalked that encounter up among The Things My Parents Just Don't Need to Know About. I still love my neighborhood, because I want to. I don't particularly like living in a city (I miss stars), but I don't assume street residents on public property to be an inherent threat. By the time I got to the other side of East High and neared the Free U, it was seriously pouring.

As I entered the building, I removed my receipt from my backpack and realized I was a goober.

I remember being pleased that the exact class I wanted was offered nearby when I first spotted it in the catalog. I distinctly remember checking the location when I received my receipt in the mail. So how I mistook the nearby branch with the one on First and Lincoln, 22 short blocks and 14 long blocks away, I know not. I'm a goober, an absent-minded goober.

Also it was pouring, and when Denver wants to pour, it pours. And floods. And flash-floods.

So I called RDC, who came out to get me. After dropping him back at the house, I drove down to another branch. It took half an hour and there was water halfway up the wheels.

Anyway, I got there. And I have had my French refresher.

After my second class, I left a message on CLH's machine. She emailed me the next day: "Ton accent est horrible!"

Like I don't know that. Not that by and large ignoring the language for the past 15 years has done it any good, but my accent was always bad. That's why I loved Latin: linear declensions and conjugations and no accent required. In French, I had the vocabulary and could read fine and write somewhat less well, but my aural comprehension and oral ability were nil.

Also it doesn't help that I resent the language. I don't know when I became a feminist; I only know I don't remember ever thinking any other way. It could have started with the extremes of gender expectations I read in Daughters of Eve (Lois Duncan, fifth or sixth grade), but my budding feminism bloomed when I learned that she is elle and he is il and third person plural is elles if it's all women but if it's ninety billion women and one man, it's ils.

Linguistically, gender is an interesting phenomenon. Nisou herself wants to know why a bed is masculine but a chair feminine. I don't know why she asks me, unless rhetorically. Also she just studied Arabic intensively for a month, which language she says is even more chauvinist. This is interesting, because can a culture become more egalitarian when its language allows only for limited means to express, convey, and comprehend certain concepts? E.g., there being but one word in French, femme, for woman, wife, and housewife.

It's an outsider's subjective opinion to assert that gendering nouns and pronouns is a feminist issue. Linguistic gender could be merely linguistic. But still I'm glad English shed its gender. It's interesting that it did, evolving from Old to Middle English, considering that the catalyst from Old to Middle was the Normans, whose language was also gendered.

But then, I'm a hobbyist resenter of anything that looks remotely suspect to me, and when I sink my teeth into something, they stay there, gnawing on nothing and starving me otherwise.

So I'm willing to give on the gendering, or to admit that I should give, of nouns: it's linguistic and bears no relation (necessarily) to the gender or sex of the thing itself. But those froggy numbers are the most ridiculous construct ever--well, not as bad as languages without phonetic alphabets, because how do the Chinese have card catalogs? crossword puzzles? schoolroom rosters?*--and I want to strike 30% of them. After soixante-neuf, you have to say soixante-dix, sixty-ten. There's no word for 70. That's ridiculous. Then you get to soixante-dix-neuf and you think "Whew! enough of that stupidity," but then you have to say quatre-vingts, because there's no word for 80 either. You have to say "four-twenties" instead. There's no relief after quatre-vingts-neuf, either, because neither is there a word for 90. You have to say quatre-vingts-dix, quatre-vingt-onze, quatre-vingt-douze, etc. That is no way to run a railroad.

* Chinese can have no crossword puzzles, but since pronunciation has nothing to do with the characters, someone from 2000 years ago could communicate--in writing--with someone now without a problem. According to Anthony Burgess in A Mouthful of Air, or maybe Bill Bryson in The Mother Tongue, I forget which, but it makes sense.

Rant out.

No, one more thing. Couldn't they stick with one system and agree that all nouns ending in a vowel, or even just in e, be feminine? This belies my earlier assertion that I had a fair grasp on vocabulary. Why is a cloud (le nuage) masculine but rain (la pluie) feminine?

And why, pray, is a native English speaker requiring that any language be systematic and logical? Though through thought indeed.

So anyway.

Today was the last class. I cannot hear quickly or compose, let alone speak, quickly, or apply a decent accent after I strung some words (translated word-for-word, because idiom is so tedious and of course metaphor bores me) together, but I think I can navigate, ask for les toilettes, and avoid eating brains. So that's fine.

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Having recently gone through his own bad spell, in grad school PLT lent me a mix tape he called "Songs to Kill a Horse." Preferring consonance, I called it "Tunes to Kill a Camel." It was my first introduction to the Cowboy Junkies, and I think it might have had as many as four, if not more, songs from The Caution Horses: "Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning," "'Cause Cheap Is How I Feel," "Thirty Summers," and "Mariner's Song." It also had the--what? I'm listening to Black-Eyed Man and I never can feel out songs with other musical stimuli. It had Laurie Anderson's "Sweaters" and "Walking and Falling" from Superman. The song I couldn't remember a second ago was "Under the Milky Way"--was that by the Church? And a song from a Warner Bros. short or something. And Eric Clapton's "Promises," a song I'd never heard before but which is now (along with the Junkies', but unlike the others) a favorite.

Anyway, driving home from class tonight I scanned through a radio station that was playing "Turn the Page." I remember one night in high school when WHCN was just trying to make me slit my wrists. It played that, Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are," and several others of a similarly depressing ilk, mercifully none of which I can now remember. Hearing the single chord necessary for me to identify, shriek, and tune away from Bob Seger, I wondered what I would put on a similar mix now.

Well, The Trinity Session, The Caution Horses, Black-eyed Man...

But seriously, of course I thought of David Gray's "Babylon," because years from now that song will have me slobbering on a floor, it'll be like the scent of bitter almonds to me. (Damn, where is my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera?) And immediately next of Tim Easton's (the fellow who opened for the Junkies last time) "Get Some Lonesome," which is my new favorite song of the moment. And then I laughed, because of course! They're so Dylan-sounding. Of course they're depressing. Beth says the Junkies' version of "Sweet Jane" makes her want to kill herself (and I'm not sure anyone else has a different reaction, it's just that some of us like that reaction so much we go spastic when we hear the song live).

Those were the only two new songs I came up with. I don't get out much.

When I wasn't miserable I was angry, way back when. I might have already said this somewhere (where is my search function? good question), but there were two albums I listened to incessantly that year, The Caution Horses and Jesus Jones, Doubt. Also Animal Logic, because that was on the back of the Caution Horses tape. And k.d. lang and Michelle Shocked. But mostly Doubt (when I was angry) and Caution Horses and later Trinity Session. What I realized afterward is that listening to Doubt now makes me angry and sad again: it deflected the emotion of then and so now continues to deflect it at me. Whereas the Junkies absorb and absolve and cancel out. Just another reason to love them.

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I am fairly manic ce soir. This could be because I am about to watch "Re-Animator," which I haven't seen in ages (and probably don't need to see again). Hey, at least I was able to catch the reference in "American Beauty"! It went straight over RDC's head, he who allegedly never watches cheesy movies. I'm not going to prop his eyes open for this, but the boy's never seen "Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension" either, and that's got to be rectified.

Loopy's good. I like loopy, whatever the reason. Aha, another: today I finally succumbed to evil Ticketmaster to buy tickets to Cymbeline at the Globe. This trip is finally real to me. Anyway, the site insisted on a title for me. I prefer none, or "Citizen," but the choices were Mr (the default), Mrs, Miss, or Dr.

So that's Doctor Lisa to y'all, from now on.