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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Like too_close_to_home_horoscopes was the fortune cookie that told me "Accept your limitations. You can't be first all of the time."
I spent two days with David on December 27-29th, a sort of staycation. After he had dinner with my family the first day, we decamped to a hotel in the east part of downtown, not extra fancy but with old-fashioned charm. Narrow, carpeted staircase, with holiday spruce sprucing up corners. Inside the room, pale yellow walls with eggshell-blue highlights, a colour scheme echoed in the curtains. Cozy.
But the first night it was too hot, my usual problem with sleeping_together but_not_in_a_sexual_way. I snuck the blanket down, accidentally depriving him of covers too. Sleepily he pulled it back up and I roasted, my shoulders also sore from lugging luggage. The next night, we were mentally closer, so we gave each other more space when it came time for snoozing.
In the day between, we saw the Nutcracker ballet at Place des Arts (my present to him, as he'd never seen it) and supped at Pho 88, which has the best pad thai. Nostalgia, a reminder of the time we were both planted in Canada, when I could stay at his place near the fields_of_Verdun. Snows of Snowdon swirled outside the window.
I was too full to eat the fortune cookie right there. We got to the hotel room early and I set up my laptop. Before working on the grading for Socio, I wanted to check my own mark for semantics class - I'd gotten an email saying "New grade posted" but you had to log into the website to see what it was. So I split my cookie open, read the fortune, and David went, "It's a sign you're going to get A instead of A+ in Semantics, so don't be disappointed."
A sign, a sign. You're superstitious. I went onto the website: there it was, a plain A. Why? Only 84% on the final. I was exhausted when I'd done it, and one mistake was simply carelessness.
David: "Well, that's not bad."
Me: "I failed!"
David, laughing: "Getting an A instead of an A+ is not failing."
Me, a little more calmly: "I failed at what I wanted to do. THAT is a sort of failing."
Because I was upset, however irrationally. I'd had this idea that I'd get A+ in every basic linguistics course. Arrogantly enough, even the one that relied heavily on math. (I admire minds that can be creative mathematically, that excel at puzzle-solving. The way this semantics course was taught rewarded those set of strengths. No wonder, when Prof. Bale has a computer science background.)
The silliest thing was, I was over the proverbial moon when I saw I'd gotten an A in Intermediate German. I'd aimed for a B+, maybe an A-, after my B- with the strict prof last year.
But semantics ("It's just semantics"). For a few minutes I sulked without speaking, blaming myself, blaming the prof, blaming the goddam fortune cookie. Then the goofiness of the cookie-blaming goaded me out of my slump and I laughed to David: everything was the fortune cookie's fault!
No, he insisted, the cookie was making things better. It was softening the blow.
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