nervous_accents epitome of incomprehensibility His name's the same as a minor character in a French comic. I know as much as he's told me about where he's from and what he's doing. Well, I've probably forgotten a bit. Last week, at the cafe, I only stayed for the French workshop. There was the English-French conversation group afterwards and I lingered, hoping to see him, though I knew I'd have to leave for choir and I couldn't stay long. Tomorrow there's no choir. It's only on Saturday once every two weeks, or whenever the director's there. Tomorrow I'll stay at the cafe for the conversation part. But he, French, will talk on the English side and I, English, will talk on the French side. Needing improvement. But maybe I can fake selflessness and linger at the English-language table, being the helpful native speaker (with my occasionally bizarre accent that takes fast Canadian squirrel-talk and mixes it with Ameeerican drawl, sometimes adding a Bostonian affectation and pronouncing "quarter" as "cwartah" instead of "corter".) Where do you come from? he asked me. Dorval, I said. In Canada? Yes, where the airport is. Just west of here. Oh. Advantages to knowing where places are. But not giving others the sense that I'm at all adventurous. Suspected his accent was French-African; it wasn't strictly European or Quebecois. Of course he could've been born in Paris, where he was telling me he did his Master's, finishing in the past months. Pure profiling, but this time I got it right: born in Burundi, he said, and he was a bit surprised that I could place it on a vague mind-map: "Near the equator," I said, squinting, looking at the wall, "either north or south of Rwanda." We were going past some photographs, part of the art exhibit, where a young man had posed as characters in famous paintings, all of them in each painting, and he had a rather masculine face so he looked funny in drag. All those white black-and-white faces. South of Rwanda, as it happens. People remember the war zones and use them as points of reference, as if they are only war zones and points of reference; but then again there's the equitable equator, a Santa Clause belt around Earth. Two weeks ago, unseen_phosphorus_dance. Last week's nervous accent was lipstick, applied looking in a little mirror. I could only see my mouth and the skin around it, until I moved it slowly away. There was my face, fish-angled because of the mirror, nose dominating. Not beautiful but cute. No matter how mournful my expression, the round nose makes me look matter-of-fact. Sultry? Hardly. But lipstick is partly magic; lipstick gives the impression that you have other make-up on when you don't. It makes the craters of past pimples, the hollows of pores, look deliberately textured, like art. Foundation is a lie. My foundation is bones, flesh, and skin. Form follows function - quoting Frank Lloyd Wright, not that he built practical houses. All to have darker lips when I said, Oh hello, no, I can't stay, I have a choir practice, oh yes you're practicing English, well see you later. If you can't love me for my beauty, like me for my geography. 140314 ... e_o_i I didn't even talk to him. Wimpy me, I stayed at the French table. But I got into a very interesting conversation with a woman from Russia. She was seriously upset that Russia and the U.S. - and maybe other governments - were exploiting Ukraine's different ethnic groups to create internal tension and maybe, eventually, civil war. She said that some of her friends aren't speaking to other of her friends because they're on different sides. I agreed. That's what I don't like about the way Pauline Marois does politics, I said, it's not that nationalism's inherently bad [I'm sure I've argued before on blather that it is, but don't judge me; "nationalism" is one word I know in French - nationalisme, c'est facile de traduire] but her divide and conquer strategies are suspect at best, racist at worst. I am so bad at French. It's clear that I need more work. I feel so awkward talking. After the workshop, some rules stick in my head, but I feel them slipping out one by one when I'm trying to actually express something. The Russian girl asked me if there was one book that had a great impression on me that I would recommend. I said that was a difficult question. She said, No, you'd know if there was. I felt kind of helpless. I tried to explain that I can't hold so many things in my head at once. I also tried to say that I'm not the type to say "This book totally changed my life!" and go on about it, it takes me a while to think about things and I'm not ordinarily effusive. Of course, in French that came out rather confusingly, and I didn't try to use words like "ordinarily" and "effusive" (though now that I think about it, ordinairement? Est-ce une chose? J'pense que oui). Without saying it would change her life, I did recommend the French book Anita, une fille numérotée by Claude_Jasmin. (Don't know whether it's been translated into English; the author can be a rather strident Quebec nationalist, but that shouldn't make Anglo-Kebby, Canaduckian, or Ameristani people turn up their snotty anglophone noses at him. I just said I don't say that books "changed my life" but that one WAS pretty powerful.) She recommended Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, an epic-type, partly autobiographical tale of a man who makes a new life for himself in India after escaping jail in Australia. That, she said, changed her life. She wasn't able to finish a novel for a year afterwards, she said, because they just didn't compare. Wouldn't happen to me - I'm far too promiscuous - although I could probably give up novels for a year since there are many other interesting things to read - but it was an intriguing sort of recommendation. 140315 ... e_o_i ...Second paragraph: should be Ukraine's language groups, not ethnic groups; they aren't that different, ethnically. Of course race, from a biological standpoint, is kinda fictional, but that's a story for another day. 140315 ... e_o_i I, have, too, many, commas, in, my, life. 140315 what's it to you? who go blather from