When You Are Sick on the 4th of July

Moyens de s’amuser le 4 juillet quand il fait 32 C, on a une fièvre, et il n’y a pas de climatisation

Habille-toi pour fêter l’anniversaire du pays.

Puis, arrache tout parce que 1) ta température corporelle a grimpé en flèche, et 2) tu vas passer toute la journée seule dans ta chambre quand même.

Remplis deux bouteilles à eau.  Mets l’une dans un frigo.  Bois l’autre.  

Reremplis celle qui est maintenant vide.  Mets-la dans le frigo.  Bois celle qui est maintenant froide.  Répètes.

Toute la journée.

Divises ton temps également parmi ton lit...

...ton plancher...

...et le canapé dans le bâtiment climatisé le plus proche.

Personne n’a dit que tu ne peux pas acclamer la parade pendant que tu es affalé(e) sur ton bureau!

Établis une relation intime avec ton ventilateur.

Marche à quatre pattes à la cantine pour manger.

Mange seul(e) et sans énergie.  Passer la peste à ses amis, ce n'est pas très patriotique.

Aies des hallucinations dues à la fièvre qui compensent pour le fait que tu as tout raté.

Pride & Procrastination

Tonight, I present to you a chronicle of incoherent thoughts collected during one dark and stormy night last spring.  I had to write a four-page English paper on Pride and Prejudice.  That was all.  Four pages is incredibly short by college standards.  It should have taken about four well-planned hours--but as soon as my fingers touched the keyboard, my brain emitted a fart and died.  Note the times of each successive comment.

And Yet, Still Majoring in French

Sorry for the late post.  Due to me not understanding how to use my cell phone, the weekly "DON'T FORGET YOU HAVE A BLOG!" alarm failed to fire. 

The French take an indescribable, meticulous fascination in distilling every nuance from the slightest of emotions.  I base this conclusion on four years of reading France's answer to The Catcher in the Rye mixed with Where the Red Fern Grows à la Slaughterhouse Five.

First, it is a law that characters must die in every single work of fiction penned by a French hand.  Not only that, but they must die painfully, and their deaths must cause untold agony for those who once knew them.  (Readers included.)  Death by drowning, by poison, by gunshot, or simply by wasting away of misery--these are the only acceptable ends for fictional residents of the Hexagon.

Second, the characters who don’t die (or who remain woefully alive until the end of the story) are required to be unhappy.  Their wives or husbands should be unfaithful.  Their shops should do badly.  Their children or lovers should die.  Extra points if they kill their own cat by throwing it against a wall.

Finally, since nothing resembling success ever occurs, these characters have plenty of time to reflect on what a cruel beast is Fate.  One may spend an entire morning wandering hag-like through the boulevards of Paris and wondering when the greenish, bloated, rotting visage of one's drowned husband (whom one has killed) will fade from one's memory and allow one to sleep.  There's nothing better than a long walk for fixating on nauseating imagery and the feelings it provokes.  Ô la belle vie française!

I'm guessing that if you have read only one French book, it was The Little Prince.  The Little Prince was slightly different from the trope in that (SPOILER ALERT) the certainty of the death of the Little Prince is under debate.  But this book contains another important element of French literature, which is that it does not make sense.