Striving for Bilinguability

Pendant mon séjour en France, je vais écrire Nibble & Spew en français ainsi qu’en anglais.  Français en premier, et traduction en anglais après.  Je vais aussi faire beaucoup de fautes.  Veuillez me corriger en ajoutant vos remarques au bas de la page.

Voici des dessins de mon cahier!  Jusqu’à maintenant, les cours ne sont pas trop difficiles donc je passe le temps en prenant mes notes en bandes-dessinées.  Je crois que ça m’aide a m’en souvenir mieux.

While I am in France, I’m going to post on Nibble and Spew in French as well as English.  French first, and the English translation after.  I am also going to make plenty of mistakes.  Feel free to correct me by adding a comment at the bottom of the page.

Here are some comics from my notebook!  So far, classes haven’t been too difficult, so I amuse myself by taking notes in comic form.  I think it helps me remember them better.

"Hello, my name is Merp."
"NO!  We have to do the cheek kiss!"

"Pleased to meet you."

 Je ne savais pas si je devrais faire la bise avec un homme que je ne connaissait pas.  En bref, oui.

I didn’t know if I should do the cheek-kiss with a man I didn’t know.  Apparently, yes.

My lunch with friends

Oh my god, there are palm trees!

 Un signe que l’hiver ne durera pas toujours.  J’étais stupide et je n’attendais pas qu’il fasse froid au sud de la France.  Vraiment, un jour il neigeait.  J’étais triste.

A sign that winter won’t last forever.  I was stupid and didn’t expect that it would be cold in the south of France.  One day it actually snowed.  I was sad.

And a machine that sells coffee!

C’est très bon marché à 50 centimes.  La tasse est petite, mais elle me suffit bien.

It’s very cheap at 50 euro-cents per cup.  The cup is small, but definitely enough for me.

"Let's be friends!"
"No."

Top row:  "Pardon?"  "Hey, taxi!"  "I'm tired."
Bottom row:  "I'm sick of it/I've had enough!"  "Hello?"  "Pleased to meet you."  "So-so."

Nous avons appris des phrases communs et les gestes qui les accompagnent.  Selon mon partenaire de langue, personne ne dit plus “hep, taxi!” mais c’est bon quand même d’apprendre des choses.

We learned some common phrases and the gestures that accompany them.  According to my language partner, no one says “hep, taxi!”anymore, but it’s good to learn stuff anyway.

The City that Didn't Mug Us

For New Year's Eve, Sibling and I traveled to New York City to visit our respective friends.  Even though we are both old enough to order the New and Improved Dink Bros. 3-Way Toaster/Cell Phone Holder/Dog Walkers from late-night television (six easy payments of $19.99!), our mother could not get over her fear that something terrible would happen to us in the city.  She was even afraid that, I don't know, Sibling would spontaneously leap out of the bus to NYC while we were still on the highway.

Our father had a stronger belief in our ability to take care of ourselves.

Although Sibling put the bag with his lunch in the cargo section under the bus 

(rendering it inaccessible), 

and although we both missed the ball dropping

(because he was dealing with a nosebleed and I was on the subway),

and although he forgot to charge his phone on the day we were supposed to come home

(making it difficult for me to yell at him to get to the bus stop on time), 

nothing terrible happened.  It was a small miracle.

The Least Fun Kind of All-Nighter

As previously mentioned, I had to get an EEG several weeks ago to check that my brainbox was functioning properly.  (Surprisingly, it is.)  EEG stands for electroencephalogram, which comes from the Latin words electra, "electrodes", cephalum, "stuck to your head", and gramus, "with a paste that makes your hair stiff and gross".  It eavesdrops on your brainwaves to make sure that there aren't any irregularities.  And you have to stay up all night beforehand if you are over the age of seven, because you need to be sleep-deprived while the test is done.  Being sleep-deprived makes the irregularities more prominent.

While reading the info sheet on how to prepare for the EEG, I couldn't help but think, "I'm so glad that I'm not the mother of an eight-year-old child who needs an EEG."  So there's always a silver lining.  At least I'm old enough to stay up all night on my own.  I drew a lot of cartoons to keep myself awake--roughly one every hour.

Mercifully, I had my appointment soon thereafter.  And as soon as I got back to my dorm, I leaped into the seductive embrace of Morpheus.

Awooo! The Hunt is On.

The past three weeks have seen an unprecedented level of pandemonium, procrastination, and hospital visits.  Let it suffice for me to say that I appear to be in good working order and that no one should be alarmed.  I even made a good series of drawings when I had to stay up all night before the EEG--every neurological exam has a silver lining, right?  Those will go up soon.

The big project now is finding meself a job for the ol' summer.  I tackled my college's career office website for the first time tonight.  That was a mistake.

I fumbled through the labyrinthine website and found a job search engine.  After lightly restricting the search results to "during the summer" and "in the United States," I scrolled through 132 consulting jobs with increasing rage.  I think the problem is that I'm not interested in grown-up things like "implementing media campaigns" or "providing financial advisory services".  My interests are a bit more elemental, like "eating" and "not dropping crumbs on myself while eating".

I tried to prod the search engine into giving me something that wasn't consulting by putting in keywords related to my interests.  The formerly infinite job list erased itself.  "Share and Enjoy!" smiled the career counselors from their homepage.   After another twenty minutes of fiddling with the Advanced Search Options, I ended up with a handful of things that didn't sound awful--but none of them were paid.  I let out a velociraptor screech and dragon-kicked my computer across the room.

What am I looking for?  Well, my IDEAL job would probably be Humor Filter, if housing was included.

To help myself out, I decided to brainstorm a list of my skills:
--I can read really fast
--I can walk on my hands
--I can run long distances without getting bored
--I can speak French proficiently (and I hope to be fluent by this summer)
--I can curl my tongue and make a lot of startling faces
--I can draw cartoons in response to realtime stimuli (and I've got more coming soon)
--I can make people laugh
--I can write and edit very well under pressure (according to my parents, it isn't really good that I've discovered this about myself)
--I can beat almost anyone in Bananagrams
--I can organize and take responsibility like nobody's business
--I can wake up early, no problem
--I can hang out in the woods at night without getting scared
--I can cook really good fried eggs
--I can bellydance a little bit

Huh, that's not so bad.  What I'm NOT good at is managing my time and finishing things by their due dates.  Sixteen and a half years of schooling have gradually numbed my reaction to deadlines to the point where I have basically become immune to them.

"I lose 1 out of 10 points if this is late?  Ehh, that's not so bad," mumbles my complacent brain.  And another night of frivolous time-wasting slides by.  I think the part of me that used to be afraid of academic consequences up and died sometime during my freshman year.  That would explain the smell, anyway.

Unfortunately, potential employers think the ability to complete tasks is really important for some reason.  So I'll have to try attacking the job hunt from a different angle.  I'll do that later.

I'm Thinking of a Number

Sometimes writing essays is like a game.  The professor says, “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and a billion.  Guess.”  But the number is an essay and if you don’t write the one the professor’s thinking of, you fail.

"Now I'm thinking of a letter between E and G..."

If you give a mouse a conference...

...she will take notes entirely in cartoons.
And if you let her take notes in cartoons,
she will put them on her blog.
And if she puts them on her blog,
you might rethink inviting mice to conferences.

(Isn't that what If You Give a Mouse a Cookie was about?  Anyway, this was a conference on translation.)

Professor Bingo

Have fun, kids.

I realized that this isn't the traditional bingo board size--ehh, deal with it.