and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

The problem with the Montreal Weblog run by Kate is that she is always posting links to interesting articles... in french.

You see, I don't speak french. Oui, it is true. I read it much better than I speak it, that is for sure, but even still it's a struggle to get through a newspaper article and get much more out of it than the basic idea.. and aren't the newspapers supposed to be at a 3rd grade or 5th grade reading level? Or is that only American papers so that all the idiots in this country can pretend to have political opinions too? Are they dumbing down their stories in Russia? Are the Italians slowing things up for the illiterate? Are the Taiwanese trimming their syllables?

Probably not. I hear they can read.

So I'm stuck trying to power through french and I have to cringe cause I hate the stuff. Hate.

Hate is a strong word but back in time when my mother was a child she ran amongst eight brothers and sisters and when they played, when they screamed and chased eachother around the house, they did it in french.

It's funny how even screaming is different in different languages.

She grew up french and it wasn't till grade school that they got slapped on the knuckles for using it. Even up until a few years ago she still spoke the language, albeit in some bastardized frenglish form, to my grandmother but never to us. When I was tiny, a little small child running around in the woods and falling in open wells and getting stung by bees and watching my maine coon cat get run over by farm equipment (what kind of a cat sleeps in the middle of the road, I asked) she spoke english. When I was a little older and we moved to the big city (tm) of Bangor, Maine, I rode around on my bike and bought penny candy and made a few permenant scars on my knees and learned how to swear and play soccer, still, she spoke english.

When I met my mother she was already grown up. She wasn't the little kid that got her knuckles slapped in grade school for saying Oui, so I didn't know she could speak french. I knew, because I would hear her on the phone talking in strange tongues to my grandmother on the other end, but I didn't really know. She sounded english enough to me.

When I got to high school I was bitter that they cancelled the latin program right as I showed up. If french and spanish were the languages of love then latin was the language of knowledge and academics and I had enough of love when I was entering high school so give me some knowledge, please. It took them a year to re-instate it so I had to take french for a year instead.

Parla vous francais?

Garcon! Coffee!

It was awful. The entire class was full of second and third year struggles repeating the class for the second or third time. They could have cared less. So could I. I spent the time, instead, flirting mercilessly with the girl who sat behind me and wore professional looking business suits to school on occasion (cripes.. pinstripes.. what was she trying to do to me?!) and flirting mercilessly back. We both got 104s on our report cards and the school had to actually change it's policy, putting down in writing that The maximum grade possible on a quarterly report card for a given class is 100. A grade is a reflection of a percent - the percent of understanding and completion of a set of study material and therefore it is not possible to score more than 100% etc etc ad naseum.

I would go on to take latin for the next three years and on that third year I would date that girl that sat behind me in class - for three and a half long and painful years - and we would break up during the fourth year. She would come over to my house one breezy sunny summer day and announce that we should end it and I said okay and she yelled at me because I didn't cry. We lived in the same small town and knew all the same small people but to this day I never once saw her again after that day. She would go on to tell everyone - complete strangers even - that I, her ex-boyfriend of three years, was gay. Clearly. Because she said so. I was gay and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.

She was french.

Alright, no more french than I was but my mother - my own mother - having forsaken her heritage, spoke english and only english to me. The language of the great white evil. The language of the uncouth british with their bad dental hygiene and their baked beans for breakfast.

When college came I went to school in a different country in a different province - a french one. I went to a place where french had to be higher, bigger, more prominent on all store fronts and businesses. I went to a place where professors were required to allow french essays and reports regardless. I went and I still bucked against the push of the language and in four years in a french speaking province I was able to avoid the language all together.

What I loved about the french my mother spoke was the regionality of it. People spoke it because that was what everyone else spoke. They were no less true-blue American than the hispanic in New Mexico but they spoke french and that was so they could buy milk and bread and work in the factory. French was their language. Somewhere along the line it stopped being about borders and countries and laws and it was just what it was - a language - for communication.

Part of language is it's natural and constant process of evolution. To keep the old for sake of it's years - it's a sin to try and save that which has a natural life span and is ready to die out. Rememberance is one thing. Prolonging a death is another.

There is a difference between "Keeping Alive" and "Prolonging Death" and our baby boomers should take a lesson in humility and acceptance and let things go - like their parents, when it is time.

Harsh perhaps but Nature herself is a harsh mother. She, ultimately, is the most compassionate of all - taking those when it is their time.

When I was born - was that the time for the french in my blood to die? Does a ruler on the knuckles constitute the natural death of a language or the oppressive stamping out of a culture? Am I no less of a person now for being a great white monolingual American? Should I be speaking french?

Hate is a strong word but it's sometimes the most appropriate word to use when describing the hard process of elimination. Hate is what I have for the whole issue before me. Hate for the language I don't have. Hating not having it. Hating that it's pressed into me against me on me from those who do have it but never being good enough if I wanted it. Hate for the self-righteous indignation of a tribe poised on the brink of extinction - propped up, supported, kept alive by the artificial drip of laws and policies. Hate for the pompous and pushy and snub-nosed. Hate not for the french but what it came to represent to me - a part of me that always pushed away because I, of it's own ilk, was tainted and scarred and a threadbare example of what it wanted me to be. Not fresh and new with the energy of spring and the youthfulness of the future.

That's the french language to me and why I cringe so much when I click on a french language article on the Montreal weblog.

That and the fact that everytime I get the babelfish translation it sucks ass.