The closest deadline at present is the Saturday deadline for our Trimestrial Report, 2011 June-September. So that’s what I’m working on today, my "day off", after I went shopping at the market. Un rapport is a report, but it’s also used in le rapport sexuel, sexual contact. My dictionary gives "contact" as a general meaning […]
Being on Zhen for so long, I’ve started to crave just a little bit of truth every now and then, the same way I crave broccoli or hamburgers or competent dentistry. It’s just one more commodity that’s hard to come by (although I hear sometimes they have it in the bigger cities). As a Missionary […]
I got my newest Worldview ("The Magazine Of The National Peace Corps Organization") from the Boffice yesterday. I skimmed through it despite the glossy paper to see if there was anything of interest. There’s an article called "The Power of Knowledge (For Better or Worse)" by Sheridan Larson which touches on a few gripes with […]
The English word "surprise" comes from the French past participle, surpris, of surprendre, which etymologically means "to overtake". You can even see the -pris past participle of the root -prendre, "to take", which also occurs in entreprendre (translated by my dictionary as "to undertake"). Saying you were surpris can therefore be seen as being overtaken […]
One of the oddities of learning another language is having to cope with homonyms. Try to translate "token ring", for example, and you’ll discover that "to ring", like a phone, in French is sonner, whereas a ring that you wear on your finger is a bague, and a ring in the sense of hoop is […]
Sometimes in transport you’ll hear "Pardon! Chauffeur, on part! Je suis pressé!" or similar, which translates as "Come on, driver! Let’s go! I’m in a hurry!" But the semi-literal idea of being pressed (pression means pressure) is kind of catchy when there’s eight zillion things to do. Was the beginning of the school year like […]
Something changed in me and all of a sudden I am overcome with a need to do a lot better. Was it the shitty half-lesson I gave in Terminale? The smiling faces of my former colleagues and students? It’s true that life picked up a great deal for me last year when I finally settled […]
We worked fast over the next week, while we were still together for Medical Week. We submitted to the tests and to the samples with the normal amount of distaste, but our real work was elsewhere. For once we pored over the Mission literature, indulged the bureaucratically-designed manuals on Behavioral Change Techniques and Memetic Design. […]
Tomorrow is when school restarts — the rentrée scolaire — and I’m a little uneasy. Uneasy is an understatement. I’m not ready. I don’t want to be a teacher again. I want another week, maybe two. Actually, saying "another" suggests that I want a week like these weeks have been — what I want is […]
Allison is one of the few/proud informatique teachers in our stage, but since she’s posted to Anglophone, she’s actually a "computer science" teacher. She used to live in a mansion, complete with glass chandeliers, with running water but almost no réseau, what we would call "signal". So hardly any cell phone or Internet. Running water […]