This is what I won't be buying today, but I can't promise I won't buy it in the future. I'm thinking it might be in everyone's best interest to learn a few more languages.
60 percent off? That's appealing, considering everything else we are buying costs at least 60 percent more right now.
Have you ever learned a second or third language? Do you still enjoy speaking it? I took great pleasure in and grew pretty proficient at French, having taken 6 years of it in school. I even began dreaming in French, which, people say, is an indication that you are becoming "fluent"... or maybe it means that you have eaten too much creme brulee before bed. Who knows?
My first foray into French was a well meaning sixth grade teacher who gave us all French names and taught us a vocabulary of about ten words like porte, chat, chien, and bonjour. Then, junior high French class was basically a room of thirty pre-teens giggling for forty minutes every other day about words that sounded strange and dirty, or actually were strange and dirty. Merde, coque, defoncer, and my favorite word, fourchette. My four foot four, late bloomer of a seatmate used to whisper, "full [of] shit!" every time we had to say the word for fork, eyes darting side to side with his chin planted surreptitiously upon his chest, shoulders heaving up and down with the witty weight of his cleverness. Madame Certain would glare as we, seated left and right, tittered into our fists and elbows, tears welling in our eyes either because we were trying so hard not to squeal aloud at this munchkin child saying "shit" (it was a different time, swearing in class could get you thrown out or worse) or owing to the fact that we were sitting squarely on our heels planted in just the right spot so we didn't wet ourselves holding back belly laughs after having drunk multiple cartons of chocolate milk at lunch.
Either way, watery eyes.
And good times.
As we moved into high school, the teachers got stricter and the lessons got harder. It was sentence structure, past, present and future tenses, thick-ass textbooks, and real conversations. But, it all sort of rolled off the tongue with me, without a lot of study time, almost like music. Remarkably, I was also excelling at Algebra and Geometry, and I began believing in the notion of left brain/right brain balance and stimulation. And wouldn't you know? Once I stopped the "real" math in favor of a guidance counselor-recommended "how to work the computer" Math class, the French wasn't as easily grasped, either. Weird how that happens.
So, would you like to revisit French with me? Should we grab a few Russian lessons, too? I definitely need some Italian. I'd like to travel and order mortadella on an aereo without it sounding like more-duh-del-uh on an air-ee-o.
And, because our world appears to be getting smaller it might be nice to have the ability to say, "We are all in this together" in a variety of ways.
Just not today, friends. Today we buy groceries and gasoline...and we make charitable donations if we can and where we're able, to those who are feeling the pinch even greater than ourselves.
Au revoir. Ostavat'sya v bezopasnosti. Alla prossima!
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