Something wicked this way comes

Going to see this in August. Words can't express. Also, there's a link to the title. Points if you know it.

The end of the week, when all my cheerful little students come to me to get practice tests for the exam in five days. I guarantee that flow of nervousness will only surge stronger as the date gets closer. As for me, I had the task of editing the video I shot yesterday. It's not all ships and wiggles, you know - I did some seriously hard graft today, not least trying to get iMovie to do what I want rather than what it thinks would look good.

Ken Burns.

Augh.

In any case, I managed to bash through that in a couple of hours, to be faced with round three of the thesis. I was armed with my red pen, and together Diana and I absolutely savaged that thing. It's almost legible now, but I can't guarantee it'll stay that way. In the course of this edit I've learnt more than I ever though I'd need to about modeling, and not the fun kind. The kind where you crunch a thousand data points and come up with a 3-D model of the way the earth beneath our feet looked 3 million years ago which is pretty cool. She's promised me that she'll come back on Monday to let me read her results chapter. "Only fifty pages."

Oh good. Only fifty pages.

In the afternoon I drafted a condolences email for a colleague (yea, that's a weird thing, writing condolences having been given a précis of the deceased's life and personality) as her English is not yet good enough to do it herself, which I found challenging. It's the first time I've ever needed to write one, and novelty is to be cherished even if it is rather morbid.

I also gave a presentation of a translation I'd done to the security guys, all of whom spoke no English and were each built like a small tank. When one shifted in their seat, I could hear the seat protesting. Seats were not made for tanks, the metal seemed to groan. However, I seem to have just about pulled it off - there were questions, which I managed to answer to their satisfaction, and there was some ribbing on the member of their crew who'd been volunteered for the video. That done, and only sweating a small river down my spine (it was the heat, alright, I don't get nervous) I made my way back to the office. A few more students, a commiseration with a friend about the exam she and I took together (French, don't ask. A need to vomit, a blinding headache and a buzzing about the ears do not make for a well-examined exam paper) and then it was time for lessons with C and B. C is making strides, and I suspect she's being the kind of student I despised when I was a student and revising between lessons. Swot.

(I was not a good student, but I've improved some, and it seems I'm not a terrible teacher.)

With B I've started on modals, which have thrown him a little - he's gotten used to "I want + infinitive, I like + infinitive," etc. So as a result I can almost see him furiously trying not to say "I can to get some water?" Modal verbs. Because nothing passive-aggressively says "I hate you" like making your language an arse to learn.

And that concludes my day, aside from one small thing. Well, two small things. +Lizzie Fane, editor, founder and all-round supremo over at +Third Year Abroad has asked me to write something for her fantastic website and I am so excited for that. If you're have gone/are going to go on a year abroad, get yourself over to that site. It is literally a one-stop shop for all you need.

Secondly, by this time next week I suspect I'll have passed 30,000 views, which is quite frankly mind-boggling. So here's the deal. If you've been reading but never commented, here is your chance. If you comment on the blog post that pushes me past 30,000 I'll write something for you. Whatever you want; a cover letter for the job you want, a poem to entrap the heart of the person you've had your eye on forever, or a blog post detailing just what a fantastically awesome person you are.

Up to you, but you've got to be in it to win it. Have a great weekend.

Doing what I love

Sometimes you just have a day. You know it's going to be a day before you even wake up. Your body tries its best to stop you waking up because it knows, it knows that when you do, it's all going to turn to crap.

This was one of those days, only worse, because my body actually kicked me out of bed before I needed to. I woke up at 6.30, freezing cold, because the heating system in my flat turns itself off at around 5. This has happened three times in three days, and for the life of me I have absolutely no idea why. Ever since I got rid of my duvet, the evil genie that apparently lives in the radiator has decided to knock off at 5am.

I couldn't get warm in bed. I couldn't get back to sleep because I was cold and apparently wide awake, so I had a shower instead and then some coffee. The luxurious pace with which I broke my fast should have told me of the heapings of crap that were soon to land on me, but no. I was lulled, like a fool, into the sense of smug self-security that envelops a chap when he thinks he is ahead of his schedule.

I arrived at work a couple of minutes early, perfumed, fresh, rascally handsome. Today was a full day, but I felt prepared to face it. I was full of nutella and home-brewed coffee. My first task was the pilot light of the deep-sea fish of a day I would shortly encounter. I had to pull up some statistics for my colleague regarding memberships: who's paying, who paid last year but hasn't yet, how many of the new graduates are ponying up the cash…it was a task that she told me I needn't rush, that would take a couple of hours. 

Imagine her surprise, and the smug look on my face - vile, isn't it - when I returned the document to her twenty minutes. It wasn't a magic trick, but it may as well have been from the look on her face - but then, an awful lot of magic is knowing something the other person doesn't know. In this case, it was knowing that all of the characteristics my colleague needed could easily be identified by "IF GREATER THAN" and "IF LESS THAN" formulae.

In any case, with this task completed ahead of schedule, I thought I could relax - but instead, a huge ginger Belgian came roaring into my life. I do mean roaring;  he has a laugh that most of the school can hear. Once his hair goes white I can see him making a pretty penny as a Santa lookalike. It was for this gentleman that I had recorded the Mind-Mapping video, and he was exceedingly happy with it.

Except one part. One little part, that would only take me ten minutes to sort out.

The man knows me. It was only a small thing, and I was confident it would take no more than twenty (he knows me, and that means he knows how to flatter me) so, with time to spare, I agreed to sort it out there and then. I set myself up in my office, sat myself down, and made sure I was handsome. I was. I am.

I started the recording. I opened my mouth.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

A chainsaw makes a noise that, if unexpected, is one of the most terrifying in the world. I leaped out of my skin and hung to the ceiling by my fingertips, like a bloody and disgusting Spider-Man. The noise stopped. I crawled down and re-installed myself. Hair a little wild, but otherwise ready to begin again. I took a perfunctory glance out of the window. Nothing.

I started the recording.

RRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr!!

Motherfu-

And this continued for twenty minutes. Every time I started recording my mysterious tormenter turned his or her chainsaw back on. Every time. If I ever meet the despicable animal who was doing this to me, I'm going to do absolutely nothing because they have a chainsaw. I'm not a total imbecile.

While I was slowly going mad inside the space of my own mind, I got a text - an unknown number. Unknown numbers always make me nervous, because I don't give out my number very much, but it was a woman who wanted to know if I could tutor her son. Sure, I said, when?

Tonight.

I warned her that I'd not be there until around 7.15; she told me it wouldn't be a problem. I hate such short notice, but a job is a job - and, speaking of jobs, it was time to get filming for the second video project of the day. There's a rather large announcement coming up in the next week, but due to various staff/national holidays, we've not had any time to prepare the online release, which will involve a video in Spanish. So that's how we two hours today: recording a three minute speech. How does one spend two hours recording a three minute speech?

Well, we did it by recording it a number of times and struggling with lighting issues, noise issues, and battery life issues. And pronunciation issues. And people-ignoring-signs-and-wandering-in-and-not-leaving issues, which were the absolute worst. In any case, we got it done, and for the next two-and-a-half hours Meyling, Sophie and I pieced together the takes to form a glorious, flowing draft. We had merely to add transitions, credits, and movement. Exhausted, we agreed to reconvene tomorrow at 8am to complete the project.

That completed, I took a whole half an hour to set up meeting the next day and chat to my colleague about work that I needed to take over from her while she jaunts off back to Blighty. Having added her items to my work schedule (and gained a new respect for the woman, she does a lot of work I didn't know about) it was to my French lesson, where I tried not to get irritated by the notion of the "traditional family," which at best is rose-tinted and at worst bigotry masquerading as "but we've always done this."Perhaps I was overreacting, but the one place in France where I've heard people using the phrase "traditional family" most was on the marches to deny the right to a family to homosexual couples. Perhaps I Pavlov'd myself again and I'm reacting to a slight that is unintended. All the same, I wonder how the class would feel if they had to describe the "traditional family" in the terms they reserve for non-"traditional" families: monoparental, recomposed (recomposé) and homosexual families versus "traditional" gives a linguistic bias (in my opinion) to the word we recognise and feel comfortable with."Hetero families" is as clinical a term as "recomposé," so why not use it?

As a result there was a slightly tense moment when I was asked what a family that is composed of a previously married father, a previously married mother, and kids from both previous relationships and the current is called. I said "a family." Because that's what it is. The day she has to say "I'm in a hetero relationship" rather than just "I'm in a relationship" is the day she has the right to label other people's families.

Sorry, that become something of a rant. I'll try to get back to the funny.

Mid-lesson I got a call from Sophie to say that the man at the top of her chain of command didn't like the video and that we'd redo the whole thing tomorrow, in one go. I have to say I'm a little relieved that our early morning meeting has been cancelled, but at the same time the fact that we wasted several hours in post-production was a knife to the kidneys of my soul. In any case, it was time to haul ass out to St. German to meet my new student, H, whose English is quite frustratingly good/bad. What I mean by this is that he has a solid to excellent grip on all English tenses and can use them comfortably and with ease, but then says "childrens" and "mens". Which is heartbreaking.

I finished that lesson at quarter past 8. I took a bus, and wrote most of this blog on the way. Since getting home I've replied to more emails and eaten half a kilo of ravioli, and I'm pretty okay with that.

Tomorrow promises to be just as exciting as today was. Oh - and I found out the name of the person who'll be replacing me. If it's you, and you read the blog, why not send me a message?

In the meantime, here's a sneaky picture from today's shoot. Hip height, so I apologise for the quality. 

As always, thanks for reading.

Back to normal

Normal here means my normal style; less "blue". My girlfriend assigns colours to my blog, but she also leaves out the u in colour so we'll take what she says with a pinch of salt. (She's coming back tomorrow, and I react to the reappearance in my life of those I've missed by being sarcastic and mean.) In any case, today began with a bang as I had an hour-long meeting five minutes after I got in. It was a great meeting, with lots of positive actions coming out of it, but all the same - that much French a mere 90 minutes after I'd woken up and blearily switched on +France24 is too much, even for someone with my staggering intellect and endless reserves of modesty.

In any case, I understood everything, and have now been commissioned to record myself giving one presentation about mind maps as well as film a series of clips for a secret project. Secret for the moment, in any case. There'll be more about it once I have more details for sharing. In any case, that brought me to 10, when I went to work for the Association, sorting out figures from last year. The accounts seem to be a bit of a mess, but I was reassured by my colleague that the figures I'd worked with last year were all wrong, and the ones I know held in my hands were the "good" ones.

(To all French students of English:  le bon is "the right one", and not "the good one. We can't make moral judgements about numbers.)

I had to fortify myself with coffee to bite back the quick response, which was why on earth was I not given the right figures in the first place, and as I waited for the dark nectar to fill my cup I realised that they probably thought they were the right figures in the first place. It is far too easy to leap to the conclusion that everyone had the information then that they do now, and it's simply untrue. I took a deep breath, a deep draught of coffee, squared my shoulders, and wrote lovely formulas to make numbers jump across pages and add up in neat little columns.

I darted back and forth between the Association and the mediatheque for the rest of the morning as students dropped in for books and DVDs. I have been dong that a lot recently, as I'm yet to work out how to automatically transfer calls. It seems that whenever I am in the Association nobody calls but the world wants to get in touch with the mediatheque, while when I'm in the mediatheque the world and his brother are both calling my Association phone. Sometimes, just for fun, they'll ring together, and I'll get so confused I run into a wall.

I have a fitness machine disguised as a pair of phones and it is a sadistic son of a gun.

I am also only now discovering the joys of endless e-mail threads, where you read something and then write your reply and send to all, because your opinion is so damn important that everyone must read it. Not just the project leader. Everyone on the project. This guy, who did a little picture montage and then nothing else this morning came into an inbox full of e-mail tennis about the correct wording of the French text in the e-mail that accompanied the montage.

And right at the bottom, after scrolling through for twenty minutes and trying to decipher the semantic battle waging, I find: "The montage is fine."

Road rage is a picnic with Winne the Pooh compared to the sensation coursing through a fellow's bloodstream on having read every line of this silliness in hope of any sort of feedback on one's work and finding it consists of four words.

No matter. I quit the business at midday, and threw myself into mediatheque work. The first part of the dual projects I have going on require a translation in which I have - and gods, I love my colleague for saying this - I have white card.

You've never seen anyone look so blank in your life. He repeated.

"Tu as white card pour faire ce que tu veux"

Understanding crept over me like moss creeps over a boulder. Slowly.

"Carte blanche?" I asked.

He beamed. "Oui!"

I almost bit through my lip trying not to laugh. What are the odds that he would pick that exact phrase to translate? Marvelous. A moment of pure comedy.

So I've broken down some of the heavier phrases and pages into more manageable chunks, like a bar of 95% chocolate recommended by the mother of an ex-girlfriend. I've played with the phrasing but, reading back what I've written, I'm realising that I may need to tone down the "me-ness" in it for those who don't speak my particular brand of English.

All of this, by the way, and it wasn't even lunchtime. I love working this hard, the time absolutely flows. I also love Fridays, because I get served this after lunch:

Pictured: why you want to work in France.

Second coffee of the day and this time with chocolate. There's just too much dark deliciousness there.

Straight after lunch I had a meeting with M, who's in charge of social media at the School. She's also charming, smart, and my co-collaborator on my third current project. She'll be interviewing a senior member of staff about an exciting new relationship that the School is developing, and she wants me to help her film and then subsequently edit the footage. We'll be adding in watermarks and doing our best to make the whole thing look as professional as possible.

Exciting times!

The rest of the afternoon was then given over to Chapter 4 of the book, which I didn't even realise I'd not seen yet. While I'll be losing marks for, you know, noticing stuff, I think it should be well noted that I then promptly busted my ass for another 90 minutes before throwing everything in a bag and running off to teach my private students.

Their lessons went well, though it's interesting to see that B, while more confident, is still a lot shakier on grammar than C - but C would rather carve her own arms off than say more than a sentence at a time. I need some way to meld them into one super-student and then divide them in two.

Crashed home, bought a kebab on the way - immigration is amazing for so many reasons, but the spread of spectacular food is the one I love best - and now, at twenty past ten, I'm considering going to bed. I had a lucky escape today; I was offered the last ticket to a party happening tonight in the Tour Montparnasse, the 2nd highest point in Paris. I was more than tempted; despite the long day, this was one of those occasions that will never come again.

But when I dug into my pockets I found nothing; not even a bit of fluff. Not even a moth to comically flutter out to denote my total lack of cash. The opportunity passed me by.

Let's be honest - after last time, that's probably just as well.