I'm an alien

I'm feeling less and less like an alien as I live here longer and longer, but it only struck me yesterday that I have been here six months. I've only got another five months and the past six have literally flown by. 

I am genuinely horrified by time and the speed with which it is passing.

Today has been an incredibly good day, with lots of exceedingly complex workbooks and data sorting to be done. I also got to look at the accounts after my supervisor emailed them to me; they have to be clearly marked as my own and only worked on in my folder, but she will work on her copy and I on mine and hopefully, at the end of the month, they will be identical. There will not be a single cent's difference between them. It's a really exciting prospect, and means if I plan on running as treasurer for anything next year then I'm well and truly prepared. Very exciting!

Accountancy. It's interesting.

The afternoon was more complex data, this time a survey that was sent out to last year's graduates to find out how they're doing and if they've got jobs. I worked through the tasks in an hour and then, since I had an hour still to spare, made graphs to show the data in as many exciting ways as I could. I've got bar charts, pie charts, and a few hundred tables. The next task is to write it up into a presentation and make sure my French is exceptional and my prose neat and professional. 

Data presentation. It's even more interesting.

This evening - which, by the way, is glorious; warm and fine and dry and absolutely what you'd expect from France - was spent in the company of C, who's taking her TOEFL on Friday. We did some really intensive work on speaking, because the test has very strict time limits and diction is the only area in which she has issues. Not big problems, but the university in the UK at which she wishes to study is asking for a really high score. She made some progress but like most people got a little flustered at the strict time limits. I have confidence that she's going to ace it, though. I'm back to see her brother, L, tomorrow, as my other potential Wednesday client - you remember, the crazy house of five boys - has not rung me back. It's not a big thing, to ask or to do, and so for them simply not to bother just tells me that I needn't either.

I know I'm not running an office, but realising that my time here is limited just makes me more irritated at people who waste it - another reason I'm so glad I have so many things to do at work. 

Being grouchy. It's not interesting at all.

So as not to finish on the boring note, here's an ad for whisky featuring the gorgeous voice of Robert Carlyle and the glorious countryside of Scotland, to continue my theme of:

"seriously, Scotland is gorgeous, and Scottish voices to die for."

Big block of cheese day

The West Wing is brilliant, and anyone who says otherwise has only watched the latter series.

It is something of a disappointment, I know, but today I have taught my lesson and then come straight home. The reasoning for this is twofold; firstly, last night I downloaded a spate of political books - I've been watching a little (alright, a lot) of West Wing and consequently realised that my political knowledge is lacking. So it's all Communist Manifesto and Wealth of Nations up in here, and in French, because if I'm going to learn I may as well learn efficiently.

The second reason is that, as I said, my student will be leaving me for a few weeks and, since he is one of my main sources of extra-curricular income, I want to limit spending - and Paris is a black hole for money from which even the most well-intentioned of trips cannot return. No; better I stay in, read books whose copyright long since faded, and enlarge my brain. I can already feel it dripping out of my nose, which I am sure any doctor will tell me is a good sign.

Back to work tomorrow, so hopefully I will be able to convince my supervisor to get us some lovely new resources - maybe some DVDs or a map. It's a map whose existence I discovered by route of the West Wing, and it's currently my desktop background: The Gall-Peters projection map. Inverted for extra amusement, it looks like this:

Front and centre: Africa, the size of the US, Mexico, Western Europe and China freaking combined.

And what should be immediately obvious is that the UK is a tiny country. I also suspect that at first blush this map makes you feel mildly uncomfortable - perhaps that's because the country in which you live is upside down, or perhaps it's because that same country suddenly looks...weaker?

In English we look down on people we don't like and if we are "better" we are superior. The boss works up on the 30th floor and the guy earning minimum wage is down in the post room underground. In almost all cultures, from lowered eyes to a bow to a priest prostrating himself before the crucifix, placing oneself below someone else is a sign of submission. In essence, down is bad and up is good. So seeing the UK looking small and, more importantly, inferior is somehow deeply worrying to us.

Seriously, you can't see us without a magnifying glass.

But I've come a long way off topic. I want to get a map like this for my new language hub because language informs what we do and how we interact, and I'd love to see student reaction to and discussion around this. It's an interesting topic.

Kind of a nerdy question, but are there any political science books you'd recommend? Anything on rhetoric? Anything, in short, that I can read and, in the still peace of my room, will cause mind-expansion?

Answers please to all the usual avenues. I leave you with a Shetland pony, doing what Shetland ponies do best.

Moonwalking.

Visit Scotland folks. It's really that gorgeous.

Tampons, and other false friends

I have never needed to ask for a tampon. It is not a source of pride, nor is it something I feel has been particularly missing in my life. It's simply something that I have never had any need to do. Nor, in fact, have I ever been asked for a tampon. My rough cheeks and gentlemanly manner have apparently notified anyone who needed one that I was a tampon-free-zone.

Imagine my surprise, then, when my colleague asked me if I had le tampon. My brain promptly melted out of my ears. Did she mean un tampon? Had my gentlemanly manner deserted me? Had my smoothly shaven cheeks given her the slip?

My mind rebelled at the very thought. I recovered (manfully) and managed to ask for clarification.

"Le tampon," she repeated. She pointed in the direction of my desk, and then made a stamping motion.

This was sufficient for me to realise, in a sudden rush, that un tampon is also a stamp. Not the kind you stick to letters, but the kind with a pad of ink (which was used before we had the one you stick, explaining why we use the same word. English is essentially very lazy.)

I handed it over with relief. She gave me a very strange look.

The rest of the day passed without great incident; I finished typing up the comments from student evaluation forms - I'm getting very good at typing in French on a French keyboard but consequently have a weird five minutes when I get home and q is in a's place and some silly person has swapped the m key with the colon/semi-colon. And a full stop is now easily accessible, whilst on a French keyboard one needs to first apply the shift key. Utter mental confusion reigns.

And of course when I go in tomorrow, the opposite will happen, and I shall seethe for several minutes as I try to work out who put my w on the bottom row and why the @ symbol has been shifted to the other side of the keyboard. Occupying two brain spaces is quite difficult, but we shall overcome.

And, best of all, my private lessons restart this weekend. Really excited to see the students again. Especially because the one I help with homework got an A+ for the projects we were working on. Seriously chuffed. 95%, get in.

It's only half past six, and my mother bought me a crêpe pan for Christmas. Let's hope I don't make a total pig's ear of this...

Pig's ear, by the way, is cockney rhyming slang for beer. Likewise tiddley wink means drink. That's why in England people sometimes get a bit tiddley, meaning drunk.

People in Scotland don't get tiddley. They just get drunk.