Les conjugaisons de la vie

Time for a pleasure check. 

If this is the summer to indulge in my little pleasures, those many amuse-bouches that together nourish my Being (capitalized à la Eckhart Tolle), how am I doing?  Am I partaking in les petits plaisirs that I set out to do?  Well, considering where I find myself, it’s pretty fucking hard not to.  I mean, pastry cases and espressos are as prevalent as planned work signs are on the G-train in Brooklyn.  Museums are Paris’ Starbucks.  And I’ll accept your Lincoln Center bid and raise you this Palais Garnier.  This city is an unbelievable package gorgeously wrapped in the French language.  Silken sentences float around me just waiting to be grabbed and relished… although that doesn’t make them any easier to understand.  Hey – I’ve only had five days of class.  Gimme a few days…

I suppose the better question, though, isn’t if I’m partaking in these pleasures, but rather if I’m even noticing that they’re there.  I’m not disillusioned enough to think that my normal life in Brooklyn is void of tiny pleasures.  On the contrary, I know there is a smorgasbord of luxuries and joys – both big (summer trips abroad) and small (a great bakery on the corner) – that I often take for granted.  Here, though, when I’m stripped of the weight of distraction, they’re so much easier to see.

I encountered a petit plaisir as I lazily sat at one of the countless cafés and a small parade of preschoolers marched by – hand-in-hand with their partner – singing with their daycare teacher.  There was the realization that our fancy cheese at home – the kind that you only find imprisoned by a glass case – is just cheese here.  Just Cheese.  Not Fancy Cheese.  There was the realization that cell phones work on the metro here – but no one uses them.  Tranquility is still sacred in some places.  There was the grandeur of the Musée d’Orsay and the surrounding arrondissements juxtaposed against the graffiti and hipsterdom of my own Parisian ‘hood, Belleville.  There was the first glass – and the first bottle – of wine.  There was the video chat with my family as I gave them a tour of the apartment.  There was the moment when a group of British tourists walked up to me and said, “Excuse me?  Do you speak English?  We’re trying to get to the Opera House.”  Ha.  They thought I was French.  There was the realization of my Parisian dream: riding a bike along the Seine with a baguette sticking out of the basket.  

But my greatest pleasures over the past week have been with this language that is undoubtedly trying to woo me into its bed with its fluidity, its sensuality, its smooth and seamless flow from one word to the next.  Ooh la la.  I’ve grown accustomed to practicing my numbers in French as I climb to the apartment on the seventh story.  I eavesdrop as I eat my crêpe, sometimes forgetting to appreciate the mushrooms and oozing cheese as I attempt to dissect the message of my fellow diners’ conversations.  I smile after every interaction – whether it’s requesting my second pain au chocolate of the day, asking for directions to Fontainebleau’s chateau, or simply asking my professeur what her thoughts are on the Mona Lisa (Granted, I couldn’t fully understand her answer but that’s neither here nor there.  I was simply thrilled that I spontaneously came up with a question that pertained to the conversation at hand.)

As strange as it sounds to many, I’m sure, I’m finding great pleasure in verb conjugations.  There’s something so systematic, so orderly about it that I find beautiful.  My notebook is quickly becoming my own work of art, one filled with tiny verb charts sprinkled with multicolored circles and arrows pointing out inevitable irregularities that veer from the orthographic path.  For those unfamiliar with the often bemoaned task of verb conjugation, it’s basically the process of taking an infinitive (to walk, to run, to love, to relax) and changing its form so that it gives us two major pieces of information: 1) the subject, and 2) the tense.  I walked.  You are running.  We love.  She will relax.  Voilá.  You’ve conjugated.

The Romance languages are unique in that every verb can be conjugated six times in each tense.  Of course, these conjugations depend upon the subject:

French: je, tu, vous, il, elle, nous, vous, elles, ils

Spanish: yo, tú, él, ella, usted, nosotros, vosotros, ellos, ellas, ustedes

Portuguese: eu, tu/você, ele, ela, nós, vocês, eles, elas

(I know, I haven’t included Italian and Romanian… but I haven’t learned those yet. J)

Perhaps the joy I find in conjugating a verb appropriately is similar to the satisfaction felt by a mathematician who correctly solves an equation.  The difference, however, is that while an incorrect answer to an equation may derail subsequent mathematic endeavors, an incorrect conjugation may go unnoticed or unacknowledged in an everyday conversation: “Where be the bathroom?”  “I eats foie gras last night.”  “We wearing a bindi in that picture.”  While incorrect, you would be understood, and it’s unlikely that someone would correct you despite hearing the error.  So it goes in real life, I suppose.  We sometimes fill in the blanks with people/things/experiences that we think are right – but in reality aren’t meant to be there.  Often, those on the outside notice the mistakes before we do, but most choose to remain silent.  The life grammarians – those who bring a red pen to what we might otherwise overlook – are priceless.  And far too rare.

What’s interesting in French – and unique amongst the Romance languages, at least to my knowledge – is that there are a series of conjugations which are spelled differently (i.e. J’aime, Tu aimes, Ils aiment) but pronounced the exact same way.  Ironically, then, you may conjugate a verb incorrectly in your head but those listening would never know.  No matter how many life grammarians you’re able to surround yourself with, sometimes it’s only through the arduous process of self-editing that we arrive at bliss – grammatical and otherwise.

Maybe my meanderings are my attempt at facilitating that process.  Autocorrect à la Microsoft Word doesn’t exist yet.  Have I been filling in the blanks of my life with the right ils and elles, hes and shes and its and theys?  Have I given of myself enough to my friends, family, and community so that I can truly say there is a nous/nosotros/nós/we?  Have I maintained a positive relationship with tu and vous?  Am je/yo/eu/I focusing my energy on those aspects of my life which promote my own happiness?

Clearly, these queries cannot be answered in a single sitting.  However, to jumpstart the process, maybe tu should hop on a plane, je will pick up some wine, and nous can discuss.  D’accord ?