moussu.net Blog

Happy b-day Eva… once every four years… « leap » year, the guy said yesterday, is really a dumb expression, because it really is an extra day between you and spring, so it should be called « restrain » year! Well, spring sure seems to be here so I’m not complaining about the extra day especially since I am a bit overwhelmed with my work. Yesterday evening, I ate dinner outside for the first time this year, with a good friend, and it was wonderful!! I still had my coat on, and as soon as the sun went down it became a bit chilly again, but oh, how good it was to feel warmth and light on me again!!! I also saw a few people on a canoe going down the Wabash, for the first time ever! It was so cute I almost had an accident watching them! It’s hard to believe that Europe is currently experiencing an unusually bad winter! That’s only fair, though, because a few weeks ago we were under the snow up to our chin and my family was telling me about the warm weather and the flowers that were already coming out in France and Switzerland… hehe… now it’s our turn!

I just talked to the man of my life, the big love of my heart… he makes me laugh… I don’t miss him anymore the way I did when we separated, but every time we chat on MSN I feel my heart go all happy again

That’s it, I’m submitting my « article » for publication to TESOL Quarterly! Wow, that’s a BIG step and if I am published there, well, let’s just say that my self-esteem might just go up a few inches… or miles…

UTAH!!! MY FRIENDS!!!! i got a great phone call tonight from a great friend, and it makes me sooooooo excited to see her again soon

OK so i’m not feeling so good these days, but thinking that in 12 days i’ll be in utah does make me feel much better!!!

i’m excited about:
- my friends
- my ex-teachers
- the elc
- the mountains
- sushi
- the landing over the lake
- seeing the I-15 sign
- the rocks, the colors, the desert
- seeing PROVO
- byu
- MY FRIENDS MY FRIENDS MY FRIENDS
- orem and spanish fork, who would have thought i’d be excited to hear those names?
- slc and the temple and the mormons (yes, i’m excited to see them too)
- the byu sign on the mountain
- the sunsets
- center street where i lived many a happy years
- good-looking people
- churches everywhere
- MY FRIENDS
- movies 8 where i saw so many $1.5-movies
- MY FRIENDS MY FRIENDS
- sundance
- mount nebo, where i went for long drives whenever i needed to think
- and so many other things!!!

great. first time a student makes me cry (last week), and now first time a teacher makes me cry (tonight). 15 years of teaching and 25 years of school! this semester’s going just peachy.

the only thing i’m happy about is that there’s no longer any life on mars. it sounds dumb, but trust me, it makes a big difference in my life!

come, spring, come!

Absolutely hilarious… and scary!!! Go see Bush’s foreign friends and read CAREFULLY!

These are the states I’ve visited/gone through/slept in/spent some time in/lived in (and not just gone through an airport there). Actually, there’s one that I’m lying about, but since I don’t know which one it is, I can’t remove it… it’s the one north east of Idaho, north of Wyoming I think… if you tell me its name and its code (like IN for Indiana) I’ll remove it from this map. Create your own visited states or visited countries maps.

A VERY interesting thing to do, about this map and other similar maps is to read the comments made on this page. Scroll down a little… It is amazing to realize how « unclear » the borders of this world are and how strongly people feel about their « country. » Anyone interested in history, geography, politics, ethnography, and such, should read these comments.

the wind is going to blow away the roof above my head

there is a little bird coming at my window from time to time not today it’s too windy and cold

do people who know they will die soon always wish they could live longer or do they sometimes also want to die

don’t try to enter purdue’s campus at 5pm the traffic is insane

yesterday i wanted to start a list of all the people i have met during my life but then i realized that in the last almost two years i’ve spent here i have met so many people i could fill five notebooks with all their names

i hate to have to admit that but i am feeling crappy these days physically and mentally

as my father would say il y a un bon dieu pour les crapules because i am doing a lot of stupid things these days and among others forgot my credit card in the atm but no one used it before i was able to block it for free too

i eat chocolate all the time and have zits all the time but there might not be any correlation between the two since i also drink water and sleep and read and worry and breathe indiana’s air and teach all the time so any of these things could cause the zits

i wrote a little website accessibility survey today for margie so she can decide what changes she wants me to make on the iawe website when she becomes the president and it almost felt like i was the website expert for a minute

the snow has melted and it feels like fall a bad fall really but not like february

i listen to paolo conte and love it especially sotto le stelle del jazz le donne odiavano il jazz non si capisce il motivo

the wind the wind the wind and the rain

my favorite flower is the daffodil ou la jonquille i used to have a whole wild garden of them in yverdon and the man who wants my heart will get it in exchange for daffodils

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch’d in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed – and gazed – but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth

last night i dreamed, woke up, dreamed, woke up… and here are three of my dreams:
- i went to teach my class one day and when i was in front of my students, i realized i had no clothes and no skin on me, you could see all the muscles and all… it was disgusting and very bloody and scary…
- i was talking with friends and laughing… but i was made out of concrete, at at one point, my whole body exploded… and i saw my arm (still made out of dark grey concrete) laying on the ground, my hand still holding someone else by the shoulder…
- i was in a huge store where there were aisles and aisles of small babies in shoe boxes…
i have to stop here or else you’ll think i’m really crazy… which i am anyway, i mean, who on earth has such disturbing dreams? if you know anything about dream interpretation, please let me know what all this means!

i had my b-day on a friday the 13th in 1995, i will have one of friday the 13th in 2006, and another one in 2026… 2012… (darn, not 2013!) … 2017 (yuck!)… 2023 (HAHA, 50th b-day!)… 2034… and in 2040… but i hope i won’t be there to see the last ones! this is WAY too scary!!!

1. Because of the number of spam messages I was getting, I started blocking domains… and blocked purdue.edu by mistake, which means that I could never get messages from my students, except from the ones that were using a yahoo or hotmail account… yeah… took me three weeks to realize it…
2. The weather is maaaaarverlous except that it’s f’ing cold, -14C today and I don’t want to know how much it is tonight!
3. I ate some delicious chinese food tonight with a great friend who managed to get me out of my house on a weekend, miracles do happen!
4. I am thinking of dropping a class, the easiest one I have, because the other two are so horribly tough and I can’t drop them… but it feels really dumb to drop the easiest one…
5. My students are great… becoming lazy, but I told them that I expected « perfection » on the last paper and hopefully, they’ll try…
6. Third language acquisition is interesting: do you think that, if you learn a third language, the second language you learned will help you or be a confusion? If I learned German, will it help me or not, if I want to learn Danish? And if I learned German, and I want to learn Chinese, will it help me or not? If you acquire certain « metalinguistic awareness » and better processing skills while you learn a language, but then forget the language because you don’t ever you use it, do you keep the « learning skills » alive, even though the « content » is gone?
7. Learning about Human Resources Management scares me to death because we are supposed to learn how to DO things (advertise, hire, manage, fire, etc.) but really, for me, it is learning about all the things I will have to GO THROUGH first. Plus I’m already freaking out about the prelims in August… I might try to get a post-doc after all…
9. There is no 8.
10. WRITE COMMENTS on this thing!! IT WORKS NOW!!! Click on « comment » and write your name if you want or whatever, and then write a comment and click on OK… it’s that easy and it works now!!!! Oh, and GO SEE MY NEW HOMEPAGE!!! I reward myself with that (if you read for 5 hours, you can spend one hour working on a webpage), and I always try new things for my homepage, which are never what I want, really, but still pretty nice. This time, I think I really like it. Go see it and tell me what you think!!!!

j’ai toujours voulu etre championne de kickboxing! j’en ai l’energie, c’est certain, et cet immense besoin de me defouler… bon… au lieu de ca, je fais du kickboxing mental contre moi-meme, contre l’innertie, contre les idiots de ce monde, contre le manque d’education, contre la haine, contre la solitude, contre le manque d’individualite, contre tout ce que je ne comprends pas, contre l’aveuglement, contre la rage, contre tout ce qui me regarde de travers.

combien de temps faut-il ne pas baisser les bras et se battre pour avoir ce qu’on veut? quand faut-il abandonner la bataille et accepter de se tourner vers un autre destin?

I am extremely sad for three reasons tonight. One of them is that other people’s sadness saddens me too… The other two reasons I can’t explain here, and not being able to talk about it makes me even more sad! I wish I could write something beautiful to illustrate my feelings tonight but I am no writer and can find no word to express it all.
Here’s one of my favorite paintings by Van Gogh. I love his tormented landscapes, they express exactly how I usually feel, but tonight I want to show this one: white almond flowers for those I love, for all my friends, for those who hurt, for those I miss, and for the friends I still wish to make in the future.

WRITE COMMENTS about my entries!!! J’aurais du faire ca depuis longtemps mais je croyais que c’était cher ou compliqué… mais c’était gratuit et facile! Hah, first time I « switch codes » here, as we say in linguistics… Anyway, please write comments (long, short, dumb, funny, smart…) if you want to!) (I don’t know if you noticed but I’ve been trying to use accents on French words lately (well I got the é and the è but not yet the accents on other letters), and it’s making a mess on my Safari (darn Macs!) but I hope it’s working on your computers. Click on « comments » and let me know).

Words of the night, as I am waiting for my darling sister to come and visit me from Michigan (a five-hour drive, poor thing)–good thing it’s not snowing tonight! I got this new CD (from France, imagine the price!) with Les Poemes mis en musique et interpretes par George Brassens, and it’s just a delight to listen to it! My favorite song ever, on a poem from Alphonse de Lama, is Pensees des morts (French poetry is so much better when Brassens sings it!):

Voila les feuilles sans seve
Qui tombent sur le gazon,
Voila le vent qui s’eleve
Et gemit dans le vallon,
Voila l’errante hirondelle
Qui rase du bout de l’aile
L’eau dormante des marais,
Voila l’enfant des chaumieres
Qui glane sur les bruyeres
Le bois tombe des forets.

You know what I miss the most in my life? These guys! OK, that’s a VERY old picture, but we all look about the same today… kinda… Nils must have been 13 on this picture… he’s turning 20 in a few days!! Joyeux anniversaire mon frère bien-aimé, préféré, adoré!!

Questions:
I am confused and annoyed and I can’t sleep tonight. I talked with this student (not one of mine!) from India this evening about our « philosophies » regarding money and the life we want. He said he loved and wanted comfort, money, luxury, lavishness, the limo, the castle, the tennis court, and all of that stuff (which he obviously has had until now). I said that I didn’t care much about money, that it was not what made me happy, and that simple things made me happier. I also said that I believed money was the cause of all the problems in this world. The question is: aren’t I a snob for saying that? Isn’t saying such things a privilege of the West? Isn’t it true that I am allowed to think and to say such things because I actually have the chance to live in a comfortable middle-class society and not in a society where you are either very rich or very poor? Don’t I say those things just because I know that I’ll never really have to give up much of the comfort in which I live? Or is it because I also know that I’ll probably never reach true opulence and great fortune, so I try to convince myself that this « simple » life is what makes me the happiest? Haven’t I been raised in a « world » in which we were always told to care for the poor and be happy with what we had (meaning: we don’t have much but it could be worse) but really, we never cared much for the poor and we had in fact a lot? And because of this education, I have the right and the insolence to think that being extremely wealthy is bad? Agh, those questions don’t reflect well the confusion taking place in my poor (or rich?) little brain tonight (or maybe they do too well). I just want to understand this world, but the more I try, the more confused I become (and that’s just about India. Try reading Mariane Pearl’s book about how her husband was killed in Pakistan or Jean-Christophe Rufin’s descriptions of civil war, famine, dictatorship, and deportation in Ethiopia, and you’ll understand my incomprehension and puzzlement even better). I feel even dumber because I know that these questions are nothing new so there, I DO feel like a hypocrite tonight, and I DO feel like an arrogant brainless privileged white capitalist who has no idea what she’s talking about! Despise me, I probably deserve it!