97 In The Shade

It is hot as blazes. According to WGN chief meteorologist and Chicago institution Tom Skilling, the 1913 record of 97 degrees might be broken today, with heat indexes reaching 105. We've been indoors all day, moving as slowly as possible and turning the air conditioning on when we can't take it anymore. I'm dressed in a tankini top and summer weight pajama bottoms, my hair up in a clip and contact lenses in my eyballs because its too hot to wear glasses. M is in a t-shirt and madras shorts. This kind of heat causes me to hibernate as tightly as severe cold, but for some reason it makes me feels worse. Maybe it just feels that way because its summer - ask me in six months and I'll probably dream for a day when I sweat the afternoon out in my kitchen.

There's almost nothing to eat in the house but neither of us wants to go grocery shopping, so I've been excavating the pantry. I would have food delivered, but I can't muster up enough appetite to think of something I want to eat badly enough to pick up the phone and talk to someone about it, and I'd feel responsible if anyone died of heat stroke on the way to my house just so that we could eat a plate of cold sesame noodles. Here's what my spelunking has uncovered:

The remains of a 16 oz. bag of farfalle;
Two 6 oz. cans of tuna, dusty;
One 15 oz. can of Del Monte sweet peas, dusty;
One 15 oz. can of Trader Joe's whole kernel corn.

I don't really want to boil anything, but it's better than our microwave option: one freezer burnt Trader Joe's southwest chicken quesadilla to split between us, and there's no way I'm turning the oven on. I set some water to boil and grabbed a cucumber from the fridge, along with a container of kalamata olives and a jar of mayonnaise. I boiled and drained the farfalle, opened a can of tuna and plopped its contents into the same saucepan used for boiling the pasta, the heat from the pan igniting the aroma of canned fish and a sudden interest from the cat population of our household. I cut up some olives and cucumber, and tossed them in with mayo, salt and pepper. The final product looked like something out of a 1950's cookbook for children, and smelled like cat food. I plated two dishes, arranging tomato slices on the plate edges in an attempt at presentation.

It's been three weeks since the triathlon, and I've been floundering between projects. The week after the race I volunteered as a camp counselor for the final week of summer camp at the Alliance Francaise, I'll get a free class out of it. I worked with a group of five to seven-year-olds, and one week was about all I could handle. From 8:45 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. every day I herded them towards whatever project was on the schedule. I was the oldest counselor by about twenty years, which made me the obvious choice for dealing with the behaviorally challenged kids. I found myself saying things like:
"Is that really working for you?" to the seven-year-old girl who pouted and cried her way through the entire week because two children who she'd decided should be her best friends were ignoring her. When she wasn't whining and pouting, she was interrupting people, and rolling her eyes and neck.
"They're being mean to me," the pouter said, leaning into my leg and resting her tear sodden face onto my breast.
"Well, you're not being very pleasant right now," I'd say, "I don't really want to be near you either. Is pouting and crying really working for you? Maybe you should try a different strategy."

The highlight of that week was a tossup between some misunderstood lyrics to a Michael Jackson song, and signage in the break room. A sign by the coffee pot read: "It would be nice if everyone would bring some ground coffee so that we all can enjoy a cup of coffee once in a while. Thanks." It reminded me of something my teacher Tim had said about the French cultural penchant for understatement. If a French person really likes something, he explained, they're likely to say "it wasn't terrible," rather than "it was great!" A sign by the sink read: "Please wash your plates and cups after you use them. Please "DO NOT" leave them in the sink. Thank You", the quotation marks undermining what they meant to stress.

One little girl kept singing Billie Jean, but it came out: "Billie Jinx is not my love, she's just a girl who says I am the one, but Chan is not my son." At one point she asked me if it was Billie James or Billie Jinx. I asked her which she thought it was, not wanting to ruin the entertainment.

We took them on a field trip to Oak Street Beach, leading them past a sleeping bum on the sidewalk, and steering them away from an empty fifth of vodka and clusters of beer bottles scattered underneath the lifeguard's perch. One boy was transfixed by something floating in with the tide that appeared to be a decomposing tampon. "It's garbage," I said to him, "leave it alone." This worked for a few minutes, but he turned his attention to it repeatedly.

Lunch for the counselors was provided by the Alliance, and consisted of a few plates of thinly sliced cold cuts, off-brand bread, iced tea and candy bars. Every day after lunch the director asked if I'd had enough to eat. I always said yes, but I was lying. I began joining the children at their 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. snack times, and carried granola bars with me in my purse. On one particularly tiring day I walked to the closest Starbucks for a strong coffee at lunch, and witnessed a bum being asked to leave Mr. J's Dawg 'N Burger. The counselors ate together in the atrium next to a baby grand piano while the kids ran around the courtyard, and conversation usually revolved around campers who were being particularly difficult.

I took a shine to one of the girls who worked with the 8 to 12-year-olds. She had long dirty blonde hair parted far on the right side of her head, the strands cascaded across her face creating a slight Flock of Seagulls effect. The braces on her teeth were offset by a small dark hoop pierced into the right side of her lower lip, and she texted constantly on her iPhone during lunch. She wore blue metallic shorts over her pale chubby thighs, tank tops that exposed her soft belly, and flip flops. She developed an instant crush on the teenaged son of one of the instructors, he'd assisted during a cooking demonstration.
"Mireille's son?" I asked.
"Do you know her?" she asked, eyes wide.
"No, sorry," I said, "I don't have any inside information for you." At the end of the week she asked if we could be facebook friends.

That weekend M and I went to Michigan with his parents, his sister, and our seven year old niece, who was a breath of fresh air compared to the children I'd worked with all week. The six of us spent three days in a cabin on Magician Lake with no internet access. We played Clue, Scrabble and Boggle when it was cloudy, and swam, canoed and fished when it was sunny. With no computers around it felt more like a week, and we returned to Chicago refreshed, our car packed with blueberries, peaches, corn, beans, tomatoes and cucumbers from a local farm stand. I turned on the computer almost immediately after returning home, logged onto facebook, and there it was - a friendship request from my teenaged co-counselor. In her profile picture she's leaning over in a tank top with six inches of cleavage visible. I haven't decided yet whether to accept.

The Triathlon, Part V - or - how I paid my way to Cape Cod with French

I've been busy. Running, swimming and biking take up a lot of time. I'm getting better at swimming, but it's still hard. I swam 15 laps in a row once last week and was really proud of myself; I've been doing "bricks," where I do two of the three sports in quick succession; and one day I did all three parts - with breaks, over the course of about four hours.

Then I got an email about getting paid to be a test subject for a French fluency exam at Northwestern University. The timing was tight - there were two days of listening comprehension last weekend, and two days of reading comprehension next weekend which I can't do because I'll be on Cape Cod. They were testing during the week too, so I could squeeze the reading test in just before departing this Thursday for my sporty journey to the east. I could sign up to do just the listening comprehension test and get paid $280, or sign up for both and get paid $560. I've been keeping a mental list of the costs associated with the triathlon, and it goes something like this:

Flight to Boston $180
Race registration fee $65
Bike and helmet rental $50
Wetsuit rental $50
Running shoes $80
Swimming lessons $120
Total: $545

The allure of covering my triathlon costs was strong, my French fluency almost never results in cash rewards, and I can't think of another time when I was offered money in exchange for taking a standardized test. I signed up for both sections.

I heard about the test through an email from the Groupe Professionnel Francophone. I attended a couple of their meetings a few years ago while on a job search, I wanted to find a job where I could use my French skills and thought it might be a good networking opportunity. I signed up to be on their email list, and have been receiving communications from them ever since. They meet on the last Thursday of the month in the restaurant of the Renaissance Hotel on Wacker Drive, and their meetings generally start with a speaker, followed by wine and hors d'oevres. The first meeting I attended went well; the speaker was from the Haitian consulate, and I managed to speak French with a number of people without slipping into English. The next time I went, a roundish man in his fifties who recognized me from an event at the Alliance Francaise sat next to me at the bar, and after talking to me for a few minutes asked me for my number, ostensibly so that we could practice speaking French with each other. I froze and submitted to his request rather than politely declining. I sat next to him, mute and powerless, as he dialed my home phone number on his cell phone. He explained that he was doing this so that he'd have the number programmed into his phone and wouldn't lose the scrap of paper that I'd written it on. My secret hopes were realized when he held the phone to his ear and said:
"Allo?" in a tone of genuine surprise. "Someone picked up," he said to me.
"Yes, my husband," I said. I haven't been back since.

Early last Saturday morning I took the #93 California/Dodge bus from the corner of Lawrence and Kimball to the campus of Northwestern University in downtown Evanston. I hitched my bike onto the rack on the front of the bus so that I could bike the nine miles home in the afternoon, fulfilling the need for continuous training. I'd never been on the Northwestern campus, so I parked my bike and asked a woman seated on a bench nearby if the building in front of us was University Hall.
"Yes, for ze French test?" she said, in a French accent.

Inside people were milling around a lecture room on the south side of the building. My friend Carla spotted me and I sat near her, we know each other from taking classes at the Alliance Francaise and I'd forwarded the information about the test to her in case she wanted to cash in too. The woman who'd emailed us the information was standing at the front of the room with a name tag hanging around her neck on a lanyard. I asked her if I could come back on Tuesday and Wednesday for the reading portion of the test.
"I don't know," she said from under a helmet of dyed, dried and sprayed blonde hair, "I am not the one administering the test." The testing hadn't even begun and already I was being subjected to French, not just the language but the bureaucracy and minimal customer service. If this had been a test for English, the woman wearing a lanyard would have distributed pencils at the door and thanked us all for taking time out of our weekends to join her for this important, final phase in creating a fluency exam. I sat down and waited for the test administrator, whoever that might be.

A slight, gray-haired man in ironed khakis and a polo shirt entered the room carrying a stack of test booklets. He placed them at a podium at the front of the room and addressed us in a calm, French accented voice. There was a problem, he said. The announcement about the tests had resulted in an overwhelming response, and while he was very happy with the turnout, there were only twenty-five test booklets and about fifty of us in the room. Would it be possible for half of us to leave and come back on Monday? A handful of people stood up and left the room. Someone asked if it was possible to make copies of the test booklets. Yes, the man said, but this would take time, and the test had to start in a few minutes. The woman seated to my left suggested that we split into two rooms, and each room take a different section of the test, since there were four sections to be administered. It took a few minutes for the ironed-pants man to consider this logic; it was out of the box thinking, and he was staying true to the French ideal of making everything more complicated than it needs to be. Eventually he acquiesced.

The booklets were distributed, along with answer sheets. The test was multiple choice, and the answer sheet had round circles to be filled in with a number 2 pencil, like the SATs. At the top of the page there was a spot for marking our name, test section, and testing location. Near that were sections asking for military rank: officer, enlisted, or civilian, and branch of service: army, navy, air force, marines, or other. I'd had a hint that this was for the Department of Defense, the email had mentioned something called the Defense Language Institute. I felt a sudden pang of discomfort, and soothed myself with the thought that at least I'd be getting some of my war tax dollars back, and since I was doing this in the name of physical fitness it couldn't be that much of a conflict of interest. I signed a confidentiality agreement stating that I won't divulge the contents of the exam, so I can't tell you what the questions were or I'll end up on a list somewhere.

I spent ten hours over the course of the weekend in that room listening to recorded questions emanating from a small CD player propped up at the podium, and filling in circles with a pencil. Although I wasn't directly interacting with anyone, by the end my fellow test takers were getting on my nerves. As time passed, the amount of sneezing, coughing, and sighing increased markedly. One person even blew their nose as the rest of the room strained to listed to an audio question.

There were more subtle annoyances too, things that ordinarily wouldn't bother me became irritating due to close proximity and time elapsed. One woman showed up to the test wearing a dress made from fabric that had the map of Paris printed on it, just in case anyone was wondering why she was in the room, and a woman in the front row did everything possible to draw attention to herself. Her hair was cut short and dyed dark red, and she wore chunky Chanel glasses frames. She sat on the far left side of the room, and adjusted her chair so that she was sitting at a jaunty angle to the rest of us. She made a grand demonstration of erasing pencil marks from her answer sheet and brushing away the eraser remains with her right hand, creating continuous background noise to our test-taking activities. During breaks she turned around in her seat and asked questions like:
"What did you put down for number twenty-seven?". On the second day of testing I arrived early to find her writing things on the blackboard and explaining the finer points of French grammar to the only other person who had shown up as early as me.

Annoyances aside, it was a satisfying experience. I got paid for using my brain, got to pretend I was a student at a prestigious university for a couple days, and the bike ride home was gorgeous. I headed west to McCormick Boulevard and followed the North Channel Trail all the way home, and even spotted a baby bunny on the way. Yesterday I went back for the first two parts of the reading comprehension test, which was easier since everyone goes at their own pace and there's no audio cues to listen for. Today I'll bike to the Y to swim my 15 laps, and then take my bike onto the #93 up to Evanston for the two remaining sections of the reading test. Then I'll come home and pack my things for the flight to Boston in the morning. Four days and counting till the triathlon...

Happy Christian Passover

There are a number of words that don’t translate literally from French to English. The word for seventy, for instance, translates as sixty ten, eighty translates as four twenties, and ninety translates as four twenties and ten. It seems like a small concession to make in order to maintain the poetry of the language, until you have to discuss an event that occurred between the years of 1969 and 2000. I’ve never gotten a good answer as to why the numbers for seventy through ninety-nine simply don't exist in French.

“It’s just like that,” my instructors will say, or “it’s leftover from Latin.”

Leave it to Wikipedia to give me a more satisfying answer. According to this entry, the French counting system is partially vigesimal, meaning it is based on counting in twenties. This habit was officially sanctioned after the French Revolution to unify different counting systems across the country. At the time there were a number of different languages spoken in France, including Breton, which was highly influenced by Celtic – a language with a counting system similar to the archaic English use of score, as in fourscore and seven to mean 87, or threescore and ten to mean 70.

Oh sure, there are words that make more sense in French; for instance the letter W is called double V instead of the English double U, but what about the use of green lemon as the word for lime, and more importantly - why is the French word for Passover “Jewish Easter”?

Apparently the same is true in many languages, and a cursory Google search reveals that the Hebrew word for Passover is pesach; when this word was adopted into Greek it remained unchanged, as well as in languages like Italian, Dutch and French. Once Christianity began to spread, there were seemingly no efforts made to distinguish Passover from Easter linguistically.

I’m no scholar on the subject, but it seems to me that if tonight marks the first night of Jewish Easter, then on Sunday there will be marked increases in church attendance as legions of believers observe Christian Passover.

So... Happy Jewish Easter to some of you, Happy Christian Passover to others, and to all of you I wish a very Happy Day-After-Easter-Half-Price-Candy-Shopping. I’ll be in the bargain aisle at Walgreen’s if you're looking for me.