I feel like there were a few things I mentioned in passing over the past few months that I meant to flesh out in a subsequent post and didn’t get around to. I guess this is one of those posts!

French class: when I was a student in Montreal, my French was pretty good. Never enough to pass for fully fluent—except when people really weren’t paying attention, which happened surprisingly often—but I took French classes, did a summer immersion, made an effort, and even held down a job in French for a while. Then I came back to Ontario, confident in my passable French like a letter in my pocket although I almost never actually needed to use it. When I actually did need it, in my very occasional travels, I would find every time I took out my letter of semi-bilingualism the ink had faded slightly, everything was harder, foggier, less grammatically correct. In my current job, French comes up more than it has in the last 20 years and the letter is nearly written in invisible ink. If I’m reading or writing—and have all the time I need—I can basically manage, but speaking is an exercise in humiliation. Even if I know what I want to say and how to say it, I can’t get my words out nicely. And often I don’t know what I want to say and/or how to say it. Anyway, I started taking French at Alliance Francaise in March and its been really nice. Not only because the French does start to re-emerge from the depths—like invisible ink gradually appears under a gently heated page (have I exhausted this metaphor?) but because it’s fun to go to class and learn stuff. I took a full communications certificate online in 2024-25 and it was grim—the profs didn’t care, the students were rushing to do the minimum, the work alternated between too easy and nearly impossible and we were actually taught very little—Mark retaught me most of the lessons that mattered and the rest were just the profs’ weird lil obsessions. The French class is in-person (I had the option to go remote and refused—I would rather commute an hour each way than deal with a screen of black boxes again) and the students and the profs seem engaged and committed. Plus it helps with the loneliness of my actual job—it’s a conversation class so we chat through our opinions and experiences for two hours at a time. FUN! The weird thing—everything has a weird thing—is that the profs and the textbook are forever trying to pick topics we will have a lot to say about, so the conversations get very weighty and weird. What are your regrets in life, was a recent one that I wasn’t ready for at 9:30 in the morning, but others include: what constitutes friendship? how can you feel safe on social media? how can you define “healthy eating? how do you feel about your career? I will be very ill-equipped to make polite pre-Zoom chit-chat at work, but I did tell one of my classmates on Monday, “Quand tu regardes dans la vide, la vide regarde dans toi.” Soon I will be able to meet with publishers in the official language of their choosing without requiring extreme patience, although we may have to talk about the abyss. I am very excited.