Chanson d’automne

I was a champion school-cryer in my days at GFS. I cried in kindergarten when I fell off a trike and scraped the shit out of my knee, I cried in 5th grade when I forgot the rough draft of my report on the Vikings, I cried in 8th grade Latin class after failing an algebra midterm, and my last week of senior year was pretty much non-stop weeping.

Today, age almost 21 and of what I thought was sound mind, I regressed. The fact that I cannot for the life of me understand what Descartes is saying about reason and God and whatever pushed me to say profoundly stupid things in class, and eventually I just settled on “je ne sais pas” as a good catchall. Everyone else, however, was taking to Discours de la méthode just fine, which made me feel infinitely worse. Through much tooth-gritting and staring very very intently at the toes of my boots, I managed not to cry in class.

But, of course, it turned out I had failed my French test. And so I found myself clutching a sheet of graph paper hopelessly marred with red ink, breathing like an asthmatic with hiccups and stammering to my smart and dignified French professor that “I am very sorry and I am embarrassing but I am a little uneasy because I am just come from a class where I didn’t understand nothing and…voilà.”

But after many kind words from both professors and classmates alike, I dusted myself off and proceeded to the Bastille farmer’s market. For most girls, “retail therapy” means a trip to H&M and a few new pairs of leggings. For me, it means 15 eggs from a basket, four slight blemished sweet potatoes for the bargain price of one euro, a hunk of chèvre with a wrinkly white skin and a creamy inside, and three apples, produced for me from a basket by a friendly farmer when I told him “I am looking for an apple to make cooked”.

So I’ll have to reset my “This Girl Has Gone 3 Years Without Melting Down in School” sign, but tant pis. This is the price you pay to read philosophers in their original languages.