I Would Read That

It’s a long haul

One of the things I’ve been doing in France to pay the bills is advising people on how to prepare their business school applications.

The people are bright and accomplished, sometimes preposterously so. They come from selective schools with big, juicy GMAT scores. They’re fast-trackers in competitive industries with impressive-sounding amounts of responsibility. Many of them are even interesting.

Despite their unblemished records of achievement, the B-school application process can be humbling. They have to dig deep to write essays about their long-term goals, what makes them stand out from the crowd, and what they regret—questions most of us would just as soon avoid. Mucking about in that gap between who we are and who we want to be is not for the faint of heart, and it takes a leap of courage to lay your dreams at the feet of others with only the hope that they’ll tread lightly upon them.

For me, though, it’s kind of fun. I get to play mother confessor, psychologist, life coach, writing teacher, and drill sergeant all rolled into one. The job is easier when the clients come to me already softened up. An evening of trawling the Internet is usually sufficient to find out that they’re just one among scads of smart, accomplished, and ambitious people aspiring to go to the same handful of programs.

You can almost see them glancing furtively over their shoulder, as if being pursued by a phalanx of candidates brandishing their Leadership Potential, armed with fluency in six languages and abiding interests in wine connoisseurship, kite surfing, and Noh theater.

You’d be afraid, too, if they were right behind you.

“I’m not original enough! What can I write about?”

Their concerns are not entirely misplaced. After all, these are people who have succeeded largely by conforming, not by being particularly original.

“Everyone is unique,” I say, reassuring them. “The more your essays are a pure expression of you, the more distinct and compelling they’ll be.”

They eye me warily as I explain that it’s not so much about content as voice. They don’t really understand what I’m talking about at that point, but they can see that I do, so they go along with me, letting my confidence ooze into the gaps where their own has drained away.

Of course, I don’t mention how difficult it is to find one’s voice. The clients who come to me thinking that my job is to help them fix their grammar errors find out soon enough how many emotional buttons get pushed as they sort out the answers to three basic questions: What is your long-term goal? Why is an MBA (from school X) necessary to achieve that goal? What have you done up to this point that would give someone reason to believe that you are likely to achieve your goal?

And so I nudge them along toward their Joycean epiphanies. I help them spin a narrative arc out of the seemingly unremarkable flow of ordinary life, and when they get too comfortable hanging around with the easy-going “whats” I steer them back to the demanding “whys.” ‘Why did you make that decision? Why was that moment so important to you? Why does this episode stick in your mind?’

I can’t work miracles, but I can usually coax them into producing something that is clear, has a certain coherence of style, and, most importantly, is insightful and honest. And when everything goes well, they come out of the process with the confidence to pursue a life trajectory that they themselves had been unsure of at the outset.

***

“Career Counseling”
Edvard Munch

I suspect that one of the reasons I was initially drawn to this work is because on some level I believed that by helping other people understand themselves it would help me bring the same lucidity and self-assurance to the task of sorting out my own life.

This has generally not proven to be the case.

I enjoy the catharsis of breaking something down and then building it back up. The predictability of the process is soothing—particularly when it turns out well for the client, as it usually does—and there’s enough variation in each case to keep things interesting. It’s like watching a genre film.

But that’s the problem—people watch genre films because their tropes are familiar, not because they’re likely to offer any great new insights. After a while, I realized that I was gleaning some interesting stories, but personally, I wasn’t learning a whole lot about myself.

At least not until Mae Lin came along.

She was the best of the best—she’d survived cutthroat academic competition in China and come to France without knowing the language to get a degree at the country’s top engineering school before getting another master’s degree at its most prestigious school of commerce. Now she was a star in the asset securitization department (think: credit default swaps) in one of the largest banks in the world and she had her sights set on an MBA from one of the top five schools in the U.S.

At our first session, I gave her my spiel on how to construct her essays. She wrote everything down, nodding the whole time, so I’d had high expectations for our second meeting.

Instead, her first drafts were catalogues of academic achievements with the standard bouquet of shopworn strengths—’curious,’ ‘hard-working,’ and ‘smart’—and confessions to weaknesses such as ‘working too much’ and ‘planning ahead too far.’

I sighed. This was the kind of stuff you get when you don’t have an initial meeting. I shuffled through the rest of the papers and skimmed through the main Stanford essay. “What is most important to you in life and how is this reflected in your professional objectives?”

She’d started the essay with a quote about making a difference in people’s lives and then used the rest of her 750 words to say that she is different because she excels at everything she does.

“Ummm….you kind of missed the mark on this one,” I said. “Making a difference in people’s lives isn’t the same as being different.”

She looked at me, apparently expecting more in the way of an explanation.

“The idea here is to identify some kind of fundamental principle or value—or even a specific goal—that guides your most important decisions,” I said. “’Making a difference’ is that kind of thing, but honestly, finance isn’t exactly one of the helping professions…”

She waited.

“…and you have no record whatsoever of volunteer work or philanthropic activity, so I think that ‘making a difference’ is going to be a tough sell unless you’re trying to be ironic…”

She waited.

I waited.

I didn’t need a laugh—just a chuckle of comprehension so that we could move on.

“I don’t understand what they want me to say.”

“Think of it this way,” I said. “What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning? What excites you?”

She stared back at me blankly.

To be fair, this is the kind of question that elicits a deer-in-the-headlights reaction from most people, but typically they recover their wits, and within half an hour, we can find a few core values and primary objectives, and then trace out their influence at key life junctures.

She struggled in silence for a few moments, so I started tossing out ideas, hoping that something would come to her.

Finally, it did. “I want to be the best!” she said, her face lighting up.

“OK, good!” I said. Not a super promising start, but it got the ball rolling. “At what?”

“At everything!”

“OK, good! So why is it important for you to be the best at everything?”

Her face went dark again. The ball had stopped.

“Why do you want to be the best?”

She thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do. Isn’t that enough?”

Was it? She’d caught me off guard with that one. Maybe it was. It hadn’t been for me. I’d cycled through that life goal in adolescence and early adulthood, only to eventually realize that it was empty, nothing more than a deeply ingrained habit born out of so many years of trying to please people who could never be made happy.

I hesitated to press the question. This wasn’t about me, after all. I certainly didn’t want to project my issues onto her, but something didn’t feel right. It’s one thing to take pride in doing something (or, if you’re really driven, everything) as well as you can, but the idea of wanting to be better than everyone else at everything you do…that merits a few follow-up questions. In any event, we were still 744 words short of an essay, and this broad, unfocused ambition couldn’t explain why she’d choose one particular professional objective over another.

“Think about it…there must be some reason…” I said, my hand hovering at the white board, ready to jot down whatever she came up with. “Or how about this…what would happen if you weren’t the best?”

She gazed into the middle distance, nonplussed. That possibility had evidently never occurred to her before.

“Well,” she said slowly, “I guess it’s because I want my parents to be proud of me…I want to make them happy.”

I capped my marker and sank down onto my chair. ‘So this is it,’ I thought, stunned into a strange admixture of elation and despondence. With an anticlimactic fizzle, the lifelong search for my grail had finally come to an end. It was as if I’d stumbled on it—long after having given up looking—in some stupid place where I never would have thought to look, like behind the refrigerator. And yet there it was, right in front of me, bathed in a halo of florescent light:

The Daughter My Parents Had Always Wanted.

‘What luck!’ I thought. In all these years, it had never once crossed my mind that I could provide that daughter without actually having to be her. I considered asking Mae Lin if I could bring her with me to Arizona on my next trip to visit my father. She could fill in for me so that I could be both myself and the ideal daughter, at least by proxy, which was fine with me. I figured he’d be OK with it too. Heck, the last time I saw him, he looked straight at me as I approached in the airport arrivals hall, waving and shouting “Dad! Dad,” and didn’t show a flicker of recognition until I had stopped right in front of him.

“Seriously, you don’t even recognize me?” I said. It had only been nine months. “My hair’s the same color, the same length…I haven’t gained or lost weight…my clothes haven’t changed—”

“I just couldn’t figure out why some person was looking at me like that and waving.”

Sadly, though, this was all coming too late for my mother. She would have really appreciated a daughter unencumbered by the notion that she’s a distinct person with her own desires. A daughter like Mae Lin wouldn’t have “made waves” with all those uncomfortable ‘why’ questions and inconvenient truths that I had been so fond of, even more so when I realized their power to antagonize. ‘My mother would have adored her—’

I leaned back and pushed the heels of my hands into my forehead, trying to stem the meltdown in my head, hoping that I appeared deep in thought over how to salvage this essay…

‘…I can’t even believe this…you waltz in here, and just like that…you don’t even have to do anything at all, and now YOU’RE the favorite one…all upwardly mobile with your perfect job and your manicured nails and your fur-collared coat…and to top it all off, you don’t even care why you’re doing all of this as long as you make mommy proud and happy??? ARE YOU F%&#ING KIDDING ME? I HATE you! How can you be like that? Why couldn’t I have been like that? Where did I go wrong? NO…it’s pathetic…who wants to be like that? But how do you do it? How is it so easy for you to be YOU?’

I was losing my mind. In less than a minute, I’d managed to conjure up a sibling and a rivalry with which I was roundly tormenting myself. It was familiar territory, though, which may seem odd given that I’m an only child. I suspect most people embellish their real siblings with all sorts of imagined qualities and intentions and motivations, and it’s the imagined versions who cause more psychological turmoil than their flesh-and-blood counterparts. The difference for an only child is that there’s no physical manifestation of the presumed Favorite One, just the persistent sense that it’s not you. When Mae Lin came along, I finally had an actual person to attach all these emotions to and recognize them for what they were.

So here I was, face to face with the Favorite One. She had everything that I was supposed to have had, from the lucrative career in finance (which I’d rejected) to the manicured fingernails (which I’d failed miserably at maintaining). She was responsible and industrious and eager to please, and she never betrayed the slightest hint of resentment about being that way. Most of all, though, she was nearing 30 and still hadn’t tired of being responsible for her parents’ happiness.

This is who they wanted me to be? Really?

They could have her.

***

We plodded along for the next couple of weeks without much improvement from draft to draft.

For the “most important thing in life,” she tried out ideas like “perfection,” doggedly unaware of how loathsome this made her seem.

Sometimes all the markers in the world aren’t enough to fill a page

“So you want to be perfect,” I said. “Are you perfect now?”

“No—”

“Do you think you ever will be?”

“Oh, no, not at all—”

“So you want to spend your whole life striving for something that you will inevitably fail to achieve?”

There was an easy rejoinder to this. All she had to say was something about the importance of the journey, not the endpoint. She could have worked in her Asian origins and invoked the example of a quest for spiritual enlightenment—knowing that you will never totally achieve it doesn’t negate the value of trying.

Instead, she shrank away, traumatized.

‘Ha! The Favorite One’s not so clever, is she?’

For the essay on her biggest failure in life? Taking on too much work for her first securitization project. What did it cost her? She had to work later than everyone else on the team. What did she learn? How to say ‘no.’

She insisted that there was no ‘better’ failure in her life that we could use, so I called upon my white board and erasable markers to work their alchemical magic. Voilà, they came through for me again, taking this crappy raw material and turning it into a pivotal transition from academic to professional life. Indeed, it was nothing less than a coming-of-age moment in which she emerged as a self-directed agent, responsible for setting her own goals and capable of establishing her own boundaries. We ended with a flourish, suggesting that learning how to manage her manager had been her first step on the path toward assuming leadership roles.

Whatever we discussed, she’d nod and write it all down. It would come back to me a few days later for revisions, usually stripped of any subtlety and most of its insight.

As time wore on, finding her story felt more and more like giving her one. I actually did want her to succeed—if for no other reason than to honor my professional commitment and to further my own ambitions—but my resentment was starting to build.

‘Why is it my job to give her a personality?’ I fumed. ‘She’s the perfect Favorite One. If she’s so great, let her figure it out!’

Beneath this seething contempt, though, I did actually feel bad for her. Being the favorite is no great prize. I imagine it’s a gilded cage, difficult to leave because you have everything to lose by doing so. Now that I’d found the Favorite One and realized that it would never, ever be me, I could stop trying to bear that burden. I was finally liberated.

Ultimately, my moments of irrational anger were kept in check as it occurred to me that outside of my little manufactured reality into which Mae Lin had unwittingly stepped, things may have been quite different. Like me, she’s an only child, and if she’s still worrying at her age about what would make her parents proud, then maybe she too is still competing with an imagined sibling, desperately hoping that one day she’ll be the Favorite One.

****************************************************************************************

Pictures from

Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

Business dragging: © 3q2q1q

Two scary people pointing: © Netris

Edvard Munch’s company men: © Chrisharvey

Nothing there: © Tomloel

Napoleon’s Alma Mater

My brain is a compulsive hoarder. Like most compulsive hoarders, it’s not a very good organizer, so it spends a lot of time rummaging around looking for stuff, pulling up all kinds of odd little fragments of memories that it wasn’t searching for, flinging them willy-nilly up the basement stairs into my consciousness.

It does this so much that I’ve become used to all the crap that accumulates on the landing. Without even realizing it, I walk around it, step over it, kick it absent-mindedly back down into the subconscious. I’ve stopped seeing the little piles of clutter, just as people who live near airports stop hearing the roar of jet engines after a while, and farmers aren’t bothered by the stench of manure.

Every now and again, though, something turns up that makes me stop what I’m doing, look down, and wonder, “Why in the world is that here?”

***

In late October, I was preparing a presentation on the U.S. elections for high-ranking officers at the École Militaire.

The school—France’s West Point and National War College rolled into one—invited me because I have sufficient “presence” (read: age) and “credentials” (read: degrees and publications) to carry weight with people who spend their lives preoccupied with authority. The gigs are small and the Ministry of Defense is an egregiously slow payer. The money actually wouldn’t be so bad if I had potted presentations ready to go, but these are one-off things for which I typically have to do research, find visuals, and put everything together in a slick little PowerPoint. In terms of the hourly rate equivalent for all the work that goes into it, it’s not the best use of my time.

But I like doing it. It’s sort of fun to visit Napoleon’s alma mater, with its ankle-breaking cobblestones and unobstructed views of the Eiffel Tower.

I end up learning a lot, too. My previous presentation was just after the Iowa caucuses, and since I’ve caucused in Iowa myself, I thought I’d liven it up with an “insider’s” perspective. As I was cueing up a video clip, I gave a cursory overview of voter registration.

“The trend has been toward making it easier for people to participate,” I said. “For the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses, you could register and declare your party affiliation on the day of the caucus.”

The officers looked confused. “So there’s a way to make the card right there?”

“What card?”

“The card that says you’re in the party.”

“There’s no card—”

American party card

“Then how do they know you’re in the party?”

“You’ve just told them!”

They mulled this over for a moment.

“In France,” one of the colonels explained patiently, “If we’re in a party, then we have a card that we carry in our wallets to prove that we’re in that party.”

“Yeah, I get the concept,” I said. “But what is there to prove? In America, you just say ‘I want to be a Republican’ and voilà, you’re a Republican!”

“Just like that? With no card?”

“Yep. Just like that. No card.”

I paused just to make sure this sank in.

“They must send the card later,” another colonel piped up, breaking the silence.

“NO! There are no cards! Not now, not later….no cards! You’re just gonna have to take my word for it on this one.”

They still seemed unconvinced, and their insistence was starting to make me wonder if maybe the expression “card-carrying member” wasn’t just a metaphoric vestige of a previous era.

“Look, let’s drop the card thing for now,” I said, launching the video. “We can come back to it. Let’s just watch the video. You’ll understand everything then.”

The video showed inspiring examples of self-organized participatory democracy: politicians in close contact with the citizens; ordinary people giving voice to their concerns; caucusers articulating their views, trying to persuade their neighbors, weighing the importance of expressing their true candidate preferences against strategic considerations of viability…

They saw a freak show: packs of people festooned in buttons and brandishing signs; opposing camps engaged in primitive chanting duels; a cheerful guy wearing a t-shirt with ABORTION IS MURDER in dripping, blood-red letters; a candidate gamely posing for photographs with the snowman who’d just interrupted his event to protest global warming…

The clip ended, and the officers shifted awkwardly in their seats. They still looked confused. And a little appalled. But at least one thing had been cleared up.

“Now we understand. You don’t need cards.”

***

Le Roi takes his meals in bed

This time I wanted to do better. It’s not that it had gone badly before, but we had been talking past each other much of the time.

I’d certainly learned a lot, and I suppose they’d learned something as well, though not necessarily what I’d hoped to convey. Time after time, I’d lay the groundwork leading up to a key point only to have the potentially teachable moment washed away by a tangential question that left me flummoxed or pulled us into an off-topic discussion.

I’d set aside two hours to complete the presentation, which was already too much relative to the pay, but an unseasonably warm breeze and brilliant sunshine were pouring through the window and the dog was lying next to me, so I was content, totally absorbed in my task. I clicked first on one thing, which led to another, which made me wonder about something else, which raised a question on an altogether unrelated topic. Before long I had half a dozen browser windows open and was shuttling between them and PowerPoint.

The next time I looked at the clock, three and a half hours had gone by. The presentation was only half finished. Annoyed with myself, I started to snap shut one browser window after another and decided to take a break. As I absent-mindedly poured warm Diet Coke over ice cubes and watched it surge up and overrun the rim of the glass, an image flashed into my head of an old photograph taken when I was about eight years old.

It didn’t look this nice on that day

There are four of us—me, my friend Wendy, my father, and a snowmobile—on the ice of Lake Delavan, Wisconsin. It’s an odd picture, because each of the four figures is several feet from the other, all occupying a slightly different position on the visual plane, and none facing quite the same direction. It’s as if we’re all there, but not together.

It was bitterly cold and windy that day. My father is hunched up under his dark brown car coat, and I’m recognizable only as a navy blue blob, my face almost entirely submerged in the hood of my snorkel parka. Wendy, never the outdoorsy type, was in a smart wool plaid coat with matching white gloves and hat. She couldn’t have been warm out there, but she was the only one looking directly into the camera and smiling.

***

Fortified with caffeine and rededicated to the task, I vowed to stop the aimless reading and focus on the slides, but once this spasm of self-admonishment loosened its grip, my attention started to wander again. PowerPoint had amassed a bewildering array of doodads since I’d learned the program way-back-when, so I started playing around with them and experimenting with all the fancy formats and colors. It was kind of fun, but after a while, it occurred to me that I was off track again.

I started to berate myself, but before I went too far down that path a second time, I made a critical shift in my thinking.

“I’m not wasting time! This is professional development!”

I reckoned that even if the content wasn’t recyclable, I could polish up my PowerPoint skills, which might be useful somewhere down the line. Armed with a worthwhile new objective, I settled back into my sunny corner to finish the presentation at a leisurely pace. Everything was humming along just fine until I wanted to put an image into an oval-shaped field with a soft edge that gradually faded away, but I couldn’t even get past step one—finding the oval.

I swear, this is not in my version

I found a rectangle with the short sides rounded off like a racetrack, and I dug up all kinds of weird things like rhombuses and trapezoids, but no oval. I kept searching, and the more the oval eluded me, the more it seemed that the success of the entire presentation hinged on it.

My contact lenses were clouding over and my neck had started to ache. I couldn’t remember which menus I’d already gone through, so I was trying every option two or three times. I battled on like this until it finally dawned on me that the sun was almost down, the room was getting cold, and I had nothing to show for my day. I certainly hadn’t mastered PowerPoint if I couldn’t even make a stupid fuzzy oval. The presentation wasn’t finished. And my effective hourly rate, never much to begin with, was starting make assembling iphones for Foxconn seem attractive.

I took the dog for a walk to clear my head. My thoughts were balled up and spinning around, like wet socks twisted up in a bed sheet in a tumble dryer. When one of them finally broke free, I was on Lake Delavan again.

Melt value: $.20

My father was going to take me and Wendy around on the snowmobile, but it wasn’t big enough for both of us to go at once, so we had to take turns. My father took an Eisenhower dollar out of his pocket and held it in front of me.

“I’ll give you a choice,” he said. “Do you want the silver dollar, or do you want the first ride?”

The answer was obvious.

“First ride! I want the first ride!”

I don’t like to think that I was gloating, but I was pretty satisfied with myself. Not only was I getting the first ride, but I was getting it because my father had made it mine for the taking! It was a clever move—picking me without making it look like he was playing favorites.

“Aaawww, jeeezzuzzz, you’ve gotta be kidding me! What kind of a dummy are you?!”

My father has never been one to allow much to intervene between what’s in his head and what comes out of his mouth, a tendency I’ve inherited and had to work on toning down over the years

“Why would you do that?” he asked, dismayed.

I really hadn’t seen this coming. Even at that age, I was adept at anticipating his mercurial flashes of temper, or, failing that, getting out of the way of them as quickly as possible, but this one had caught me flat-footed.

“You really don’t see why you should’ve picked the dollar?”

I shook my head.

He turned to Wendy, who I’d just realized had been as happy about my choice as I had been before I found out that it was the wrong one. “Explain it to her.”

“In the end, we both get the same number of rides, and I get to keep the money.”

That had never occurred to me. The logic was impressive, though. I could at least spot common sense, even if I didn’t have it myself.

“OK,” I said, hoping it wasn’t too late to redeem myself. “I’ll take the dollar.”

“It’s too late now,” he said, exasperated. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

It was one of those teachable moments.

***

The processing of this event started that very evening, when my parents explained to me that Wendy had “street smarts,” whereas I just had “book smarts.” They might have meant this as a reassuring acknowledgment of the diverse faces of humanity, and there’s a possibility they didn’t use the word “just,” but it was there all the same, and over time, the idea that savvy, practical, “real world” intelligence was preferable to the nose-in-a-book-all-the-time kind developed into one of the core tropes of my childhood.

Since then, I’ve dusted this episode off and looked at it several times over the years, and on each occasion, I’ve seen something different. In my 20s, I relived the anger and shame of being humiliated in front of my friend, but those feelings stopped bubbling up a long time ago. If I had to imagine what was in my father’s head that day, I think it would be sort of like the sensation I have when I’m teaching and can see that some students are lost and starting to give up. In an effort to bring them back in and build their sense of mastery, I occasionally pitch one of them a softball question that no one could possibly get wrong. And yet they do!

It’s not a very good teaching technique, because when it works, the benefit is relatively small, and when it backfires, the damage is enormous. Not only does the student remain lost, but now he’s also embarrassed. When that happens, I inevitably redirect some of the anger at myself for having created the situation and become annoyed with the student. “How, how, how is it POSSIBLE that you could have heard this explanation 87 times and STILL not get it?”

I’ve never actually said that, but the temptation has certainly been there, and I’m sure that they can sometimes read it on my face, so am I really any better than my father? At least his outburst was honest.

When the vignette resurfaced many years later, it stirred up long buried resentment over the fact that my parents expected me to spring from the womb as a fully formed adult. Although I tried my best to become a grownup as quickly as possible—and was, of the three people in the household, quite often the only one—my progress was inconsistent and I was always behind schedule.

They’re still hugging the bear

At a certain point, however, those emotions dissipated, and the episode became just another example of growing up in the bizarro-land of my parents’ idiosyncratic—and rather distorted—world views. The notion that I was supposed to have acquired “street smarts” by the age of 8, living in a middle-class suburb whose civic slogan was “Hug the Bear,” with parents so controlling that I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike beyond a two-block radius from home is so absurd that even I—the very person whose lack of practical intelligence was seen as a congenital defect, not as the consequence of having been denied the means to develop it—can see the humor in it.

And now, going on 40 years later, here they were again—the dollar, the snowmobile, Wendy, my father, the frozen lake. This time, I didn’t feel any anger or resentment. Just sadness. And discouragement. Instead of sticking to a plan that would’ve made this job just barely profitable, I’d wasted a whole day doing stupid things and was working for peanuts as a result.

“I guess you just can’t escape who you are,” I thought. Even after all these years of being on my own, I was still making the wrong choices. Evidently my lack of a practical head for business was something I’d always have to struggle with.

To top it all off, I wasn’t even ‘book smart’ anymore. I was just ‘wikipedia smart.’

***

Best views of the Eiffel Tower

The presentation went even better than I’d expected. All of my “shock and awe” moments came off as planned as I explained the absurdities of the electoral college, partisan control of redistricting, and the rise in restrictive voting laws. The discussion was lively, and I was ready for all their questions on everything from foreign policy to campaign financing and communication strategies.

“Are the problems of the electoral college talked about in the U.S.?”

“Sure, everyone knows it’s ridiculous. It can’t be defended on principle—”

“So is anyone trying to get rid of it?”

“Hahahahahaha! Nooooooooo!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not in anyone’s interest to do so. Until there’s a sufficient number of people who see it in their political interest to change the system, nothing will happen.”

Their finely honed Cartesian minds were having difficulty processing this. The logical progression from i) “system is flawed” and ii) “everyone knows it is flawed” should be iii) “people will fix the system.” Not fixing it, or not even trying to fix it, didn’t compute.

“This is very American.”

“Yes, it is!” I beamed. As the presentation wound up, I was feeling slightly giddy with a renewed, slightly perverse, sense of pride in a country whose political institutions are messed up, whose political culture is messed up, and yet still keeps bumbling merrily along despite itself.

After the event, I had to get across town quickly for another job. I started out across the cobblestone quadrangle toward the guard shack and had covered about twenty feet before I realized that, in my haste, I’d forgotten to change out of my high heels into flat shoes.

Apparently no one has ever reset the cobblestones since Louis XV had them put there, so now they’re separated from one another by deep crevices, and the edges are so worn down that there isn’t a single one with a flat surface on top that was big enough for even a small foot.

I wasn’t about to change my shoes in the middle of the open space where everyone could see me, so I kept going, lurching and weaving like a doomed deer flailing around on a frozen lake in one of those nature shows.

And there, as I picked my way across the courtyard, the episode came to me again in a flash, and I was seized by a thought that had never once entered my mind in over three decades of periodically revisiting the silver dollar, the snowmobile ride, and the ice of Lake Delavan:

What was wrong with wanting the first ride?

Sometimes a few hundred thousand isn’t enough

Dear French Language,

We need to talk.

We’ve been together now just over two years. Not a long time as relationships go, but long enough to get a sense of how things are working out.

Let me start by saying that I really admire you. I’m sure you have many sterling qualities. You’re certainly as beautiful as any language I’ve ever heard. I respect your literary traditions. I even like your little grammatical idiosyncrasies, difficult as some of them are to master.

But despite all of this, I just don’t love you.

Before you say anything, I’ll admit that I haven’t been putting as much energy into this relationship as I should. I haven’t devoted a lot of time to you in the last year, and I’m aware that my ongoing thing with English Language comes between us. And, yes, I know that there’s still much about you that I haven’t discovered yet. This is all true.

But there’s one major problem here that I’m not sure we can get past.

You have no words.

OK, maybe not NO words, but, seriously, if I hear, “We don’t have a word for that,” once more, I may lose my mind.

I’ve read studies that claim that English Language, with something like a million words, is the biggest. Others refute this and offer the usual reassurances to languages like you—things like “a couple of hundred thousand words is plenty” and “size doesn’t matter; it’s what you do with it.”

I can’t speak for anyone else, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s just no substitute for the pleasures of an enormous vocabulary.

I realized early on that there was a problem, but I’ve been reluctant to bring it up. Soon after I arrived in France, I looked up the word for “earnest” and found sincere. So then I looked up the word for “sincere” and found…sincere.

At the time, I blamed myself. I thought it was my fault for using an abridged dictionary. But then I got a better dictionary and realized that it wasn’t me—it was you! You don’t distinguish between these two concepts!

The difference is subtle—sincerity is admirable; earnestness gets on your nerves after ten minutes—but it’s important, especially in a relationship. If I were to confess my feelings for you, and you were to tell me that you appreciated the sincerity of my affection, would that mean that you were emotionally moved? Or that you were mocking me?

Do you see how you make it hard to establish a foundation of trust here?

And what about ignorer? With English Language, things are simple. “To ignore” is to deliberately not pay attention. But you like to be vague about your intentions. For you, ignorer can mean either “to ignore” or “to be ignorant/unaware of” something.

So if I happen to mention that you’re not meeting my needs, and you give me one of those gallic shrugs and say, “je les ai ignorés,” how should I interpret this? That you were ignoring them? Or that you were innocently unaware of them?

I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that you’re just not invested in this relationship. As a language, one of your most important roles is to clarify conceptual differences and assign names to them. Instead, you just want to use the same word for a hundred different things and then leave all the work to everyone else to sort out the meanings based on the context, the tone of voice, and a whole lot of pantomime. Of course, all languages do this, but you take it to absurd extremes.

La Baguette Magique

Take, for example, chopsticks. You call these baguettes. It’s the same word you use for a long loaf of white bread, a conductor’s baton, a magic wand, a drumstick, a divining rod, and a penis.

English Language sees a vast conceptual difference between these objects and does not want to risk confusing them.

True, it’s unlikely that a philharmonic conductor would stop a performance to look for underground aquifers or that a Japanese restaurant would employ a wizard to serve baskets of French bread. But let’s talk about the time when I, tired and hungry in an unfamiliar part of town, was overjoyed to stumble upon a place called La Baguetterie. Can you imagine my bitter disappointment when, looking through the window, I saw percussion instruments, and not the delectable baked goods I had expected?

This is the kind of deception that is not easily forgotten.

I know you find these double entendres absolutely hilarious, but don’t forget that you also think Jerry Lewis is riotously funny (just sayin’). Sure, skilled word play can be amusing, but English Language is capable of that as well, and for every clever play on words you come up with, there are probably twenty examples of how you use three times the number of words as English to convey half as much meaning.

“Rattlesnake” is a case in point. Serpent à sonnettes.

Serpent with doorbells?! How do you come up with this stuff?!

Let’s start with the fact that you don’t distinguish between a serpent and a snake. Oh, you think there’s no difference, do you? Listen, if somebody tells you that you have a snake in your garden, then depending on your disposition toward wildlife in general and snakes in particular, you might decide to leave it alone, or you might fetch a sturdy spade to dispatch it.

“…and the sinners shall be dragged into hell by the instruments of their sin…the lascivious by their baguettes…”

But if a serpent shows up in your garden, then you’ve got problems. Big ones. You’d better find an ark, and fast.

You see, a serpent is a snake of deep figurative meanings, of biblical or mythological significance. Granted, the idea of getting bitten by a serpent is sort of thrilling—right up there with being captured by a dragon—but sometimes a snake is just a snake.

And sonnette? What’s up with that? You actually have a word for rattle—hochet. Why not use it? Even serpent à hochets would be an improvement because a rattlesnake actually sounds like—guess what!—a rattle.

All I can figure is that back in the 1700s, a bunch of old coots in the Académie Française were reading dispatches sent back from the New World by semi-literate trappers trying to describe the exotic fauna they had encountered. Without being able to hear or see a rattlesnake, maybe this was the best they could come up with. Perhaps the idea of changing it has even been raised in the intervening centuries, but I’m sure it would’ve been met with protracted discussion, the outcome of which would’ve been that changing it would either 1) undermine French culture and tradition, or 2) involve too much paperwork.

I know you think that I’m overstating my case because sonnette just means “thing that makes a sound” and it’s applied to a whole host of noisy things including bells, buzzers, alarms, pile drivers, and snake rattles. But that just gets us back to square one—why on earth don’t you have a dedicated word for doorbell?!

I guess the thing that worries me the most is that you don’t even seem to have a good relationship with the people who’ve known you their whole lives. I’ve tried to learn more about you by eavesdropping (écouter de façon indiscrète) on them in cafés and watching them on television, but more often than not, they seem incapable of finishing a complete sentence. They trail off with something like, “mais fin…c’est ça, du coup…tu vois…ehhhhh…(shrug)…voilà!”

The fact that you make them walk around all day with access to so few words doesn’t seem to bother them, though. They’re Cartesians—they think, therefore they are—so if they have no word for something, then it, by definition, does not exist. Like “slush.”

One day, without a dictionary at hand, I tried to elicit the French word for slush with various descriptions—semi-frozen water, something between ice and water, a kind of suspension of ice in water—none of which yielded a glimmer of recognition.

We are from France. We have no slush.

“We don’t have that in France.”

“Yes, you do! I’ve seen French slush! I’ve stepped in French slush!”

“In France, water is either frozen or not frozen. There’s nothing in between.”

You’d think I was an Inuit with a complex taxonomy for 100 kinds of frozen precipitation. In desperation, I did a Google image search to prove the existence of slush.

“Ah,” my friends said, recognizing the substance. “We don’t have a word for that.”

Why don’t you just take slush? English Language is generous that way. It’s happy to give other languages its words (many of which it appropriated from them in the first place). Slush is a great word—it sounds just like it is. But you don’t even want it, do you? You’re content to get by with neige fondue—melted snow (again, more words for a less precise meaning)—or soupe (because why……?  That word doesn’t have enough meanings already?)

So where does this leave us? Frankly, I’m worried. By this time in my relationship with Polish Language, I was madly in love. Even German Language—which is not going to win any beauty contests—captured my heart. And I have to say that spending so much time with you over these last two years has only deepened my affection for English Language.

I know I can say all of this to you because you don’t care anyway. It’s not like you’re going to change. If this is going to work, then I’m the one who needs to make it happen, but I’m not sure that I can.

We just have two very different ways of operating in the world. I’ve spent much of my life amassing and tending vocabularies so that I can always find a word with the right nuances of meaning, with just the texture I’m looking for, and in the proper rhythm relative to all the other words around it. I strive for clarity and parsimony, even if I don’t always get there.

When I’m with you, though, I feel like you want me to be a different person. In principle, I wouldn’t mind changing for you at all, but not if it means having to conduct cumbersome, time-consuming conversations that convert simple ideas into vague, abstract notions that require multiple rounds of clarification to eventually arrive, not at a shared understanding with an interlocutor, but at something more like a stalemate.

We’re stuck together for now, so at this point, I guess all I can do is go back to the books and rededicate myself to our relationship. Get a look at you with fresh eyes. And keep trying to make this work.

Love (hopefully, some day),

Denise

P.S. I know you have tons of friends, lovers, and adoring fans, so if you can convince any of them to share with me all of the wonderful things they see in you that I’m evidently missing, I’d really appreciate it.