Perdu

French class resumed today after a Christmas break of five weeks or so, a span of time which turns out to be more than long enough for every scrap of French in my brain to blow away. Ah well. C'est la something-or-other.

Much sadder than this loss was the discovery that starting our new course unit means saying good-bye to the characters from the previous one. The textbook, you see, uses the same cast of six or seven illustrated characters for each activity for three units until, all of a sudden, it switches to a whole new batch (sort of like that dark day when Saved by the Bell became Saved by the Bell: The New Class). Now, I tend to envy the lives of characters in foreign language textbooks to begin with: the days are always sunny and the towns are always happily multi-racial and everyone's always smiling and riding on the TGV or making dinner reservations or asking one another the time. Add to this my tendency to grow attached to inanimate objects and fictional characters, and I'm sure you can see why it upsets me that after becoming accustomed to buying my imaginary train tickets and arranging my imaginary lunch meetings with Vincent and Véronique and Marine and all the others, I am now expected to do the same sorts of things with these assholes I've never even heard of. I mean, Marie Beauchamp? Jacques Verdin? Guillaume Lanoux?! Who the fuck are these people? I want Vincent Leroux and Marine Bouayed, dammit!--who, by the way, were vacationing in Martinique together when we saw them last. I guess they're just stranded there forever? What about their jobs at the fashion magazine?!