I have always been amazed by the amount of work my poor brain gets up to
at night, and have always suspected that I dream in high definition with
amazing graphics and Dolby stereo sound that could give major media and
production houses a run for their money! Be it tsunamis, or crashing planes,
sky surfing sky scrapers, or encounters with the good old souls of the dead, I
could count on my dreams for some genuine blockbuster entertainment. Not quite
sure if the plots conjured would be everyone’s cup of tea though, so I’d
refrain from connecting probes from my brain to YouTube just yet. It’s
not just high quality entertainment though; sometimes it’s productive stuff as
well. Years back, as a software developer staring for hours at a black and
green screen going through thousands of lines of code, I remember coming home
late at night with unresolved ‘abends’(IBM mainframe error message for abnormal termination of a software program) and then dreaming up potential
solutions. Can’t say any of those revelations worked….but, well, one thing leads to another, right:-P? Anyway, just to be clear, I’ve never put on my CV –
Skills include dreaming up solutions, though now on second thoughts maybe I
should have ?! Would have probably got me more interview calls, at least for
shock/weirdo value.
For quite some time there has been a lack of impressive broadcasting in my
dreamland. It’s like someone had tuned my channel to the real world equivalent
of daytime entertainment! Boring. Always on, but boring…like back to
back replays of some American comedy series complete with canned laughter
<<hahhahaha>>. (I’ve always wondered what would happen if all
canned laughter was banned by say a new world order. <<
hahhahhaha>>)
A few nights back, though, it seemed as if my ‘dream channel’ was re-tuned,
for a bit, maybe to the French equivalent of Cbeebies. Now, in real life, I’ve
been learning French for about two years. And, even though I am supposed to be upper
intermediate level ( oui bébé oui !), amongst many things that I find difficult
about the language like ‘verbe conjugaison’, ‘les pronoms’….ummm….‘les
adjectifs’, ‘les temps’, ‘pronominal’, ‘negation’, ‘prononciation’ etc etc….I
also find counting after 69 a bit challenging :-D French being French,
doesn’t have a word for 70 (seventy) or 80(eighty) or 90(ninety).I can’t
understand why! I mean they have words for twenty, thirty, fourty, and fifty,
and then they got lazy? So, the geniuses start doing this after 60s. For
70 is said as 60+10 ( soixante-dix), 80 is 4 x 20s ( quatre-vingts !), 90 is (4
x 20s) + 10 ( quatre-vingt-dix). I mean seriously!
Would it have been so difficult to just make a septante, octante, and
nonante !!!
Anyway, so at French class – in the real world - when the teacher asks
us to ‘prenez votre livre Pg. 198’ (i.e, Page Cent quatre-vingt-dix-huit),
which is literally translated in English:
‘take your book, Page Hundred four twenty ten eight’, my brain processor
‘abends’. I do have a little workaround though which goes like this - Flip
through the pages intensively, and while doing so track someone who has settled
for one, take a snapshot of the pictures on the page they’ve stopped at, and
then frantically locate it in my own book. A few times, now, the teacher has caught me in the midst of my struggle, and has had to show me the page
number on her book to put me out of my misery, to which I never ‘merci’ her as
it would be an acknowledgement to the whole class of my disability or let’s say
limitation with the French numbers. Now this little system of mine
has worked quite well for me so far. And why fix what works, right? I mean
in real life, how many situations am I going to face where my life would depend
on ‘prenez votre live pg. 198’ right ? Well, if my life did depend on it, then I
wouldn’t make it. Sometimes you just have to accept your fate. I had made my
peace with that….
Until that fateful night when my dream channel got switched to a french
language class. In my dream, I was instructed to ‘prenez votre livre Page
Quatre-vingt-vingt’. Even in my dream, I knew the drill. So, I looked around to
see what page others had stopped at, but to my utter horror and despair the
pages in their books were a blur. It’s a dream, so shit like that happens.
I knew that too. I found myself in unchartered territory and in a state of
panic I decided I had to deconstruct the Quatre-vingt-vingt for myself. This
was it. It was going to be now or never.
I said the words out aloud. Part one- Quatre-vingt which
I translated to English - Four Twenty and then did
a mental multiplication 4 x 20 = 80. Voila ! We got an eighty. Now, what was
the next part? -Vingt. Cool, so plus 20 to 80…..What ??? n’existe
pas ! That’s 100 – for which the French do have a word, thankfully. I
wanted to protest, but was released from my dream. Hate it when that happens! I
realised I'd been tricked … in my dreams.... bloody clever…but so not cool! On
the brighter side, I've finally got a grip over French numbers beyond 69....and
I worked that out in my dreams...in a matter of seconds....well it was seconds
in dream time, who knows if it took me all night in real time with me muttering
away quatre vingt vingt quatre vingt vingt.....
In any case, I am hoping I
don’t need a refresher course anytime soon.
