By wink of water

This week I began my intensive French classes at the Sorbonne. I’ve been pretty nervous about this whole plan, since 25 hours a week of class is quite a lot. I also wasn’t clear on the class times, and the woman who gave me my oral exam told me “ce n’est pas possible” to work and take the class; moreover, she told me I would be in class from 8 am to 4:30 pm. When I pointed out that this was way more than 25 hours a week, she said there was an hour for breakfast, an hour for lunch, and 1.5 hours of lab, then said “bonne courage!” in this particular French way, where instead of meaning “good luck” it means “you can try but I don’t think you’ll succeed.” As far as I could figure, this meant I would actually be in class from 9 to 3 and would have to skip the afternoon lab.

Luckily, this is not the case. It turns out that there are several different classes, starting at various different times; mine starts at 8 am, the earliest possible, goes till 10, then there’s an hour of phonetics, then an hour for lunch, then another 2 hours of class. This is perfect for me. The class is at a satellite location of Boulevard Raspail (not far from Alliance Française) and it’s 10 minutes by metro to work. Thus I’m able to take class all morning and be at work in the afternoon and evening, and I don’t need to stay until midnight to get something accomplished. I also suspect “bonne courage” woman helped arrange this for me, for which I’m grateful. Then again, 8 am is probably not the preferred start time.

Immediately the class has made a big difference. I can understand everything the professor is saying, and just listening and understanding French for 4 hours a day truly helps me to start thinking in the language. I have a lot more confidence in striking up conversations with people, including at frisbee and with random men telling me about their socks in the laundromat. I’ve been reading too, both my John Grisham (L’heritage, or The Summons) and Le Petit Prince. I haven’t started listening to only French music but I don’t think that’s going to happen; I just don’t know enough French bands.

Although the timing is perfect for me, working and taking the class is still quite difficult. I’m not super tired, intellectually – the French is in a completely different part of my brain than computer science – but I haven’t been sleeping at all. Previously, my routine had been to wake up when the sun wouldn’t let me sleep anymore, typically at 7 am, run (sometimes), shower, clean the apartment (necessary every day because of the cats), make coffee, eat breakfast and read, and roll into work between 9 and 10 depending on how into my book I was. I would usually go to sleep between 12 and 1, at 11 if I was really tired. It’s hard to sleep much earlier than that because the sun is still up.

But nowadays, that schedule is impossible. I would very much like to keep running in the mornings but so far I haven’t been able to. Nor can I actually clean the apartment; these days I don’t even bother making the bed into a couch. I think the cats prefer it anyway, and I’m only in the apartment to sleep. I wake up at 6, make some coffee, do my French homework, then shower and get ready; I try to leave the apartment by 7:30. I get to work around 2:30 pm, but if I need to do any shopping I have to do it then. Moreover, if I have any activity (frisbee, friends of friends in town, special events) I have to adjust my schedule, usually by working later another day. Wednesday nights are summer league and it’s seriously necessary for my mental health (no practice since I came back, everyone’s on vacation). I’m working weekends, which I find pleasant, because it’s so much more relaxing than getting up at 8. This week I had several nights that I slept less than 4 hours. Surprisingly I feel great, but sometimes when the alarm goes off at 6 am, I hate my life – my loud apartment, my cats that don’t want to sleep at night because they’re starved for my attention, my 8 am class that I have to get up for and my challenging post-doc that makes me stay up too late.

That said, I really think I’m living a dream. It took me a very long time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve always been good in school and I’m interested in a fair number of things; I love math, find it to be incredibly beautiful, but I also love literature, and politics, and economics, and interacting with people. I think I could have been content in a number of different professions, but I am delighted to find myself happy in the one I’ve chosen. I get to spend all day long working on interesting problems, surrounded by incredibly intelligent people, talking about cutting edge research and learning from the best. And I’m paid to do this! I don’t have to teach, I don’t have to sit in boring meetings, all I have to do is think; think, and implement. And I love to think. I am doing exactly what I want to do. So don’t feel too sorry for me when I complain about my lack of sleep; I’ll sleep once I’ve learned French, and published a paper in computer vision, and won a European ultimate tournament.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.