Bon Jour March 28, 2010

O.K. I will admit I am a bit of a Francophile.  I have a passion for the life and style of France if only it weren’t for the language barrier!  I haven’t given up on the goal of spending at least part of my year living there.  I have spent the last 15 years gathering words in my brain and studing the language resulting in minimal success!  I have absolutley no idea why I studied German in school?  I don’t have a German bone in my body and have never been there, where as, I do have French bones and spend a fair amount of my travel in France.  Go figure, youth.

Recently we decided to house three French exchange students for several weeks.  I put my tapes in the day before their arrival and was communicating beautifuly with my French instructor (who understands everything I say).  The problem seems to be that no one communicates like that.  When you speak the lines you’ve learned on the audio tapes they look at you as if you are speaking Greek.  The other problem is I know these phrases in there complete form and cannot break them apart…so, I either have to say it as I know it and hope they will understand or butcher it and enjoy their giggles as I distroy their beautiful language.  Years ago while reading “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris, I found myself laughing out loud through much of the book as he struggled through the language creating an Eng-Fre version of the language.  Today I find myself asking my dear sweet French girls if they, “you like want me you go him with ready soon?”  They look sweetly at me then at each other and smile and say, “oui” and off we go.  Bon Jour.

All on the Table March 4, 2010

The other day I was talking to my sister, a coach of a stuggling  basketball team on a losing streak.  This young team has shown so much heart and fight, that their pain of not having a win is felt by all who know, watch and coach them.  They leave all that they have on the court and even though the effort and hard work is there, the rewards are not to be seen.

Is it just the win that matters?  Perhaps as a society we are geared to think that way.  The 2010 winter olympic’s have just ended and of course that is the ultimate “win” and even the announcers have a way of making a “Silver Medal” feel like a loss!  How do they do that!

When everything you have is put on the table and you still lose, can you really still be a loser?   What is loss, never trying or to have tried and failed?  Are life’s lessons enough or do we need the win to justify our efforts?  Some win without trying, others try and never win and still others win big, and lose big, and visa versa.  No matter how you look at it, it appears as if winning and losing are part of the same game.  My father used to say:  “All work is honorable”.  Even the work of trying to win, when the odds are against you, is honorable.

Winning is a state of mind.  Dream big, work hard and put everything on the table.  I hope you win.