I am starting to hate French.
Little, green, eighth-grade me glorified the AP dream. French all five years, take the AP test, and get my Seal of Biliteracy. The perfect plan–but just the naive musings of a child wanting to be great, wanting to achieve the Rory Gilmore dream and go to an Ivy.
But as vocab quiz after new grammar rule after what seemed like hundreds of exceptions to that new grammar rule piled on top of each other, French became just another class, a repetitive jumble of sounds and patterns, not the glamourous discernment of language and culture I thought it would be. It was hard. It is hard.
The language of love has become the language I despise.
It seems as though my classmates had the same idea: Seal of Biliteracy or bust. Another bullet point on the resume.
It’s all meaningless—for me, at least. Every vocab word will be forgotten; every grammar rule will be tossed aside if I don’t care enough to put the language into practice. The broken record of going in one ear and out the other has made me realize I’ve never truly cared about it.
Our current French lesson is about professions. The vocab list has anything from “doctor” (le médecin) to “artist” (un/une artiste) to “plumber” (un plombier). Madame introduced the new vocabulaire by having us repeat with the correct pronunciation, then asking, “Who wants to be this?”
I laughed. There was no chance everyone already had their whole lives figured out.
But as people began raising their hands and explaining their in-depth plans for the rest of their educational and professional careers, the knowing smile slowly leached off my face. How could everyone in that room already have their lives figured out?
Everyone has it figured out. Except for me.
The next task was to take a quiz that would tell us what field we should enter. I laughed and chose the responses at random. It said I should be a cook—une cuisinière.
For the third and final exercise, we partnered up to talk about our future—where we wanted to live, and what we wanted to be. Who we wanted to be.
“J’ai aucune idée,” I said. I have no idea.
“Tu devrais devenir une comedienne,” my partner said. An actress.
I laughed.
I made a list a year ago ranking ten careers by how much I think I would enjoy them. Then, I made one ranking them by average salary. The two tiers nearly exactly converse in structure.
It is common knowledge that most people don’t like their jobs. That’s why it’s called work. That’s why people get paid for it. The constant battle between happiness and job security, between passion and being able to feed my future kids, wages war inside my brain, creating one simple phrase: J’ai aucune idée.
As I grow up, the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up,” becomes more and more complicated. A child could say he wanted to be an astronaut or a teacher or actress without question. As I near graduation, “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” becomes less and less of an acceptable response. I need to have an idée now.
