Allegedly Badass

In my compulsive browsing this morning, I found a neat video (okay, it's a Nokia commercial). Supposedly, it's everyone's favorite classic martial arts movie star, Bruce Lee, playing ping-pong. Whoopty-doo? I think not. See for yourselves.

Update: There's a decent probability that this was faked. Even so, I agree with the sentiments expressed in the last line of this discussion.

Tired Journalists

Obama wins. By most indications, it was a pretty exciting contest for most pundits and political buffs--which is why I completely understand if the editors of the New York Times, through fatigue or enthusiasm or both, made a few mistakes:

"...out of Iraq in a fast ifand? orderly fashion," p. 1

"Mr. Obama also did strikingly well among Hispanic voters, beating Mr. McCain did far less better among those voters than Mr. Bush did in 2004," p. 2

"Mr. Obama took a page from what Mr. Bushfull first reference to President Bush did in 2004," p. 2

"...reflecting the imperative he felt of trying," p. 2

"...his effort this year. Indiana for a Democrat since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, and Mr. Obama..." p. 2

"He later returned home to Chicago play basketball," p.3

A conversation I had this morn...er...sometime

Matt: I'll try and post tomorrow
me: okay
Matt: but I need to sleep now
me: go for it
Heh
I just woke up
It is tomorrow already for me
Matt: hah
me: I'm communicating with you from the future!
Matt: OMG
me: Let me tell you, it's a pretty amazing place
So much neat stuff
Matt: well
me: but I can't tell you about it or I might wreck the timeline
Matt: I'll see you there when I wake up
me: excellent. I'll be waiting for you.
Matt: O WAIT
too latefrq
every
me: ?
Matt: thing
is
me: shit
Matt: falling
me: shitshitshitshitshit
da,,it!
Matt: AAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPAAAAAAARRRRTTTTTT
me: OMG! My keyboard!
What happened to my keyboard? It's not qwerty anymore...it's...azerty! I--Matt? Matt? Hello? Fuck

Departure from France, First Day in India

Tuesday, 5th August – Wednesday, 6th August.

We left for India today. The morning was full of packing and last-minute errands: searching for hospitality gifts for Nusha's family, buying envelopes to mail important letters before leaving, etc. The airport itself was fine—we had ticket troubles at the self check-in, so we went to the counter to talk to a very friendly guy. Checked in, bought chocolates and caramels because we hadn't found any gifts earlier, got in line (waited a long time) at security, and then had to switch gates. Once inside, we waited and watched people play video games at the terminal.

The flight itself was decent, a quick hop to Heathrow (a nice man switched seats so we could sit together) with a long drive between terminals, a short wait, shopping, and then eight to nine hours on a fairly comfortable British Airways plane chatting with neighbors, sleeping, and watching movies. I chose Kung Fu Panda (which was a well-made mediocrity), and afterward listened to a BBC radio comedy that produced the following stroke of improv genius:

ANNOUNCER: Your turn, [Panelist X]. Can you fill in this log line from Brokeback Mountain: "Love is..."?
PANELIST: ...a pair of chaps.

Redeye flights are much better on a comfy plane, and BA makes 'em good. Meals, too. Though I hear Virgin Airlines is even better.

We arrived on Wednesday around 11:30 local time (GMT+4.5 in August) and had our bags by noon. Nusha and her mother and driver met us and took us through Bombay's humble-jumble array of shanty slums and grime-streaked high-rise apartments. We spent lunch at their apartment building, a homemade meal of keema (spiced ground meat) and rice with veggies and spices, plus a sort of yoghurt and cucumber side dish. We also met other parts of Nusha's family—her grandparents, her sister Shanaz, and Shanaz's son (Mehdi, 8 or 9) and daughter (Sophia, 4 or 5, and a lot of trouble).

Then it was time to hang out while Nusha, the bride-to-be, went to a make-up appointment. Afterward, we all went to a hospital across town to visit the day-old twin cousins born to another of Nusha's relatives. On the way back, we stopped several times, including at a roadside stand selling freshly roasted corn on the cob smeared with lime juice, salt, and red chili powder. Delicious! Then it was home to dine on leftovers and some fried discs of dough whose name I've forgotten.

I played with Sophia, who is altogether too cute and very mischievous. We chatted with Nusha's family and finally met her aunt Sheriz, in whose flat we were staying. End of day: we slept soundly our first night in humid, hot Bombay.

Not Married

Just to clarify, nope, I'm not married. V and I got a PACS, as I mentioned earlier, but we're not married. When we do get married (and no, we're not engaged yet, but we have talked quite a bit about it), even if we decide to have a private ceremony, I'll tell everyone in advance. You're my friends and family. (Well, those of you who are, at any rate.)

The PACS is really just an agreement to live together. Anyone can do it except family members, and all it says is "we live together, please give us a small tax break". Lots of friends do it, for instance. However, it is also an option for gay/lesbian couples as a form of marriage. The contract part of it is really flexible, so you can, if you want to, make it more of a commitment.

As it is, for us it's a way to get a tax advantage and help me secure my place in this country and V's right to follow me to other countries without losing her job, among other things. There's also, I suppose, an element of romantic commitment, but not nearly as much as you might expect from a marriage or a civil union (if you expect such things). Basically, the whole dreamy process consisted of getting birth certificates (officially translated, in my case) and proof of address, submitting these with application forms in order to get an appointment, and then, at the appointment, getting an official stamp on the papers before being dismissed from the office. Ordinary administrative transaction, no fanfare, nothing. And if we want to end it, we go down to the Mairie (the town hall) and say "We want to end our PACS" and it's done. That's it.

Return to Paris

As usual, it has been awhile since I've posted. First I went to the US for visa reasons, then we went to India for vacation and the wedding of two friends, and now we've been back a month and I've begun two jobs and my PhD, plus I'm once again taking my writing projects more seriously (good timing, right?)--so there's a lot of news. We'll take it one part at a time.

The visa applications went more easily than expected, given the effort required to arrange appointments, gather paperwork, and even get information. The tourist visa for India took one day to get, and that was only because I missed the morning deadline for same-day processing. The French long-stay student visa took all of thirty-five minutes, of which twenty were spent waiting to be called to present my paperwork and only fifteen were spent processing my dossier and producing the visa. W00t for efficient administration! (I've written a more detailed description of the process, but I am considering creating a separate blog for my foreign PhD experiences so that I can offer help and entertainment for others interested in the situation or hoping to pursue the same sort of path.)

India was a crazy experience, about which I wrote daily journal entries while there. I'll be posting revisions of these in the days to come.

Having returned to Paris, V has begun work at UPMC (Paris VI) again, this time as a tenured, full-time teacher. (Last year, she was a temporary, full-time teacher.) I got my carte de sejour (another story), which allows me to live and work in France, and I began work as a sort of adjunct teacher of English (language) at UPMC. I teach one class a week, and will get paid sometime early next year. I've also begun working for a company called YES (Your English Solution), which teaches English to businesses in the Paris area.

Additionally, my classes have started up. I'm taking my advisor's poetry and poetics course, which so far is interesting, and a short translation course he's teaching as well, so I can practice my French.

V had Lasik eye surgery at the beginning of September, which means that now she can see pretty much as well without glasses as she once could with glasses. There are some small side effects, some of which seem to have faded, but she and I both wish the doctor had informed us more about them, as they may have influenced the decision. (On the plus side, she's very happy to be able to snuggle without removing and protecting her glasses.)

V and I got a PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarit&eaccute;, or French civil union) on the 2nd of September, so now we're officially living together and supporting each other. Pretty cool. It's such a potentially small thing (the document needs only contain one line about how the two of you agree to support each other, but can have more) that we weren't going to do anything for it, but our friends wanted to have a party, so we threw a small fête and got lots of wine. We don't drink much at all, so typically this means we hold onto bottles for weeks or months, until we have guests over.

I've also found a dojo that teaches Ki Aikido, and I had begun going, but our finances were low this month and last due to India+French admin fees+Lasik, so I'm holding off for now. But once things get underway a bit more and I get my paycheck, it's back on the mat for me!

I'm also learning how to better organize myself so that I can do everything I want to. I've made myself very busy, which is fun, and now I'm learning how to manage it all. I'm also teaching myself a bit of Ashtanga Yoga.

That's pretty much the update for now.

All the World's a Stage

Something that we've been working on for a long time, but that I have neglected to post about (FAIL) is the play that just finished its performance run last night. V and the rest of the cast have been working on it since last September or October; I've been involved since I came over mid-November. So really I should have written something about it. Sorry.

Anyway, the play we've been working on is Kindly Leave the Stage by John Chapman. Cast/characters:

RUPERT played by Micky Filhol
MADGE played by Marie Dubois
CHARLES played by Yann Fuchs
SARAH [CULLEN] played by Maëva Vincensini
DOROTHY CULLEN played by Amandine who has a last name somewhere
EDWARD CULLEN/FROBISHER played by me
NURSE played by Barbara LeLan
ANGELA played by Virginia Fumagalli

We're almost all pretty much rank amateurs; only Virginia has acted and directed quite a bit, and otherwise Yann has done one play (with Virginia), Barbara has done a little bit of improv, I've taken one general acting and one improv course, and everyone else just started this year. And everyone has done remarkably! Okay, I can't speak for myself really, but at the very least I've had fun and people seem entertained by my part; and everyone else has made huge acting strides, which is amazing and wonderful, and it seems like, by and large, our audiences have all been pleased with our performances. We still have a lot to learn--at the moment, we still perform best if we do a run-through before each show--a trait that, ideally, wouldn't exist--and we need to work on loosening up a bit, finding our characters more quickly, punching up the energy of our acting, following on the ends of each others' lines, stuff like that. But these are all things that will go away with practice. And the bottom line is that we pulled it off, and pulled it off well!

In fact, in order to secure our performance dates, we had to form an official association, "Hark Who's Talking", so we're a theatre troupe, or perhaps a club, now. And we're looking forward to our next year--now that we have had some small success with a few places, it'll be easier to secure those venues again for other performances. And we seem to have impressed enough of our friends and families that they'll spread word a bit and we might get a bigger audience. We don't do this for profit (we might pass the chapeau in the future to help recuperate the production costs), but we'd still like to get as much of an audience as we can.

I posted pictures of backstage at our last show online. Check 'em out.

New Apartment

As recent posts sort of imply (and the one before that blatantly states), V and I have been searching for apartments with a friend. We've found a really nice one and will be moving into it on the 1st of July. It's located near the Buttes Chaumont, which is a lovely park that completely bucks the French tradition of neatly trimmed, flat, geometrically arranged gardens with small bushes, tiny flowers, square trees, too many statues, and grass that you can't walk on. (This is much to my relief--French gardens are pretty, but I prefer some wildness in my caged nature.) It was built over an old quarry and includes some bluffs (topped by pavilion), a small lake/large pond and a waterfall, hills, winding paths, grass that you can (gasp!) sit on, and many many trees.

The apartment is furnished (pictures here), and is well-situated for all of us. For Marie and V, it's near metro lines that go quickly to their workplaces. For me, there is ki aikido (Ki Federation, not Ki Society, but same thing, really) not far away. For all of us there is the park down the street and right next door to us a pool. For V and I, a rock gym. Plus a nearby organic cafe, a fruit/veggie open-air market, and plenty of other neat things. All told, yay! We're excited to move in!

Caution, c'est pas cochon (mais ca peut etre con)

That is to say, "'Caution' isn't 'cochon' (but it might be 'con')."

Your "caution" is the security deposit you pay before renting an apartment. It's rather huge here in Paris, and in addition to paying that, you have to pay your first rent and typically also the equivalent as a fee to whatever rental agency you had to go through to get the place, which is why it can be "con", a multipurpose swear word that can mean something like "idiot" or "idiotic" or "seriously annoying" (kind of like saying some turn of events is "a bitch", perhaps a bit stronger), or it can mean "damned" as in "that damned gerbil!", or it can mean "cunt", in which case it's (obviously) pretty offensive. A "cochon" is a pig. In French, "caution" and "cochon" are pronounced similarly (the former with a bit more of an "s" sound and the latter with an "sh"), and in my head I'd been spelling the former a lot like the latter. When I thought about it a bit, though, it didn't make a lot of sense to have to give your landlord/lady a pig before moving into one of his/her properties.

The Streets of Paris

There's a funny naming thing going on with the streets ("les rues" en français) in this town. Today I walked past "Rue de Monsieur le Prince", which I thought was kind of cute: literally translated, it means "Mister the Prince", which doesn't really give a good idea of how it's used, but no matter.... Last night, some friends and I found ourselves near Rue de Petit Musc--Street of Little Musk.

There have been others, too--Rue de Nicolas Flamel and Rue Rohan, as I think I mentioned earlier. (If you don't remember this post, it's because it's been a draft for several months, and I only just published it, backdated, of course. For your convenience.)

A nice touch was that the same friends and I spent some time hanging out on Rue des Anglais (Street of the English).

Update V and a friend (Marie) and I have been looking for apartments together. We found one, but to get there we had to walk down Rue Hautpoul, which sounds a lot like "haut poule", "high chicken".

A Lot Like Love (Very Late Post)

Last night (*ahem* February 1--ed.) Mehdi & Nusha came over for dinner (read: Nusha used our kitchen to cook for everyone) as they often do, and afterwards we watched a movie we had rented, a romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet called A Lot Like Love. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rotten rating (41%), and some French paper quoted on the back of the movie case gave it three stars, which Mehdi says means the same thing as the obligatory "Two thumbs up!" that some no-name critic has to stamp on practically every film that comes out in America just to sell it.

However, we rather enjoyed it. It began as a quirky and cute piece about chance meetings between two people trying to find themselves. The dialogue was well written, witty, and fairly subtle, with quite a few things left nicely unspoken. There were nice symmetries throughout the film (the exchange of photography and guitar stuff, the breakups, etc.). And the characters were relatively normal people with normalish lives (yeah, middle class, but still normal) containing successes and failures. Also, surprisingly, Mr. Kutcher and Ms. Peet did decent acting work, showing characters that matured well over time and had believable subtle oddities. And their friendship deepened nicely.

The parts I thought didn't work so well were not large enough to make the film rotten, I felt. The soundtrack was for the most part poorly chosen, and felt like a sampling of Greatest Hits of the 1990s radio. Almost none of the music seemed to match the mood, tone, or present events of the film. The sound on the DVD itself was poorly done, so that we had to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue and way down to avoid deafening the neighbors with soundtrack music. And though the film started and progressed for awhile as a quirky and somewhat unconventional romantic comedy, by the end, it seemed to get impatient with its characters, and so forced them into a standard romantic ending, complete with stupid chance misunderstandings and silly reveals.

Roger Ebert has a somewhat harsher view of the film.

Auguries of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

--from Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

Tetchy Turtle

Lately I (really "we") have been simultaneously revising and translating my projet de thèse (thesis proposal). My written academic French is pretty poor (it's the combination of different syntax and grammatical structures and different ideas about how one should write an academic paper), so I'm pretty reliant on Virginia and some friends (Marie, Jean-Julien, Elisabeth), plus my director. But sometimes no one is within reach and I have to rely on other sources, like Wikipedia.

One of the poems I've written about includes a scene involving a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), which I translated, thanks to the above-mentioned source, as "tortue hargneuse"--a phrase that my director, M. Aquien, thought was hilarious. Turns out that a tortue "hargneuse" is any or all of the following things:

scowling
scathing
shrewish
tetchy
bitchy

Apparently, though, it's the real French name for the creature.

On French Words and Their English Cousins

Translation, I'm learning, is a funny art. It's not a matter of looking up the appropriate cross-language synonyms in a dictionary; even intellectually knowing this in advance, though, the fact of it comes as an enjoyable surprise.

I've been working on various short translation and editing projects--mostly tests--that may lead to regular freelance employment, which would be really nice. In the process, I've stumbled across a few of those little gems you may have read about, the sort that seem especially common on the border between English and Chinese or Japanese.

One of my favorites is a possible translation given to me for "Il n'y a pas de reponse a votre recherche," which, I gather, was supposed to be the default no-match response to a search-engine query.
The translation that I was provided with by the software I'm using (and which I wasn't supposed to change) was, I thought, startlingly philosophical:

"There is no answer to your search."

Awooooooo!

I meant to post about this a couple weeks ago.

"Howl" is one of Allen Ginsberg's most famous poems. You may have heard the opening lines of part I in one form or another:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,      starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking      for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly      connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

Ages ago I found that someone was sharing a recording of part I via my university network. Turns out this is a fairly famous recording, one of the earliest of Ginsberg reading "Howl". In fact, for awhile, it was considered the earliest known recording of said poem.

But recently a literary researcher uncovered a recording that was older still, "at the library of a private college here [in Oregon]". Which private college in Oregon, you ask? What else?

Reed College.

You can listen to the new oldest recording along with poems from the same reading here.

A Question of Geekiness

Look at this.

It’s a link to a short list of eight things that “happen when geeks have children.” However, only half of the photos, to my mind, actually qualify as examples of geekiness applied to (inflicted upon?) children--and in some cases they qualify only barely. Shall we run through them?

1. The D&D baby. Giving your child character stats for the granddaddy of all roleplaying games, which are still the hallmark of geeks and nerds everywhere. Sheer geekiness. Our winner.


2. iPood. Baby-based parody of a popular mainstream electronic device. No geekery at all.


3. Cthulhu baby. Dressing your child up as one of the chief alien gods from a series of cult horror stories penned by an obscure (nowadays semi-obscure) New England writer at the turn of the 20th century. Definite geekiness.


4. Robot child. WTF? Making a robot costume for your child out of boxes and foil? Robots aren’t geeky. My halloween costume at that age—a walking personal computer, complete with 5.25” floppy disk and disk drive, was geeky. A Robby the Robot costume would have been geeky. But a mere generic robot? Cute, sure. But not geeky.


5. Mario and Luigi. Cute, admittedly. And the detail is pretty neat. But the Mario Bros. have been popular video game icons since the late 1980s, starring in millions of sequels and spinoffs. Putting your kids in costume as them hardly squeaks off the ground. But we’ll give points for effort. Inching toward geekiness.


6. Ninja baby. I know ninjas are all the rage now, and the ninja vs. pirate meme that got passed around among certain crowds several years ago was definitely geeky—but ninjas and other eastern martial artists have held our collective fascination since before Bruce Lee—through movies, TV shows, stories, etc. Dressing your child up as a ninja for halloween is as mundane as serving cereal for breakfast (in American culture). Just ask my parents about taking me to a martial arts supply store when I was in 1st grade to buy a genuine ninjitsu outfit for the end of October. Not geeky.


7. iPod baby. Okay, the baby’s expression is cutely disturbing. And actually clothing your baby as an iPod is a little bit on the geeky side. But it’s still a popular mainstream electronic device, and I would bet that this baby jumper can be bought easily and by many online—and was tailored for exactly that. So: borderline geeky.


8. Princess Leia. Fine, fine, you win on this one. Star Wars fanatics (old-school ones, especially, and not young kids these days) rank as high as Trekkies on the geekometer. So this one counts. But every time Lucas clones a sequel (excuse me, prequel) or a spinoff, it gets less geeky.

To Be or Not To Be: Determining the Fate of a Final Work

I'm a little late to the literary news table with this one, but that's okay.

Dmitri Nabokov, son of the late Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and many others), is facing a dilemma: respect his father's wishes and destroy the literary genius's unpublished final manuscript, or fulfill the desires of the international literary community and publish it.

Honestly, I don't know what I'd do in such a situation myself. A part of me hankers to see this last work (and knows, too, that other greats made similar requests that went unheeded, much to our literary benefit), and another part of me understands the need to honor our dead loved ones and follow their final requests. Yet a third part of me has little idea why one would make such a request in the first place--unless maybe one felt that the unpublished work was crap. On the other hand, if I knew I wasn't long for this world and I still had unfinished works, would it really matter to me if people saw them after I shuffled off?

Bubble Tea Chez Nous

V and I recently discovered we can make one of my favorite drinks at home (fortunate because there seems to be only one store in Paris that sells it). Tapioca pearls, however, are difficult to cook right, and we've found very little good advice online about it.

That said, through trial, error, and "painstaking" research, we've found a method that seems to work well:

1. Bring lots of water (anywhere from 4 to 8 times the volume of tapioca pearls you wish to cook) to a boil in a saucepan.


2. Pour in tapioca pearls. Cover and turn heat to low.


3. Simmer for 1.5 hours, adding hot or boiling water periodically to keep the tapioca well-saturated.


4. Check tapioca pearls: they should be full and round, and if you used uncolored pearls, they should have turned clear and there should be next to no white powder visible at the center. A few pearls with white centers are okay. More than a few and you should continue cooking a bit.


5. Turn off the heat but leave the tapioca pearls covered and on the stove. Let them sit in the warm water for another half hour.


6. Drain liquid from the pearls and rinse them in cold water. Serve, or for short-term storage, cover them in a sugar syrup made of 1 part each brown and white sugars and 2 parts water brought to a boil and then cooled. (This is also used to sweeten the tea for the drink.) I hear also that tapioca pearls freewe well, but we haven't tried it.

Create a Miracle in Your Life: Increase Your Pen!s

That's exactly what I did today. With Virginia. (She increased her pen!s too.) We went to the store and bought some study supplies, including two new pen!s for me and one new pen!s for her. They're now sitting in bags on the bed, waiting to be added to our collection. So today, truthfully, we have increased our pen!s stock size.

And lo, on returning home, I found in my inbox a very prescient message exhorting me to do exactly what the title of this post says. I have to say the experience was quite miraculous. I'm not sure I've had as large a pen!s stack before.

Tangentially, did you know that Thesaurus.com lists "cock" as a synonym for "stack" and "pile"?

Seeking Work

I've returned to freelance writing and editing again to make money. I'm mentioning this because I'm seeking to put my name out in the world in as many ways as I can so as to attract more business. I realize this blog may not be the most prolific or effective way to advertise, but every little bit can help. So if any of you who read this blog (the few, the proud, my relatives and friends) hear of people looking for an editor or a writer, I would be extremely grateful if you were to pass my name along or refer them my way. Interested parties can check out my iFreelance portfolio here (thank you, Dad, for referring me there) and my LinkedIn profile here.

Or if you have ideas for resources that might be helpful, I'd love to know about them. Ditto for suggestions to improve my profiles, etc.

Thanks three million times.

Update: For whatever reason, the links I provided above for my LinkedIn profile don't work properly. However, you can find the same links in the sidebars of this blog (---->), where they do work properly. Or you can search for my profile in the People directory. (When sifting through the hundreds of David Clarks on LinkedIn, look for one who's a writer and writing teacher in New York. I know I'm in Paris--I even updated my profile to say so--but LinkedIn hasn't recognized this in the directory, apparently.)

Please Tip Your Servers

Wait staff aren't really anybody, are they? Within their jobs, they exist only to ferry desires from customer to kitchen and fulfillment from kitchen to customers. Same holds true for other serving staff: we tend to ignore them.

I was thinking about this as I walked home from a caf&eactue; this evening: the language we use when seeking service in retail and service environments is really telling. We rarely ask about the server him or herself, and when we do, it's often a surprise to the person behind the counter.

But even so, when asking for things, we typically say "I'd like" or "May I have" or "One [x]", and even if we're polite (please, thank you, etc.), there's a fundamental deprivation of subjectivity that happens in our language in these situations. "I'd like" is a simple statement of our personal desire. It ignores any agency on the part of the person who might help us obtain our desire. "May I have" adds some personhood to the server by symbolically asking the server for something--but it's largely rhetorical now, and it isn't much. And simply stating the object(s) of desire is like pushing a button on a vending machine: we don't give even the courtesy of complete sentences and the interpersonal interaction hinted at by introducing ourselves as a subject. It's interesting to me that with all the variations available to us, we never ask "Would you give me", which would open up an even interaction, human to human.

Quoi

Adding "quoi" ("what" en anglais, and usually interrogative) at the end of a sentence as a sort of rhetorical flourish is pretty common in spoken French. Virginia has been trying to get me to say it and other "French" things so I sound less like a barbaric American (my words, not hers) and more like a fluent francophone. Things like using "quoi" properly are hard to get--it's basically colloquial language and doesn't correspond exactly to the meaning of the word that I learned in school. I've been using "oui?" instead, which Virginia says marks me immediately as foreign. She said something to the effect of "It makes one wonder whether you're Belgian. Or weird."

Since my parents will probably vouch against the former, I guess we're left with the latter. I hope the French will still accept me, quoi.