When you're talking to yourself, who are you talking to?

I want to talk about my father.  Not for any particular reason, I suppose, just who he is.

My father was born in Washington State, of New England stock, the fourth--and last--child of Richard and Marjorie Plaisted, who are individually their own stories.  From his mother, my father inherited abounding generosity, or at least I imagine it was from his mother because that is mostly what I remember about her.  From her he inherited a love of mystery, a love of movies, a love of reading, a love of cooking.  From his father I imagine he inherited a stoic and admirable work ethic which dictates that his family always comes first.  I remember little of my grandfather, but this I imagine to be true above all else.

I think I am more like my father than I am my mother, which it took a long time for me to figure out.  I think perhaps I have more of him in me.  Not necessarily his good qualities, though if I can live up to those some day, I most certainly will, but a lot of his interests, a lot of his tendencies, a lot of his ideas.  My father got me hooked on hauntings, on mysteries that can never be solved--I always imagine his favorite is Stonehenge.  Because of my father I sit through the credits of every movie.  I love cities.  I love art and museums.  I don't like camping.  I write.  And I don't think these are things I necessarily chose.  In some ways I think they were born into me.  Because I never thought, "I want to be like him, so I will do A. B. and C."  I never thought that at all.  I'm just becoming who I am, and that happens to be a whole lot like him.

My mother would probably disagree with me, but I can't recall either of my parents ever telling me I was beautiful.  My father doesn't say things like this.  My mother said once, "How did I get three such beautiful girls?" I nearly cried for thinking that maybe she really did think I was beautiful.  But on two occasions my father has said to me in public and in private that he thinks I look like his mother.  I have never heard him say that he thinks his mother was beautiful, but it's in his voice that he thinks she was one of the best women that ever existed.  I think he knows I think that too.  So when someone said to my father in public, "Your daughters all look like your wife," which was most certainly meant as a compliment because my mother is beautiful, he said, "Well, I think Jennifer looks more like my mother."  And though I do think my mother and I looked quite similar at certain points in our lives, this comment wasn't just observational, but meant something more, it meant he thought I was beautiful.  Funnily enough, I think if he'd said, "Yes, I think my daughters do look like Paula," I would have interpreted it the same way--that he thought we were beautiful.  It was the comment he made on my looks at all that made me think--maybe he really does think this about me.

I want to tell you something else about my father.  He learned French when he was in grade school, which he attended in New England.  He also, I believe, took French classes in High School.  He never spoke french, except for every once and a while we'd ask him to recite some french literature he'd memorized as a kid, which he did gladly.  When I decided I'd be taking French, he started saying things to me like 'Allons-y' when he wanted us to leave the church building after church.  Or 'Je ne sais pas' (said: J'une say pah) when he didn't have an answer to things.  When I'd try to say things in a french accent, he'd correct me.  He'd say words over and over and over again until I heard the difference between the way I was saying it and the way it was mean to be pronounced.  The word 'beouf' (beef) comes to mind.  When I came back from my first few semester of taking french, my father started buying French films.  Oh, dozens of them!  When he'd never owned a french film before.  He spoke to me in french when I came back for breaks, and he watched french films with me in the evenings when everyone else was out of the house.  He'd done this before, when I started listening to Frank Sinatra, he suddenly bought a hundred Sinatra albums he didn't own before, which he still buys and listens to, and gives to me when I come home so I can load them onto my computer.  No one else in my family has ever done that for me and I don't ask it of them, but he did it on his own, and that's something that still impresses me.

Now, why is beauty so important?  Why is sharing collective interests so important?  Or why is what we say and how we say it so important?  I feel something I've been fighting against in this class is this idea that other cultures are so different from ours.  And I keep screaming from the rooftops, "Ours isn't so easy to figure out either!" and I just need someone to say, "Yes, you're right."  I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure if I believe in hegemony.  Because I think about my family and how many different types of people I've had to learn how to communicate with--people who consider themselves American through-and-through, who have put me through the wringer!  I mean, how often have you tried conversing with a New Englander?  It's freaking hard!  But I grew up around that, and there are ways my father communicates that remind me of Hemingway's iceberg (so I call it--where he discusses in his writing that only the bare essentials need to be said to get across a larger meaning) and I find more comfort in one word from my father than I do in twenty sentences from a friend across the hall.  Because I understand what he means, and who he is, and what he's saying.

My mother's communication is not so easy for me to navigate, and yet I've been living with her for just as long, and have been communicating with her effectively for longer.  But as I change, and as my culture changes, she and I have a harder time understanding one another.  Well what does that mean?  For me, it means culture changes.  It means that we can't go in to another culture thinking that "These people are French so they will act this way, this way and that way."  No.  Because if someone said, "Oh, Jennifer is American, which means she think this, this and that," chances are they'd be dead wrong about me.  Because they're communicating with someone who has created their own culture, who comes from two cultures that are worlds apart even if both American.

But, something I find great interest in is the ideas of values.  I think you can make more general blanket statements about cultural values.  As an American, I am bound to value certain things.  It doesn't mean that other cultures don't value those same things, but that there are some I can pick out for certain.  If the French value eloquence, and grandeur, and family then I can safely say that as an American I value independence, individuality and simple pragmatism.  The interesting thing about values is that one need not embody the values they hold dear.  Not every American is pragmatic, just like not ever Frenchman is eloquent, however we sometimes value things we do not embody ourselves.  And this is an extremely interesting idea to me.

My father is not a particularly mysterious man.  But he values the unexplained and the uncertainties of life and of other people.  Furthermore if we talk about politics in the house, he's rarely in favor of propositions that will make him pay more in taxes--he believes in independence, he believes in sustainability--and I think he believes others should be able to support themselves.  And yet I know no one more generous than my father.  Without me perhaps my father would have never bought those french films, and we'd be 24 french films poorer in the Playstead household, but my father seems to value shared experiences.  And though my father values the time he spends on his own, no one else in the family thinks of as many things as he does for things we can do together.  Watching movies, going to plays, driving up the coast for the weekend, seeing museum exhibits.  The rest of us would sit in separate rooms of the house if he didn't pull us together to sortir.  Where do these values come from?  They could be American, they could be values of the Pacific Coast, or of Los Angeles, or of New England.  But more likely--as any good American would believe--they're the values of an individual, who is all of those things, and is also himself.

That's culture.

Language

I first fell in love with French when I was learning the phrase, 'Je suis enchantée de faire votre connaissance.'  I had been back at home in Los Angeles for six months from a study abroad in London and had another two months to go until I returned to Provo.  Learning is all that has ever made me particularly happy, and after six months of not being in school, I was reeling with dissatisfaction.  Perhaps sensing my displeasure with life, and aware I'd be taking French in the Fall, my parents gifted me one of those CD-ROM 'Learn a Language' programs for my birthday to get me started.

I worked about four to six hours every day at a Law Office, and when I came home, I'd practice French for hours, lying across my parents bed repeating words and phrases.  I loved it.  My roommate collects stories I tell her of my prayers with God; her favorite is the story of the week I prayed every night for God to help me get the pronunciation of the French 'r' down.  I can still remember the first time I said 'rouge.'

Fairly quickly, I familiarized myself with most of the disks of the program, and swapped them out depending on whether I wanted to learn phrases, 'Au secours!' (Help!) which is another great direct-translation, or vocabulary, 'souris' (mouse).

It was a phrase day when I found, 'Je suis enchantée de faire votre connaissance.'  I had NO idea what this meant.  I knew it was supposed to mean something about being enchanted, and maybe meeting someone, but I hardly understood the sentence syntax or meaning of the individual words.  I looked it up online.  It means "I'm pleased to meet you," but more literally, "I am enchanted to make your knowledge/acquaintance."  I was smitten.  Someone could tell me I was wrong now, and I'd probably agree with them, but at the time this phrase meant something a lot more than "I'm glad to meet you."  It was saying something more like, "I'm enchanted to know you exist."  What a glorious idea.  Because if Descartes is right, and 'Je pense donc je suis,' that means that I am my knowledge.  I'm only as good as my knowledge, and they're pleased they know about it.

French wasn't about learning another language that day, it was about learning a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing people, and a new way of seeing the world.  How could you ever have a bad day with people being pleased to know you exist and other such grandiose phrases?  Granted, I've now been studying French for almost two years and I don't know that I could make the same argument about this phrase, knowing what I know about the meaning of french words.  But it doesn't really matter that my direct translation was a little off, because I believed it, and it carried me through two years of learning a language that more often than not frustrates me, and makes me feel ridiculously incapable and inept.  I hate it.  I mean, I hate it.  I hate the homework, and I hate that I never know how to say what I want quickly enough.  I hate that I can't understand most people speaking the same language I've been studying for two years, and I hate that I understand concepts I can't put into practice.  I hate getting up in front of people and fumbling with the words and the grammar.  I really hate it.

But then--I'll accidentally forget time.  I'll forget the other homework I've got looming over my head, and I'll get stuck in my grammar book, and I'll marvel over this language that makes no sense some days, and all the sense in the world others.  I'll find a book written in french about the history of jazz, and I'll read seven pages of it before I realize I didn't once look up the definition of a word, or wonder what the hell a series of words in a particular order meant.  I'll forget about what needs doing and realize how long its been since I had to get the direct translation for "I'm glad to meet you," and I'm back lying across my parents' bed, pronouncing rouge for the very first time.

Terrien: french ideals in application

Still reading Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.  This chapter was about the tie the French feel to their land.  Wherever they are, where they are from means more--they are never from 'France' but from a region of France, as if the region they are from is really the country they are from.  The equivalent would be to say, Mon pays est de Los Angeles.  And yet I've been thinking about this a lot in the last few years of my life: being an American means very little.

The book quotes an instance when Charles de Gaulle said in an interview, "'How can anyone govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?'  What he meant was, 'How can anyone be expected to govern 246 different kinds of French?'" (21).  We don't think of Americanness in these terms, though we really ought to.  Because there are 50 states, about 300 cities of a population of more than 100,000, and between 30,000 and 35,000 cities and towns, depending on how interested you are in population, whether its "incorporated" etc.  And there are 196 countries in the world (give or take a few, depending on the year, who is deciding, who is at war, and whether or not we're being politically correct), and at least one person from every country is most likely represented in the United States whether they have been here a day or their family has been in here for generations.  An American can be any, and several of all of these elements mixed into ONE person.  Point being, in what way can we say "I'm American" with an meaning at all?

I'm not even a complex example of this, but see what I mean: I'm not just an American, I'm an American from Los Angeles, born of a Californian and a New Englander, a Westerner and an Easterner, a Mormon and a Congregationalist.  My ancestors come from Massachusetts, Maine, Utah, Canada, and before that England, Denmark, France, probably a thousand other places.  And we could try to narrow it down by saying I'm an American from Los Angeles.  But I was born in Culver City, and I grew up in West LA, and I went to school in Santa Monica, and I commuted the 405 for years, and I lived in the San Fernando Valley.  I went to church in Van Nuys, and the movies in Winnetka, Northridge, and Burbank.  I went shopping in Glendale, and I spent time with my friends in Reseda, or Lake Balboa, or Granada Hills.  We went to Downtown LA or Hollywood for shows, and Westwood for day-trips.  And we're still in Los Angeles.  But I have to tell you--those kids from Granada Hills were not my favorite, and we had dances with the kids from Canoga Park, but whenever I meet someone from there I don't particularly like them, I never went to Beverly Hills on my days off, and the Sherman Oaks people were always a little snooty.  North Hollywood was kind of a sketchy place to go, and I never got to know Studio City.  Yeah.  We're still in Los Angeles.  It also matters where you go to school in Los Angeles--Did you go to your homeschool?  Because that's odd.  I went to Elementary school in Culver City and Sherman Oaks, and Middle School was in Northridge and High School was in Lake Balboa/Van Nuys/Reseda--you could put any of those names on the envelope and it'd get sent.  And did you go to a public school or a private school? Was it a magnet or a charter?  Did it have an honors program?  What about a swim team, or a football team?  A robotics team or a Humanities magnet?  I mean WHAT KIND OF AN ANGELENO WERE YOU!?  How long did it take to get to school, or to your best friends place?  Yes--including traffic.  Do you like Mexicans?  What about Armenians?  Blacks?  Did you have all white people at your school?  Or all sorts of people?  Did you mistake the Salvadorans for Mexicans?  Did that get you in trouble?--Hope so.  I'm even going to get started on food.  And every person from Los Angeles who could possibly be reading this post right now would tell me about the hundred things I missed that makes people from Los Angeles different.  AND I KNOW.

Breathe.

Maybe there's one thing we agree on: How do you feel about LAUSD?

Yeah...

Point being, I'm hardly an American, and maybe the French have it right.  Because I don't know what the heck I am.  But if we're going to start somewhere, 'American' just doesn't cut it.  What does it tell you?  About some national loyalty?  Patriotism?  And I don't know if you can tell but I love mon pays.  I particularly love the part of it I know really well--the part of it I'm from, Los Angeles.  And I don't love all parts of America equally.  Because they're not mine.  And so I can understand that while this desert I live in is far more beautiful that most of what I saw every day in Los Angeles, it still can't win and it never will.  But because Los Angeles resides in the United States of America--I love America too.  It's just that . . . it doesn't mean as much.