She looks at the letter recently arrived in the mail and says: “This looks like your handwriting”. I responded, perhaps haughtily, that I “don’t write letters to myself”. Humpf. So I looked at the letter, and it DID look like my handwriting.
I opened the letter. I was confronted with 3 pages of text, my name at the top of each, ALL of it in my own handwriting. This annoyed more than puzzled me mostly due to the earlier comment about how I’d never write my own damn self a letter. Damn. Still, I hadn’t the faintest idea what this was all about, until I noticed that it was written in ANOTHER language! I should perhaps point out that I noticed the language thing quite quickly.
So NOT only had I actually written a letter to myself, it was written in a language I mostly didn’t understand (any longer). Damn.
What had happened here, was that we had an assignment in my French 11 class where we were to predict what our lives would be like in approximately 10 years, and then we would read these at our 10 year High School reunion. The annoying thing about French assignments, above all, was that they had to be ENTIRELY written in French – which was a problem for my comprehension 11 years later. Even more confusing, there was a hand print, presumably mine, in blue paint on the last page. This looked like something out of a Kindergarten class, yet it was a full size hand. Strange.
So…. as I had conveniently written the whole thing in double spacing, I wrote underneath the French writing a translation. Managed about half of it without cheating with a dictionary. As we had to always speak in French in French class, the sentence that still most easily comes to my mind is “Je ne sais pas” and a few other things like that. Sadly, this sentence was not in my letter.
Another thing that became painfully obvious was that I wasn’t that good of a French student. This was also a letter to ourselves, so the teacher didn’t proofread it for us, as this was a private matter. This made some of the sentences hard to understand, and one of them downright ridiculous as a prediction:
It is possible that you will be a woman, but child I doubt.
In my own defence, I know that I meant that I would be married or something, not that I would BE a woman. I don’t think I meant I’d be a child either. Some might differ on the opinion as to whether that “you probbaly won’t be a child” prediction came true.
The other predictions I will leave where they are, but will point out that I am no Nostradamus. My favourite part of the letter to myself was where I, in the last sentence, pointed out that 10 years from now my French probably won’t be too good, so I bet I’d be looking all this up in the dictionary. How things change…. I was on google.com, running the parts I couldn’t’ decipher myself through the language translator. I should point out that when I graduated from high school, the world wide web had barely begun, with approximately 3 web pages in North America. Now, I have more than 3 web sites myself.
The hand print turned out, as explained by the last page of writing, to be a self administered palm reading. This reminds me exactly why I didn’t like French class. It wasn’t learning the language, it was the mentality of the teachers, invariably female. I will not torment you with tales of countless mock fashion shows and posture projects about my favourite actor that I had to endure. Horror… the horror.
The next time I get a letter in the mail, I’m going to keep my mouth shut.