Optimiste

Even though my French is pretty decent, I have become so used to constantly second guessing what I say, whether it's in terms of gender, agreement, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc., that I often forget that I'm not the only one making mistakes or constructing awkward sentences.  I recently was recently encouraged by the preschool aides when they discussed how they don't always feel they're good at French, even though it's their native language.  By that they meant that they sometimes have trouble with agreements (ie gender and number) or just with making awkwardly constructed sentences; both are trademarks of my French, so now I feel less alone.  Of course, I should have realized before this point that just because you're a native speaker doesn't necessarily mean that you speak your language properly (case in point: all the girls at Franklin County who talked about getting their hair or their nails "did" for school dances.  Fingernails on a chalkboard).  It's just that my mistakes are more glaring because of my (hopefully very light) accent.


Realizing that I'm not alone in my French mistakes is pleasant enough, but I really feel accomplished the times that I catch other people's errors.  Okay, so they're typically my students using the wrong irregular past participle ("li" instead of "lu", for example), but I guess you have to start somewhere. 


And now I get the point of this whole discourse: Tuesday when I was babysitting Felix he and I were doing our traditional races when he told me he would race me to the "optimiste".  There's an optometrist on his street, so while his proposal seemed a little bizarre I knew what he meant.  Then as we sprinted down the road it dawned on me: unless the optometrist is known for his incredible optimism, Felix had switched "optimiste" and "opticien".  The giggle this gave me may caused me to lose the footrace (or it could be the fact that F likes to give himself huge head starts--I'm talking at least 15 feet) but I don't care. I'm an optimiste.