oui-dire

I'm trying to be more positive...at the risk of sounding positivist, I've afforded every utterance a physical, mental, or literal "yes", a sort of sic (sick!) to affirm the existence of language qua language, irrespective of the validity of its content.

I tried to parlay this attitude to my students with a game of gradual linguistic distortion called Telephone, or téléphone arabe (their words, not mine), but the orthodoxy of errancy upset my littlest ones. To my delight my older kids quickly began to treat the game as an opportunity to commit varying degrees of speech acts, and pretty little Khadidja slyly modified "I Love You" to "I Fuck You." Khadidja was already my favorite, because during a pre-Valentine's Day speed-dating activity she insisted--just to be sexy--on dating girls, but with this affirmed commitment to sexual and textual errancy I want to lock her in my room until she causes me unspeakable epistemological agony (sorry BA, not feeling the Proust content?). But enough, this is beginning to sound like my senior essay...

To help my 13-year-olds with their pronouns I made them ask each other, "What do you want me to do?", which got pretty freaky:

"We want Olivier to dance on the chair!"
"We want Juliette to do striptease!"
"We want Julien to kiss Katie!"
"We want Chinois [not his actual name, I'm pretty sure] to do math calculation!"
"No striptease?!? Mais Madame...!!! OK, we want Juliette to montrer son torse"

Incidentally French children are slightly worse at asking to go to the bathroom than they are at understanding "Do You Understand?", and it was all Olivier could do to request "please go Ladies and Gentlemen?" I let him go, but only after explaining that apparently his chair-dance routine, rather than deconstructing the Lacanian Ur-binary of gender difference, had only reinforced it with the absurdity of its inversion. But enough...

I'm trying to dire "oui" with my roommates, too. I got them T-shirts, which they loved, because the French don't even have a word for T-shirt. The other week I think I heard, out of context, Marwan reassuring a tearful Manon that the things you overhear are sometimes "hors du contexte"...but this is all just ouï-dire, and yesterday she even invited me to a dinner party entre filles; she's making couscouscouscouscouscous

I need a job post-fin avril, possibilities suggested by my students in a game of Categories include Bitch, FBI, Superman, Stripteaser...what do you want me to do?