A Year in High Heels

Welp, I’m officially overwhelmed. Ms. Morton decided to shove the entirety of the kitchen sink into this date, and before the 6th. I’m going to try and keep this fairly short as I only have an hour for lunch, and I don’t necessarily want to spend all of it writing.

I’m not even going to give this first bit a heading, because it’s literally two sentences about Mendelssohn. Two sentences. We find out when and where he was born, and the names of two of his pieces. The most famous of which is likely The Wedding March. However, straight up, aside from movies, I don’t think most people use that tune for their walk back up the aisle anymore. Also, the idea that February is the month to find love is absolutely ridiculous. It’s still the dead of winter. February is still the month to hunker down, eat soup, and wear the coziest, most ill fitting clothes. Finding love in February is way too much effort.

Learning a Language

Gotta say, this isn’t bad advice. Having a basic grasp of another language can always be handy. I’m not entirely sure if her examples and attempts at phonetically spelling hello in various languages works, but I’m willing to give her kudos for the attempt.

She does proceed to wax poetic about France from here to nearly the end of the chapter. It’s her assumption that you’re going to learn French, and visit France, have a croissant there, and consume a variety of French media in order to prepare. This preparation includes Perfume: The Story of a Murder, Cyrano de Bergerac, and likely Julia Child because who doesn’t enjoy the French Chef? Anyway, while I appreciate that Ms. Morton is a Francophile, I am not likely to be going to France anytime soon.

Instead, I’m going to put my efforts into Japanese. My husband and I have planned a trip to Japan to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. Now, I do have a minor advantage here in that I have 2 years of high school Japanese under my belt. I don’t really remember most of it aside from how to introduce myself (as a high schooler), but maybe some of it will come back to me. I’ve already worked on a handful of phrases, but I know that sometimes out of context I’ve got the wrong one in mind. Hopefully actually using the language will come a bit more naturally.

In the meantime, this is a solid excuse to eat sushi, get familiar with Japanese written characters again, to watch a fair amount of anime and j-dramas, and to revisit my favorite j-pop and rock from when I was 17.