MR

MR

Thanks for the empathy, I am sure it is hard to not be able to write about your belle-mere just as it is for petite not to write about her thoughts about work. Especially when the blog forum might be one of the few outlets for those thoughts…

I would like to talk about what happened on my blog as well, though of course I cannot unless I start a new one. Now, I feel like I have to take care with each sentence because something as innoncent as “I’m half in love with our baker” (who is a rotund but sweet 65 year-old, though I would forget to add this) could come back to my boyfriend as “Cecile is cheating on you.” I have enough confidence that I know he wouldn’t buy it, but as you said, I don’t want to have to avoid his family (to whom he is close) forever.

So, I’ve expressed some of it here, which is unfair to petite and I’m sorry for taking up your space, but I hope it’s still relevant to the post.

Those other family members who have the “shaky but functional” English (like your boyfriend’s cousin) are quite likely to get back to her with a mis-representation of something I have written. Or, hell, a true representation.

Whatever. I’ve decided that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life dodging my own mother-in-law (who does, by the way, supply the apartment we stay in in Collioure….), so I s’pose I will keep it light. Sucks, though.

I’ve been reading your blog for a while now, and I hope everything ends up okay at work. Safe is better than sorry in my experience…I am american living in paris and I have a non-anonymous blog (I didn’t put the URL because I am changing it soon), though my last name is nowhere to be seen and you cannot search for it unless you know what’s in it already. Nonetheless, I was very shaken and upset by something that happened in the last couple of weeks. I was recently staying at my boyfriend’s family’s house in the south of France, and wrote about some of it on my blog, which is mostly read by expats I know in Paris, my family, and close friends back home. After I left, however, his cousin found it on the history page and because of shaky but functional english completely misinterpreted a sentence I wrote. I found out from another member of the family that said cousin now thinks I had a horrible time in the south and think they are all “paysans”. When I found out specifically what sentence it was, I couldn’t help but laughing out loud: I describe how wonderful the days are there and then say ironically how difficult life is. My sarcasm is so explicit that a native speaker would never misread it.

Sorry to post such a long comment, but I wanted to share it because that one misreading caused an agonizing night for my boyfriend and myself, and has shaken up our once peaceful relationship. He says I should write to them and explain how much I enjoyed my time with them; I tend to think that may be the diplomatic route but je m’en fous, it’s my blog and it isn’t my fault they misread it. Nonetheless, I don’t want to risk it again so I will be changing my URL and “quarantining” most of my old blog for a while.

Good luck at work, and happy birthday.

If just one of them is untrue then I am saying ‘g’. Most of the other ones are too bizarre to be made up, even by you.

Happy B-day…