A roach bit my face. I am so fucking traumatized right now. I don't want to go in there and go back to bed. It is somewhere, lurking. I HAD A ROACH ON MY FACE. God, if there is a god, please strike down every single roach on this property. It is 3am and I really just want to sleep.
I read somewhere a while ago that we are always within 10 feet of a spider at any given time in your house and that people probably eat several in their sleep during their lifetime. So you should probably be happy you didn't eat him. I mean, just a little bit closer and he would have been in your mouth. Happy sleeping! These are my nemesis every fall. I don't know why they love my sink drain. I can't function when I see them. It's like I have to kill them, but sweat it out as I do. They're fast suckers. I just know they are going to fly at my face and land there and get tangled in my hair which I will then have to shave off.
More than 20% of Canadians speak French as their first language. A significant number of those people aren't even inside Quebec. This learning point brought to you by the conversation I had last night with the nice Canadian military officer who said she felt ashamed to say she was "Quebecker" because of how anglophones respond to it, and who had also been told that she wasn't truly Canadian because she spoke English with an accent.
That's not as bad though. If it bites me, it may hurt and it's proving its mastery over me, which is humiliating. But if I eat it, I'm proving my mastery over it, which is preferable. In other news, I'd seriously give consideration to buying this bad boy if I could make it fit in my living room:
I don't care if YOU'RE bingual. This country isn't. How long exactly did you live there to constantly defend those assholes with such brio? I. Have. NEVER known a single French person. None. Got it? It's like saying America is bilingual because of the Hispanics. Don't cut me a line of anthrax and tell me it's cocaine.
Yeah, that's because you live in London. You bragging about having never known a single french person is the very fucking definition of the frog at the bottom of the well. When I lived in Ottawa, there would be road signs and business signs and advertisements IN FRENCH not because there was a sign law or everyone was super afraid of offending Quebeckers but because - holy fucking shit - people actually spoke French in that particular neighbourhood. When I lived in Germany, working with a bunch of Canadians, there were so many French Canadians there that the townspeople, on seeing my Canadian self, would greet me in French on the presumption that it was my first language. I know tons of francophones. I work with tons of them, I live with tons of them, my girlfriend happens to be one. They aren't all separatists. All you're doing is paying attention to the assholes and politicians who make newspaper headlines and assuming that they're all like that. Believe you fucking me, they're not. You might as well assume that all the lovely Americans here on the board believe that women don't get pregnant from legitimate rape because a few ignorant American politicians here and there have made statements to that effect. I want you to go back and read again what I said about that military officer who had been told she wasn't truly Canadian because English wasn't her first language. Really think about how fundamentally ignorant someone has to be to make such a statement. Given that you're basically writing off more than one in five Canadians on the basis that they don't speak the same language as you, how are you being any different? You also might do well to think about how you might feel if the situation were reversed and English wasn't the majority language and every stupid fucking francophone you met felt compelled to say stupid stock English phrases to you. "Uhh... I speak English... please! Thank you! May I go to the bathroom?". Because I see that shit way too often. Since you asked me how long I've lived "there", I've spent a collective 6 months of my life living in Quebec, most of which was spent in two lost summers in a miserable little place south of Montreal that was a little anglophone enclave and I can't really say I "lived" in Quebec while I was there.
Yes, it's always been officially considered that way. But when they're dmanding that we accomidate them while simultaneously banning our free will, that's makes them fucktards. Not all of them, just the chain-smoking separatist hypocrites.
Just so were clear, I am not sirecting scorn at every French person in this country. Mitzou is French.
Why, just today I was greeted by a UPS phone menu in French and had to wait to be spoken to in English so that I could press 2 to continue in English! I SPEAK ENGLISH! I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WAIT TO PRESS 2! MY FREE WILL IS BEING TRAMPLED UPON!
I do! Albuquerque is interesting in that there are several different cultures that don't always get along that well. Mexican Hispanic, Spanish Hispanic, Native American and everyone else. Not too many signs in Spanish, but there are very likely more spanish speakers than not here. Hopefully we don't get a movement for secession.
More accurately, people with anglophone privilege are oppressing people without anglophone privilege and the best analogy is that the bilingual phone message is like giving transgendered people the handicap spot so that Robert Zimmerman won't try to track them and confront them as they walk from the parking lot to the store. But more seriously, I'm bilingual enough that if I had to I could go through the message in French but not bilingual enough that I'd really want to. It was just unusual that a phone menu greeted me in French, normally they start off in English. The road sign thing actually does piss me off about Quebec. I've only ever seen two places in the world with stop signs in French. Quebec is one of them; the other one was Morocco, where French was the alternate to Arabic. In France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland - all over Europe in fact - stop signs say "STOP". Because it's a fucking safety issue. And when you cross the border into Ontario, signs like "IT'S THE LAW - HANDS FREE DEVICES ONLY", etc., are in both languages because it's important that people understand they can't text on their phones when driving here. Things like the sign law are bad enough, but traffic safety isn't fair game for politicians' narcissism.
The sign thing is the most ridiculous thing, by far. And after that Ottawa asshole sued the airline because they forgot to speak French to him. For seven grand.
It's one of my favourite things to do when I'm in Montreal is notice what things violate the sign law. "And that violates the sign law and that violates the sign law and that violates the sign law..." Usually it's shitty restaurants in Chinatown where the inspectors won't go anyways. The line is drawn at Italian restaurants putting the word "pasta" on menus.
Crown, just out of curiosity do you refuse to eat at Mexican restaurants with names like "Los Margaritas" or "Los Jalepenos" because the sign is not in English?
Do you know what is going on? It's a ban on English. They want it so you won't be allowed to use it in Quebec. You won't be able to go to school there unless you're their kind. What did they used to call that in your country? How'd it work out?
Crown, I think you need to take a deep breath and realize that you have English-speaking privilege and by asserting that privilege, you're oppressing all of the Frenchies.