33. Try to Write About the Eiffel Tower

This is my attempt to write after a four year brain fog.

My French teacher is making me write short essays to prepare for my French language exam for citizenship this Spring where I write about anything based on material she provides. The other day she presented me with this Victor Hugo quote: "Rêver c'est le bonheur, attendre c'est la vie." The translation is essentially: "Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life."

I wrote about how my son wakes up 3-4 times a night since he's still adjusting to his new bed. Each time he does, I put him back to bed and stand at the doorway until he falls asleep again. His room is the smallest in the apartment, but his window has a view of the Eiffel Tower -- something he doesn't really care about as a two year old.

When I am on guard duty, waiting for him to fall asleep, I spend a lot of time staring at the Eiffel Tower. If it's before 1 AM, I see the hourly light show and always think about how drastically different his childhood is from my own, where from my bedroom window, I just saw a gray Houston bayou.

Between 2-5 AM, the Eiffel Tower is not twinkling, just silently aglow. The other night, I was staring at it like always when suddenly it started twinkling, even though it was not time for the light show. I thought I was hallucinating, but there it was, going off like it was at the clerb. I checked Twitter to see if anyone else noticed but nothing. It was very eerie.

So I attempted to write about all of this in French, but since my French -- especially my written French-- is shit, I don't know if I got the point across. In short, I ended up writing a thesis statement that was somewhere along the lines of: "Parenthood consists of a lot of waiting around, but at least I have a nice view while I do it." I wanted it to sound a lot more poetic than that, but like I said, my French is, to quote my daughter, caca boudin.

My teacher read my essay, and after correcting my thousand errors, she told me that she, too, was aware of the glitch that night. I asked her why she was awake at such an ungodly hour, and she simply said, "You think you're special? Everyone is always looking at that thing."