Am I ever proud of my master degree in French linguistics, in experimental phonetics, to be more precise! Best move I ever made! To get such a diploma, I sweated for the last two years of my B.A., during my two years of “license” and then, rotted for three years in a laboratory spreading cocoa powder on my friends’ tongue and taking photos of cocoa prints on their palate. Disgusting, isn’t it? But nothing is really too ridiculous when you really want to add a few letters to your name… letters you never use anyway! By the way, at the time, I lost a few of my friends! I was highly motivated: all my teachers at the university constantly repeated that I would be one of the very few in Canada to deserve a PhD in experimental phonetics; what they didn’t say is that nobody needs someone with a f*****g PhD degree in experimental phonetics. So I quit after my master degree; I didn’t even go to the big show where they solemnly give you your dilploma paper; they sent it by mail! All my life I will remember the face of that guy at the unemployment office when I told him I was looking for a job in “experimental phonetics”; I’m sure he wet his pants!
Those years were not completely useless. I learned that somebody can easily choke on cocoa powder. I learned that you can easily feel like a piece of crap when you have a master degree and nobody wants to hire you and even thinks that you are the funniest thing around in weeks. I learned never to listen to somebody with more than three letters after his name. I learned that Canada doesn’t need a specialist in tongue-cocoa-spreading-and-palate-photography. And most of all, I learned that we always speak too much; with or without cocoa powder in our mouth. This last knowledge came from my studies in general linguistics. And, why do we speak too much? Because people don’t listen. And why don’t they listen? Because they know that most of what is coming out of your mouth is either cocoa powder or bullshit. Remember, I listened to my teachers’ bullshit!
So, I decided that I would spend my life speaking as little as possible. It’s not easy when you earn living teaching teenagers. On the other hand, teenagers quickly make you understand that everything that comes out of your mouth is either cocoa powder or bullshit. When you decide to speak as little as possible, you choose carefully what you say. And one of the ideas I thought was important for my students to know is that you can get anything from life if you give everything in exchange. In my 30 years of teaching I probably repeated that a thousand times. This is that kind of idea you can repeat again and again because it sounds wise and mainly because you know damn well nobody can give EVERYTHING to get something else.
Once more, I should have kept my big mouth shut. Can you imagine somebody that would give everything, and when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING, to reach a goal. Somebody that wakes up thinking of this goal, talking about it while eating, somebody that buys clothes only if it serves this goal, somebody that exercises to get in shape to pursue this goal, somebody that can’t sit still and look at a television show if he doesn’t have his laptop to work a little, at least during the commercials, somebody that goes to bed each night dreaming of the day he would reach that precious goal, this goal he knows he will never reach because it constantly runs out of reach. Frightening, isn’t it? Might sound nagging! Not at all. If you ever meet people such as this wonderful guy, stick to them. They’re the only ones worth living with. They’re not real human beings; they’re gods.
That’s why my beloved Mathieu (Laca) is such a wonderful and promising artist. Sometimes I like to believe that maybe he listened to me when I told him about getting things from life.
I dream that maybe I might have made a difference.
Comeau B.A., L. ès linguistique, M.A. (phonétique expérimentale)
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