Today, I write an e-mail to G's teacher from last year, who she adores, to see if we can skype with him. Because her school in San Francisco is also a French immersion/bilingual school, her teacher is French, and so I write the e-mail en français.
There are a few problems with writing en français on an American keyboard, however. One is that the accents are a pain in the neck to insert properly. Another is that spell-check or auto-correct are both very irritating (yes, I did mean "danse" and not "dance", "ile" and not "isle" or "ill" or "I'll", etc.). But the hardest of all to guard against are my own typing habits. For example, when a word ends in the letters "in", like "lapin", my fingers just automatically type "ing."
And so, today I find myself trying to arrange the skype call with her teacher who, you should know for the purposes of this story, is -- how shall I say it? -- quite easy on the eyes. I want to tell him that it's probably best on weekends, when it's afternoon or evening here. Or another option that would work with the 9 hour time difference is if he goes to bed late (say, 11pm), and it would be 8am our time. So I aim to say, "I don't know when you go to bed at night" or, in French, "Je ne sais pas à quelle heure tu te couche le soir..." But my fingers type "touche" instead of "couche" which makes the sentence read, "I don't know when you touch yourself at night..."
All I can say is Thank Goodness I am an anal email writer, and I always edit what I've written, and especially in French. So I do in fact fix it (and alter the sentence a lot, in case some freakish auto-correct thing happens along the way), but not until I crack myself up and blush a great deal. And I don't know why it is more embarassing for me to send it to a handsome man than anybody else, but it just is.
And I don't know why it's less embarassing for me to tell all of my family and friends about it (including him) in this blog post than to send it to him in the first place, but it just is!
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