Faux Meditation

Over the past year, I've developed a strategy to help my easily-distracted brain focus better. If I'm reading for class or doing important bureaucratic paperwork stuff (hello, France, I'm talking to you), and my mind wanders, I just write down whatever comes through my mind. It's kind of a cheater's version of meditation, you might say, since from what I've read, certain practices of meditation involve just calming your mind and acknowledging mental distractions but not acting on them when they come around.

In the spirit of this faux-meditation, here are some things that are on my mind. Some of these I did, in fact, write down while doing some reading of Willa Cather's My Ántonia for one of the English classes I'm working in.

• It would seem that the cheese I like and have bought more regularly than anything here is not Brie like I thought (although I do enjoy Brie), but Ortolan. It's very mild and texturally easy to deal with, and honestly I think that since I had such a strong olfactory aversion to the Camembert that I tried two weeks ago, I'm probably not going to become a strong-cheese-lover very soon.
• Lesson ideas: repeat of my Halloween Tree lesson for the kids I didn't see last week; a discussion of this spooky Emily Carroll comic, retweeted by the one and only Neil Gaiman; finding out students' individual goals for English proficiency (being able to talk about sports, politics, etc); oral analysis of the way dialogue in My Ántonia (1918) differs from modern spoken English; particularly odd linguistic tricks in English like the ability to say "[direct object]+[verb-ing]" as in "bureaucracy-braving." I also need to figure out a neat way to make all students participate without making them hate me. (They're probably going to hate me anyway.)
• Random stuff:
  • Figure out zones to purchase access to on my monthly Navigo metro/RER/bus pass
  • Eyebrows
  • Tupperware
  • Reserve flat