Another French song: “L’hymne à l’amour”

Our first anniversary

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Yesterday, my girlfriend and I celebrated our first anniversary.

She gave me a scrapbook. I didn’t know what that was.

“Do you know what scrap is, Arthur?” she asked me.

“Nope,” I said.

“Scrap means fragments, pieces,” she explained.

“Oh, crap but scrap,” I said in a tone of understanding.

So scrapbook is an album that you put pictures of you and your boyfriend or girlfriend. To be a nice scrapbook, one needs to decorate it.

My girlfriend had pictures of us separated by theme. Each page of the scrapbook is decorated according to a different theme. Two pages also have a dried flower that I gave to my girlfriend during the 12 months we’ve been together.

I can only say that I really like my anniversary present.

Thanks, Lindinha. I love you!

After studying for the GRE…

http://goodbadandugly2.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/sick.jpg

I had to take the GRE exam because I am planning to go to grad school.

The GRE tests one’s knowledge on vocabulary among other things. So I’ve been memorizing English words for the past month that even native speakers have no idea what they mean.

Now, I use some of those words in normal conversations.

For some reason I don’t remember I used the word “fulminant,” which means abruptly and with great intensity, when talking to my girlfriend.

“Are you using these words because you studied them for the GRE?” she asked me after doubting that “fulminant” was a word.

I told her to stop making fun of me because I had a cold.”Just wait untill I ameliorate (get better),” I said, taking advantage of my GRE vocabulary.

I didn’t tell my girlfriend, but I don’t think I used the word “ameliorate” correctly.

In the airplane

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One of my Brazilian friends didn’t speak English very well in his first year at Winthrop.

He said he was in the airplane coming to Winthrop from Brazil, when a man approached him.

“Hey, what’s your seat?” the man asked.

“Rock Hill, South Carolina,” my friend said, thinking the man had asked him what his “city” was.

My friend said the man was kind of confused. In the end, though, they understood each other.

I can see your halo

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I thought halo was a bad word.

“I can see your halo,” Beyoncé sings.

After listening to Lady Gaga’s words “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick,” I thought “halo” referred to sexual organs.

My girlfriend laughed at me and said “halo” is the round, yellow thing flying above an angel’s head.

So there are no sexual connotations in Beyoncé’s song.

Womanizer

The “halo” story reminds me of a professor who told me that his daughter thought that “womanizer” from one of Britney Spears’s songs was a bad word.

Shame on these pornographic songs that affect the lives of little kids and non-English speaking foreigners.

Pretty woman has bushy eyebrows; so do I

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My girlfriend was looking at the cover of “Pretty Woman” and said that Julia Roberts had bushy eyebrows in the movie.

My girlfriend’s friend agreed. I couldn’t agree nor disagree.

“You don’t know what ‘bushy’ means, Arthur?” my girlfriend asked me.

Of course I didn’t.

“It’s like your eyebrows,” she continued. “Thick.”

My friend’s friend is a hermit crab

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A friend of mine told me her roommate is a hermit crab.

Of course I didn’t know what that was.

“It’s a mix of a crab and a snail,” she said, making crab claws with her hands.

She explained that a hermit crab stays inside his shell most of the time. Her roommate doesn’t leave her bedroom for nothing. So her roommate is a hermit crab.

Hermit-Crab Campaign in Brazil

I told my friend that a Brazilian TV program launched the Hermit-Crab Campaign one time.

People who would show up behind a reporter on live TV and would make an impression of a hermit-crab would win the program’s T-shirt. The program called the hermit-crab impression “a dança do siri,” the hermit-crab dance.

Check these two videos for the hermit-crab dance live on TV.

Dividing my hair

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My hair is as long as my girlfriend’s hair.

I told her that I am going to cut my hair short when I go back to Brazil in December.

“Then, I am going to divide it on the side, not in the middle anymore,” I said.

She started laughing.

“It’s to part the hair, not divide,” she said. “Dividing your hair sounds like you’re going to cut it all off, separate it into two piles and give it to your friends.”

The importance of knowing another language

My new favorite French song: “Je ne veux pas travailler” by Pink Martini