00goddess

There's a thread on AskReddit "what was something your family did that you didn't realize wasn't normal until later" and at some point someone said "Using a mix of random German words, I didn't know it wasn't English until my friends looked at me funny." But his family has been in the US since 1902. and another person chimed in and said their family did this with Spanish.

OMG I have found my people! Y'all my family did this with French! French was my paternal grandfather's first language, and my grandma learned it in school, so my mom grew up in a house where French and English were mixed together and so did I. I really wish they had just spoken only French at home instead tbh.

Like we never said "Excuse me" we said "Excusez-moi." In fact we almost never used the word "me" at all, it was always "moi." You know how in "Frasier", Frasier Crane is always inserting French words into conversation and it's mega-pretentious? My mom does that except it's not pretentious, it's just how she was raised in Deep East TX.

Once I was in public school I had to change how I spoke because teachers and students didn't understand what I was saying and it upset them. Typical white people xenophobia. In junior high I took French though and was one of the best in my class. My teacher was really disappointed that I didn't continue. My French is really good when I am drunk, but otherwise, I need more practice.

My French professor at HCC said I was good enough to teach beginner lessons (that was 10 years ago though, I am sure I am not that good today.) The lady who tailors my clothes says my accent is so good when i said her name that it surprised her when I continued on in English. She had to stop and ask me to repeat myself because her brain was expecting French and didn't understand me.

I was really surprised recently to learn that having a lot of houseplants is a new trend. I thought this was normal. One thing I really did like about the house I grew up in (my biomom's house) was the plants. She always had a LOT of houseplants. the east side of the living room had 4 big windows, and the west side of the room had a sliding glass door, and both of them always had at least one row of plants in front of them. I remember she had several variegated pothos (which we called "ivy"), a ficus, a "rubber tree", an aloe vera, and at giant dieffenbachia. The deiffenbachia got to be about 4 feet tall, and the last time I saw it, it was potted in a giant trash can that she spray-painted green. So the top of it reached at least 6 feet. At one point the central stalk snapped, it broke almost completely, and she was so upset. She ended up taping it back together and it kept on trucking. She also kept some plants in a kitchen "garden window".

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I'm a mystic, in the sense that I'm still mystified by things.

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