The State of my Development

Lucille: He’s fine. I’ll be in the hospital bar.
Michael: Mother, there is no hospital bar.
Lucille: Oh. That must be why people hate hospitals.
Michael: …
Lucille: Bwahahaha!

Arrested Development. I downloaded every season. Why is it that Cheers and M*A*S*H lasted like 12 years and Arrested Development only lasted 4 years. (I must agree with some of you, I honestly did love M*A*S*H – my mom and I would watch it sharing the couch, my head resting on her butt. It made sense at the time.) But Arrested Development? Such a great show with tremendous writing. You know – I love using that word – tremendous. To be honest, I don’t even know what it means. Does it mean a lot? Or maybe a lot of good-good stuff? Yeah, I could google it. But I won’t.

John From Cincinnati. Now there was another tremendous show. It only aired one season. A partial season of 8 episodes. Set in Southern San Diego or Imperial Beach. It was a story about a surfing family and a boy post surfing accident. It played with notions of god. Without ever talking about god nor without ever being a Hallmark’ish Stairway to Heaven tackiness type of bs. Stairway to Heaven – how long did THAT air? Too long. I need to be a program director.

Last year, in the blogosphere, a rumor was running around that Arrested Development was coming back. It was a general common agreement that this rumor was good news. Tremendous news to me. “To” me or “for” me? I’m not stupid, I’m French. Some small linguistic details go sliding way over my head. Like the definition of tremendous. If I knew the translation, maybe I’d get a better understanding of the word. Maybe. I may be French, but my vocabulary isn’t that much better in my mother tongue.

Sometimes I think our brain can only hold a certain amount of words. Regardless of the language, there is a limit. The more I learn new words in Spanish, the more my brain is wiping out certain words in French or in English. That’s why I often stop mid-sentence at a loss for words. Literally. I can’t go on because I have no clue of the word I intended to say. So I’ll work around it. A towel becomes a piece of cloth to wipe myself with. A wrench becomes a thing to tighten bolts with. That’s twice now that I end a sentence improperly. I was hoping you hadn’t noticed so I pointed it out in case you had – so you’d know that I knew.

I am. Je suis. In Spanish it is either Yo soy or Yo estoy. But in reality all you need to say is Soy or Estoy. I am sick. Estoy enferma. I am from Canada. Soy de Canada. I am in Mexico. Estoy en México. I wish I knew what (which?) words I lost in order to learn those. I’ll find out whenever I’ll try to pull them out of my vocabulary tool box. My fingers will be blindly searching for the right tool and they’ll come back out empty.

My development appears to have been arrested. Ooh! Talking about Arrested Development… I hope the rumors were true and I can’t wait for it to come back.

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Images: 20th Century Fox Television