Apparently my brain has a two-language maximum.

So I had dinner with my friend Erik last night. Erik and I met when I was studying in Senegal and he was working at the center that organized my classes. We also worked together on the magazine the center produced. He lived in Senegal for a couple of years and was in Peace Corps in Guinea for a couple of years before that.

Point being, he speaks Wolof much, much better than I do.

Anyway, last night at dinner my blog somehow came up in conversation. And then I learned that I made an error in Wolof when I named the blog. I thought "du wax loolu" meant "shut up," but in fact, "shut up" is "bul wax loolu." Which I actually knew once, now that Erik has reminded me.

This is somewhat embarrassing but luckily, all is not lost. "Du wax loolu" is still a meaningful phrase. It translates to "She [or he] doesn't say that." Which I've decided (primarily because it's too late to rename the blog) is a more oblique, postmodern name for a blog than "shut up" anyway.

In other (foreign, sort of) news, I am leaving tomorrow for a two-week trip to France. I'll be spending a few days in Paris, visiting my friend Pascal, and then spending the bulk of the trip in Toulouse with my host family from high school. Torsten and I have already planned a marathon American Idol/House session for when I return. So while I'm there, I will have to avoid all news sources so that I don't accidentally find out who got voted off American Idol before I see the show. In a way, it's sad that I can't look at hard news without being informed of the latest in reality television. But it is even more sad that I am voluntarily remaining ignorant about what's happening in the world for two weeks just so that I am protected from finding out about the results of these reality shows. So I guess that shows where my priorities are. Can I really blame the news media for catching on to the public's priorities and mixing hard news with stuff that people really want to read about? Probably not. What a shame.