I just watched two hours of TV5Monde Etats-Unis

I don't know what you're doing, but I just watched two hours of TV5Monde Etats-Unis--and I don't even have what you could politely call rudimentary French. It all began because I didn’t have anything worth watching in my DVR and Peter’s at school and I felt like watching something. Not sports news, not South Park—oh, hey! a (subtitled) documentary about what appears to be some sort of co-housing/communal living community in Quebec(?). Possibly vegetarian? This could be fun.

That’s the last coherent English thought I had.

Two hours later, I stepped away from the television, having watched some sort of documentary news program about urban gardening (entirely in French). And while I was wondering about that, I got sucked into some sort of extreme athlete profile show where a woman (I think?) was cross-country skiing across a polar ice cap (?) by using a para-sailing technique. No subtitles. I understood some of the numbers, but since they were in kilometers, it didn’t do me any good. I can’t do math AND translate. (What was she DOING up there?)

This was followed by a very strange, very polished commercial for something about the JFK assassination (?). The most graphic frames of the Zapruder film were featured prominently. My rough translation of the title of what it was advertising left me with the understanding that "It is not the hour of the Kennedys." (What?)

I then found myself following three teenaged girls, who had been born in China, but then adopted by Quebecois parents in the 1990s, as they journeyed for the first time (speaking only French) back to visit the orphanage in China where they came from. And THEN, I watched the most sedate/confusing game show I have ever seen. It was utterly dull and utterly mesmerizing. I swear the host of "Questions for Champions" (?) never made any sort of facial expression whatsoever, and yet, I was rapt. The point system seemed fairly arbitrary, the questions were lengthy, the answers often only one "mot" and in the end, the guy who had been doing the worst (Jean-Marc) defeated the inscrutable and much younger Mathieu in a "Face-to-Face" lightning round, but then...seemed to split a 500 franc (?) prize...? Also Stephanie won some chocolates. Je ne sais pas how this is what I'm doing right now...My brain feels like it had a bath in fresh spring water. Is this what it’s like to do drugs?

The secret to TV5Monde’s appeal, I think, is that they don't have any commercials, except for their own programming, so viewers are smoothly conducted from one program to the next. You just...keep going, like you're on some sort of pleasant escalator in an airport…in France.

Oh, my gosh! And now the Kennedy thing is on. (“There are no happy Kennedys”). I cannot walk away...Peter's going to come home in two hours and just find me here, staring at the television, a look of such intensely passive concentration on my face, he will think I am sleepwalking. In French. (He’s going to be so confused.)