Yolande Villemaire

There is a saying in French: « le trois fait le mois ». It means something like whatever happens the third day of the month gives the whole month its rythm, pace, focus, theme. Something like that. Usually in matters of weather. Today in Montreal looks mild and sunny through the drapes of my bedroom’s window. I’m directly posting on the Web from my iPad, still in bed at almost 8 o’clock. After a wonderful Fête des Rois with my family yesterday. Kitchen is a mess but I don’t see it from here 🙂

Waking up early, I connected with friends from my #twittercity list and unexpectedly did jump into something that had been on my mind for a while: at 6.42 am Montreal time, I started using my real name on both Twitter and Posterous. Twitter says it might take a while to show, on Posterous it’s already active! My fears of connecting online and RL identities are not completely gone but I’m now willing to deal with the awkwardness of living all my personal and professional life in French and connecting to the world in international English. After all, many of us are living a similar situation. I would love to communicate in my maternal language by then how would I connect with @natashabadhwar in Delhi, @lindahollier in Dubai, @ElizaMadrigal in Miami, shakti_shetty in Navi Mumbai, @AnneFlournoy in New York or @jmatlin in Montreal?

I’m fluent in English ( though I have a very strong French accent) but it’s still a second language and I used to think it was showing. After more than a year in the virtual world of Second Life as Eden Haiku, and especially in a wonderful group experimenting about the nature of reality and Time called Play as Being, these fears are gone, thanks to these wonderful fellow « guardians » who listened to me and put up with my typos and sometimes a tad too creative use of English words, grammar and syntax. Many of them are American, Canadian or from UK but others are native speakers of Dutch, German, Hebrew, Italian, Maltese or Finnish and we all manage to discuss our lives and experiments in the vehicular language of our time. So going transparent is happening today for me. Let’s see where it leads me! ( Hopefully into improving my website which is still very much hidden deep into the invisible web and on which I intend to work after cleaning up the kitchen and hosting my Monday Second Life session at 7 am ( Second Life Time which is Pacific Time).