Virtually Home

Last night we went out with our friends Carley and Danielle to celebrate the end of their finals week. It was still sort of surreal to me, maybe because I really only had about two weeks of actual work during the whole semester, and most of that was me procrastinating my paper rather than just getting it done. Still, it was a good celebratory outing. Vianney and Benjamin ended up meeting up with us. Somewhere near the park at Gambetta at around midnight we encountered the only group of violent people I've yet run across in France, who, after asking us if we had any cigarettes, for some reason I couldn't understand, hit Alex and then pushed Benjamin over twice before disappearing into the night. Everyone was okay, if a little confused. We hurried home. This morning was its own trial. I had alerted our landlady to the possibility that Something Was Very Wrong with our kitchen plumbing. Every couple of hours there's this tremendous gurgling and water sort of shoots out of...

Today, France decided to let me catch a break. I was told Auchan might come sometime today. My phone rang at 10 a.m., and I, having been awake until five, struggled to be awake enough to understand French through the phone. For some reason it's a lot harder than in person. The guy on the other end said he'd be at my house somewhere between right that instant and 11, so I scrambled to get dressed and go get cash from the ATM to pay him with. When he arrived, he started tinkering with the washing machine and asked me if I still had the estimate. Awkward, because we never got the estimate and no, I didn't even have the bill that the first guy left me when he came to make the estimate. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized he might decide not to do the work, lacking that damned signature on the form. To my surprise, he kept working. He called the company to get the price of the part, installed it, and was in and out in fifteen minutes -- the total cost...

Time passes strangely here. My schedule hardly conforms to the one I kept over the last several semeseters in Oklahoma. It involves a lot of late nights and a lot of sleeping in, eating meals at strange times and bouncing between the attention span of a goldfish and marathons of one activity or another. Lately, I've been throwing all my time at procrastinating studying for my various tests and writing my paper for typology. I'm about to get to the end of a book I'm reading on lingustics, and one of the last chapters is talking about the connections that link language to race and customs in a sort of awkward way. I'm going to blame the fact that it was written in 1921 for the way it talks about race, because it's not strictly politically correct. But then, what does that even mean? Other than that, I've spent a lot of time in my room listening to Tilly and the Wall, really. When I have something to do and feel guilty about not doing it, I spend a lot of time ...

I never thought much about my accent, really in any context, until I left the place where everyone sounds like me. These days I'm meeting a lot of people who have a hard time understanding what I'm saying when I speak French, and a lot of Canadians and Brits who speak different English than I do. Combine those experiences with the fact that my classes are taught in French by professors with various accents (Congo, Naples) and mostly deal with the subject of linguistics? I've been thinking about it a lot more than I ever have. Most of the anglophones I meet in this country immediately say "Oklahoma? Really? But you don't sound like you're from Oklahoma!" The American-inclined ones might add "Actually, you don't have an accent at all." Most of these people have never been anywhere near Oklahoma, though some of them are American (Californians, I'm looking at you). It's true that I scorn the word "y'all" and try not...

I tried to go to bed relatively early last night -- and by that I mean around 2 a.m. Instead, I was awake until sometime after 5 a.m., and woke up when my alarm went off at 10 in a haze of dream-confusion and grainy-eyed pessimism. I got online and bought a plane ticket from London to Geneva to meet up with Rachel on Christmas Eve. The next plan was to head over to the SNCF office and get a ticket from Bordeaux to London to visit Tom, since their website has been steadfastedly refusing to show me train schedules for days now. But after a comically cold shower, while on the point of pouring cereal into a bowl, I was surprised by a phone call from our landlady regarding the washing machine problem. Yes, the washing machine problem is ongoing. Yes, this is three months. And of course, since I can't stand letting cereal sit in milk for any length of time longer than strictly necessary, I halted my breakfast preparations. As it turns out, Auchan mailed the estimate to my address in ...

Friday, I went to see Paranormal Activity with Anthony. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, to be honest. It was fun to see, but I'm struck by the oddity of the flood of horror movies that are coming out in December. It seems like now is the time for Christmas movies. Afterward we met up with Xavier and Maria at Dick Turpin's, and ended up running into Carley and Danielle, some Canadian friends. The next night, I went to Anthony's to watch Miss France, which was pretty much exactly what you would expect if you took Miss America and made it more French (which is to say, not any better). The announcers had a much more French sense of style, though one of them was wearing a dress that made both Anthony and I think she looked like an ostrich. The panel of judges included Jean-Paul Gauthier. There were lots of coordinated sort-of-dance routines with matching outfits. All of their swimsuits and bikinis matched (yes, there was a swimsuit contest AND a bikini contest)...

So I went to the book store this afternoon and picked up a Robert & Collins English vocabulary study guide, which I'm planning on using backwards. I thought it was pretty clever. Plus, it'll teach me Britishisms! The better to understand my rapidly expanding base of non-American anglophone friends. On the way to the book store I took several photos of the various Christmas trees and light displays near my house. Unfortunately, I discovered that the photos are just a little too blurry even for my hasty posting here. I'll go back and take more time with them. Practice holding my breath and being really still for those long exposures. Maybe I should get a tripod. Point being: you have to wait a while for Christmas photos. In other Christmas news, I've expanded the Great European Christmas Adventure of Ought Nine/Ten (I'm rethinking this title as a result of the awkwardness of the year 2010. On the one hand, I'm already angry about not being able to use the ...

This morning I woke up oddly motivated to work on my project, but had to go to class. Maria and I went to the tram stop about ten minutes later than I usually do, which seemed fine since I usually get to class about fifteen minutes early. Except that the tram was going to be 12 minutes arriving, and when it finally did arrive, it was too packed for us to get on. I had to wait another 5 minutes, at this point knowing I was going to be at least 20 minutes late to class. I was planning on not going, but just then the tram pulled up and I couldn't really keep myself from getting on it. Twenty-five minutes later, I walk into the auditorium, expecting 200 heads to turn around and look at the disturbance. Instead, I found myself alone in a large empty room. I love it when class is canceled without notice. So I spent 30 more minutes waiting on and taking the tram. It wasn't the best way to start my day. One thing I noticed on campus was the rather prolific amount of anti-fascist ...

Sometime over the weekend I managed an incredible feat of physics, the likes of which only seems to happen to me. Like the time I broke my toe by barely knocking it on the side of the desk chair at my Traditions apartment. Or the time, while lightly dusting a bookshelf, I managed to wedge my finger against the shelf in such a way that a big chunk of it got sliced off. Pretty awesome. Anyway, while rinsing out the coffee pot, it sort of barely touched the side of the sink, and grew one perfect round hole about the size of a pin-head, from which was a pretty impressive halo of radiating spider-webby cracks. Yeah, I just mixed my angel and arachnid metaphors. Deal with it. Anyway, today I got home from class and decided it was not okay not to have a coffeemaker. I went and bought one, and then spent the next chunk of too-much-time cleaning the apartment. I find that when I procrastinate, one of the first things I do is spend copious amounts of time on the Internet. Next, I clean the...

So "Boomer Sooner" is about all I have to say. I'm tired of missing things.

This is a photo of the chicken I cooked tonight, posing with Charlie, the inflatable turkey my parents mailed me a week or so ago. For scale, that inflatable turkey is 16" long. So, in the absence of a (real) turkey (and really the absence of ambition to make a turkey), I decided to roast a chicken, which I'd never done before. By the time I got my plans for roasting a chicken together, it was already 6 p.m. and I was beginning to get hungry, so I decided to just put some olive oil and rosemary and garlic under its skin and go with that. For some reason, it always looked really easy to do this kind of thing when I was watching my mother do it. What I didn't take into account is that chickens have skin that doesn't float freely over their muscles. I'm not really sure how I even thought that was possible -- maybe I just always missed the part where my mother must have spent several awkward minutes pulling the skin loose and listening to the fascia tear. I'm ...

In a country without Thanksgiving, there's not even a pretense of delaying Christmas until its allotted time. Decorations have been going up for weeks now -- lights hung from the sides of buildings and wires strung overhead were the first go show up. Yesterday they started putting up huge trees in Place de la Victoire and by the cathedral near my house. Also coming to Place Pey-Berland is what appears to be an ice-skating rink? I'm interested to see how this is going to pan out. I was told that it will rain all winter, which I interpreted to mean it will never get cold enough to freeze. I guess I didn't expect ice-skating. Although I've never been fond of even the idea of ice-skating -- all that strapping blades to your feet and gliding about and falling on your face seems to lend itself pretty handily to getting digits cut off. But since Thanksgiving is finally upon us, I'll stop feeling weird about seeing Christmas decorations. I'll even be posting pictures...

Today I had my first exam in France. It was a really straightforward test over the International Phonetic Alphabet, in a class that is composed of nothing but linguistics majors. So imagine my surprise when I noticed rampant cheating. Not that it would have been difficult, as we had one exam form, and one proctor for a class of over 200, who didn't even walk around the room during the test, didn't discourage people from talking, or even look up when cell phones rang and were answered. Also the girl in front of me kept asking me for answers. I pretended I didn't understand her. And that's today's advantage to being foreign! But seriously. If you're a linguist, shouldn't you know IPA?

This is going to be a long and rambling post. Most of it is going to be specific information about the two concerts I saw this week. Don't say I didn't warn you. Last weekend was a rather nocturnal one for me. Sunday night found me trying desperately to sleep "early" and utterly failing until 7:30, which made going to class at 1 pretty painful (and believe me, I know how sad that is). Monday night I didn't manage to sleep until 2 a.m., and woke up on account of a too-early alarm at 4:30 before getting up at 5:30 to start my epic London adventure. It was a really foggy morning. You probably can't tell very well from this photo, but even in the train station there was fog about the rafters. I would have appreciated it a lot more had I not been so exhausted. The train ride to Paris passed in a haze. I arrived at Paris Montparnasse and had to cross the city on the number 4 metro line to change trains (not to mention going through all of the metal detecting...

So about an hour ago I was panicking that I hadn't yet received my tickets to the Monsters of Folk show on Tuesday in London. So I called their office, told someone my problem -- he got a superviser to change my tickets to will call (apparently they don't mail things to France, and didn't bother telling me that when I ordered?), sent me a confirmation email -- and the problem was solved in under five minutes. Why, oh WHY can my washing machine problem not disappear in the same way? Tomorrow I will call them...when I have gathered my willpower...and put more money on my phone. Somehow I doubt my 30 seconds of credit is enough to resolve this problem.

Or, so I infer from the greetings around here. When it starts getting toward that time in the afternoon (which apparently falls anywhere between 3:30 and 8 pm, depending on the various people I've been greeted by), people start saying "bon soir" by way of hello -- for goodbye, on the other hand, they use "bonne soirée". They both mean good evening, but I'm still amused because we also use "soirée" to talk about parties. It's like wherever you are, someone is always hoping you'll have an awesome party. The cashier at the grocery store, the guy that asks you for money on your way home -- everyone! You can tell I didn't have an eventful day, 'cause I don't have much to say. Class as usual, and home now just before the rush exploded on the tram.

Yesterday I went to see The Box with Anthony, which, by the way, was pretty confusing and not at all what I expected. But beforehand, during the inevitable pre-preview commercials, I saw something I've never seen before. A commercial soliciting volunteers for the French Army! And I was struck by all the differences in the advertising campaigns. Lately, the US Army ads I've seen have been all electric guitars and montages of guys doing things like scaling cliffs alone, or drilling with rifles in the rain. The French ad, on the other hand, was all about interspersing images of soldier life and personal life -- I guess kind of like the ads for the Reserves at home. The guy would be on a motorcycle with his girlfriend, and then he'd be leading a troop of uniformed soldiers out of a helicopter, and making hand signs. There was always lots of technology in the picture, and no silly feats of strength. The shots never focused on the guns. There were no swords, and there were no...

"Erasmus" is the magic word that makes professors give you alternate assignments or cut you slack when you had NO IDEA what was going on in class. It also, I have come to realize, is a much larger community of displaced students I ever imagined. When we met that group of Erasmus kids on Halloween by coincidence, it seems we wandered into a new group of people. Some of them are hosting a party just down the street from us tonight, for just a bunch of foreign kids. I'm excited, but I'm not sure how many of them we'll know from other places. It's kind of interesting how, if the only thing you have in common is that you don't belong someplace, that becomes a way to belong in itself. It makes me want to get involved with the exchange programs at OU when I get back to Norman.

The last few years I've watched V for Vendetta on the 5th of November. I think the first time I saw it, we were in Providence, RI on our great northeastern college tour. Strange to think about. Things are really picking up in Bordeaux. Last night there was a sort of welcome party hosted at Place de la Victoire for the Letters/Linguistics department, and Maria and I went. I met several kids I recognized from my linguistics classes, and one kid I met on the tram a few weeks back whose name turned out to be Vianney. He turned out to know Alan, which I found to be sort of crazy -- I mean, if you only know five people in a city, what's the likelihood that they know each other? Tonight, we went with some of the people we met last night to yet another almost-university-sponsored party at a club, this time for the Applied Foreign Languages department (LEA) -- they were all Chinese-English majors. In France, when you major in a foreign language, you major in English AND some other l...

A few weeks ago I was talking to a guy at the pub downstairs about the (non-)tradition of Halloween in France, and he told me basically it was an excuse for young people to throw parties. He told me there was a band called Water's Edge who would be playing at a bar by the river. I told him I'd consider it. Fast forward to last night. Alex and I went out for some late-ish Thai food at a nice restaurant and, afterward, found ourselves at 11 p.m. on Halloween and still no plans. We headed over to the show and saw most of Water's Edge's set. The music was really enjoyable. I saw a girl from my Italian class there, and the original guy who'd told me about the show. We were on the point of leaving when we saw a sign posted outside advertising a midnight showing of Rocky Horror. We were a little confused, since it was 12:15, but the bartender told us it was just because the band had played late. Elated, we stayed to watch. The movie was barely loud enough to hear, an...

Sometime after regaining consciousness and before opening my eyes this morning, I remembered (sort of gleefully) that I'd fallen asleep reading the Wheel of Time, and thought of sleepily carrying the book and a blanket downstairs to sit by the fireplace and read all morning. I thought probably if I sat there, someone would come build a fire on the hearth. Then I opened my eyes and realized I was both in France, and no longer 14 years old. Also, that the house is gone, and that particular morning will probably not happen again. It was really disorienting, but not altogether unpleasant. Friday afternoon. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with my Friday. The photo is of a cotton-candy setup at the fair from a few days ago. Here they call it "Barbe à Papa" -- "Papa's Beard". Those bins of different colored things are your flavor options. There are a lot more decisions to make than just "pink" or "blue", here. I think it...

I think the latest washing machine atrocity witnessed the bottom of my I-miss-everything-and-have-no-friends spiral. I think I realized that my life, while not wholly unpleasant, is not complete without people I can socialize with. Additionally, I realized it's hard to socialize if you don't speak to anyone, and that it's hard to speak to anyone if you're constantly afraid of their judging you for something or other. I've had a pretty promising, seeming-upswing the last several days. First, I went to the birthday party of a guy I met a few weeks ago, and had a lot of fun talking to and hanging out with him and his friends. I met him for a Coke the next day and had a good conversation, and when I wandered leisurely back to my house I came across a fair, which is where the ferris wheel photo comes from. I like it because I took it with my cell phone. Despite my lens having been repaired, I didn't think I'd come across such cool things when I left the hous...

Today, I am frustrated beyond belief. Already. Last week I called the company that came to give me an estimate about the washing machine to ask them why the hell they still had not come to fix my washing machine. They told me I had to wait for the formal estimate in the mail and then MAIL IT BACK TO THEM when I made my decision. And so I waited with as much patience as I could muster, for over a week, for a piece of mail they claimed they mailed to me from not even a mile from where I am sitting right now. No luck. I just called back to beg for someone to come fix it, and their response was that they HAVE to have the request in writing and I MUST wait for it in the mail. They agreed to send me a new one. I asked them if we could just forget I ever "asked for" the estimate and start a new work order. She said no. And furthermore, there are parts to order. I asked her (rather hopelessly) if she could order them in advance. She said no, she has to receive a request i...

Yesterday after class I was waiting to ask our professor a question and listening to the conversation he was having with another student. The question he'd asked had to do with the difference between a linguistic sign and a symbol, and as the professor started talking about symbolism, he suddenly says: "Like America. Everyone in the whole world knows the value of America. When you seen an American flag, you don't just think that it symbolizes the U.S. -- it symbolizes a lot more than that." At which point the student says "ok, I understand now" and they both turn and look at me. I'd sort of worked out my whole question in advance so I could minimize stuttering, but I was so surprised that it didn't work out quite like I'd planned. Last night, Alex had heard about a rock show near our place, and we went. It turned out to be a juice bar called Soup&Juice. A juice bar that also sold beer? Or, kind of. They explained to us that they would onl...

This morning I was walking to the tram past a couple of ladies with clipboards. I learned after the first week that once the ladies with the clipboards conducting the survey or trying to get signatures for the petition figure out that you're not French, they absolutely refuse to talk to you further even if you display interest. So I was walking by with my headphones and they made eye contact and I just told them sorry, I'm not French (except I said it in French) - and they're like "wait! Are you English?" (in English) and the confused, resulting conversation that took place in mixed French (on my part) and English (on theirs) was apparently intended to lure me into the church of scientology. I was confused at first -- aside from passing some Jehova's Witnesses at a tram stop once, I have not been proselytized to once since arriving here -- not even in all the churches and cathedrals I've visited. When I looked confused they said "Scientology...you h...

Well, our washing machine still doesn't work. Also, we lost to Texas. I hate that a lot, but I can't say I didn't see it coming. It got cold in Bordeaux all of a sudden. It's already affecting my life, and it's not even below 50 yet. I just have very little desire to walk around aimlessly (which was one of my chief employments until this week) when it's cold out. All the shops and restaurants are starting to keep their doors closed and move their furniture inside. I hate it when it gets cold. I lose motivation to go anywhere, and when it gets dark earlier I'm much more likely to stay inside than to get anything done. It's not ideal. On the upside, the guy I left my lens with tells me he can fix it for around 30 euros, and to call back sometime next week. Hopefully this is true, because that's not a bad price at all. I was expecting worse. I'm copying the notes I took during the first week of class into some new notebooks. They don't r...

...and I wish I could see the game.

And after a title like that, I have to start off with some more connerie. I called Auchan the other day, and after the lady on the line looked up my work order, was simply told to "be patient" and hung up on. Aside from being offended by that awkward departure from my expectations about customer service, I didn't have any idea what I was being told to be patient for, so I made Maria call again. Maria was told that, when I told the technician to tell me how much it would cost before beginning work, he took that as a request for a formal estimate. Which means that he went back to Auchan, filled out some paperwork, and had them mail me an estimate. By the mail. As in, the kind with a postman. And then, when I receive the estimate, I have to decide whether the cost is acceptable (phone-lady said 107 euros, but refused to take the order over the phone) and then mail it back to them. And then they'll call me to schedule an appointment. Which, judging by the last time I made...