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...