Virtually Home

Last night I thought it was a great idea to be out until 4 a.m. And it was, at the time, since I got to see all my favorite people at Dick Turpin's open mic night, and at the Connemara open mic night, including my English friends who are all headed back home this weekend. This morning, I overslept. I woke up at 9:28, which is about ten minutes after I should have left the apartment to get to my 10 a.m. meeting a couple of minutes early. Because I'm obsessively punctual. Thanks, Mom and Dad. Anyway, I woke up cursing. Ran out of the house. Discovered that yes, it's still in the 40s Fahrenheit, still pouring rain off and on, still windy, and still overcast. Oh, and still May. Explain that. I missed the first tram and had to wait an extra six minutes, putting me further behind schedule. I ended up only about ten minutes late, and that living on French time, but it still makes me uncomfortable. My professor gave me a 12 for the course, which isn't too shabby, all thin...

I still have about a month and a half in Bordeaux, but today I felt really ready to go home for the first time. I mean, I'm far from having achieved closure with people, or even with the school, but I just missed things. People. Driving. What the South Oval probably looks like right now. Frog and insect noise, now that it's warm. It was 84 Fahrenheit today, which means it's reached the temperature that I need to keep the windows open for ventilation. While sleeping that's going to be a hassle, since the windows have no screens and the mosquitoes, though nowhere near the droves found in Oklahoma, are beginning to emerge. If the drapes are closed, no air passes. When they're open, my across-the-courtyard neighbors' lights shine right into my room. To say nothing of their windows looking right into my room, I guess. Morning sunlight is a whole separate issue. I think this will be good for putting me back on a diurnal schedule, though. Coming off of the Amsterda...

I spent most of today reading my history textbook, trying to study for an exam that probably has very little to do with anything that the book has to say. We'll be given a text and asked to make a detailed outline of it, making a few points on no particular theme. This doesn't strike me as a very useful learning tool, and I'm kind of wondering what I'm going to say in the couple of hours we'll be given. Then I realized that studying won't really do much, since I'll be given a work to analyze, and Amy and I went looking for piercing jewelry on Rue Ste. Catherine. We got dinner at a Thai restaurant, whose tom kha gai was lacking a certain amount of flavorfulness but which was, at least, better than the utter void of Thai food I've been living in. We headed over to the fair so Amy could experience pineapple-flavored cotton candy. I had a crepe with Grand Marnier, because it sounded good and because I was incredulous at the idea. It turned out to be a pret...

Sophomore year at OU, I was assigned a 20 minute exposé for my French class about French music. I chose, more specifically, to talk about French rap. I played some MC Solaar and got in a bit of a sticky situation explaining NTM's "Pose ton gun". I thought this was an exercise in speaking for a prolonged period of time, since we were all there to learn a foreign language. Little did I know that it was, in fact, just the way French classes are taught. Each class assigns exposé topics. Without fail. And then the student is responsible for gathering information and presenting it to the class. Your teacher might interrupt numerous times to correct your grammar, or your facts, or tell you he/she just didn't like the order in which you made your points -- or your opinion on a certain subject. In fact, opinions are discouraged, though I think this stance would probably have a lot more weight if it was ever the professor who was responsible for conveying information. We sp...

These two are not really related, it's just that I remain sick while all around me, people are falling victim to the plague. Erin and Andria were feeling bad when they moved out on Monday, and Maria and Alex are both sick. I've relapsed. However, Amber arrived on a train yesterday afternoon. She got stuck in the middle of Auvergne due to snow, and they all had to sit tight while people got out and poked at the wheels to dislodge ice from them. She finally did make it on time, since they held her connecting train, and I picked her up at St. Jean. We went out to an Italian restaurant, where I had a pizza with apples and olives and honey and onion jam. It was pretty fantabulous. Afterward we took a kind of epic walk, down to Place de la Bourse and along the river, then across Pont de Pierre and farther than I've ever walked on that side of the river, to a church that turns out to be called Eglise St. Marie. We walked in a circle around it, and found that while the front wa...

Today I woke up feeling listless, and then I remembered I had a bunch of homework, re-evaluated what  "bunch" of homework meant based on my experiences this year, and felt rather like a letters major. Or, what I imagine letters majors should feel like when they're complaining about the homework they have to do. So this afternoon I've been reading some about the reign of Louis XV on the internet, and I've just started reading Rimbaud's Illuminations, which I'm supposed to finish by our class on Thursday, even though she's told us we're only going to discuss one of them that day. I'm not sure what etiquette on homework here is, as I never figured out in the linguistics department when the homework, which always seemed suggested, was really just suggested, and when it was actually taken up. This wouldn't make much of a difference on my quality of work, were I writing in English, but the difference between taking French notes for my benefit a...

I think I've mentioned this wall before. It's possible I've even posted a crappy iPhone photo (much like this one!) of it before. At least once a week, there is a spray painted message on this wall. Usually it's an anti-fascist sentiment, like "Fascists go home," or something of that nature. This one is a wish for "parasites" to leave universities. The messages often about some aspect of university life. You probably can't read the tag at the bottom right corner, but it's the name of some kind of student forum that often puts graffiti on this wall and on others. And every time this happens there is someone out there the next day scrubbing the wall, or repainting it if that's what it takes. I really wonder why they don't cover this particular wall with the kind of paint that turns walls into chalkboards, or install a giant white board and just leave a bunch of markers. It occurs with ridiculous frequency, and apparently without con...

I woke up this morning feeling better, in a relative way. I'm still doing a lot of coughing, but my head no longer feels like a bowling ball and I left the house for the first time since Friday. My only class on Monday was supposed to be an introductory film analysis class. The class turns out to be a continuation from last semester, so it seems doubtful I'll try to take it. I was hoping it would be an opportunity to watch a bunch of French movies, but the first thing we did was watch the first fifteen or so minutes of Edward Scissorhands. Then we watched it again, scene by scene, and discussed it. After was the final scenes of the Bride of Frankenstein, and then some clips from Frankenstein, the 1994 version with Helena Bonham Carter. I remember that the reason I didn't want to take a history class called The France of Louis XV was because it conflicted with film. I thought I'd go check that out next Monday, but when I went to check out what room that class is in, ...

I didn't feel great yesterday, and when today decided to wake me up to go to the university and choose classes at the last possible minute, I felt a lot worse. I dragged myself out of bed despite the soft rain noises from the courtyard trying to lull me back to sleep and went to the school. I chose a bunch of classes in history, literature, music history,  and film and set about trying to figure out when and where they met. This is a complicated process of finding each department's tiny, hidden hallway with a bunch of posted paper timetables and locating your class, which may or may not have the same course number as the one you initially chose, or any posted title at all. As I expected (feared), many of the courses I selected were not on the schedules, even though they'd been posted for us foreign dupes to believe we could take them. I came up with about 16 hours worth of things, but I think I'll probably only take twelve. One of the ones I'm interested in is a...

Lately I've been on a Mountain Goats, Bob Dylan, Neil Young kick. You know, guitars and male vocalists with hard-to-like voices (can't forget Conor, but I wouldn't call that a kick anymore). Today, I'm working on learning The Needle and the Damage Done on guitar. I'm making an effort to play more often, since I have all this time on my hands with which to learn while I'm, you know, not going to school. I'm wrestling with myself over whether I should try to go to the university today. I have to turn in some photocopies of a paper I got back about two weeks ago, but every time I've tried the professor hasn't been in his office, since they don't necessarily keep office hours in this country. Some of them do, if they want -- one hour a week, for all of their undergrad and graduate students combined -- and they don't announce it in class, so you're just forced to show up at their door, if you can even find it, as that's not announced in ...

Amy moved into a hotel a few days ago, to have her own space. We've been meeting for coffee or lunch just about every day. I've been seeing a lot of Vianney and Benjamin. Yesterday we tried to go see A Serious Man at this little indie move theater, Utopia. I must have walked past it a hundred times and never realized it was a movie theater. The line looked like it was going to take an hour to get through, and as we were five minutes to the last showing of the night, we gave up. We walked around aimlessly until we ended up at a sort of wine bar near the Grosse Cloche. I had a glass of an organic white that was, as far as I could tell, just called F, and by far my favorite kind of white to date white wine I've ever tasted. Today was kind of aimless, except for it having been open mic night at the pub downstairs. I learned that it's not just professional musicians in France that write their lyrics in English -- all of the amateurs were doing it, too. I think it'...

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 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 ...

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?

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.

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...