Virtually Home

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 ...

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...