Back to Basics.

So the Taurus is dead. We scraped it on Monday. All told, minus the work we owed the mechanic, we got 100$ for it. I was hoping for more so I could get some of it but I know I probably will in the end. Now I'm back to the old bumming rides routine. Goodbye Freedom!

Last night I watched "The Chateau" while folding laundry after a boring evening at work. It was decent, comical in some really bad mishaps of cultural interactions. These two American brothers inherit a chateau in the south of France and they get, well, a lot more than a chateau. I did like the last scene though but I don't want to spoil it. It's a cute movie but I wouldn't suggest running out to get it.

So the few things I need to get together before I leave are as follows:

1- Get my ticket from STA. I called today to check on it and it should be getting here tomorrow or the next day. Icelandair changed the itinerary so I needed a new ticket and had to send it back.

2- Buy a guide book for Paris and France. I know I need to bring one but I'm not sure because they take up so much room in luggage. I could buy one there but that's always expensive. And it'd be in French.

3- Set up Power of Attorney for my mom in case she needs to sign anything for me. Not sure how I go about that. I should ask the town clerk.

4- Ask Bank of America how money transfers from my parents to my French bank account work and if there is a bank I should specifically go with. Then get the papers for Jacques, my ISEP coordinator, so he can open the account for me before I get there (handy, huh?)

5- Get the translated copy for the Town Clerk of my birth record. They say you need it for your carte de sejour (living permit) but then the Montpellier website says that you don't need that when applying. I don't know. They seem to be doing it for free so I'll just do it and go over next Monday and have them give my paper a little official looking stampy on their special paper. I was supposed to do it yesterday but my brother bitched about having to take me to the town office. Oh well. I should email the nice lady back and apologize.

Other than those things and working I need to start getting a move on AJ's book. I'm editing a book for a friend. I'll be honest and say I watched movies at work today instead of reading it. Bad I know. But I needed a break from reading.

As for reading lately, I've read a few things in French, trying to get back up to speed. I read L'Etranger this last weekend. Sad ending but definitely kept me on the edge of my seat. Well I've got to close up shortly so I'm going to start cleaning up. But here's a poem I wrote this weekend at 5am because I couldn't sleep.

"Party Politics"

Shear and

brutal Politics

cut through once

Intimately tangled

Gordian knots.

A single blow

severs twists of

cherished reminders,

giving a sour,

disdained,

frayed relation.

Blame could be placed

on the Wielder but

Politics aren't quite

as simple as a Sword.

Car Troubles, Again.

Well the lovely Taurus might be finally dead. I'm hoping it'll pull through because it only has a few weeks left till its final retirement. Tomorrow is exactly a month until I leave.

This morning I went to take care of Gunner and Boo and after pulling into the driveway and parking, my car started making a knocking noise and spitting out almost all of its coolant. I took care of Gunner and Boo, both of whom were acting bizarrely, possibly from the tornado-crazy storm we had two nights ago. I took them for a walk and let them play out in the yard for a bit and then took off to my service station to see what they could do.

July is apparently the worst month for cars but the best month for garages! They couldn't fit me in today but said it looked pretty dismal. Either the water pump or I finally blew my head gasket. If it's finally kaput it puts me in a pretty bad position, losing out on babysitting and Ocean Spray, equaling around another $250 that could have been spent to travel. Hopefully the car gods will take pity on me and grant me another few weeks.

Thanks to Ryan :), I made it to work on time. I was so frustrated I cleaned the whole stairs and the retail area; the mindless task of cleaning somehow helps center me. For dinner I spilt the whole box of tri-color rotini on the floor. Nice macaroni art but not a very nice dinner. Today just isn't my day!

Last night, when driving home in the rain, I was having a pretty hard time seeing out the window. There must be something on the windshield that makes a huge sheen across it whenever headlights shine on it. For a moment I thought about how I was completely interred in water and metal. A water coffin if I messed up and veered a bit too far to the right into a tree. Still not exactly over the nasty accident I had last fall.

I'm really looking forward to not driving at all next year. It's not that I'm scared of driving so much as it makes me very uncomfortable and nervous. I know I'm not a very good driver, even with the advanced driving class I took. I still underestimate the size of my car. This summer I scraped the side on a post when parking in a tight garage spot. My first accident was with the Prius in a parking lot where I drove straight into someone's trailer hitch because I didn't back out enough. No driving? Thank you!

But I'm pretty happy looking forward. A little scared too. A month and I'll be in France speaking a different language. It's not so much the culture I'm nervous about. If I can move to Arkansas and handle it, not without huge bumps of course, I can handle France. They're still a Western country. So the next month might be a little bit harder without a car but I'll manage somehow. I've always found someway to!

That reminds me, I need to sell those old prom dresses on ebay. Anyone interested?

Doggie Treats.

For the longest time since our lovely Puzzle left us, I've been trying to get my mother to get another dog. I firmly believe that all girls should have a reliable cuddle around accompanied by a wet nose.

And I firmly believed that till this weekend, when I dog sat what I thought were two wonderful little creatures. Could I have ever been so wrong.

We picked up the two dogs, Gunner, a Labrador retriever, and Boo, a small white lapdog, and left for the beach house. Boo was in a little kennel and Gunner lying on the car floor. At first Boo was whining but soon calmed down but Gunner, on the other hand, never did. Unless I was petting him he was showing his worry and repositioning himself around the car. We finally got to the beach house around 11:30 at night.

We let the two dogs sit in the living room after a walk, the small space being big enough for the kennel and Gunner to lie down. But Boo, as we soon discovered, likes to hump everything in sight and is also the dominate dog. Who thought a small little thing could be so awful! Every five seconds, literally, Boo would attack Gunner and I'd have to pry Boo off and tell him no, to which he rolled on his back and whined. "Please, I'm cute! Don't say no to me!"


Eventually I was fed up and put Boo in his kennel and made a bed for Gunner on the bottom bunk of my bed and showed him it was going to be his new place for the next few days. Boo was whining and Gunner did not stop pacing the whole night long. Under the bed. Whack, whack his paws on the wood frame. Scratch, stretch on the blanket. Step of the bed and make me sway above. Then click click click click on the linoleum floor. Waking up Mom with a lick in the face and then seeking more attention out with Boo and starting a whine fest. An endless cycle for a number of hours.


Around four I finally fell asleep, only to be woken by the sound of something being shredded. Gunner had gotten hold of an SOS pad from under the sink and was pulling it apart next to Boo's cage. I bolted out of bed and took it away, luckily before he had eaten any of it, and woke up Mom who had also just gotten to sleep.


After a walk and breakfast Boo was still humping the hell out of Gunner so I had had the last straw and packed everything up. We were back home, dogless, at 10. A whole twelve hours.


Needless to say, my desire to get a puppy has been slightly driven out of my mind.



Right now I'm having a conversation with a young sophomore at Hendrix who is vastly underestimating my worries about France. "You make your own meals and live really far away from your family." I think it takes a bit more than that. But yes, I adapted, although with lost of struggle, to Southern Culture. Who knows how hard it will be to adapt to French?

Adapting to Southern life was really hard for me and often times still is. My freshman year was pretty up and down and I often considered dropping out of Hendrix. I wasn't where I really wanted to be, as last minute I had gotten somewhat stuck with Hendrix. I can't say I made the best choice in going there but I can't say it's the worst either. And I think most graduates say that about their respective places. Hendrix so far has given me a pretty good education, a much better one than any of the other schools I could have gone to. But it's far away and frustrating. Especially the other people. Not that I don't love a good number of them and hold them dear but there are plenty that have made things... difficult. If you know what I mean.

But as for adapting to French life, if I can handle all of the various hardships Hendrix has thrown my way, I think I can handle French disasters. Unless of course there is a strike, in which case I'm probably going to call it quits and go somewhere else.

Strike on the Horizon?

So last year UPV, the school I'm going to in Montpellier, went on strike when Nicolas Sarkozy proposed education reforms. He started a program called Operation Campus, for which UPV, along with all of the Montpellier University schools, was selected. I have no idea what this means for my school year, if I will even have one.

Needless to say, I'm a bit nervous about UPV going on strike when we start. I'm a little hazy on the details of Operation Campus because the UPV site on it, accessable through their homepage, explains that there will be changes but not exactly what it means for the current students. I did notice that new buildings where going to be in process while I'm there. Sort of like Hendrix. Everything that's changing for the better will only be there once I've gone on my way and I'm stuck with the inconviences of construction.

Trying to look on the bright side when everything is semi up in the air is a bit hard. I called my study abroad coordinator at Hendrix and he said he'd call the central offices and put his feelers out to figure out what's going on. Still, I'm not exactly sure.

I think the funniest part of Tour de France is when they strech while peddling. They keep going with one foot while putting the other up on their seat and streching for a bit. Pretty intense because they're going around 35-40mph, as it's a flat stage and they're very close to the end.

I've been watching la Tour the past few days as they're going through the areas that are pretty close to where I'll be studying, trying to get a feel for the countryside around my soon-to-be new home.

Running away to France?

A few days ago someone told me I was running away to France because of all the stress of the past year. After everything that has happened, I couldn't be happier than going to France; this is true. But at the same time, just because I'm going to be an ocean away doesn't mean that all the stress is going to be left behind.

The idea that a year abroad is a vacation is a pretty common one but so far in all my preparations I've learned that this is certainly not the case (Although I wouldn't mind a vacation and have lingering images in my mind of sitting on a French beach with my velo locked to a bikerack and a bottle of wine snuggled down into the sand).

For instance, the amount of cultural and language misunderstandings that can occur that might inflict some pretty serious social consequences are astronomical. The simple word for a vegetable group, which includes my favorite zucchini, cucurbitacee can be pronounced incorrectly prety easily, resulting in a string of swears (ass-ass-dick-enough). Then there's the infamous tu and vous forms and when it's appropriate to use them. While tu can be something used between colleagues of equal level, it can also be used instead of the normal vous form as an insult.

Stephen Clarke gives some really good examples in his book Talk to the Snail that I picked up at the book store last night. I'm already half-way done with it and out of my post-vacation reading slump. I read too much over vacation and wore myself out!

Anyway, Clarke is a pretty tongue-in-cheek writer who mocks a lot of French cultural oddities that may well be rightly so mocked. But he does get down and dirty with a lot of things other culture books skip on, like how to get a waiter that's insulting you to serve you and that French women really can be fat. He also brings up the cucurbitacee word but I'd heard it before from Charlotte, the French girl I lived with last year.

But back to work.

I've been Missing.

Sorry I haven't been updating for almost a month. It's hard when you don't have a laptop! I'd been trying to find the time at work to update using the work computers but there's always something that needs to be done.

Right now it's my morning off from babysitting the Miller's (a new job I found in my hiatus) and I had to come into the shop to open up for the air conditioning contractor. The air conditioners have been not working quite exactly right for a while and he's finally getting the final touches on to make them work correctly! YAY!

So since my last update. I got my French Visa, along with free samples of the new M&M ice cream. It's your average novelty, a M&M shaped vanilla circle covered in that traditional M&M chocolate and candy coating. They're pretty awesome and if you have the chance, I would say to get some. If even just once. It's worth a try I think.

I went with my Mom to get my visa because we both had the day off from work and so we had a nice late lunch at Vinny T's (formerly Vinne Testa's, a Boston favorite). I can't really remember what else we did because, well, it's been a couple weeks. Oh, we also went into the Prudential Center Mall (The Pru) and looked in Sephora for a nice makeup kit for me to take to Europe. Of course they had a great one but the eye shadow colors were "Spring," in other words, purple and pink which can't be changed. As those are my least favorite colors to wear, as they often make me look like I haven't slept enough, I decided to just go for the Walgreen's makeup. Oh well.

June 28th was my 20th birthday. It's that awful year between being a teenager and being of drinking age. Of course most 20yo's drink anyway and I really don't see the point of 21 but that's another story. Lucky for me most of my 20th year will be in France enjoying lovely French wines.

For my birthday Lauren, a bud from archery, and I decided to go to the beach. And of course like we always do, we didn't make it. She was late waking up and we went to Friendly's for lunch (a local ice cream diner chain with traditionally bad service; why we still go there I have no idea but they have good ice cream). And after stuffing our faces with chicken tenders and Reese's ice cream, we were off to the beach. About half way there Lauren realized she forgot her towel.

So we were off to the mall! It was on the way and Old Navy, as Lauren so excitedly pointed out numerous times during our highway turnaround, was having a sale on flipflops. At the end of four hours neither of us bought anything. No longer can we shop at the Rave or WetSeal, the fashions aren't old enough; but neither can we afford Express or NY&C. Hopefully France, the country of fashion, will cater to my bargin hunting, classic style fashioning desires?

The present of the year is a Olympus Stylus 850 SW, that awesome camera that can go underwater!

The next day was the first day of Family Vacation. I started it off with a bang, having not gone to the post office all week. They had two packages and although we could very easily leave them there for the week my Dad was in such a tired state he couldn't think straight to know. In the end we convinced him and started our vacation as planned. A week at the beach house with my new camera yielded some pretty cool pictures that will be uploaded maybe today when I get my computer back from Best Buy.

Well, the air conditioner guy is done so I'm off to the gym, the bank, and the post office. Then back home to bask in the sun on my hammock. I like mornings off!