Teacher Snow Day

This is the closest I've ever come to seeing the face of the big man upstairs.

(I'm obviously not speaking literally, because I live in a one story farm house that rolled off a SEARS delivery truck in Arkansas plus or minus a hundred years ago.)

So figuratively. Literally, the joy I experienced when it was confirmed that I had today off gave me such a surge of endorphins that I couldn't fall back asleep for half an hour. That's some serious joy, my friend. That's physical, scientific joy.

Now this is a strange way to check in after 7 months of unpunctuated absence, and it's most certainly misleading. Joy has consistently been among the top 5 emotions I've experienced on a daily basis since entering the classroom in August. The other 4 rotate among  confusion, delight, love, regret, grit, coffee, and exhaustion. If you don't think those are all emotions I encourage you to write me a well crafted persuasive essay that reflects close, thoughtful reading and research. I have my responses ready.

The point is, I love this job. It is sheer insanity how much I'm expected to do, how much I actually do, how much my kids are capable of, how much gee dee work it's going to take to get me from right now to the teacher I want to be...but I know that this is the lone of work I want to work in. And by "work" i don't mean, clock in/clock out, earn a living, or coast. By "work" I mean put in 12 hour days, grade until I can't see straight, love hard, fall asleep AND wake up thinking about the kids I need to do better for. This sin't necessarily the hardest thing I've ever done, but teaching is the hardest thing I've done for the longest period of time. And while I believe the hard is unrelated to what makes it good, it is absolutely related to what makes me good.

There are other factors that correlate pretty directly to my success, by which I mostly mean my students' success. Coffee is way up there. As is patience. Pollen count is hit or miss. Love. Access to a copier. Sense of humor. Hours of sleep the previous night. Hours of sleep the previous week. Sleep. Just as a general blanket statement. Blankets. Weight and texture. Quality of school-unrelated reading. Lots of things contribute to me feeling good, being good, and being good to my students. Which is why this mystical gift from the Arkansan gods (I imagine them as characters from a Diego Rivera mural) is so graciously received.

Today I have done the following:
Wake up
Make coffee
Add milk and cinnamon
Eat half an apple fritter left over from yesterday crushed under books in my teacher bag
Read and read and read
Make super fancy pesto mozz grilled cheese
Day drink wine
Make cookies
Read and read and read
Catch up on correspondence
Read
Write this blog post
(and there are margs and fajitas in my future)

This is basically a recipe for transforming back from exhausted, bitter January teacher to real life human, ready to drown my kids in love. And that love looks like high expectations and second chances, and patience, and individualized lesson, and energy. And excitement and passion for every aspect of preparing these kiddos for the lives they want.

It would be impossible for me to recount the subterranean-extraterrestrial rollercoaster that has been my first 6 months of teaching, but I think this sliver of a day gives you some pretty solid insight. A lot of emotions, not  a lot of time. Definite celebration of the small things, like snow days.

Stay excellent.

Merci et on y va

This year I learned the power of a noun. Sometimes an adjective. Suprisingly frequently a verb. I am a writer. I am American. Oui, I speak French.

In pursuit of a goal I stripped down my life to what felt like less than the bare minimum and I moved 6000 miles away, where I knew no one and I knew nothing and while I definitely brought something in that stuffed luggage, it was a whole lot less than I was used too. Then I ate less, decorated less, did less, and slept more. And then it was time to start adding things back in.

That was what French was: a mechanism to distill the gunk and figure things out, figure me out, even if I didn't realize that's what I was doing. I had realizations and ideas all the time in English, both passing thoughts and heavy moments of truth, but I frequently found that truth nestled in a kernel of French. French. A language that I was building up from the rickety base of 3 mispronounced, unrelated words. And yet, only a few weeks in, we arrive at a point where my prof can say, and I can understand, that Dana, Elle est ecrivan. At the time I had never earned a penny for my work and by no stretch of my imagination could I imagine it being my identifier, and yet here I was, with the ability to say so little, leaning against this enchanting proposition with a timid Oui.

It is a wonderful feeling, to feel special and unique for all the right reasons. And it is truly a gift to be able to give that feeling to others. It's something I received on so many occasions over the past 11 months, from this incredible, chic, brilliant gaggle of international friends and classmates and teachers. And the most incredible thing is how powerful their words are. I hold on to them like prayer beads and cycle through the kindness, starting over when I get back to the beginning, because my gratitude never quite overtakes my disbelief, and the only cure for my imperfections and confidence seems to be to trust that what they've said is true. I love them for so many reasons and respect them for so many more, so I seem obliged to internalize their gentillesse.

That I'm special. That I'm a writer. That I have a big heart. That I'm going to be a great teacher. That I'm going to be ok.

As somebody who has always been a little too self reliant I now find myself asking and listening more than ever before in my life. Swimming lost among the hungry harks and jelly fish of la subordonée du temps and le subjonctif can do that to you, make you reach out for a lifesaver, make you lean on others for wisdom and cues. I learned to come second. I learned to enjoy being bad but still being my best. I almost learned to cut myself some slack. But I learned to let my outstretched hand be a step up for someone else, that if my failures help someone, even if it's not me, great. I want us to all make it. All for one. One for all.

And that's really what conversation is. It's a team effort. It's two or four or 10 people working together to share their emotions and ideas and go somewhere new together, arrive at a new realization. It's hard to see that in English, in America. There I talk to catch up, to fill the silence, to be heard...but to distill those words down to the most basic communication...there aren't enough words to shoot the shit. You have to economize, save your words for the big things, the important things. The things that are necessary for survival. Food, education, love. And in doing that, you find that talking and expression unto itself is necessary for survival. Each and every one of us is so spectacularly different, and how can we celebrate that if we don't share ourselves with the world?

There are so many nouns that weren't important to me before that are now. American. Writer. Artist. Liberal. Jewish. The list goes on. Things that were always a part of me, but which I never felt this acutely until now. But the most important thing is that I didn't discover them alone. Language is social. Life is social. And in surrounding myself with people who challenged themselves, with people who have high expectations, who believe in themselves and in me, I was able to become the best version of myself, and tear myself away from an incredible city in pursuit of a new adventure. Donc merci et on y va.

Grief at the Blades of Edward Scissor Hands

I got a bad haircut.

Actually, I got an incredible, luxurious, skilled haircut, but I hate it. And it is destroying me.

I know, I know. You think I'm overreacting. And I agree! How could such a marginal difference (literally no one has taken notice or made a single comment) have such a massive impact on my life? How?!?

But it has. And I refuse to believe that this is a condition specific to me. It very well may be specific to the so-called first world, but not to me in particular. It feels like the Grinch came under the cover of night and stole my hair. My thick, strong, ambiguously Eastern-European locks were shredded and sheared within an inch of their life so I'm left looking like some thin haired basic who feels cultured when she eats sushi. Kill me.

He stole a part of my identity when he stole my hair. (You may find it to be misused, but I'm sticking with my verb). This may sound weird, but I've never really felt like I had "white" hair. I never rocked the blond hair blue eyes thing, nor did I really want to. My hair was this rich, dark brown, fuller and shinier than that of the other girls in my classes. Was it spectacularly different? No. But I felt a part of my family history, of my culture, in this defining difference.

So not only am I just aesthetically dissatisfied, I actually feel as though I've lost a part of myself. And how could I not? People have been commenting on my hair and my eyes since I've understood English, and potentially before. My bowl cut of childhood could have actually served as a soup bowl for someone down on their luck. It was that substantial. And now I'm left with a third of the thickness and some exponentially smaller portion of my confidence. And I know that is not the way a grown woman should respond when things don't go her way, but it is. Sue me.

The point is that we internalize how people see us. My parents never put a high value on beauty. That's probably in part because we don't collectively look like we just walked off a J Crew catalogue shoot, and also because, and I REALLY believe this, there are no fewer than a billion things that are more important than the way you look. And believing that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy putting together a good outfit in the morning, or care about the way I look in a bathing suit. It just means that the things that I do like about my appearance tend to count double, because I really care about so few of them, and I'm not ready to loose the hair. I know that at the end of the day what's inside my head counts more, but I also know that the confidence that I derive from liking the way I look, from looking like I have my shit together, impacts the way that people receive me and my ideas.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the magnitude of my reaction is a projection of these other big life changes on the horizon. I'm moving countries, moving states, starting a new job, starting a new life for what feels like the fourth time in 6 years. Is that a part of the "catastrophic" cut? I'm not ruling it out. But I retain the right to freak out about whatever I like.

So whether it's a bad haircut or 3 lbs of waterweight or a bad grade on an exam, let me have this one. Sometimes its just SOO much easier than confronting the real thing, and so much more therapeutic as well. I'll continue to do my pre-work and make packing lists and not freak out about what I've gotten myself into, but asking me to not have any crisis at all...? What do you want from me? I'm only 24.

Ready? Get set. Go!

This one post a month thing has been working for me. As I've learned French and lost my finesse in English, it's just about all I can manage. Mais, c'est pas grave. On y va!

So I'm not saying goodbye to France just yet, but I do officially have an exit strategy, and I thought that news was worth sharing and dissecting. Returning to the roots of this blog, a quarter life crisis blog, I think that major life choices and changes are always on the menu. So I'd like to explain mine, mostly to me, but since you happen to be here, feel free to tag along for the ride.

Maria always said that the beginning was a very good place to start, so I want to rewind to last March. I have been rejected from 8 PhD programs. I have no prospects. I have little money saved and no idea what to do...keep pursuing this goal? Quit while I'm behind? Tutor full time? Quiet all of my reservations and just join corporate America for the paycheck? I mostly went with "drink wine" and "visit professor giving talk at Columbia," listed on your multiple choice exam as "e: none of the above."

After more internal turmoil than was probably necessary and definitely less contact with the outside world than would be advised, I landed on France. My instincts, my rejections, and my professors guided me toward the realization that my project, one of layered identities in literature, was not an English project but a comparative literature project. And to study comparative literature I needed languages. Like French. And almost as simply as that (if you call two months of wallowing misery simple) I got my financial backers on board and planned to head for France circa Summer 2014.

And then I did. After many many visa struggles and tough packing choices and indefinite good-byes, I got on a plane with my one way ticket and headed to France. This is roughly where our France narratives begin: finding an apartment, being American, making friends, etc. And they've been interesting and thrilling and terrifying all at once. But the most unsettling part of the whole thing has undoubtedly been not knowing how, when, or why I would leave. I came with the intention of applying to a master's program in Europe and then hopefully picking up another language and then making my way back to the U.S. for my PhD. But this year of language acquisition from the most over qualified teachers I'll probably ever have was...eye opening. I've always known the risks of going into academia: an indefinite education, terrible locations, long lonely hours, and a fruitless pursuit of the jobs you really want all to teach intro to British lit for the billionth time. Less than ideal. And my responses to my professors' warnings were always two fold:
1. For the love of literature.
2. (In a quiet voice, overfed by American exceptionalism) maybe I can beat the odds!

And I think it was only in living the pursuit of these goals that I could begin to unravel those attempts at logic. First off, you can love and pursue and enjoy things that are not a part of your job. And you can love your job without it including all of your favorite things. Second there was the realization that I didn't actually love literature. (GASP!) I mean, I do, but that's not what gripped me about all of my favorite classes and concepts. That's not what got me excited. It was always this issue of identity. Of layering all the parts of ourselves and watching them all fit together, in whatever illogical or messy way they could. And yes, perhaps I could succeed in studying this in an academic office on [insert mediocre college campus here], but the reality is that kind of work would be literally, metaphorically, and ideologically isolated. And maybe one day those are the experiences I'll want, but right now, what I really want is to talk to people, and to support them in loving and appreciating themselves.

Enter Charlie Hebdo. I think I gave this tragedy a few lines, as there are much more educated people than I with much more meaningful commentary on the events, but here I want to give you my very personal reaction, which was to ask, "didn't their teachers ever teach them to recognize and interpret satire?" It struck me as such an obvious failing of their education. If their parents wouldn't teach them, why wouldn't their public school educations prepare them to encounter the world in a responsible and meaningful way? There were a few other moments in the weeks before and the weeks after that tightened this focus on the societal role of education, but by the end of January I had applied to Teach for America, ready to move back to my country and learn to be a part of the solution.

It took us a while to arrive at this punchline, but c'est ca. I want to be a teacher. I thought I wanted to be a researcher too, but as it turns out I'm not sure that I need to be compiling data and reviewing books to feel that I've discovered something new and meaningful in my life. And I'm excited to take some time off as the representative of all things American and support some youngins in their exploration of their own identities. It's going to be good.

So after several rounds of interviews I was accepted to TFA Arkansas, teaching (probably English) in upper elementary or junior high, and in a few days I'll know exactly where I'm moving in just a few weeks. Definitely one of those life changes that I didn't know I was looking for until I found it. A question I didn't know I had until I found the answer. And while I will miss these international conversations and chance encounters and art and café life and used books...it feels really wonderful to be moving towards something that I want, with all of these incredible experiences from the past year to make the journey that much more pleasant.

Wish me luck! (Ou merde a le treisieme pouvoir)
Either way, I hope that every step you're taking towards your goals brings you that much closer to a future where you're excited about tomorrow, whatever that tomorrow brings. Because can I just say, it feels great.

Less is More

Ok, so at first glance this title may seem like a justification of my lack of posts for the past several months (which now that you mention it, I guess it is) but it's also a genuine life lesson and truism I've found to be remarkably fresh and true in my Parisian life.

People are always ready to tell me what I'm like and what I like for the reason that I'm American. Everything from 50 shades of Gray to peanuts to being racist to being puritanical. You see one Fox news report or one episode of How I Met Your Mother and you think you know me. That's fine. But that's not actually why I brought this up. My point is that my reference point, the things that I find to be genuinely different from my American life, are not at all what people tell me is different. Variety and choice are actually the most marked differences for me. 

When I buy something in the U.S. I'm accustomed to having nothing but options. Peanut butter, you say? Here are 7 national brands plus a store brand each porting 3 to 5 sizes and bottle styles with a minimum of crunchy and creamy, but likely to include other varieties like all natural, low sodium, and reduced fat. It's almost insane. I mean, we have a whole aisle for cereal. Is that really necessary? Someone asked me, "but how? There aren't that many cereals..." And when I thought about it, I also wasn't really sure.

In Paris, the most international city in France, if you want peanut butter you have one choice to make: yes or no.

I know this seems like a bad example, because France is historically on the wrong side of peanut butter history, but it really clearly illustrates their approach to choice and variety. In the U.S. if you're selling anything, you're selling at least two brands, two varieties, two sizes, two something! There is always a choice to be made.

Living without this call to decide has been working fine by me. I eat less. I buy less. I waste less. And not just with food, but with everything. It is liberating to just choose yes or no without the million gradations between black and white.

Speaking of which, I can't help but feel that the international adoration of those black and white portraits of Paris are an extension of this philosophy. To simplify, to reduce an image to its barest emotions, to its purest sense, is to tap at something bigger and more universal. I don't need to know the color of her dress or the contrast of his tie to know that their kiss is passionate and willful. I don't need the color or an outrageous size or some trick, I just need the people, in their purest form.

My sister was visiting this past week and I finally made it to the catacombs, which had been on my list for a while but which I had been putting off for some time. But they were incredible, and an ultimate test of this less is more philosophy. If you don't know, during the 19the century bones were dug up from all over Paris and relocated to this nameless crypt. Skulls and femers are piled up into patterns of various intricacy, with hips and fingers piled up behind, filling out these damp underground caves. In French fashion, historical and literary quotes in the meaning of life and death mark these nameless tombs. 

At first glance, these piles of bones may seem grotesque, crude, inhuman. But for me they were something different. These nameless Parisians would be underground either way, without name or marker to signify their life to future generations. But here, in this sort of art, they rest together, building patterns in the walls with their own heads and arms and legs. They are contributing to something bigger with what is left, and they are calling out to future generations, to us, "we have lived! And you should too!" It's direct and powerful and true. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

L'enthousiasme

Long time, no see! Have you lost weight? New haircut? I dunno, something's changed...

Oh, me? Not much. I successfully avoided posting about Charlie Hebdo. Plenty of people had more informed, thoughtful, poetic things to say than I did. Happy to let their collective impressions stand in for mine in lieu of contributing to the white noise.

Moving on. I spent what felt like all of January prepping for, taking, and recovering from exams. (That last stage is actually misleading, it took about .5 milliseconds and some wine/beer/coffee.) Anyway, it was two weeks of me failing practice exams and butting heads with my professor who was selective in when she could pretend to tolerate me. It was literally waking up, 5 hours of class, going home and spending a few hours with a text, and then a few more hours trying to tease logic from some essential grammatical concept that after 7 months I had failed to make a dent in. Good times.

Eventually, the dark morning came (dark because I woke up at around 6 am) when I rolled out of bed and onto the deserted streets of the quartier Latin, making my way for the somehow more deserted RER (suburban train). I rode that vessel out of the city to a testing center, which was, I believe, built based on a composite of the nightmares of college juniors taking the SATs. They didn't let us in the gates until about half an hour after our hopelessly lost professor told us to be there, and then we weren't let into the room until the very moment we were originally told the exam would start. Vive la France.

But, in the end, the exam was fair and I think it went fine, (and in the beginning I was too nervous about failing to care about the bureaucracy) so all was forgiven. 3 hours later I was free to cafe hop to my heart's content.

This was Saturday, and then Sunday I spent holed up in a cafe reviewing for my oral exam, the decided dark horse of the two. The scene: a professor who hates my Anglophone ways and a complete stranger posted behind a desk, ten pieces of paper with ten French texts scattered, face down. Me, the student, entering nervously, fearfully, selecting one from the tumult and after a few minutes of preparation rising from the ashes and delivering an eloquent, complete, correct response to an elementary question concerning the text. So, in short, a piece of cake. Laced with rat poison.

The preparation stage was only difficult or frustrating because as we prepared ourselves to discuss these texts, all of them, we knew that we would only have to discuss one. Meaning that roughly 90% of the work we were doing would be a complete waste in 24 hours. Not an impossible mental block to overcome, but also not a state that makes studying any easier.

So I went early, in hopes of getting it out of the way. I reread all the texts and the in class notes and my own summaries. Twice. I ended up going later than my originally scheduled time, but that didn't make much of a difference. I got into the room and my Americanness took over me. I greeted the procters and selected my text ("memoires d'une jeune fille rangee" de Simone de Beauvoir) as gregariously and warmly as I've ever done anything in my life. I set to work, outlining my argument, something esoteric about how Simone was writing about the sense of community in academia to make an argument for solidarity in 1950s French feminism, which is when the book was published. Blah blah blah. More successful as some moments than at others.

But, gosh darn it, I was enthusiastic about it. When I read my assigned selection aloud I adopted the voice of a PA announcer.  I made lots of eye contact and hand gestures and smiled more than was necessary. I talked about what I knew I needed to, but also what we had never discussed in class, meaning the facets of the texts that were genuinely interesting. I finished, having spoken too long to leave any time for questions, and the professors asked me a few questions about my plans. They offered some advice and summarized the general sense of my exam with a rollercoaster motion with their hands. Up and down. Great, then terrible. But, I was enthusiastic! And that counted for a lot. Their parting words were to hard my enthusiasm, to hold on to it. Whatever my other failings may be, this energy could curb them. A worthwhile trait.

Learning French has been exhausting and terrifying and incredible. This is about to get braggy, but it has really been the first time I've had to be bad at something. When you're learning a language, even when you're really good, you're bad. And I'm not that kind of bad, I'm just bad. And it is a shaking experience, but also thrilling. Throw off the bow lines and head straight for the iceberg my friend! I still have strong cravings for gold stars, but in general, being completely devoid of aptitude and skill has left me looser, calmer, and happier. C'est la vie! Que sera, sera! I don't know why why we want to say these sentiments in French, but there's certainly a strong link for me now.

In a language that is no rules and all exceptions, it has been liberating to fail. It has been fun to struggle. And it has been rewarding, not just in language learning but in settling into a new and different life, to remain enthusiastic.

The Body of Evidence

So this post is coming from a lot of different places, but the two sources that are easiest for you to access (and that I highly recommend) are the phenomenally creative and thought provoking novel The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt and the unprecedentedly engaging and entrancing podcast "Serial." These 2 projects came in to my life within a week of each other, just after Thanksgiving. They are...completely different. Like based on every superficial metric they have nothing in common, and I can't even imagine that the audience overlap is significant, but they do share this one important premise: Let's sit down and take everything, all the documents, and half-truths, and records, and opinions and articles and lay it out and see what story emerges, see which story is true. Which, when you think about it, is not so different than the way we live and edit our own lives. So as I've been devouring both of these projects and witnessing the accumulation of crap and subsequent purge that carries us from Christmas and through New Year's, I can't help but wonder...what kind of trace am I leaving? Am I leaving one? What do my objects say about me, and why does whatever they say seem to be so loud?

So. Here we are. Meditations on consumerism, capitalism, and the illusion of self-growth, in short,  the importance of stuff. How we accumulate it. How we let it go. How it becomes important. (Note: I will not answer all of these questions, at least not today. For today, the questions are enough.)

Monday night, actually on my way home from my book club discussion of The Blazing World, I lost my class ring. I have been wearing it on my left index finger, and even there it was a little loose. But I've been wearing it nearly every day since graduation, and especially during my year of underemployment it was a totem, a touchstone, a reminder that I had once been well, and with a little time, I could be well again. I have a, I guess you'd call it a tick, where I twist my ring by dragging my thumb through the space between my middle and pointer fingers. So as i was setting down my stuff on my desk and I was absently mangling my fingers, I quickly realized that my ring was gone.

My mind actually jumped almost immediately to Serial, because in one of the early episodes Sarah discusses our inability to recount details from our day. A pain stabbed my chest and I thought to myself, could I retrace my steps? could I remember exactly which bridges I had crossed and allys I had taken? My instinct was "nearly," but slowly pacing cobblestones in the dark of half midnight was not a proposition that particularly interested me, especially considering the futility of such an undertaking. I called the bar. I told my landlord. I tried to move on.

I tell this story mostly because I was surprised at how upset I was. Having so little going on right now I feel pretty centered, but losing that ring was like a stabbing. And maybe it was because I've been investing less in worldly possessions (emotionally and economically) that the loss of that petite scrap of metal hurt. Before I had cared for everything a little bit, and here I was left with a hole in my heart because I had transferred that interest to a very few objects, without losing any passion in the transfer. But, self criticism aside, everywhere I went and everything I read I was receiving the same message: Stuff matters!
Money might not buy happiness, but it does buy something, lots of things actually, and all those big and little things add up to something significant.

At the British Museum there is a piece entitled "Cradle to Grave" on display near the American tapestries by Susie Freeman, Dr. Liz Lee, and David Critchley, a trio otherwise known as Pharmacopoeia. It's a burlap quilt of sorts, really a blister pack that runs the length of a gallery, fashioned of a loose mesh and protected by a glass box. And upon closer inspection there are actually two streamers, side by side, loaded in a gridded and orderly fashion with pills. A man's and a woman's medical history. On display is not only every pill they've required over the course of their life, for reasons ranging from hay fever to birth control to pre-natal vitamins to heart attacks, but also personal trinkets, including family photos and 3rd place canoeing medals and etc etc. The idea being, there's more to wellness than the medicine, there's the personal stuff too. And to represent that sphere, there are actual objects, which on their own mean very little but hold the wight of very much.

In fact, it's not just this installation. The entire museum, all museums really, are glorified warehouses. We're looking at things, collections of objects that once meant so much that by extension they still meant something today. We don't save the coffins of every culture, partly because so many of them have disappeared or disintegrated, but also because sometimes we don't care. But the sarcophagi hanging out in the British Museum tell a different story. It was an empire with the means to preserve its own history, it was a rise and fall that the British were interested in, that they felt was somehow part of their legacy, and by means of archaeological work did actually become part of Britain's identity. And now tourists from the entire world can come to put finger prints on glass boxes that protect these incredibly old objects.

Now for contrast, cut to my room: desk with a Pisa-esque pile of folders and notebooks; 1-3 item receipts litter my desk; water glasses and half full mugs; a stack of one pound coins; paper flowers falling out of reused wine bottles. Swivel to my book shelf: piles of acquired souvenirs for family and friends, soaps shaped and scented like macrons, prints from boquanistas; books from expats who have already moved on to their next exotic locale; french children's books; my very own Larousse; and the notebooks, both completely empty and completely full, from courses finished and trips completed. And swivel, tight shot on that closet, undoubtedly the fewest pairs of shoes I've lived with since infancy, and I doubt that even as a newborn I had so few articles of clothing in my possession.

So here I am, amid my objects. No placquards or glass cases for tourists to mark with fingerprints. There are some bangles from Jaipur, and a postcard of Georgia O'Keefe on the back of a motor-cycle. There are colored pencils and a brand new pair of brown boots that I'm in love with. And all these things mean nothing. And everything. If the building burned down tonight in a fire, what would I miss? My journal. I could never replace that. But otherwise...

And yet, my sense of permanence is attributed almost fully to this...stuff. My very own piles of papers and projects in progress. That, and getting to fill out my french phone number and address on forms, that's when I feel like "wow, I actually live her. I have a life here." So it all means essentially nothing, but at the same time it means essentially everything. Is it my capitalist upbringing? Do communists feel less defined by their possessions, I wonder? Hard to say. But regardless of how important or impermanent my suitcase sized life is, it's here. And right now, it feels like my Larousse and my Petit Marseillais soap say everything you need to know about me. Oh, well that and my class ring, which in the end was found by a neighbor in the foyer and was graciously returned to my landlady who graciously returned it to an ecstatic American. So, maybe it's ok to be loosely defined by our possessions. To be honest, I don't hate the story my stuff is telling right now. That can't be a bad sign.