Je Te Mangerai

So if I'm a scottish Scott from Scottland, where did the word "Scotch" come from?

Does "ch" equal "ish," and if so does that mean that britches are actually Britishes?

This is what I thought about last night while I laid awake until 5 am.

Things around here haven't gotten much better since I still haven't gotten word from Will about whether or not I can hang with the choir if I take care of my own accomidations...

Also, I've gotten another midterm back with a less-than agreeable grade and I'm really wondering what the point of me coming here was. The teacher oh-so-sweetly graded not on content, but on grammar. Had I known this I would have spent more time writing and less time reading the books we were tested on.

Meanwhile, Santiago and I took a walk yesterday to the cemetary in the south part of town. The French have some unfamiliar practices as far as remembering their dead. The pictures can explain it better than I can. It was interesting to take a walk to a new part of town (we found the Arabic district), except that we got lost and were therefor late. So it wasn't long before the caretaker asked us to leave the cemetary so he could shut the gates. He was oddly cheerfully for someone who sits around and looks at graves all day: "Quoi? Vous voulez dormir ici?" ("What? You want to sleep here tonight?")

Other than that I'm really just trying to hang on. This school has been such a let down and it seems to only get worse. There's no such thing as pulling your self up by the bootstraps here; you basically just have to accept whatever bad news they want to give you and there's no way to work with anyone. I'm totally unaccustomed to that and I sometimes feel like I should have followed my initial instincts and come home in the first week.

This all probably sounds remarkably less comedic than usual, but I figure you read this to know how my life is going and I should be completely honest, even if it doesn't sound nice.

Essentially, I don't know if I've ever really regretted anything in my life but I regret coming here. On the bright side, I'll leave with a few hundred pictures of things I've never seen before, but considering my personality and Tim's, I'm relatively sure I would have seen the best things eventually. And if not, I wouldn't have known what I was missing.

To everyone in Shreveport, I wish with all my heart that I was there. I think about you guys all day long. Be so glad you spent your semester together, because we only had eight (well, some of us have nine or ten) and a couple of us wasted one.

Rest assured, I'd be there if I didn't have to take care of the commitment that I made when I enrolled myself to come to this horrid school.

I'm not mad at France for all the crappy things that have happened this semester, some of them would have happened no matter where I was. But it all would have been a lot easier to take if I was with people who made me laugh.

I blame G. W.

Phrase du jour: En France, nous n'avons pas des reforms; nous avons des revolutions. (In france, we don't have reforms, we have revolutions.)

File it under "H" for Heartbreak

Brown Cat (AKA Wiley Cat) got hit by a car last night. Sorry Carly, Tim, Kacie, Zach, Jared and everyone else who loved him a little bit.

And a horrid person moved into my great grandmother's cabin like a louse and has destroyed the one place on earth that was always sacred and never bad. Camp is lost to us. Sorry Trina, Emily, my Family and most of all, Tim, who will never see it the way it was.

On top of that there's no room for me on choir tour (make that another five days I have to sit alone in Lille).

Another student has died at Centenary.

And I can't take any more bad news.

It's funny, I dreamed about this. But it turned out worse.

I'd ask you to call me but my cell phone is gone. Good night.

I would buy myself a gray guitar...

roxie and her lobster

So... I haven't been totally worthless while in French-Land (as mon petit singe calls it). For one of my classes we had to create a self-portrait and write about it in French. I'm a bit perplexed because I made a 19, which is the grade equivalent of Jesus having written the paper for me. The teacher commented that she was more impressed with my paper than with even the native speakers. Hmmmmmm...

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, ye teacher who gave me a D in translation.

Anyway that's a functioning maze with two converging routes behind my head. The moutains are all tiny words. The face, hands and lobster are all stippled (tiny dots). The robes are pencil. I like art. If you like art too you can see more pics and a couple of D.C. here.

Tim says roxie is beautiful

PS: Quit complaning that I'm not on Facebook. I have my eye on you. This means you, Mr. Brookshire, with your haters' club. And Chris Comeaux can shut it, too.

Time Travel Convention

In case my last post was a bit of a downer, here's something massively cooler. This is the first, and last, annual Time Travel Convention at MIT. The point is that Time Travelers really can go whenever they want to, there only needs to be one because they'll all show up at that point. Sadly, the guy needs help advertising so that time travelers in the distant future will still be able to receive the information. Technically, I'm just spreading the word. Check out the site here:

http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/

DO IT!

This formula represents my pain:

Me not graduating with honors(instead of graduating Summa Cum Laude)

(+) Me having no money and no job

(X) Me missing my Friends/Family/Boyfriend/RCB/Toga/ TKE House

(+) Me gaining nothing from my stupid French "education"

(+) Me potentially having to spend an extra semester and not graduate with my class

(-) the occasional crèpe

(X) the amount of regret I feel for coming to this rediculous school
____________________________________________
L'Université Catholique de Lille

Thanks a lot.

RE: THE FACEBOOK

I'm so disappointed in Centenary.

Facebook?

Honestly people, I thought you had more sense than that. Tell me, why do you need to read about each other on the internet when you could go to out to dinner, or um, walk across the hall and see each other? I only use this rediculous aparatus of internet-communication because I can't afford to actually talk to people.

I can't believe you're all selling out, you posers. It would be one thing if we went to a college with more than 900 people and it was actually some sort of social tool... W.T.F. guys?

But as I am majorly outnumbered, even by Kacie and my beloved TKEs, I will continue by saying only this: this will end badly, wait and see.

Karma police: This is what you get when you mess with us.

Why are some weekends to full of activity and others so completely boring? This has been one of the fuller weekends, where three days pass and you have no idea where they went. I would have posted sooner, thanks to the addition of one computer with internet access in the residence hall, except that there are two girls who are on it non-stop and they guard it like junkyard dogs. On the bizarre occasion that they leave their post to eat or bathe, a group of fifteen Spaniards swarms in, kamikaze-syle. Hence, no internet for the rest of us losers.

This I wouldn't really mind if one thing had not occurred. Yesterday at the market (which I'm not sure I will able to live without when I return to America) my cell-phone got stolen. Not only am I out 45€ because of the rebate and the phone time I had already paid for, I'm now nearly completely cut off from anyone I might have wanted to talk to. Or, if there was, say, an emergency... I have to resort to yelling, I suppose. What I don't understand is this: if you're going to steal a cell phone, why would you steal the absolute crappiest cell-phone ever produced? Honestly, the thing was made with twist-ties and Elmer's Glue. Fate is unkind.

Except for the unfortunate fact of the pilfered cell-phone, it's actually been a marvelous weekend. Since no one has any money left we're all sort of playing the "stone-soup" game, wherein we pool our means and meager ingredients and come up with some excellent food. I knew that 5 kilo bag of potatoes was a good investment.

Among exciting news is that Josh got a tattoo of a Celtic cross on his forearm that is the size of my face, Cody got his tongue pierced and it swelled up and filled his mouth and Alexis keeps cigarettes in his new eyebrow ring. This is pretty much where my body-art phase ends.

I went to the Park Vauban twice this weekend and I'm amazed by how much France can resemble the Renaissance Festival come-to-life at times. So many people lounging on the grass, juggling, playing Radiohead songs on their guitars, making out in public, airing out their dred-locks. It's fantastic really. Yesterday the cutest baby on earth wandered up to me while I was reading and gave me a daisy, while his parents laughed knowingly. You try living in an impressionist painting sometime-- if only the stupid university here (and the cell-phone thieves) weren't trying to thwart me, this place might actually be endearing.

There are moments of surprising clarity when France is everything it's cracked up to be.

Phrase du jour: J'ai perdu mon portable. Si vous le trouvez, j'habite dans chambre 007. J'ai vraiment besoin de cet portable. (I've lost my cell phone. If you find it, I live in room 7. I really need this cell phone.)