Sadly, my blog is also disappearing into the vapor of the virtual world

I had such high hopes for my blog -- one post a week, every two weeks if I was lazy -- and here I am without a single post for January. Oh well.

January: busy! I took my last exams (economy was a nightmare, but my Exorcist presentation went really well), started my new program, moved, and went through two weeks of intensive French classes.

Now all of a sudden it's February! My new program is good. The classes are wonderful, I like a few of the people a lot, my new host family is amazing...everything is going well. I'm super busy: last semester I had lots of fun with American friends in Paris, this semester I've decided I'm going to buckle down and really work. I'm taking two ballet classes a week (I look like an old lady in tights when I dance, but whatever, I'm really good at naming body parts in French now), I'm babysitting for two families, and doing English tutoring for two more. I'm reading the second Harry Potter book in French, which totally counts as an academic endeavor. I'm auditing an extra French class because I want the extra practice. I'm also trying to get eight hours of sleep a night because the flu is going around Paris.

My French is not fluent. My French will not be fluent by the end of this year. Fluency is sort of this very maliable concept for me. In high school, if I had heard myself speak French like I do now, I would have said, "Hell yea I'm fluent, let's move on to the next language." But now that I speak like I do, I realize that there is all this stuff I don't know: slang, which rules I can break to acheive various effects, cultural references, and sometimes some everyday word or grammar rule that still escapes me. But I do finally feel that Rachel in French and Rachel in English are almost the same person. For a long time, Rachel in French was pretty stupid, had no sense of humor, laughed at the wrong things, and didn't really understand how daily life worked. Rachel in English is often just like that, but at least she is usually aware of her betises when they are presenting themselves -- and thus gets to enjoy the resulting humiliation. (Rachel in French was also remarkably non-chalant for being such an idiot.) Now, Rachel in French is still a little dim, but she can make the occasional joke and she finally has a pretty clear understanding of the world around her. Of course, she now gets to experience the full impact of the embarrassing moments that she is often responsible for, but in order to cope with it, she usually just pulls the ignorant American card.

My friend Michelle and my mom and my grandparents are all coming to visit in the next few months! So that's exciting. My mom and Michelle are both going to stay with me because my host parents are so sweet and are letting them. Yay!

one week to paris...

One week until Paris! Well, one week til I leave for Nice, and then two days after that I leave for Paris. I have really reached my limit of being in isolation. I know this because I’ve started online shopping. Well, okay, I haven’t actually bought anything yet, but I’ve drooled a lot.

I also have done lots of escaping into the world of Harry Potter. Willa and I have been listening to the seventh book on tape, or on iPod I guess, while we cook, and it’s really invaded my real world. Willa and I recently became full nerds when we wrote a rap song about Harry. I guess wrap: wizard rap. It’s great, and as soon as we get the music video up on youtube, I will let you know. We also have created a Harry Potter fan club headquarters. Valerie moved to her own apartment, and Willa took her bedroom. So we turned Willa’s old bedroom into a living room. Her bed and pillows has become a couch, and we turned a sort of shelf into a coffee table. And we’ve made lots of posters and signs and hung them all over. One says “Potter Fan Club, Long Live the Chosen One.” Having this area of our own is actually really nice. There’s a sort of freedom in the privacy it gives us. Most of what we do in this room is just watch trashy American television (there are some free downloads on iTunes) and drink tea.

We continue to cook two meals a day from scratch, as well as work in the garden. Yesterday we started gathering wood for the winter.

There are three dogs here, and two of them have been pregnant. One of them had her puppies probably the day before yesterday, and last night I found them with their mother. The mother dog is very sweet and trusting, and she let me pick up her puppies without any sort of nervous reaction. Of course, they were adorable. But Claude had been saying ever since it was obvious that the dogs were pregnant that he would have to drown the puppies. He doesn’t have the money to get his dogs fixed, or the money or will to have any more dogs. All the farmers around here get rid of their newborn dogs and cats. So this morning, I unhappily told Claude where I had found the puppies with their mother, knowing exactly what would happen next. It seems crueler to me to let all the puppies live and have them starve to death than to kill them quickly and keep the population in check. But after Claude took them, their mother started frantically looking everywhere for her puppies, shacking and panting and whining imploringly, especially to me, I think because I was the one who found her with them. All day, she’s been acting just like a mother of any species who can’t find her children. The only thing that could make the situation worse is laughing at it, and that’s exactly what Claude has done. He keeps making jokes to the poor dog herself about how her puppies took a nice swim today and how she’s better off without children to bother her. It makes me want to throw up. And he thinks he’s being cute, or showing how manly he is because he can laugh at killing things. Frankly, I think it’s just redneck. It’s a trait that I have seen in other people who live close to the land like this. Not everyone, of course, but some people with a similar lifestyle have Claude’s same attitude of needing to show their toughness and their disregard for anything “city people” think is pretty or sacred. It’s as though he’s showing how he can kill puppies without a second thought to prove his paysan-ness. But somehow I don’t find it tough or paysan to laugh at a mother whose babies have just been killed, even if that mother is not human. Maybe I’m being too hard on Claude. He made it clear that he doesn’t like to have to kill puppies. But I just don’t think the way of dealing with mercy killing is by being flippant. The real icing on top of the cake was when the dog found her dead puppies in the garbage and tried to take them back and hide them in the house. And I feel responsible because I was the one who told Claude she had puppies. But I don’t know what else I could have done; he was bound to find out at some point. So all in all, it hasn’t been a great day.

Daily life, etc.

So honestly, I don't really have much to say. I've really fallen into the rhythm here: two hours or so of farm work in the morning, a long lunch around noon or 1 followed by a nap until about 4 (no nap for me, I can't sleep in the day), then another two hours of work, and dinner starting anywhere from 7 to 11 at night, depending on what's being cooked. I still cook a lot, weed a lot, harvest a lot, and eat a lot. In fact, every single facet of life here is somehow related to food. We are either growing food, eating food, cooking food, talking about food, or sleeping. It's genius.

I'm currently reading the first Harry Potter book in French, and although it's good for my vocabulary, I have to say that I'm glad English is my maternal language, because so much of this book is lost in translation. Dommage, but still the translator is admirable.

Two weeks ago, another American WWOOFer, Willa, arrived here. She's 18, from Minneapolis, was born at home, and is going to the French Culinary Institute in New York to learn pâtissière after she spends a year in France. Her French is a little shaky, so I'm speaking a lot more English, but I'm also translating a lot more, which I think is good for my brain. At least, it gives me a headache. Several weeks ago, I thought that long debates in French were difficult. Well, that's nothing compared to trying to translate those long debates for Willa. But since she's arrived, we've eaten dessert pretty much every other day. So that's chouette. And I'm getting nice and plump before my arrival in Paris, where I'll suddenly be a poor student again living on brown rice.

I'm excited for Paris. I miss public transportation, and getting dressed up, and other people, and Indian food and sushi and tofu and miso and going places. And I sort of miss shopping more than I care to admit. Yes, the stars are beautiful, yes, the garden is amazing, yes, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, but I just don't think I could live anywhere but the city. Also (don't remind me of this when I'm stressed out about some essay, it won't make me feel better) I miss school. Not the homework part, but I really love going to class. School starts in a month from yesterday, and I'm definitely terrified, but really I can't wait. Of course, I'm sure saying goodbye to everyone here will be pretty tearful. But I've been invited back for Christmas, and anytime I have a long weekend.

My latest culinary-based foreign relations advancement was the peanut butter and banana sandwich which no one wanted to try at first. But in the end it was a real hit. Willa and I quickly destroyed that advancement when we made zucchini bread. Because baking soda and baking powder don't exist here (instead it's a sort of combination of the two that also has some flour mixed in), and because we don't have American measuring cups, we used a French recipe that we found online. It was just terrible. It tasted vegetably, was kind of slimy, and had the metalic flavor of too much levening. The dogs liked it a lot, but we're still getting teased about it. Kin still scoffs at our idiocy in thinking that you can make vegetables sweet. Maybe we'll skip the pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.

But our real triumph was making latkes. I called my mom and got the recipe and some tips, and they came out perfectly. We tried to teach everyone the word latke, but settled for calling them galettes de patate. We ate them with crème fraiche instead of sour cream and apple sauce, and I got a real kick out of the culture fusion. Of course, my heart will never be the same, but it was worth it.