Increasing the retirement age + french people = no class for Rachel

The title pretty much says it all: let me just be perfectly clear and say that this semester school is a complete joke. I have had about 50% of my scheduled classes, and classes anyway don't require half as much work as school in the U.S. For the first time since middle school I am able to blow off school work and still be completely on top of my responsibilities, and I gotta say, it's awesome. I'm not really here to get a really stressful academic experience -- I went to prep school and a private college for that. I'm here to eat pastries with every meal and go to clubs that play euro pop and have a life in a foreign country in a foreign language. I'm also knitting myself some very nice mittens and continuing to cook a lot.

Okay, so my mother has been asking about the strikes. Like I said in my title, they are causing a lot of cancelled classes. Dauphine has been totally on schedule, but Nanterre is a hot mess, having had to cancel most classes for the last two weeks. There was also a loud but very orderly parade of strikers for a few hours right outside my apartment. Other than that, public transportation is a little slower than usual and therefore more crowded. But I'm used to BART, which comes every 15 minutes, so having the Metro come every four minutes instead of every two minutes just doesn't really piss me off that much. OK WAIT QUICK PAUSE IN HOW I WAS SAYING THE STRIKES DON'T BOTHER ME. I just received -- as in, this second -- a text from my program, and the ballet they were going to take us to see tonight is cancelled! Because of the strikes!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Screw you, Sarkozy, just give these people what they want!

Let me explain as much as I know about the strikes, and why upping the retirement age two little years is a big deal. Honestly, I don't really understand it that well myself, but I'll try. It's important to understand that since France is a social democracy, the state employs many times more workers than in the U.S. Since their public sector economy is so much bigger, it makes sense that there are more angry people when the government wants to manipulate that economy. Think about it this way: in the U.S., how many people are going to strike if Toyota changes their health benefits? Only the people who work for Toyota. In France, how many people are going to strike if France changes its retirement policy? Everyone who works for France, and that's a huge number of people since all transportation, health, school, university, police/defense, postal, and some bank workers are employed by the state (I definitely missed a few industries in that list, sorry). The governement wants to make the minimum (for government employees) retirement age 62 instead of 60, and the age to collect a full pension 67 instead of 65. People are not striking just because they will have to wait two more years to collect. It also has to do with the fact that unemployment is a problem in France. From what I have understood, it is not easy to find a job in France. High school and college students have joined the strikes because if the retirement age is raised, there will be fewer job openings every year. Youth unemployment in general has been a chronic problem for France, even before the economic crash. This problem has been ongoing, and making the job market even more competitive obviously will obviously only augment it.

I'm still trying to give myself an intellectual experience. I get bored with nothing to think about (which makes me awesome, not a nerd), so I'm writing an article for the Mills newspaper, sort of reading a book edited by Homi Bhabha (essays on post-colonialism), translating from French into English a screenplay written by a friend's host father, meeting once a week with a French student for bilingual conversation, volunteering in an elementary school English classroom, and, like I already said, knitting mittens. I'm also still cooking a lot with my friends and host mother. And I may start running again because I practically fainted the last time I walked up the seven flights of stairs to my apartment.

The Paris Routine

I have finally decided all my courses. For my friends in school in the U.S. who are going through midterms right now, yea, sucks to be you. In Paris, there are no midterms, and school doesn't start til October, and not even really then because they have to strike about some things for a while first, so we're just now getting going. (Apart from cancelled classes for a few days and a more-crowded-than-usual metro, the strikes haven't really affected my life.)

Ok, so here are my classes: at Dauphine (Paris IX) I'm taking Economy of Development; at Nanterre (Paris Ouest) I'm taking a Cinema Studies course on fantomes and fantasmes and an Art History course on the internationalization of Dadaism and the surreal. I like the latter two the best. I'm really only taking the Economy course because I feel like I can't consider myself a student of post-colonial theory without understanding the mechanism of imperialism (which is capitalism and our contrived economic structure). Plus, every time I say I go to Dauphine, everyone always acts really impressed, so that's fun. Required by and taught by APA are also French Culture and a French language course. I managed to get myself into the top level of the language course (couldn't weasle my way out though) and am taking the advanced writing course through APA, where we're supposed to be learning stylistics, but really we don't do much of anything.

I'm going to be doing a ton of reading, that much is clear, but I won't have more than three graded assignments for each class, apart from the writing course where we turn in something every week. My favorite course is my cinema course. I mean, it's Friday morning for three hours, so it has to be really good to keep me from doing what all my friends are doing on Friday mornings, which is sleeping or nursing a hangover. It's a Masters level course (I did weasle my way into that, at least), and there are about nine people in it. The professor is a tiny little woman with big glasses and short hair who talks to us intellectually about movies like The Shining and our incest taboo and why we hate dead bodies. Oh, and there's this cute boy in it who gave me his email address in case "I ever missed a class and needed his notes." Hehehe...

Courses only meet once a week for three hours, so I've got some free time to fill. I am doing a once-a-week conversation with a French student at Dauphine who wants to work on his English. We're alternating talking in English and French. I am also going to be volunteering in an elementary school English classroom, and hopefully take some jazz dance classes too if I haven't missed the regestration deadline. I eat dinner three times a week with my host family, so the other four nights I either have a baguette or get together with two of my friends and cook dinner. Most students opted to have dinner six nights a week with their host family, but the three of us were the cheap ones. Fortunately, we all made friends with each other before knowing that we had the same meal plan, so we've started cooking together to eat more cheaply. We've been doing dinner for three on about 7 euros total.

Apart from that, I spend (like I said) a LOT of time on the metro, so it's good that I consider public transportation one of the wonders of the world (put into the context of the post-industrial revolution world; I still think the industrial revolution was no good; buy my future book if you want my full, not-so-educated opinion on the topic). I am also knitting myself mittens and have gotten sort of addicted to How I Met Your Mother and I'm writing a decent amount. I would love to travel, but now that I have a Friday class it's going to be difficult to schedule. Plus, it's expensive.

So that's about it! Life on the farm feels pretty far away...