Saturday, November 24, 2007

jingles for Christmas

Here's a funny thing for a dyed-in-the-wool atheist: I love Christmas music. I love a lot of things about Christmas, actually, but the music in particular, as long as it's not "Away In A Manger"-style schmaltz or "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer". I even like God-heavy numbers like "Joy To The World" and "Hark The Herald Angels Sing". I know three verses of "Silent Night" in English and one in German.

Every year I start fidgeting near the end of October, waiting to be able to listen to Christmas music. I'm not quite sure where this comes from. Maybe the years of singing in choirs: after all, what's more joyous and majestic than Christmas music, aside from opera? The loud songs are like bells; the quiet songs are lovely in a melancholy way. Being inside all that beautiful noise is a transport of some sort. I get all the peace and goodwill I need even without the religious significance. And it's something better enjoyed as a family, unlike arthouse movies or Christmas shopping trips. After all, my great-aunt on Dad's side is still the only woman to have played the pipe organ for her talent at the Miss American competition - who could pass up a chance to sing to that accompaniment? And Mom's family are all musical. The post-dinner cleanup is usually in three or four part harmony.

Bosslady is not big on Christmas music; I don't foresee "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" playing in the bookstore anytime soon, and thank goodness. Give me old-fashioned soaring harmonies any day, churchy or not. No doubt Biceps is going to get on my case about this. "How can you sing these songs when you don't even believe in God?" But Christmas isn't just for Christians anymore. I think that's clear, when it's celebrated all over the world with plenty of American trimmings and poppy, non-denominational tunes. I myself once taught some Indian children how to cut paper snowflakes, right before I took them to my very first midnight Mass at the cathedral in Calcutta. Christmas celebrations in America are practically enforced, so steeped are we in caroling and Christmas bargains and tinsel and Santa Clauses on every corner.

So let the raucous sleigh bells jingle, in the words of Tom Lehrer. I'll just be in my concrete office consoling myself with twelve different versions of "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Now if only Pandora would learn to recognize it.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

home for the holidays (oy)

So! Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which of course means that the library and the bookstore where I work are deserted. Outside, despite the fact that it's an astounding 67 degrees, it looks as if it's about to snow. Miserable weather, no classes - yes, it's going to be a slow day. On the plus side, that gives me a lot of time to think about recipes for tomorrow. It's tough sometimes being the only vegetarian, especially during these holidays so dedicated to meat. Last time I was home for Thanksgiving, my relatives forgot not to include bacon in the green beans and chicken brother in the mashed potatoes, so I was stuck with a small portion of salad and a hastily microwaved potato. Wasn't feeling a lot of peace and love, I can tell you. It's hard to feel included when you're an afterthought.

Thanksgiving in India and France was a lot more difficult. In Madurai, for instance, it was easy to get potatoes, butter, and pumpkin, but the only turkey available in all of South India had to be ordered from and cooked by the city's biggest hotel restaurant - there simply wasn't another kitchen equipped for it. We cobbled together a pie, but we had to get the servants to show us how to work the SITA Center's oven. It's not as if improvising reduced the quality of the meal: subbing in an Israeli-style salad for green bean casserole and all the fixings was probably healthier.

In France, the only problem was that turkey's expensive. I think Anna spent 35E on a 12 pound bird; Mom sounded so shocked when I told her. We had mashed potatoes and green beans and stuffing (always the surfeit of stale bread! I made stuffing a couple of times a week for about a month at one point, it felt like) and pumpkin pie (which perplexed the little old lady at the vegetable stand) and Matthias the Austrian carved and we all said things we were thankful for. I was thankful that it was a lot easier for the other non-American assistants to understand the point of Thanksgiving than it was for my blank-faced students. Apparently, Pilgrims don't make a lot of sense to other people.

This year, Mom and I are taking special care to have plenty of food that I can eat (I don't enjoy being irritable at family holidays, but when the point of the day is a meal I can't eat, gratitude runs short). It's so easy to have Thanksgiving here, but sometimes it's less easy to remember what I'm thankful for. Daily contact with the ones I love tends to inure me to their charms and instead highlight their irritating habits, but I'll take a day or two to remember why I'm glad to be home.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Shoe money tonight!

I'm excited: tonight is poker night for my department, a whim of Biceps' which Bosslady decided merited a little more followthrough than some of our other ideas (say, the construction of the Redhead's box fort). You would think that, given that I spend a significant portion of my week with these people, I wouldn't be thrilled at the prospect of devoting my Saturday night to them as well, but on the other hand, work at the bookstore doesn't usually involve classy beer and minor gambling.

I think fictional President Josiah Bartlet summed it up best in one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing: "I don't know why, but nothing makes me feel quite so good as the sight of colleagues, enjoying each other outside work." (The episode in question is "The Crackpots and These Women".) While my colleagues don't have quite the frenetic charm of a Josh Lyman, the gawky grace of a C.J. Cregg, or the sardonic, "the world is going to hell" humor of a Toby Zeigler, I'm fond of them, and it'll be entertaining to spend time with them in a less professional environment (though I'm sure Bosslady would make some comment about how we could hardly get less professional, some days).

Hard to say why the appeal of social events with people I work with is so compelling, or why I find it so enjoyable when fictional characters do the same thing. Maybe it's because, for the first time, I'm in a job where my colleagues aren't my fellow students or my housemates. If I want to see them outside of work, it has to be a conscious choice. I hardly ever have a chance to bicker with my colleagues over who's better at chopping onions or compare references for that hefty paper. We don't go on school trips to foreign countries together. If I want to spend a Saturday evening mingling with the people I'm usually rearranging books with, it must be planned. It's a good sign that we get along well enough to agree to this. After all, we could just meet up again on Monday. The office part is a curious phenomenon; at least I am assured that ours will not be quite so awkward as those on The Office (though less carefully planned).

I imagine our work-friendship will stand the test of one evening playing poker. After all, the buy-in is low and so is the potential for tipsy shenanigans. And it won't be as idyllic or moving as Sorkin's various descriptions of colleagues playing poker (Sports Night's "Shoe Money Tonight", The West Wing episodes "Mr. Willis of Ohio" and "Evidence of Things Not Seen", among others), but I imagine there will be plenty of laughs. And hey, I finally have something to do on a Saturday night.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

A rare schill: Raw Minerals

In a surprise move, a shallow post: today I'm writing about makeup.

It's very clear, once one detaches from the keyboard, that I am not one of those posh and polished girls. I hardly ever wore makeup in college. I'm not wearing makeup now, given that I was running late this morning. But I had to rave a little about the stuff I've been wearing for the past couple of weeks, because for the inexperienced and the indifferent, it's fantastic.

I found out about Raw Minerals through their many internet ads and a little word of mouth. "Free 30 Day Trial!" the ads proclaimed, and I thought to myself, "Self, you can't beat that very easily. Especially being the broke and miserly girl that you are." So I coughed up the five bucks for ground shipping and waited for the box to arrive (it came slowly). Eagerly I unboxed all the little jars and pulled the (quite nice and yours-to-keep-free) brushes out of their plastic wrappers. I followed the directions, first moisturizing, then dusting the stuff over my face. Result: a dewy smooth glow unlike anything my limited skills achieve with regular makeup.

Ever since I got back from India, my face has been prone to breaking out in a way it never did when I was a teenager. Normal makeup seems to aggravate this, but the Raw Minerals stuff doesn't. It hardly feels like makeup at all, and even at the most obvious, it doesn't look cakey like my usual foundation does, so I'll never be mistaken for an out-of-her-depth sorority pledge. Best of all, it seems to be repairing my skin. Outlandish! Delightful! What kind of makeup is actually good for your face?

The two tones of powder blend right into my fair/light skin, evening it out without the need for concealer, and the blusher/bronzer that seemed outlandishly dark is actually quite flattering. I like the idea of a powder with an SPF of 20 that goes over my SPF 15 moisturizer and evens out the glow if I apply too much bronzer. The brushes are great, with the added benefit that I feel like an old-timey dame as I dust the "Active Veil" powder over my nose and create the illusion of cheekbones with the "Mineral Glow" blush.

I'll probably be sending back the little pots of skin-colored powder once my trial is over. While I can afford $5 for 30 days of glamour, I probably can't swing $40 per month (or $60, which my email promises is a special members-only deal). However, if I do get a little extra cash in my pocket one of these days soon, I'll probably swing for another batch. RawMinerals stuff isn't sticky or runny; it's not heavily and bizarrely perfumed; and it actually kind of makes me look forward to putting on makeup despite the little voice in the back of my head that tells me I'm betraying my liberal arts education.

So how about that?

Verdict: Hokey names, great products.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Leaf raking and pie making

The other day I helped Mom rake leaves in the yard. We have two large maples out in the front, which means we get glorious color (most years) for a couple of weeks, but we also get enormous piles of leaves all over the yard. I'll be the first to admit we haven't got the nicest lawn in the neighborhood (partly due to the delightful deep shade provided by the maples and partly due to the rambunctiousness of the dog), but apparently a deep carpet of crunchy leaves isn't an acceptable alternative. Hence: raking.

It was an enjoyable twenty minutes or so, but also strange. It seemed like such an outlandish thing to do. Raking leaves? Sure, and afterwards, maybe I can whitewash a fence. Then I remembered that I haven't been home in the fall for five years. I skipped off to college in the fall of 2002 and I haven't raked a leaf since. The extremely competent and cordial facman staff did that at Grinnell, with all their noisy leaf blowers, and there weren't any leaves to rake in India. As for the one tree in the courtyard of our maison blanche, it didn't drop that many leaves, and if it did, there were janitors at the lycée to take care of that sort of thing.

Leaf raking is only one of the fall traditions I've skipped over the last while. It's kind of strange to think that I haven't spent a Thanksgiving or a Christmas at home in the last two years. Sure, we cobbled together a pumpkin pie in Madurai (and had to call the servants because we couldn't figure out how to turn on the rickety oven), and I made a prodigious pile of mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce in Cambrai, but now I'll be in a country where it's actually possible to purchase and roast a turkey yourself for a reasonable price and investiture of effort. Strange. And Christmas decorations aren't going up yet like they did in Northern France, but I know that the day after Thanksgiving, I won't be able to turn a corner without running into tinsel and carols. Or will I? Stores are definitely barreling toward the season; it was hard to find flannel sheets without Christmas ornaments on them. Soon, the notion of a Christmas that comes but once a year will be slightly laughable, since it'll be a three month process. The "So's Christmas" comeback to a slowpoke insisting on their imminent arrival is already rather dated.

I feel a little out of touch with American customs, even though I've put the effort into recreating my interpretation of them the last two years. Thanksgiving especially is a concept that doesn't really translate well. "It's like Christmas, without all the religious parts, just the togetherness," I tried to tell my French students, who stared at me blankly. But then again, they live in a country which is extremely Catholic: even if the French people are mostly non-practicing or non-Christian, all of the holidays are modeled around the Catholic calendar, and the shops close on Sundays. By contrast, America is a country where the people are devout, but the holidays try to be secular (except Christmas. And Easter. But you can't tell me Lincoln's birthday and Labor Day and Halloween are because of God).

Now that I'm back in the States for the holiday season, maybe I'll try to bring a little foreign flavor back with me. Curry the green beans at Thanksgiving, perhaps, or learn to make the gaufres so popular in the Christmas markets in northern France (Liègeoises, of course: I love the way the sugar crunches, and the Franglais in this recipe is charmingly incomprehensible). I've spent the past couple of years adapting to new rituals; it's odd to be in a place where everything is so familiar. I keep expecting saris or firecrackers or a Ferris wheel in the middle of town next to a mulled wine stand. Fortunately, America's pretty easy going about enveloping new rituals from other places into its existing celebrations. Maybe it's our history of colonizing and having been colonized. Maybe it's our immigrant populations and our cultural gluttony. I have to admit, it works for me.

And oh, Father Christmas, if you love me at all, send me a package of those chocolate-topped gaufres so easy to find in Cambrai or Lille (or in the giant vending machine in Paris Nord), but impossible to get in small-city Upper South U.S.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

this is Halloween!

Aha, it's Halloween! That other holiday that only Americans really celebrate. Last year in France, I saw a few kids out trick or treating, but most of the students and the general population didn't care. Another happy example of cultural grafting that doesn't take. At least it's rather easier to explain the rationale behind Halloween: candy is delicious. There's none of this jive history about settlers in funny hats and the natives they displaced and inconvenienced.

Not a lot of visible festivities around, unfortunately. Perhaps that's because Halloween falls in the middle of the week, but personally, I'm all for taking advantage of a day when I can wear ridiculous clothes to work. Bring on the costumes! Bring on the candy corn! How can you dislike a holiday that involves carving pumpkins (mine features Mulder and Scully, or did before it began to slump in on itself) and unabashedly pagan ritual? Halloween's got history, and it isn't all death and destruction (well, lots of death, but mostly not on purpose).

Saturday, October 27, 2007

like a tree falling in the forest with no one around

I've noticed recently that the way I drive is ridiculous. Not that it's dangerous, mind, or uncouth, just that it's rather silly. Lots of fingertapping, lots of making faces. I crook my pinkies when I'm turning, as if I'm expecting high tea to be served from the passenger's seat. Of course, I also make silly faces when I'm sitting and doing nothing. Right now typing this, I've pursed my lips and crooked an eyebrow. I can't seem to stop my thoughts from affecting my expressions as I sit here at my desk at work with only my thoughts (and the largely empty room) for company. I grin at the thought of my team winning today. I scowl at the thought of battling tonight's traffic.

Ah, the trials of being an introvert.

Fortunately, we live in an age of electronic solitude. Despite the fact that I look as if I'm trying to communicate with an imaginary friend, no one notices. They're all wrapped up in their cell phones or web browsing or iPods. It's a great time to be constantly lost in your own head, since talking to someone else involves more effort than it's worth. They're probably on the phone or listening to music anyway.

In my head, this made a better blog entry. It was less to do with solipsism and more to do with my need to communicate, even if I can't see the expressions of those I'm communicating with. In the absence of conversation, my face does the talking, or my quirky little gestures. I think too much, and when there's no one to talk to, all the thoughts come out as odd expressions or unnecessarily cultured gestures. Much like this blog: it hardly matters if anyone is reading it anymore (I doubt it), because the point is that the expression is there, and the chance of someone catching it is about the same as someone actually responding to the smile that crosses my face as I sit in the coffee shop and relive a great Scrabble play.

Truly it's a great time to be lost in your own head. The internet and the prevalence of personal communication devices makes actually leaving the house to talk to people unnecessary. Your friends and coworkers don't have to be geographically proximal at all. Talking to someone who hasn't specifically contacted you seems almost intrusive. It's only tactful to respond to your screen and nobody else's. Still, my face goes on trying to communicate my inner life, with or without my approval. Just as well. It might be that sometime someone will notice my pointless little scowls and the inner monologue will become a conversation. Or maybe my friends will come home for a visit and I'll have someone to talk to besides the screen.

In my mind, this was an opening line. It would evoke a response. Even introverts enjoy communicating. But in the end, it's probably just another wry grin at nobody.

I need to get out more, eh?

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

books, books, books

I think I'm spending too much time around books lately.

Not a statement anyone ever expected to hear from me. I majored in literature, after all. I work in a bookstore and a library. My room is crammed with books. I can't even count the times I've woken up with a book next to me on the pillow. I love the way books feel and the way they smell. I enjoy helping people find just the books they're looking for.

Still, there's a point when it feels like I'm taking my work home with me. One of Mom's library books was lying on my desk on its cover. The back of the book had a stylized R and the word "Revell". "Oh," I thought to myself, "Revell is the Christian-themed imprint of Baker, whose books we buy from J.A. Majors." Or I noticed a Scribner book in the living room the other day; that's Simon & Schuster. Each week I update the bestsellers for our store; Saturday I did the lists and only had to look up one of the publishers. For all the others, I knew the imprints already (Grand Central is Hachette, Vintage belongs to Random House, Riverhead is one of Penguin's and so on. For the record, the one I didn't know was Washington Square Press, which turns out to be part of Atria, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.).

While this is great in a way, because it lets me get done with the spreadsheets-and-order-forms part of my job faster and go on to the rearranging-the-displays and hassling-the-cashiers parts, it's also somewhat alarming. What if I suddenly develop a social life? I won't be able to hang out at bookstores, that's for sure. The people at Barnes & Noble have better shelves than I do, and more of them. They also have their own imprint, which makes me shake my fist every time a customer wants a book that's only available at Barnes & Noble. Heaven forbid I ever get invited to a party. I'd probably be standing around jabbering about multi-press conglomerates and how mysterious it is that the big presses don't seem to actually send out their books on time. As it is, I spend more time on the phone with HarperCollins and Von Holtzbrinck than I do with my best friend. It's gotten to the point where I know which companies have the best hold music (not Perseus - Enya makes me want to take a nap).

I suppose I could do something with this knowledge, like start an indie press movement. We'll listen to peppy music and only buy books from small, expensive, tough-to-contact independent presses! Yeah! Books that nobody would ever want! Or I could irritate people by poking through their collections and pointing out that they seem to buy all their books from one group or the other. I could write an exposé about the irritations of restocking fees and shipping delays that get us the bestsellers a week after they've fallen off the list or why the price-gouging students complain about at university bookstores is mostly a bunch of whining. Nothing much compared to ground up rats in the sausage, though.

I suppose in the end my bookstore skills will be just about as useful as any other specialized skill set, say playing bridge or understanding a dead language (neither of which I can do): sometimes entertaining at parties, but not a lot of practical applications outside of the field. Ah well. That's why I went to a liberal arts college, right?

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Knitting circle: not just for grannies

Fall's been late coming to my town. As recently as last weekend, it was in the 80s. The maples in my yard are stubbornly green (though one's started to drop leaves early). The hills aren't the usual palette of oranges and reds and yellows. Fortunately, a cold front moved in; maybe that will coax the leaves to change. It's been rainy and grey and chilly and awful the last couple of days, and it looks like that'll continue all week. And we know what that means.

Knitting weather.

Not that I didn't knit all summer, but the point is that now it's chilly enough to have a scarf or a sweater piled onto my lap. So long, cottons! Hello, wools and mohairs! I'm fortunately to have a local yarn shop stocked to the ceiling with exactly the sorts of spun things I want to twine between my fingers. There's also a yarncat (the best kind that only smacks the yarn off the shelf and doesn't try to eat it), and they host a knitting circle on Monday nights.

Ever since I came home from France and realized I no longer know anyone in this town (and hence have no social life), I've been looking forward to Monday nights. After all, I don't care about anything on television on Mondays, and the gym's crowded at night now that the students are back. Knitting circle's become the highlight of my week. It gets me and Mom out of the house one evening a week, and we meet a number of amazing, inspiring women.

No doubt about it, the women in my knitting circle are characters. People drift in and out each week (we even have a man who's a regular), but there's a core group of twelve or so who show up almost every time, for half an hour or the whole two hours. People bring in homegrown or homemade snacks to nosh on, like the jalapeño jelly cream cheese dip. There's wine, there's yarn, there's the cat, there's a half-dozen projects of varying difficulties and degrees of completeness. I am astounded by some of the things those women knit. I'd still call myself an advanced beginner: I can do basic lace, I could probably cable if I wanted, but I'm not brave and bold in particular. I don't like seaming and I've never turned a heel. I can read a pattern, but I've never designed anything. Still, the women of knitting circle lavished my simple sweater with praise: I guess it's all about the fundamentals. Plus, I know if I do take on a major project, I'll have plenty of help. These women are sharp, and they know what they're doing, and they're generous enough to lend a hand.

Sure, we have minor strife and tribulation. Mom and I knit continental, and apparently we purl like no one else; the rest of the knitters are mostly English-style, wrappers instead of pickers. There's some friendly bickering about that ("Wrapping is slow!" "Continental is complicated!") as we try to argue the pros and cons of this purl stitch or that cast-on method. We talk about Yankees (Mom is one, and so are a couple of the other members) and how Southern women will say outlandishly snide things, as long as they're followed by "bless his/her/your heart". We talk about the job market, how much we enjoy or don't enjoy our jobs, whether we'd rather be knitting. Sure, most of them are plenty older than I am (but such dignity and sass!), but they're not the stereotypical grandmothers, rocking away and knitting ugly scarves in dull acrylics. These women are knitting hot pants and kicky hats with skull patterns on them. Sure, they're knitting baby blankets and self-striping socks, but with new, cool twists. Part of it is the amazing new yarns that are coming out (Fortissima makes me pine to knit socks of my own, and Koigu looks amazing no matter what you make out of it), but part of it is that knitting is cool again (thanks, Stitch & Bitch!). I may be the youngest there most weeks, but I'm not the only young person knitting.

I'm really looking forward to all this horrible weather. After all, I've got shows to knit through, and waiting rooms to knit in, and Christmas presents to get a start on. Plus, I want to have something to show off next week. Last night, I spent the whole evening struggling through a calamari snarl of the spring green wool/bamboo blend that I dropped the other day as I was heading to work, and trailed behind me for fifty feet or so. Good thing it was sunny then. Good thing I'm going to be keeping the ball in a Ziploc bag once I get it wound.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Why I (Still) Watch The X-Files

So I meant to talk about why I watch Friday Night Lights, but it's 10/13. This is, as any X-Phile knows, both the date of (fictional) Fox Mulder's birthday and (oh so real) Chris Carter's (the guy who created the show in the first place). Therefore, in homage to my show, I have to eschew for the moment the tangibly dusty field of the football stadium at Dillon High and wander instead into the strange and wonderful world of The X-Files.

I started watching the show right as it got terrible, in the summer of 2000. Truly it was horrible timing, and I later did exactly the same thing with The West Wing. I know there are those out there who will say that The X-Files started going downhill after Season Three or Season Five, but I think we can all agree that it was a rough and awful transition from the rather light-hearted but compelling Mulder/Scully dynamic of Season Seven to the Duchovny-less Seasons Eight and Nine. No matter how much you enjoy Robert Patrick's John Doggett and the charming Annabeth Gish as Monica Reyes, Duchovny was the anchor. Moody, brooding Mulder was the reason for the show to exist, and it just wasn't the same without him. Regardless, I stuck by The X-Files through the last two long seasons of bizarre plot lines and pointless dead ends (the baby plot, which went nowhere; the last episode, which answered no questions at all; the death of the Lone Gunmen, which was the only episode that ever made me cry).

I don't really watch a lot of television. Which is to say, I watch a healthy number of hours of the few shows I do watch, but I'm never just going to turn the thing on and channel surf. I missed the pop culture explosion: I never saw a tv special or a photoshoot or an article about The X-Files, though I remember seeing a couple of commercials. I didn't see the movie when it came out; I had no idea there was a movie. Because of this not-watching, I had hardly heard of The X-Files before a friend told me about it. Actually, I read a story she'd written that featured the characters; it was my first brush with online fandoms and fanfic. When I met up with her that summer, I told her I'd read it, and she offered to send me some tapes. I still remember getting that box in the mail, with her strange note about the "mytharc" and the "MotW" episodes, and how the mytharc ought to be watched in order. I just took her word for it and popped in a tape, which turned out to be the episode "Duane Barry". This of course means nothing to you if you don't watch the show, but it means quite a lot to the fan: that three-episode story arc was, in my opinion, the twist that really solidified the show's reputation. In that episode, Mulder and Scully (who have been split up) confront an ex-FBI mental patient who is holding people (including his psychiatrist) hostage in a travel agency. Duane Barry believes he has been abducted repeatedly by aliens; he also believes he can escape this by offering the aliens somebody else. Mulder is sent in to negotiate as his slimy new partner Krycek remains with the other agents to throw a wrench in the works. Mulder successfully talks Barry into a compromised position where Barry can be subdued; however, Barry escapes FBI custody and kidnaps Scully, with the aim of exchanging her for his freedom. The other two episodes in the arc deal with Scully's abduction and return, Krycek's deception, and Mulder's despair and loneliness as he tries to bring the powerful men behind Scully's disappearance to justice.

The reasoning behind this story line was writing out a very pregnant Gillian Anderson for a couple of episodes; thank heavens she got knocked up. I was hooked by the end of the episode. The aloof intimacy between the separated partners is magnificent; Mulder casually disregards and manipulates Krycek as he confides in Scully. Barry is played to perfection by Steve Railsback: paranoid, unhappy, sharp-witted, childishly sure of his bargain. He swings from pleading for protection to completely menacing in the space of a moment. Duchovny brings a surprising competence to Mulder's myopic focus, and Gillian Anderson says more with an eyebrow than most actors say with a monologue. Mulder is powerless to stop Scully's abduction or Krycek's defection; though he searches for Scully, none of his contacts accomplish anything, and his self-destructive grief causes him to throw himself into his work even more than before. When Scully is returned, without any answers or memory and with her health compromised, Mulder's powerlessness is even further emphasized, though his relief at having her back overshadows his quest.

Without this arc, I think the show would have faltered. Scully's skepticism or Mulder's fanatic passion for oddities would have driven the partners apart. However, Scully's abduction and subsequent health problems gave her an investiture in the campaign to reveal the shadowy government powers behind the alien abductions. Without a personal stake in Mulder's insane quest, I have no doubt the dynamic of the show would have become stale. Despite the crackle of chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson, Scully's early-season puppyish devotion to Mulder could only have lasted so long without becoming tiresome.

Really, even if every other episode had been awful (and there were some remarkable stinkers during the show's nine-year run), I would have loved The X-Files just for that arc. The longing of the separated partners, whether romantic or platonic, strikes a chord. It's two people against the world, fighting the good but secret fight. They're never going to get a reward for putting themselves in constant danger. Their quest is nearly as pure as the legendary quest for the Grail, but in this case, determination is going to get them a lot farther than purity. Over the course of the show, both agents commit a variety of illegal or questionable acts, but they do more good than bad. Their intentions are good, and they stay good, despite an astounding number of setbacks and attacks. The X-Files, for all its showcasing of twisted and strange individuals, ends up being a testament to the endurance of the human spirit. The world falls apart around Mulder and Scully and they still manage to rely on each other. Though the justice they achieve is only partial, they've made a difference in the world by the end. That's something we'd all like to be able to say.

Fortunately for me, most of the rest of the show is great too. There's the black and white episode, with the Cher-loving mutant just trying to find a friend (even if it's through genetic manipulation and what could probably be called rape). There's the one with the town full of vampires who just want to be good neighbors (my personal favorite). There are creepy ones about government mind control ("Wetwired", "Blood") and silly ones about baseball and Hollywood and local legends like the Jersey Devil. The awful special effects of the first couple of seasons are as charming, in retrospect, as the choppy stop-action alien critters in the original Star Wars trilogy (the original original), and they did get a lot better in later seasons. Even the cringe-worthy episodes usually have a good line or two, or some obscure actor who went on to be famous (Lucy Liu, for example).

There was the landscape of the show, too: from the forests of Florida to the chilly Arctic in the five seasons the show was filmed in Vancouver. The amazingly versatile biomes of British Columbia were put to excellent use. The first five seasons were chilling: Mulder and Scully were in dire danger as often as not, with all manner of supernatural (or not) murderers and forces stalking them. They stuck together through thick and thin, through cancer scares and Bureau censures and the pasts that came back to haunt them. The sixth and seventh seasons, when the show shifted to L.A., were undoubtedly more lighthearted: post-film, the dynamic focused a little more on Mulder and Scully's relationship and the inevitable but deliciously subtle and understated romance.

Funny how watching The X-Files still makes me feel safe and happy, given the eerie to terrifying spectrum of the episodes. It might be the comfort of seeing two people who trust and rely on each other absolutely even through their various spats; Mulder and Scully end up only having each other in all the world, having alienated their friends and witnessed the deaths of their family members. It might be the quirky, funny moments among all the serious ones, like Scully singing Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World" to an injured Mulder as they spend the night stranded in a forest and hunted by mutants. It might be Mulder's earnest ache to believe and Scully's dry skepticism, or the few, illuminating instances of normality in the world-gone-mad they inhabit. It might be the eternal quest for justice. It could be the (slightly ridiculous) writing or the delivery that turned odd lines into extraordinarily quotable dialogue. Or maybe I just enjoy the Mutant of the Week and Mark Snow's well-crafted score. Hard to say. Unlike Mulder and Scully, I don't always have the need to get down to the bones of things. Which is fortunate, really. There are a lot of nasty secrets and truths that might as well stay buried.

So that's my show, the first show I ever planned to watch every week, the gateway that got me into The West Wing, Sports Night, and the handful of other things I now watch, including Friday Night Lights and Pushing Daisies. Thanks, X-Files. Now when's the second movie coming out?

Saturday, September 29, 2007

I read Déja Dead by Kathy Reichs

So, working in a bookstore as I do, I get a lot more exposure to popular fiction than I did as an English/French major at a small liberal arts college. I've been shelving bestsellers the past few weeks, and I noticed the newest Reichs book, partly because it's got a nice shiny cover. The blurb says the series is the inspiration for the tv show Bones, which I know friends of mine adore. I caught the last ten minutes or so of last Tuesday's episode, and it was interesting enough. Being more inclined to books than television, I picked up the first in the series, just to see if it was something I should get into.

From what I could tell from my short exposure to the show, the books are drastically different. For one thing, in the books, the heroine is called "Tempe" instead of "Bones", when people use her nickname. The first one is set in Montreal, not Washington D.C. There's no Booth, no Zach, no Hodge or Angela (these are the things I pick up from listening to my friends). Temperance Brennan in the books is a lonely, somewhat angry woman with a lot more issues than Emily Deschanel's Bones, what with the alcoholism, the marriage on the rocks, the chauvinistic co-workers, and the almost complete lack of a social life. On the television show, she seemed more the mad scientist type: brilliant, but slightly naïve, in a sweet sort of way. Temperance Brennan of the book gets herself into a lot of dangerous situations in Déja Dead, but it seems like it's less because she's got a hankering for justice and more because she can't find much to live for. Passion, sure, but the self-destructive channeling of it gets Brennan stalked and almost killed in Déja Dead.

Given the choice between an empowered but self-endangering woman and a woman whose head is so deep in her work that she has to be saved from burning herself on hot coffee, I'm more likely to take Bones over Tempe. In both cases, Brennan tends to rely on the men around her to avert the consequences of her actions, but at least Booth isn't a jerk the way Claudel is; Bones seems to enjoy her life more. It's also interesting to see a female mad scientist: other women dedicated to their work retain a social sharpness verging on the brusque (Scully from The X-Files) comes to mind. Deschanel's vague loopiness is endearing, and I like Booth more than any of the men I've encountered in the books.

So saying this, of course, I ended up picking up one of the other books, which I'd taken out from the library just in case. I can only hope that Tempe doesn't decide to scramble off on any life-endangering trips down Prostitution Row in Fatal Voyage. Meanwhile, I might tune in on an occasional Tuesday to cleanse the palate with a more cheerful Temperance Brennan.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Football season

So last weekend, having lived most of my life in a university town, I went to my first college football game. Sure, I'd heard the games from far off: the sudden swell of cheering like the roar of the sea, the anxious horns as fans tried to escape yet another dismal loss. I'd been to junior high and high school games, both as part of the pep squad and part of the laity. This was nothing like any of those: sheer scale of magnitude transformed it from a game into something verging on worship.

The stadium holds 72 000 people and most of the seats were filled. I don't think I'd ever seen that many people together in the same place, and all of them focused on the movement (or not) of a ball that from my seat in the nosebleed section was barely visible. I don't consider myself a rabid fan of football in general, but the groupthink crowd mentality was overwhelming: I was on my feet for two hours shouting my throat out for the home team among all the Greek girls and boys in their finery and the regular joes in their astounding variety of university-themed t-shirts.

We lost. Of course we did. We mostly lose, these days: our coach was brilliant for two years and has been flagging since. At least being the hosting team, it's not such a schlep to get home, and there's still the satisfaction of being part of a mass of losers, while the out-of-place fans in the other team's colors rejoice. We all went home grumbling about penalties, about passing games, about the coach, about this and that, as if any of us could have turned the game around.

In the morning, it all seemed vaguely surreal. I think it's a trick of the lights: everything in the bowl of the stadium seems hyper-real, ultra-detailed, each replay shown in full color on the immense screen that distracted drivers for months before they finished the construction of the lower wall. The cameras that captured footage of the game were powerful enough to show us craters on the moon during halftime. The smell of fried food and diesel fumes in the air. Time got skewed by the gravity of the game. The day faded into sunset, but it was noon-bright until we left the stadium and crept back to our car, where the twelve-minute drive home took three quarters of an hour, the cars bumper to bumper along the narrow little streets. How could anything else be as true as the muscled young men on the gridiron with the eyes and thoughts of half the state's population on them, and the voices of the seventy-two thousand of us there raised in chorus? But then, it was nothing like my regular life, so how could the game have been anything but a vivid dream?

Hard to say. Either way, I'd do it again.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

the itch to be elsewhere

Funny how the smallest things can trigger nostalgia. I'm wearing a sweater I'd only ever worn in France, and the sky is grey as it was most of my time in Cambrai, and if only I could walk through the grande place, past the bakery and the perfume store, smelling the baking and the sweet oils and the damp cobblestones, then life would be perfect. That was always the best part of my walk home, and it didn't matter about the rain and the dog droppings and the weariness of twelve hours in school. Instead I'm in Fayetteville, which has its own charms, but this is the longest I've been home in five years and it's making me twitchy. Out of the past 26 months, I was out of the country for twelve. A year out of the last two years. That's an odd thought.

Missing India is easy: Rani is there, soaking up all the sunshine I'm missing, eating dosai and chutney. Jaya has a new host daughter, no doubt, and I'm not sure if she got my letter at all. All I can do is watch Indian movies and eat the occasional dish of dal. There's no one to practice my fragments of Tamil and Hindi on.

Missing France is even easier because it's so fresh, and so much more similar. I'm not likely to turn a corner and find a Krishna shrine or a water buffalo here, but I might find a little narrow street, or a section of the highway that reminds me of the fields of the Cambrésis, or smell the rain on the air and slip back to Cambrai in my head. I almost miss waking up to the sound of cars on cobblestones clattering down the narrow alley between my window and the row houses across the way.

I do appreciate America. I love that I can get vegetarian food fairly easily. I love the broad open highways. I enjoy the fact that at least America tries to subvert its racism, instead of the open disdain the white French have for the children of the Maghrebain immigrants, and that the fairer North Indians have for the darker South Indians.

But I miss waking up somewhere else. I miss the sense of history of Europe. I missi sitting in Starbucks in Odéon, looking at the prow of the building where the streets come together at an odd angle. I miss the solemn stone corridors of the temple in Madurai, and the tiny aarti lamps in all that gloom, and the smell of camphor. I miss the sun on the rocks in Italy, the lazy self-importance, the freshness of the food.

I suppose the price of travel is knowing what you're missing, and the dissatisfaction that comes with that.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

can't stop writing.

It's become a force of habit to write a weekly email, so even though it's late and I've not really got internet, I'm sitting here writing. There would be a nice view over the valley if I hadn't drawn the curtains to keep out the bugs - we're in a rather posh hotel in Cortano because there weren't any openings anywhere, though tomorrow we move to a convent where our accomodations will be a bit more austere and a bit more reasonably priced. It's eleven and we've just come back from an excellent dinner and a ramble around town, up hill and down dale, cones of gelato melting about as fast as we could eat them.


It's been a long week with lots of traveling. First there was the sleeper train from Paris to Rome, which was nice. I hadn't been on a sleeper train since India, and I have to say, as a whole, I preferred them, though this train was certainly generally more comfortable. Less character, though, and no calls of "chai! Chai chaiyya chai!" or "teeeeeeea. Kaaaaaaappi. Kappi, tea" and no channa or sweet curd to buy. No families pulling feasts out of stacked metal containers. No barred windows to prop open, just lots of air conditioning that made my throat sore. But a pleasant train nonetheless, and we met some friendly people. Went to sleep in France, woke up briefly when the train stopped in Switzerland (but it was dark, nothing to see here), and woke up again to sunshine and square houses with red-tiled roofs and hills that were definitely nothing to do with Northern France.


I'm plugged into the tiny iPod, soaking up some music and just relaxing. Our posh room has a nice tub and I had a bath earlier and scrubbed away the lingering dirt of Rome and Sorrento and Capri and Pompeii. Sorrento was the first place we stopped: we caught a train from Rome to Napoli and then from Napoli to Sorrento, to stay at a little place in Sant Agnello, next to Sorrento. It's a hotel/hostel/cooking school called Mami Camilla's, and it was delightful. First, the food was great, and cheap. Because you can go and sign up for a week long cooking course, the lunches and dinners are student-cooked (with help from the excellent chefs), and so you can get a four-course meal in great company for fifteen Euro. The people that came and went were all so interesting: we met some Swedes, a bunch of English people, some Aussies, and of course a few fellow Americans, including two young tv-industry types on their honeymoon who told us a bit about what it's like to work at NBC or write for Prison Break. Second, the dorms were clean and homey, recently decorated and really well done. Not much street noise at night, either, and our roommates weren't too bad. Altogether a comfortable and highly-recommendable place.


We used Mami Camilla's as a base for the three days we were there. The first day was just getting there and settling in: they had hammock chairs that I made good use of, and Dad sampled the local wines, and everyone sat about and chatted and taunted the dogs (one enormous mastiff named Spike who had too much tongue for his muzzle and was gentle as anything, and then a fiesty Chihuahua called Lola). Sorrento's a sweet little place, all sunshine and citrus trees, and Mami Camilla's has its own small groves of lemon and orange trees, which meant there was always fresh-squeezed orange juice at breakfast. The second day we were going to head out to Capri, but it was a bit cloudy, so we ended up going to Pompeii instead, where a guide offered his services for "less than a thousand Euros. Ninety-five!", so we eschewed his help and just rambled around the ruins ourselves with the maps and explanatory pamphlets. It was an interesting place to see, even without the history laid out for us. The ruins are really extensive, and there's always the mountain glowering. We tramped about for hours and I took about two hundred photographs of doorways and archways and alleyways and shrines and statues and more archways and windows. I'm noticing some trends in my photography, I have to say. Very grateful for Saurabh's gift of the digital camera, though - otherwise I'd go through a billion rolls of film and have not much to show for it. These I can download and tidy up and upload so that you can all see them that much faster (in fact, they've been up for a few days already at my Picasa album along with the photos of my students and Cambrai).


The second day was clear and lovely, so we caught the hydrofoil out to Capri with a bunch of French students (mostly because we were too late for the ferry, but it was a great ride, very fast through the perfect navy blue water with its perfectly white crests of foam). I stood on the back of the boat and put my sunscreen on and licked the salt off my lips, listening to the students chattering.

"Where are you from?" I asked one of them (in French, of course).

"France!" she said.

"Yes, I know," I said, "but where?"

"Northern France."

"Where?" I asked, all a-tingle.

"Sin-le-Noble. Do you know it?"

"Yes!" And I do - it's one of the stops on the way to Douai, not so many towns over. Anna and I always joked that we really liked the name, even though Sin has nothing to do with sin, and is really pronounced more like "San", and there aren't so many nobles around. So that was nice, to meet some people from the area where I am. Was. Whichever.


We took a boat tour around Capri, Capri with its cliffs and its rocks and its greeny plants. The cliffs are so high that they catch or make clouds, even on a clear day: all around was sunshine and then the one scud of fog over the cliffs. We paid for the long tour all around the island because it was only three Euro more than the tour that only went to the Blue Grotto, where you have to pay again to get in, and it was definitely worth it. Two hours of tooling around in the beautiful water, listening to the boatman talk in English and Italian about whatever it is we happened to be seeing, avoiding the seagulls, taking a thousand photographs of rock formations and boats and lighthouses and villas and statues. We got around to the grotto and waited about half an hour to clamber out of our boats into tiny rowboats, pay nine Euro each, and squeeze through the passageway into the grotto, which really is lovely. The sunlight reflects off the water and off the rocks on the bottom and filters into the cave from underneath and just lights the place up with this perfect blue glow. Very calm, floating in the little boats with the boatmen singing that song about the moon over Capri (except ours was rather sullen, and the only song he sang was "and now you give me a tip for my good work").


After that, we took the funicular up from the beach to the town of Capri and had lunch with a couple from Chicago whom we met on the boat (also on their honeymoon - 'tis perhaps the season). Capri is posh too, mostly for the rich and famous despite its small size and accessibility, but fortunately it was the off season, and the narrow roads weren't choked with people, though it was rough when the students from various countries and schools would all try to cram through the same alleyway. Then it was gelato in the square and people-watching, since we didn't have enough cash for the chair ride to the top of the cliffs and we'd had a lot of sun anyway, and then we sat on the beach for a bit and then caught the hydrofoil back to Sorrento, and took a bus back to Sant Agnello so as to avoid the long hike up the hill from the marina. I met some French people and talked Italian buses with them, and then met some English and Australian people and talked cricket.


Tourists are interesting. The more I see them, the less I like them, generally, even though I am one. Self-hating, sure, but at least I'm not one of those tourists with an agenda. "I must see this, I must do that!" Maybe I'm no better than any of the others, but I'm content to wander. I don't expect a place to be my end-all, to answer all my questions. I'm not looking for ultimate peace, or for the perfect view of anything. Capri is beautiful. It didn't change my life. Maybe a place will, but that's not what I'm looking for when I go there. I come to the world and I let the world come to me. A cappuccino in Italy is good. A cappuccino in America is good, maybe not quite as good, but you can get a lot of different things in the U.S., and I'm sure Italy would quail at the thought of a gingerbread latte. Things are different everywhere and I refuse to rank them. Dad tonight was complaining about how there's no good food in Fayetteville, as compared to Cortano or Italy in general, and that's just not true. No place is going to solve all your problems and save you forever. Not even Paris, city of lovers.


Paris, city of keys. Roma, city of clocks, where I found a watchface in the road. I had Indian food in Rome too: there was a little place near the Colosseum that had a nice menu, so we went back after circumnavigating the Colosseum and the nearby ruins. "I wish they had South Indian food," I said, and then looked closely at the other menu, and it turned out that on Saturdays and Sundays at lunch, they did! So I introduced Dad to the joys of dosai and idli, sambar and chutney, vadai and lassi. Dad used his knife and fork and I used my fingers (thinking of Jaya beaming and Saurabh wincing) and basking in the sounds of Hindi and Italian from where the boss lady was talking to her son about menu formatting. Then I ended up talking India and Bollywood for at least half an hour with the boss lady, and that was nice. Wherever you go, there you are. She said that family in Italy, at least, is like India, though the Indian communities are better in London and the U.S., and we agreed that Bombay is a strange place with odd customs (people are getting into cohabitation and everything there) and she offered us pan parag, which Dad had to pretend he wasn't running to the bathroom to spit out.


I liked Rome. Rome was after Sorrento and Capri. The most surprising thing about Rome is that it's so small - there are some buses and a rather rudimentary metro with only two lines, but it's very walkable. We walked to Republicca and we were almost at Trajan's Column, and from the Column and the Wedding Cake, the Colosseum is visible. If there weren't so many buildings in the way, you'd be able to see the Trevi fountain as well. But there are plenty of little alleyways full of gelato, including San Crispino's, the best I've had so far (bergamot sorbetto and then a ginger-cinnamon ice cream: no wonder Let's Go calls it the best gelato in Rome). Lots of trinkets, lots of things to see and do in Rome, and it feels so friendly. There was sunshine and more sunshine, and some very nice restaurants (I forced Dad to try Ethiopian food and he liked it).


I've been reading a lot as well, with all these trains and long waits and early nights in hotel rooms because we don't always want to be out after dark when we don't know a place well. Julia sent me the first two books of the His Dark Materials trilogy, which meant I had to buy the third one, and I picked up Wicked as well. Lots of stuff about good and evil: might as well go on that theme. When in Rome, as they say, and if any place is going to lecture about sin, it might as well be there, all cozied up to the Vatican. We tried to go to the Vatican museum but didn't realize it was one of the days when it closed exceptionally early, so all we got from that was a nice ride on the metro.


Been missing my girls and the folk from Cambrai, so I'll probably skip home for a couple of days (and I can do my laundry!) to curl up on the couch and drink hot chocolate, even though it's getting too hot for hot chocolate and cuddling. I'll relate to them my few words of Italian and they'll correct me, since they were able to take Italian classes at Fenelon (pity Jacquard was too little to teach Italian, and that I wasn't around for half the classes at Fenelon and therefore couldn't take it, otherwise I'd be a bit more useful here). But I'm glad I came to Cortona - it's a little walled city perched up on a hill, all small windy streets and cobbled slopes, and as I've said, the views are very nice. It's quite peaceful here, since not many cars are allowed in the city, and the food's been wonderful. We ate twice at the same restaurant. I had two different kinds of gnocchi (and although one of them looked suspiciously like scallops, it's been nice to be in Italy where there are more things I can actually eat). Tomorrow we'll walk up the Citadel and I'll take another too many photos and eat a lot of gelato, and then Tuesday hopefully I'll catch a train to Paris and soak up a bit of the North before I head back south to meet Dad in Provence before coming back to Cambrai for the last time to finish up the packing. I'm anxious about the results of the French election, and about leaving, because it's finally sinking in that I have to leave my girls and Matthias, that Steffen and Katie and Anna have already left, that the little white house will be empty, that I won't have text messages to look forward to.

Oh, France.

Home now for a couple of days, soaking in my girls and the lovely spring air. Oh, Cambrai. I wish we had time to walk out to the hotel where Max works one more time, to take tea in the dining room that makes us want to take a turn about the room Eliza-Bennett style. Hotels built in castles, courts built on top of castles, surprises around every corner. I will miss the place, with the three spires.

Anyway, I'm off before I get maudlin. We had train adventures last night and I'm tired - remind me for the next email.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

The last update from Cambrai

Hallo, all.

As Dad and I are leaving on a train at 1.15, this is probably the last update from Cambrai. It's been a good seven months. A fantastic seven months, really, no major tragedies or disappointments, and lots and lots of joys to balance out any tedium.

The colza is in bloom (so Amélie tells me), and the fields that aren't green or dun or cream are preternaturally yellow, so bright that it almost hurts to look at them. It hurts to look at them anyway, given that I won't be seeing them for much longer. No more bus rides. No more waiting in the growing light and watching the buses uncurl like caterpillars. "J'aime me laisser conduire sur les chemins du cambrésis", they say on the sides: I love to let myself be driven along the roads of the Cambrésis. And it's true. But not any longer. I never did get off the bus on a random afternoon to play with the two dancing chocolate labs behind somebody's gate. Never got a photo of the chicken statue. Never ended up going to the lace museum after all.

But I did take my two favorite students to a café for their last class, and we had a very nice conversation, and then when I was going to pay, Virgil insisted on paying, like a gentleman. He'll do well in the U.S., and Astrid will do well wherever she goes. My wistful girl, hoping for so many good things. I gave her my Jane Austen seven-novels-in-one, because that was the best I could do to reassure her. And the teachers threw me a lovely little party on Thursday afternoon, soda and presents and the cookies I'd made and all the naughtiest kids, mostly on their best behavior. I nearly cried. They got me a book about the architecture and geography of the North, a little journal, and a comic about teaching and teachers, and I looked at everyone and thought how dull my weeks at home will seem at first, without these people to occupy me. I'll miss riding home with Christine or Amélie, and chatting with Virginie and Romain and Nathalie and Adrien and Marie Claude and Marie André and Stéphane and Stéphan and all the others.

The American-hating philosophy teacher never did say a word to me, though.

Sometimes I think I'll be lost without the spire of St. Géry to pull me home. It's visible from so far out of town, rising over the roofs, over the rolling fields. It's my landmark. It's home. Dad and I walked out along the canal today and ended up in a part of Cambrai I'd never been in, but I found St. Géry and then it was easy to get back. It's so beautiful, this town, and even though I've lived here for a while, it still startles me sometimes. There are big fancy beautiful things like the cathedral and the belfry and the chateau, and then there are the gardens with their elaborate planning. And simple things, even, like walking through the place with a cone full of sorbet, pear and blackcurrant. There was a wedding going on on the steps of the town hall, and everyone else was out at the tables of the cafés, stretching their legs into the sunshine and calling out to friends who walked past. There are a lot of delights in a small town. We went to the posh bakery for one last round of pastries and carefully avoided making coffee with Cata's filter that seems to be made from a sock.

Here are some photos of Cambrai, and the colza, and my students. I may continue to update this blog later, when the reverse culture shock hits, and I feel it's probably going to hit really hard. How will I go to the grocery store in English? What a strange thought. How will I find anything? How will I order in restaurants? When we were in England for a few days, I kept wanting to order in French.

No more lemon yellow kitchen. No more blue room (though my room at home is just as blue). No more cranky stove that wants to kill us and crazy washer that takes two and a half hours to do a load if you don't put it on the fast cycle. No more leaving clothes to dry on the rack. No more bags and bags of stale baguettes so that we have to invent recipes to use them all up. And it will be all right, but it's hard to know that now, even though I know it. On the plus side, no more French bureaucracy.

I've made a lot of friends here and had a wonderful time. I'm sure that if I could stay longer, it would only get better. But my students and a lot of the teachers have my email address.

I'll be glad to have a dryer again, and Mexican food and vegetarian food, and I'll be glad to see family and friends and the dog, but life in France is easy and sweet and I will miss it a lot. And for all the things I didn't do, there were plenty of things I did do. I went to Belgium, Sweden, and England (and will have gone to Italy). I picked up a bit of German and some Spanish. I learned how to cross the street (pretend you don't care if the cars hit you) and how to give guys in bars the brush off (grab someone else). I can navigate the Paris metro and the aboveground Paris, or really any Metro you throw at me.

And who can be sad when there is Italy, and sunshine? Not me. Or at least, I'll try.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Easter in Cambrai

Hello, all!

We've been doing Eastery things all day: an egg hunt for chocolate eggs, scrambled eggs from the eggs that Cata and I blew the insides out of so that we could dye them with the dye kit that Anna acquired, lots and lots of chocolate in general. I'm in the process of making a fruit salad and a big bowl of stuffing for the Easter dinner tonight, but the others have gone to MacDonald's for the second time today, so I have a free moment to write. We've got a rental car for the weekend and we're trying to make the most of it: last night we went late-night bowling in Douai, and tomorrow we're going to the Asterix Park for Easter Monday (I will avoid the roller coasters). But there's a sure sign Cambrai is moving up in the world. Not only have we got a MacDonald's (Macdo for the French), we recently acquired a Domino's. The delivery people zip around on their scooters and introduce the French to the height of American pizza, or something. Personally, I yearn now and again for Eureka, or for the fried tofu at Chuong Garden, or for any Mexican food at all, but I don't care about having a Domino's around, except as a status symbol. Take that, Paris! Maybe we'll get a Starbucks too! Except for the fact that we won't, and that's all right: everyone who lives here is resigned to the diminished importance of Cambrai, once the jewel of the Spanish Netherlands.

I've been uploading more photos and forgetting to tell you all about them, so there are some here of my visit to Paris on Tuesday, and here you can see more of England and Sweden.

I can't believe it's the last week. I can't believe my last week is a short week: no one works Easter Monday, and so I've only got Thursday and Friday. I'm going to bake cookies for my kids on Wednesday night, and maybe make a chocolate pie for the teachers' lounge. All the profs are stressed, because they've had conferences all last week that lasted until nine every night. Virginie just remembered some things she wanted me to do earlier and now there's not really time. Romain remembered that next week is my last week and that was both nice (that he knows when I'm going, and he knew when my birthday was) and sad, because it reminded me that I'm leaving so soon. I'll miss him, the beau gosse of the teacher's room, because he's a sweetheart, and he's really funny. And I'll miss the English teachers, of course: Virginie, to whom I belong, and Marie-Claude, who thought I should flirt with Gautier because it was Valentine's Day, and Veronique, who was sweet but not always communicative, and Severine, whom I almost never saw because she was off on maternity leave. The older man whose name I don't actually know who gives me mixtapes and talks to me about astronomy and local history. Adrien, who I talked to all day on Thursdays. Nathalie and Marie-the-sports-teacher, with whom I talked India and France. Marie-Celine, who was always frustrated that the naughty boys remembered my name and not hers, though I only came to class once.

It should be a fun last week though. I get to cancel one of my classes with my least favorite group of seconde to have a party with Marie-Claude's naughty boys, who are going to bring things to eat. It's the last round of football at Fenelon (for us) and Cata's making empanadas for everyone. I really ought to go to the lace museum in Caudry. At least I've eaten a croissant and bought a shirt with some French on it. My goals for France are accomplished.

Life will go on while I'm not in Cambrai. Next year the premiere and the seconde will have another assistant, probably, and maybe they'll behave better or maybe they'll behave worse with him or her. I'm kind of possessively pleased that Virgil and Astrid won't have any other assistant: they'll graduate and move on and do other things. So it goes.

Oh man, and now I have to start packing. How to clear up the detritus of half a year in another country? We've made the little white house our home. I've got papers and clothes and all sorts of things to range away or throw away.

Anyway, happy Easter to everyone!

Sunday, April 1, 2007

la rather belle vie

It's another sunny Sunday: the weather's decided that it's spring again and so we've got the windows open. Mind, it might be France's idea of an April Fool's joke (which here is les Poissons d'avril - the fish of April). But the weather report says it will be lovely (or at least not-rainy) the rest of the week, which is excellent, as I'm off to Paris on Tuesday to visit a friend. Warm warm warm weather coming up, I hope.

Not a lot of things happened this week. We're all getting stressed and mopey about the end of school in two weeks. I've got to start sorting out my school paperwork, for one thing, and writing a letter to next year's assistant. Fortunately, the Moroccan prof said that I could stay in France and just move in with him, but I imagine his wife would be a bit cranky about that. Still, it's nice to know I'll be missed. The students had their best startled faces when I told them I was leaving forever after vacation. A lot of them I'll miss. Astrid and Virgil, my advanced students, the only ones who actually come to class (from that group) and the only ones I've had all year. Astrid and I talk about everything: her grades, how hard she works in school, how hard her brother didn't work, her life outside of school. Virgil is coming to the U.S. next year, repeating a year of high school before he applies to an American university, and he wants to badly to play or coach basketball. The passion in both of them is incredible. Then there's David, who always wanted me to come and play football (and I wish I could have), Teddy, who I always think is little and quick but who's taller than I am (and who is bright and sassy without being disruptive), and Nico, who is quiet but very thoughtful. François once came to class even though he's not in my classes anymore. The girls from seconde trois have started behaving, mostly, and it's only Vianney who needs some discipline.

I actually had the girls from seconde deux volunteering new topics for the opinion cards the other day. "I want to talk about the bureau de surveillants!" said one of them, so I let her, and she talked about how handsome Gautier is (true enough) and how funny Rudy is (I couldn't say) and it was nice to see the students' relationship to the professionals that are there to help them out. We also spent a lot of time this week talking about how cute Romain the Spanish teacher is. And it's true, he's a wonderful guy, but it's also really funny to see the dreamy looks on all their faces when they say, "I love zee Spanish! M. Delagrange ees beautiful!" And then they make up stories about how I must be dating either him or Matthias. Oh, tiny ones, thank you for assigning considerably more excitement to my life than actually exists.

It's coming up on the presidential election here and what I'm surprised about is the lack of advertising, in comparison to the U.S. elections. I've seen a few posters: mostly on one billboard on my way to school that was covered with Royale, then Sarkozy, and now Bayrou posters. None of those homegrown ads on tv, and none of the polished ones either (though we've mostly had the tv off). I hear the teachers talking about the candidates, but overall, there's a lot less frenzy. I asked Max if he was going to vote and he looked at me like I was a little bit stupid. "It's my duty," he said. "Everybody votes." It's funny to hear so little when I know it's actually a huge deal. France could have a woman president, or it could have a crazy racist president. Never underestimate the power of fear: unemployment is already a huge problem in France and a lot of people think that immigrants make it worse, so an anti-immigrant, pro-white-French stance (nos ancetres les Gaulois style) is very welcome to a lot of people. I was talking to my two boys from seconde quatre about immigration, because they're studying Ellis Island and such. I had them write a little narrative imagining they were immigrants: where they'd be from, where they'd go to, whether they'd try to keep their old traditions or really integrate. They decided to be Chinese people immigrating to the U.S. to get better jobs, but they wanted to live in a Chinese community, speak Chinese at home, and use chopsticks to eat. I pointed out that this was basically living out their old lives in a new place, and they nodded.

"So what is it to be French?" I asked. They conferred for a moment.
"To be married to a French person."
"So if I got married to a French person, I'd be French?"
They gave me the shifty eyes. "To speak French? To live in France?"
"I speak French and I've lived in France for six months. Am I French?"
More shifty eyes.
"What makes the French spirit different from the American spirit? Is there a difference?"
The bell rang while they were still thinking, but they were thinking. And that was wonderful. I gave them a little bit of my own opinion: France knows where its boundaries are. France lives inside its language and its hexagon and its fine old traditions. America always wants to discover something new, to go beyond. They nodded a little and said goodbye and left, but I kept thinking. There are so many different people in America that the identity of an American is necessarily fragmented. We eat so many different foods, we learn about so many different holidays and traditions, we're taught that diversity is the best and strongest way from the beginning. And it doesn't stop the prejudices, but maybe it helps. It doesn't mean that we get French or (much) Spanish music on the popular radio stations, but you can find bhangra in New York clubs, and African music, and all sorts. I can hear people speaking other languages on subways and street corners without feeling the need to turn and stare at the weirdos who actually know another language besides English (we've gotten stared at a lot lately for speaking English or German or Spanish). And I'm not ashamed to be an American. There are plenty of good things about America, along with the plenty of bad politics that gets us reviled by the rest of the world. Sometimes I'm ashamed of other Americans, when they forget there's more to the world, but then again America is so big and contains so much that it's almost understandable that people get wrapped up in it and neglect to notice the other countries. America is a microcosm of the world in the big cities, and the influence of the hundred different cultures filters even into the smaller towns.

In conclusion, I'm going to miss my students a lot, and perhaps reading American Gods in French all week has gotten me thinking a bit too much.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Paris in the springtime

We have just changed the clocks here in France, which suddenly meant that we all stayed up way too late last night, but people kept coming by for no apparent reason. And then they'd learn that it was my birthday and wish me happy birthday and ask all kinds of questions. But it was a good day despite the fact that we were all sick and/or lethargic. I made garlic mashed potatoes and fake meatballs for dinner and then later baked a cake from a plain mix to which we added cinnamon, nutmeg, and the maple syrup Aunt Mim sent. Tasty! We watched my birthday movie and then spent the rest of the evening listening to Disney music for reasons which are inexplicable.

Today is Sunday and it's after one, which means there's nowhere to go and nothing to do, but that's all right. We've all got books and more movies and things to eat and look at. Not nearly as exciting as Friday, when we took about a hundred students to Paris to go to a science museum (Palais de la Découverte) and the theatre. And of course, in my group were the only two students who have ever really given me a lot of trouble, but they actually behaved surprisingly well. They tried to escape the boring weather lecture, but everyone was trying to escape, and the girl was quite nice to me. It was the older boys who were worse behaved, and that was at the theatre. I can understand not really wanting to watch the play - it was baroque, and a bit odd - but be civilized, children. It was nice for me to get to hang out with the other teachers, as well: I know them all by sight, but I don't always know their names (because everyone knows me, so they forget to introduce themselves). We had a tasty dinner. Overall, it was still an excellent trip. We drove around the Arc de Triomphe, close enough to see the flame that marks the tomb of the unknown soldier, and we drove past the Eiffel Tower, close enough to see it from top to bottom (and the view from the theatre when it was lit up in the evening was gorgeous). Paris certainly is magical.

It's sad to think of how little time we've got left. Bit of stress in the maison blanche, but we try to work around it and not break into shouting or tears too often (only once so far, fortunately). I ought to start packing and tidying up, I suppose, or at least straightening up the things I'm going to leave for next year's assistant and writing my letter. Strange to think what I'll do without the beautiful tower of St. Gery to draw me home.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

cloudy sunny cloudy sunny

In Cambrai the weather is cloudy but clearing, sort of. It was raining, and now we get drifts of white clouds and drifts of grey clouds and glimpses of bright blue sky. Now it's clouded over again, only to go sunny half an hour later. I'm sitting in the living room writing this: the window to the left and the one in front of me show slices of blue sky and bright sunshine, and the window to the right is thick cloud. Michelle's taking her visiting friends around for the tour of Cambrai and canal in a bit, but I think I'll stay in; I have some artsy and writing projects to finish. Steffen's sister and her boyfriend are here too. It's a big weekend for visitors! St. Patrick's Day, you know, which meant that all the pubs in town were serving Guinness and whiskey, and that everything was packed when we went out dancing and we couldn't even get up without losing our seats, so we didn't end up dancing at all, but at least I got a free Guinness glass (a tiny one). And then we came home and ate chocolate pie.

Today we have big plans to make spinach and goat cheese lasagna, since Cata's not back from Spain yet, so we can still cook with goat cheese without hearing a number of complaints. Though we might get some anyway - she didn't tell us what time she'd get home, although she got cranky with me for not saying what time I'd be home from England when I went. Ah, the joys of cohabitation. It is good generally, though: our tiny house that occupies three has so many unofficial inhabitants. Yesterday we even got Steffen to vacuum for us. Actually, he volunteered while I was sweeping in preparation to mop (and believe that the kitchen floor looks so much better than it did yesterday, given that at points I was on hands and knees with a sponge). So that was pleasant, having our half-housemate actually do some tidying up when generally we can barely coax him into doing the dishes. But he still can't cook for anything.

It was a good week at school. My classes that don't generally behave behaved pretty well, though I'm not sure they actually understood what the lesson was trying to convey. They're learning about the American west and the frontier and it's rather impossible to explain to French children what the frontier meant to the pioneers, and what it still means to the American spirit. The French have pretty much always known where their boundaries were since the time of nos ancetres les Gaulois. They've been conquered a lot more than they've been doing the conquering. I tried to explain how much hope the pioneers and the immigrants had for the wide, wild lands of the West, but the landscape is different, both physically and emotionally, from the soft rolling French countryside. So eventually we just played with the opinion cards. With the older classes, I had my favorite student show up with one of my kids from last semester whom I technically don't have anymore, but it's always nice to know that they like me enough to come to class even when they don't have to.

Next Friday I'm going to Paris with a significant number of the kids. We're going to the theatre. I'm not sure what we're seeing - some Russian or German play in French, I think - but it should be fun, and it's a nice little birthday present for me, since we won't be back until after midnight, and then it will be the 24th and I'll be 22. I've told Michelle I expect to see a frosted cake and a pile of presents on the table. And I get to go to Paris for my birthday like I wanted without having to pay for it! Nice! Although what I really wanted to do was pick up Fragile Things and take it to Neil Gaiman's book signing. I miss books in English. The French books I've found are kind of hit or miss. I read Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson in French and it was excellent, but the Discworld books are rather awful. I suppose I could get actual French books by actual French authors, but why on earth would I want to do that? They're probably all depressing. (I'm kidding, but only half.)

I've done the dishes, and I can't do any laundry until Steffen's is done, so I suppose I'll go back to futilely trying to copy my music off my iPod onto the computer. Oh, Windows Vista, you're certainly pretty, but you give me problems. Or maybe I'll attempt to perfect my Scouse accent before the Liverpudlians get back, so they can be amused.

Have an excellent Sunday!

Sunday, March 11, 2007

springtime in Cambrai

When I left for Sweden, I stopped at Odéon on the 4 Metro Line for a lot of coffee. Paris in the early morning light was curled into itself like a snail shell found in a garden, each arrondissement pearly under the weak sun of the end of winter. Paris, city of love, city of lovers. I have not found love in Paris. For me, it is a city of bridges and of keys. I do find keys in Paris: a tiny anonymous key to one of ten thousand interchangeable locks on diaries with pasteboard covers. Someone's house key, which I left on the curb where I found it, though I took the small one. There are a million others just like it.

When I left for Sweden, Paris was shading towards spring and Stockholm was still locked into winter, snowy and slushy and chilly. Not as cold as Iowa, certainly. Stockholm lacked some of the bone-chilling cold of Iowa, certainly: it never really got below freezing. It was like home, really, about as cold as Arkansas, with considerably more snow. And it was pleasant. Fewer blond people than one would expect, but cobblestones and twisty streets like France. And to me, the Swedish subtitles looked a bit like German, at least enough that I could recognize some words. But it was a wintery place, and we ate wintery food, like the goat cheese with walnuts and honey and lingon jam that I had in the vegetarian restaurant, and the roasted veggies Angie made.

When we landed at Beauvais, outside of Paris, it was spring. The fields were greener under the brighter sun, and the sides of the road were touched with color: white from the snowdrops and the shrubs and trees like popcorn and the daisies buttoning down the grass, pink from some other sort of blossoming tree, and yellow from dandelions and daffodils and the forsythia. The light has gone from winter silver to spring white gold, and outside the maison blanche, there are violets. We've started taking long walks by the canal on the more and more frequent sunny days, just because we want to bask in the sunshine (and hey, Mom, I'm wearing my sunscreen that smells like India and everything). Cata has a photo of me standing under one of the trees that's just exploding into blossom, and none of us can stop smiling. Even though it's still a bit chilly, we have the windows open to let in the fresh air, and it's warm enough to go out without a coat.

There's an organic market today across town, but we're not going, because it sounds more fun to sit on the Grand Place and eat ice cream. If that isn't a spring and summer food, it's hard to say what is. We keep buying fruit for the house as well, a sure sign that winter's slipping away. I may make a fruit salad later: we've got a can of lychees and a can of mangos and a couple of yellow plums and nectarines that need using and I've got my trusty shaker full of ginger. Plus, I've started drinking coffee (with cardamom and cream, generally) instead of tea. Change of season.

Work starts again on Monday and I'll be glad enough to go back. I miss my students, and I like having a little more structure to my day than "Wake up, stumble downstairs, eat some yogurt, and argue peaceably about what we're going to do for the rest of the day, which ends up being sit around with our various computers". Although on Wednesday, we did go to Valenciennes to teach Cata how to bowl, and to play pool and air hockey and dance on the Dance Dance Revolution machine and wow some schoolchildren with our impressive skills. I've lost three fingernails this week: right thumb and ring finger to the bowling ball, and then right index at random. I also cut partway through my left index fingernail while I was slicing up (vicious! Lethal!) stale bread to make a vegetarian loaf. Been a bad week for my hands.

After this, only a few weeks of school left! Tragic. But for now I'll just try to enjoy the moment. Some of the old German assistants from a few years ago are visiting, and they've shown us some of their old favorite places around town, which are our new favorite places. So we're off to bask in the sunshine and chatter away in our patois, and it'll be lovely.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

not France but Sweden!

Hello, all!

This is my last day in Stockholm with Angie! It's been a great vacation. Extremely relaxing. We've just been wandering around the city, eating vegetarian food, talking about our favorite tv shows, and comparing the various countries we've visited. Last night we went out to a sports bar to watch some song competition having to do with Eurovision and free slots left. There was a lot of cheering and a lot of hissing going on. The place was packed! And then we did karaoke. I have learned some important Swedish phrases from watching this and some random television, such as "jag måste kyssa dig" (I must kiss you) and the words for "naked", "wonderful", and "for king and country". So that will serve me well. But I can also say "I don't speak Swedish!" and "Do you speak English?" so that's all right.

Today I think we're going to visit some gardeny place and I'll teach Angie how to use the newly augmented contents of her spice collection. The weather hasn't really been the best for sightseeing - rather slushy and cloudy - but it's been pretty mild. The girls were afraid I would freeze, but it's so much warmer than Iowa was. Colder than Cambrai, but often enough above freezing, so I am toasty as a little piece of toast in my coat and scarf. No problems. But their concern was cute. It's so nice to actually find vegetarian food in Sweden. In the restaurants, in the grocery stores, wherever you go, there's always some vegetarian option, and it isn't a salad with the meat hastily taken off. Plus, there's lingon jam everywhere, and that's almost as tasty as cranberry sauce. Mmmmm. I approve of Sweden, yes, I do. It is clean and fairly friendly and easy to navigate. Expensive, though. I keep trying to divide kronor by rupees instead of Euro, and that's bad news for my bank account. But! In general everything is lovely.

It's been strange to come to a place where it's dark at six again. In Cambrai it's been so light that I don't wake up to church bells anymore: starting at 3.30 or so, I can wake up to the chirrup of birds in the trees and on the theatre, and some of the trees are budding and blooming. Hopefully the frost won't kill the blossoms. But here in Stockholm, it's still brown and bare, except for the snow and slush. This is the farthest north I've ever been! How exciting.

I had some more things to relate, but they've slipped my mind for now. The rest of vacation looks to be incredibly relaxing. The girls and I have been cleaning the house and cooking a lot. There's fruit in the maison blanche again, which is good, and we've all been paid, which is excellent. I have some writing to do when I get home. It's so strange to think that after break, there are only five more weeks of school and then it's over. I can't believe it's March already. At least I've got birthday plans to distract me. Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors, is having a book signing in Paris on the 24th, so I think I'll play the birthday card until someone comes with me. It'll be great.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

and it isn't even spring

It's winter break, but it feels like it ought to be spring break. All these vacations have spoiled me; after only eight weeks of work, I was pining for a respite. Been a bit sniffly since we got back from England; apparently I picked up a proper cold. But it's all good. It's vacation, we're getting paid in the next few days, and I'm going to Sweden on Wednesday for five days. Hooray! I'll visit my friend Angie in Stockholm and eat a lot of lingonberry jam and get a new stamp in my passport (although I never got one on reentering France, so for all the governments know, I could still be in England). At least I have my carte de séjour now, so I officially live in France. They don't notify you that you can come and pick it up, but Max was going to Lille in the car, so Cata and I thought I'd try. We took our numbers and sat at the prefecture for three hours, doing a little gratis babysitting to amuse ourselves, folding paper airplanes for bored children who liked us so much that their frustrated parents brought them back to us when they wouldn't keep quiet in the room where actual business goes on. Then when it was our turn, the woman interrogated me as I handed over my receipt. "Have you had your medical visit?" Yes, clearly, otherwise I never would have gotten the receipt in the first place. "Have you done this?" I've done everything. "Are you sure it's ready?" Yes? And then I got my card! This whole incident has reinforced the idea that it's okay to tell white lies to bureaucrats, which I'm sure is exactly the lesson I was supposed to have learned.

It was a pretty good week with the students. No one wants to work before vacation and I'd run out of teacher-mandated activities, so we just did the opinion cards and traded tonguetwisters (French children see the words "three free throws" and panic; meanwhile I work my way competently through rhymes about six saucissons qui coutent six sous). I had some sassy ones, but they bent to my iron will. The little brats in seconde 3 insisted they didn't want to read aloud, but they did when I made them do it, so that was an improvement on the last time I had them and I had to send one of them out for boundless exuberance (they bent to my will then, but it was kind of a travesty). They really are so funny sometimes, and their clothes are too. Half of them follow the chav fashions of sports wear (okay, mostly the boys), and the girls are tiny fashion plates. Here are two things that never should have come back into fashion in France: fanny packs and mullets. I swear, the haircuts some of these kids have are straight-up mullets. I have to muffle my giggles every time I see them. "You're not young enough to remember the 80s," I want to tell them, and "your small town isn't the right kind of small town for you to have this haircut." But alas, the hairdressers of France persist in inflicting fashionable, razored, feathered mullets on the teenage girls of France with their jeans tucked into their boots and their bangs swept across their foreheads.

You know you've been in France a while when you develop firm preferences about the bises, the little cheek kisses. I was thinking about this this week because I got the bises from a student for the first time - not one of mine, but one who was in my group for the England trip. I was in the library with my student and we saw him and he kissed her and them me, quite cordial. He had a decent style. What I don't like is when people come over to kiss you and don't even bother to put their cheek to yours, or when they don't make the little noises. My favorite is when the young Moroccan prof comes over and puts both hands on my shoulders and actually kisses my cheeks. But then there's the problem of having to pay attention. I was reading the news the other day when he came over to me and almost turned my face too far and really kissed him. That might have been awkward. It's an interesting phenomenon, the bises. I don't generally do them when it's me coming into a room, and they forgive me my American froideur. There are some people who are good friends of mine whom I hardly ever kiss (all of the assistants, some of the profs) and some people whose names I still don't know who kiss me religiously. Tricky! I'd say they were going out of fashion, except that the schoolgirls are always kissing everyone on the bus and clogging up the aisles.

So after this two weeks of vacation, there are only five more weeks of school. And then Steffen goes back to Germany, and Michelle goes back to England to prepare for going to Spain, and Anna goes back to the U.S., and Katie goes who knows where, and I try to get in a bit more traveling before heading back to the U.S., and Matthias and Cata stay here for a bit longer and then go back to Austria and Costa Rica. And the little white house will be empty. Sad to think about. But for now we're making spinach lasagna and I'm subtly influencing the television preferences of the house by watching West Wing and X-Files and Sports Night, and getting the girls hooked on Bollywood. I win the culture war! Although Michelle had a head start - I already love British tv. So perhaps she wins.

The weather here's been really typical Northern France lately: chilly and rainy and foggy. Yesterday half the sky was storms (dark, foreboding storms), and the other bit was bright bright sunshine. And then it all clouded over uniformly, and then around 11 it started raining like a crazy thing. Today it's just cloudy and cold. But at least it's tending towards spring. It's light now when I leave the house at 6.45, or lightening, anyway, and by the time I get to school at 7.30, the sun is almost all the way up. When I come home at 6.30, there's still some illumination for the green fields left fallow or planted with winter crops and the rich brown of the plowed furrows. That's a lot nicer than leaving in the cold dark and coming home in the cold dark past the posh bakery with its beautiful cakes that we will never be able to justify buying. By my birthday, I'm sure it will be light all the time.

Now back to arguing with my computer and trying to convince the programs that aren't quite compatible with Windows Vista that yes, they really are. Technology, eh?

Sunday, February 18, 2007

les agneaux égarés

Sorry for the lateness of this email, family, etc. I woke up late because I'm a bit sick and then went out and about, so that took a good chunk of my day, and then I made an early dinner for myself and the girls and worked through some interpersonal drama, but here is the email now.

I am typing on my new laptop! Which still smells like new laptop, and the battery works, and it's not hot enough to cook an egg on, and all of this is rampantly exciting. Also exciting: having gotten back from England! Though really it was more fun to be in England. It's a bit tough getting used to the touchpad on this laptop actually working: I keep closing windows and selecting things by accident.

We spent most of our time in Cambridge. The kids were in host families and so were we, thus neatly circumventing the problems of a bunch of teenagers staying a hotel. Divide and conquer, that's the strategy. And it seemed like the students behaved very well, and most of the host families were really good, except the ones who didn't come to pick up their students on time, or the family that let their kids walk home alone on the second day in the dark, leading to the kids getting lost for two hours and us almost going to the police before we found them. That was stressful, let me say. I was sick that day, just aching and sitting on the couch in a haze while Virginie and Marie-Claude tried and tried to make calls, and then I had to get in the faces of the cranky English people who kept making things worse by shouting and talking about how problems with the students were causing them personal problems in their relationships. Seriously, things we don't need to know about. They kept suggesting that the two boys had gone off to a party or a pub or were out painting the town, and we kept explaining that no, these boys wouldn't do that, they're tall but they're just scared kids right now, in a country where they don't really speak the language, in a neighborhood they don't know at all, and they're cold and hungry.

Fortunately, we found them eventually and that was good. The next morning, two of the girls got lost on the way to the bus stop, but that didn't take nearly two hours to resolve, and there weren't really any problems after that. It's tough to travel with forty-five eleventh and twelfth graders and only four teachers/responsible people (for the record: me, Virginie, who is my responsable and arranges things for me, Marie-Claude, who teaches English in the professional high school, and Gautier, the adorable surveillant who tends a bit to discipline). They do have a tendancy to want to wander off, and then you really feel bad for them when they wander off by accident and end up frightened and confused. None of them seemed to have realized they needed adapters to be able to charge their phones, so we couldn't even call them.

So the first day was the Duxford War Museum, which is lots and lots of little old airplanes, some of which fly through the air in horrifying loops. It was a nice museum, but really too many planes for the students, who had been on a bus approximately forever. I had a group of ten kids, about half of whom I knew and half of whom I didn't, and I sheparded them all around and felt like an actual factual grownup for the first time in a school setting. We watched the engineers restoring the old planes and we looked at the tank museum. Adrian set off an alarm (not that I knew his name at the time; he was just number Seven). We rode the tiny tram for a long time just for kicks and then went to the café, where four of the boys tried to escape from my silken clutches, but I showed them my iron fist and they settled down. Then it was on to Cambridge to meet the families.

Wednesday (the night that Maxime and Florent got lost) we spent in Norwich, looking at the castle and the cathedral and exploring the village. There's a nice museum made out of part of the old castle. I had to keep dragging Nicolas and Laurent back to my group when they would wander off to the main room to eat their sandwiches, but for the most part, everyone behaved really well (except for the bit where they started knocking over each other's block castles, but the fact that they were playing with blocks in the first place was ridiculously endearing). Then we had free time, which meant I went off with the teachers to have actual lunch instead of the pathetic bag lunches our families had made (seriously, they were not tasty, though it was kind of the family to make them) and the kids went off to stuff themselves with sugar and try to find posh clothes on sale. There are all these twisty little medieval lanes around the cathedral in Norwich (Norrich, as Virginie and Marie-Claude took great pride in pronouncing after our host family had corrected us).

Thursday we had a nice guided tour of bits of Cambridge (in French). We saw King's Chapel, King's College, and then Clare College, Trinity College, and St. John's in passing. Sadly, our guide wasn't very interesting, and the kids just aren't always fascinated by Stephen Hawking and J.M. Keynes (I was, but with the French school system, only a small group of them are studying sciences, and only a small group are studying economics, so there was always a large percentage of clueless students). The architecture was lovely, though, and it was nice to see so many students on bicycles. By this point, seven kids of my group had decided we were best friends, which was sweet. The boys would come to me to translate song lyrics and things they'd heard other drivers shouting (being a French bus, the door opened on the wrong side, and so we'd get people angry at us for standing on the shoulder of the road in the path of traffic waiting for the students to debark). In the afternoon we went to see Gainsborough's house and a funny little village called Lavenham where all the houses are crooked wattle and daub painted in picturesque colors.

Friday we left! To a chorus of blame from some cranky host parents, whom I sorted out. It was funny: they were praising the kids at the same time they were yelling at us for being late (we weren't, except that the parents were). Two of the biggest, sassiest boys from the professional side of the high school got kissed on the cheek by their host mom and praised up and down (and they are sweet when they want to be: one of them carried my bags in London just to be nice). We hit the Museum of London on the way and walked up and down Piccadilly Circus. I spent too much money buying delicious vegetarian food and a big block of cheddar cheese, but it was worth it. Virginie had predicted that the kids would all sleep on the bus on the way home, but instead they were awake and singing. A couple of my kids started serenading me, which was sweet. The ones in the back of the bus kept standing up and shuffling around too, which was strictly not allowed. I shouted at one of the worst ones at one point and got an ovation for it. It's like they forget I can speak French, even though I speak French with them all the time when we're not in class. I don't whip out the discipline so often, really, so it's weird to them when I do. A couple of them have started saluting me when I make them behave. I am entertained.

And you know what? It was sunny most of the time we were in England. How weird is that? Plus, once I got there, all I wanted to do was speak French to everyone, even though all the people around me were speaking English.

Today I went to the Cambrai Museum with Anna and her friend Laura, and it was surprisingly large, modern, and well-stocked. There was, of course, a lot of stuff from the old cathedral that got destroyed in the Revolution (too bad: it was apparently the jewel of the Pays Bas and the finest cathedral in all Christendom) and a plan relief of how the city used to look in the 18th century, and a lot of history about how important Cambrai has been (really important! Surprisingly enough!) and then art, art, art from everywhere, and a bunch of bones from the tombs they've discovered by Cambrai. There's a nice bust of Hugo by Rodin, and a piece by Camille Claudel, and a few other vaguely famous things by vaguely famous people. It was very lovely. A nice thing to do on a Sunday. And then when we left, the woman at the desk gave us free stuff. Yes!

So tomorrow it's back to school.

By the by, these are my students singing on the bus.