MAAAAAH FACE

Really wanting a new necklace...

Where I'm From

Where are you from?

It's one of the first questions people ask you when you are first introduced, especially now that I am living in France as soon as my accent is detected and my origins need to be confirmed. I usually struggle with this question and oddly my answer usually tends to be Texas.  Why Texas you might ask? I know I grew up in Ohio and honestly that is where I have lived a great deal of my short life, but it honestly doesn't feel like home anymore.  Because, for me, home is where the people I love are.  I haven't really spent much time in Ohio since I was 15, and it is hard for me to really connect with it anymore.  Since then, I lived in France for a year, went back to Ohio for a year, went to Boston for 3 years for school, and the last year I've been living in France and will live here for another year.  But when I go home on vacation I usually am going to Texas, as my parents and sisters live there so for me that seems to be a definition of home. 

But honestly, I'm not really from Texas, I don't share the local accent, my Texan culture is zero to none - I don't even know the Texan pledge of allegiance, and I have only spent time in Austin and the San Antonio region.  But  saying I still am from Ohio, while my family is in Texas(living and loving), makes me feel farther apart from them than I already am.  My Texan compromise is my way of holding a shred of normalcy in my life.  It's my way of still being apart of my family.  It's my way of gluing together the disparity that is my life and my family's life. 

Today whilst writing a tutorial at work. . .

I came upon this.  I had written it in my calendar when my parents were thinking about coming to visit then.  Now it's just my two sisters, but I am still really really excited. It was such a good thing to fall upon.

And it brightened my morning.

Being in Castles

Last weekend, we went to visit the Castles in the Loire Valley.  Castles are weird.  In one awkward place, the Chateau de Rigny-'Ussé, they had set up reenactment of the Sleeping Beauty story because evidently this was the castle that inspired Perrault to write the story.  It was terrifying.  I used to be really afraid of this episode of Are you afraid of the Dark? where the girl get sucked into a large dollhouse.  I remember having nightmare about that and so being in this castles you felt like you were in a bad dream, I would almost go as far out to say nightmare ... but it was just so damn amusing.   

Most of the castles even had current photos of the families that own them, I think the pictures are meant to put you are ease, but honestly they sort of made me feel weird, like I was peeking into a window I wasn't supposed to look in.  At the end of the day you have walked into these peoples homes and granted my house doesn't have 50 bedrooms, or ornate ballrooms... but still sometimes people still live in them. 

We had taken a car for the weekend to easily bump from castle to castle.  We went to Chambord which has 365 fireplaces in it.  It was really enormous.  I think there are 400 rooms all in all.  Can you imagine that! And it was designed to be a mere hunting lodge.  We took loads of selftimer photos. Which was pretty great.

We also got to use my Polaroid Land Camera and the results were pretty good.  But try to be awkward and ask foreigners to take a picture using my camera, and you get curious stares and raised eyebrows.  No matter what I said people would not get close enough to us.  I would try to coax them along, but nothing seemed to be able to entice them to get a little closer.  I was like NO,REALLY C'MON PLEASE... etc but to no avail.  And then the viewfinder is a little off and so it was an awkward photo taken when the "volunteer" photographers tried to center the photo.  There are numerous photos with only one arm seemingly deattached from a missing body. 

Leaving Paris

Before today I felt indecisive.  I had started to unfold my days and weeks of Paris and look at them, one by one, spread out to see in my mind's eye, a simple reflection of how I had spent my last few months in Paris.   I had begun to  ask myself, querying if I had seen what I wanted, participated enough, and connected with those whom I wanted to connect with.  I'm winding down to six weeks left in Paris and I'm was beginning to face the reality of being done and (before today) the possibility of going home, back to Boston and within six months joining the full time workforce.

I started to get nervous. I started to panic. It was upon realizing how much more I wanted to do, and how many more things there were actually to do that I knew (for sure, for sure) that I wanted to stay.  Before then I had tittered between the possibility of going home and things being easier, but as the idea of being unable to stay took hold I knew that it was not what I wanted to do.  Indeed, it seemed as far away from what I wanted as it could possibly be.

But now I know I'm staying. My classes are passed, and my future more certain. More importantly I know that I have more time, and more time to really get what I want done.  This month every weekend seems to be packed and so I'm starting to come to terms with the fact that 12 more months is really only 52 weekends (and less even since school years aren't really 12 months) and however long that sounds it is still so so short. 

Either way, I signed a lease today in a cafe on the Champs Elysees. Amidst the Gucci and Louis Vuitton clad, the tourists, and the shopping I took a risk and signed before I knew that I was even staying. I took a leap of faith and at the end I secured us our apartment.

In a few weeks we will be going to Ikea to furnish the place, we will stock up on mustard, pickles, and sultan beds! It will be AMAZANT!

edit: I had to edit this post as I had written it near 1 am my time... it was full of mistakes, many of which are probably still there...