My God the Cost; I Can't Afford You.

It's been several weeks since I posted, despite the fact that I've thought about doing so nearly every day in those last several weeks. It's just seemed too daunting, and too irrelevant. I took pictures of my students and thought about how I wanted to present a final entry about what I actually do in France, but the kids fell by the wayside as I sobbed my way through The Lasts:

the Last Trip to La Comtesse (my favorite bar)
the Last Trip to Chartrons
the Last trip to St.-Michel



the Last Class with P-O's kids, and then Elodie, Astrid, Sandrine, Sophie, Delphine, Anne, Chloé....
the Last Time I saw the Gambetta Profs



the Last Time I saw P-O...

[I can feel my throat tightening again.]

Throw in the fact that I made myself incredibly sick, caught some kind of laryngitis, lost my voice, and stopped sleeping, and well, it wasn't a good time.

I'm home now and have been on American soil for a week and a day. To put it politely and sincerely, I am totally flabbergasted by that fact. Everything feels familiar and everything feels totally bizarre. Everything feels too easy and yet everything is a difficulty. The space. The space of California. How can we ever traverse that space? How can we ever manage the sheer distances? How could anyone ever possibly bump into someone else, and god forbid, fall in love in a city like this? It's too much. The miles are too many, the buildings too big, the parking lots too massive, and the public transportation too glaringly awful for human communication. I wish I could say and feel otherwise, but I can't stay here.

And I'm not going to. I received an email two days before my departure from Bordeaux that - en fin - my contract had been renewed. I screamed. And then I screamed again, as only twenty minutes before, I'd spent 130 euro shipping two boxes of books and winter clothes that I a) need in Bordeaux, and b) could've left with a friend had I known I'd be returning to collect them. Ah, La Belle France. En plus, despite asking repeatedly for a return to école primaire (primary school,) I've been placed in a collège (middle school) and a lycée (high school.) Egads. I'm already scared.

But I'm not complaining.
The knowledge that this madcap adventure is continuing fills my heart and my head with a profound relief, and a slightly wizened happiness. France isn't easy. My life there isn't what I'd call "fun," but it is entirely my own. As Laurence once said to me, everything I have there I have seized for myself. That's valuable. That's real.

So. Between now and September 23rd (my flight to Paris which I booked when I still didn't know I'd be able to take that plane!), some things to expect from me:

[if I write them down here where I know other people can read them, I am more likely to deliver. Funny how self-imposed peer-pressure works]

1. an entry about French food, which let me tell you I have documented!
2. an entry about teaching the wee ones, and possibly pictures of them if I can morally justify that to myself.
3. a continuing anthropological documentation of my life here in southern California. I've been taking pictures. Don't you worry.

a preview: