The Waiting Game

In a quick succession of posts...

I promise I will disappoint you with infrequent posts at some point and the only reason these last two are so very close together is because it took me so very long to write the first.

And so...

This is pure torture. I got my acceptance letter just 11 days ago and I am already getting seriously impatient for more information. I have been obsessively watching the rising prices of plane tickets and looking at different living options around the Orléans-Tours area. I am SO not good at not being able to plan things.

I take comfort in knowing that I am likely to be pretty happy wherever they stick me, as long as I'm in France and can get to a train station. So I guess I'm not stressing out so much about the lack of information and more about the lack of being able to do anything. The only other thing I'm worried about is the start-up money--plane tickets, initial rent and living expenses, visa, etc. For now I'm doing what I can to make sure I have work over the summer and trying not to lose my mind before I hear from my school(s).

If I am totally honest...

I am hoping to get something closer to Tours. I really love Tours and I believe there will be some students from my school there for the Fall semester (I think--maybe. UPDATE: There won't be. So sad...maybe I can convert some people into French majors before I leave? Not that my French professor needs any help. People change majors just to take more classes with her ALL THE TIME. She is awesome.). I would pretty much be in heaven getting to show first-timers everything around Tours and hopefully keeping them from getting lost for 4-6 hours on their second day there (definitely happened to me and my travel buddy and hence the blog name*).

In the realm of graduating:

I have the most intense senioritis. I am so sick of being in college. I know that there will be a day when I look back on these times with nostalgia and say "Oh to be in college again!" but that time is not now. I hate papers. I hate homework. I hate research. I hate projects. I hate sitting still in uncomfortable chairs and taking notes for hours on end. I am tired of furiously stuffing new information into my brain so that I can maintain my GPA. Oh mon dieu are there days when I have no control over which language comes out of my mouth and the French, Spanish, English, and Latin all fuse into one ungodly brain-slur of exhaustion. And while the uncontrollable subconscious translation of everything that I read in English into the last language I spoke to a professor may be an indication of something useful that will no doubt aid me in France (and breathe), for now it only adds to the over-taxation of my too-full brain. I am also really tired of the extra toll that studying takes on my back. I would really like to maybe not have to go to the chiropractor three times a week and I'm pretty sure that studying is the cause of at least one of those visits per week.

In the dark recesses of my memory, I know that I really love learning...but right now I would really like to sit in front of my television for a couple of days and melt my brains out.

All that being said, I am really going to miss the constant access to professors and friends. I'm going to miss staying up all night talking and hanging out with people when I'm supposed to be studying for a mid-term that I have the next morning. And at some point I'm going to miss my classes.

In the realm of wedding:

I am still at the point of "I just don't even want to have a wedding and can someone just hand me a piece of paper saying that we're married because that's the important part. Right???" Sam is there too, I think. We've both (okay, mostly I have) said various times that we wish we were more selfish so that we could just go get married on a beach by ourselves and then spend a week sleeping in a cabana with umbrella drinks. I don't know if that's just both of us already having so much to think about without wedding stuff, or if we're actually just mean people who don't love our friends and families enough to be excited (I'm pretty sure it's the first thing). But there will be a wedding...even if it's a pretty weird and small one. I have a dress. There's going to be cake...sort of. Everyone can breathe a sigh of relief and stop waiting for us to cancel it.

I'm not proof-reading this out of yet more rebellion toward academia. TAKE THAT, SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES!

*No seriously. We were fairly decent walkers especially considering that we're from Mississippi and walking is NOT a practical form of transport here. However, our wonderful professor had taken us on about a twenty mile whirl-wind tour of Tours that day and by the time we began the long (well thirty or forty minutes from the end of Rue Nationale) walk home, we were already really exhausted, thirsty, and hungry. We got SO lost. We forgot that there was another street between the street we were on and the street we lived on. We walked up and down a three or four mile stretch of road for couple hours before beginning to explore side streets. NO ONE knew where the street we lived on was located. My feet literally started bleeding at one point. We were both extremely dehydrated and had devolved to the point of ridiculous bickering and general crankiness. It was awful and it felt like we were lost for days instead of hours.