I have had another email from the embassy. It was really just an email telling all of us panicked/curious/impatient assistants to chill out and be patient while we wait for more instructions/ an "arrêté de nomination". It did have a couple of useful links to dissuade us from driving our embassy contact insane though.
"Arrêté de nomination": This is my teaching contract. This contains the name(s) of my school(s) and the city I'll be working in as well as the contact person for my school that will be able to tell me about housing options and so on. So until I receive it I have literally no idea what city or town or village or sheep cheese factory* I'll be living in and I definitely won't know where I'll be teaching. These come in anywhere from June to the middle of August and I can do almost nothing but save money until I get mine. So for now I and all the people asking me questions about it will have to be satisfied with "I'm teaching French kids (ages 6-11) English somewhere in central France."
As far as saving money, it is impossible to get an official summer job here. I imagine that is the case in most of the country right now. No one wants to waste money on training someone that's only going to be with them for a few months. But I'm tutoring and baby-sitting as much as possible this summer--both of which are my preferred money-making activities anyway. So hopefully I won't die of starvation and exposure after I arrive in France...hopefully.
Second (and perhaps it should have been first), I graduated! WOOO! Here's a really terrible picture without my magic golden stole:
It should have been exciting but mostly it was just painful. I had an appointment for a trigger point injection (big giant needle in your back) that got moved to the day before graduation and I'm allergic to the stuff that makes it hurt less afterward. So I spent my entire graduation hoping I didn't collapse into a puddle before it was all over. The part of me that wasn't howling in pain was excited though. Until I have an aneurism and decide to go for some more letters at the end of my name, I don't have to write anymore papers! I saw most of my favorite professors and bid them adieu (although unfortunately for them I'm totally going to be back there again before I leave to bother them). I got a high five from Dr. Randle, which was pretty epic and there was a lot of hugging from Madame. I was threatened with my life by many of them to keep in touch and post a million updates and pictures while I am living in France. And then my family went to get food, where I almost had a heart attack when I opened the bathroom door and all the fire alarms began going off.**
I think I'm more excited about finishing all my finals and papers than I am about the actual graduation. This semester was, pardon my English, sheer hell. I am sooooooooooo glad that I was not working 25+ hours a week on top of that. I do not know if that magic golden stole giving GPA would have remained intact. As is, I nearly finished my Spanish Civ. research paper and made up the lost points for the word "nearly" by taking the final from which I was exempt, I wrote fourteen pages of summary in French for my cultural dossier, wrote a final paper for French film, and wrote an additional chapter (also in French) for "Une Pièce Montée" by Blandine le Callet for French Postmodern Novel. All were due in the last week of classes. It was a little hectic since I had not had much time to work on a lot of this over the semester due to the amount of other papers I was writing. I'm pretty relieved it is over.
Third, the wedding is a little over a month away. My current status on this (as well as Sam's) is, "please don't talk to me about my wedding." So that's going incredibly stressfully.
All and all, I'm glad that very soon my focus will be entirely on getting to France and enjoying my last few months in Mississippi before the long stint abroad.
Last of all, Happy Mother's Day everyone! I'm sorry my mom is better than yours, but maybe you'll be okay anyway.
*Probably not one of those since the sheep are more in the basque region and I'll be in the wine valleys.
**Literally the second I pushed open the door there was an explosion of flashing lights and sirens. I couldn't imagine what I had done to cause this panic. It took a few minutes for me to realize that there was no possible way that I could have caused the fire alarms to go off by opening a bathroom door. Perhaps it should have taken a college graduate less time to realize this. I took solace in the fact that my fiancé had to tell my brother (who also just graduated) and I that we had to stop arguing about tautology because it was an entirely too pretentious conversation to be having at lunch. So maybe I can't function in normal every day society, but at least I can hold my own when arguing about things that are totally useless in daily life, right? I'm pretty sure that's the whole point of higher education.
