Updates on everything.

First, TAPIF.

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. 

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.