The last few days here have been bitterly cold, which is fitting for Paris in January, and so I don’t really mind. I don’t suppose it’s really any colder than it gets in, like, Kentucky, but way colder than Raleigh and Atl. Even with my Coat to End All Coats, it’s still been pretty wicked. The kind of weather where you will wear stiletto boots all day long just because it means your leg is covered over your jeans up to the knee. People walk around with their scarves pulled up over their mouths, and I find myself wearing my Uncle Chink hat more and more (for racially sound definition of Uncle Chink and his hats, please see entry from earlier in January sometime), mainly because not only does it keep my head warm but it also keeps my hair out of my face, so I look less like Jade Puget and more like a 21-year-old girl who happens to have hair vaguely similar to his. Sans hat, my hair is not only in my eyes (because the way it is cut that is kind of to be expected) but also in my mouth and all over my face. But the thing is that it’s only really cold because the wind chill is so far below zero– people walk around looking at the ground in front of them, because if you look up your eyes start to water and your nose runs even more. I still love it. Babies wrapped until they look more like loaves of bread in their strollers, kids who you could roll to school in their thick parkas, businesswomen on bicycles with their scarf tail flying out behind them, trying to change gears in thick winter gloves... love it.
But life is still, as always, ridiculous. I think the person I am in Paris is so different from the person I was in the US– perhaps this will be a lasting change, or perhaps it is just a result of being a foreigner and existing in my second language all the time. I found out today I missed one of my finals. Oh, yes, I rater-ed it completely. I assumed it would be during normal class time, but of course I was wrong, and today when I showed up to take a different one, I happened to notice a sign posted with the exam times. Suffice it to say, I had no exam today. One yesterday and one tomorrow, but the problem is that the one I missed is for a class that I only have one grade for, and to get credit at Emory, I obviously have to have more than that. So this could be quite bad, but as I was getting back on the Metro to go to my program center to tell them, I couldn’t compute it in my head. This situation should have a lot of gravity– I potentially could have just failed that class. But all I could think was "this would never have happened to me in the US. And if it had, I would have gone to pieces." But here, it’s just, well, to be expected. Not because I am irresponsible– this one I just misunderstood. But it’s expected because the French are so different from us in everything they do that I just had no idea I had to go to some out-of-the-way little bulletin board to find out when my exams were. No one told me, and I’m not claiming they should have. I am living in Paris on my own, there ought to be some level of self-reliance, right? But alas, I screwed up. And the really ironic part is that it’s for a class I actually love– one of my two favorites since coming to college. Which says a lot, but too bad it doesn’t count for much when it turns out that half my grade for that class is a zero.
Tomorrow I go back to the University to see if there is something I can do about it, a makeup date or something... this is going to be awkward, I can tell already.
But honestly, the academic firsts in this country for me are just... astounding. First failing grade, first pop midterm, first missed final... It makes me sound like a real winner, eh? But it’s so hard to get worked up about things like that when... you live in Paris. And it’s really more important that you be able to function every day in another language than it is that you pass your classes.
I wasn’t in this jovial of a mood to begin with, just for the record. But after I found out, I did what any sensible person in Paris would do– headed straight to my favorite boulangerie, thinking that sometimes the only thing that can fix a bad day is a macaron au chocolat. And I push on the Desgranges door and realize, of course, it’s Tuesday, and Desgranges is always closed on Tuesdays. See, this is what the stress does to me– I forget the schedule and operating hours of the best bakery this side of... well, anywhere. So I continued down the street, to one that is highly overpriced and where I went one time to find they had run out of croissants, so I have never been back. I boycott them really because I can’t afford them and they are located almost a mile from my apartment, but I like to think I’ve taken the moral high road and am not patronizing them because what kind of a bakery in Paris runs out of croissants? I had to make an exception today, though, because of the inconvenient closing of Desgranges, so I bought a meringue and went to the gardens of Luxembourg, to my favorite place in Paris, the Medici fountain, and sat there for awhile, watching the ducks sleep and the bare trees and feeling the wind in my hair and listening to the kind of music that is so wild you can’t listen to it with out lip-synching along, probably further cementing the fact that Paris has indeed made me lose my mind. But it obviously helped, as now I can’t help but laugh at the fact that I missed a final. How many people who go to Emory University can claim that?
I dyed my hair dark dark brown right before I left the US– like, extremely dark brown. If you looked at it in the dark, it would look black– that kind of a color. Although I guess if you looked at anybody’s hair in the dark it would look black, so that’s a terrible description. When I walked into the program center today, the first thing the woman that works there said was, "Oh, have you changed your hair color? It’s such a contrast with your eyes!" So that is what I get. Not, like, "Oh, it looks so natural" (although it doesn’t really) or "How lovely!" (Which is not what I was going for anyway), just "it contrasts with your eyes." What is one supposed to say to that? It’s not really a compliment... but you still have to respond. So I said what anyone else in that position would have said in French, "Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I was going for."
Everybody run now,
B