"Hollywood... it’s the most addicting drug in the world."
~Jay-Z

From a letter I wrote during my second week in Paris:
"I have moments now when I forget I am in France– or perhaps it’s that I forget this is not MY country. Sometimes I forget this is even my life... Paris changes everything and I still miss you.
This place is amazing, even though I have no makeup and no hairbrush and no music to listen to because everything in my life is in those bags that are probably floating somewhere in the Atlantic.
On the one hand I want to live here forever and on the other I cannot communicate with anyone. My French is essentially useless– I can get by at our internet bar where the bartenders speak French to me but slowly and just barely... paying for things is still hard because I still can’t tell which euros are which.
I’m sitting now in a café close to Metro Luxembourg with a too-hot café au lait and a very burned tarte au poire. My pants are rolled up because the bottoms were rain-soaked and I know that my hair is a frizzy gypsy-looking mess. But somehow I feel that my world is at my fingertips. I am 20 years old and on my own 8000 miles away from everyone I know. The problem, I think, is that I love being independent too much, and this city, this country, changes things. I’ve been suckered into the romance of the whole thing... I want to stroll down the road in a fluffy skirt, messenger bag, and headphones, with the wind in my hair, a baguette in my hand, and an Orangina on reserve in my purse, with everyone I pass thinking ‘Look at that Parisian girl...’ That’s what’s weird about being here– in the US, I strive to stand out from the crowd, to be independent and different, but here... in Paris, I’m dying to blend in. When someone walks past me without giving me the American Look, when an unknowing barista or pharmacist starts a conversation with me in French, I am thrilled because it means I AM BLENDING IN– I look like one of these beautiful people with their beautiful voices and beautiful clothes and always their silly worn-out shoes."

And from my journal the night I found out I had mono:

"Aarrgghh! Who does this? WHO goes to another country for nine months, loses their bags AND contracts mono-freaking-nucleosis, ALL IN A PLACE WHERE SHE BARELY SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE? What is wrong with me, and more importantly, WHOSE life is this???
[big space and some scribbles.]
No, wait, it is definitely mine. It seems for as long as I can remember my unintentional motto has been ‘Why do things simple when you can complicate the bejeebees out of life?’ And this has, of course, become no exception. Also, I don’t think my French is getting any better, I think I am just getting used to not being understood on the first try and without gestures."

Oh, how I miss that girl...
B