The Surreal Life

[mythematiclife]

In ways which I am currently too exhausted (from doing what, I could not tell you, but exhausted nonetheless; watching TV and eating baguette is tiring, I guess...) to tell, the past few months of my life have been incredibly, unbelievably surreal. I now, at least, understand why the French love absurdism so much: they dwell in absurdity. And I, I suppose, dwell in its shadows, pretending to be English, wondering if life is really so incomprehensible and unpredictable as all this, or if my French is just too sub-par to understand. While at first, the absurdity was too much to take in and enjoy simultaneously, ever since the end of October, it's been getting better and better, and I've been loving it as much as I've been laughing at it. Or maybe things just got better at the end of October, as it's more or less the last time I regularly attended a class...as one of my professors said "you must have noticed that French University is one of the most depressing places to be in the world" (that was, of course, after he shouted at the militant student/strikers, calling them all cunts). And I would attest, that my specific University - University Montpellier III Paul Valery - is one of the most disheartening, disorganized, overgrown, depressing places I've had to spend more than three consecutive hours in since high school. But, I've kind of grown fond of the surreal life that is etre étudiante at a French University (although mainly, the striking). So, here I am, clinging to the very last vestiges of a month-long era of lighthearted, coffee and wine drinking, entire-TV-series-in-one-day-watching, carefree shopping, house-pants-wearing, utter confusion and insanity, and I'm struggling to capture it before the reality of it slips away. But already, it's gone. I'm going home tomorrow, a week sooner than planned (because of threatened plane strikes, parental begging, and lack of anything better to do), after nearly a year away, and the spell is about to be broken. But I was languishing anyway, wasn't I? Before the countdown closed in on me, and I realized the dream was about to be over. I am incredibly glad to be going home. Since my 19th birthday, I've spent only 12 full days in the Homeland. And while there's a part of me which relishes the verity of that sentence, thinks of it as an achievement, the ever-expanding sentimental part of me doesn't like at all what that implies. For, while I like a bit of distance, I do not want to be distanced from my original home.

So, I'm putting away my proverbial picket, shelving my glass of wine, heading back to America for a month, and very glad for it.