Let them eat cake
Damn, that Starbucks peppermint mocha that they serve at the Hillside cafe is mighty delicious. I am going to miss things like that when I return to the Superfuckyeah New York Wonderland™ The holiday bug is truly going around: two days ago, they lit the tree in the plaza, and in a fit of multitasking wizardry, we decorated the tree in the lounge and had cookies & hot cocoa while watching the Muppet's Christmas carol while writing heart-wrenching letters to hot soldiers fighting for World Peace. Oh, and I unleashed the fury of Picasso on computer paper and cut-pasted snowflakes onto my door.
This chick on the crew team, Allegra, she's hilarious. I truly love her. We're like, out in thirty degree weather after practice frozenly waiting for the bus, and she comes out, wearing orange booty shorts and we're like, "dude, why are you naked?" and she's like, "cos my spandex is sweaty." Then she had the most ridiculous story, "I'm like, in Italy, living in my own apartment and basically being all independent, except I was piss-poor and only had like, $400 left and no job. I'm wandering around the shops and I see this amazing watch. It was $380. It's Dolce & Gabbana, beautiful, and had like, diamonds on it. Ok, not diamonds, maybe crystals. Point is, it was gorgeous and I kiss it, and bought this watch. Now I am in Italy with absolutely no money. So then I got a job."
That's a great moral though. However, this winter hols, I will be doing one of the following (or more, or simultaneously): faceplanting on the tables in restaurants from overindulging, skiing, sleeping, trying to bake belgian brownies, painting my nails ridiculous shades weekly, shopping (therapy), photographing, and just fucking off. Not in an air-conditioned office, raping everyone's finances, reading the NYtimes styles section, and refreshing my 3 e-mail accounts, like I did all last summer. No, not this time. This time, I'm milking the benefits of still living under my parent's household and enrolling in the bank of mum and dad.
The illustration of the mouse in the biology text was so cute that I spent 6 minutes making "aw precious" faces at it and taking macro-pictures while everyone studying around me stopped, and 'WTF'-thought bubbles hovered over their puny mortal heads.
Now Meg, a petite redhead who runs 10 miles a day and studies French, taught me to say, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche." Her dream was to become an interpreter, and then she tells me that an interpreter must fluently converse in and comprehend six languages: in all its innuendos, subtleties, and colloquialism. I would like to learn French as well so I too can become an interpreter or an international emissary of some sort. It all seems so glamorous. I want to be in Prague and say to my hot, elegant, sexy, intelligent colleagues, "gosh, darling, love to stay but I must jet to Beirut for a breakfast conference."
(it seems like the sort of career where you'd be surrounded by impossibly attractive people, isn't it?)
I was discussing with the Professor of Politics in Modern Ireland about my desire to study French, but he was curiously biased towards German and tried to hint things like, "we've had 6 Fulbright scholars from the German department" and then started quoting German. But he redeemed himself when he commented on the marketability of the range of my language repertoire and how I was just so goddamn amazing. No. Really.
My main incentive to learn French though, is because I love pastry- the delicate ones with the pure cocoa, strawberries, truffles, cremes (Southern France), I enjoy food (French culinary institute), and I like to ski (Geneva). Also, it would fulfill the 6th language I would need to know to become Nicole Kidman. I mean, an interpreter. Next fall, I will enroll in the intensive elementary French course, and then the following spring, I will continue with intermediate. It is entirely possible to be amazing at French in a year.