Here's to being narcissistic enough to believe people are reading this.

What's up, blog?

Uh. Hmm. I've been mostly writing in my real [pen + paper] journal lately. I've spent a lot of time obsessing over the possible interpretations of the phrase "the difference is in the details."

My and Lucy's attempts to "faire des soldes" resulted in us going in halfsies on a 500-piece High School Musical 3 puzzle, and then putting it together in something like an hour and a half. It was a pretty lovely way to spend a Saturday night. Sunday I finally went to Le Musée Sainte Croix with Alex and a friend of hers. The museum is just across the street from where I live, yet it was my first time there. It was deceptively huge; we spent close to three hours there and didn't make it to every part. Luckily, all French public museums are free for European Union students and people who're under 26. All museums includes places like the Louvre, le Centre Pompidou, and le Château de Versailles in Paris. Plus, almost every "major" town/city in France has its own "check out how epic we are!" museum. I went to the one in Angoulême with a friend a while back, and it, too, was surprisingly comprehensive.

After however many years of studying French [4, now, it would seem], I think I am finally beginning to understand how to use the partitive. We're working on it in the linguistique class that I'm taking, and, at long last, I think I actually "get it". I was reading La Nausée earlier, and every time I can across du, de la, de l', or des I seemed to be able to make the distinction between "some" [indefinite] and "of the" [definite] in their use. It's little moments like these, when the grammar makes more sense in an important way, that I feel just that much more capable of understanding the meaning behind the words in a much more productive sense.

I think this may be the homesickness talking, so take what follows with a grain of salt:

There are a number of things about France that I find myself really not liking.

I do not like French methodology, which seems to be everywhere. I've never considered myself much of a proponent of Cartesian philosophy [sorry, Monsieur Descartes...]. I have distinct memories of suffering through Beata's lectures on methodology and forcing myself to memorize the four precepts of The Method [fromDiscourseon the Method, if you're really, really interested...]. I'm caught in a chicken/egg paradigm. Is this methodology fixation because of Descartes [he's been referenced in almost every single one of my classes...]? Or was he just one of the first to put into words what is actually a very, very French tradition?

Okay. That was vague. French-ruled paper has four "lines" per "line". My friend Jess is an assistante, which means she teaches English in a collège [elementary school]. It's through her that I've learned the purpose of so many lines. She explained to me that it's so that students can have a visual aid to learn how to draw their letters. All French hand-writing in, essentially, the same. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does. I love my hand-writing, and cannot imagine having been told since a very early age that my writing style must be a certain way.

Also, all written works for class must follow a format that irritates me, and I don't think it's just the typical "you pretend to hate it because you can't do it" attitude. In middle school I was taught how to write a 5-paragraph essay [you tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, you tell 'em, and then you tell 'em what you told 'em!]. I can write a damn-good 5-paragraph essay, man. I mastered, conquered that beast.

And I loved nothing more than that magical moment when Mr. Woods told me that he would not accept that format, ever, under any circunstances.

Being forced back into that tradition, but in an even more exigent way makes is stifiling me.

And, to finish this complain session. I am taking 3 history classes. In each of them, every time the professor goes on and on about how some other country did something epic, such as the Spanish Amarda, they have to toss in an the end that France was doing something equally or even more epic at the exact time. It's always just as an aside.

The actual example that I'm thinking of right now is France's colonial territories during the XVIIth century. Cool, France. You had Canada. You had Louisiana. You had a MASSIVE piece of land [foughly 1/3 of what is now the US] that you sold to the United States. Can't we just get on with the history class? Must we dwell on past French glories?

And then there's overwhelming pride in the professor's voice as he tells us about how France was the first country to track sailors throughout the entirety of their careers, keeping accounts of where and when they went, their pay, etc. [Learning about Les Livrets Ouvriers was also a rather irritating form of control that I learned about last semester...] I just feel like being one of the first countries to keep those records, to be one of the founders of that kind of invasion of privacy isn't really something to be particularly proud of. Alas.

I'm not even going to get into the actual headach that was the bureaucratic process of getting my titre de sejour [visa]. Suffice it to say that "top-down coordination is only necessary when people must be made to do something they would never do of their own accord".

Wow. That was a lot more complaining than I was planning on. Maybe I'll just complain to Emily when she gets here, and delete a lot of that. Meh.