Get ready to ramble!

So that post I promised that was going to reinvigorate my blog and prove that I could keep up with something...yeah, I'm a flake and you all know that. And you love me or something. In any case, it's been a while since I've updated. Fortunately, due to the insularity of French people I have not actually made any new acquaintances to tell you about. Since returning from Morocco, I have played the role of hermit disconcertingly well, in spite of the fact that I feel more at ease in this country than I ever have before.

Given that this first semester is more or less finished, and many of my new friends go home this weekend (that's you, Liz, Ana, Red/Rouge/AlexJKnotAlex, Yasmina-coughtraitorcough-, Caitlin², Kimianotnewbutstill, etc. and etc.), I'm in an unusually reflective. Here are a few things that occupy my brain on this, the official four-month anniversary of my departure from California.

AN: This might be broody and not funny. If you only come here for the lawlz, please steer clear. If you've never lawled and think I'm a self-aggrandizing asshole for assuming that I am witty...well get in line probably. Also, after spending thirty minutes on this, I'm amending this note to add that this is a fucking ramble-fest. Not for the faint of heart or really any but the terminally bored. And even then you might want to stay away.

Thought one: It's not really hard to live in a European country. While I run the risk of sounding like some post-First World-apologist in suggesting that, on the whole, France and America are more similar than they are different, I beg you to hear me out. Yes, I supplicate myself before thee.
France is different, certainly. There are a myriad of clichés that I could point to to illustrate this difference and they would be true: more types of cheese than Tiger Woods had sexual partners (yes, a sports reference. And no, I'm not talking about golf...wait, is that too dirty? Do children read this? If they do they shouldn't. Bad parents. As a side note, I'm really angry that more of my high school classmates haven't gotten pregnant at an obscenely young age. It seems to happen so often to my friends from Oregon. EDIT: Just looked it up. While teen pregnancy rate per 1,000 teenaged girls 15-19 in California is 1.2 higher than in Oregon overall [38.4 to 37.2] teen pregnancy among non-hispanic Whites [I went to UO and I grew up in LG. This is the more relevant statistic, sadly] is 11.2 higher in Oregon than it is in California [27.0 to California's 15.8]. There, now you learned something. CDC).

That kinda got away from me. Anyways, the point I'm going to make before I go off on another tangent is this: while France differs superficially from (cf. Cheese, hours of eating, differences in social comportment, bises, and if you want to extend superficial to its extreme I'd even go so far as to say that the political differences are only cosmetic changes to a base of the Western democratic ideal).

When they (who are they? I don't know but they definitely did what I'm about to describe) try to prepare you for study abroad, they warn you of this apocalyptic and unavoidable scenario in which you will eventually grow to despise your host country due to its differences vis à vis your home. It's not a question of if, but when. You will inevitably be unable to cope with just how alien your environment is, they tell you. They call it culture shock, and it never happened for me. Four months in France and I have yet to be confronted with an element of the culture so incomprehensible to me that I am thrown into a pit of maladjustment. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Maybe the French culture is so impenetrable that, even living as I am in a host family, I am simply not connected enough with it to feel just how different it is. I don't think that's it. Maybe it's the fact that I have some sort of inoculation to this culture, as I've been here before in a host family. I still don't think that's it. I'm not saying that it was a waste of time being here: on the contrary, I have validated my love of all that is "abroad" and confirmed that the path I am currently taking is a path that I'm happy with, and not just one that sounds cool when I talk bout it at graduation parties/ a justification for wanting to learn languages. And that's cool. But I do feel sort of jipped. Ok, this is going nowhere, so onto the next thought. There will be three thoughts or this will be more agonizing to read than the Scarlet Letter. Which was a good book, but I have Hawthorne's inability to finish a sentence. So yeah.

Thought number two: None of this has to make sense. I guess I just realized this is my blog. But then again I write for an audience. I suppose I am at a cross roads of purpose. Spoiler alert: this is an overwrought metaphor for where I am in my life. Oh God...I'm about to turn into Thought Catalog here.
I have always maintained that you don't start to be a real person until the age of sixteen. Real person here will be defined roughly as a self-aware being capable of critical though but, more importantly, possessed of some sort of metacognitive capacity (which does not have to and, quite often, is not fully utilized) by which to analyze his or her own life in such a way as to create an internally-defined vision of what their world is. I believe that, up until the age of sixteen, you are defined by all that which is exterior to you: essentially, you are built from the outside in. That's why middle school is a stereotype of trying to be something else. It's in the early teens that you start to feel this need to build identity, but everything up until then has led you to take your cues from the world around you. From day one, when a poster plastered on a front door says it's a boy or it's a girl, you are told who you are. It's only in your mid-teens that you understand that you can decide who you are and, more importantly, how you wish to view the world. Anyway, this is important because I thought that it was a sort of exponential curve from there where you went from zero to one hundred and then were a real person. But I think that what I and many others my age are going through at this point is anxiety of influence: the world still has expectation of us, and as human beings we enjoy gratifying others. But we have expectations of ourselves, and at the point where the world's expectations and our internal desires diverge, we feel an intense anxiety. I think this is especially pronounced in the college crowd, and especially the college crowd of American students. But now I'm really rambling. In tl;dr news: It's hard to know where you want to go in life and we get kinda anxious about that. I don't know where I'm going in life and that scares the living shit out of me. And there is no rosy ending or nice comforting but it's okay quote because this is my blog and I choose to view the future as a giant question mark over a pit of terrors with just a rickety bridge to cross it. And more likely than not we fall in the pit, get a desk job and get over ourselves.

Outtakes from this post:
I tried to type America and I wrote dinner. It was such a bizarre typo that I thought about keeping it in. But I didn't because honestly after that whole pregnancy fiasco I couldn't afford another weird tangential loop that only makes sense when I'm narrating it in my head at a thousand miles per hour.

At one point I tried to make a funny (read: turned out awful and I removed the beast from this post) grammar joke and wrote spitting infinitives instead of splitting infinitives. That made me think about the possibility of some edgy reboot of School House Rock where they rap. And then my brain exploded because it was awful and now I have to explain to my host mother why I need new sheets when she just changed them. And you're brain exploded because innuendo and now we're all dead two days early. Marry Christmas and Happy Babushka! See you on the other side of the ball drop!

Also I promise the next post will be extra funny, light-hearted, and coherent to make up for this mess.