Crois-moi

I’m getting a better idea of my future, I think.

Or I’m letting go of having a better idea of my Future, and getting on with thinking about what’s next.

Here’s the plan so far: wrap things up in Toulouse, spend the summer studying Arabic in either the Maghreb or the Middle East (I’m still trying to decide which program I want to try), read lots of books in the meantime, then come home and find employment while I prepare for the Foreign Service exam. Hopefully everything will fall into place for me to take it in November and then see what happens next! I’m not going to put all my eggs in that basket since I can’t really predict how it will turn out, but I am going to stay optimistic and keep that goal in my sights.

So that’s that, and it feels good to live and work and think about who I am and how I want my life to play out.

I have been paying more attention to conversations I overhear in the bus and cafés, and the things my coworkers in the schools say about their lives. This is it, I’m an adult now, and it’s up to me to take myself where I want to go. That sounds so obvious when I say it to myself, but I don’t think I understood it before this year.

The other day, Stew and I were making dinner, and he said, “This is what the Unbearable lightness of being feels like.” Complete freedom of choice doesn’t always feel like liberty; sometimes it feels like a crushing weight. That’s how I feel sometimes when I try to think about what I’m going to do with myself now that school is over and it’s up to me to decide what’s next… I feel so much safer now that I’ve made a choice and have an objective.

The vibe is good here. There is a pattern to these years where I change my scenery and my set-up. The beginning is rough, but towards the middle of winter things start to feel golden. Ca y est ! It’s golden (literally golden, too – the weather is warm and BEAUTIFUL these days)!

I’m taking swing lessons now (lindy hop, specifically). Summer and Heather are taking them as well, but Stew opted out because one of his feet bothers him. It’s fun! It’s also a good exercise in laughing at oneself: silly things happen when I try to move jazzily. Dance partners are pretty tolerant, though, especially the other beginners. Spinning the wrong way, bumping into other couples, the occasional foot stamp – ça passe. What doesn’t go over well is showing up for class smelling like your dinner, which I did on the very first day, when dinner was fajitas. Before leaving home, I reminded myself that it would not be good to smell like dinner at my first night dance, so I popped a piece of gum in my mouth. I figured that the bike ride to the dance school would air out my clothes, but I was wearing Stew’s windbreaker which apparently sealed the smell of Tex Mex inside it. When I arrived and unzipped the coat, Summer looked over at me and asked, “Did you just eat Mexican food?” All night, I could see the smile change on the face of dance partner after dance partner as I approached and the refried bean aroma reached them. They were all courteous, but it was a reminder that in France, loud noises and strong odors are often perceived as more invasive than the amount of physical space a person occupies, so my fajita miasma was probably not the best first impression to give people. On the other hand, the second and third impressions I gave probably weren’t any better (curry and Moroccan food) so now I shut my coat in another room when we eat and change my shirt before hopping on my bike for dance class.

We’re in the middle of a three-day wind here. It swung my lunch bag back and forth while I waited for the bus this morning and drowned out the buzz of the high-tension wires over the school where I teach on Thursdays. It knocked the shades against the windows during class and at recess, when I took a coffee outside to another teacher, she had one hand clamped over her ear to keep out the gusts.

In Toulouse people are used to this kind of wind. It’s called le vent qui rend fou – the wind that makes you crazy. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more tiring than anything else. The streets are like wind tunnels and when I ride my bike it’s like slogging through mud. I stand on the pedals, squint the grit out of my eyes and hunch against the cold. Sometimes it feels like the pedestrians are going faster than me.

Every day I start English class by asking, “How’s the weather?” and every day the kids shout back, “It’s windy!” I know this wind and what it’s bringing : winter, and two months of splattering rain and greyness.

YES. I finally got the payoff – this morning Harry Potter made me cry.

I wept into my coffee at the breakfast table. The tears’ tracks ran diagonally down my cheeks and I left them there until I was ready to leave for work. It was great.

This morning I had a moment of a different kind of unexpected pleasure. I went to one of my schools early to sit in on another English teacher’s lesson. She was introducing the weather to the class, and all of a sudden she dug in her purse, asked them all to be quiet and pulled out a CD.

She played “Singing in the Rain” to thirty raptly attentive French children and one rapt American. I felt full of warmth and surrounded by it while the song played; I don’t know what it was, but it was amazing.

Today my afternoon classes are canceled because my kiddies are going to the pool. At 10 AM, I herded my morning monstres back into their normal classroom and had a moment of disorientation – it took me a minute to realize I was FREE. Free time is such a rare gift these days!
I left school and walked out to do a crossword and wait for my bus to come. The school where I teach on Thursdays is a forty minute bus ride from the city center. I like to watch the landscape change on the way out: the downtowny narrow streets and old architecture give way to wider avenues on the outskirts with their big blocky apartment towers. My bus route in particular is interesting because it passes right in front of the former site of the AZF factory, where there was a huge chemical explosion a couple of weeks after 9/11. This explosion completely flattened a few square miles: apartment complexes, research centers, industrial buildings, and a hospital were totally destroyed. There’s a highway which passes over my bus route, and once we come out on the other side of the overpass, the land is completely different. You can see every stage of destruction and reconstruction. They’re making swift progress on a super-modern looking cancer research hospital, while a few hundred meters away, homeless people camp out in the graffiti-riddled concrete skeleton of an office building.

So today, while I was waiting for the bus, a nice old man offered to drive me back into the city. He and his grandson had just been to a job fair in a municipal building right next to the school where I teach. “We came here to look for a job – not for me, of course. I have a long-term contract with the Ministry of Retirement,” he said with a little smile. On the way back to the city we talked about the fires in California and the AZF explosion. The grandson had been on a field trip from school on the day the factory exploded, and he said that on the way back to school, all of the kids had to hide under the seats in the bus in case there was another explosion or some kind of attack. Pretty scary. As we went under the overpass, the older man told me that the cars driving in the lane closest to the factory were blown over to the other side of the highway.

That was my interesting morning. Everything else is going well. Kids are pretty awesome, but I’m still figuring out how to keep their attention and how to deal with the little miscreants before the whole class part dans tous les sens. It’s a sweet job, though. AND and and and and and and and and

AND I just checked my bank account – I GOT PAID! Youpieeeeeeee! For two months I’ve been burning dollars: all of my hard-earned tips, sacrificed to the terrible conversion rate. For a while there the balance on my ATM receipts was a bigger number after I took out my money – not a good sign – who knows why they don’t print the little minus sign in front of your balance when it’s negative! But now I can stop worrying about how to make the canned goods in our cupboards last as long as possible. From here on out, I’m eating Euros.

I didn’t know that ‘avoirdupois’ was a word in English until I got to know Le Robert & Collins computer edition – which is more fun than any computer game I’ve played in a long time (go ahead, laugh at me). Another good find was j’ai eu beau le chanter sur tous les tons, “no matter how many times I’ve said it.”

O PUREE, I’m twenty-two years old. On my birthday Stewart and I had bike ride and a nice dinner, and then we had more wine at the river with Xav and Stéphanie. We had a little chat with some drunk Americain au pairs, jeered at men peeing in the street, and then ended the night with another lovely bike ride. (J’aime la bicycle-tteuh, savez-vous comment?) So it was a good one.

Today I finally went to see the schools where I’ll be teaching. The teachers all seem really nice! I have a rather considerable case of la trouille at the prospect of having to manage large groups of small people, but I’ll make it work. It’s about time for me to stop being scared of people, anyway.

Well, September was a whirlwind. The Dickinson students’ arrival was as much a learning experience for me as it was for them : the first time I found myself face to face with a group of students, I had this weird déjà vu – I was reliving My First Day in France 2004, but instead of sitting in a chair feeling fragile and awed, I stood and spoke and tried really hard to emanate reassurance and strength.

Last weekend la Famille Dickinson voyaged to Paris, where all sorts of madcap things happened. Luckily, the students this year are all really curious, positive, friendly, helpful, motivated, etc. That didn’t prevent them from being late to pretty much everything, but I can’t really complain because I, too, was late to pretty much everything.

Lots of great things happened on our trip. There were many puppies involved : puppies in the street, puppies in bags, playing with each other or prancing after their masters. There were also lots of little children, none of them in bags, but some did play with each other and prance after their parents. Stew and I had fun watching the puppies and the babies.
I also enjoyed matching wits with the hotel cafeteria man who told me that all vegetarians eat fish, and if our vegetarians didn’t want tuna then they were vegan, and next time we should order vegan sandwiches (which we did, and got cheese).
On Saturday night we went out with Cécile, Domitille and some of the Dickinson girls, drank wine and ate plates of charcuterie in the back room of a wine store, where they served us despite the fact that we were not their usual clientèle – ‘usual’ being middle-aged men with sweaters on – and despite the fact that they were not legally allowed to be open that late in the evening. After that we went dancing at a bar/club whose name I shall translate as the “World’s Couch” where they played nothing but their jangling idea of Brit Pop.
I actually have lots of little anecdotes and reflections (does ‘reflections’ mean ‘thoughts’ in English? uh-oh, I’m semi-lingual again) to share with you. It’s too bad being far away means we have to be so far away.