i get a thousand hugs from ten thousand lightning bugs.

First and foremost, I am always tired.

Second, this is what I'm thinking about:
sets of three
partner exercises
footwork, footwork
breathe!
sword takeaways
free fightings + one steps

Also, I am doing so much less for my thesis than I should be, but I still seem to be on top of my other work. I'm not sure what that means.

Ah, sickdays -- like some sort of vacation from hell, trapped in my parents' house with a deep chest cough and no medication but some sort of infrequent-use inhaler that, while it allows me to take a deep breath, is not curing my bronchitis.

This is apparently because I am idiotic and can't even manage to set up a doctor's appointment correctly.

This does not bode well for escaping from this place anytime soon.

I suppose while I am lying here, wishing I could taste the lentil soup I've been eating and also wishing that I could remember tae ryun four, I should get some things done, such as:
-finding a thesis adviser
-finding a thesis source base
-finding nommy recipes for vegetarian food

I also might explore the mysterious world of Hulu, the online television player. Other than that I have two books which I'm alternating between (Julie and Julia, by Julie Powell, and Skeletons at the Feast, by Chris Bohjalian), and after that I'm out.

More updates later, I suppose.

home front update

I've been home four days, and so far I have hair cropped short enough to frame my face, an ankle brace with reinforced stays that actually supports me, a very filthy pair of riding jeans, pain from kendo in my neck/shoulder that will not go away, and a lingering numbness from my right elbow down to my hand.

I'm still tired, only vaguely sleeping at appropriate times, but pleased enough to be back and able to do at least some things right away. Work starts on Monday.

cold turns your breath into clouds

It is anything but cold here, right now, in the gasping, record-breaking Lyonnais heat. I lay in the coolest room in the apartment with all the windows open, and dream while I am supposed to be studying.

I've been listening to this song a lot, possibly because the video is too cute for words. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4sa2HoXpsE&feature=PlayList&p=3C7EDDA78EE64DDD&index=1).

I am realizing that some combination of being physically inactive and living in the Land of Pastries has done some pretty serious damage to me. I'm not looking forward to having to buy new clothes for riding and for work when I get home -- hopefully something a summer at the barn and in the dojo can help me fix.

By the way, two songs that are really good to jump around in your underwear to are:
American Hi-Fi, "Flavor of the Week"
The All-American Rejects, "Give You Hell"
My weakness for bad pop-rock will probably never die.

I'll be home in nine days!

bisous?

As I sit here frantically striving for some sort of thesis topic to present to Professors Rossman and Reed, I have one headache inducing, worry inspiring thought -- France is not done with me.

Or, should I say, I am not done with France. Despite the myriad tribulations this country has put me through this semester (and, inadvertently, in semesters and years past), it seems my thesis will be nothing other than a careful treatment of some aspect of French history.

I need to be putting my energy into thinking up that thesis, I think, not blogging about it.

notes on other blogs

"Self-pity, needing someone, and the bittersweet sense of self-reliance. There must be an archaic, non-English word for that experience. (Probably French?)"
-nightmare brunette

The best I could think of was "débrouillardise" (resourcefulness), but I'm not sure it really carries the bittersweet combination that she's searching for.

The quote is an excerpt from a short piece on cities, loneliness, and life in your mid-twenties. I am very interested to see what the next handful of years brings me.

Now, back to the teeny world of note recopying.

listening to: mixes from ML
reading: blogroll

well you put on quite a show.

This is the first book I want to read when I get home. (http://openlibrary.org/b/OL2196866M/Above-the-river)

I never thought I would actually feel like I was living in a James Wright poem.

listening to: Take A Bow (remix) // Rihanna
reading: nothing much

Maybe it will be a little countdown tradition?

It being precisely five weeks until I go home, I am taking this moment to compose a short list of places I just can't wait to go.

1) The dojo. Uptown, downtown, class, or workout, I can't wait to get back to being the eternally-abused brown belt.
2) The barn. I would be happy to reek of horses, leather cleaner, and hay-dust.
3) Bodo's.
4) The downtown mall -- I hear it's having a facelift?
5) The nest.
6) My huge, low, down-comforter-dominated bed at my parents' house.
7) Proffit Road.
8) The Lawn-proper, The Corner, steps of the Rotunda, Old Cabell, Harrison-Small, and of course ALDERMAN.
9) Greenberry's.
10) Daedalus Books.

listening to: ML's mix (rap side)
reading: notes for Souveraineté et Mondialisation

dive in like honeybees

I have so much to say, and it feels like so little time left to say it.

Maybe I never mentioned that I could never stop writing, not even for a brief hiatus, when I turned my back on the suggestion of being an English major and fell into the challenge of learning about something new. I know what you're thinking, that I could have sunk so deeply into literature, poetry courses, an interdisciplinary creative writing honors program, and come through these long four years with a portfolio worth showing.

I wonder if that would have been a better use of my time, as I tap my fingers on the dirty table and wonder how I am supposed to write a historical thesis abstract in the the next twenty-three days.

It's been more than four months since I've sat down to write an academic paper, the notes and sources and reference books arranged around my cross-legged form in a perfect semi-circle, coffee cups perched on the table and ignored, a pen twisted in my hair to keep it out of the way as I frown in concentration, my fingers flying to keep up with the corseted, gasping, tightly-laced flow of facts and images. I haven't recently had the pleasure and the tension of a deadline ticking down, the exquisitely formatted margins bottlenecking my text, three tabs on citation formats open in the background.

When I write papers, I write them straight through, churning out a page every fifteen minutes with footnotes included, racing through a detailed outline, until finally I reach the end. Then I sit back, reread, edit, scowl and change things, delete and add, move paragraphs around, polish the piece.

That love/hate relationship with the tightly bound freedom of writing papers is, at the end of the day, why I want to write a thesis so badly. Maybe sometimes I have been forgetting that desire.

Reading: my notebook
Listening to: What Sarah Said // Death Cab for Cutie

listmaking early on a Thursday morning.

In precisely two months I'll be journeying home.

Here are the things I can't wait to see:
-bagels
-correctly formed lines
-stores that are open between noon and 2pm
-trees, grass, and similarly green things
-mountains
-American coffee
-ponies
-you

Here are the things I could be fine with never seeing again:
-American cars
-news from the conservative right
-my class schedule for fall 2009
-traffic on 29-North
-prices in dollars
-most fast food restaurants

hot beverages get you into trouble every time.

tea on the Macbook last night, so not good.

hoping to get the situation resolved within the week.

days until family arrives: 3
days until B arrives: 12

extremely irate Sunday morning

European Daylight Savings Time WHAT? (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=195)

Apparently it's an HOUR LATER HERE.

And I thought the US was the only country stupid enough to think time was under its control to change.

...I hate having another hour of time difference between here and home. Great. I guess I'm running late now.

unwelcome spring news

I sprained my ankle for the seventh time in three years today.

Misery. I will be spending most of my weekend indoors with the offending joint propped on a pillow and wrapped in an ace bandage. It's impossible to find ice in this country, so I'm not going to ice it -- and I haven't iced it since time no. 3 anyway, so it should be okay.

It hurts unbelievably. Super.

reading: my email
listening to: the street noise outside

two completely unrelated paragraphs.

You leave me alone for a day, curled in bed and finishing all the books in my room, and this is what happens. I decide to write for debauchette and nightmare brunette, and not just to select one of the hundred labeled, catalogued, numbered word documents on my hard drive. No, I have time, and I certainly have no shortage of subject matter. I will write them something entirely new.

I long, right now, for the feeling of mucking stalls in the dead of winter, swearing and stripping off my gloves to punch through ice-caked water buckets, my fingers turning blue over and over again in waves. You're not a rider, a horse owner, until you've stood in an unheated barn at the crack of dawn, your warm breath condensing and immediately freezing on your scarf. I'm with K on this, though -- I like barn chores, the simple weight of the work.

reading: feministing.com
listening to: rest your eyes // azure ray

this is the way, is the way that we live

Tonight I watched The L Word's season finale. I don't know what I expected, but (forgive the spoilers, I assume if you haven't seen it yet, you're not going to) they definitely get catharsis points for finally killing Jenny Schecter.

This was the show's sixth season. The pilot episode aired on January 18th, 2004. I didn't start following the show until the spring of 2006, which is when season 3 was beginning. I played catchup with seasons 1 and 2 that summer, and was pretty much hooked.

I've seen those first three seasons countless times, and they certainly carry connotations of the beginning of a relationship that's over now, which is kind of strange to think about.

I remember watching season three, curled up on the tan leather couch on Sunday nights, never able to make it through an episode without being distracted by each other. We were seventeen, tiny, scared of going to college, and ferociously in love.

The seasons continued to air and develop more and more ridiculously through our first and second years of college. This was before they went online legally, in high definition, and we would call each other with YouTube links to the most recent episode, watching pirated ten-minute segments in the few hours before they got taken down. The portrayal of queer people, and the drama in general, became more and more unrealistic, but I continued to watch because we all did. Love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in between, but the bi, lesbian, curious, and questioning girls all watched The L Word.

We aged, both of us, and I only feel it now, looking back across time. Watching the finale was certainly sweeping, and I am sure that it moved me more because of how faithful I've been to the show. I certainly never imagined that I would be watching it alone in an apartment in downtown Lyon. I am twenty, not at all tiny, living in a foreign country, noting a profound dissociation between the past and the present. To paraphrase, that was the past, and this is the present. I am no longer the person who lived in that past.

But tonight, ah, tonight brings these things back, perhaps in sharper focus that I would like.

The river moves like glass under the streetlight. I ache, for many things but primarily to be curled in bed with a glass of tea and a book, at the moment.

Listening to: You Are the Best Thing // Ray Lamontagne
Reading: The Fellowship of the Ring // J.R.R. Tolkien

in my room, you can go, you can stay.

It's the end of another lazy Tuesday here in Franceland, Lesbia, and I still have no idea what to do with myself.

My mind is far away, thinking of the fall. I started this little corner of a blog in the fall, a fall that's now a year and a half ago, on the same day that I perched myself on the steps of the Rotunda (University Avenue side) and wrote a poem that 3.7 later published.

I miss the Classics girl who was part of my life in that time, at whom I bubbled once in a café about my new best friend. I remember her raising her hands together, palms inches apart. Face to face, she said. Stay away from this distance, it's dangerous.

I saw her in the architecture school one day last fall, a year after that conversation and that friendship happened. She asked me how I was, and she looked to sad to hear the truth, so I said exactly what I was saying to everyone last semester: "School's good!" She raised one eyebrow, and I raised my hands, inkstained, thin, cracked and calloused, turning my palms inward, face to face. And then I walked away.

Anyway, it was a good poem, and I remember us commiserating about how much we adored Sappho, how dirty Catullus really was, how incredibly gay this all made me.

I haven't been able to pass in the world as a straight girl since my junior year of high school, and then only briefly. I realize now that one of the things I miss the most is our mutual, fierce pride at living on the outside, at weathering the insults, the catcalls, and the compliments alike.

I suspect that, when I go home, I will be struck by how different the world feels now.

Reaching further back, I realize I miss queer culture, feeling like a part of something with a group and a definition and a name. I miss the overwhelming, glossy, flamboyant boys, the only ones whom I would ever allow to pressure me into a party, a dance floor, a drink in my hand. Something about their energy always pulled me out of my reticent, serious self and encouraged me to laugh more, to smile more, to enjoy the beat and the alcohol and the pretty, pretty girls.

I never go out anymore. There are all the reasons I typically give, and then there are others, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

In all truth, this post stretched from a night into a morning, and now I've somewhat lost the original train of it all.

I don't envy her engagement in the slightest. My needs can all be summed up in one phrase: please, please, you've got to get on the same continent as me. After that, everything else can just worry about itself.

More to the point, I've got to get home. At this point I am just willing the days to go by, devouring books I never thought I was interested in (but I'm so glad I gave Tolkien another chance), napping the afternoons by, ticking each successive day off on the calendar on the wall. Once June is finally upon us, I will be preparing to get on a jet plane. I already promised you that I would never go so far without you again.

listening to: the beatles
reading: The Fellowship of the Ring // J.R.R. Tolkien

you did nothing wrong, and nothing right

While going for my morning run, I occupied my mind as I usually do, jogging along with some sort of bouncy iPod playlist and scanning methodically from left to right, then from right to left, in my field of vision. La berge du rivier was fairly crowded with promenaders, bicyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, French mamans pushing prams, and other runners, as usual.

As I passed one of the many half-pipe / skate park type areas, my eyes swept over a young man stretching with his skateboard propped up next to him. He looked like someone in kneeling seiza who had fallen over -- his lower legs still folded underneath him, but his torso flat along the ground, shoulders resting on the concrete, the smallest of arches in his lower back.

In the fraction of a second that it took for my brain to process the visual information, mental images shot through my head, narrowing around the look and the feel of the muscle the boy was stretching (the internet seems to indicate this is either the tensor fasciae latae or the sartorious, the flat deep muscle gathered just below either hipbone-point).

I saw a long front stance, the tension ripping through a room simultaneously; watched a girl mount a running horse, her powerful hips flexing to vault onto his back. The ghosts of fingertips gripped white-knuckled onto the lines of muscle standing out through my skin, felt the lengthening and resistance there.

I used to be able to do that stretch, to tip backwards until I lay flat on the ground, looking up at the sky. I don't think I can do it anymore.

Or maybe I could. The thought has stuck with me for the otherwise unremarkable and lazy day.

36 days.

killing time on Thursday evening

From my morning internet perusal:
"I just wish two things were more promoted in our sexual culture: pubic hair and foreskin."

Thank you, thank you, nightmare brunette, for making me feel like I'm not the second-to-only person constantly saying this. Well, the former point, at least (I can't claim any beliefs about the latter).

Apparently the reflection comes from reading the tumblr site sexartandpolitics, which I'm not familiar with personally, but I scoped out the offending post that inspired nightmare brunette's comment and perhaps I'll add it to the 'roll.

Come on, I'm living in a foreign city with no classes and nothing to do but soak up French culture and spend money. The least I can have is an extensive Anglophone blogroll to read in the morning before I go out and do those important things.

Eh, on second perusal, I think I can skip it. Too much watered down politics that I already get in full force from my obsessive reading of The New York Times and BBC World Service.

Nothing else of note to report. Hop on over to Squidgirl in Lyon to take a look at my pictures from Italy, or, you know, kick back with a giant mug of tea and some sudoku and a view of the river like I'm doing right now.

38 days.

you've been leading me beside strange waters

I am, as usual, baffled by the things I learn on Facebook.

It's too early in the morning for this kind of excitement (namely, the kind that isn't exciting at all). I am still lying in bed, not looking forward to pulling back the curtain and surveying the cloudy day, not looking forward to having to fill another endless morning and afternoon with things to do.

It's only been five months.

Today marks my two-month anniversary in Franceland.
In one month I will be entertaining my parents, and anxiously counting down the days until you arrive.
In three months I will be celebrating my second full day back home.

I guess that's all. I still can't bring myself to go out for breakfast. Maybe a midafternoon coffee. Then again, probably not that either.

like painted kites those days and nights went flying by

Wow, today has just been one of those awful, awful days that blindsides you every once in awhile.

It all started with my lack of sleep, I think, because even though I got seven or eight hours last night, the two-day trek back from Italy is something that my body surely hasn't recovered from yet. Pair general fatigue with my recently re-sprained ankle and I was already pretty ready to drop.

But the really bad part was when ML and I trekked all the way out to class and discovered that this grève nonsense is still going on. I still say that I respect French administration, chercheurs/enseignants, and etudiants, but for the sake of everything holy, this is the fourth week of strikes. When we got there the students had taken it upon themselves to physically blockade the stairs / doors to the auditorium with tables, chairs, etc. I've never encountered so much opposition for trying to go to class before.

So back to Quai Sarrail we marched in the cutting wind, chilly and miserable, both (I suspect) wishing we were walking along the sunny River Arno in Florence again.

This was particularly crushing to me because I was impatient during much of Italy to get back to a life with a routine. Although students might not have the strictest time schedule, everyone sorts out their own daily plan and I especially like to have a reliable routine to my days. It helps me feel productive. But I came back and things are just as nonsensical as before.

All these things combined, I spent the remaining morning hours curled up miserably in bed, rolling back and forth with the ponies tucked against me, feeling completely sorry for myself and generally homesick. I finally gave in to the need for some external comfort and dialed your number from Skype, despite the extreme earliness of the hour (just around 6am at home). On the third try I woke you up successfully, and I got to hear your bewildered, sleepy voice on the other end of the line, slowly making sense of my words. Undeniably comforting, if very selfish.

After that I summoned all my courage and got out of bed, walked to the kitchen (blessedly deserted of roommates, who were similarly napping or out), and slowly put some lunch together. Once I had fed myself and had some tea I curled up again and closed my eyes, convinced my body needed rest. I woke up a couple times but managed a two-hour nap, waking in the late afternoon to bright sunlight pouring onto me.

I'm still upset about the same things (no classes, few chances to practice my French, a feeling of general uselessness) but feeling much less despairing about them. I've made a resolution to go running more, because I need a higher level of exercise than I'm getting here, but the full-body fatigue combined with the ankle makes that seem like a bad idea for today. Maybe I will practice some self-defenses or kendo stance sword work tonight to take it easy.

I have to say that was the worst that I've felt not just since coming to France, but in a long, long time. I hope things here settle the way that they're supposed to, and soon.

I think that's all for now, Lesbia. From across the ocean, I bid you au revoir.

and what if there are no damsels in distress?

I had a friend once who owned the complete discography of Ani DiFranco. I had forgotten about this album until a few minutes ago, and Not A Pretty Girl stuck out at me. I like angry Ani better than almost anything.

Lyon is Raining. Not just raining as in for a few hours, stopping toward the evening and breaking into a lovely, mild night. Raining as in with a capital "R", pouring from the first light in the morning until late at night, pedestrian streets flooding, crosswinds flipping umbrellas inside out on the bridges, water driven absolutely sideways by the gusts. You can barely stand in a doorway without getting soaked to the skin.

It is a particularly bad time for this kind of rain because we have not had classes for more than a week now due to the professor strikes against Sarkozy's education reforms. I finally heard a good explanation -- he is trying to change the requirements for becoming a teacher, shifting the focus away from historical and cultural knowledge to pedagogical logic, as in, how to teach, rather than what to teach. The French are not reacting positively.

You can see how the combination of these two things can get a girl down. But I've tried to have a productive day, braving the rain to explore bookstores and pick up plenty of groceries for the weekend (seriously, where does all my money go?) and suchlike.

We're also planning the Florence trip, which is getting more and more out of control. Hopefully all will, in fact, go as planned.

Off to be anti-social until dinner.

Election international

Tomorrow, as you are all painfully aware by now, is the much-awaited inauguration day. While I am across the ocean, currently hunting for a bar or a friend with a television so I can watch Obama's speech with my fellow expatriots tomorrow evening (due to the time difference, it will be from five to eight pm here), I am thinking tonight about November fourth of last year.

My memories of the first presidential election during which I had the right to vote are decidedly positive, and also charged with feeling.

I remember walking into the polls, fixing the familiar middle-school gym with a direct stare, aware that history was being made. I stood in line and thought, most appropriately, about showing you the movie Iron Jawed Angels, about the sacrifices that were made so that I, and not only you, could vote on that day.

Exit polling was a whole new excitement for me, and I stood in the rain and did it, to the delight of a PolySci student in the parking lot. Then I ran back to the car, raving about how exciting exit polls were, and you laughed as we drove away.

That night there were two bottles of wine, the winning bottle and the losing one, a white and a red, and we curled up tight in the already-drafty living room and held our breath as the results came in, state by state.

It was eleven pm by the time that they called Virginia blue, and I looked at you, and you looked back at me, in disbelief and the dawning realization that it had really happened. We ran out into the dark street and set off fireworks, listening to the exuberant reveling that was starting around us, enveloping the two of us in a cloud of smoke and noise. I called my mother, woke her up, screeched my excitement into the phone over a bad connection.

We left the door standing open and I didn't hear a word of any victory of concession speech, didn't see the footage of proud supporters crying and laughing at the same time.

We stood on the corner of the damp porch and held each other tightly under the eaves, and I think I cried a little bit when I said we did this, this is happening because we're here.

And then I said something else, something I hadn't intended or even known I would say, the words tumbling from me into you like little birds, half-whispered in my second language (prettier by far than the first) and you stared down at me. Say it again, you said. And I did, brazen and eyes wide open this time, unmistakably there.

You picked me up and carried me across the threshold into the house, kicking the door shut as we went. We turned off McCain's concession speech and that was the end of that.

You're going to miss inauguration, you told me, and I just smiled.

And yes, I do wish I could be home to celebrate with the rest of everyone, but most particularly with you. It will be good and it will be moving and it will be unmistakably positive to watch it here, whenever I can, bonding in our little island of Americana one third of a world away. But it won't match even a quarter of the goodness of last November.

On an unrelated note, here are the songs that I have come to miss the most:
Babylon / David Grey
When You Were Young / Oasis
So Alive / Ryan Adams
Reva Thereafter / Girlyman
Live Your Life / Rhianna feat. TI
Wonderwall / Cat Power
Under the Table and Dreaming / Dave Matthews Band

All those songs that I used to play while I was driving and sing along with, drumming my hands on the steering wheel, constantly ramping up the volume until it filled the whole world.

Well, hello, you!

Here are the things you should really know:

Lyon, France is good so far. I would say that, for a girl with commitment issues and fears of traveling and an introverted nature, I'm adjusting pretty well. I've done a good job of making friends, I think. We're moving into an apartment today, but I'll still be with two friends, so that is good.

I never thought I would hear Taylor Swift over here, but I did, and I won't lie, it made me miss you very much.

Anyway, we're trying to organize, so off I go. New places, here we come.

Oh, and I discovered at dinner last night that one of the girls I am moving in with was, no joke, E and M's next door neighbor in Reeves last year. Small world, isn't it?

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

I leave for France in three days.

Pepsi is arranged for, with five different people on hand to ensure that he is cosseted, ridden, petted, fed, trimmed, and generally smushed with love.

Red Stripe and Thé will be delivered to the nest on Saturday, and my car will remain at my parents' house, hopefully to be driven occasionally.

That's the everything of value that I own; all of my sundry possessions that I can't take are staying in boxes here. Mostly books and fancy clothes, as well as school things and odds and ends that I don't need or can buy overseas.

***

I'm ready to go. As Rick said, I guess I'll find out when I get on the plane, but I just stood in a parking lot and yelled "I'll see you in France!" which pretty much sealed the deal.

And I realized that this is the beginning that is coming from the end. To be honest, this town is crushing me with thoughts and memories of you, and as much as I love home, I don't want to come back until my guilt and pain have lessened. The only thing I really want is time.