Something to help with the excitement...

This video has made me feel a little better.

Update on the visa status: I have made a bit of progress, and gained a slightly earlier appointment, but it's still not good enough. I am still working on it though.

"Lose another day here, lose another year here; I'm with you..."

I've been home in New York for about a week now, and things are not going so well.

I'd rather not give too many details, but I've screwed up my visa application process, and it looks like I may not be able to get my visa in time for my scheduled departure, and I am absolutely devastated. It's completely my fault, and I'm having a very hard time with it emotionally. I feel like I've screwed up my dreams before they've even happened yet.

Enough of that.

I'm going through a stage of unexcitement. What makes me want to do this? Why for so long? It's so far away. I will miss my friends. It all sounds so silly when I write it down like this, but it's the truth. I'm starting to feel really uncomfortable about the whole thing. I'm sure that once everything works out I'll be feeling much better, but right now it's really really tough. I just wish there was an easy answer to everything that's been going through my head recently. I suppose there isn't though, and I just have to work through it on my own.

Tears On My Keyboard, and Global Citizenship

Today was my last day at Rollins for a very long time. But let's talk about last night first.

I spent my last night in Florida with some of the greatest people I know, at one of my favorite places--Tolla's restaurant in Winter Park. I feel so lucky to have had 20 of some of the greatest friends to have joined me last night. I think it makes it even that much harder for me to leave for such a long time. There is nowhere else on this planet that I could have done that and had so much fun, than in Winter Park, Florida.

Afterwards, I spent the night with Aspen, Brittany, Jackie, Zach, and Scott. We had a great time. We celebrated Aspen's birthday with a cookie cake, and stayed up until past 2am, just hanging out and having a good time. The others stayed up later than me, because I wanted to go to bed so I could wake up and watch the sunrise over lake Virginia.

And that's what I did: Woke up at 6am, and made my way over to Dinky Dock. The sunrise was absolutely magnificent--just breathtaking. The whole plave looked like a poem--all the yellows and oranges and purples and blues swirled in the water, while dragonflies skimmed across the surface. The moss in the trees swayed in the breeze like a metronome, and I was at that moment perfectly content. It was the most amazing sunrise I have ever seen on the lake.

Now comes the (not-so) fun part. Of course, I waited until the very last minute to pack and clean and move out, so when I got back from the sunrise I did laundry. I cleaned my room and packed. Packing was very difficult--I did not realize how much clothes I had with me. I barely fit everything in my bags. In fact, I gave three pairs of shorts to Dustin, who thankfully accepted them!

I then went to Starbucks. Of course, I had to go to Starbucks one last time. It was a little sad to say goodbye there actually. It is slightly embarassing how much time I spent there this past summer...A little while later, Aspen, Brittany, and Jackie woke up (finally), and we went to the farmer's market. Oh, how I will miss the Winter Park farmer's market. We had a great time.

Got back to Rollins, and I finished packing and cleaning. Then Courtney Howell came over and she helped me move my stuff to my cousin Ann Marie's house, and we went to lunch at Panera. I am so thankful to her for helping me! After lunch I began saying goodbyes. I am not going to dwell on goodbyes very much because many of them were difficult. Very difficult, so that's all I am going to say about that. Courtney came back at about 4:30, and we left for the airport.

And noe, I am sitting here in front of Gate 126 in the Orlando Airport waiting for departure, and there are tears on my keyboard. As I said above, leaving Rollins for such a long time is very difficult for me. The life I have in Winter Park is amazing. I love all of the people, and the town, and the atmosphere. Someone asked me today what I was going to miss the most, and my only answer is being there. I can not say enough how much I love Rollins and Winter Park. I already miss it, and I already can't wait to get back.

But now I am off, to pursue the world, and to become the best global citizen I could be--after all, isn't this what Rollins wants me to be? I can't wait to bring this back and share it with everyone I love.

I Have an Address

This past Tuesday, I was sent my home stay information, which is what I have been waiting for all summer, because I think it is the information that makes this whole thing so real. Now that I know where I am living, I think I am ten times more excited about going to Paris.

I am so excited about the family I’ve been assigned to. I didn’t receive that much information about them, but what little information I know is very exciting. They live in the 14^thParis (picture below). arrondissement, which is the very south of the city of The specific area in which they live (according to my research) is fairly quiet and not very touristy (which I am very happy about!). Although it is not the most exciting area, it is very well situated because it is very near a lot of cool places. I am only a four minute ride on the metro to my school. There is also a little park about 5 minutes away, and a nice street with shops and cafes (from what I can see on google maps).

Madame is a lawyer, and the bottom floor of their home is used as her law office. Monsieur is a physician. They have four children, but only their 13 year old son lives at home. They have a 17 year old daughter who visits home often, so I assume she is at boarding school or college fairly nearby. They also have a small dog (not very exciting to me, but I suppose I’ll have to get used to it). That’s pretty much all the information I have about them so far. I haven’t received any real contact information yet, or even their first names, so I hope that comes fairly soon. My friend Jose lived with them last semester apparently, and he loved them, and said that I would as well. I really can’t wait to meet them.

Well it is just past midnight on Friday, which means I’m officially leaving Rollins tomorrow night. I’m planning on writing another post while I wait in the airport, so expect that soon.

Above is an image of where I'm living, stolen from google maps! Not the best quality photo because I had to save the screenshot image in Paint...

July 6, 1909

Today, I was working in the Olin Library, and was very distracted from my work. So, I decided to look through the novels in the the French section of the library. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, and nothing was really striking me as interesting. All of a sudden, I noticed a small, old, army-green colored book. It was so old, that the title had rubbed off of the spine and cover, so that you could not read it. I opened the book, and there, written on the first page was a signature (the name is slightly illegible, and the date, "7/6/09." I could not believe my eyes--this was exactly 100 years earlier! It seemed too much like fate, and I had to take the book out.

The book is called L'Abbé Daniel, written by Andre Theuriet; I had never heard of neither the book nor the author. After some research, I found that Monsieur Theuriet had been a lawyer in the late 1800s, who also write novels and poetry, and even won a few awards. This particular book was first published in France in 1893. The copy I found was printed in New York in 1906, as a sort of text book for beginning French students. It inclides an introduction and notes by Robert L. Taylor, PhD., a former French professor at Dartmouth College. The back of the book includes a whole vocabulary section of words in the novel for students to use. I was unable to find any plot synopses of the book, so I have no idea what it is about, but I am very excited to see what is inside this book. I would imagine, just from the title, that it is about a priest named Daniel. I will keep you updated.

This is, quite possibly, the coolest coincidence I have ever experienced.


The front cover of the book--Notice the wear and tear.


The date and the signature on the inside cover.

The title page of the book.



Update, 24 July 2009: The book put me to sleep within the first 3 pages. I hate to say it, but in this case, I had to give up on fate, and return the book without having read it. Oops.

Frugal Paris

I found this article in the New York Times, this morning.


http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/travel/28frugalparis.html?em


:)

BBC's 100 Books

Found this from a friend on facebook. I did some searching, and found further instructions, which I have added myself.

If I am to be a writer, I think it is my duty to one day read all of these books.

BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Put an 'X' after those you have read.
Put a ‘+’ after those you love.
Put an ‘*’ after those you want to read

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X +
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dicken X +

Total: 7/10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott *
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy *
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller *
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (almost…) *+
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien *
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk *
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X +
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *

Total: 1/10

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (started, but never finished) *
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams *
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame *

Total: 2/10

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens *
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X +
34 Emma-Jane Austen *
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe X +
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

Total: 4/10

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell *
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X +
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving *
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins *
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy *
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (loved the movie, couldn’t get through the book) *

Total: 2/10

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert *
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons *
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen *
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth *
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon *
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (If you know anything about me, you know that this is my absolute favorite book of all time) X +++
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon X +
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *

Total: 2/10

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X +
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt *
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy *
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding *
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville *

Total: 1/10

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker *
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett *
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson *
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Inferno – Dante *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome *
78 Germinal - Emile Zola *
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray *

Total: 0/10

80 Possession - AS Byatt *
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens *
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell *
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker *
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro *
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry *
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom *
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton *

Total: 3/10

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (in French, of course) X +
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks *
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams *
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole *
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute *
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X +
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Total: 5/10

Total, over-all: 27/100

I need to get reading.

My Favorite Picture

I decided to change the look and layout of this blog, and in doing so, my favorite picture no longer fit at the top. So, I decided to post it here so everyone could still see it. Some of you may recognize it as the desktop background on my computer :)


Enjoy.

My Own Moveable Feast

This weekend I finished reading A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. This book is a set of memoirs written about the famous author’s years living and writing in Paris during the 1920s. There are so many things about this book that make my head spin, because of how amazingly wonderful it is. Hemingway, at least in this book (since it’s the only one of his I’ve read so far—many more to come of course) is a name dropper. There are so many other famous and renowned expatriate writers and personalities mentioned in this book, with whom Hemingway had much interaction, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (by the way, he and Zelda were a mess). I can’t imagine being in a more perfect place at such an amazing time—interacting with all these remarkable people and being influenced by them in so many different ways. I think I will say it—I want his life.

One of the things I’m most excited about in moving to Paris is writing. I want to write, and I think reading this book helped me realize, that I want to be a writer. Wow. I’ve figured life out; well, not quite. I never thought that I would want to be a writer, and now that I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, it is certainly not something that is going to make me very rich in life, but I think it is something that will make me happy, and that is all one ever really wants in life—to be happy. For the longest time I wanted to be an actor. Those plans changed a while ago. So, I’ll be a starving artist in a different kind of way now.

Now what am I going to do? In the past, I’ve been mostly a poet. I don’t want to be a poet. Not that I wouldn’t mind continuing to write poetry; in fact, I do it quite often. I want to write a book. So, I am going to write a book about Paris. I am going to write my own Moveable Feast. I obviously can’t write it yet, because I haven’t yet been to Paris, but I think as soon as that plane takes off on 3 September, my pen will be on a notebook writing the first dew lines of a masterpiece.

In the meantime, I’ll be sitting in the Olin Library, dreaming.

Speaking French in Central Florida

I am spending this summer working as a research assistant in the department of Anthropology here at Rollins, working on a project studying French slang usage from a linguistic perspective. I would prefer not to get into too much detail here on the project because we are still in the early stages of the work, but it is an ethnography, so our main source of information is one-on-one interviews with native French speakers living in the central Florida area. So far I have met with three French people living near by, and I must say that it has been amazing, and it is helping me become even more excited about leaving for France. All three of these people have been absolutely fantastic. They are more than glad to talk to us about our project, but even more glad to speak with me, because I am a student of their language, getting ready to move to their homeland. They have been easy to talk to (all in French, of course) and it has been a really positive reinforcement for me as I prepare to move to a country where I will have to use this language 24/7. I am feeling incredibly confident in my linguistic capabilities, and my ability to communicate in French. I am so glad to have this job this summer, because it is unexpectedly preparing me for my trip abroad. I am also learning a lot about French culture through these interviews, which will certainly help very much while I am over there.

And yes, I have finally applied for my visa. It was a difficult process, but I submitted all of the forms and mailed my payment. I have about another week and a half until I will hear back from the embassy. I'm sure that it is all fine, however I am still nervous that I did something wrong. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see.

I am also anxiously awaiting the arrival of more information about my departure and arrival. I really want to know where I will be living. That is really the most pressing thing I want to know. I have no idea when I will be finding this information out either. It could be tomorrow, or it could be the last week in August, which is obviously very frustrating. I also want to know about my classes, but I know that I won't know about these until I arrive in September. Apparently we need to take a placement exam during orientation. Slightly annoying yes, but how hard could it be?

Anyway, I'm sitting here in the Olin Library avoiding real work, and I think it would be in my best interest to get back to that. Or, take a nap...