FIELD NOTE 2.21 - Snow.

At 8h17 this morning I woke up to a French girl screaming outside of my window followed by a peal of laughter. More shocked at hearing the scream than annoyed, I gathered up the energy to roll up my blind only to discover the ground and cars were all covered with a fine sheet of white.
Snow.
I've been hearing about snow in Richmond for the past two weeks as it has come to my inbox and exploded on my FB and Twitter feeds. And with each new announcement I have grown steadily more and more depressed at actually missing the one winter when it snows at home. So waking to it this morning actually made me smile, even if the accumulation here was less than half an inch.
That smile quickly slipped from my face two hours later as I tried to make my way from my dorm to the tram stop in my no-tread Chucks. In the middle of my careful path down the sidewalk I witness the French snow removal system: one man with a leaf blower blowing the snow to the side while two men behind him look idly on and cast a mixture of salt and sand behind the first man. Thankfully for me, the man with the leaf blower let his machine idle as I approached. Unfortunately this did not save me from being covered in a fine sheen of snow crystals. I did the French thing: said "bonjour" and kept going.
The path from the tram stop at Faculté to the building where my oral French class is proved to be even more of a hassle than getting to the tram itself, for between the two lies a three minute walk.
Normally I enjoy this walk because it lets me fall into step alongside French students and forget eavesdrop a little before classes start, little snippets of clothes, dates, and classwork. Today that walk was covered in snow packed so tightly by students having stepped over it for the past few hours that it was now basically ice. I was forced to once again carefully make my way and pray that I wouldn't misstep - only this time I had to do all this in the presence of other students.
I'm not going to lie, I almost slipped and fell about fifteen times and at one point I may or may not have been making sure I was in tread with a sturdy-looking Frenchman just in case I happened to lose my footing so I could grab onto him and prevent myself from completely embarrasing myself.
The entire time I was doing all this a blush began to stain my cheeks. I like to think that if anyone happened to notice they would think it only a response to the cold. That blush changed from one of embarrassment to one of delight when I dared to look back and noticed several French students almost losing their footing. Suddenly all those times I had almost fallen seemed worth it just to be able to see others with the same predicament.
And then all thoughts of snow and Richmond lost my mind as I realized something: I was not alone.

FIELD NOTE 2.20 - Unexpected coffee is the best.

My daily goal, which is unashamedly uninspired by the Tal Bachman version of "Wear Sunscreen," is to do one thing every day that scares me. Since I have a penchant for isolating myself, doing something that scares me doesn't have to be some grand adventure. No, normally I just hop on a tram without a specific destination in mind.
Today I boarded the tram still talking with a girl from my French writing class who last week had invited me to join her at Marché Gloriette. We talked in broken French for the entirety of the tram ride about Skype and socially-imposed notions of masculinity and femininity. When it came time for her to get off the train I decided St. Mihiel was as good a stop as any and decided to get off with her and walk with her as far as her apartment, never expecting there to be an invitation to an impromptu coffee.
Two cups of coffee later, I made my way back outside and walked as far as Place du Cirque before boarding a tram and heading back to my dorm to get some homework done.
For three weeks the only coffee I have drank has come from vending machines in hostels and school hallways. I had almost forgotten how good it feels to drink coffee with a friend. (Note to self: Make sure this happens more often.)

FIELD NOTE 2.19 - I'm not scared, just changing.

Tomorrow there is a party scheduled for ISEP students that will unfortunately force me to miss my French writing class, the only class I actually feel like I know what I'm doing. Being me, I made sure that all the homework and classwork that I would be missing was done so that I could hand it in today after the class, a fact that seemed to genuinely surprise the professor.
One of the class exercises for tomorrow involves the concordance of time where we are given sentences with two actions and we are supposed to add in the time conjunctions that link the two together. Alors que, aussitôt longtemps que, depuis que, pendant, à, dès, avant que, après...the list goes on and on. There are so many that I cannot memorize them all in a single night and after looking at them for a while they all start to lose their edges and blur together.
I told the prof as much as soon as she started looking over the paper. She told me that she could tell I liked grammar. Curious, I asked her how she knew that.
You're always early to class. You listen attentively and always smile. You draw pretty trees when you concentrate on something you don't understand.
With just three sentences she had me pinned down completely. I do like grammar. Like math, it is a rigid code and if you know how to use the code, then you can say pretty much anything. Or at least this is how it seems in a classroom. Language in the real world is an entirely different entity.
When I said the same thing to the professor in (not-so-broken) French something happened between describing the difference between the classroom and real life.
A brief pause.
And during this pause my mind took over. Suddenly my hand was gesturing and my and my mouth was pursed and had admitted a slight puff of air, two gestures I have seen countless times over the past three weeks and never really thought twice about. Now, after they had been performed by me, they made my entire body suddenly feel like a foreign country.
The feeling passed and I began to finish my thought.
Sitting here six hours later, I can no longer feel that foreign sensation. The only thing left of it is the memory and even that doesn't scare me anymore.

FIELD NOTE 2.18 - I can't live without my pens.

The pen stopped writing in the middle of a word. I knew it was coming - I can always tell with these pens. The ink runs thickest right before the end and my words had been fluid for two days. The end was imminent.
Still even knowing this didn't stop the momentary panic of wondering whether or not I had a spare in my bag. Thankfully there were three.
The pens were actually the first thing to go in my bag as I packed for France. Fifteen in all - fifteen I prayed would be enough to make it through five months of class.
Now there are fourteen.

FIELD NOTE 2.17 – Now I become myself.

I’m beginning to love it here. I realized this as I stood shivering for the tram to come and take me from the fac to my dorm at 14h00 this afternoon. My classes are overwhelming me, I haven’t managed to make a single French friend, and I have absolutely idea no idea where my life is headed. And yet even with all of that, I still managed to feel peaceful standing there with my hands shoved as deep in my pockets as they would go.

I was told yesterday that I would never learn French in a classroom, that I would need to get out and practice. This is true. But I’m beginning to suspect the real reason that I’m here right now isn’t actually to learn French.

That’s just an added perk.

No, I’m beginning to feel that my being here is more personal than anything else. Every day is a ritual of class followed immediately by returning to my room to look up terms and verbs I didn’t know in class (and is normally quite lengthy). Living like this has meant I’ve had to spend quite some time alone, something that used to bother me a lot.

But here I’ve come to like being alone every day. It’s given me time to actually get to know myself, as silly as that sounds. Normally I hustle through each day, making lists of what needs to be done, what needs to be bought, what needs to be thought of. So many lists that my life seems to become a list in itself. Life isn’t like that here. Sure, I have my lists but they don’t seem nearly as imperative to complete as they did in Richmond.

I feel like I’m beginning to breathe again. I’m also beginning to see there are things about myself that I’ve completely overlooked and that I’m smarter, more amazing and (dare I say it?) more beautiful that I ever realized.

Knowing this, everything else seems secondary. The French, the friends will come in time. I am completely happy for the moment living completely alone, an exile in myself. Maybe this is what I need at this point in my life.

I finally understand the words of May Sarton’s “Now I Become Myself” when she wrote:

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)

Is this what is happening?

That sounds a lot like destiny, a term that has always worried me. I don't want to be fated to anything, I want to choose. I think that's what it is more than anything - I am choosing to finally be myself, I am becoming myself.

FIELD NOTE 2.16 - Little things.

I have two classes in la salle afrique each week and there have been three weeks of classes. That means I have sat through six classes in this room and yet only today did I realize that I had never even looked at the window. Too consumed by the pressing need to convert the words on the board to paper, I completely overlooked a single detail that made me take an appreciative pause.
Perhaps completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but ivy grows just outside of the classroom. On one side of the window the ivy is slowly climbing up the glass, its little roots holding fast in the upward climb against gravity, while on the other side of the window the ivy has obviously been ripped away, its absence notable only by the stains left behind on the wall.
The class discussion goes on around me - something about economy and grocery stores - and I try to figure out why that stain on the wall seems so important to me. I wonder if I've recently excised some part of myself in my transition process to life in France, but I can't feel any hollow ache.
There is a feeling, a very nameless feeling growing inside me. Impossible to put into words, but the best way I can think of to describe it is to tell you that I feel as if I've expanded past my shape and definition into...what exactly? The infinite? The unknown?
One question breeds another until my head is filled with them, each buzzing as I turn my mind back to economy. The one that lasts the longest is the hardest to dispel: Which am I, the ivy growing or the ivy cut away?

FIELD NOTE 2.15 - Words don't always mean the same thing, don't get offended.

The sentence translated to something roughly like: "Europe didn't want to form a union so shortly after WWII. Part of this stemmed from a fear of American hegemony..."
Five desks down to the right a hand immediately shot up, an American's. She told the professor that she normally doesn't support American policy but she wondered if there was any way that the teacher could speak more kindly of America because "hegemony" was just too strong a word for what the paper was really talking about. She said she would like the words to be changed.
After weeks of constantly having to shape my English sentences to fit the few French words I know, the girl's request angered me. That she felt the need to expand for five minutes in trivial pathos appeals just solidified the fact. Why should the French have to change their language when an American is in the room?
I came to France to learn the French culture and language, never expecting them to change one single nuance or sugarcoat realities for me. No, I do not have the all the words and I can speak only marginally better than a three year old, but that's all part of the experience.
So, professor keep your words as they are and I'll translate them without seeing them as an attack on either myself or my nation.