FIELD NOTE 4.17 - Faire la grasse matinée.

I have taken the liberty of using this 3-day weekend to catch up on all my missed sleep. For the past 2 nights I haven't woken up before 11h00 in the morning, a first for me considering before this weekend the latest I have every been able to sleep in my room was 9h40.
The sleep was welcome and it makes the days go by faster, but I have a feeling that I will pay for it when it comes time to wake up at 7h00 on Tuesday morning for my early classes.
Still, the late hour seems to me a triumph of a sort.

FIELD NOTE 4.16 - Easter in France.

Today is Easter - the day of resurrection to some and to others just the day of chocolate.

Never having been very religious, I typically count myself amongst the latter. But this year, being so far from home and having asked my parents to send me nothing else, I knew that there would be no candy come this morning.
Even knowing this, it was hard to accept. It's wasn't even the thought of not having any chocolate that made me sad, it was as if I was somehow willingly breaking a cycle or ending a practice before its time.
So I did the only thing I could think of: I bought myself a chocolate Easter bunny at the grocery store. It's not that much to look at, this hollow shell of dark chocolate wrapped in gaudy gold foil, but it means the world. So the cycle continues and the practice is unbroken and the world will not fall into chaos.
I couldn't quite bring myself to tear open that foil today and begin nibbling on the ears. Instead I merely contented myself with the bunny's presence on my desk, occasionally reaching out and ringing the bell on the ribbon around its neck. And I smiled, the world here seeming a little more like home.

FIELD NOTE 4.15 - Deal.

My hair is longer now than it has ever been and I am now just beginning to learn things about it that I never knew before: it curls as it grows in a way that brings to mind the word "Greek," it refuses to be tamed some days, I don't know if I can name its color or if I've ever seen it before.
So many things I never knew about about a part of me I rarely ever thought about until I decided to make a deal with my mother. It was one of those early days soon after my arriving here when I realized that my hair was growing and I was still a little bit homesick. Somehow in the course of an email dialogue my mother and I both came to the following agreement: that from that day until the time I arrive back home neither of us would cut our hair.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now it just seems like all I can see are the split ends and that life is almost always a bad hair day.
But even still, I don't regret it for a minute, this decision.

FIELD NOTE 4.14 - Lemon trees and metaphor.

A few weeks ago in my phonetics class we listened to a song called "Le Citronnier" by Amélie-les-Crayons, a song about love and lemon trees. Since that time the song has constantly been in my mind.
Some days I wonder if my heart became a lemon tree and I had to take it back to Virginia with me and replant it, then would it survive there? To be sure the same sun shines there that shines on France, it just shines here 6 hours earlier. And it's actually warmer there then here. But still, this lingering doubt, a question: Is it even possible to go back to the way things were and will the roots ever run as deep as they once did?
I fear the answer is no.

FIELD NOTE 4.13 - Broken umbrella (again).

The wind stole my umbrella then ripped it.
This has happened before, the last time I managed to fix the rip with a few bits of string and a few well-placed knots. This time there is no room for strings or knots.
So now I must content myself with searching for a new umbrella, this time one that can stand the wind.

FIELD NOTE 4.12 - How sad.

I realized something in the middle of Alice in Wonderland that suddenly made my breath hitch and a bloom of sadness grow inside me as the Hatter walks Alice toward the castle of the White Queen and mutters the words to "The Jabberwocky" under his breath. I have long loved this poem and now as it was being spoken to me in the voice of Johnny Depp and the translation appeared in those annoying yellow Ariel letters at the bottom of the screen I realized that some things can never be translated, that in translation they will always lose something - that undeniable and all-important something that makes them perfect.
How sad that the French will never be able to understand the words in quite the same way - neither the words of "The Jabberwocky" nor the phrase "Have I gone around the bend?" No, for them it will always be a flatter picture, the bend replaced by the cool question "Have I gone mad?"
How I wanted to tell them that there must be bends to madness, that madness is never a straight line or a simple phrase.
And then the sad realization that the same is true of me - I will forever be forced to live in the shallows of this language, never to understand the deepest parts.
Sad, that.

FIELD NOTE 4.11 - Movie night.

We've been saying that we should do it for quite a few weeks, go see Alice in Wonderland one weekend. Tired of waiting and tired of plans falling through, this week I decided would be the week that we actually followed through and went to the cinéma.

The movie ended up not being quite what I expected, inflated by weeks of waiting. But still that wasn't really what mattered. What mattered was the time spent there in those red velvet seats and the memory of the four of us holding our voices as the movie began and the collective sigh of relief when the movie turned out to be in English. That will linger longer than anything else.