Fair warning

Alright folks. I miss writing English essays, so I'm gonna turn this blog into an essay blog soon. Now is the time to remove it from rss feeds and fb updates, if you so desire.

Gratitude

On the train to Nîmes:

I've been harried the whole day--started this morning when I dropped my credit card somewhere and couldn't find it for an hour (it was in my suitcase), continued in the BIOCOOP as I fretted over which organic cidre and beer to get my next WWOOFing hosts, and followed me all the way onto my transfer train to Lyon when a man who probably is a model--piercing eyes, cheekbones, jawbones, browbones, etc--sat down across from me, giving me the Zoolander look from time to time (I later found out he's a woodworker from Nice). It's 15h10 and I've finally identified the feeling that I've found so unsettling the whole day: I'm not worried. I've been awake since 6 am, caffienated, jittery, trying to stress out and feel productive, but I can't bring myself to do it with any sincerity.

Today I'm going to an unfamiliar French town, tomorrow I go to a stranger's vineyard. I've got too little money, too much baggage, and next to no direction. I've never been so happy and at peace my entire life.

Je suis tellement heureuse

I am in heaven, just had the most amazing 5 hours ever.

Too tired for real sentences, but here are pictures....
--took walk around village
--picked up Chan with Camille
--Camille took us on a tour of the countryside
--went to Camille's friend's estate, where her horse is right now, and hung out with the horses
--made amazingly delicious dinner--vegetable soup, vegetable omelette, rubharb tarte, apple and rhubarb compôte--entirely from things we picked that morning from the garden
--conversed and joked around almost entirely in French, and I didn't end up with a headache!
--all the while Chan was running around the bungalow, yelling, 'C'est quuuuuuoooiiiiiii?' It's her favorite sentence, and she sounds like an angel.

We have a new game to play during dinner: I try to say something, struggle to describe the word while the others listen attentively with their hands folded, and the first person to come up with the word I'm looking for wins. It's a lot of fun, and not lame, really.......or maybe it's the general excess of happiness and contentment in the air here....

Green is 'vert', and preservative is 'conservateur'

It's Monday afternoon here in Quemeneven, and we've finished working for the day. This morning, we worked in the vegetable garden--weeding, plowing, planting, watering. I'm completely exhausted from both the work (first time I've worked in a garden) and from struggling to understand a foreign language for the past 5 or 6 hours, but I've never been this happily exhausted.

Chez Boderiou, there are 5 adults and la petite Chan. The Boderiou adults are Olivier and Camille, and Chan is their angelic 2 years old daughter. Then there are the three woofeuses: a couple, Marie and Justine, and me. Marie and Justine are 100% French. They've been, and are, biking around the country--2000 km so far and no plans to stop anytime soon. We all get along almost surprisingly well, considering the fact that I find communicating with them completely exhausting (there have a lot of 'essaie d'expliquer!' from the others and a lot of sighs from me). It makes for a pretty hiliarious time though. While we were preparing lunch today, Camille mentioned how great it is that we know absolutely everything that goes into our food (I'm on an organic farm), and I agreed, saying that it tastes really good and there aren't preservatives or anything. Except. 'Le préseratif' means 'condom' and not 'preservative', as I thought. A mistake I will never make again.

I have to go soon. Marie came in a while ago and invited me to play tennis with her and Justine, and it's taken me almost an hour to type up this post (French keyboards are pretty darned different from American keyboards). But like most things right now, it takes a while but it happens, et ça marche bien.

La vie en rose, et verte, et rouge, et bleu, et jaune

I am blogging from chez Boderiou--the farm of my host family in a tiny tiny little 'town' in Bretagne. I'm too tired to say too much right now, but I'm pretty much in paradise. Communication is a little difficult because the grown-ups here don't speak much English, I don't speak much French, and the little bèbè doesn't speak much of anything, but this family is unbelievably sweet, everything is mind-bogglingly beautiful, and I am bursting with happiness. I really can't imagine how things can get better, but I've only been here a few hours...we'll see what happens tomorrow!

L'amour

Today I fell in love. My cousin's neighbors asked me to babysit their 18 months old son. The little boy's name is Xiao Xiao, which means "chuckles". He got the name because he makes a high-pitched squeal-laugh about three times a minute.

First we played a game in which he hit me on the head with his toy camel for a long time. Then he drove around the apartment on his toy truck. Then we played tag, but had to stop because he banged his head on his crib ("Oh? Touched head!"). After that he got sleepy and decided to start punching me in the face. At that point it was nap time, and I took pictures of him falling asleep.

I am going to steal Xiao Xiao.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose?

I've been in Beijing for a week, and today I took my sister to the airport for her flight back to LA. After seeing her off, I boarded the express bus back to my cousin's neighborhood. It was pretty much empty, and when I got on, the bus driver was sprawled across the front row, fast asleep. The overhead luggage racks were blocked off by two steel bars, and as I struggled with the idea of decorative luggage racks, the driver's cell phone went off. Ringtone: "Oh, Susanna!", midi remix.

He answered: "Oh, it's you. Yeah I was sleeping, my head still hurts."

"Uh oh?" I thought.

Him: "Yeah, I already took my medication. I guess I'll take it again after I finish napping."

Me: "Severe illness or hangover?"

Him: "The route's not bad, only have two shifts today. Problem is, I've never driven it before, and I have no idea how to get to the station."

Me: "What?"

Him: "No. Why would I ask him? I know the general direction. I'll figure it out. No one's in a hurry anyway."

Me: "What?"

Him: "I wouldn't have even taken this Saturday morning shift, 'cept they fired me last Wednesday and I'm doing this as a favor."

Me: "Maybe I'll take the train...."

I considered whether my fear of this possibly terminally-ill, heavily-medicated, inexperienced, recently-unemployed bus driver outweighed my laziness, but before I could talk myself into getting off the bus, the driver turned around and grunted in my direction.

"Kid," he said.

"Yes?"

"Have you taken this bus before?"

"No, I'm new to this area."

"So you don't know how to get to the Tongzhou station?"

"Sorry..."

"Shit."

Then he put on his sunglasses, reclined his seat, and went back to sleep. I decided to stay.

I like to consider this the beginning of my adventures. Recently, I wandered Beijing with someone who's been backpacking around the world for the past eleven months. He gave me a reference on couchsurfing.org and said that I know exactly what I like and what I dislike. I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but such self-awareness doesn't seem to be a trait that's conducive to the type of traveling that I want to do. In fact, I'm not even sure if this is the type of person I want to be. When I bought my tickets to China and France, I had "wanderlust" in mind. I don't know what this term means exactly, but it feels like the type of loafing Larry Darrell wanted to do--life, liberty, and the embrace of happiness. How did I get from there to having all my likes and dislikes figured out?

I've got a lot to learn, especially from the crazy bus driver.

I feel like I'm trapped in a David Sedaris story

Last week, I came back to Chicago to volunteer at bible camp and to clear out my apartment. I'm not the most functional person ever, but I thought surely I could pack up my closet and sell my kitchen supplies in 7 days--most of my stuff was shipped back in June. I envisioned a neatly packed suitcase; an ad on marketplace that would result in a mad scramble for my beloved utensils, knives, and random gadgets; and 6 days of preemptive nostalgia spent wandering the various places at which I've gotten drunk out of my mind.

Reality has been different. Turns out a morning spent running after little kids, followed by half an hour on a moon-bounce trying not to get crushed, followed by a long walk home in the steam room that is Chicago, is really exhausting. Plus, the knowledge that I'm finally going to Europe has turned me into a crazed insomniac, staying up into the wee hours to research Bordeaux, hostels, and sketchy Eastern European airlines. As a result, I come home from camp, collapse onto the couch, and read Sedaris until the insomnia kicks in at around 11 and I begin my virtual tour of Europe.

This life-style is not so conducive to sanity. Yesterday, I got into an epic fight with my parents that resulted in several fits of hysteria and culminated with me writing an angry e-mail to my parents telling them that I was not going to China, not going to Europe, and that I was going to go home, pick up my dog, move out, and find a job. HA! I thought, that'll show them.

I curled up in bed and put on Pink Floyd. Every now and then, I shed some self-congratulatory tears. What better way to punish my parents than to be miserable and do everything they ever hoped that I would do? A few hours later, I still hadn't received an apologetic call from my parents, so I decided to check-in on them. They seemed to be having a dinner party and were confused when I asked, choking back tears, if they had read my e-mail. My mom asked me if I had eaten, since it was so late in Chicago. I told her, "No. I don't want to eat. I'm going to vomit.", hoping she could hear the period at the end of the sentence and the bitterness in my heart. She said that skipping dinner was good for losing weight, but at least I should drink some warm water, whereupon I hung up on her.

I woke up this morning not knowing what to do with myself. There wasn't camp on Saturday; I didn't have a tour of China or Europe to plan; and I couldn't go out because I had nothing packed, nothing sold, a flight back to LA on Monday, and plans all of Sunday. I thought it best to stay home and do responsible things, so I sat down and spent the day reading Sedaris.

Periodically, my mom would call and ask how packing was going, if I had eaten, if I had sold any of my things, if I was tired, if I had any problems only a mother could solve. I tried to limit my answers to "yes" or "no", taking care to use "no" as often as possible. An hour ago, I realized I couldn't actually fit all my stuff into the bags I had planned to check, and was starting to panic when my mom called again. This time she offered her UPS account and said I could always just screw it and throw my crap away so that I could go to bed. I told her, "No." and hung up. Then I went to the UPS website and scheduled a pickup for Monday morning.

I was really upset to find my anger and resentment at my parents going away. Here was a woman who is fundamentally against my pursuit of happiness, and my dad is no better. They conspired against my independence and wanted more than anything to turn me into a puppet-daughter. If I had any backbone, I would refuse their support, renounce them as family, and run away. Money wouldn't be a problem because one day a famous director (Wes Anderson?) would discover Freddy, and I would make millions as the agent of the cutest dog in the world. Freddy would spend his life being loved by every person on the planet, and when he went back to Heaven, I would devote my life to writing devastatingly witty books.

Until then, though, I guess I'm stuck with my parents. Sure, they took over my travel plans and now I'm signed up for a guided tour of the South with my uncle and little sister, during which I will see a tree or two and 800 million weary, screaming tourists. And maybe they think guilt is the most effective method of persuasion. But, they're also the ones who call with a way to get my things home just as I start to hear David Sedaris whisper in my head, "If only you were a gay man high on cocaine, you wouldn't be such a failure at packing."

I wanted to go to the Norton Simon this afternoon but decided to take a nap instead.

On my way home from the delicious lunch that convinced me to skip the NS, I passed a huge church with two giant balloon angels in front. In front of the angels, there was a sign written in Chinese that said something to the effect of, "VIP parking this way."

Perhaps they were expecting Jesus.

Oh, Kindle!

I had planned to go to the Getty Villa today, but I decided to stay home and wait for my Kindle instead.

It just got here and is definitely worth missing the Villa. The Kindle is so wonderful; I am so in love. Kindle, I love you. I want to take you places and read with you.

**update**

The Kindle would be a lot better if I could actually buy Kindle books. As of now, my Kindle will remain empty until Bank of America decides to mail my new credit and debit cards to Los Angeles instead of Chicago. Way to go, Amazon--why doesn't your Kindle store accept bank transfers when your 35 million other stores do?