The Ignorant Recipient

On Thursday, October 22nd a package addressed to me was discovered at the Institute. Its contents were as follow.

Messages of love, courage, and phalli.
Context-free highlight: "... I just walked around academic quad collecting leaves like a fourth grader, and now appear to be a creepy emo huddling in a corner on the stairs writing in a notebook..." - Simone Waller

In a more-or-less successful attempt at quirk, a letter comprised of post-its.


Context-free highlight: "The only thing I still need you for is so I feel like I have a stake in this whole gay-rights thing." - Kevin Donnelly

Yes, that penis has wings. No, you don't want to know why.

Context-free highlight: "P.S. By let your penis fly, I mean get a prostitute in Amsterdam." - Mike McAllister

Apparently they were out of the regular ones. But considering all the goat cheese, maybe that's for the best.

Please take careful notice of the already opened packaging.

Oh, yes. Yes.

YES.

The Bible.

"Your half - Make it last."

Halloween tastes like corn syrup. Delightful.

Even my host-mom loved them.

And then, when I thought my smile couldn't get any wider and my eyes any more teary, I find this.
Yeah, I know.

Thanks, guys.

P.S. Also included was a jar of extra crunchy Jif. Due to the fact that I destroyed it like downtown Tokyo, there is no available photograph. Your imaginations will have to suffice.

The Ignorant Nostalgic

This note was originally handwritten on the 14H09 train to Bordeaux on the sixteenth of October. Leah Merchant aided in the conception of at least one of its included metaphors.

My train to Bordeaux just offered my fellow passengers and I a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean. It looks like layer upon layer of shiny tin foil, the sun bouncing off like a pinball after a quarter starts the game. Dolly is singing about Heaven’s light into my ears, I’m wearing a shirt that hasn’t been washed since I left the States, and a woman sporting one impressive eyebrow is recreating the love scene from A History of Violence with her finger and right nostril. I’m having a moment.

Although it goes without saying, I find it comforting—selfish, I know—to reiterate that trains are probably the most poetic mode of transportation. Planes may be more spiritually wealthy, and Harleys may get you more poon, but if symbol is your muse, hop the Express. It’s all in the view, really: the land that separates you from your destination becomes a kind of concrete metaphor for life. So concrete, in fact, that I hesitate to even call it a metaphor. It’s not abstract at all. It’s solid and real, as in-your-face as my friend Big Jon’s lay-up.

You may cross more terrain—entire continents, even—in a jet plane, but that land is hypothetical at best: it has no face, no features. It’s as hollow as Zac Efron’s sex appeal to second grade girls. But every inch viewed from a train window has identity, thick histories on which lazy cows graze all day long. The metaphor is a fucking laser beam: land traveled, time spent, life lived. The only people whose entire lives flashed before their eyes were the ones who died in tragic train accidents.

Let it be known that at this point in the narrative my pen just gave out on me. Emily let me borrow her blue Bic. It doesn’t write as smooth as I prefer, but writers can’t be choosers. Or psychologically healthy.

Each farm with lazy livestock, each little village with its Terracotta roofs, each abandoned train car strewn on the edge of the track, articulates another syllable to a word with two completely different meanings: one is exclusively French, spoken with a heavy accent and a subtle air of superiority. The other belongs to me, is made of me, even if I don’t fully know what the hell it means. I think that’s the point, or at least a necessary symptom.

The farms are the most personal part of the metaphor for me. These are homes. These are the places you come home to. Houses can have three-car garages, but homes have apple trees and woodpiles out back. Truth be told, I haven’t milked a lactating mammal since God-knows-when, and my last pair of cowboy boots probably resembles an accessory to a Fetish Ken Doll™. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Willie Nelson. Maybe an overactive romanticism is bending me over its knee again. It seems illogical—not to mention remarkably shallow—to feel a pang of nostalgia for a life you never really lived. Maybe I’m once again rebelling against my surroundings: “Four months in metropolitan France? A one-way to the Bluegrass State, please.” I’m forced to question the sincerity of it all, which has kept my pen moving, sure, but it makes me reconsider every reconsideration. In summation: Mindfuck.

But that’s when I go back to the metaphor (or whatever the hell it is). Train. Forward. Never backward. Forward. Even when I board my train Sunday back to Nantes, I won’t be going backwards. I’ll be going forward. I guess the only way to go “backward”—this is when the “metaphor” crumbles or solidifies depending upon your philosophic aesthetic—is remaining stagnant. Going backwards simply means not going anywhere. I think Dolly and Willie are with me on this one. It’s the paralysis of a perpetual horizon, of a destination that’s always out of reach. It’s an abandoned train car. It’s majoring in Business.




Forward.

The Ignorant Observor

Assembled here is a list of twenty-one humble, potentially culturally insensitive observations on Nantais culture. Let's start a dialogue, people.

1. French leaves are just as crisp as Ohio ones. However, they don’t smell nearly as wonderful.
2. Manpris.
3. Judging from conversations with my peers as well as my own host-mother’s tendencies, I’m led to the conclusion that the French don’t use fabric softeners. Drying machines are foregone almost entirely.
4. An overwhelming majority of the French hates peanut butter.
5. In a possibly related note, an overwhelming majority of the French has never actually tasted peanut butter.
6. Speculoos may be the most delicious thing ever devised by human capacity. This divine accident (I bought it believing it was PB) combines the taste of cinnamon Teddy Grahams with the stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth consistency of peanut butter. Exercise caution when pairing with Nutella.
7. French spoons are either too large or too small. Goldilocks would starve to death in France.
8. The dogs are remarkably, almost eerily well behaved. Off-leash dogs stroll right beside their masters, even past bucheries. However, one explanation behind this phenomenon accuses the French of using more corporal punishment during the training process. Further investigation necessary.
9. At least one stereotype is true: Baguettes out the ass.
10. It’s not uncommon for someone to wear the exact same outfit two days in a row. Madame Rouchet, la Directrice Administrative of the program and the one that scares the “Yankee shit” out of me, recycles her staples several times a week.
11. Everything is smaller, more efficient, and just a wee bit uncomfortable. Case in point…















I shower in a Dixie cup.

12. The glitz and glamour of public transportation begins to diminish slightly after the first week and takes a dive after the first month.
13. Only one man-purse spotted in over a month. Keep up the good work, France!
14. Drinking glasses at meals are very small, and water is rarely drunk in general. The only water fountains have naked people made of stone in them. I’ve been in a perpetual state of dehydration since my arrival.

15. Today was sunny and pleasant with a high of 23° C (about 74° F). It is, of course, mid-October. Get on the ball, France!
16. Forget the cleavage; here, it’s all about the legs.
17. French automobiles look like the toy cars you buy at gas stations when you forget about a birthday party and all the toy stores are closed.
18. A widespread initiative has been enacted to reduce the number of smokers, particularly among younger people. Instead of wordy warning labels, packs of smokes simply read FUMER TUE (“Smoking kills”).
19. The culture is, at least in my opinion, a remarkably homogenous one. A lack of diversity—and I’m implying almost every single connotation of the word—has left this collective more concentrated than Amy Winehouse’s morning pick-me-up.
20. Passers-by on the street rarely make eye contact, let alone offer up a friendly “Bonjour!” I’m trying to single-handedly change that.
21. Fucking manpris.