Sixteen hours from now, I will be in America. My strategy for this one is to stay up all night packing, take advantage of the fact that Air France will serve me wine, down a demi-bouteille as I board, and sleep for the duration of my flight and any potential delays. I'm pretty excited to see how it goes.
I'm in a slightly better place than I was a few days ago, because I really can't wait to see my friends and family, but I won't pretend I don't still have my doubts about leaving this place for good. I keep telling myself that it's fine because I'll come back, but that doesn't really tell the whole story, since a lot of what I'll miss won't be here this summer, or next year, or after graduation. I won't be able to stop by museums for 40 minutes because they're free with my student card, I won't be able to text my host mother that I won't be eating dinner at home because my friends and I decided to go to the best creperie in Paris, I won't get to wander the hallways of the Sorbonne and wonder how it's possible that I go to school there, I won't bump into my friends and classmates on the Champs-Elysees, I won't have a weekly Tuesday lunch date with five French friends, I won't be able to listen to Voltage (without question the best radio station in Paris) and have them announce "Beeyonce--Eef I Wear a Boi" and receive a text seconds later because a friend of mine is listening too...none of this can be recreated when I come back as a tourist. And most of my friends are going home soon too, so even if I stayed the year, nothing would be the same, but it doesn't stop us from planning the apartment near Chatelet we are all going to rent together and the non-profit we are going to start so we have an excuse to stick around.
Also, packing sucks. I cannot believe that I have accumulated so much crap. I'm just lucky it doesn't all have to come home right now or I would be in big trouble.
Okay, back to updating my iTunes and waiting for the sun to rise so I can go get my other suitcase out of the closet next to my host parents' bedroom. Home so soon!
Well, obviously that last post was a lie, but here I am now. To go back awhile, Thanksgiving was fun. The whole family was here, complete with many pounds of potatoes, marshmallows, cranberries, and stuffing smuggled through customs in innocent-looking checked luggage. My host mother ordered us a turkey from her butcher, who also happens to be the butcher to the President of France ("presidents come and go, but the butcher remains"), and everything was delicious. We had a bunch of kids from my program over and I think everyone had a good time. It was nice to see my family, too, and I got to show Marissa that French is actually worth learning if you have people you can speak it to.
I also got to go to London to see Elyssa (and Hugh) a few weeks ago. It was great to see them, and London is a really cool city, but my French took SUCH a hit. It makes me really nervous to go home for Christmas/for good if I lost so much after three days away! Other than those respites, I have been either sick or working or both. I have an astonishing amount of work to do, and I've gotten extensions on almost all of it, which means I'll be working over Christmas too. I am not thrilled about this prospect.
I'm also really frustrated because a semester is not enough time here, and I wish I had the guts to stay a full year. Honestly, if I didn't know that my team was waiting for me, I think I would do it. Most of my non-rowing friends will be abroad this spring anyway. Half of me thinks, you can't just stay because you have responsibilities back at home, you have a roommate, you've registered for classes, the Tripod is depending on you, Model UN is depending on you, Habitat is depending on you, your team is depending on you...but then half of me thinks, those aren't real responsibilities because there is always someone else who can do those things, and when am I ever going to be in a place in my life where I have so few real responsibilities and I can just drop things? I was talking to one of my good friends here about this last night, and she's in kind of the same place I am: she plays lacrosse at Bates, and she knows that if she doesn't go back for the spring she'll never play again because there will be 40 kids trying out for the team her senior year and her coach will just cut her. I wish someone in authority would just make this decision for me. I keep talking to people studying abroad other places, and I usually hear variations on, "Yeah, I'm having fun, but I cannot wait to get out of here and go home," and that is not the case at all for me. I hate when my life doesn't go according to plan. I read somewhere that you always regret the things you don't do more than the things you do, but I can't figure out whether staying here is doing or not doing. It's a little ironic that I came so close to backing out and not coming here at all, and now I'm miserable at the thought of leaving. It's not that I don't miss Trinity, because I do, but I'm also so tired of some aspects of it, and a lot of what I miss won't be there when I get back because people have graduated and people are going abroad in the spring. I'm also afraid that the Trinity I left and the Trinity I'm coming back to won't be the same place and I won't like it as much. But I can't imagine leaving a sophomore and coming back a senior and missing out on five more months of Mather dinners that go past 8 p.m. and interminable Monday nights at Tripod and all-nighters straight through 'til morning practice during finals and AC's runs and the Red Sox on NESN and watching our squash team embarrass everyone else and the egg line and winning and everything else that makes home wonderful. So basically...I'm a mess.
Also my scale broke. Actually it just ran out of battery, but I can't figure out how to replace the battery, so it's about as useful to me as it would be if it were broken. You can just go ahead and assume that I have not gained any weight here, though, because I walk constantly. Sorry, team.
More to come later today, but in the meantime, I am in the midst of posting about 100 pictures, so you can check those out if you have a minute. I somehow screwed up the original album, so they're here.
Sixteen hours from now, I will be in America. My strategy for this one is to stay up all night packing, take advantage of the fact that Air France will serve me wine, down a demi-bouteille as I board, and sleep for the duration of my flight and any potential delays. I'm pretty excited to see how it goes. 
