December 8th, La vie en froit
Have you ever gone into the Gap, just looking for a cute pair of mittens, and they're all over $40? Sometimes, a small part of me wants to do this...

I was listening to "La Vie en Rose" by Edith Piaf at school today and it made me miss Paris. I know that it's a cliche to love Paris, but what I love about Paris is the dissonance of French culture...there is little cookie-cutter suburban culture, dismal, mass-produced, boring and bland Americaness there. McDonalds has fruit-filled brioche breakfast muffins and shrimp in the salads. The ice tea is bitter, the waiters are often unapologetically arrogant, and they don't even sell prom dresses in their department stores (it was that time of high school and I checked). And then when I did buy a dress, I tried it on behind a curtain in the corner of a small store, with a tiny bichon-frise in the dressing room with me:) Old men in berets hit on you and it doesn't seem creepy...it's whimsical.

Here is a my favorite quote from Adam Gopnik, in Paris to the Moon:
The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York and Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken, confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river- only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still...you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't see before, either.
It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right: You can run away. (270).

After feeling suffocated in suburbia all through high school, I'm afraid of the tedium and sterilization of a routine and slowly stiffling life. While I'm too busy to feel that way now, I see glimpses of it at school and it scares me. Part of me wants to abandon this next year and run away. I almost want to try something new...if only to avoid being in a rut, which I know is a horrible reason to do anything. Part of me wants to go to law school, though or get an architecture degree. Maybe then I wouldn't be working in the math supply room and bus entry room, which is either freeeeezing cold or like a sauna, so I'm always either stripping (which always involves a still-teacheresque bottom layer) or piling on the layers so I look like a marshmellow. I know it's the whole paying-your-dues thing. Grr. I kind of hoped that the five years of higher education were somewhat factored into my dues. I feel like I paid quite a pretty penny during my 100's of hours at Starbucks on Forsyth and Handley.