"Il fait beau"

"Il fait beau" is what one says when the weather is nice. The weather is, however, far from what a native North Carolinian would call nice. 55 and cloudy, raining off and on. My host mother made sure to tell me that when it is nice outside that I should leave my windows open. I didn't know how to explain that it was fucking cold and gross, so I just nodded. I did have a kind-of conversation with my host dad about my French class, in which I am so UNBELIEVABLY bored but still have no idea what the hell all of the words on the page in front of me say.

My teacher is, as I suspected, completely insane. Our class consists of her talking out of her ass and saying things that contradict one another enormously, followed by an hour looking at a worksheet about sci-fi that is trying desperately to be funny when it's actually just useless. It's also beyond me why we're learning sentence structures and how to form questions when we haven't talked about any vocabulary or anything vaguely resembling trying to understand the words in the sentence. So, just like in almost every class, I am boredboredbored and completely irritated.

I wish that I could just not be, and that I could just deal with it like the other girls seem to do. Accept my fate as a student, i.e. to jump through hoop after hoop of idiocy. However, I cannot turn off my natural instinct to #1 be convinced that my teacher is a fool and see evidence of it left and right and #2 resent my presence in a class where I'm just filling a seat with dollar signs (or in this case Euro signs). Can't imagine what it will be like back at UNC.

I know it's only the third day, but all I want to do is go cook food and read other books and not this inane shit I am assigned. My family keeps insisting that I eat with them, too, so I haven;t even gotten a chance to make my artichoke, edam, bacon, and tomato risotto. For fuck's sake, it's all I want! But again, my vocabulary does not extend that far. It does, however, extend as far as to say MERDE!!!!

I leave you with this, which is what I read today in class rather than stare blankly at my idiot teacher.

"Being in a foreign country means walking a tight rope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known since childhood."

-The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Going to go read more articles for Cinema. At least it's in my god damn language.