[Find yourself!]A handful of cards and pictures are arranged my wall in an almost random, overlapping pattern so as to use the least amount tacks as possible (I only have one hundred, you know). Forming an ever-growing mass of vertical and horizontal rectangles, it is slightly oval, overall. Under all this, on my desk, there sits a tiny golden box of matches, a drinking glass clinging to a decaying harvest of mid-Fall's last wildflowers, pages of notes on geometric area formulas or strategies for essay responses and an owl made of wax, whose fate as of right now is not yet determined--he may yet suffer a beautifully slow death which, with the help of combustion, emanates from the nature his very being, something that flows straight through his core! (Get it? Candle-related humor: a genre of slow burners whose hilarity only waxes with time!) Needless to say, I love all the mail. The cards, letters and postcards have been a saving grace for me in terms of feeling connected with faraway friends and family.
Someday in the distant future, though, I may have to take down the beautiful collage that is the proof of my friends' and family's support of the failing US Postal Service and reassemble it on the wall of my new room, in my newly renovated apartment in Building E of la Cité Scolaire Brocéliande, where I can enjoy the pleasures of unbridled internet access. However this day, my friends, is far from being near as there are still holes in the ceiling of this elusive Building E apartment, since renovation work at the school is everything but fast (e.g. loud, long-lasting, a large physical presence, very glassy, not-too-impressive, etc.), and because this collage is just too damn fabulous to see the destruction of its present form.
Translation: I won't be getting internet of my own any time soon here in Guer—clearly not until after the New Year, if that's even a reasonable estimate after the latest discussion with a supportive, but not really catalytic M. le Proviseur (headmaster). All is lost, Skype users.
And so, we need a change in perspective (lest I go crazy). Let us rather believe, friends and family, that one day in the middle of this ever-approaching foggy and rainy Breton winter, the clouds will weaken their miserly hold on the sky’s coveted daytime hours, and the sun, in his not-quite-pale-enough-yellow-to-be-considered-eggshell yellow track suit, will peak out his head and reveal to us Language Assistants the splendor of a standard of living in which one can find outlandish and often humorous stories of fictional encounters with Bill Murray at the tip of one’s fingers. That day will be a glorious day, friends. And full of pictures of kittens.
So keep up the postcards, the letters and stamps, and I will keep up with the replies. I have regular email access five days a week, so feel free to use that if you feel disconnected from good ol’ me in the meantime.
Until then, with love and international postage,
Adam
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