December Holidays Part 1: Today, Early Vacation, Fumes

These next couple posts have been a long time coming. It’s been difficult turning them out.

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As I sit in a very newly renovated apartment, with double paned windows and white washed walls that reiterate your every sung conviction back at you, distracted by the TV my roommate is laughing at and by music on YouTube, I’m noticing how much has happened in my life since the 14^th of December, one month ago today.

My last couple days have been unique in their tumultuous own way: hectic and dull, still and dynamic, stressful and then relieving. With unrestricted internet access for the first time in almost four months, with no GRE to study for and with the feeling of Winter finally settling in around me, my weekend, to start, has been overloaded with information, and uninspired. Finally settled into the new apartment, I woke up this morning with the idea to photograph horses, and the muscles on their necks, firmly planted in my head. I feel as if I’ve emerged from the sort of seclusion of a wooden cabin in the forest, which was coldly disguising itself in the dull masquerade of a fourth floor apartment atop a solid concrete design, white and dusty and white, to find myself in a setting of very similar aesthetics, but now with neighbors and a television connection, a shower with a door and a meter missing on one side. We'll get to how I got here later.

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The December holidays started two days early at Lycée-College Brocéliande when a fuel line broke somewhere within the heating system of our building, Building C where the male boarding students also live. Our apartment was flooded with gasoline fumes, and my brain was flooded with a chemically induced daze. Suddenly caught up in a very real and stressful fog, worsened by the fear of potential consequences for the then-fast-approaching GRE, I avoided my apartment for days and stayed at colleagues’ homes the following weekend, trying to get in last minute studying before my GRE on the following Tuesday. After a reassuring and comfortable couple of nights at the home of an amazingly accommodating friend and colleague named Joanne (the antics of 10-year old son and 5-year old daughter included in the experience for free), I set off for Paris on 19 December, a Monday.

My means of transportation from Guer to the big city was arranged through my favorite pragmatic website, covoiturage.fr: a carpool with Gilles F, a recently divorced, middle-aged man of somewhat conservative political beliefs, fitted with a graying buzz cut and glasses that frame fairly gentle eyes, who, by either profession or pastime (throughout the whole five hour car ride I was never quite certain which), is an avid historian and family history enthusiast. He was an extremely chatty man, who let me have my say but seemed perfectly content to share his own stories and, in the intervening silences, to pose me questions with an air of polite interest.

Arriving in Paris by mid-afternoon, Gilles dropped me off at l’Etoile, that crazy, crazy thing that encircles the Arc de triomphe and which some people might be inclined to call a roundabout but rather reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of city streets in southeast Asia, swarming with mopeds and motorcycles and humanity, and I sent a text message to my roommate that read something like, “j’suis à Paris. putain, les touristes.”

I stayed at a hostel in the 9th with a summer of love, rock and roll, Beatles kind of theme and, accompanied by a short novel named after the city of Rome, ate a dinner of gnocchi served by a quietly flirty waitress at a pizzeria down the street. The next morning I took the dreaded 4-hour exam that has occupied a medium-sized space in the back of my head since no later than September, and as I pushed open the glass doors of the testing center, said a big fucking "hello" to vacation.