another novel

Monday 7 December 2009
It’s beautiful. Absolutely beautiful outside. It’s 8:20 am, the sky is clouded with light gray overcast cloud cover but it is still bright and the sun is brightly shining through an open patch. Sitting at my dining room table, I can see out to the sea which is dark and deep blue grey, foggy and hazy so that I can’t see out until eternity as I usually can. It’s warm-ish (of course…) but there’s a great cooling breeze. The past few nights, I’ve been cold. Yes, cold. Chilly. Saturday night I slept outside in my hammock and woke up at 4 in the morning to quest for my sleeping bag.
Yesterday was a typical Sunday in Martinique. Florence came by and picked me up after going grocery shopping and when we got to the house, I helped carry them inside and re-arrange the fridge. Then while she cooked lunch and had Paul recite verb conjugations (I don’t envy French children) and yelled at Lucas when he messed up the song he was supposed to learn by heart for school (I really don’t envy French children!) I sat in the living room and studied for my exam today. Then we ate lunch together. Florence was super pissed at herself in the car when she found out I don’t eat shrimp which she was planning to make. So she made me fish with the same sauce- coconut milk with onions and peppers. So delicioussssss. Interesting thing I read in the Omnivore’s Dilemma which is definitely true here: the French regard it as impolite to have dietary restrictions. Look French people, I made the compromise to eat fish sometimes but I am going to keep being vegetarian, okay? After lunch, we had our usual coffee and chocolate (I love this. I love this. I love this!) and then we went to the beach and hung out. I didn’t feel like swimming too much so I hung out on my towel with Florence and the kids swam and goofed off and at a certain point Florence and I went in but it was cold. Yes, I just said the Caribbean was cold. I mean, it wasn’t Emily and I running into the Atlantic at the beach house in two piece b-suits the first weekend in April (THAT WAS COLD) but it was, you know, chilly.
All I can say is that I am probably going to die at the airport in Chicago. Dad: if you could be so kind as to bring one of those magical thermal blankets they give to people with hypothermia for when I go into shock… in the terminal before I even step outside. The other night, December 4, it was 26 degrees Celsius and Kristen took a picture. I was wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt.
Saturday was kind of a wicked bummer and pain in my butt. Thursday night, I got 3 hours of sleep thanks to my quality procrastination skills. Big push at the end of the semester time right now because I’ve spent the last three and a half months doing nothing and doing everything. I like to think I’ve spent my time here living my life to its fullest by going to the beach on Sundays and doing dance and exercising? I don’t know exactly what I’ve been doing but I do know that it’s been fun, alright? Oh, and I’ve been sleeping. I get like 8 hours of sleep a night. How great does that sound? I am going to die when I get back to Willamette. Anyway, Friday was killer. On a good note, I got my paper back from my class which I have a final exam in today, Francophone Literature of the Antilles (and by that, she meant Martinique) with the professor who’s a politician and doesn’t show up half the time. The first paper, I got a 10 on (out of 20. Side note: this is average here. It was like a b minus or a c, I think???) and on my second paper, which I spent an entire day sitting in my room working on and then went upstairs to have Youma help me with the language and after each sentence in the introduction, she said “ce n’est pas bien. Ce n’est pas bon” or in English “this is no good. This is terrible.” Maybe I wanted to cry. Maybe. But after we worked on it for an hour or so working on the language and style, it turned out well enough to merit a 14. A 14 is pretty damn good considering she read the paper in about 3 minutes and I didn’t deal with the subject we were “supposed” to write on and of the books we were writing about, I had read 1 of them entirely, 120/300 pages of the next and 60/300 pages of the most important one. Oops. There’s something terribly wrong with being able to BS. I don’t think it’s fair. And it’s certainly not “right.” And I certainly don’t pull things like that back when I have teachers who are invested in being teachers. But I have trouble investing myself in a class if my professor can’t show up.
Friday night we went to a Chanté Noël which was fun… sort of. It was really loud and interesting to see but I was super tired and not super into it. I did get to hang out with a cute kid, though. He’s like 2 and I can remember his name but he’s the grandkid of the woman who cleans the house for Youma. Youma has taken this family under her care because she likes to help people (one reason we sort of get each other, I think?) and so Mag-d (Magdalene) comes over and cleans and Youma got her son an apprenticeship/schooling and whenever we go out, Mag-d comes along and brings her grandson. Her two year old grandson who her daughter (his mother) doesn’t care about or take care of AND she’s pregnant again. Yay for awful family situations. But he’s super cute so at the Chanté Noël, I put him up on my shoulders and we danced around and bounced. I said to Kristen “I told you I usually like kids” in response to me having really NOT liked the little girl when we went to Fond St Pierre for my birthday.
But that doesn’t change the fact that people don’t buckle their kids up and I FREQUENTLY see rear facing car seats in the passenger seat. Sweet.
Saturday started around 6 30 or 7 and ended 12 hours later when I crawled into my hammock and stayed there for another 12 hours. I was picked up at 7:30 to go babysit all day. One nice thing about this situation was access to a washing machine since ours is broken and the laundry mats cost 7 Euros a load. SERIOUSLY. However, I was dealing with 2 little girls who are cute and fun but the older one is super dramatic and going through a tough phase in her life because her mom, who negotiated a year off of work while her military husband was stationed here, is going back to Paris mid-January to go back to being a lawyer. The kids are going to stay in Martinique until July when the whole family is coming back.
Florence and I talked about it yesterday in the car because the families we hang out with and who do sports with Seb are very interesting. The mom’s put a lot of pressure on the kids to be proper all the time and they’re just sort of up-tight and the husbands seem sort of in the same boat as the kids. Florence explained to me that she found out recently that a Colonel, which the two husbands in mention are, gets between 8 and 10 thousand Euros a month. Not so bad, huh? Florence, hilariously, threw her hands in the air and said something about a totally different lifestyle she takes no part in.
As a lawyer, Hélene (who I was babysitting for) gets at least 8 thousand Euros a month back in Paris. The down side of this is that she mandatorily works until 8 pm. No wonder Chloé, her daughter who I got to spend a day yelling at in French then comforting when she threw on the dramatic water works, was so difficult. She’s in a tough spot but she also just has a negative, pessimistic humour, personality, whatever you want to call it. She asked me like a million times all day if they could watch TV which their mom had said was limited but anything else they did created problems. Riding her bike, she got pissed trying to pedal up the hill, freaked out and started crying when a stupid, useless piece of rubber tore a tiny bit and was yelling “merde” and “putain” and saying it was “chiant,” all very strong, swear words. She’s going to be 7 in a week. NOT okay. But that’s for her mom to deal with. I told her to stop, told her it’s not okay and tried to tell her that she should freak out about her bike and little things in life because there’s too much that’s not going to be easy to let these things take her head but I’m 1. Not a child psychologist and 2. She doesn’t listen to me half the time and doesn’t respect me half the time because I’m not French. But they like me! We also had a really fun fight when I tried to correct her pronunciation working on homework and she didn’t believe me. BELIEVE ME KID. I HAD TO LEARN THE SAME THING. You said un œuf, but when it’s plural, des œufs, you don’t pronounce the f. And she refused to listen to me. Until mommy got home and backed me up. Sure, it doesn’t make any sense but that’s just how it is, kid. It didn’t help that I was super exhausted. But I got her to do her homework! And the younger one, Romane, is much more good natured and sweet and happy so she was a breeze except that she only took a half-hour nap.
But, I made 80 Euros. Not too bad for 9 hours of playing with/yelling at kids. And I got to do my laundry fo’ free!
Okay, I’ve got to finish up my last dossier and take a final in a few hours. As of the moment I turn in my dossier sometime after 4 pm, I will have two finals in a week and two weeks left here. Kristen and I are going to rent a car for a week (take a guess as to who is going to be driving, considering it’s all stick down here) and we’re going to be FREEEEEEEEE to explore and move and get out of the house and do things. I’m super excited. This week is going to be a breeze of studying and relaxing and beaching and running and dancing and getting my stuff organized for leaving. Weird thought. But it’ll all work out delightfully and I’m looking forward to being home. Just not to leaving.
Love to all, Bethany