The Girl Who Ate Everything

After a while, you get used to seeing this stuff everywhere.

Latest Parisist post is up if you are in dire need of food porn.

I finished my root canal this morning. Well...my dentist finished my root canal; I sat in the chair while stretching my jaw to maximum openness. After I got out of the office, I went to the supermarket to buy some clementines and figs (my favorites) and then hopped across the street for a gargantuan baguette from a bakery I had never been to before. Longest. Baguette. Ever. Half of it stuck out of my tote bag until it broke from being too damn long. Unfortunately, I would rate it as just okay for being too airy and for having too thin a crust, but it's not that bad, perhaps better than average. I haven't come up with a good rating system yet.

(Wow, I think I eat too many baguettes. It's no wonder my pants, while still wearable, uncomfortably squeeze my organs into places they probably don't belong. But as my housemate Mare said, "You only get to do this once! You can diet when you go home." Then again, she's gluten intolerant and has thus escaped the problem of carbohydrate overdose.)

By the way, it's really weird to eat when the right half of the roof of your mouth has no feeling. People probably wait until their nerves start working again to eat something. I waste no time. Actually, I always waste time, except when eating a baguette. Baguettes wait for no one.

I had written a long rant about how I'm not learning enough French and how at this halfway point during my stay (I go back home on December 23rd) I'm about to gouge my brain out since there's no hope in having a decent conversation with any French person, two major reasons being that I don't know much French (because I rarely have to speak it; ah ha, the cycle of sucking will never end) and I don't know any French people, but my wi-fi isn't working at home and my entry is saved on my computer. Considering that I have a hard enough time making friends with people I can talk to, methinks befriending a French person is out of my range.

So that's the shortened rant. I feel useless, as though I'm not doing what I'm supposed to here. Not learning French, not exploring neighboring countries, not becoming buddy-buddy with my international classmates, not eating buckets of chocolates.

Not that I don't like being here, of course. I like Paris, as opposed to my other housemate Valerie who constantly feels the need to "get the fuck out of Paris" due to rampant sexual harassment and the impression that every Parisian has a stick up his ass. I luckily haven't encountered either of these problems, but maybe the baguettes are hallucinogens that keep my head in the clouds and oblivious to anything bad that may be happening around me. (All the more reason to eat them.)

I bring myself down with my own thoughts, not because bad things happen to me. If anything I'm lucky that so many good things fall into my lap, although sometimes it makes me feel guilty for getting things I don't deserve. Maybe I'm more like Stéphane than I originally though I was. It's not as though I'm applying aspects of a dream world into real life; I just have a tendency to miscontrue thoughts and assumptions in pessimistic ways until I conclude that, "So and so must not like me," or, "My life is doomed," or, "This sentence has so many commas; commas must not like me and my life is doomed."

People have asked me if I'm excited about my trip to Rome this Saturday to next Wednesday (so if you don't see a post from me for a while, that's why) and I tend to reply with a half hearted, "Uh...yeah...uh." If it were a trip with a group of friends, I'd be all over it. However, it's a study trip with my history class, in which I have no good friends, but I do have a very (enjoyably) intense professor. I don't even have a map of Rome. I'M SO UNPREPARED. How will I look up foodie addresses without a map (gelato, here I come)? (Okay, I supposed I'll buy one when I get there. No need to freak out now.) I DON'T KNOW ANY ITALIAN.

OH MY GOD DOOM.

Okay, I'm off now to return to my probably wi-fi-less home. Don't ask me how I'm going to live without internet for five days in Rome. I'm ignoring that little problem for now.