And I want...

To design a night-black standard dress of lace over nude synth, long sleeved and close-backed with a plunging neckline in front and a golden dragon wrapped around the waist.  Had a dream about it last night and it was pretty striking.

It's the beginning of Day Three...

Of staycation!  And what have I done?

• Exercised a lot.
• Negated the exercise by scarfing cake.  Caspian has helped tremendously with this chore.
• Read for hours.  In fact, I stayed up the other night to read the entire last half of Abhorsen, which I had never finished because I was too worried about the outcome.  It was amazing.
• Become a pro at making syphon coffee, which is surprisingly simple.  No other coffee, made through any other method (commercial included) is as tasty.
• Took all kitchen implements, pans, pots and appliances from the cupboards, washed cupboards and implements, and replaced them in a more convenient configuration.
• Read for hours.
• Using unexpected birthday money, I finally bought what I've wanted for months, ever since a cringe-worthy fender bender with my engagement ring.  My engagement and wedding rings are heavy (16g), heavily-engraved with leaves and milgrain and encrusted with many tiny purple and white diamonds.  They're also 18kt yellow gold (purchased just before the price of gold skyrocketed), which scratches and dents quite easily, and the only person I'd trust them with is the jeweler, Ken, who designed, cast and carved them.  The last straw was when I dropped the engagement ring last Saturday, which clattered all over the apartment like a box of rocks when it fell.  I picked it up and noticed quite a large scratch underneath it and haven't worn it since.  Anyway, long story er... long, after weeks of searching, price-comparison and alloy research (very enlightening!), I bought a very small diamond ring to wear for everyday to spare my poor beloved rings additional torture and disfiguration.  I chose a hard and springy 10kt white gold over 14 or 18kt, containing 35 tiny round diamonds set flush with the band so that they won't catch on everything like my tall engagement ring does.  Even though I found an uncommonly-good deal, I figure the ring will pay for itself anyway through dent- and heartache-prevention.

Trente Ans

It's my birthday today.  I'm 30 years old!  It's bizarre.  Never, in my youth (I'm still "so young" according to my mother), did I ever envision myself at 30.  Probably because it's a rather unromantic age, according to the media.  Fuck the media.  I have accomplished so many things!

On Saturday, Caspian presented me with a gorgeous and thoughtful present, a Syphon vacuum coffee maker.  He even bought an Italian butane burner, and the whole set is just beautiful.  It's chromed steel and Yama glass.  I feel like a stylish chemist whenever I make coffee.  My parents sent me the most beautiful coat I have ever seen.  It probably cost several hundred dollars, and it's gray shot through with gold.  I really should take a picture because it's marvelous, knee-length with filigreed bronze buttons, military-esque but very feminine, with two pleats at the waist in back and a double collar.  It's luxurious to have beautiful, high-quality and unusual things.

And, probably the best birthday present, I received my final grade for the first part (of five) of Intensive French last night...  An A.  My money didn't go to waste, I didn't miss a single hour of class, I studied and mastered every principle, I received 95% + on every project and test.  My teacher, J, hugged me so tightly when I turned in my final exam.

I am so relieved to be 30.  Relieved!  I feel like I've finally started to outgrow all of the silly obsessions of The 20s, the empty rat race of wearing slutty clothes that one doesn't actually like to compete with one's peers and impress males.  Bah, no more stupid competitions that have nothing to do with reality, intelligence or skill.  The fashion race that only the rich 40 and 50-year-olds can actually afford to win.  I told Caspian last night that there's only one objective left:  To feel beautiful.

At 30, I am probably 12 or 14 lbs. slimmer than I was at 18.  Smarter, stronger, better, faster.  Aware of my needs and wants.  Educated and well-read.  Married to a beautiful, talented, extremely intelligent and attentive mate.  Possessing diverse and true friends.  All of the silly obstacles of early adulthood are out of the way; the only direction left to go is up!

Thoughts for a Sunday Evening

Here I sit with a glass of wine, pensive after a strange weekend.  My blue-eyed prince sits at his computer with his feet propped up on a fuzzy kitty bed to stay warm.  He is in the process of making cajun red beans and rice for tomorrow's dinner, and it bubbles fragrantly on the stove.

I think I'll make some tea once this wine is gone.

The city is in a strange state.  The winter has been very mild and the snow is melting, revealing, in chronological order, the detritus of three months.  People aren't sure which coats to put on, whether they should wear the acrylic or the wool scarf, or if Wellingtons are in order.  I saw a girl last Thursday morning wearing earmuffs, a down jacket and a pair of jean shorts over hose (not tights) and mid-calf boots.

This is the beginning of the last week of my twenties, and what do I have planned?  A presentation (tomorrow) and five exams (Thursday and Friday).  Passing a level of intensive French seems like a pretty awesome way to celebrate year the thirtieth, especially since I swore on my 29th birthday that the following year would be devoted to French.  And thus, after much travail and paperwork, it is.

Yesterday morning, I culled about a third of all of my Facebook "friends."  Now I'm left with my real friends, people I interact with on a daily basis, good connections, particularly interesting acquaintances and family members.  I feel like I've almost completely severed myself from the dance milieu in my old city, for good.  And it is good.  Now I shed the old skin in preparation for a new decade.  I heard from somewhere that decade three is one of the most surprising and amazing for women, since they've left the self-loathing, wondering and questioning of their early adulthood behind and are settling into who they really are.  They're still beautiful, and they know what they want.

I'm excited about dance.

Fronching it Up

One more week, and I will have completed almost three college semesters (1.5 years of a 4 credit hour course) of French in six weeks.  That's 210 hours of class time, not counting homework or studying for exams (not that I've done a whole lot of studying).  I did tons of homework, I did it ALL, required, not required, suggested and even some stuff on my own.  I completed ALL pronunciation lab work.  I scored 95% or above on all of my exams so far, oral, listening, writing, reading and improvisation.  I didn't miss a day.

I'm adamant that I can't lose any of it.  It was expensive, and the school/program is world-renowned.  I'm particularly worried that I'm going to forget, since it was a lot of information crammed into a small period of time.  Foreign languages require quite a bit of what my dad calls "sink time," when your brain soaks it in and fixes it into place.  Maybe I will study during the week break between levels?

In other news, I'm reliving my teenagerhood by reading ALL of Tamora Pierce's books, now followed by Garth Nix's Abhorsen series.  Seems to fit well with all the studying and stuff.  Wait.  Did I study when I was  teenager?

Nop.

The Red Tent: Thoughts and Impressions

My friend S loaned me Anita Diamant's The Red Tent the other week, and I just finished it last night, reading the 2nd half in about three hours.

I will be honest and say that I loved it.  It's not a rational feeling, but a gut-deep appreciation for the way love, birth, death and beauty is expressed in the book.  The book wounds and it rends and it grates and it sighs and shouts joyfully under the sun and the moon of all things human and female.  It's fiction, and it would be inappropriate for me to pass any judgment at all upon it's so-called "authenticity" (which so many offended, super-Christian readers complained about in their reviews).  It makes me laugh when people get so up-in-arms when a book is labeled "religious fiction" and they pick it up, believing that "religious" has to mean "Christian" or else.

People complained that it drags on and on.  One witty reviewer snidely commented that it flies, "when tossed across a room."  I usually understand the reasoning for comments like these for many books, but in the case of The Red Tent, I'm completely baffled.  I couldn't put it down, maybe because I'm a woman and strongly drawn to goddess traditions, but I'm not usually so receptive to so-called "female literature," usually rejecting it as hokey or too New Age.  I have become very masculine in my values.

I asked myself so many weird questions as I read this book, questions I've never pondered or ones I've scoffed at as barbaric and base.  What does it mean to be a parent?  A mother?  A girl?  A weaker subgroup among the strong?  Female?  Male?  My whole life, I was socialized to despise, feel dirtied by or at least be inconvenienced by my monthly cycles.  My husband, Caspian, was the one who really introduced me to the concept that it's good and natural and part of being female and should be appreciated, and this book helped to drive the power of real femininity (not masculine expressions of power by females, which are acceptable and valued by society) home to me.

When it comes to book reviews, I'm horrible at analyzing plot and literary devices and stuff like that, simply because I am such an instinctive reader and don't even pay attention to these things the first time through a book.  However, Diamant's descriptive skills entranced me.  I was enamored of Dinah's mothers, her lovers, the gritty, often barbaric, yet beautiful world she inhabited.

People nowadays fear the earth.  They separate themselves from it and entwine themselves in a glittering, false net of pop culture and fleeting, banal, unhealthy values and die in this state.  The book reminded me, once again, that the earth and time and the cycles that govern my body and the universe should not be ignored.

P.S.

Class high score for written exam.  BRAGBRAGBRAG!

The Cinnamon Fiasco

Sooo...  I have a young classmate who has been jonesin' to try the infamous cinnamon challenge.  To take this challenge, one simply attempts to swallow an innocuous spoonful of cinnamon, always with messy results.

For two weeks, me and another classmate, S, have shown her numerous videos of various people attempting the cinnamon challenge, but to no effect; she was dead-set on trying, and in class, no less.  S provided the cinnamon and handed it over, warning them that it wouldn't be a fun experience.  Our other classmates readied their smartphones for recording the event.

In the middle of the computer lab, this classmate B, and another, R, took the cinnamon challenge.  Before they did so, I yelled at them, set up a trashcan and left the room with N, positive that they'd explode cinnamon all over the expensive equipment and/or puke in all directions and that I'd get in trouble.  I wasn't disappointed!

I stopped in the restroom on the way from the lab to our classroom, and presently, in roar R and B, coughing and gagging.  R was laughing so hard that she could barely gasp, clouds of cinnamon pouring fourth.  Meanwhile, B vomited into the sink, coughing and laughing between retches.  Really?  This is somebody's idea of a good time?

R recovered before B and stood by, pointing and laughing.  When B finally emerged from the bathroom, eyes and nose streaming cinnamon tears, she croaked, "Shinseiko, I should have listened to you.  That was horrible."

At the tail end of lunch, one of our other classmates, E, saunters in.  He's one of my faves, a young, chill dude from Mexico City with an endless array of Armani Express t-shirts.  As soon as R and B described their suffering to him in gritty detail, he was jonesin' to take the cinnamon challenge, no matter what I or N (the doctor in the class) said or how we pleaded.  N pushed him out into the hallway and, surrounded by five other classmates with their iPhones out, ready for filming, proceeded to stuff a heaping spoonful into his mouth.  He chewed for three seconds...  And ran for the men's restroom, naturally.

The whole class couldn't stop laughing all day, because E suffered by far the worst effects.  Unlike R, who had managed to isolate and swallow her cinnamon, and S, who coughed and puked it all out, E snorked it deep into his sinuses, where it proceeded to puff up all of his poor mucous membranes to the point that he was drooling and slobbering, unable to breathe through his nose, and couldn't feel his throat.  He went through a box of tissues in an hour and sat taking notes at his desk, sweating and sniffling and croaking in discomfort.  During break, I said, "So, E, how was it?"  And he smiled adorably like a little sick kid, his eyes watering and spilling over, and grunted, "It was awesome."

Life (and Other Things) in the City

Recently, my classmates have asked me about my transition from uber-suburbia to big city life, and I've been so immersed in it that I haven't really bothered to think about the huge changes that I have undergone, for the better, I think.  But, just to shake things up, I'm going to start with some of the irritating things.

Irritating Things

• High cost of living, especially food and rent.  Our apartment is smaller than my first solo apartment just out of graduate school, and costs over twice as much per month.  Our grocery costs are almost 200% what they were before we moved.
• Pretty much no way to own property without being moderately wealthy.  Property tax in Québec is 40%, and houses anywhere on the island are flagrantly expensive.
• Our budget, with me in school at the moment, is probably slightly less than 40% (YES.  FORTY PERCENT) of what it was.  Not forty percent less, but a little more than ONE-THIRD of our pre-move budget, not curved for any cost-of-living increases.  We buy so little.  Every expense is examined.  Nothing is bought for any reason other than its functionality (sometimes fashion is a side-effect).  Frugality is a skill, but not necessarily fun, especially when I see my peers back at home settling down at their nine-to-fives, buying homes, amassing "stuff" and having babies.
• Pretty much no reason to own a car.  We sold both of ours soon after we moved and never even took them to our new country, and we are pretty much stuck here on the island.
• I don't have a cell phone.

Awesome Things

• I don't have a cell phone.
• We live in the thick of it, so to speak, in the center of downtown, where all the cool shit is going down.  AND we have two gardens, and a beautiful residence that is almost 150 years old.
• My tuition, for full-time studies, at a university that is #17 in the world, is just plain cheap.
• We walk everywhere, in rain, in wind, in snow and blazing heat.
• If we can't walk, we take public transportation.
• We generate so little waste, it barely fills a kitchen-sized garbage bag a third of the way per week.  We compost all vegetative organic waste spring, summer and fall (and sometimes save it in the winter, too!).
• We recycle the equivalent of three kitchen-sized garbage bags per week.  All plastics, papers, cardboards and metals are accepted by the city, and you don't even have to pre-sort!
• Our friends are an amazingly diverse conglomeration of nationalities, backgrounds and languages.  I encounter so many different perspectives on a daily basis that it makes my head spin.

We might be "behind" our peers in certain areas, but we have huge plans for our future together.  Canada, specifically Québec, is the place for us, at least for the next decade.  I want to be certified fluent in French by a world-class university and work for a cause (this is important now) in a dynamic multilingual environment with intelligent, interesting, liberal people.  And once that happens, I want to single handedly design a beautiful contemporary home (where there are forests and we can have land for a garden) and spend my vacations traveling the world and studying languages.  Maybe I will fit a PhD or two in there somewhere.

I can't speak for Caspian, but I know that he is amazingly intelligent and has some awesome, meaningful and lucrative plans in the works.  But at this moment, we happen to be focusing on my development.  I feel a bit guilty about it, but it must be done.

To be honest, I feel a bit left out, like I've gone in a completely different direction than the people I grew up with.  But it's funny; I'm happier now - in our little place, with my funny, beautiful and talented husband, our cats and our tight budget - than I ever was with the liquidity I had, plugging away at an "acceptable" (as opposed to "above average" or "outstanding") life in my little southern city.  "Outstanding" takes time, heartache, patience and work.

Happy Kitties Get Wine

I totally aced part deux of my midterm.  I raced through it, checked it twice (paying special attention to the accentation of stem-changing verbs and the plurality of my possessive adjectives, since they follow the object modified, rather than the number of subjects), and was outta there in like 40 minutes, the 2nd to leave the room.  If there's one thing I'm super good at, it's remembering ANYTHING verbal.  Anything.  If I've written it down once, chances are I'll remember it without studying for probably two or three weeks.

The university is getting on my case about my passport, which expired in January.  Soooo, I ran to the bank, got a money order and sent it all off to be renewed, hopefully in time to complete my registration for the next level, beginning at the start of March.  Tonight, I am pretty excited about not having to feel guilty for not studying.  Heh.

It was a beautiful winter day in Montréal, windy and chilly and clogged with fashionable people of course, but everybody I interacted with was friendly.  I am a happy kitty.

Has anybody noticed...

That everybody seems to be spawning recently?  It makes me bitter and smug because I am an immature, selfish individual.

I had the oral part of my midterm today.  That's right...  A year of college French in six weeks = midterms at the beginning of the fourth week.  Tomorrow is the reading/writing part, and Friday is listening comprehension. my walks have been pleasant despite the 40-60 kph winds, since it has been really warm recently, only -2 or +2 degrees C.

Je suis job-hunting.