Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

If you’re family/friends from Wisconsin, a lot of this probably isn’t news to you. If you’re blogstalking me from Europe, prepare for an education.

After the November 2010 elections when the Republican Party took over the Governor’s Mansion and both houses of the State Capitol, the legislature was able to very quickly send a wide variety of bills to Governor Walker and these bills became law. One of them was a bill greatly strengthening the requirements for voter identification at the polls, leaving Wisconsin to have some of the strictest voting laws on the books in the entire country. Since this isn’t a politics blog, I won’t go into full details of how this law is complete bullshit. We can save that for a face to face conversation once I return to the States.

I had ten days between coming home from my internship in Washtington, DC and leaving the United States for ten months. On my list of things to do was to go town to Village Hall, and register to receive absentee ballots while I am abroad. I filled out some forms and they explained that I would receive my ballots by email, and I’d just have to print them off and mail them back to be counted. However, yesterday I received an email from a village clerk saying that there were going to be some issues with this process.

Apparently there were some changes to absentee voting that meant that after the February primary election, absentee ballots could only be emailed out to members of the military and “overseas voters” (a person who is residing overseas indefinitely). Since I am neither of those, there’s an election in April where I will not be able to receive a ballot via email—it will have to arrive via standard US Post. This becomes a problem because I only have about twenty days for them to mail me the ballot and me to get it back to them. Mailing things across the ocean isn’t exactly the quickest and easiest thing, and having to do it twice will obviously take twice as long. So in theory, for me to be certain that I wanted my vote to count; I would have to pay an arm and a leg to overnight/express mail my ballot back to Wisconsin to be counted.

There are a number of things that I do not understand:

· How does physically mailing a ballot versus emailing a ballot reduce voting fraud, when in both cases the voter is physically mailing the ballot back for counting?

· How does a citizen living abroad indefinitely have primacy in this situation over me if I’m the one who definitely is coming home and will be more directly affected by the outcome of the election?

· How is it more cost efficient to the tax payers to be paying to physically mail ballots to certain people instead of emailing?

· How does leaving me to pay the hefty fee for express international shipping not count as an obstacle for me to practice my right to vote?

Over the summer, I tried to do my own research on this voter ID law once it started to receive more and more press. I decided to write to Mr. Jeff Stone, who is not only my representative in the Wisconsin State Assembly, but he coauthored the voter ID bill in question. I explained to him that I was researching the bill, and was looking for information regarding absentee voting while overseas and any changes that might be made to the procedure after the new law is implemented. A few weeks later I received a response in which he called my concerns “unfounded and unnecessary” and said that everything about absentee voting remains “relatively intact”.

At this point, a girl can’t help but feel deceived. I began to realize that this could not only pose a problem to me, but to any Wisconsin student who wants to practice their right to vote while they are studying abroad in the future. I asked the village clerk with whom I was in contact if the same twenty day window would apply to the elections in November, and she said that there was a 47 day window between which ballots could be sent out and received for counting. So this isn’t even an issue for all elections, just some of them.

I might be preaching to a niche market, but this is important. The right to vote—the backbone of democracy. America goes to war in all corners of the world to spread democracy yet at the same time we have stuff like this going on in our own country. I am one of the last people who you should try to tell that she won’t be able to vote.

I am going to get answers, and no one is going to get in my way.

**please excuse weird coloring and formatting, blogger is being dumb

Winter Break

Hello, everyone.

Sorry…I’ve been too busy lately to update this. Kidding. That’s a bold faced lie. I haven’t been up to much, and it’s been wonderful.

My last exam was the 14^th of December. The long weekend after that was full of celebration and end of the semester festivities. My university has a lot of foreign students who only stay for one semester, so some goodbyes were said. It was sad, but we’ll run into each other again someday. There were about 100 of us in the initial crop who started in September, and I’m not sure how many are staying for the whole year, but a lot of my friends are sticking around and I’m sure lots of new people will come for the spring. I’ll survive.

I’ve made two trips to Marseille since exams ended. The 1^st was for a Segway tour with a friend, as a “gift to self” for surviving our first semester in France mostly because we love Arrested Development. If you don’t understand why we would do that, please sit down and watch all 52 episodes and then we can talk. Then a few days later another friend and I went back just to wander around the city shopping aimlessly for a few hours. I really miss true city life, and I forgot how close and accessible Marseille was. So I think I’ll definitely be going back more often in the future.

Then Christmas came around. As you know, I was pretty successful with spending Thanksgiving away from home and family, and it worked out again for the most part for Christmas. For dinner on Christmas Eve, some of the Americans from my program and I all had a potluck dinner at another girl’s house. Most of the kids in our program are either traveling around Europe, went home to the US, or have their families visiting them over winter break. But that left about 8 of us “all alone” in France for Christmas. It was really nice to spend an evening with the other misfits.

After that, I came home and Skyped into Wilson Family Christmas festivities at my Aunt Margie’s beautifully remodeled house. It was nice to “see” everyone from that side of my family. The Wilsons are a loud people, but once I had some external speakers hooked up to the laptop stateside, I was able to hold my own in the room. My father sent me a large box full of goodies for Christmas (thanks again, Dad!) and among other things, was a wrapped present that had “Do not open until on camera at Wilson Family Christmas. No commercial value. No useful value”. I instantly knew that it had to be full of tube socks stuffed with smaller items, also known as the classic Wilson Family party game “What’s in the Sock?” I was not let down, and my family got to watch me play What’s in the Sock. If you are curious about this game, as you should be, please ask me in another venue because I will not explain it here. But it’s hilarious. Then I digitally traveled from Greendale up to Whitefish Bay to visit with my mother’s side of the family for a bit, which was nice.

Since I haven’t usually been waking up in the AM lately, I missed Christmas morning. No big deal. Early in the afternoon, my friend Grace, along with her visiting sister and parents, came over for Christmas dinner. I realized how funny it was that not only them, but my friends here in general congregate at my house for meals because of my “good kitchen”. I don’t have a good kitchen by US standards, but as far as Aix student worthy apartments go, it’s AWESOME. So we cooked up and dined on some delicious duck and other things, washed it down with real champagne, and finished the meal off with a buche de noel (traditional French Christmas cake—think large, fancy ho ho). It was French, it was tasty, and it was fun.

Then I spent probably about 6 or so hours skyping into Christmas at my house. I had three gifts from my mother that I still hadn’t unwrapped, so I was added into the gift opening rotation just as if I had been there. They opened up the box that I sent home, which got beat to shit en route, and everyone loved what I included (except Ryan…because shipping abuse meant that his hollow chocolate Santa stood no chance, and arrived in powder form). The rest of the time I kinda just spent hanging out “at the counter” until I got too tired to stay up any later. They were cooking chicken wings and brats for Christmas dinner to eat while they were watching the Packer game, which I was jealous of. It’s no secret that I don’t care for watching sports, even if it is my home state’s nearly undefeated, reigning Super Bowl champion, American football team. But the idea of such a Wisconsin Christmas sounded wonderful.

So now I’m going back to doing nothing. But I’m not REALLY doing nothing. I gave my apartment a thorough cleaning, and I think it might look better now than it did the day I moved in, so…go, me. I’m doing a bit of reading on my lovely new Kindle Touch (thanks, mom and brad!). I’m doing a bit of research for my birthday trip to Milan. By the way, I’m going to Milan for my birthday with two girls from my program for a few days. I have plane tickets purchased and a hotel room booked, but I need to figure out exactly what I want to do when I get there. I’m very excited to use some Italian. I took four semesters worth at UWM for fun’sies, but it has kind of been buried in recent months by you know…living in France. Perhaps tonight I’ll watch La Vitta è Bella without any subtitles. Buongiorno, Prinicpessa! I’d like to take a day trip to the Alps over break, as well. They’re not that far away and there are plenty of cheap buses and trains that head in that direction. I just need to pick out a town or two to wander around for the day. And I’ll be baking some cookies, because three people know me well enough to know how much I would appreciate receiving American chocolate chips while in France. (Thanks Dad, Andrea, and Al!). Andrea gets bonus points because she also sent American brown sugar.

So yes, that’s my life right now.

I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas and were fortunate enough to be surrounded by family and/or friends.

Bisous.

Travis came to sit at the counter as soon as they brought the chicken wings inside from the grill, and, unprompted, proceeded to stare directly at the computer for longer than I was comfortable. I could hear him purring through the webcam, and it looked like he was staring directly into my soul.
Christmas portrait. I think these photos are hilarious.

My body is easily convinced.

Shit. Does that title come off wrong?

This post is about sleep deprivation. I currently sitting in bed at 3:19am on a Tuesday morning and I'm running on three hours of sleep from yesterday. I'm blaming Thanksgiving weekend. For that stretch of four days, three of them I had spent awake until the wee hours of the morning for either American Skype dates or just for funsies.

And apparently that was enough. That was enough to convince my body to just forget everything it had ever been trained to do in the past and to just stay awake into all hours of the morning.

For a period of my life, I was going to bed at 8pm and waking up to go to work at 3am.
When I wasn't working that schedule...like clockwork I would start excessively yawning at 10:30pm on the dot and eventually go to bed at or before midnight.
I even once went through a period of a few months where I literally needed as much sleep as a four year old human.
And now here I am....laying awake at 3:31am on three hours of sleep.

Who am I, and what have I done with the old Carly?

This hasn't really caused me many problems so far. And you know why? Because I'm a champion. I got three hours of sleep last night, crawled out of bed, cleaned myself up, put on a blazer and some heels and went and passed two exams. By the way, passing exams here is really all I'm going for. It's enough of an accomplishment for me at this point.


In other related news, I have four exams left to take over the next week and a half. They're all oral finals and these are my only grades for the entire semester. That means I show up at a certain time, pick a topic/question at random from a pile, and am given 10 minutes to draft a structured oral response. Then I give my little schpeel to the professor, and then it's out of my control. Thank goodness for being an alumni of Greendale High School's forensics and debate teams.

And in more exciting news I have a Skype date with my circle of friends from school on Sunday morning. I was so happy to be invited to an event at Ben's apartment called "Say bonjour to Carly!" that I cried a little bit. Not gonna lie. I miss those people a lot and I can't wait to see them again, even if it's just through a computer screen.

So that's essentially all I have to say at the moment. Hopefully I'll fall asleep soon. This could make a great case to get a cat, actually. At home I fall asleep faster if my cat Princess is sleeping on the pillow next to me (can you believe a cat named Princess has her own pillow on a queen sized bed?) because she purrs all the time. So the cat could purr me to sleep....and defend my apartment from mice. I see no downside to this.

xoxo

The First Thanksgiving

Spending the holidays away from family and friends could very easily go wrong. Celebrating your first Thanksgiving somewhere that isn’t America could have easily been horrible. I’m glad to say that nothing went wrong, and nothing was horrible. I had a great Thanksgiving.

Wednesday night, about a dozen Americans from Sciences Po and other programs threw a potluck Thanksgiving for our international friends. Americans brought traditional Thanksgiving dishes, and everyone else brought food from their country or just something to contribute. This was the first Thanksgiving that I had really made food. I enjoy cooking and consider myself quite competent with a stove, but never really got assigned much for Thanksgiving at home. This year, I cooked up a bunch of chicken (because turkey was too expensive), cornbread (mix courtesy of a carepackage from the US), and cranberry sauce to contribute on behalf of myself and two of my American friends. I did a damn good job. Part of me wished I was just cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner myself because then I could feel completely accomplished, instead of just partially. But we’ll save that for next year or so.

Held in a large party room at the dorms, there were probably about 50 people who showed up. It was insane, as was the obscene amount of food we had to feast on. For the majority of the people in the room, it was their first American Thanksgiving and everyone was very eager to try all the strange food we cooked up. My cranberry sauce seemed to confuse people. They kept asking what they were supposed to put it on, probably because it was a sauce. Yeah I know it’s called a “sauce” but you don’t HAVE to put it on something…you can just eat it. The sweet potato casserole also perplexed some, due to the marshmallows on top. Fortunately by the end of the night, everyone tried a little bit of everything and I heard no complaints. Job well done, everyone.

At the end of the evening, some people had been asking what the story behind Thanksgiving was. I told everyone that if they wanted to hear the story of Thanksgiving to meet me on the other side of the room so I would only have to tell the story once. This quickly turned into “story time” when some people decided to sit cross legged in a semi circle around me, and then inspired the majority of the group to do the same. It was adorable. My ability to tell a good story combined with my bullshitting powers teamed up to tell a version of the story that 80% resembled what we teach kindergarteners, but with a little profanity mixed in. In the end, everyone had a great time. I love cooking for people. I love sharing the better aspects of American culture with other people. I love spending time with friends. I love telling people bullshit stories. It was the perfect storm of awesome.

As for Thanksgiving Day itself, the fun only continued. I decided ahead of time that the day would be heavily focused on Skype so that I didn’t have to feel like I was missing anything. This was the first Thanksgiving that my entire family hasn’t been together, and it was strange. To make the separation seem smaller, I figured my family could just open up their laptop, call me on Skype, and they could just leave me on the counter all day while they hung out and ate. The plan worked perfectly.

With the time difference of seven hours, it made the schedule a little tricky, but I wholeheartedly committed to it. I talked to my mom, stepdad, siblings, and pets for a while at my house. Later, I followed my siblings to the next location for festivities and spent some time with them, my dad, my stepmom. Eventually, they left for the next location…and so did I. I said goodbye to my siblings as they were leaving my father’s house, and greeted them as they arrived at my aunt’s house. From 5,000 miles away I still found a way to beat them to the party…at least digitally.

And so I hung out on the counter at my Aunt June’s house for a while. InitiallIy, I was just briefing my family on what I’ve been up to lately, since I haven’t spoken with some people in a few months. After a while though, I was just kind of hanging out like I was actually there. Thankfully at her house, most of the people sit at the table and just hang out for extended periods of time so I had a good stationary place to take in all the action. Towards the end of the night, I saw that my brother, who was in the living room, had posted a quote from Elf to facebook. I then demanded that someone please carry my laptop into the living room so that I could watch the movie with my siblings. They kept forgetting I was there, and would be startled when all the sudden I would comment on something or join the conversation. It was hilarious. Before the night ended, I even made it into the group photo, as a floating head on the kitchen table. I didn’t hang up the Skype call until my family was leaving to finally go home for the night, and I made it to bed around 4am.

I didn’t even have to miss a Thanksgiving meal. Between all of my Skype sessions, my program took our group out for the dinner we all needed at a nice restaurant. We all got our fix of turkey, stuffing, mashed potaters, and pumpkin pie. It was lovely.

In all, I had a great Thanksgiving. Between festivities with friends, and still being able to take part in everything that was happening at home with my family, I couldn’t be happier. The cherry on top is the fact that I’m currently sitting in the south of France, and not slaving away at Target during Black Friday right now. I'm thankful that I occasionally have ideas as good as my solution to holiday homesickness, and look forward to repeating the process come Christmas.

Photos...since I have real internet and can upload them to posts now:

Let the feast begin.

"Raise your hand if it's your first Thanksgiving!"

Story time.

Hanging out, watching the Packer game with my siblings....and Travis.

A less angry post about things I’ve been doing.

Here are some updates:

I made my first batch of chocolate chip cookies here. The ingredients posed some slight issues, aside from the basics.

· Brown sugar does not exist in its processed, American form, instead they have something called Cassonade. It’s closer to that “Sugar in the Raw” stuff than it is brown sugar…big ol’ grains of sugar…but at least it’s brown.

· They have vanilla extract, but I didn’t buy it because it’s expensive. Instead I bought these packets of vanilla something. I don’t know specifically what they are, other than the fact that it’s poor man’s vanilla flavor.

· Baking soda doesn’t really exist, instead they have something called leveur chimique, or chemical riser? That’s a shitty translation, but this stuff does the job.

· Chocolate chips exist…but they’re expensive and come in small quantities. I substituted M&Ms for one batch and crushed up a dark chocolate bar for another, with the latter being tastier.

· Crisco, the secret ingredient to my cookies (I can tell you the secret ingredient because I know you’ll never be able to duplicate them, unless I teach you how to make them), doesn’t EXACTLY exist here. Instead they have something called grasse a frire that is pure vegetable oil like Crisco…but hard like a brick. Cue some time in the microwave, and I can convince it to behave like I want to.

· So…essentially all that was the same was white sugar, flour, eggs, margarine, and salt. Hey look…you have all the ingredients. You still won’t be able to make them. Just ask Chris Sewalish.

Next challenge, mixing all this stuff together. My mother was kind enough to mail me some measuring cups and spoons, so I don’t have to worry about that. But I had never made cookies without an electric mixer before. So I spent some time fighting with a wooden spoon, the cheapass whisk I bought, and a fork. Eventually I showed the dough who was boss. After some time going through batch by batch to see which pan from my cupboard worked to bake them on, I eventually remembered that I had a metal cake pan that was the closest I’d get to a cookie sheet. It worked beautifully, and the cookies turned out well. As you may know, I have very high standards for my chocolate chip cookies. Given the circumstances, I did a very good job. But perfection can only be obtained with an electric mixer and 100% American ingredients.

Aside from testing out the recipe, I was preparing these cookies for the next life update I have. Through my program, I’ve started volunteering a few hours a week at a center where adults go to take intense English classes. Everyone who goes there is trying to learn English because they’re unemployed and want to be more marketable to employers. Each class focuses on a specific job sector, such as hotel/restaurant, tourism, sales/business, etc. It’s a bit of a somber mood when you realize why all these people are in a room together, but they have fun with it. So I show up there twice a week for two hours and speak English with these people. In exchange, they’re encouraged to invite me out to do things and speak French with them or if they want to practice their English more, we can speak English. Everyone there is super nice, and took down my information (and were impressed that I possessed personal business cards) and said they’d contact me in the future.

Today, I went in to have some discussion with the groups and brought them the cookies I made. They were too excited. I had mentioned that the colorful cookies were made with M&Ms because chocolate chips were too expensive. Then, one of the students mentioned that she has a stockpile of chocolate chips at home because she used to own a bakery and would be willing to trade chocolate chips for cookies. Then another student says that she would be willing to pay me to make cookies for her family and friends, and another agreed. So now it looks like I need to go through my receipts and see how much it costs me to make cookies in France. Because I think I just found another part time job. And this is all just proving the fact that I totally have a pretty sweet backup life plan if politics fails me.

After that, I went out for lunch with a group of eight people from the class who are learning English to find jobs related to tourism. They were very impressed when I said I could understand 95% of what they were saying during the table wide discussion and that my French sounded very good. My French is just better than their English, let’s be real. My French has a long way to go. But it was a very fun environment for all of us to practice in, and I look forward to joining them in the future.

Smaller updates:

· Contrary to popular belief due to the tone of my blog, I’m having fun here.

· If you’re reading this blog, then you should probably know me. If you know me, then you know I can be an asshole most of the time. But I mean well. Usually.

· I love it here. I don’t want to come home. At least not until June. I am very happy with my choice to come to this city, this school, and to stay for a year. My life is magical, goddamn it. I’m living in the south of France. I miss some things about home, but the things I find here that I can’t find back home combined with the “once in a lifetime opportunity effect” are doing a good job at fighting off most homesickness.

· I still don’t have internet. I’m still angry about it. My roommates and I are still working on it. This is giving me some practice with my Angry French, something I insist on mastering before I leave this country. If I got home not speaking normal French any better but could argue and rip someone a new one like nobody’s business, I’d be totally content. This is what’s important to me.

· I remain upset about a lack of contact with friends from back home. The only time I have reliable, long term internet time is my afternoon/your morning. And you people (what do you mean you people) are all getting ready for, and going to class then. I miss all of you. So I know we haven’t talked in a while, but please don’t forget about me. As a point of reference, American Central Time and I are seven hours apart. I have some great friends here in France, but they will never replace the ones I left in America.

· My friends and I had taco night the other day. The only thing missing was margaritas. But it was still great. I still miss real Mexican food though.

More updates to come as my life continues to get more interesting.

I spent Halloween weekend in Paris.

I’ve been learning French since 2002, and Paris is pretty much the cornerstone of all things French. So I’ve learned about it two or three times. Seen a couple movies that took place there. Seen a few pictures in a book. I don’t travel much. Traveling would require more money or a stronger US dollar in the global currency markets. I’ve never been blessed with either, so I’ve been waiting for this for a while.

I’m a city girl. After spending the summer in Washginton, I had been experiencing a bit of an itch to get back to a real urban environment. Aix-en-Provence is lovely and I fully support my decision to study here, but it is in no way shape or form Paris. I love having tons of people around. I love being able to take a train across the city and pop up somewhere completely different. I always have a strange sense of being “at home” whenever I’m zigzagging through the streets of Chicago or DC, and can only imagine the same for New York. Paris satisfied my need for some city time.

Paris was pretty much every photo and movie I had ever seen coming to life. It looked exactly like I expected it to, but I was just so excited to finally be there that it seemed better. The first place we went when we arrived was a neighborhood called Montmartre. As we turned around a corner and got to the Sacré Coeur and all I could think was, “Oh my god I’m at Amélie”.

I went to the Louvre. I climbed stairs halfway up the Eiffel Tower and then took an elevator up the rest of the way. I sat on a bench inside the Arc de Triomphe wishing I remembered why/when they built it and wondered how you get your name written on its walls. I saw the Eiffel Tower sparkle at night. I enjoyed a picnic dinner of bread, wine, and cheese along the banks of the Seine. I wandered through Notre Dame. I walked down the Champs Elysees. All things Paris.

I also saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a small movie theater with a shadow cast, which is actually the only theater in France that is licensed to play it. The amount of continuity that film adds to my life is almost disturbing. I’d say I’m not ashamed to say how many times I’ve seen it in a theater, but it’s too many to count. Many of my life’s adventures revolve around going to see that movie in Milwaukee and it clearly holds a special place in my heart. So the fact that I was seeing it 5,000 miles away from home made me feel pretty good.

Three days in Paris to be a mega tourist proved to be a proper amount of time. I was very happy to return to Aix. Things are simpler here, and that is what I need in life right now. I look forward to visiting Paris again in the spring and hopefully having a different kind of visit. In the meantime, I’ll just ask that you continue to be jealous of my life. I know I would be.

Miss you all. Give yourself a hug, from me.

This post is full of profanity. You have been warned.

Fuck this country.
Fuck the internet.
Fuck Orange Telecommunications.
Fuck my 400 year old basement apartment.
Fuck everything.

Since my arrival in France, I have been telling everyone that I don’t have internet. The ultimate irony in the situation is that I can’t communicate with any of you without the internet. So if I’m posting on Facebook, sending emails, or putting up blogposts…how can I not have internet?

For the first month that I was in France, a public network would “float” into my room most of the time. The only catch was I needed to have my computer resting on the wide window ledge above my desk. It was uncomfortable to lean over my desk, and it was a terribly weak and almost useless signal, but if it connected me to the outside world and was a temporary solution…I’d oblige. One of my friends was kind enough to give me a password to said network, since it was already included in her rent. Between that temporary fix and having internet access at my program’s office, I could get by. My roommates and I were in the process of figuring out all the information we needed to set up a connection and what company we were going to use. All of us had some tiny stolen internet connection, so it wasn’t an especially pressing issue.

Unfortunately, as I enter month three in France, I haven’t seen this public network floating into my windowsill in weeks with the exception of a handful of moments. Somehow, every bedroom in my apartment can grab stolen signal…except mine. It’s not available in the kitchen or the living room. The tables and chairs that were in my private garden have long since disappeared (apparently it’s winter here now?). I’m relying on the schedule and goodwill of others to contact the outside world for short periods of time.

Enter my household’s ongoing fight with the phone company.

Since this is France; the land where apparently up is down, black is white, and every piece of paperwork needs an identity photo paper clipped to it—getting an internet connection is unnecessarily complicated. We needed the name of whoever used our telephone line last in order to avoid a 50 euro fee to set up a new phone line. We checked with our landlady, who didn’t have anything to tell us. I’m not even going to expand on that because I think its crazy speaks for itself. The company was able to give us a list of people who had at least used our number in the past, which we cross referenced with the list of former students from my program (remember that my program works with the same landlords every year…so one of these people lived in my apartment and used the same line and got internet because no one wants to live in 1993 again). One of the names matched up, we passed it onto the company, and they said it would take about 2 weeks for us to get the box and get the line activated.

That was 5 weeks ago. What has happened between now and then? We received the box in a timely fashion…but it wouldn’t activate. After waiting three weeks post signing the contract, giving them the benefit of the doubt, we finally went and had our program staff contact the company. Orange said that they never received the name of the girl who used the line before, so they couldn’t set up the line. BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT, ORANGE. YOU HAD THE NAME. After re-giving them the name, they said we would have to wait a few more days and then they box would be activated. Again, BULLSHIT…but okay, it looks like this is almost over.

While in Paris last weekend, a blogpost that will make it up here eventually, we found out that the line was activated. And there was much rejoicing. Until we got home only to see that it wasn’t activated. We went into our office to get help dealing with the company again, and they were supposed to call my roommate yesterday to start dealing with this again. They never did. Repeat the same process today, and she finally received the call. The company asked what our problem was, even though it has been explained to them a thousand times, they do their thing, and reply that there’s a problem with our line. NO SHIT SHERLOCK. I HADN’T NOTICED. So they’re going to call my roommate back on Sunday to set up an appointment for a technician to come out later in the week. That last part is too ridiculous for me to even expand on.

It is the year 2011. I am living in a decent sized city with 50,000 other college students. It is a goddamn right for me to have an internet connection. It hit me this week that I have been away from home for five months, because I’m not counting the ten hectic days between France and DC. I miss everyone. I feel super disconnected. I haven’t skyped with a single friend. I can count the number of good facebook chat conversations on one hand. I’m starting to go crazy. I bought George W Bush’s autobiography to have something to read. This is what happens when I don’t have access to the internet.


Please send love, notes, internet, and help to:
Carly Danger Wilson, Academic Program in Aix
30 Avenue Victor Hugo
13100 Aix-en-Provence

If your love, notes, internet, and help don’t fit in an envelope…please write “sans valeur commercial” on the box…or else I’ll have to pay import taxes.
=========================================================

I want to take the goddamn internet box and do this with it. All day everyday.