I feel like I should have something to write about, but life has been pretty usual in Montpellier for the last couple of weeks. I had plans to visit Cecile in Dijon last weekend but when I went to the train station to buy tickets there was a fire in a neighboring city so I was not able to buy the tickets. Because Cecile and her friends leave Dijon by March 30th for stages in different cities, I won’t be able to go after all. This weekend I’m going to spend a night in Orange. It would be a suburb of Avignon, except it has one of three remaining walls to an ancient theater—their claim to fame. Orange is where one of our social assistants and all of his friends are from so I’m going with a couple other Americans to see what life is like in a dinky little provincial town. Other than that I’m spending my time in school and my internship. I don’t do much for my internship, I shelve books and she’s in the process of putting barcodes on books so there are huge stacks of stickers and I spend my hours looking up the books that correspond with the numbers and putting the sticker on. This is the work that I do while my friends take Friday day trips to Avignon, Carcasonne, and the other ancient cities around the south. I’m working on getting a resume together for summer internship applications and I’m preparing for oral presentations—I have two twenty minute oral presentations to give this month. The first is not intimidating because it’s for my lit fantastique class and the rest of the students are Americans. I am also preparing a twenty minute presentation for my Paul Valery class on parody in the media, but reading about the history of French newspapers is actually very interesting to me. I’ve had a lot more time to read here. I bought a yoga book that cracks me up. I picked it because it was the cheapest yoga book at the used book store with the most pictures and is actually very helpful in setting up different routines, but it’s also a book made by the French singer Aria. It’s called Le Yoga De Ma Vie, “The Yoga of My Life.” In the first couple of pages she describes her travels around the world and how all of the cultures influenced her, but the most influential of her travels was to Las Vegas working at MGM. She talks about how she met this great Yogi Master there, “A little good man, but a great yogi master.” Later we read that the Yogi Master’s name is Shawn and that he studied under “the Great David Swenson.” Haha! Rachel and I joke about The Great Yogi Master Shawn now. The used bookstore by my apartment is one of my favorite places—it’s five floors! Mostly I spend my time outside where everything is under three euro. For a euro each I bought the fourth Harry Potter in French, and a CD called Les 20 Tubes de Vos 20 Ans: 1987 (the top twenty most popular songs in France in 1987, “Walk Like an Egyptian” is thrown in amongst the French eighties music). Well, I’m off to work on my lit fantastique presentation, I’m giving it with a chemical engineering major, so, we have some structural disagreements to work out—it might make you laugh to imagine us working together. Allison expects that literature, like anything in life, should be logical, chronological, plug-and-chug, without ambiguities. She doesn’t trust that Lit classes are my strong suit because I told her that it didn’t matter if her socks were two different colors of black. Poor Allison, I quoted a poet my last English prof always quoted, “Allison, you can’t tie literature to a chair and torture meaning out of it, you have to walk inside it and feel the walls for a light.” It was probably the scariest thing she’s ever heard from someone whose grade is tied to hers. Our presentation is on Monday and it will probably be the best because of the different mindsets we have (Allison's on the grade, mine on the piece itself).