martinique0405

martinique?

Tue, 17 May 2005 16:56:23 GMT

did i ever actually live in martinique? here i sit in heels and grown up clothes using the wireless internet in my house and listening to NEW mp3s (thank you thank you thank you god for itunes.) and martinique feels like its a lifetime, and eternity away from where i am sitting right now. i couldn't figure out how to verouiller my clavier on my portable, but thanks to internet i could actually look up the answer to my query online in about 10 seconds instead of waiting in the blazing sun for the bus, taking hte bus to town, walking halfway across fort de france, waiting in line for ten years at the cell phone store only to find one of my students standing at the counter, staring blankly at my phone and then answering my keypad-locking questions with questions of his own, like "do you want to make sex with me all nights longer?" where AM i?

out in the cold

Mon, 09 May 2005 18:37:10 GMT

you definitely can never go home again. not only is my home climatically totally unacceptable, but it has also been locked down so that i can't even get in again. tried to go running but have no key. tried to check email but don't have computer login. tried to make lunch, can't find food. tried to do laundry but can't get washer to start. tried to check voice mail but don't know password. feel like foreigner, although am pretty sure that this is the part of town where i'm supposed to feel right at home. hmmm.. apparently fam not getting home till around 7h30, so i'm stranded out here in middle of nowhere with nothing i can actually do and no one to explain it to me. perhaps family has entered me into a reality show and i know nothing about it. "locked out lucy." they're probably reviewing hte footage of me saying mean things to the cat when couldn't find the key and will air it on prime time tv to destroy my future political career. fuck it, guess i'll have to be a writer instead. which is good because i need to lose weight and writers never have money for food. so, actually, my family probably does have my best interests at heart. thanks mom!

unchained (unhinged?) melody

Fri, 06 May 2005 14:53:01 GMT

i guess i need to change the name of my blog. yesterday i left on a jet plane, dont know when ill be back again. instead of waking up to the sunshine filtering through the banana leaves ce matin, i woke up to COLD COLD COLD and GRAY. sitting on Tatianas couch, huddled under blankets, wearing all the warm clothes in my suitcase, thinking, i dont know if i can go running with her because i think my lungs might actually freeze into small blue chunks inside my rib cage. actually contemplating putting on a pair of tatianas mittens while i type this even though that would mean this entry would look something like this: ekijahdjeioaj aosidfu or actually, maybe like this: brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

so yeah, i have reached the end of my caribbean travels. i feel lost, lonely, floaty, dreamy, confused, displaced, uprooted and unrooted, alone, frozen like ice AND like a deer in headlights. the usual. nothing new yet everything feels new, even my friends, even this free internet. did you hear that? FREE internet. for the first time since le tout début, i am coming to you live via FREE internet. pas de sous involved. some birthday present. last night, in my weary, fucking frozen, afraid-of-my-psycho-shuttle-driver state, i gave my license to the door man when i signed in. haha. joke's on him, my license expires today. nahnah nah nah nah. god i crack myself up.

and so martinique, as i sit here craving the beach and cursing the fact that my twenty third compleanos is not being spent surrouned by gendarmes in the warm green water at anse macoubé, i will sing you a song: "if only i were not so lost without you...without you my life's gonna be forever tuesday morning..."

end of the road

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 18:21:19 GMT

things are finishing up here in martinique, and clearly the computers here at the good ol cyber cafe have taken that as a sign that they should mess with my brain by doing everything in german, using english key commands and yet keeping a french keyboard. you wouldnt believe how long it took me to find the GD period key and how annoying it was to write emails with a comma as a substitute. made me feel like i could never stop to catch my breath...

today, one of my students actually got choked up when i told her that next week is my last week. touching, although i cant help wondering if she only got choked up because she wont be able to do n'importe quoi during english anymore, since a 'real' teacher, ie someone who actually knows how to take attendance, will be taking over in may. but, whatever, i felt special. ive made a difference...next thing you know, i'll be making sniffly all state insurance commericals about the global community or some crap like that.

but i am not home to be commercial filming just yet. i am still here, and important things are happening in martinique, and just as i am leaving. i am a little disappointed that madinina has saved all of this moving and shaking just for the very end. for example, big things are happening in the world of recycling. Yes, thats right folks, the self proclaimed queen of recycling has found herself here in martinique at the time, in the place, where GLASS in ALL of france can now be put in personal recycling bins and does not need to be lugged seperately off to magic recepticals far away. Magical! Recycling makes me swoony when it is so easy and accessible! And not only that, but incredible changes are sweeping the domain of school lunches as well. since the dawn of time, martiniquan school children have had to scarf medicore food produced by a faceless chef. However, times have changed. The school lunch program has been given a leader, a symbol, a place for those bright eyed young citizens to cast their gaze when they arent staring at the healthful heaps on their plates...THE RABBIT! Thats right, that unfortunate rabbit, who you may have glimpsed slouching self consiously a prison jumpsuit and warning paris metro passengers not to stick their fingers in the door has been liberated from the dank underbelly of the metropolis -- it is now his time to shine! Now a proud and outspoken proponent for school lunch, the rabbit has cast off his crappy pyjama things and, with his chest bared, stands upright, wearing only a pair of ripped jeans. It is a momentous time in the history of martinique, and i am sad that i will be leaving just on the cusp of such changes.

but alas. in 2 weeks, i will be boarding a plane back to NYC. so long beaches and palm trees and rum. as is the rule with departures, the closer i get to the actual date of leaving, the sadder i get. you've been so good to me martinique! with your insect bites and wierd rashes, you have kept me humble even as i got sooooooo tan and blond. sniff.

but it is not yet time for sighs and adieus! i still have one more week of teaching and then one more week of packing. i have scads of parties to attend, biere lorraine to drink, sand to accumulate at the beach. if i were a tourist, this would in fact only be the debut of a long an memorable vacation. actually, if i were an american tourist, i would still be at home right now, working my ass off and feeling incredibly guilty for the five consecutive work days i would be missing next week and trying to figure out how to get my blackberry to work in somewhere as off the grid as martinique. but for now, i am still faux euro trash, so none of that stress for me. i met a very nice metro yesterday who asked me "comment tu fais pour parler sans accent?" and i was flattered to bits. but enough of that. i need to quitte this internet cafe before the blasting AC turns me into an icicle. I have adventures i need to have in the next two weeks! food bunnies to ridicule! glass bottles to recycle! i'm out...

Operrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 17:54:29 GMT

"C'est toi!" "C'est moi!" --Carmen

On Friday, I went to the opera. What an enriching cultural experience. We went to see Carmen. We got dressed to the nines - finally an excuse to wear the dress shoes we each lugged from our respective continents - and zipped off to the Atrium, the only theater on the island, or at least the only theater large enough to house an opera. Everyone who's anyone was at the opera, probably since its the only opera they've had in years in Martinique -- everyone wanted an excuse to wear uncomfortable swank shoes that they had lugged back from the motherland the last time they were shipped over to Europe for reprograming. Righto, so...the opera. Lovely. The opera in Martinique is not to missed. Because if you are going to sit in a theater surrounded by posh, overdressed people looking very serious and snooty as they listen to loud, overdressed people belt out nonsensical foreign langauge mumbo jumbo and gallavant around melodramatically, you need to be able to vent your emotion somehow - otherwise you would go insane from trying to blend with the posh crowd and absorb the music like the happy little music-appreciative seasponge that you should be... Fortunately in Martinique, the line between comedy and opera is so indistinguishable that insanity was echapped and a good time was had by all, or at least by slee, kleen and me.
First of all, being the cheapomatic pays that martinique is, the theater heads had unfortunately had not wanted to dispense the sums necessary to bring a the real award winning opera troupe over from europe - instead, in a fit of avarice, the Atrium bosses had booked the understudies of the awardwinning opera troupe. Ok, so déjà we're listening to second string opera singers. And then, as is traditionel in opera, the on-site martiniquan team had provided the chorus, which was clearly a group of talented vocalists handpicked from an elite pool of singers on the island.... The marriage of these two elements was a winning combination that, I fear, could never be duplicated. From what I could extrapolate after watching this display of choral talents, I believe that the pure genius that was the martiniquan organizers of this grand cultural display, in a flash of brilliance, had delegated costuming duties to the individual members of the chorus, and also had decided to deny the 'rising stars' of the European opera scene the opportunity to do a dress rehersal with the island team, preferring a more organic, improvised, martinique flavored interpretation of this opera classic. The end result: a medicore carmen and crew belting out really poorly pronounced french and hordes of martiniquans in the most hilarious getups -mainly inspired by carnival, i would beg to wager - gallavating around is if they were trying to parody the worst middle school production you have ever attended. bliss...

after the opera, like any members of the hip and happening set, the three of us decided to go to dinner. now, while this may seem like a logical conclusion to an evening of enrichment, it turns out that in martinique, one does not eat after the theater. Perhaps their souls just to filled with cultural goodness, they feel no need to feed their bodies to...or perhaps, they are all on a hunger strike inspired by the quality of the evening's performance...whatever the case, restaurants were ferméd by 10:00 when we were released from the opera. We did find a chinese restaurant that looked pretty promising, but were finally chased away by the security guard who ridiculed our puerile belief that lights on in the restaurants and people sitting at tables eating might be taken as a sign that it was open. but perhaps that was for the best, because we noticed as he was chewing us out that he was crawling with cockroaches - and in fact, everything around the resto was roach infested, including our car, eeewwwwwwww... Our searching was not in vain however. Finally, after many hurtful things were said among the three of us, some blows issued, and some permanent scarring incurred as a result of painfully empty tummies, we found rive gauche pizza and we found ourselves in the thick of our second musical soirée. Rive gauche pizza is a pizza joint like any other on the canal in Fort de France. (The canal in Fort de France is known for two things: pizza places and crack dealers with big guns who like to gang rape white girls.) Anyway, back to our pizza place...So, we arrive, we say we want pizza. Perhaps because we are so swankily dressed, our waitress says, oh, you must be here for the party, follow me, and takes us to a secret upstairs room where we find....some of the most scrumptious veggie pizza i've ever had AND ladies' night karaoke officated by a slew of gay male waiters. Never have i heard celene dion interpreted with so much fervor...And did you know in that kylie minogue song, the lyrics are lalala lalalala and not nanana nanananana. Huh. Anyway, we gourged ourselves on pizza, ingratiated ourselves with the waiters, gave a coup de main to some singers struggling with those slippery english lyrics - "can't get you out of my HEAD", not "can't get you out of my heed" - and sang The Lion Sleeps tonight en francais, which has such classic lines as "no more rage, no more carnage, the lion is dead tonight." And thus concluded our night at the opera.

voler mais sans le plaisir d'un avion

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 16:15:56 GMT

'visé la lutte, ça ne me fait pas peur'

quelqu'un m'a volé mon portable. quelqu'un a osé me piquer le portable, sale con espece de putaineseque merde concu de deux batards extremements degelasse dans l'enfer. grrr. yeah, so some clod broke into my apartement and stole my cell. at least he didnt take my laptop and passport, but that was probably just cause he broke in WHILE I WAS THERE and didnt want to attract too much attention to himself in my puny cell-sized domicile where i could have poked his eyes out; had i noticed him. or because hes a lazy assed martiniquan who couldnt be bothered to finish the job. this entire episode reduced even keeled mademoiselle salois into a puddle of furious rage-a-rific tears that was astouding enough to bring friends running from all corners of the isle. and while she tried, though tizanes and schlafe to overcome this infantile grouchoramadom, the fact that so far today has been a comedie of errors because everyone in the universe chose last night to leave me urgent messages regarding today has not much assauged my feeling that all is hors mon controle. funny how technology has so warped our brains that by leaving someone a cellphone message, we have the impression that we have spoken directly to the person.as if, you could run off to neverneverland unnoticed as long as you got a friend to respond to your text messages de temps a l'autre. to the point that that friend would be considered more you than you. confused confusion. anyway, now i have a new sim card, which i can look at, but no phone to put it in, its a start. hopefully i can milk my martiniquan connections and score myself a phone. sans cell, i think i would creve de une isolation créé par un manque de trop. no lights no phone no motorcar not a single luxury, like robinson carusoe, as primitive as can be. luckily, i have coolio amigos like slee, who bring me chocolate and fruit and scoop me up and whisk me away to HLM peacefulness in apartments to high up off the ground that no one can break in though your glass slat windows. because did i mention that? my studio has window that dont shut and that is how the entrepid voleur entréed. just let himself in the window. guess i wont be able to call the police if he decides to let himself in again. but nor could the police call me. now without a phone i feel like i am off the grid. i could just entremêle myself with the crowd and never come home again and how would you find me? huh, huh?

random

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:22:00 GMT

So, here i was just chilling in the internet cafe, preparing to write the blog entry to end all blog entries, when this random guy walks over to me and asks if i speak english and french and have a college diploma, and then offers me a job working for the EU doing translation on an engineering project for their intelligence agency. and then in the course of the discussion it was revealed that they are opening an agency of this special projects unit in DC and would i be interested in working there? and by the way this guy is having a little trouble with his english cause he just got back from a few years in china...so strange...and he is doing a phd in france but wants to spend a year of his phd thing at gtown. huh. small world.

strangest part, my english assistant lethargy has sunk so deep that the idea of working MORE than 12 hours a week seems pretty daunting. but, the idea of speaking loads of french and picking this guy's brain about china sound fun. so perhaps i'll drag myself over for the interview. perhaps perhaps perhaps.

dernièrs vacances

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 15:45:18 GMT

“it’s always better on holiday, so much better on holiday, that’s why we only work when we need the money”

j’y suis, devant mon ordinateur, c’est le sixième jour of my very last vacation period, and everything seems to be broken down into crystal clear divisions with blurry spaces in between.

so many impressions, so little coherency in explaining them. First of all, my last month here is starting and i don’t know quoi faire. je ne suis pas sure si j’ai hâte de partir ou si je veux rester pour toujours. the sun is so bright and hot that it makes me confused, just when i feel like i have reached real conclusions in the shade of my studio, they are melted into a sticky mess by the bone bleaching sun outside. There is so much left to do, mountains to climb, sand to track, street grime to collect on my feet, and yet there is nothing to hold onto at times so that i feel lost and floaty, kind of like a waterlilly. la plupart of me is floating here in martinique, but i have long, thin (feeble?) roots reaching all the way home and those are at times what is sustaining me. yet i also feel so detached from america that the thought of starbucks and hummers and massive movie complexes seems overwhelming, too much, too many, too loud, too in your face. i wonder about myself, because first and foremost and forevermost i am and i have to be american. every langauge i speak, no matter how hard i try to mask it, will be marked up with americana. it’s where my passport and drivers licence and birth certificate proviennent from. its where my plane tickets have to originate. yet. i am constantly accused of being british, belgian, dutch, german, swiss, swedish, canadian, south african. anything but american, no one can seem to pronounce that international maledicition upon me. my vowels are too well formulated, i put a t in exactly with an exactitude not often seen in these here parts. i have been told time and again that i simply don’t look the part. its confusing and conflicting, and while i don’t really jump at the prospect of going home to the american me, i know i can’t stay here. i’m not martiniquan and never will be...and though often people are reluctant to peg me as etats-unienne, they can never seem to quite settle on where i should be from - i just float in a nebulous puddle of ‘otherness.’ but if i am the other, i have to come from somewhere else, some home. but where is my home, because it is most certainly not in the house i grew up in, or at the university i studied at, so actually, i don’t think i have one. the US is too big to be “home.” i rattle around in such a big place, it’s not homey enough or cozy enough, and the car emissions levels disgust me. but i am going back for the summer anyway, attempting to create a “home” for myself in a city i haven’t lived in for about 20 years, working probably in a suited office full of the very people, i have been generously assured by all non-americans, that i could never become. making friends i’ll have to leave behind 3 months later, probably will write one letter to each of them and then let them fall into the abyss of unnoteworthiness forever after when i ship off to china.

and speaking of china, while i am psyched to go (if i get the job, please please worldlink, hire me! i swear, i will be the best english teacher ever! ) i wonder why i am so set on china. i have no illusions of china becoming home for me. i am positive that just as i am feeling comfortable enough to buy my movie ticket and chewing gum in chinese, i’ll be packing my bags to ship home(?) again. but somehow, even this place that will be foreign and daunting and challenging to the point of ridiculous expat clichés, seems ever so much more appealing to me than being cryogencially frozen in an over airconditioned office filing stuff. and why is that the only option that i see for myself in the US? rationally of course i know not everyone in the etatsunis does this phantom job that i so despise in my head, and yet i am positive that it is a paralyzing fear of this image which pushes me continually far away from mon pays natale. but, i think i should also noter une autre image which makes me feel cold in the pit of my stomach and forces my lips into a straight line grimace: going to a generic restaurant that is decorated exactly the same as all of the other 800 franchises of this resto and ordering the same thing as 800 thousand other people that night, probably the only thing vegetarian on the menu(a salad with the chicken bits surreptitiously scraped off in the kitchen), and scarfing up this mediocre food which is dished up in enormous portions to cover for its blanditude while listening to the same too loud music that is being played in the 800 other restaurants in a room full of people so programed to america that they can’t stop to think that this is scary, this isn’t healthy, this numbing. ah the naive criticisms of the american à l’etranger. i am sure all of my preachiness will fade when i get home. i’ll drink a cup of chai and use my free night/weekend minutes and attend a yoga class and america will have quitely sunk her docility inspiring hooks into me again.

ok. enough of the granola philosophizing. i have 11 more days of vacation and 21 euros left in my bank account, i’ve got places to go and things to do. time for yoga on my studio floor.

guadeloupe

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 16:35:03 GMT

last weekend i went to guadeloupe with 3 friends. in a fit of wow, wouldn’t-that-be-like-mtv-ish-ness we had rented a camper van for the weekend. on sunday night, when asked if i would ever go on vacation again in a camper van, my answer was no.

my camper van experience taught me several things. first, i hate big driveable things. they are so intimidatingly gigantic and difficult to manuveur. along the same lines, i’ve decieded that i probably wouldn’t like elephants or rhinocerouses or dinosaurs. i hate the clumsiness and the headache of finding a place to park, of trying to get out of where ever you’ve parked, of needing to find gas every 5 minutes. but most of all, i hate the clanking, sliding, slamming, bang, smash motion of the entire back section of a camper van when it is in motion. yeah no. i’d rather walk, barefoot through a broken glass dump then get into another one of those devil contraptions.

second of all, short people and camper vans mix like baileys and grape juice. i was a raging bitch for a large part of the weekend because i was voted by my more statuesque friends “too petite” for the front and instead got tossed in the back with the luggage and dishware until i was bruised and car sick and very very not pleasant to hang out with. and it probably didn’t help that the other three people couldn’t hear anything i said, including various “ouch”s and “goddamn fucking bloody hell”s that i would yell every once and a while as piles of stuff came raining down on my head at when we turned at sharp corners. if only they had come up with another reason for me to be stuck in the back -- “gosh rebecca, you are proabably the only one of us to be tough enough to handle the wear and tear of the back seat. please, honor us with a demonstration of your fortitude,” then i think i could have taken it all in stride. but unpleasant memories of being the only kid too short to go on the tilt-a-whirl came rushing back as soon as i was deemed too petite to be able to see over the steering wheel and it was all down hill from there. for all i know, the front probably wasn’t that super either, but the fact that it was forbidden made it seem like a mega fun zone extraordinaire. so yeah, basically, i spent a large portion of my weekend imagining storming the front in a driving coup and leaving the others to walk barefoot back to martinique through a broken glass dump.

thirdly, camper vans are like huge, messy babies. they need to be continually emptied, changed, filled, rearranged. and, if you happen to already be quite grouchy, this is not fun and exciting, like it might be for a new parent. it is just messy, smelly, headache-inducing, and obnoxious. plus, camper vans don’t giggle and look cute. they just crash into things and prompt uncomfortable questions from men in work boots, like “how much horse power does this baby have?” and “which would you say gets better gas mileage, your camper van or an m16?” and “who do you like better, johnny depp or john cusack?”

so, to sum up: i have now deleted “try out for road rules” from my list of things to do with my life.

guadeloupe, however, besides being viewed through the windows of the devil vehicle, was pretty cool. it had a lot of things that martinique doesn’t have: funky art, white sand beaches, bike lanes, night life, mango and kookaï. but overall, the most striking part of guadeloupe for me was the other english assistants that we visited, because meeting them gave me a chance to play the what if game. what if i had been assigned to guadeloupe, what if i had made different friends, and worked in a different kind of setting (guad is an archipelago, so for all i know, i could have been outposted to one of the tiny surrounding islands all by myself), and what if all of this had lead me to make different choices for next year. it all seemed a little overwhelming that last april, some french guy at the embassy holding a rubber stamp that said “martinique” instead of “guadeloupe” played such an important role in the direction my life is taking. trippy.

phone phun

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:20:06 GMT

funny thing about martinique. because my only solid, never-fail link to the outside world is my cell phone, and because cell phone minutes are outrageously expensive (free nights and weekends my ass! i pay big bucks for 90 minutes a month -- and i am scamming the cell company out of 30 minutes a month, so really i should only be getting 60 minutes, and all that for 22 euros a month [approx 2357.00 USD using current exchange rates]) , and thus, the only way that i can really communicate reasonably with people who aren’t wacko (a side note on wackos: some guy left a post-it note on my door: “je suis un homme amoureux. appelle-moi.” how cute, in a psycho-pathic stalker kind of way.) anyway, right, communicating with non-wackos: i text. a lot. like, i probably send a good eleventy-billion texts every week. and this manic texting has led to a lot of important things.

1. i realized that i suck at spelling. predicitive text is an invention of smarmy spelling bee winners, i am positive. i’ll bet they sit around in their stuffy little windowless offices smiling greasily at the thought of excluding “carrott” and “carrot” from their dictionaries, making unhappy spell-a-phobes like myself become frustrated, feel hurt and alone in the void of sucky spelling, and next thing you kniow, we are running off to third world countries where we can hide from our gaffes or jumping into bathtubs with our cellphone chargers. righto.

2. my thumbs are now an outpost of my brain. sometimes, i will be doing about 80 things at once - reading a book, practicing yoga, clipping my toenails, and rewiring my studio - and my thumbs will still manage to remain focused on the task at hand and plunk out a reasonably coherent text while the rest of me is getting paper cuts, making bones crack in ways they never ever should, shredding my feet to bits and getting electrocuted.

3. i have begun to dream and speak in text. “i rite livjourn now. u r bored w/ entry? try faire bien, but no think gud. fish eat paper in bath 2moro? bring sox&wire. XX” ok really, it just sounds like i have a loose grip on the finer points of the english language. or that i am trying out for a part in a spy movie. hopefully one staring pierce brosnan. either way, i think i have just nailed down why it is that my thumbs can text independantly of my consious brain and still “plunk out a reasonably coherent text.” bring sox&wire?

4. i respond to the cheerful trill of my phone recieving a message in the same way that i used to respond to the obnoxious badoop badoop of a newly arriving im message back my days of youth. its a drop everything, run for the phone response. which is really rude when done in the middle of a conversation. and usually just to recieve unintelligible texts that say things like “meat jewels in ur boxes. 12e @ the $$. ok?” but i don’t really want to talk to people in person anymore anyway. i’d rather just recieve their texts.

5. i have beat the system and i am very good at calculating sums involving 918 and 758. every text starts on character 918 and ends (or at least, becomes 2 texts) on 758. i can tell you how many characters i have left in a text, down to the space, at any moment. which, i bet, would piss off someone working at samsung. i’ll bet they developed these inane number markers just so dopes like me would send really long texts that they (they being those bastards at orange caraibes) could charge us extra for them. well, i’ve shown them, huh! huh?

ok. well, i feel that i have outlined the finer points of cell phone ownership and its effect on my life. if you have any questions about what it feels like to have your life controlled by a cute little frenchy french flip phone, please feel free to text and my thumbs will write back to you as soon as they can. and i hope before you fall asleep every night, you say a little thank you prayer to whatever divine power you believe in for giving you free night and weekend minutes so that you dont become a textomaniac psycho like me. um, gotta go. dulcet tones of my phone calling.

ps -ok, so much as i just ebulliantly expounded on the wonderments of textos, i have this to say: sophie just called me, breaking a chain of text-text-text, and it was super and it was crazy the way there was, like, a real live human connection. apparently giggling is a lot more satisfying when not done through stupid smiley faces. never have been a fan. back in the day when i was an im purist, i used ++ as a substitute for the corny and smug little smiley. unfortunately, no one ever understood ++, so i had to breakdown and start using the :) in any case, no amount of added features to the :), such as :-) or the ;-0 are ever going to make it better. and this has nothing to do with my real point, which is this: call your friends and read more Tom Robbins novels, and you will feel at peace with your life and not trapped in a void of electronic beeps.

pps: perhaps i am feeling funny about the texts since my phone just ran out of batteries and i won’t be able to recieve any for the next few hours. ambiguity is the spice of life.

ppps: what did The Cure mean when they said “what a beautiful sight to see you eat in the middle of the night.” ?? and while we’re at it, i have a sneaking suspicion that blind melon says “cheating stragety” and not “cheating strategy” in their song no rain -- obliquely symbolic or just poorly enunciated? the spelling bee peeps will have a field day with that one.

grain of salt

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:30:37 GMT

big disclaimer: i almost didn't post this entry because i feel like on-edge near insanity of the whole thing is a little beyond what i am actually feeling about martinque. however, my feelings on martinique change by the nanosecond. walking to the internet cafe 15 minutes ago, i was the happiest chica in the universe and was loving hte french west indies even though it was pluvoir-ing on my head. i dunno. but anyway. i think my journal writing has slacked off because i have been pretty busy "finding myself" and "figuring out what i want" and "bullshitting essays to admission committees" and all of this pensive self study and excuse to play tetris has put me in a precarious mental position. en tout cas. here's my bloggiest of blogety blog entries for you to feast upon:

DELIQUÉ

the hit martiniquan song du moment is called deliqué and i every time i go to the cinema, they play the video along with the trailers. i don’t like the song or the video. the song because it is too romantic cheesy pop. and the video because it’s lo-tech jumpy shots of a lady singing in a swimming pool put distance between me and my movie. and pour dire franchment: without the movies, i think we’d all go loopier than we already are. we need the cinéma to bring us proof of life on the other side of the seemingly bottomless chasm dividing us from the real world. even in the most foreign of foreign films, a brazilian prison drama or a bollywood pic, we feel reassured because we know that somewhere in the production of that movie, sophisticated cameras and computers were put to use. probably the internet too. and then we don’t feel quite so insane for thinking that yes! sometimes it still seems almost plausible that speedy internet and stores that are open on weekends and bars that it is safe to go out in were once within easy reach. it’s not that we obsess day in day out about all that we miss. it’s just that distance between life here and life at home is huge -- but in a disarmingly camouflaged way. it’s not as if we are in the middle of the sahara desert or antarctica. this is the most developed country in the antilles. we have shopping centers that look surprisingly like they are american and highways and ipods being raffled off on the radio. you might almost be charmed into thinking that you hadn’t left home if you weren’t really paying attention.

but perhaps the most distancing element of all, meiner meinung nach, is more social than material: we are the only permanent foreigners around. in most places in the world, you are bound to run across some other compatriots or at least someone else as foreign as you, other people who can relate to your ridiculous nostalgia on national holidays and who can regale you with stories of their adaptation process to the country. but in martinique not so. we are the only non-martiniquais kicking around, for the most part. which means that it is only from each other that we can reaffirm the outside world, but since we have all been such integral parts of each other’s experience here, its hard to associate each other with elsewhere. add to that the fact that we are, pour la plupart, all female, and we start to get the crazy idea that in our former lives, we lived in a countries populated solely by women who are slowly slowly tipping themselves off their rockers with their ever increasingly puerile demands for simplicity through complicated technology and their moms and, pour le dire franchment, sex.

and that, my dear friends, is why we here in the lesser antilles are all such emotional freaks. we are more sensitive than fresh off the boat tourists with no sunscreen. we can’t really remember where we’re from and we aren’t quite comfortable in the place where we find ourselves because something, be it physical or ephemeral, seems to be missing. and to add insult to injury, our last, tenuous relationships with the outside world fuck us over quite often, probably due to the fact that we are slowly slowly going insane and ils en ont marre de our bizarro-ness. when visitors do manage to get here, they are like giant emotional sunlamps, and we all flock, squishing in around them and begging them for information, stories, anything anything. which, in the end, makes them go a little wiggy themselves, and at the moment, it seems to be the fashion for these visits to end más o menos badly. but more often than not, especially in the past few months, our potential visitors have been skipping the ‘visit’ part altogether and just opting to keep the ‘or.’ boyfriends at home are dropping like flies, college roommates and high school pals are finding more and more complicated reasons to exchange their plane tickets for cold hard cash and avoid our island asylum, despite the plages and palms. i’m sure it has nothing to do with us, and more to do with our nights spent on caribbean verandahs drinking cold beer and smoking joints and pondering in not at all ponderous way what’s going on without us on other parts of the globe. and of course i am exaggerating the extent of our paranoid insular sense of cut-off-ish-ness. bien sur bien sur. but something about this place man. it makes a girl think think think.

tsunamis and tanukis

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 17:06:55 GMT

you spin me right round baby right round, like a record baby right round.

in the past fourteen days, i have been wrecked by two tsunamis.

beginning: i went to barbados, and it was a disarmingly peaceful adventure, the usual caribbean scenery. white sand, tropical fish, swimming with sea turtles and diving around ship wrecks. you know the drill. sleep late, swim in sea, bounce along on left side of road in cute car with friendly locals smiling and waving and muttering ‘thank god for the lavish overspending of ignorant tourists’ through their teeth. enough ridiculous shenanigens to keep people interested when talking about our trip, nothing too intense. until... key in ominous music now....

...until the very last day when on the way to the airport, we decided to stop for one last swim in ocean before jetting home. just like in teeny bopper surfer movies, we pull up on side of road, strip down to bikinis, grab towels and bound down to the playa. splash around in big waves, do some body surfing, yay for tropical fun. we get bored with playing in surf, decide to dry off in sun, head to airport. nice nice. except, tsunami one: while i was standing in the water, rinsing the last little bit of sand out of my hair, a towering skyscraper-sized wave materialized out of nowhere. i felt like the bad guy in a kids’ action movie, getting my due, as i stood in front of that wave frozen with sheer terror. no time to run to beach, clearly too late to swim out beyond it. and then it broke and in slow motion i was scooped up, slammed down onto the floor of the ocean, pounded into shore and then ripped back out again over and over, battered and wrecked until my bikini, hair elastic, watch and a large portion of my hair were torn away and i was left bruised, bleeding, breathless on the sand. and then every seemed to switch into fast forward: my friends shouting, running out to pull me up before another wave broke, clearing the sand out of my mouth and waving fingers in front of my eyes screeching “how many now? how many now?” and wrapping me in a towel and pretending like they would know if i had broken bones. and me just sandy and shivering. plastered in sand, coughing up sand, crying sand, breathing sand. and then, cheery-o, off to the airport. sputtering, swollen, and checked in for the next flight to martinique, i sat in the barbados airport watching people hopping on planes to newark and montreal and wanted nothing more than to fly somewhere in north america and have a yuppy wrap me in fluffy overpriced towels and babble on about the gas mileage of his suv and which weed-killers work best on that nasty crab grass invading his lovely lawn.

but instead, my 20 seat plane with palm trees and parrots painted on it buzzed off in a noisy clank of propellers to tiny martinique, where even the towels have been downsized so that all i have at my disposal in clairiere is a couple of partically paper-towel sized squares of barely there terry-cloth. and almost as soon as my feet hit the tarmac, the second tsunami hit, in the form of carnval.

from the airport stretching into the next three days, i was at the mercy of a raucous, brilliant, grotesque crowd of irrational martiniquans dressed like cheap whores. exhausted from my first tsunami, i didn’t have much left in me to try to fight my way to the surface and breathe normal oxygen and real life during carnaval. i just let the crowd pull me along into a ceaseless fete where everything was a far cry from reality. maybe i had head trauma from the first tsunami because everything felt so bizzaro, but actually brain damage probably would have just restored a normal vision of life for me. carnval was this: men wearing g-strings, fishnets, bras, ski-masks, neon leg warmers. women wearing pretty much the same plus dominatrix boots, minus ski-masks. drums (tambours) everywhere. parades all day. lead by the Vaval, the spirit of carnaval ,who this year took the form of a giant banana. followed by burned out cars packed with menacing teenagers, followed by raging crowds of people. parade sucking in all spectators until it seemed that everyone in fort-de-france was just running, dancing, screaming, having one massive orgy to the banging of the tambours. and then at night fall, when everything had reached fever-pitch and the real raping and pillaging had truly begun, someone would pull the plug, and we would all drain off to our respective homes to try to catch our breath before the night parties (in heavily secured, safe-from-hoodlums compounds) began. and night parties segwayed into morning parties. which would end around 7 am. at which point there would be a dangerous and eerie calm while the wave backed away for a moment to regroup itself and everyone slept. and then at around 2 in the afternoon, the cycle began again. with intensity increasing day by day and culminating on wednesday night with a massive bonfire to burn the effigy of Vaval.

by the time carnaval tossed me up on the shores of clairiere coughing, heaving, exhausted, incogniscent on thursday morning, i was a wreck. thursday was spent mainly staring at a wall in kathleen’s apartment. friday i managed to pull myself together enough to tend to the injuries from my first tsunami: a severly battered shoulder, bruised ribs, various cuts, scrapes and contusions. on saturday i managed to finally kick out above the massive hangover and psychological trauma of my second tsunami and become a semi-functioning member of society again, or at least someone who can speak in complete sentences. and here we are at sunday, and i am trying to start picking up the debris left behind this week and put it together into what comes next: planning lessons and laundry and valentine’s day and other daily life-ish-ness. on verra, but right now, normal feels so not normal that i am feeling sort of lost. like when you leave a concert and all you can hear is buzzing in your ears, so that real life is blocked out and all that remains of the concert is a loud yet empty interference with normal sound.

groove

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:31:18 GMT

have found my martiniquian rhythm and suddenly everything feels easy. it’s like i passed through some sort of cosmic sheet of saran wrap, and now, although my life looks just the same, is just the same, i have the hang of it so that instead of chafing and stressing, it just feels comfy like a line dried cotton sweatshirt on the first chilly night at the end of the summer. and sadly it’s only now, when i am more than halfway finished with my caribbean adventures, that i feel so rocked into zen that i say saptastic things, like ‘i dont want this to ever end.’ although, i still have enough wits about me to chop up my lameness with a little bit of sarcastorama. here are some highlights of the past week, so that you can understand that nothing major has changed in my life except that i have figured out how to snuggle down comfortably into it instead of forever fighting tooth and nail to find some greater purpose to my existence. yeah no, i still just fuck around like a frat boy but female bien sur and perfect my methods of sloth day in and day out, like the party version of Ground Hog Day. so, here’s my week of thrill:
MONDAY: beached and watched movie with face eating zombies and didn’t sleep very well, not sure whether due to movie or sunburn on ass. stupid snorkelling. (and yeah, you can keep your smart ass comments to yourself about how you feel sooooo baaaaad for me cause i went snorkelling on a tropical island. i can’t help it if my life is too cool for school. you shouldn’t pick on me just cause i’m different. loser!)
TUESDAY: downloaded tetris and thought would become addicted but realized had downloaded one of those “you have to pay for all the fun features” versions so not really that sucked in, for better or for worse. but continue playing it none the less, like moth who insists on crashing into screendoor all night long just cause there’s a light on the other side.
WEDNESDAY: ever so dangerous combo of: mexican food, open flame, marshmellows, and enough booze that i no longer had a filter. no visible flaming marshie scars, dieu merci.
THURSDAY: taught one class, to a group of four girls. sat around for an hour and read People and discussed whether or not we would ever pull a anna nicole smith and marry someone really really old for the the cash. verdict: not for all the viagra in the world, though we might try her TrimSpa stuff if we were ever looking into scary dieting. god, i ROCK english teaching.
FRIDAY: played horticulturist with emily and we picked sugar cane and mangos and almonds in our yard until emily fell out of the mango tree while i was supposed to be spotting her. and then i went to see bridget jones II, and god, colin firth is way orgasmically fantastic. after wiping the drool off my chin, i got fucked out of my mind on some cheap ass wine and played fuck, chuck or marry in my backyard. pick: colin firth, billy graham, oscar the grouch.
SATURDAY: kind of fuzzy, because most of it was obscured by a raging hangover, but if i remember correctly, and put together some physical evidence found in my studio, i think we spent the better part of the day sitting around and discussing whether or not throwing away my one and only condom would increase or decrease my chances of having sex. then, applying the law of grease+me=no more hangover, we had some french fries at snack elize (home of the best ever milkshake, tho i wasn’t really feeling the dairy product vibe on saturday) and then emma and i got beat (unfairly!!!!!!) at a board game. god it hurts to get beaten at a trivia game by imbeciles. way to hit me while i’m down jerkstores! hungover, can’t drink milkshakes, no longer own a condom, still haven’t slept with colin firth. and STILL the brainless monkeys insist on beating me at cranium. assholes.
SUNDAY: roasted like chestunt on the plage and named state capitals. nevada is carson city?

and, since i am on vacation till valentine’s day, i have over two weeks of this level of stimulating activity to be floating along in, uninterrupted. on tuesday, just to shake things up a bit, i am going to barbados.

i feel like, in a way, writing in my blog is becoming sort of pointless, because all of my entries sound the same. “i do nothing, ever. but my tan is nice.” well. since i have nothing else to report, perhaps i will just wax poetic about colin firth for a while. ah colin firth. besides the fact that our age difference might be illegal in some countries, i think we were meant to be and i think it was DESTINY that brought me to umm....all of those movies that you’re in so that i could become psychopathically obsessed with you...it is so worth watching 4 hours of pride and prejudice just to see the wet shirt scene....i would just like to extend a huge apology to alyson heller, because before i embarked on this blog project, i promised her that absolutely no uncomfortable details about my love life would end up in this blog, especially phrases such as “fluttery kisses.” but, in my defense, not one fluttery kiss has been mentioned. so maybe i’m in the clear after all. although, i think that i really should put colin firth and fluttery kisses in the same sentence just to make myself feel happy. ha!

and also, just for the record, i am NOT an alcoholic. i just have the tolerence of a flea. (and a flea can get drunk off beer fumes, if you aren’t currently up to date on the alcohol tolerence of small and obnoxious insects.) plus, it’s so hot here that i am perpetually a little dehydrated. so give me a break! cause you just have to give me one biere lorraine and i am toasted halfway through. thus although from reading my blog you might think that i am breakfasting on vodka and desperately chugging cough syrup and mouthwash in hidden corners of cora where the security cameras don’t reach, in actuality, it just that i only have to sip 1/2 a beer before i start stripping off clothes and getting my eyebrows shaved and starting sentences with dangerous phrases like “in all honesty though....”, etc. so put down the phone for AA and my mom, cause it’s all good.

Well. This has been a pretty trippy ride of blogging. I hope you don’t delete your link to this lovely piece of online literature after having read today’s contribution. i promise i will bring back many and interesting stories from barbados and from carnaval and from guadaloupe and i will write them coherently so that you won’t sit in your office and think to yourself, what IS the appeal of reading r.j.salois’ drivel?

grip gotten

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:42:06 GMT

done with griping about the trials of free time in the tropics, at least for the moment. spent weekend bronzing myself on lovely yellow sand and snorkeling in warm water and feel much more upbeat, although my bikini is getting a little ming. sigh. but, i am gonna go to barbados next week, and with the crazy drunken ride of carnaval piggybacking along with that, i think i will be able to overcome the great sadness that washing my favorite bathing suit is going to cause me. and it is sad, because this means that for the next 24 to 48 hours, whenever i want to sunbathe i will have to wear one of my other four bikinis, which is quite trying. i suppose a little tan line diversity never hurt anyone though. well, before you all hire hit men to come and bludgeon me to pulpy disgustingness, perhaps i should season the mix with something more real lifey...ok, i am not sure what to do with the devil children at my jr high tomorrow, but i am thinking that i might play american jeapordy with them. and hopefully they will find jeapordy to be fun and engaging, not riot-provoking. because if the devil children trample me and i get stuck wearing a cast, the effect on my tan is really gonna be quite detrimental. well. i haven't been home in 3 days and there is a stash of diet coke calling my name at 30, voie principale de Clairière and i am sick of having sand in my hair, so hasta pronto hermanas y hermanos!

ennui

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:43:50 GMT

i am drowning in boredom. i have nothing nothing nothing to do and 5 more days of weekend stretching ahead of me like a kansas highway, yuck. here's what i've decided: i prefer things that are compressed. cities, busy schedules. not such a big fan of wide open space or empty time tables. i will never be a housewife because, judging from the success of my life on a tropical island with loads of free time, i would shoot myself within the first 6 months. not that you need to worry about me shooting myself right now, since i at least have the prospect of a busy life dangling just 3 and a half months away, dieu merci. also because i have in the past few days become the victim of the most perplexing crippling bone deep fatigue, so that even just sitting up seems like a feat requiring way more energy than i can muster. going to a store and buying a gun is definitely an insurrmountable task. ok, perhaps i should drop this gun thing altogether before you all flip out. it is sort of tasteless. just like the movie "un mariage de princess" (princess diaries II) that i got stuck watching last night. you know you are bored when you go to the cinema and the only thing that you havent seen is perhaps one of the most shitty films ever produced -- and you watch it anyway. and in some sad, i am bored out of my mind way, you find that antics of julie andrews and mia thermqsdfjlialis somewhat entertaining. god i am losing my mind.

today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw me back to you

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:45:11 GMT

Back in Martinique. Home 18 hours and already solidly reaffixed in my life here, like a piece of fruit suspended in jello. When I woke up this morning, everything was already unpacked and put away, my mail read, my swedish fish gobbled up, and my hair curly and my skin sticky again. And although this is the natural order of things in martinique, I felt somehow that everything being the same was a little off. I felt like there should have been a big pause where we all contemplated the depth of my trip back to the United States, my trip back to quasi being in college, my trip back to the anglophone world that is constantly pushing in around the edges here but never quite makes it in except in strange little scraps, like stores named 'city rock' and shirts that say 'my dream is relaxed.' I was expecting a sort of collective inhalation of breathe. But no....text messages were filling my sim card and lessons needed to be planned and were done in the usual half-assed manner, bus tickets were dug out of the jumble on my desk, red shoes strapped on, grocery list written and out the door i went.

and so here I sit after a morning of martiniquan activity, which means not very much activity at all but lots of sweating and waiting, wearing minimal clothing and eating a sandwich with pate d'arachides and confiture de fraise on pain de mie, feeling so embedded in my martiniquan universe that i am not really certain if i really went to palm beach or whether i just passed out under my mosquito net for the past five days and had some freaky ass dreams.

boston brian was on my flight back -- he had been in san juan for the weekend visiting his girlfriend - and we both just sat there in the st. lucia airport like zombies. i think we had the same conversation about how everything felt 'whacked out' about 13 times. ['it was just so strange man.' 'yeah, weird to be back in the us.' 'very weird. whacked out.' 'yeah.'] and then every once and a while, one of us would pipe up with a sentence like 'i watched cable' or 'i drank chai at starbucks' and the other person would nod sagely, and then we'd go back to staring blankly at the one poster on the wall of the airport. (advertising a jazz festival that starts on my birthday, interestingly enough).

however, on that 20 minute flight from st. lucia to martinique, something shifted. somehow, just seeing the turquoise water and the shiny green rainforest and the volcanic mountains and the sailboats from the plane made my mood much more buoyant. And when I went through the passport control, ALL of the border guards left their desks and came over to chat me up, making the line behind me pile up into a raging crowd of highly grouchy tourists, and somehow it was fun (probably because there was a sheet of bullet proof glass between us).

i read an article in Time yesterday in the san juan airport that said that people who complain frequently are more likely to suffer severe health problems. and suddenly i could feel my fingers start to go numb and my pulse speed up and gangrene start spreading from my toes up to my knees, because i bitch so continually about martinique. so, i decided that maybe i should try to cut down on my martinique complaining. which might explain part of my whacked-out-ish-ness in st. lucia, because one half of my brain turned into a watch dog and spent the rest of the day kicking the shit out of the other half of my brain whenever i thought anything bad about martinique. however, this wasn't very successful because the other half of my brain ran out of shit and then there was nothing for the watchdog side to be kicking out and the whole thing was a flop. a total embarrassment to the administration. but, i did bring me to the following conclusion, so maybe not a total waste: i think we need to get something straight: the reason that it is so easy to complain about martinique is because my starting point is a tropical island. its pretty bloody hard to improve on that. and it would be boring and lame if the only reflections on martinique i could produce were sycophantic elegies expounding on the wonders of rainforest and sunshine and plage. yes master! you are so awesome master! i want to be just like you master! so. perhaps, i am just going to have to sacrifice my radiant good health for the betterment of my blog and my general learning curve in martinique. i wonder if i could give up my sense of rhythm instead of my health. ooh, that'd be great, because my rhythm is so off as it is, that cutting it loose would probably benefit everyone. so then i could complain-o-rama AND better my participation in rhythmic endeavors. well. clearly, things are on the up-and-up in fort-de-france.

big

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 15:15:04 GMT

this morning i woke up in a double bed with lots of pillows and it was wierd. even wierder: i couldnt reach the fridge and my cereal bowl from where i was. strangness. last night i was on a 5 lane highway for over an hour and the highway didnt just end. nope, when i got off the highway, it kept going and going and going. still, things arent all that different here - they've still got the palm trees and beach and crap weather (damn you, chlorofloro carbons!) but. something about traveling for 15 hours makes martinique seem like a dream place that i just made up and imagined myself living in for the past four months. but i suppose that in 3 days, florida will become just the same. so, for the moment i am going to drop all of this introspective dream place crap and go take a shower and then maybe go bungee jumping or grocery shopping or ou bien simplement faire des choses en anglais. peu importe ce que je fais, au moins que ca soit en anglais..

Emma and Reb's Plan for World Domination

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 16:31:39 GMT

Outline of a screen play composed by Emma Payne and Rebecca Salois during run on the coastal path in Ste. Anne, Martinique, at 5:00 pm, Caribbean Standard Time, January 9, 2005.

Title: Scoop
Small town Scotland, close to Edinburgh, Present day.
Frustrated intelligent young journalist feels trapped writing the horticulture column for local paper. Feels that he has the potential to be a truly great writer, if only given the right story. However, at the moment, the biggest story he has to cover is the pumpkin contest at the local gardening fair.

The pumpkin contest has come down to two contestants: a prominent member of the local community who runs a large farm and who has won the pumpkin contest for the past 8 years. This woman and her husband have a large family. The second contestant is a pakastani woman who recently moved to the town with her family. This woman and her family have had a difficult time adapting to scottish culture, and they have not been warmly recieved in the community. The husband of the first woman is having an affair with the 19-year old daughter of the Pakastani family (who happens to be a friend of his own daughter.)

The journalist finds out about the husband having the affair and decides to use this to his advantage to make his story more exciting. Soon he is going back and forth between the two contestants, doing all that he can to fan the flames of this conflict and make his story better.
Unfortunately, things spiral out of control: The husband runs off with the 19 year old, decimating the Pakistani family and rendering his wife pretty much insane. After a complicated series of events which I will not reveal here, because if I did you wouldn't go see our movie, the wife AND the pakastani woman end up dead, and it was the journalist who killed at least one of them.

Suddenly, this scoop-hungry journalist finds himself first on the scene of an amazing story. Explosion of racial tensions, disintegration of leading town family, questions of statutory rape between the husband and pakastani girl, and murder in cold blood -plus perhaps suicide as well. He gets the atttention he's been gunning for and finds his career taking off. However, problem: the police officer investigating the scene figures out that it was the journalist who committed the murder(s.) However, the police officer (a woman) and the journalist are having an affair by the time she figures this out. Further problem: she is pregnant, either by journalist, or by her husband. Police officer in turmoil: loves journalist, doesn't want to turn him in, if she doesn't turn him in they could concievably have a pretty cool life together since he is now on the fast track to becoming the editor of the Sunday Times and winning the Pulitzer. However: not turning him in means jeapordizing her own carreer and a mega loss of integrity. Also, she will now be throwing in her lot with someone who has committed murder just to get a good story. Clearly not a very safe individual. And-- what about her husband (to be played by Colin Firth) -- a starving artist working long hours at Mc Donald's because she has dissed his art so much that he feels very insecure and feels like he needs to start making money to please her.

In order to decide which of our 3 alternate endings we are going to use in the film (which will be unveiled later), we will have a phone in vote, in which we are going to invite the entire world to help us decide. And each call will cost 20p, and we will use the proceeds to stop nuclear war. Which is going to put emma and I on the fast track to both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Advance tickets will be on sale in a theater near you very very soon.

New Years Resolutions

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 16:29:56 GMT

I've got the power

Yesterday, at Collège Tartenson, I manipulated the incredible power vested in me by the country of France, and as a result I think I may have left an indelible mark on the history of English language instruction in Martinique, and perhaps around the world. Yesterday, I created the ancient american tradition of "New Year's Resolution Envelopes." You may not have heard of this distinguished custom before, since I just invented it yesterday, so I will explain. In my region (cough cough...family...cough cough...by myself in my studio...ahem...in my head...) every year on New Year's Day, we, the good people of my region, take out our markers and our colored pencils and our construction paper and we make a beautifully decorated list of our New Year's Resolutions. Some sample resolutions are: This year I will stop biting my nails. This year I will stop fabricating American traditions to make teaching English easier. This year I will make my bed everyday. After the list is written, we carefully fold it into a complicated and nearly impenetrable envelope. The directions for creating this envelope are top secret and only known by a few elite, such as English Assistants, who travel about helping the unlearned masses meticulously fold their lists. In some regions of the US, these envelopes are known by names such as "Chinese fortune tellers" or "Cootie Catchers" or "Those little things that you can make when you fold in all of the corners of a square of paper to the center and then flip it over and fold in all the corners again." After the secret folding of the Resolution list, we write "Do Not Open Until December 31st, 2005" on the front and seal the whole thing with loads of scotch tape. If we have extra time, we decorate the front with fun english phrases such as "Happy New Year" and "Don't forget your New Year's Resolutions!" and "Water and Electricity never mix!" And then...on December 31st of the same year we anxiously rip open the envelope to see if we kept our resolutions. And usually we haven't! But, if we have kept at least one, we get a prize, such as candy or ice cream or comic books. God, I love New Year's Resolutions Envelopes! Did you know that they also practice a variation of this tradition in Emma's region in England? It's a small world...

However, today at my lycée, I was not sure if New Year's Resolution Envelopes would be well recieved. I mean, yes, I think we can all agree that New Year's Resolution Envelopes are the bomb when it comes to captivating and inspiring holidy traditions. But for the wanna-be 50 Cent crowd, i thought something more gangsta-esque would be appropriate. So, I opted for what is known as the "public humiliation" form of sharing resolutions. I had each student write a resolution, then I put them all in a hat, then I had each student pick one out and try to guess who had written it. The game was humiliating for two reasons. 1: Not everyone understood the directions of the game, so some kids didn't know their resolutions would be shared with the group... 2: I didn't do a very good job of proof reading their resolutions before their grammar and vocab mistakes were posted up for the whole class to see. Which, suprisingly, my homeboys get a little sensitive about, despite the fact that they are too cool for school. Here are some samples of the Resolutions I recieved:
-I want to back live with my mother.
-I want will sex with passionate way.
-I want succeed in music.
-My new resolution for the year's is to arrive in hair. (Trans: I want to be on time for class.)
-I want with Jennifer Lopez to have sex.
-I want to be know in the world.
-I want to kill other students in my course. (Think that was a joke?)
-I want to be President of the United States.

It was refreshing to see such a down to earth, achievable list of resolutions put together by my students. I feel like if they really focus, they'll be able to make some really positive changes in their lives in the next year. Can't wait till Amélie is the commander in chief and Fabien is shacking up with Jenny from the Block. Makes me feel a little petty for having silly little resolutions like "Write every day" and "Take better care of your feet." Well. I guess we can't all be Super Stars. But, I did still feel pretty damn cool having a blackboard with corrected sentances such as " I want to have sex WITH Jennifer Lopez."

jubilation

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 16:44:53 GMT

floride! dith! la vie en rose! i get to stay safely snuggled between the tropic latitudes (i think) and i get to see dith and everyone, well not everyone in the whole world but like some people who are cool and its exciting and i get to get SEVEN stamps in my passport so that bientot i wont have any space left at all in my passport and will be one of those cool jetsetting types that has to get extra pages tacked in. not that this is all about passport vanity. dith! florida! krispy kreme donuts and people magazine and trident gum and not being on an island, well ok, actually, i will be on an island but its not like i will be that far from the mainland like i could walk to the mainland which i might just do.

in other news, i officially dropped out of my creole class yesterday. yep, i went in, picked up my exam which i had recieved a 2 out of 20 on, tried REALLY hard not to choke to death on giggles while emma and i read the comments on our exams (emma got a 4, that brown noser!) and was very very bored during a two hour lecture on the subjunctive in creole which i didnt listen to at all and so was forced to play tic tac toe with myself during. this is a big deal. because first of all, reb salois doesnt drop out of things. and second of all, reb salois doesnt deliberately tune out class. reb salois has become one of her poubelle students. she is apathetic, unmotivated, lazy, stupid, and it is FABULOUS. seriously, i dont know if i am going to be able to go back to my go-getter self after this lovely year of sloth. well. starting to feel dizzy again. think i will leave internet cafe and go take another nap. luckily only have 4 more hours of work this week.

and go see The Incredibles if you havent already. One of the best movies ive ever seen, even if i had to watch it dubbed in french. or maybe it is better in french. qui sait?

sick day

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:12:32 GMT

today is my last day of my 16 day vacation, and it is also the day that my body has decided to become massively ill. however, it is one of those nasty viruses that dont have any sympathy generating symptoms. no vomiting, no obvious fever, blue lips, quivering, spots, gangrene, paralysis etc. just feel blah, achy, feeble, headachy. perhaps have malaria. which would make sarah lee laugh because for the enitre time we were in the DR she dilegently scarfed anti-malaria pills at every meal whereas i snootily derided her malaria fears and pointed out that malaria meds are only really effective if you take them weeks in advance and even drank tap water once or twice. well, on the plus side, if i get malaria, i will have a good excuse not to give blood ever again. not that i mind giving blood. in theory at least. yes, giving blood is very good and charitable and you should all race over to the red cross and give them pints and pints. go! but in practice, giving blood is just a huge disappointment for me. if i am not turned away immediately for being under weight or under-iron-ed or having traveled to a malaria-risk country in the past 5 years, i am flat-out passed-out about 30 seconds into the process. either way it is humiliating, beecause if i am rejected, the other people at the blood bank place, i am positive, think i am getting turned away because i have some sort of nasty std and not because i am short and vegetarian and well traveled. jerks. otherwise, they get all hoity-toity, i-am-better-than-thou-i-can-give-gallons-of-blood-and-not-even-flinch! ha! when i faint daintily away. double jerks. and so, in conclusion, perhaps malaria would not be that bad.

however, i am not sure that i have malaria. my ears feel funny. perhaps i have an ear infection. hmmm. well, i hope i start developing some sort of symptoms soon or am rejuvenated post haste, because it is going to look really bad if i call in sick the first day back from vacation. perhaps i should stick blobs of cold oatmeal all over my body like lisa simpson did to bart and homer so that i can get sent to a leper colony on a tropical island. well. actually.

i may also feel sick due to malnutrition, since for my first two days back from the DR, everything on the entire island was closed and all i had in my fridge was a few stale frosted flakes, some packets of jello, margarine and peanut butter. i ate frosted flakes and a packet of jello powder before i resorted to walking the streets in search of anyone, anything that would vend me some sort of alimentation. after hours of trekking around smelly fort de france in the blazing sun, i finally found a sketchy gambling place that sold me three popsicles, which i had to eat asap before they melted. then, tripping on sugar and with blue lips and tongue, i stumbled (although felt like i was floating) the few miles back up the hill to my stuffy little studio to feel sorry for myself. when em finally rang around to say that she had found an open grocery store, i hardly had the energy left to lean on my cart and navigate the aisles of géante. to complicate matters, the grocery store was packed (i think the martiniquan government may have issued a statement saying that food was going to be outlawed and that all citizens should prepare for a lifetime of eating rocks and slime from now on) so, i had to navigate a massive, riotous crowd of exceptionally pushy and driven martiniquans while simultaneously trying to not pass out and to remain cognicent enough to buy the food i needed. the task proved a little too much for me, since i left with more champagne for new year’s eve than anything else (champagne was the first thing that i had encountered in the store) and then i proceeded to get sodding plastered that night since i hadn’t really eaten anything for two days. which brings me to the next possible reason for my illness: hangover. however, i still firmly believe that champagne does NOT incite hang overs. none the less, i currently feel like crap, so maybe i am wrong.

the champagne did however incite me to do something uber-stupid which may also be the cause of my health decline: at 4 am on january 1st, i suddenly decided that i needed to put in my retainors, which i haven’t worn in about a year, because i was inebriated to the point that i thought my teeth were moving. um yeah. anyway, let’s just say that the 12 months since i had last worn the retainers haven’t been particularly kind to those little plastic molds. they are decidely ming. so, it maybe just be the fact that i passed out with two exceptionally nasty-tastic little plastic chunks in my mouth a few nights ago that has left me in this deplorable state.

or, it could just be that after 2 weeks of living it up dominican style, and then a hellish trip back to martinique (goddamn you air caraibes!) and then no food and then a wild new year’s eve and then stupidly deciding yesterday, even though i felt craptastic to go for a mega-long run, and add to all of that the horrendous air quality of my little studio which is dripping in exhaust fumes from the semi-highway outside my window...and maybe that is why i am feeling a little under the weather.

but sarah just texted and she is feeling malade aussi. so. probably it’s malaria after all. phew. bonne année 2005!

silver bells

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:10:09 GMT

ok, let's face it, those reindeer who "shouted out with glee" when rudolph finally got taken off the bench were bloody two-faced. smarmy bastards, keeping their reindeer games all for themselves and then as soon as rudolph is the it-thing at the NP suddenly their all over him like cling wrap on leftovers. it just makes me sick. and by the way, what comes after "bells on bobtails ring, making spirits bright?" cause i always just sorta mumble my way through that one. "what fun it is to blqsdfj jqlsfjsdl lqsjf song tonight." and my student keep getting all confused at the "blqsdfj jqlsfjsdl lqsjf part." but its all good cause usually i don't sing for em anyway. nope nope, keeping my precious vocal chords fresh for...vocal things. usually i just slap down my tattered little jcrew and llbean catalogues and play the christmas shopping game. its more fun then watching a hamster chase its tail. find me a present for my grandmother who likes mothballs and golf, go! ummm.... would she like the heather snapdragon three button cable knit cashmere cotton lycra blend with three quater sleeves on page 10? no you fool, my grandmother would never dress in those twenty something preppy clothes! get back to work! but...this is the summer jcrew catalogue, her only options are ugly shoes or bikins... tough luck! shop till you drop or ill make you listen to me sing about those backstabbing flying caribou again! ack no! not the singing! we have to stop the singing from coming, but how? and so it goes in whoville....

meet me in Cognito

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 16:26:06 GMT

meet me in Cognito baby.

today is opposite day. actually, every day in martinique is opposite day. in the real world, i am obsessively motivated to the point of scary-thriller-level manical energy. in martinique, i lounge. every day i wake up knowing that my schedule is overloaded with bare blocks of tiempo libre. time time time. i could write a novel, i could run laps around the island, i could learn how to set my alarm clock, which has been an hour off for over a month now. but somehow, despite swimming (actually, more like drowning, can't be bothered to make the effort to swim) in free time, i never accomplish anything. case in point: yesterday, i had an exam in my creole class. usually i am that obnoxious suck up student who studies until her brain is numb and then pretty much takes the test on autopilot because all relevant information has been burned into her cerebral cavity for all of eternity. for this creole test, i have a had three weeks to study, and approximately twelve hours, one minute, and thirty-eight seconds of free time each day to study. (if you consider that i am 'occupied' by work, class, running, sleeping, and transporting myself in the other 11 hours, fifty-eight minutes and twenty-two seconds). and yet, i didn't study at all. no studying what-so-ever. i couldn't be bothered. instead, i sat around (for three straight weeks) with a few diet cokes on the verandah and worked on obliterating my tan lines (bane of my existence man!). Then i napped some. I read a couple of novels. Actually, i just read the same novel twice. can't get enough of this tom robbins guy. then i burned myself a cd to listen to while i napped on the verandah and worked on erasing said tan lines. fucking bra straps. then, i took my creole test and bombed. it was abyssmal. painful. and i didn't care. not one speck. bought myself an orangina lite and vegged in the car with my man tom robbins (encore une fois) while emma meticulously sweated out her answers.

ok, so i'm not 100% lazy lout. i go running! see, i AM motivated. but because martinique is opposite land (i swear, it really is!), even running is fucked up. because, usually i go running to relieve stress, get sweaty, get that super duper i've exercised till i wanna pass out feeling. ah running. but, in martinique, running has nothing to do with physically wearing myself out and mentally relaxing. just the opposite acutally. i never really work out that much, but i am mentally burned out by the time i'm done. because, to go running here, i have to plan my route with the precision of a military strategist. the sun sets at 5:53, dusk lasts for 14 minutes. If i run at tartenson, there are street lights, but there are also masses of my students around until 6:15. The dog on rue des hibiscus is locked in until 6:00. And then I very carefully run around a very small circuit, racing to get to the well lit part, diligently circumventing people, drainage ditches, slobbering animals. And if i forget just one detail, usually a catastrophe so atrocious ensues (dog bites off my leg, get trapped in a baby-talk english conversation with one of my students, don't get through the unlit stretch of road before sun-down and fall into a drainage ditch) that i just have to hobble home, having done more damage than good to my body.

oh opposite land. if there were more of a link with the real world, where all of my actions would seem backwards and silly, i think i wouldn't slide so naturally into my new martiniquan character who is flipped upside down from everything right. but since i am so far away from it all, it somehow has come to seem a-okay. it is ok that i show up to class having planned nothing at all and to just blather on with my students about the best way to drink rum. it's okay to tell perfect strangers to fuck off in response to phrases like "can i help you?" it is okay to talk to people that i would normally tell to fuck off because it's an opportunity to speak french. its a wacky world. wackiest of all i think: i don't chew gum that often anymore because the fucking humidity eats through my gum faster than i can chew it up. no actually, even wackier: i don't sweat that much anymore. seriously, i don't even need deodorant anymore. (yup, that's right, reb now stinks and has bad breath...) well. reb salois is a little worn out from all of this typing. and she has about 100 pages left in Villa Incognito. so she is gonna go read and tan her little ass off for the next few hours to recupe from this wild bout of computer activity. and so it goes in opposite land.

bad day

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 16:21:51 GMT

'look baby, this is simple, can't you see, you fucking with me, you fucking with a p.i.m.p.
come get money with me if you curious to see what it feel like to be with a p.i.m.p.'

a day like any other, reb salois drags her cute little ass out from under her mosquito net at 6 am, gets gussied up for work in her very teacher-est outfit, mary janes, cardigan, glasses, mother fucking p.r.i.m.. and out the door, trucking down the street in the meltfying sun at 7 to catch her bus to work. so far, so normal. however, something is missing at the bus stop. namely, the bus. so reb waits and waits and waits and finally calls the teacher to say "desolée! je vais etre en retard!" and the teacher says, duh! no buses, dummy. it's the grève! i'm lounging by my pool, just went for an early morning swim." well, reb has sweated possibly a little too much under her cutesy cardigan while waiting for the bus to apparate, so she is now in a pretty lousy mood. especially since for once she had actually bothered to make a lesson plan for this class. but, no worries, she is just gonna trudge home, call around to find out if the rest of her lessons have been cancelled.

Just at this exact moment, a martiniquan man pulls up beside Reb and says hey, wanna ride? Reb pretends she doesn't hear him. He hisses. (Reb is not sure if this martiniquian seduction maneuver has ever, since the dawn of time, worked, but this guy seems pretty gung-ho about it.) Hiss, hiss, hiss. Ignore, ignore, ignore. Irate irate irate. Guy goes off on angry tangent. "I don't know what you are EXPECTING mademoiselle, you with your BLOND HAIR and your little red shoes and your skirts, trucking around our neighborhood on foot all the time. We all know you. We know where you live. Voie principale de Clariere. Yeah, we know you, and we know what you want. If you didn't want it, you'd buy a car to haul your rich white ass around in...." etc. etc. etc. So, reb goes a little nutty. "Fuck OFF! I am not a FUCKING prostitute. I am only trying to take the FUCKING bus to my FUCKING job which is being a teacher and not, contrary to the popular belief in this FUCKING neighborhood, a whore. get you and your nasty ass hissing away from me asshole." However. Unfortunately, all this guy understood in english was fuck. fuck. at this point, reb had a total nuclear meltdown.

but, she picked herself up and plowed onward. she will not be beaten by a bunch of neighborhood busybodys who think she is a whore because she goes places on foot. righto. so, still got lessons to teach, reb is out the door again. mediocre class, not one word of english spoken, but overall pas mal. quality cd in reb's disc man keeps her beebopping happily while walking to and from work. lunch a bit of a bummer since ants have invaded her bread, but who needs carbs anyways? nothing like eating your peanut butter straight from the jar...and back to work again, on foot, in the rain, to teach two more lessons. in which one student, when asked the question, "what did you do last weekend?" responded, "I made love. lots and lots of love. goooood love. sex! i could love you rebecca...." so of course reb jumped right on that. and of course it was raining for the entire walk home, and so reb's shoes dyed her feet red and she had the pleasure of spending some quality time in wet denim.

but this day must get better right? reb had a nice relaxing read of tom robbins, her new drug of choice since you can't buy crack on teacher pay, and then she remembered fuck! creole test! which i haven't studied for ! so, then she went to class and failed her test. first test reb has ever failed in her entire life. but still, the day seemed redeemable! it was only 7:30. so, reb chilled with some m&ms and diet soda in the car to rejuevenate.

and then emma finished her exam and to cheer themselves up after the abyssmal exam, they decided to go for a night swim in schoelcher. awesome! so they loaded up the car and trucked to to the sea. where, after about 5 minutes in the water, emma got stung by a mysterious venemous sea creature and was wracked wth incredible pain and had to be rushed home by reb, who was still dripping from the ocean, not sure what to do about the mystery injury and scared and stalling emma's car because she couldn't reach the pedals.

still, there was time for the day to improve. perhaps a happy finale of some sort. so reb got ems cleaned up, sat down with dinner, made plans to watch a movie later with the gang. at which point, she got really really violently ill for no apparent reason (but i'd wager it had something to do with the dinner) and decided to throw in the towel, since she was already throwing a lot of stuff at the moment, such as the contents of her stomach. but, as she was getting ready to collapse, exhausted into bed, she noticed a strange rash spreading all over her shins, an extremely itchy rash which kept her up for hours scratch scratch scratching. and that, my dear friends, was finally the end of reb's bad day.

noel noel

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 17:24:41 GMT

ah christmas, the time of year when i remember just how much i suck at wrapping things. it doesnt feel like christmas at all this year. okay, perhaps a little. because there are things called "chante nwels" all the time here. which translates as "singing christmas." but, its not christmas sung like it has ever been sung anywhere else i thnk. first of all, everyone on stage is dressed like they put on their get-ups sometime in the mid-80s and never changed. and then they added santa hats. and they just sort of sing whatever, a mix of 80s classics, zouk, hip hop, and there is no mention of bethlehem, snow, angels, pine trees. and everyone in the audience gets riotously wasted and eats cotton candy. but otherwise, besides christmas lights hanging off of the palm trees, it just doesnt feel like santa season.

but never fear, because as an english assistant, my job is to bring exciting tidings of christmas a la the USA to all of my students. for the next two weeks, i am going to make them sing me christmas carols the way that they need to be sung and i am going to insist that we all wax nostalgic over the joys of the north pole and stockings by the fire place and chestnuts roasting over open fires and little elves and keeping christmas trees alive enough that they dont burn down your house... yeah, its gonna be good. i can just hear my students singing now... "rudolp-f ze rrred noze rreinder have...has...had..a noze very sheeny..." sweet.