Bad Of The Country

The funny thing about writing a blog is that it makes you think of your life as chapters in a book. How can I give this week a plot, a beginning, climbing action, climax, and conclusion? A thesis, an argument, a rebuttal?

I was thinking about tackling the subject of homesickness this week, and of course it would be simplest to treat it like any other chapter in any other work of fiction (as one really should approach any blog they read). Indeed, there exists a very clear format that can be followed by anyone.

All you have to do is commence with something that would make me miss my family, my home, my friends. Maybe how the constant rain reminds me of walking through downtown Portland with soaking wet hair, how the glow of the city lights somehow seem more beautiful against the angry gray sky. Or how talking about politics makes me think of the evenings in my living room with my family, screaming and laughing and debating every subject spanning universal healthcare to the best Star Wars movie.

Then you begin to tie these things together, make them gather on each other, until every thing I see reminds me of home. You could add a scene where I am contemplating buying plane tickets, one where I am calling home every minute, another where I am begging people to come visit me. You could draw on psychological models, make references to Greek Mythology, add in some talking animals, if you want, whatever you like as long as at the climax of the story I reach acceptance.

The falling action of the story would be simple. As I felt more at home in Caen, I would be able to start appreciating the differences from the familiar. Caen would become my new home, my new place of comfort and safety. I would long for my dorm room bed. A galette would replace my mother’s apple crisp. French children would become my new nieces and nephews.

Homesickness plot over. Turn the page and move on to the following conflict in the following episode.

However, all that would be a lie.

Homesickness, as with everything else in life, cannot be confined to a chapter. There is no clear beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it branches out, it disappears and emerges. It does not respect the two dimensional neatness of a piece of paper or computer screen. To make it obey these conventions, I would have to resort to gross exaggeration and flat out lies.

Homesickness is not a chronic disease; it is an acute pain that happens from time to time, more like heartburn than cancer.

I never pine for my home or my life before I came here. This experience is too exciting, too rich, and too glamorous in my eyes for that. I have never wasted hours wishing for my bed or spent days imagining my friends joining me here. I cling instead to the moment I am in now, because I know it won’t be long before I will be missing it.

But sometimes, when I least expect it, I feel a pang for what I have left behind. I want to go feel the cool urbanity of Seattle. I want the warmth of the fireplace in my house. I want to pick up my nieces and nephews. I want to surprise my brother at high school with a slurpee.

This lasts for only a few minutes generally, and while they are unpleasant, I don’t wish them gone. These are how I am going to get to the airport on December 23rd. How I am willingly going to return to Ellensburg, WA. How I am going to appreciate these miniscule little details of my life when I return.

In all honesty, I believe that while this version is less dramatic, it is more meaningful. Aside from the simple virtue of it being the truth, this story reveals the moments that are truly important in my life. They are a clear vision of what makes me happy; a guide to what I should maintain when I get home. A brief revelation of who and what I will be when I return.

And so I will welcome mal au pays or rather, when I am homesick for English, “bad of the country”.

My Cousin Committed Suicide

The first day I was here, I was immediately startled by what appeared to be a large mosquito. With spindly legs sprawling out the distance of your average coffee mug, they certainly looked menacing. Afraid that it may give me malaria, I killed it with a piece of my room insurance paperwork.

As I learned in my writing class later on, these are not in fact mosquitoes, but simply a harmless, though ubiquitous, relative. I still don’t know the name of them in English, but here they are referred to as un cousin.

In France, there is a proverb that refers to these cousins, one that celebrates their apparent powers of divination. It reads:

Araignée du matin,
Chagrin
Araignée du soir
Espoir

This roughly translates to “you see this bug in the morning, you’ll be depressed. If you see it at night, you’ll have hope.”

Neither the most insightful, nor the most vivid of poems, but you do you have to congratulate it for its succinctness.

With this knowledge in mind, this morning, when I was taking a shower, the bathroom was full of the cousins. Of course, I paid this no heed, as they are generally omnipresent morning, noon, and night, and somehow I have still managed to be rather content.

But, as I was nodding off in the hot water, one cousin in particular caught my eye. He had been flying above my head for some time, nonchalantly. Now, I know he must have been working up his courage.

Taking a nose dive from the corner of the shower, he flew directly and purposefully into the drain in the center of the floor, disappearing down into the pipes and beyond immediately.

This makes me wonder, if the mere presence of un cousin is going to make my day shitty, what will witnessing the insect’s suicide result in?

While I find that question perfectly valid, you have to wonder if that attitude is why he took his own life.

Maybe he just wanted to stop the mania of predicting humans’ moods. To take control of his own life, his own day.

Maybe he really wanted to be eulogized in some random person’s low profile blog. To be a martyr of his race. So that humans will no longer look at him as solely an annoyance, a war game, a prophet, a loser in the Darwinian game show of life, but as a fellow creature of this world, with his own problems, his own love, losses, mind, body, soul. So that we can learn to treat the cousins that live on with the respect of fellow autonomous beings.

But then again, he could have just been a really fucking stupid mosquito.