Breaking the Boredom Habit

Listening to “Bohemia” on my iPod, sitting on the antique bench in my apartment in southern France, under a full moon.

Five straight weeks of being sick. From migraines to atrocious cramps, relentlessly upset stomach, against a backdrop of constant respiratory infection, fatigue, and low-grade nausea. Either in Marseille tomorrow during our school-mandated visa physicals, or at the doctor Thursday, I’ll find out what’s wrong with me and fix it.

The worst aspect of the past month, besides the drama of two host families and an apartment search, has been the physical symptoms and how left out they’ve made me feel. Other students and teachers don’t seem to understand that I really don’t feel well, week after week. How quickly people’s patience runs out. I don’t know what it is either. But they need to stop acting like they’re the ones most inconvenienced.

I’ve barely been able to do any traveling at all, even around Aix. I figured on having a slower pace than most of the students. After all, I’ll be living here a year. Most of them are leaving for the States in two months to resume their respectable American lives, their study abroad experience an enjoyable anomaly. What I didn’t figure on was having to sit here while everyone else travels constantly. I didn’t figure on the envy I’d feel, listening to them discuss which train pass to buy. Every week, one set of friends or another heads to Milan, or Chamonix, or Prague.

While my closest buddies went to Oktoberfest in Germany, I sat at home, coughing my head off and drinking beer in my living room.

But things are changing. You know how it is when you feel sorry for yourself, and you can’t see changes coming? This little rut of house-nesting, of non-traveling self pity, is about to end. This semester is dividing itself into two halves: the first half, all about the novelty of Aix, setting up a cozy house, reading and exploring the town; and the second, upcoming half, with multiple trips and visits and critiques.

My friend will be here tomorrow night, for a four-day visit. After that, there’s three days until the Marchutz students head for Giverny, where Monet painted. That trip overlaps into fall break, which I’ve decided to spend in Berlin, so I’ll be leaving the group in Paris as they return to Aix, and instead catching a flight by myself to Germany.

Once I come back from that, it’s one week in Aix, and then we Marchutz and CAC kids get to go to Paris for five days. And between our return from Paris, and my winter month in Edinburgh, is only four weeks, one of them finals week.

So it’s true, this rut of hibernating and contemplating will soon be broken. Meanwhile, I’ll continue my amused minuet through the remainder of ‘05, one of the most evocative, necessary, life-direction-changing, French-market-basket-full-of-goodies years I’ve ever had, and try to lose the myopia.

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