Now: Whining and Cleaning; Next: What I've Actually Been Doing

Alright, here's the deal. Sometimes, late at night, I get cravings. This uncontrollable, undeniable desire...to organize. That's right, the moment is never opportune and is never during a normal person's waking hours, but when it seizes me I let it. I did a FANTASTIC organizing job tonight. My entire room has a system, all my clothes are finally hung up/folded in lovely order, my scrapbook stuff is no longer haphazardly stuffed in every available pocket, and even my to-do list has been cleaned up. Dearest mother, I'm sure you'd still walk in here and complain about the electronic wires plopped on the floor, and the way my knitting is next to my clementines, but I'm putting this one in the Win Column.

That said, let's talk about the part that you, dear readers (aka family members, but I like to pretend I have a fan base), care about: Paris.

Paris is beautiful, despite its clingy film of gray and perpetual precipitation. According to my hostman, hereby called QP (for quasi-pere, because M. Leonard is too long to type and initials are fun!), a cold winter means a beautiful spring, so here's hoping in a month or two I am toujours bathed in sunshine.

Everything here is old and beautifully designed, and even things that would look a little shabby in the US look shabby-CHIC in Paris. I am still hiding in my room a little while I fully adjust (and wait for my monthly Metro pass to kick in), but I think after such a life-altering last semester and whirlwind, high-stress end to the winter break that I can take a pass on rushing around, at least for a few weeks. Semester at Sea is still very much in my mind, and I see things I know my SAScats would understand (but others would not) every day. No one else gets that the Vietnamese restaurant in the Latin Quarter is really exciting for me because I've eaten a frog I hand-picked out of a tank in Saigon. No one else gets that I love sushi so much because I've eaten it at a hole in the wall in the middle of the pitch-black closed-down Tsukiji fish market. I can't expect them to, but being away from home again just makes me want to hop down the hall and knock on Carrie or Katey's door, knowing that even if we're just watching old TV on DVD, our shared experience means that things are "same same, but different."

So as much as I hate to admit to my fellow intrepid and vicarious travellers, I have been a touch reclusive for this first bit of the semester. But now I have a nice little group of amies, plans to visit BU-ers and SAS-ers alike in the next few months, and a whole lot of city to discover dehors.

Expect much less whiny and much more jealousy-inducing posts in the near future.