cheese-eating surrender monkeys

I'm a walking cliché, and I love it!

Optimistic young sets out to conquer the world and flees to France, looking to spend her penultimate semester of college strolling down a quay with a baguette under one arm. Will she feast on wine and cheese while wearing a silly hat? Will she construct a bridge of understanding between freedom loving Americans and them cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Will she tap dance down the Champs-Elysees and teach hordes of French children to sing American showtunes?

A girl can only hope!

Cliché or not, it'll be quite a privilege, and I’m ready for it. Almost. The departure flight looms closer every day, and yet – I still can’t manage to see it down there at the bottom of a mile-long to do list. Things that stand between me and a semester’s worth of Gauloise-tinged art history lectures* include:

1. Graduate school applications. I must get as much as humanly possible done before I reach France, where apparently the post is so slow that even les escargots are offended by the term ‘snail mail’.

2. Studying for the GRE. With vocab words like desuetude, contumacious, and periphrastic, who wouldn’t like this?**

3. Wisdom teeth. They must come out. As I am (really) not inclined to undergo optional-sounding medical procedures (see my left index finger--broken, never treated, still bumpy), the idea of letting someone knock me out and steal my largest teeth is less than thrilling.

There’s more, but I won’t bore my reader (hi, Mom!). Suffice it to say that getting there is all part of the journey. And I don’t really care if it's been done before.







* Ok, doesn't sound very appealing, and I shouldn't assume my professor smokes, even if it is Paris. Still, I cannot WAIT. Hellooo, Louvre.
** Me.