Comment dit-on “this is awkward?”

This is what I asked my French teacher today. I’m finding that I’m in need of more everyday kinds of phrases and this is one I anticipated coming in useful as the French school year began and us awkward, foreign Americans found ourselves trying to claim our space in studio. She didn’t have an answer.

Claiming studio space, as we’ve been led to believe by our faculty, works in a very feudal way. Those with the most seniority receive the lofted spaces which look out over the rest of the studio space and the plebeians within it. The more highly ranked of the common class receive the window seats which look out onto the chateau, the lowest years get whatever is left. This leaves little for us and forces us to, in the words of Alex our program director, “conquer,” whatever we can. We get the choice of studios 13, 14 and 19. 13 has the reputation for being the partiers, 14 the more laid back and 19 the more studious.

The process of working our way into the student culture, as it turned out, isn’t quite as cutthroat as it might sound. It began tonight with the studio meetings which aren’t so much meetings as they are house parties. The best word I could think of to describe the night was “fratty.” It really turned out to be a good ice breaker. For the first half of the night Americans and French had conversations in broken forms of their respective languages until, in the second half, everyone settled on a common understanding of booze and loud music.

Bullfighters and narcissism.

I’m starting this process a little late and with about half as much enthusiasm.  Not to say that I find having/maintaining a blog a chore but my Idea had been much more grand.

Last year I had it in my head that I would treat it as a year long photographic essay in which I would catalog my surroundings at home, openly ponder their significance, contemplate the impact they have had on my life, people’s lives, life in general and then compare and contrast my past assumptions/experiences/ideas with what I encountered across the globe. That idea died. It died, in part, because I generally reject things like… this. Blogs, journals, diaries (especially public) that I feel exist more in the name of narcissism than anything particularly productive.

But, that said, mine is the narcissistic generation and I’ve already got a facebook I check every twenty minutes so I shall indulge. Every so often you will find here a new post full of MY thoughts, MY ideas, MY experiences, MY etc. My one promise to mostly MYSELF is that I’ll try to make them as productive as possible so as to avoid the cringing feeling of falling back upon this years from now, or my little sister years from now, or my little brother years from now, or anyone for that matter, and thinking “good God, get a grip.”

I’ve been in Versailles now for about a month and a half. I live in the top floor of a house owned by an incredibly hospitable landlady named Veronique with my roommate Brett. Included with the house is a golden retriever named Chingy (sp?) who frequently drops in during the evenings in search of food or a game of tug-of-war. Our school is in the lesser stables of the palace of Versailles. The chateau can be seen fully out the windows of our studio, state-fair-esque gravel parking lot and all. The studios along with a café in the center of the school are legally owned by the students. Due to this fact these spaces are covered in graffiti (much of it dirty), and softcore porn. I’m not sure how old it all is but if I had to guess there are several decades worth.

Life has been… easy. Too easy. But, finally, the hammer is coming down and it’s somewhat of a relief. We are slowly getting things to work at and having to earn our free time.

The staff here is better. The classes are smaller. I feel like I’m going to learn more than back home. There’s more first hand experience available simply due to geography. In a single, short and inexpensive bus ride I can actually go and see the ruins of Jumièges rather than just look at a picture on a power-point slide and because of that I’ll probably actually remember what the ruins of Jumièges are. It makes you care a little more. It’s that narcissism again. You care because it happened to you, because it’s your experience. Maybe it’s not that exactly but in the words of one of my classmates regarding our history course “just tell me what I need to know, and why I care.” I thought that statement was genius. Trim everything else and all you have is the information and the motivation for retaining it. It’s more motivating here. It’s just a better place to be learning about architecture because architecture needs to be seen, the spaces need to be experienced.

This is going to be a year of great experiences. That is a corny statement. That is something that makes me cringe. But, it’s true. I named this blog “all the way up,” after that famous Hemingway quote “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.” I’m living in Paris, I’m kinda from Oak Park, I like the book, it seemed appropriate. It also might be another one of those things that makes me cringe (mostly because it’s kind of a shallow literary allusion). Those things aside, this year I’m going all in. It’s life all the way up. If I’m lucky it’ll become a habit.