Whoa, March?!

I'm still behind on blogging, but I'm no longer so far behind that I feel like I can't keep up with my life, so that's nice. I'm also back at work, and this has been a pretty easy week so far. It's really hard to believe I have just a few weeks left before my contract is up. One thing about the French school calendar is that all the breaks really make the time fly.

The biggest development this week is that I FINALLY have a working bank card again, after an entire month and one final setback in which it turned out my card was still blocked from the ATM incident in
Quimper and I had to go to the bank and say "My card doesn't work and I don't understand why because it's brand new" and wait for the woman there for figure out the problem and give me a lecture while she fixed
it.

In other news, we've had some gorgeous weather lately. Yesterday was a bit like the foggy, gloomy last week of vacation, but Wednesday was like summer. In February. It was amazing. I walked around without a
jacket, and my friends and I had an afternoon drink outside on the terrace of a café near the castle. It's funny how this strangely nonwintery winter has kept me from even realizing how much I missed spring!

Also on Wednesday, I finally spent some quality time with that keyboard in the music library. It was a little terrible, since I hadn't touched a piano in months and have never exactly been a virtuoso, but it felt so good. I've been missing music a lot for the last couple of years, especially since I left college, and I'm looking
forward to getting back in the game once I'm settled somewhere else for a while. (I actually briefly looked into the possibility of joining a choir in Brest, but by the time I did so it was a little late in the year.)

On that note, most of my spare energy in the last week or so has been taken up with job hunting. I've found at least two and possibly three positions that I'm applying for for now, but they're all just for the summer. I'm still not sure what's going to happen in after August even if one of these works out, but we'll see. I do know that at this point, it looks like it's likely to be back in the U.S. I have mixed feelings about that, but the EU does not seem to have terribly mixed feelings about [not] hiring Americans for not-super-skilled jobs.

In any case, I just want to take a moment to give a shout-out to the internet. I can't imagine living abroad without it. (I can't imagine a lot of things without it, but that's the magic of the moment.) Thanks to email and instant messaging, I correspond not just with my family and close friends back home, but with a lifetime's worth of friends and acquaintances all over the world, including some in developing countries. I sometimes lament my failure to send more letters and postcards, but the truth is I'm just as in touch with friends via email. (Or at least, I could be. I also lament my failure to send emails with any regularity...) Facebook lets me stay at least nominally in touch with people I'd have lost contact with years ago even without leaving the country if it weren't for Facebook--I'm better connected to my friends there than I would be being pen pals
the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, I call each of my parents about once a week, give or take, and my sister only slightly less often. And that's because I'm busy; if I want to talk to them more often, there's absolutely nothing stopping me, because do you know how much those calls cost? $0.01 per minute if I use Google Voice. Something like $0.02 or $0.03 per minute if I use Skype. (Compare to upwards of a dollar a minute on either my French phone or my international phone.) And of course, if we plan ahead, we can voice or even video chat using either of those mediums completely for free. It's an amazing world we live in.

Not that we can't still imagine more amazing worlds: My friends and I watched Midnight In Paris the other night (which means I've now seen all of about three of this year's Oscar nominees), and it's now
officially one of my favorite films.

It does make walking around Brest at night even more sad by comparison, though.