5 Things About Feminism I Agree With

I've been blogging a lot about the things that feminism does wrong. But I don't want to give the impression that I'm an anti-feminist, either, because that would be pretty far from the truth. So here are some reasons we need feminism:

1. Birth control and abortion rights. These are the two most legitimate issues on the feminist agenda in my mind, because they are two issues that must have showed up in a time machine from the 19^th century because who the heck thinks that women shouldn't have a right to decide what to do with their own bodies? Granted, I could write a much more coherent political post specifically about these issues, especially since I know not all of my readers agree with me, but it's been done many times before far better than I could do. There are many reasons for which I consider these issues no-brainers, but the biggest one is that women are sentient human beings and can decide what to do with their own bodies without the rest of the world chiming in. If you are a woman and are against abortion, great. Don't get one. (Similarly if you are against gay marriage, great, don't get one. Ditto for contraception.) But leave the rest of us alone to make our own decisions. My body belongs to me and me alone.
   
   
2. Read this article: How ‘Slut Shaming’ Has Been Written Into School Dress Codes Across The Country. This is a weird issue because it combines sexism and ageism, a concept I'm going to write about... soon. Whenever I get the time. (Note that my list of topics to write about is getting longer faster than I can cross them off the list.) I am aware that this does happen in adult work environments, but is much less common and much more shocking. We consider it perfectly normal if a kid says “At my school, we aren't allowed to wear spaghetti straps because it shows too much skin.” But if an adult says the same thing it sounds really weird. “Isn't that a little sexist and overly controlling?” you might respond. Perhaps the worst is the reason given, that it's “distracting.” To whom is it distracting? Example #4 from the article is: 'A kindergarten student in Georgia was forced to change her “short” skirt because it was a “distraction to other students.”' In kindergarten I really don't think the boys are going to be distracted by a little girl's ballet outfit. In kindergarten I'm pretty sure my brother still wanted to wear dresses to school so the two of us could be matching. (And my mom let him, because she's awesome.) Kindergarteners don't give a rat's! So really what this is about is trying to teach girls from a very young age to cover themselves up because their bodies are sinful. In an exercise in charitable thinking, it's trying to teach girls that there is a respectable way to dress that follows certain societal rules and expectations. It's for their own good so that they don't dress like sluts later on in their professional life. It's just when you think about what the gesture actually means that you realize we're installing the belief in girls' heads that their bodies are shameful, they have to cover up or other people will be distracted, and eventually that if they get raped or sexually assaulted, it will be their fault for dressing provocatively. It is fortunate that these sorts of rules are much less common after high school, but the damage has been done.
   
   
   
3. Read this Cracked article: 5 Ways Modern Men are Trained to Hate Women. I don't agree with all of these points, especially not the end that makes it sound like men think only with their dicks. I don't know, I'm not a guy, but I was not under the impression that that's how it works. Anyway, points 5 and 4 I especially agree with. It's not anyone's fault, but it's true that all the romance stories we've ever seen since we were born tell us that the average-looking main character guy deserves a hot girl in the end when he deals with his problems, defeats his childhood bullies, and becomes successful. And since everyone sees themselves as the protagonist of their own Hollywood film, they often feel like the world (or the girl) has been unjust when their advances are refused. Again, I don't think this was an intentional move by the misogynistic media or the patriarchy or something like that. It was just sort of an unintentional thing that happened from our historically sexist society. So blame is dumb and that's where I think a lot of feminists are getting it wrong, but we should realize the message here. In general heroines don't vanquish their enemies to be awarded with the muscled man-toy of their choice.
   4) The other point I liked the best was “We're trained from birth to see you as decoration.” Truth. And it's not just the men who are trained this way. Read this article on How to Talk to Little Girls. Even very young girls are told every day that they're pretty or well-dressed, while young boys are told that they're getting big and strong. The problem with this is that we're socializing these kids to believe that looks are very important, especially girls being pretty.
   
   The other day I met a 5-year-old French girl who immediately upon meeting me explained her wardrobe choices for the day (I chose the gray pants because the blue pants didn't go with my top and the black leggings are getting too small!) and told me that I had a weird face and told my host sister that she was beautiful. (I was very tempted to answer her question “Why is your face like that?” with a very blunt “Some people are just ugly, but they tend to take it badly so you should learn not to say it. Some day you might even be ugly! You never know.” Fortunately I restrained myself and her mom sat her down and explained the concept of acne.) Anyway, my gut reaction to her thoughts about her wardrobe was that there was something wrong with her, that she had already at such a young age been conditioned by her parents and society to care about things she shouldn't care about. I certainly didn't care about being pretty when I was her age, and adults didn't tell me I was pretty – probably because I made insulted faces at them if they did, cause looking back at my baby pictures I was pretty adorable. But then I was forced to admit that she is probably like many of my friends – actually genuinely interested in fashion. Fashion, after all, is like an art, so why should an interest in fashion not be legitimate? Just because I've never liked fashion and have always felt pressured to try to like it doesn't mean that a large percentage of girls aren't genuinely interested in it. So this topic is difficult for me to write about, because I'm not sure how much we're socializing girls to like fashion, and how much fashion is an art form created by girls that many girls happen to be interested in, just like how math was invented by nerds and nerds continue to like math. (There's nothing oppressive about math, even though nerds are often considered to be the bottom of the high school totem pole.) But even if young girls have a perfectly legitimate interest in fashion, I do think we emphasize the idea that they are decoration too much, since standard adult conversation to little girls consists of little more than “What a lovely dress!” 
   
   
   
   
   5) Girls can't do leader-stuff: Remember the thing in that Cracked article about how we judge Elena Kagan by her looks even though that has nothing to do with the job she's supposed to do? Same goes for Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, two of my favorite female politicians. (I've never heard anyone insult Elizabeth Warren's looks but that might be because she's less well-known and so the only people who know about her are more sophisticated thinkers.) Criticizing Hilary Clinton's looks is such a non-sequitor, such a breach of logic that I really don't how you ended up there. We weren't talking about her looks, we were talking about her ability to run a country and make rational decisions that represent the will of the people... Speaking of Clinton, the word “bitch” has been used to describe (probably; this is just my best guess) the fact that she's a woman in a position of power. Since this is a minority opinion, I'm not going to address that issue. But what I am going to address is the underlying psychology that spawned it, in my humble, completely uneducated-in-psychology opinion.

Guys who are leaders are often seen as powerful, intelligent, arrogant, horny, charismatic, ambitious, etc. The negative qualities (arrogant, horny) often just contribute to the general picture. They can be excused by the man's greatness. Steve Jobs was allowed to be an asshole because he was inspirational and a Leader. I guess I can't claim that men are allowed to have sex scandals, considering what that did to Bill Clinton's career, but it's not shocking. Many, including myself, just sort of shrug and say “Oh well, I guess all politicians are horny.” I have no idea how we would react to a female politician with a sex scandal. (Update: Apparently, either we don't really care or it doesn't happen to really prominent female politicians because it happens less often in general.

But if female leaders exhibit some of the same qualities – let's go with the ambition/arrogance/confidence cluster because it's easier to deal with and analyze – they tend to be called bitchy. Like Hilary Clinton. In my estimation, Clinton is no more ambitious or confident or arrogant than any other politician during the 2008 elections, but she was the only one to be called names for it. It's sort of our gut response to females trying to take power. We question it, because it doesn't feel right. Personally, I tend to get along very poorly with female coaches or teachers. A female English teacher is the most likely to get on my bad side, because I often disagree with English teacher's comments, provoking sentiments like “Who does she think she is, anyway” and “Who is she to tell me what to do.” I've never had a male teacher in English, but I've always gotten along wonderfully with my male history teachers. I respect them for their history knowledge and let them tell me what to do in my essays because I feel they have the right to. In sports, I have a terrible time accepting orders from females, and tend to doubt their qualifications. If a female senior marching band member told me what to do, I might well have thought to myself “It's not like she knows how to march well anyway! And she should treat her fellow marchers with more respect.” But a male coach can scream at me and humiliate me and I'll generally feel terrible, but accepting of this discipline. I'm assuming that this is not just me. It could be something to do with wolf pack psychology, that as a somewhat dominant female I do not like other alpha females, but am fine with (and even tend to like) alpha males. Or it could be something to do with the fact that all of us have trouble accepting female leaders.

This really sucks. I'm not sure what to do about it, because I really do believe it's a natural phenomenon that has a lot to do with wolf packs and testosterone and having “being a leader” engraved in our brains as “muscle-y and virile and able to fight off enemies” and nothing to do with a conscious and deliberate hatred and oppression of women. So is feminism useful? Who knows. I'm sure there are some things we can do to fight against our brains, but I don't know what they are. But that's one of the biggest reasons I don't like being a woman, because I'm aware that being arrogant and ambitious and self-centered are all things that are more acceptable and attractive on a man than a woman, and it's way harder for us bossy females to look leaderly than it is for men.

I guess what would be more accurate to say is that these are 5 reasons it sucks to be born a woman. I do not feel that all of them are causes for feminism. Abortion rights, birth control rights, and the one about school dress codes definitely qualify: Go kill school dress codes, feminists, with my blessing! These are all issues for which I am a fire-breathing feminist. But the others are more deep-rooted psychological issues. It sucks for me that I will never look as leaderly as a tall, imposing man, but it's no one's fault and I don't know what, if anything, we can do to fight against it. I think my primary objection against a lot of things that radical feminists do and say is the hatred and blame that they use. I find the term the “Patriarchy” confusing and blameful. I find they are too negative, seeing sexism and rape culture and other terms I don't really understand when I never would have thought of that, and have to squint my eyes and smoke a little concentrated feminism to even start to see what they're getting at. (See my last week's post on the negativity of radical feminism.) But I am aware that I've been pretty lucky and have never felt discriminated against for my gender in ways that are institutionalized and not psychological. When other feminists go on rants about things that I found perfectly normal, they are probably reacting that way because they have a different history than I do, have been more abused by our sexist society, and have learned to have a trigger response that looks a little crazy to me. Anyway, so I managed to end on yet another negative note, but this was supposed to be my post explaining why I do consider myself a feminist among all the other posts I write criticizing the movement. I'm not trying to be a horrible anti-feminist person! It's just that I actually am a feminist, and I started reading a lot of feminist blogs and feel the urge to pick on all the things in their logic that I don't like! My apologies, feminists. I am on your side. Now let's go convince people that abortion rights and birth control rights would be great things to have.

I have a massive crush on humanity

This is an argument simultaneously in response to republicans, radical liberals, and radical feminists. It is not a very rational argument, but it is one of the principals by which I try to abide that has very little to do with rationality and utility but is really really important to me anyway.

Here are three arguments that I don't like:

1. Welfare is bad because there are a lot of people who take advantage of the system and abuse it. We shouldn't support those lazy people who just don't want to work.
2. (From my crazy leftist US gov teacher at De Anza): Society is falling apart and going to hell because of these evil evil republicans who want to keep women and minorities in a quasi-slavery position and because the socialization of our children today teaches them about violence and drugs and rape and not enough about love and family values.
3. Men (the “patriarchy”) are evil and trying to suppress women and want to rape them and deny them their rights. The media and makeup/clothing companies are evil and want to make women have Lots of Issues by making them insecure about their bodies to sell them products.

What is the common element? Quite simply, that people are evil. This is something we should always avoid thinking, because it mis-portrays our opponents. How do I know this? Tell me this: have you ever met someone who actually thought of themselves as evil? Someone saying to themselves “Mwahahaha, I am now going to oppress women for my own advantage”? No, I didn't think so. The point I'm going to make here is that your model of the world will be much better if you have a sense of charity to your political opponents; that you should remember to be optimistic about people because everyone (with the exception of psychopaths) is well-intentioned.

So first of all, let me destroy these above points one by one.

1. Do you know anyone who wants to live on food stamps? I don't. Standards of living are much better if you aren't on the US's pathetic version of welfare, and working is a fairly good predictor of happiness. As this Cracked.com article points out, misery is sort of humans' default setting, and working is one of the best ways to fix that. People on welfare are therefore probably pretty miserable and don't want to be in that situation. Furthermore, there are actual scientific studies that show the negligible percentage of “people who cheat the system” and how we spend way more money trying to find them than they would've taken away from the system in the first place. [Citation here]
2. ...I actually have nothing to say. This teacher's argument is so incoherent I don't even know where to start, except that it sounds roughly like the good old geezer's complaint “Kids these days! Society is falling apart because of video games!” which a few decades ago must have been “Kids these days! Hippies and pot will destroy society!” and a few decades before would've been “Them flappers and their bobs and pants will destroy society!” and a way long time ago must have been “Kids these days and their new hunting techniques with frigging bows and arrows must be making them lazy!” I have news for you, old geezer: society isn't falling apart. By many measures, it keeps getting awesomer.
3. I just don't think anyone planned for the oppression of women. Sure, the media has some negative effects. But do you really think that the people who design makeup commercials and put unrealistic plastic photoshop women on their ads were thinking “Haha, I will make women feel terrible about themselves!”? Personally, I think it's more likely that they were thinking “We are making a commercial for makeup. Therefore, it would make sense to have a really attractive woman in our commercial.”

I want to elaborate on this one a little bit, because this post was primarily inspired by the radical feminist blogs I've started reading. I just think they're doing it wrong, out of pure negativity. There is a recent internet buzz about Dove's Real Beauty campaign. Watch this video, but if you're too lazy it's a forensic artist who drew women based on their own descriptions of themselves and then on a stranger's description of themselves. I thought it was pretty powerful, and gives all of us hope that what we see in the mirror every day is not an accurate representation of what we look like to others. Our faults are magnified, and we should all break all of our mirrors remember that we're more beautiful than we think. Dove has a history of good feminist campaigns. I liked their last one even better: a time-elapse video showing how the women on makeup billboard ads get so beautiful and ending with “No wonder our perceptions of beauty are so distorted.”

Anyway, people on the internet immediately started making a huge fuss about the Real Beauty campaign because the women involved were primarily young-ish, thin-ish Caucasian women with blue eyes and blond hair. I definitely remember seeing a black woman on the video, but whatever. Details aren't important. I definitely remember seeing a woman who was about 40 on the video, too, but I guess that doesn't count either. The main point is that they're doing it wrong. They aren't giving Dove credit for what is a well-done campaign that is touching and empowering for a lot of women. So maybe if you, radical feminist, were on the design team, you would have included fatter, more diverse, older women. But does this neglect make it a bad campaign? Maybe I'm the only one not shocked by this because I too am a young Caucasian woman with blue eyes and blond hair. But I also don't think I would have noticed if it were all black women, or all Asian women, or all Latinas. I recently watched a different video on Youtube that was a short touching romantic film that had only Asian people and I literally didn't notice until I scrolled down and saw in the comments an exchange that went roughly like this: “Wow, Asians.” “But would anyone have said anything if it were all white people?”

I'm not trying to get all up on my high horse saying that I am above racism. I recently took a bunch of Implicit Association Tests which I recommend you do as well and it showed exactly what I would have predicted: I have little or no association with Asians as foreign or bad, and a strong automatic preference for whites over African-Americans. No, I wouldn't have predicted this because I'm secretly a horrible racist, but because in our scared little human brains, unknown is bad. Where I grew up in the Silicon Valley, I know just as many Asians and Indians as whites, and therefore I see them as just another brand of Californian, just as “ blond” and “brunette” might be two different brands of Californian. I don't look at Asian people and think “Hey look! An Asian!” because I am used to them and that would be ridiculous, like a New Yorker getting excited every time they see a Jew. However, there are very few black people where I grew up, and I'm pretty sure I've never had a close friend who was African-American. (I say African-American, not black, because I do know a Cameroonian who is one of my favorite people ever.) Just like how I disliked beautiful popular girls until I got to know some of them, I think my brain is normal to be suspicious of a group of people I haven't gotten to know.

However, it also is possible that these tests show nothing at all, because I just took the Gay-Straight test, where I honestly expected to get “slight automatic preference for gays over straights” and they gave me “strong automatic preference for straights over gays.” What? I am aware that my internal stereotype of gays is of kind, creative intellectuals who are awesome and share my political viewpoints, like a certain lit teacher at Homestead, or my history teacher now, or my friends from Campbell UCC, or any of my gay friends from, you know, everyday life. I know the “ I'm not racist, I'm friends with a black person!” claim gets shot down a lot, but let me just say I had no reason whatsoever to expect this result. So who knows what the IAT measures or whether it's accurate or whether it only works if you've drunk enough coffee in the morning and have fast reflexes and it's Tuesday.

The point is, I'm not above racism and I don't think anyone is. People have implicit preferences for people of their own race: “88% of white Americans (and 48% of black Americans!) show an implicit racial preference for whites on this test.” Clearly there is some weirdness going on here where everyone is secretly racist in the traditional sense of the word (against blacks), but it also shows that people just plain like their own people better. I think most people date within their broad racial/cultural spectrum (not sure if this just works on a white/black/Asian/Latino level or on a more specific Polish/American/Brazilian/Jewish sort of level). And this seems normal to me, pretty much like how I'd only date nerds because I'm a nerd and nerds understand each other.

That was a tangent. Sometimes I do tangents for an entire page or two and then realize that I'm not talking about the right topic. The thing I actually decided to write about was that a lot of the time, people make arguments (political or otherwise) that don't make sense simply because their enemies don't actually think that way. This is called strawmanning, and it is bad because it prevents people from rationally discussing issues to compare pros and cons and make decisions. When we aren't familiar with people, it's easy to assume that they're evil. This sort of ties in with racism: if you aren't familiar with a certain ethnic group, you probably don't actively think “Black people are horrible!” but subconsciously you might trust them less. It's very easy for me to assume that pro-lifers are horrible, misogynistic people without remembering that they actually believe that a fetus is as important and valuable as the mother (often more so, because the fetus hasn't sinned yet) and therefore it would be murder to abort. Everyone is the hero of their own story. No one plays the evil villain, except mentally ill people. And whether or not they are wrong, it works much better to treat them like the well-intentioned people they are.

I was inspired to write this post partly by watching youtube videos of this CMU a capella group my best friend sent me. Watching it just gives me the feels, this wonderful feeling that humanity is just awesome and that there are so many beautiful, kind, quirky, special, intelligent, fascinating individuals out there to discover and I can't wait to meet as many of them as I can. This is an odd feeling for me: I am an introvert and meeting people terrifies me. I have a lot less social anxiety than I used to, but it's still stressful to be among people.

Still, I get this feeling fairly often. Theater and music both give me the feels, and even when I've been in the pit orchestra for musicals, I never dare to talk to the actors because I don't want to destroy the perfect image I have of them. I've done HMS Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, and South Pacific. Every single time we in the pit romanticize the actors and talk about them, without ever daring to talk to them. It is easier to have heroes when you don't know too much about someone. I idolize Gustavo Dudamel, and I know nothing about him other than what orchestras he conducts, and Danzon no 2. Just look at that smile, that fervor! Tumblr is a great example as well: they know quite well what unreasonable infatuations are. They are obsessed with Benedict Cumberbatch/Sherlock Holmes. They are obsessed with David Tennant/Doctor Who. They are obsessed with lots of beautiful and creative people, and you know why? Because people can actually be really cool. Granted, sometimes when we get to know them they aren't as perfect as we hoped they would be, but sometimes they're really really cool anyway and sometimes they're even cooler than we could've imagined. People are fascinating and complex and beautiful and they're what I want to study in college. Everything we do revolves around people, and generally if we feel like we have no one, if we feel alone, we're pretty depressed creatures. People are what makes us laugh, and cry, and love, and everything else that we obsess about and write poems about and live for.

So the flaw in these arguments about welfare and the patriarchy and all that is that these people are forgetting the humanity of their enemies, and they're confusing the issue by misrepresenting their opponents. People aren't trying to be evil, I promise. The patriarchy, if you insist on using the term, is not a club of straight white males who are trying to suppress your liberties. The patriarchy is a system of cultural traditions and norms that need to be overthrown because times are changing. A lot of the enemies of change (those who oppose subsidized birth control and abortions and gay marriage and all that jazz) are exactly that: people who have trouble with the notion of change because they were quite comfortable with the world in its previous state, having never felt disadvantaged by it themselves. They have reasons to oppose it, but a lot of it is just being conservative, which means reluctant to change the system, and with not being gay/female/an immigrant themselves.

I know quite a few people who are homophobic, but they know just one or two gays and insist that these gays are not like the rest of these (sick, perverted, drag queen, whatever their stereotype is) gays. One of them sent me a chain email with a picture of two fat men walking hand in hand in a gay pride parade, wearing pink high heels and thongs and nothing else. The caption was “And we'd let these people adopt children?” And suddenly I understood. He doesn't like gays because he doesn't know enough of them. He knows one or two, thinks they fall outside the norm, and thinks that the norm is the flamboyant cross-dressers in gay pride parades. With so little information, it doesn't seem surprising that he would conclude that gays are just really kinky people who probably shouldn't be trusted with children. (Sorry, trans people who are excluded by LGB media because you're too weird and we're trying to emphasis the normality of many gay couples! But... one step at a time, ok?) So when he says he's against gay marriage, it's not against my gay friends or my awesome history teacher. It's against “those people” because he's taken away their humanity. Just like how I often take away the humanity of pro-lifers before I remember that they, too, are in fact well-intentioned. So whenever you find yourself hating a particular group, try to imagine yourself what their rationales might be. Try to remember that they could be your parents, or your “That's my uncle Bob – he has some weird political opinions so don't get him started on communism, but he's really cool! He taught me how to hunt squirrels!” Try to imagine the little quirks about them that would make you like them. Maybe they hum off-key all the time and it's simultaneously annoying and endearing. Maybe they are gluttons for chocolate. Think about what they ate for breakfast, and whether they are a cat person or a dog person. Think about the things that make them human, the things that make them awesome, and remember that no one is evil. Some people are wrong, but no one is evil.

Noirmoutier, Brétagne, Le Mont St Michel

I just got back from vacation, which I spent at an island called Noirmoutier, in lots of different places in Brittany, and at Le Mont St Michel.

My host family's grandparents own a house on Noirmoutier that we borrowed. My host sister, her boyfriend, three close friends, Sarah the American, and I got to chill out on the beach for four days and goof off together. I got sunburned, of course, because I am very white. Otherwise it was not very eventful, at least not with publishable events, except that we did get to witness part of the filming of the second Le Petit Nicolas movie. It was very relaxing and exactly what we needed after a long winter and lots of school stress.

Sarah and I buried in sand:

This is all we could see of the filming: they were making waves with these boats to make it look stormy. We all wonder why they couldn't have just chosen a beach with more waves, but whatever.

After Noirmoutier, we got home and immediately loaded the RV of my host grandparents to go explore Brittany.

The Viaduc of Morlaix

We stopped and explored a lot of beautiful coastal cities: Morlaix, Perros-Guirec, St-Brieuc, Lamballe, and St Malo. All this adventuring took 3 days. 

Perros-Guirec: a port city with lots of pink granite in large improbable boulders on the shore. It's a little spooky and quite beautiful and striking. 

Look at that boulder, just perched on top like a BAMF. Stop! That isn't how physics works!

At Perros-Guirec we ate at the best restaurant I have yet discovered in France. Brittany is famous for their crepes and galettes, which are properly eaten with a mug of Brittany cider. I had a goat cheese-honey-walnut galette followed by a pear-chocolate-whipped cream crepe, and it was really incredible. If you ever find yourself in Perros-Guirec, give me a call and I'll try to find this restaurant again for you.

We also spent a lot of time in random ports that I don't even remember the names of anymore, so here are some pictures:

 

My host mom and I, being the gorgeous models that we naturally are.

My host mom freaking out because she thinks I'm going to fall over the cliff. It was really windy.

Everyone in Brittany has this bumper sticker

We spent the first night in Morlaix parked under a lamp that dripped on our roof all night. The second night we spent with some friends of my host parents who are also furniture merchants and were very accommodating. Their property is big and beautiful:

The third night we spent with some other friends, entertaining their 5-year-old daughter. They served us Breizh Coke, which is apparently a special kind of Coca Cola in Brittany.

The third day we spent in Saint Malo, the Corsaire City. 

Here's some traditional sea chanties from St Malo for you to listen to while you scroll. This one has pretty pictures, too.

It's a city that you've probably heard of because it's an important port and therefore has been crucial in many wars. It's a walled city, clearly very well defended.

The ramparts

With old architecture

This is the name of a café in St Malo which means: The local coffeeshop down the street at one end of the city opposite the port La Java.

They have interesting deco choices.

 The next day we were at Le Mont St Michel, the second most visited site in France after everything that's in Paris. I have to admit, I tend to be really bothered by touristy things, and le Mont is probably the most touristy thing I've ever visited. Paris is at least a city: there are real people who live there, and it is the political, economic, and cultural capital of France. Even if it's very touristy in certain neighborhoods, you can get away from it if you explore the city alone and on foot like I did. But le Mont only has a few monks who actually live there, and everyone else is a tourist. The whole thing is museums and restaurants and gift shops and it sort of put me in a bad mood. But it was nonetheless beautiful.

The construction going on was not very photogenic.

A real live monk!

 

So that was le Mont St Michel. Beautiful, historical, fascinating, and frustratingly touristy. In general I preferred the roadtrip through Brittany over our final destination because it showed me a lot more of France than I've seen so far and gave me a feel for the different culture they have over there.

For example, their traditional garb involves funny hats:

And bilingual road signs, in French and in.. Breton!

No, I did not actually pass by Brest. I stole this photo off the internet because I forgot to take a picture myself. Here is a map of my actual route:

And then when you consider that I've also seen Le Mans, Angers, Nantes, Blois, La Rochelle, Méribel (Albertville), and I'll soon be off to Toulouse, I've seen a fair chunk of France! Not too shabby.

Coming up soon: a philosophical post that I'm having trouble writing because it's about nothing in particular.

Life Update

Here's an update on my life, starting with college, including my back injury, and finishing with a reflection on my timeline of emotions of my year abroad.

Last I left off, I was deciding where to go to college, between Madison, UCSD, UWash, McGill, U of Minnesota, and UCSC. I got rejected from Berkeley, which didn't surprise me at all and only disappointed me for an hour or two. I posted a question to the world about UCSD's vibe and got overwhelmingly negative responses; people telling me that UC Socially Dead is very weak on extra-curricular activities and is not friendly and open. Further research also showed me that much of UCSD's reputation comes from biology and engineering, while Madison is very strong in the humanities. This means that Madison is a better school in the subjects I'm more likely to major in, as well as having a better vibe for me. It's not that I want a party school, exactly, because I don't really like parties. I just want the attitude of a party school, where everyone is looking to be friendly with everyone else, and you can smile at people as you walk down the street and sit next to strangers in the dining hall and strike up conversations.

Anyway, after a lot of research and reading the many facebook messages I got on the subject and soul-searching, it became pretty obvious to me what my best choice was, which is actually the school I've wanted since the beginning: The University of Wisconsin-Madison. So on April 6^th I signed my online confirmation, finished signing up for housing, and declined all my other offers. WOOOOOO!!!

Excuse my unprofessional writing, but WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! Let's put on some happy music. (I'm actually not very good at happy music, so this is the best I've got: My Evil Plan to Save the World)

I'm really excited. It feels like the right choice, and I'm also really glad to be done making that choice. My best friend Grace got a really stressed angsty 3am Gchat conversation with me the weekend before. Now that that choice is over, I can theoretically get a good night's sleep!

Theoretically, because Life Update #2: I have back issues. I posted a week ago about my accident that ended me up in the hospital (Socialized Medicine). Unfortunately, my back issues weren't getting better, so on Wednesday (6 days after I fell) I went to see a kinésthérapeute/ostéopathe, which is a very generalized French doctor who does physical therapy, chiropractics, osteopathy, etc. He was very attractive and kind just like my emergency room doctor was, leaving me with the impression that all the rumored good-looking Frenchmen I was promised are all hiding in doctor's offices, because I certainly don't see them very often. He showed me that I had one leg 2 inches longer than the other, which is not normal, and put my pelvis back on its hinges. After he finished cracking me back into place, he showed me that my legs actually have a normal half-centimeter difference, which is why I often have back problems because my pelvis likes to jump off its hinges. Then he turned his attention to my upper back which is where it actually hurt, and said “Does it hurt to breathe?” “...Yes, especially if I sneeze or laugh.” “Well... that's normal. You have a muscle caught between your spine and your ribs that catches every time you breathe.” “...Oh.”

I guess eventually I will learn that whenever I hurt, I actually have a pretty bad medical problem. Obviously an out-of-place back is nothing I could die of, but it is nonetheless painful and every time I've needed to see a chiropractor they've been astonished that I didn't come in earlier. This problem runs in the family: we have high pain tolerance, don't like asking for help, and assume the problem will go away if we ignore it. I am writing all of this down to try to help me see how stupid this is so I won't do it anymore. It was especially stupid of me because I was on maximum dosage of paracetamol for 4 or 5 days and it was doing absolutely nothing for me and I couldn't sleep, so I should've known that I had a problem that wouldn't go away with time. Now, fortunately, I'm doing much better, am off the pain meds, and even went back to frisbee practice last night for the first time in two weeks. Yay!

In other news, springtime decided not to come this year. We went straight from a cold, gray, rainy winter to summer. Last Sunday was the first day of summer, and I went fishing with my host brother and father in the grandfather's boat.

Bare feet!

Fishing, meaning I lay on the top of the boat and sunbathed. Yes, I did get sunburned, but it was worth it.

With the sudden arrival of summer, a lot of things are changing. People are happier, we hang out outside during lunchtime instead of inside, and everyone's starting to count down the days until school's out. My friend Sarah, the other American, is going home in less than a month. I have less than 2 months until I see my parents and less than 3 months until I am HOME for real. 3 months from now, I'll be picking up my host sister at the airport.

You know how smell is the sense the most strongly linked to emotion? This has always been especially true for me because I have an acute sense of smell. The warmer weather means my sense of smell has come back in full flood, oddly enough reminding me of when I first came at the end of August. The smell of the soil and the plants in the garden, the smell of cows and green things when I go running, the smell of my sheets and the particular laundry detergent that they use, the smell of the house in general, they all remind me in a vivid, gut-wrenching sort of way how terrified I was when I first came, how sick and lost and alone. It's a weird feeling, but somewhat triumphant because it reminds me just how far I've come. In August and September I didn't talk much, I barely ate because I couldn't stomach the heavy food, I didn't know what to say or how to say it or how to act or anything. After two weeks I went to my first frisbee practice. I was terrified of everyone, didn't understand a word the coach said, and especially hated the fact that all the frisbee players say hello to each other with a cheek kiss. Seriously, isn't that a little overkill? In the States we just show up and say “Hi guys!” and start playing.

At the end of November, I went to my first frisbee tournament and declared that weekend a turning point: I had finally found a reason to stay in France. Now, my coach is one of my favorite people I know, and he's determined to send me to the national women's championship (more on that later) because he said he's proud of what I've become and how much I've improved.

I'm gonna miss these guys!

So for a brief summary:

In early October, I broke down for the first time and cried, just because I was homesick and alone and felt like the months ahead of me were so very long. (For the record, I broke down twice this year, once in October and once in... January? Anyway, the middle of the year.) In late October I had an angst crisis: sure, I was starting to get used to life in France, but what if it didn't fulfill my dreams? What if my life at home was actually, well... better, in most respects, than my life here? Considering how often I had told myself “Just X more months and I'm out of this high school, out of this boring city, out of this whole messed-up country!” before leaving, that was a pretty sad realization and took awhile to get over.

In mid-November I was in Paris, mostly alone, getting lost and daring to ask for directions and even starting to walk with the confidence that made people think I was a native – I got asked for directions three times. In December I sold oysters at the market, and celebrated Christmas away from home. In February I went to England with my class, which was the other most important turning point during my year abroad: I finally started feeling like I belonged with my class and with my friends, like I deserved a place on the bus instead of feeling bad for tagging along and annoying people. I also turned 18, which has honestly given me a sassiness +10 bonus. I'm a responsible adult, and no one can mess with me! In February or March I finally started being best buddies with my host sister – we got along excellently since the beginning, but now I never do my homework because we're too busy hanging out, watching bad reality TV, and making fun of each other. April 4^th, when I went to the hospital, was the first day where I forgot to be embarrassed about my accent in front of strangers. I just started talking to the nurse and the strangers at the hospital without stopping to explain, timidly, that I'm American and I'm sorry for my accent. And guess what? It worked just fine – my doctor talked to me in perfectly normal French. Even though they obviously knew I was foreign, they respected the fact that I speak fluently and didn't make a big fuss over my foreignness.

That leaves us at the present. Up until quite recently, I didn't think I was going to be sad to leave France at all. Sure, there are a few people I'll miss. I'll miss some people from my class and my frisbee team and most of all my host family.

 Les copines me manqueront!

But recently my life has just started to take on a greater degree of completeness, a sensation that I'm actually not in withdrawal of anything. I miss my parents and my friends and my music and my hometown, but I also have a life here that is becoming more and more rewarding, and it's going to be more difficult to leave it than I had imagined.

I know this was a very rambling update. But to conclude, I'm very excited to be going to Madison next year, my back issues are better, and France is starting to smell like summer.

Here's a love song with very repetitive lyrics that are adorable, since I haven't done any complementary French songs for awhile. T'es Belle – Volo

“You're beautiful when you smile... and when we see your teeth... when you make a lame joke in the middle of a silence... when you get mad and it's not the right time to tell you so... You're beautiful in all circumstances.”

What language do you think in?

“Et alors ? Tu penses en quelle langue ?”

This is one of the questions I get asked a lot. “Since you're bilingual, what language do you think in?” (I like to contest the “bilingual” assertion, since I reserve the word bilingual for people born with two languages who don't have an accent, and prefer the word “fluent” for those foreigners like me who have simply become adept in their second language. But the French of my acquaintance are less linguistically picky, and tell me to stop being silly.)

Up until now, my response would've been: “Well, in English, obviously. But I don't translate from English into French when I'm speaking to you.”

Recently I've discovered that this is not true. I wake up from dreams in vivid Frenglish. I catch myself thinking in Frenglish. I rarely think in pure English or in pure French, but a sort of mix of the two.

One caveat: as anyone who has ever read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker (which I think of as Linguistics 101) would know, we don't actually think in language. We think in what he likes to call Mentalese, which makes perfect sense if you realize that sometimes you have a concept in your head but can't think of the right words to explain it, even in your mother tongue. Being at a loss for words is only sometimes not knowing what to say, and other times it's not knowing how to say it. And I think that a lot of the time, the thoughts in our heads are in pure Mentalese that we don't bother translating into English. Sometimes we do think in English sentences, especially if we're thinking in a check-list fashion, or trying to lay things out very clearly, or rehearsing conversations in our heads. For example, “Okay, laundry, then homework, then shower and sleep.” Or “I don't know how I feel! Billy is being mean to me, but I still want to be his friend, and Jennifer only wants to be my friend if I stop hanging out with Billy, but I don't like Jennifer as much!” Or “Mom, I have some news for you... But let's just keep in mind that report cards are not the only thing in life, and it's not the end of the world, okay?” So my instances in Frenglish are mostly this sort of thing: everyday checklisting in my head or the other types of things that we think in actual English and not in Mentalese.

This morning I realized that the bathroom window was open, so I should close the bathroom door if I didn't want it to bang shut in the wind later and scare me. (Yes, this happens all the time.) And I caught myself thinking “Gotta close the porte, sinon ça va slammer.” Slammer is not a verb in French. French for “slam the door” is “claquer la porte.” So what is interesting about this sentence is threefold:

1. Porte (French for door) came more easily to mind than “door,”
2. I started in semi-English and finished in semi-French (although it happens just as often the other way around)
3. I invented a verb à la française, turning English “slam” into “slammer,” conjugated into near future “va slammer.”

In math class, I'm likely to be thinking in French because I was just listening to the teacher and my classmates in French, but as soon as I start counting I have to switch. “La somme de toutes ces probabilités doit être égale à un, donc un demi... I mean one half, plus one fourth, plus one eighth.. the last option must be one eighth, c'est un huitième.” Which, all in English, goes “The sum of all these probabilities (possibilities) must be one, so one half... I mean one half, plus one fourth, plus one eighth.. the last option must be one eighth, that's one eighth.” By the way, here's a really good explanation for why math in French is hard, although I believe most people have trouble doing math in their second language. My English teacher (who speaks very good English for a French person), says that she can't do math in English, either.

There are also certain words that don't really translate, or are just better in one language than another. For example, I use the word “awkward” in English a lot, as many teenagers do. We use it to describe an uncomfortable situation in which we did not act appropriately. I explained this word to my French friends using the example of asking a lady when the baby is due and having her inform you that she is not actually pregnant. This has never happened to me, but it's the quintessential awkward situation. In French you can say that something is “embarrassant” (embarrassing), but it's really not the same. Especially if you want to say “I'm a really awkward person... I always say the wrong things in social situations, and I never know how to act around other people.” I wouldn't know how to translate that into French. Maybe they just don't have any awkward people.

In French, I really like the word “chiant,” for which Wordreference.com suggests “a pain” or “a bloody pain”. It manages to express at the same time something being boring, annoying, and unpleasant, in a slightly vulgar way. “C'est chiant” sort of takes the place of “that sucks,” but is slightly stronger and less immature-sounding. I have a feeling in the US I'll still be inserting “Mais nooon, c'est trop chiant ça !” into my sentences.

Sometimes there are just words that are more specific in one language than another. French, for example, has one word “culpabiliser” for “to make someone feel guilty.” They have a word “pisteur” for the ski patrol, which signifies both their capacity as slope maintenance and as first aid workers. In English we have awkward and creepy and all sorts of other words that don't translate. So in whatever language I'm thinking in, I'll often use words specific to the other language mixed into my sentences.

Sometimes I invent words that are either very rare or don't exist at all. I do this a lot on Skype with my mom. The other day I said something was “exigent,” which made her laugh because that is a real English word that means challenging, difficult, or picky, but is not a word you hear every day. In French it's “exigeant” and is much more common. I also invented “emission,” which is English for something being discharged or emitted, e.g. an electron emission, when what I meant to say was “episode” (of a TV show), which is “émission” in French.

Sometimes I hate speaking French. I hate my accent, which I can hear but am incapable of eliminating. I hate not being able to find my words sometimes. I hate the fact that I'm not allowed to speak like everyone else – you know how when you hear a foreigner swear in English, it's hilarious? Well, same thing goes for me. If I use the same bad words as all my friends, they laugh at me, so I don't, which just distances my language usage even more from theirs. And because I'm full of contradictions, I also hate the fact that I talk just like everyone else: the fact that I learn by imitating others means my language is much less colorful and whimsical and special than it is in English. I love my native language because I play with words and use words in odd ways that sound a little bit funny, and use big words and can make my word choice match my identity of someone a little bit odd and little bit well-educated. I can't do that in French – I imitate the people I hang out with, so I sound just like all the other teenage girls, which is definitely not a part of my identity.

I also think the language you speak changes your personality because of all the cultural differences present as soon as you switch languages. In French they are more politically correct and tell meaner jokes, are more aggressive in their speech, more judgemental of appearances, and much less private. Sometimes I translate the jokes I laugh at into English in my head and realize Oops, that's actually really mean. But it isn't in French. Racist jokes, fat jokes, even Holocaust jokes are much more fair game. Making fun of people is easier. My host sister might come home and yell “Salut la grosse!” which means “hey fatso!” which is not really something we'd say in English, even as a joke. They also tend to announce when they've farted instead of politely ignoring it, they share details about their morning poops, and talk about how much periods suck even if they're surrounded by awkward teenage boys. I am aware that plenty of people are like that in the States too, but I have observed as a general trend that people are more open and more verbally aggressive in French than in English. I had to inform my host sister, who loves Chinese jokes, that most of my Asian friends back in the Bay Area are not fans of white people telling Asian jokes. At all. I remember once getting a really bad reaction when I made a Chinese driver joke.

I have a feeling that as much as I miss speaking English, I'm going to have trouble speaking English too. I enjoy having no accent and having whimsical phrases, but maybe I'll miss the blunt openness of French. I'll stumble over my words sometimes and beat myself up over it. WTF? This is supposed to be my native language... Because maybe, after all this time, the easiest language in which to express all the cultural knowledge that I have now acquired is actually Frenglish. I have a hard time telling my parents about my classes because the concepts are different. How do I explain the “TPE” which is a semester-long research project class? In French, all you have to say is “TPE” and everyone understands, but in English I have to stutter and say “So today in TPE (pronounced Tay-Pay-Euh)... I mean, you remember that research project thing I told you about?” which is not exactly well-said either. Conversely, the other day I had to explain to the family why I was on Skype with my mom for an hour throwing a hissy fit about how bad college websites are. It was to sign up for placement tests, a concept which doesn't exist in France and I couldn't even find the words to describe. A lot of the time I want to share something about my life, but there are no words to describe it because it's a cultural concept completely foreign. I'm a senior and have spent this entire year on my laptop writing college essays, researching colleges, and laboriously applying from overseas, and yet I'm pretty sure they still only have a vague idea of how college works in the US. I've done my best to explain it, but I have a feeling it would work out better if I just plain drew up an ideas map/flowchart thing, which would look better if I knew more about computers and weren't lazy:

Football games and stuff → Colleges have a big social component in the US ↓

College is important! → Pressure to get into good college → strong college identities

Colleges have a big social component in the US ↓

College applications contain a lot of non-academic stuff, like extra-curriculars and essays

And so on. And then, after explaining American football and the concept of extra-curriculars and how our essays are really questions about your personal life philosophies and struggles and triumphs instead of the cold French cover letters, you might finally start to understand the college process in the same way that we do. So clearly the phrase “college applications” itself can't translate into French because it is such a different concept, with so many cultural differences behind it.

Until rather recently, I missed the confidence I had in my native language. But recently I've realized that I over-analyze what I say and what is said to me way less in French, and now that I've gotten over being ashamed of my accent (mostly), that means I'm less shy in French. I really hope I won't come home and be shyer than I was in France. I feel like I've spent a whole year being so acutely uncomfortable with myself and my surroundings that I've become immune to embarrassment by simple overdose, and I profoundly hope I won't lose this immunity with another language change.

This morning I was home alone with the cat. And realized I was talking to him in French, because obviously it would be weird to talk to the French cat in English. And yet I remember at the beginning of the year, I thought it was hilarious that my host mom spoke to the cat in French, because it seemed so obvious to me (not understanding French very well) that the cat didn't understand French. I think this is a universal hilarious moment, thinking it's obvious that animals don't understand foreign languages and then realizing that animals don't understand your own language either. If you speak French, I highly recommend this sketch by my favorite comedian Gad Elmaleh. At the end of the clip he talks about his bizarre experience in the Netherlands hearing people speak Dutch to their dogs. He also makes fun of cats, which is, you know, always funny. And as long as we're talking about Gad, I can't resist sticking in my other two favorites as well, les français where he makes fun of French people and la cigarette where he makes fun of smoking.

Anyway, so I was talking to my cat this morning, and I was telling him “Non, Nuts, dégage ! T'es tout mouillé, c'est degeuelasse !” which means “No, Nuts, go away! You're all wet and gross!” And proceeded to dump him off and go put more wood on the fire, thinking to myself “Le feu va crever, oh shoot I'm getting smoke everywhere.” Vive le franglais.

Socialized Medicine

I have oddly enough been looking forward to the day when I could finally have a personal opinion of the socialized medical system. Granted, anecdotes should not be the basis of political opinions, but there are so many numbers and statistics around to analyze that sometimes it seems better just to get a feel for the vibe – just like choosing colleges!

I have already written a little bit about my medical experiences here in France: I had to pass a physical to get my Ultimate Frisbee license, and I've gotten a cold three different times. The physical was remarkable only in how much less paperwork there was than in the US. In the US, every time I went to the doctor I had to fill out a lot of forms with my weight and blood pressure and if I ever felt depressed or gay or like taking drugs. My physical in France was much less complicated, consisting quite simply of taking a few basic measurements (height, weight, blood pressure), asking if I had any health problems and if I do any sports, and having me do ten squats to prove that I wouldn't keel over. Then he declared me quite healthy and sent me on my way.

My colds proved to me that French people really like medication. Here's a chart showing that France really likes antibiotics, as an example:

I tend to think that my body has evolved to take care of itself pretty well, and it often seems to do its job without my messing with it. Research has been controversial over the usefulness of fever, but I prefer to take the safe path: I don't run screaming to the medicine cabinet at 98 ºF, but anything over 101 ºF I will try to lower. Just like hand sanitizer, fever might not be that good for you, but it's a heckuva lot worse for your bad bacteria, and immune responses can be sped up with increased temperature. So whenever I'm sick, I take an ibuprofen or two if I'm too feverish, but never any antibiotics because colds are viral and every time I'm sick it's a cold. Furthermore, I was suspicious of French medication at the beginning just because I didn't recognize it, so I refused to take anything. This left my host family with the impression that I'm extremely anti-medication, which, compared to them, I guess I am.

So those were my experiences of medicine in France up until today, when I got a new insight into French hospitals. In gym class, we finished our running unit (where I had one of the best grades in my class) and the badminton unit (where I had the worst grade in my class) and now we've moved on to gymnastics. I am even worse at gymnastics than I was at badminton, unfortunately. In my defense, I am quite athletic. I go running every weekend through the empty cow-strewn countryside of my commune, and I play frisbee twice a week. But I am not the most coordinated knife in the drawer, and I am incredibly inflexible. Dance is something I've long known to be impossible for someone as awkward as me, and gymnastics therefore combines three things that I'm bad at: dancing, being flexible, and being coordinated.

Long story short, I cannot do a handstand. I told the teacher that I couldn't do a handstand, or a cartwheel, or even a somersault, and that I'll hurt myself or someone else or both (or all three or four, if I'm lucky). But he said “Nooon, tu ne vas pas te faire mal ! Je te le promets.” (Nooo, you won't hurt yourself, I promise!) Which is how I ended up in the hospital today. Because I can't do a handstand.

...Okay, have you stopped laughing? Can I finish my story?

When I do a handstand, I either go too far (and fall over on the other side) or not far enough. For all of us who couldn't do a handstand, the teacher said we should have our partner catch our feet as we go up in the air, so that we'd get a feel for what being balanced on our hands should be like. The first time I tried, I realized I pushed way too hard and was going to kick my partner in the face if she wasn't careful, so I dropped into a rather painful somersault instead of holding my arms rigid. The second time, determined to succeed, I locked my elbows and told them not to bend. Since I can't do a somersault on the mat because I don't tuck my head in (I can do one by pushing up on my arms!), my whole weight fell on my unbent head and unbent arms and it was my back that folded in half, right in the middle where it's not supposed to bend. I'm pretty sure I screamed some inappropriate Anglo-Saxon words that my classmates are probably familiar with despite their low level of English, and I proceeded to lie on the floor for a good half-hour, incapable of movement or breath. Eventually after a few false starts I managed to get up, which I only had the willpower to do because my teacher wanted to call the firefighters to bring me out on a stretcher. I kept insisting that I was fine, and even went to physics class afterward, but they got mad at me for not following instructions and going to the school nurse like I was supposed to, so they escorted me there. The nurse then said I should go to the hospital and get an X-ray, just in case. I knew nothing was broken, but since I couldn't breathe very well, I couldn't explain myself very well either, so I don't think that helped our communication.

By the way, the nurse thought I was German. Not the first time I've gotten that. Generally I'll take that as a compliment since Germans speak better French than Americans.

Anyway, the nurse drove me to the hospital and left me there (since I'm 18, which suited both of us just fine – I hate being hovered over). After 40 minutes or so of time in the waiting room, I got half of a room walled off with a curtain from an old guy having heart troubles. The nurse took my blood pressure and the doctor was not long after, asking me lots of questions starting with “So you're American?” and “But you speak good French?” and segueing right into the medication questions and how much does it hurt questions. He was a very charming and handsome young man – younger than doctors in the US usually are, considering that med school in France is 3 years and you don't need an undergrad, compared to the 8 years of total college needed in the US before you even start residencies. I just felt like this needed mentioning, that the French socialized system managed to provide me with a very aesthetically pleasing doctor. These things are important to the morale of the patient!

So he took a look at my back, checked that pressing on it didn't hurt, and said that obviously nothing's broken and an X-ray would be useless – it's just some painful muscle trauma. So he sent me off with some painkillers and anti-inflammatory pills, as well as a strict note against doing sports for the next two weeks.

“Uhhh... is this negotiable?”

“Sure, I'll make it one week if you promise not to overdo it.”

“I have a frisbee tournament this weekend. If it doesn't hurt by this weekend, can I play?”

“...I really should say no, but if it doesn't hurt, go for it. Just go easy on yourself, okay?”

So he sent me off with some painkillers and anti-inflammatory pills, as well as a strict note against doing sports for the next week that I'm allowed to break if I want to. Woohoo! And next time my gym teacher wants me to do a handstand, I'll just show him my little doctor's paper that says “Contusion dorso-lombaire d'allure musculaire” (which is exactly what it sounds like: a muscular contusion of the mid-back muscles, but in fancy medical language) and tell him I told you so. I TOLD you I would hurt myself.

I got to spend the rest of the day at home in bed, keeping my back muscles warm so they wouldn't seize up. I'll probably be back to school tomorrow, but I am not altogether unhappy with my little emergency room visit, as I have proved once and for all to my teacher that I really truly am incapable of doing gymnastics.

What this allows me to say, furthermore, is that I have now dipped my toe into a socialized medical system, and I have no complaints. I didn't have to wait a long time, my doctor was nice and said exactly what I thought he should say, and it was a generally good experience.

However, I am aware that there are blacker tales of this country's medical care lurking just around the corner. You remember my host sister's broken collarbone? Well, they should have operated right away, but they didn't. So now, since her bone healed in a still angular fashion, chances are that they'll have to re-break it and re-set the bone. She is not pleased at all.

Next up, keep your eyes open for a post about college decisions. That is, the decision is made... it just has to be finalized. *Suspense!*