some serious flower talk and a little bitta party

this is the first blog i've written, i think, that's not trying to cover a 2month span of time. it's strange and very nice, actually. ive resolved to add chapters about my past life without internet and just put them up every once in a while; there's not one attached to this post, but there will be one at the end of the next one.

ive had a resurgence of energy; these 2 weeks were kind of insane. had a human rights presentation monday, 2 midterms scheduled for wednesday, and on tuesday a 20 minute revolutions presentation on anarchism, socialism, the rise of the "left" pre-world war 1 in russia, the great britain, france, and germany, and revolution. i didnt sleep more than 2 hours sunday night, or a half hour monday night. however, tuesday night i got a record 14 hours of sleep. which is a good thing, because it was an epic weekend to say the least.

first, id like to figure out some logistics. im a little weirded out by using my friends' real names on this blog (which is why this blog looks like i have no friends and i keep referring to a vague and confusing "we".) so after several long bus rides this weekend, everyone i know, including myself, has been endowed with a nickname. not just any nicknames, either. kill-bill status kickass nicknames. and because this is, after all, the secret life of flowers, all of my friends are represented by whatever lovely flora i think suits them. im only listing the absolutely necessary ones at this time; no need to confuse you all with a million names i wont say again for weeks. but, incomplete or not, here they are. please feel free to introduce yourself.

tulip~ if rays of sunshine disguised themselves as people and walked around in black star-studded converse, this girl would be a prime suspect. it's lucky that tulips are her favorite flower; i think she'd be a yellow one, and if she were any cuter, i'd probably eat her. she's an expert at all things pop-culture, she's completely obsessed with harry potter, and she loves to discover new music. she really, really really likes naps, but she moves like a rocket- the girl gets things done. watching her take notes in class is something else. she's supersweet, supercute, supersunshine girl, and im really glad she lives with me. that way, i get to hear her giggle in her sleep (fave quote, from her sleeping and completely covered in blankets except for one renegade foot: "heeheehee you look so funny!") AND see her bolt straight up in the morning when its time to go. also, if eddie the echo's friendly spirit were to wander the earth searching for a soulmate, this girl would be his salvation. so i guess that's all i have to say about her (cool cool!!), let's move on to another one (yeah yeah!!) and then (funny funny!!) we'll ((george) lucas lucas!!)... i dont even have anywhere for this sentence to go. (finish finish!!)

lilac~ she's supersmall and supersweet! she has several adorable pets, who we all know very well by now. shes obsessed with twilight, and has yet to find a fellow fan in paris. she also loves nutella banana crepes, and she chugs, like, a lot of tea. shes really the only person ive ever met who says "i need some tea". she wears a watch that's 3 minutes fast, but sometimes not, so the two of us getting to school together is quite an affair. she steals all the tiny spoons from the kitchen for yogurt, then discovers them weeks later in piles in her backpack. she really enjoys talking to her family, and our room is regularly filled with the sounds of the lilac family skyping. she and her little sister are really too much together (not to mention tika, which is some type of pet who usually skypes with them as well). she really likes leggings, and shes succeeded in looking the most french, i think, of any of us. in fact, she really loves paris; it's totally her place and i could definitely see her living here in the future. she has a visual journal for class which has pretty much taken over her life, and human rights professor, and she likes honey (because the two of them are both so sweet! hahaha). dr. scott blair (professor of the awful human rights course that she and i are both in) loves her, and is constantly trying to find a family connection between the two of them based on their similar (but not the same) last names. very strange and obnoxious, but par for the course. she's freed her mind from the prison of time, by which i mean she might respond to the 4th alarm she's set in the morning, but she always manages to get to class! also, shes famous for her straightener, and one time she woke up at 3am (about when i was going to bed) so she would have 2 hours to straighten her hair before we left for amsterdam. classic.



snapdragon~ this one's a character, not to mention my hero. she comes off as a snapdragon, but she's secretly a stargazer lily at heart. she's pretty much my soulmate, and we're getting married, which is convenient, because we want the same wedding. for those of you who didn't know yet, we've already taken the engagement photos,and you should be getting the invitations in the mail soon. we knew we were destined to be together when we talked about POOH STICKS in Monet's garden. it also doesnt hurt that we've lived our entire lives less than an hour from each other, (went to semi-rival high schools AND colleges) and then somehow met in paris. she's addicted to nutella, she's absolutely hilarious, and she likes walking really an inordinate amount, which is great because so do i. shes (not so) secretly a philosopher, and when we're together all we do is chase down the biggest questions we can find. she's really one of the only people who i feel i'm able to talk to about big things that i think about, because i know she thinks about them too, and it's really, really great to have someone like that. im so glad i met her. she might be obsessed with chicken nuggets, she really likes the idea of being a checkout girl at a grocery store for life, she has this weird thing about running on stairs, and one time she tried to ram herself THROUGH a metro turnstile. (in the girl vs. machine battle, this one went to the machine. that sounds like a joke, but in fact, there is an actual battle, because she despises technology. im sure the score will be settled in the near future). she really is my hero, that isn't just a cute joke. she loves to read, she will one day be a famous (but not too famous... maybe cult-famous) author, and ive never met anyone whose views on the universe are so close to mine. love love love her.




daisy~ she might be the love of my life, no joke. she manages to make me smile every day, without fail, and i find myself constantly doing things she does (like the double peace sign COOL or singing THE JONAS BROTHERS). shes addicted to orangina, trying hard to quit, and failing. she thinks she looks like david beckham (? i know), which i dont understand at all, but whatever. i guess gorgeous never recognizes itself in the mirror, right? shes a straight up gangsta; homegirl can throw down a beat, which is probably why she's such a great dancer. her talent for music is obvious- she's an honorary jonas sister (she's almost famous, no big thing), she's constantly holding workshops teaching us all how to do all the various nsync-style dance routines i refused to learn 7 years ago, and she's a human jukebox. which is awesome, because im also a human jukebox, but we're constantly playing totally different songs. needless to say, our room can only be described as the lovechild of mix 106.5 and wild 94.9. and maybe some 104.9 and that oldies station whose name i never remember. anyway, its pretty great. she was a tree for halloween, which is typical. she rocks natural waistline pj-pants which can actually cover her entire body if she tries (and trust me, she has. i encouraged this activity as well). shes really good at weird voices, she does cute REALLY well, she doesn't eat meat, and she's probly... awkward, with a capital A. it's awesome though, im really glad she lives with me, and if she and i didnt write love letters back and forth in fashion class, i told her i'd probably have killed myself by smothering my face in a puffy 19th century sleeve. and it's totally, totally true.



oleander~ this one's a boy (shocking i know), one of only 5 (of 100 girls! lucky boys) in our cea program. he's an economics major, but every day he says he should switch. he's a swiss citizen, and he makes semi-regular visits to the "mountain house" in the alps (absolutely ridiculous, i know). his parents live less than 2 hours from mine, which again makes it insane that we met in paris. he is obsessed with basketball, specifically ucla basketball. which is fair enough, but i make fun of him because it seems every article of clothing he has is stamped with those 4 letters. he also makes a strange and inordinate amount of references to daniel craig, and he's one of the nicest people i think i've ever met in my life. which is saying a lot for me, actually, i try not to keep un-nice people in my company for very long anymore. he's pretty much a giant, which sounds like im exaggerating until i tell you he hits his head on the ceiling beams in our room. he's also a good cook, and keeps threatening to cook things i cant pronounce for me. i'm going to assume they're weird swiss things and not magic potions, though you never really know. to be fair, everything he's ever cooked for me has been amazing, so i guess geschnetzeltes or whatever is probably amazing. he lives with a family in a haunted apartment close to the eiffel tower, in which there may or may not be a piano. there are so many living rooms in this place he doesn't know if they have one or not. we're in human rights class together, and we play (or keep trying to play) a game wherein we dare each other to cause mischief. (for example, in talking about human rights, each of us picks a historical figure- say, the aztec god quetzacoatl- and makes repeated references to this figure throughout the class. it is required to bring them up every time we speak, and to also bash the other players' historical figure, so that the class period degenerates into a verbal wrestling match between any number of entirely unrelated historical characters. it'll be great). needless to say, we have a good deal of fun.



iris~ this girl, love her. she's really down-to-earth and practical, but she's also maybe the goofiest person ever. she used to work at THE CAVE (really just A cave near her home), which we all know like the back of our hands now, having had multiple virtual tours in the past few months. that's not to say she's an excellent tour guide, apparently she was kicked out of tour guiding because they thought she would be "better suited" to working in the gift shop (mhmm). it was all in love though, because the CAVE now sends her care packages (?!?!?! wtf mates) which include hundreds of mentos, money, and shoe storage things? they've discovered her talent for spoonlicking (means what it sounds like), and they also call her agnes, which is weird because... thats not her name. i dont really understand it, but who am i to question the omniscient CAVE? anyway, she also loves j crew, but not half as much as she loves dogs- she really, really, really loves dogs. her dream day is to play with bulldogs all day. this is probably because animals have been good to her, she is the only person i know WHO GETS CARDS FROM HER DOG. with regularity, too. every couple weeks, heres another card from OP! shes also pretty much obsessed with the pope, which is pretty cool as far as obsessions go. we tease her about her pearls, but we love her to death, and we appreciate her luncheon-organizing talents.


so that's a start on my friends. obviously, they're all insane, but this goes without saying. you should see the tiny paragraph about me, i sound absolutely psychotic. speaking of which, i have my own flower nickname, and if any of you can guess what it is, i'll... i don't know, be your best friend forever or something? ill think of something good. but i expect guesses, by comment, facebook, or otherwise. do it. (i'll judge you if you don't).

so, as for this last week, it's been amazing. not that much happened in october, but this last few days made up for it. i should just stop now and every day of this week should have its own blog entry, honestly. but why not just make this one even more massive? here we go.


chapter 1: the halloween partayyy~

this is called halloween 1 because it wasn't actually on halloween. october 24th or something, maybe. it was last friday. anyway, the deal is that our entire building except the 1st floor (which in america would be called the 2nd floor, it's one story up from the ground) is european- that means french, german, or spanish mostly. but most of the 1st (/2nd) floor is americans, all CEA students. and apparently halloween is off and on in france. we've been told that they do halloween "maybe or maybe not, depending on whether or not the stores have halloween stuff". 1st of all, this blows my mind, because i cant imagine whether or not we have a holiday hinging on whether or not the stores put stuff out. i hear halloween was big here like 5 or 6 years ago, but it has since died, and most of the people here didn't even know it was halloween. weird, right? so we decided we would BRING them halloween, since it's our holiday. no trick-or-treating could be done (showing up unannounced at strangers' doors and threatening to "trick" them is they dont give you candy is apparently not a normal thing to do in most countries), but we planned a huge party and invited the whole building, to be held in one of the giant basement rooms. we made some decorations and bought some wine, and put posters all over indicating that COSTUMES WERE MANDATORY.

lilac was a detective, with a hat and a trenchcoat. daisy was a tree, made out of a giant paper bag and real leaves. tulip was a bunch of grapes, which may have been the cutest thing i've ever seen. oleander was the walk of shame, with lipstick on his face and disheveled-looking, iris was the snl cheerleader, snapdragon was matthew mcconaughey, complete with newspaper-ad mask, boy jeans, and drawn-on abs (that was all me). and i was a toilet-paper mummy. it was great during the party people told me i had a great last minute costume, and i, though not offended at all, indignantly informed them that this was definitely the plan from the beginning.

pre-party dressing up was a lot of fun. daisy, in her tree costume, could unfortunately not bend over. at all. so, when she knocked over one of the bottles of wine we bought to bring to the party, and it somehow broke and spilled all over our room, it was really funny to watch her just stand there and yell AHHHHHH while other people grabbed towels to clean it up. we blew up balloons and safety-pinned them to tulip to make her grapes costume complete, and i drew abs on snapdragon so she could REALLY be matthew. i did terrifying makeup to make myself look dead, and afterwards we wrapped me in toilet paper. which, i must say, is not a great costume idea. actually, no, it's a great idea. but seriously, toilet paper is, i think made out of like 1 actual solid molecule of stuff per sheet, and thus is secretly non-existent. BECAUSE IT RIPS EVERY 1.5 SECONDS. serious issues occurred when i tried to dance. oh well.
constructing my costume- thanks guys!

the transformation is complete!
me with matthew, no big thing

happy halloween-goers!

i guess there's not that much to say about the party itself, we played loud music and danced, and lots of our building-mates came. there were 2 surgeons, an amy winehouse, an indiana jones, an amazing lion, jerry garcia, a butterfly, mother nature, chewing gum, a vampire, several "french people", the spanish girls came as cats, and maria came as herself. a good time was had by all, i think. it seemed so, anyway, and they made us a poster afterward saying they loved it! so that's good :).

im going to have to postpone chapters 2-5(ish) for next time, which i would like to have up by wednesday of this week. but this thing is huge already, and i dont want to write badly about these things because i care about them. so check back by wednesday, and hopefully, barring any ridiculousness, there should be stories about monet's house, the loire valley, real halloween, disneyland, and my brand new haircut. talk to you soon :).

and it seems the curtain is drawing to a close on my disappearing act...

but before you jump up and down singing the praises of cea and/or aepp (my building), you should know that this is NOT because i have received the fabled special cea internet. it is because i am stealing the reception desk's internet in a more effective way than usual. and sometimes it is because i have acquired a fake password for neuf wifi, which im pretty sure i should be paying for. at any rate, i have built my own internet-based tower of babel, and am awaiting the wrath of the spiteful cea gods in return for my insolence. until then, my screenname on aim is singwithmejenny.

at this point, i have a massive word document filled with stories, thoughts, and rants from the past month, but it seems silly to put them all up here (you know you wouldn't read them anyway, come on). so i think instead of copying them all into here in a massive marathon of lauralife, ill highlight some key points, and in the next little while ill slip some stories in when appropriate. it'll be like a pre-episode recap on tv. sound good? great.

so over the past month, a lot has happened. which is to be expected, really; it wouldnt matter if nothing happened. im in paris. even if all i did on a saturday afternoon was step in cat pee, you could ask me what i did that day and it would still be a cool story. observe:

"what did you do today, laura?"

"oh not much. i stepped in cat pee... in paris."

see? amazing, right? i've automatically made my life 15times more interesting just by living here. way to go, me :D.

but back to this month. there have been a lot of really amazing experiences; it's strange living through experiences you KNOW are amazing beforehand and during, you know? like i've never known before i did something that it would change me. but that's how this is. at this point, im almost adjusted to living in paris. im overadjusted, actually, i think, because i keep forgetting that im not in america, and answering questions in french to people who dont speak french... sigh. it's really weird. i feel like... you know when you're falling asleep in front of the tv, and you're kind of halfway dozing, and kind of halfway dreaming, and then you have this half-dream that you trip over a tree root or something and you jolt awake, physically reacting to the dream? that's how i feel here, as if im constantly almost dozing off to comfortable adjustedness, and every so often im jolted back to the realization that i live in a country where i cant understand most of what people on the street are saying. it's very strange.

i've spent the month going to classes (for those of you who go to school with me, you will fall over when you hear that i've missed a total of 2 classes this month. a week ago, i would have been able to say ZERO classes, but i hurt my back randomly and missed french and fashion) and generally exploring the city.

so now it is time for the pre-episode recap of the last month. this includes several small chapters, and a few large and nonsensical paragraphs packed with everything im trying to say but dont have space for. get ready.

i have discovered hot chocolate that tastes like melted chocolate bars somehow in a constant liquid state. and i have ceased to understand why anyone buys anything from hershey's chocolate. because it is NOT GOOD. it is my opinion that americans buy disgusting food just because it's put in front of us. like, bread? baguettes here are 80 cents. and they're good. why do we eat sandwich-white bread? bad chocolate? even mcDonalds here is better, like legitimately BETTER, because people here will not eat it if it's bad. coke is the same way. things taste more real here, because they're made of real things, because people dont WANT to eat packaged, processed, semi-cheese and pretend raspberry flavoring and flavorless powdered hot chocolate. it's going to annoy me, i think, when i go home.

speaking of chocolate, one of the things i'll miss most about france is the ability to go to ANY street, ANYWHERE, and find an eclair. and a damn good one, too. it's really unreasonable. if there was somewhere on earth where i would go to try and make myself fat, it would be here.

there is NOTHING more beautiful in the world than the eiffel tower at night. ok this is maybe an exaggeration, but it is still so breathtakingly beautiful, i cant handle it. you dont understand unless you've seen. i love it love it love love love it.

starbucks costs $8 here. i mean, it's 5euros, which is circa 8 dollars. ridiculous, no? even more ridiculous? thats also the only place in town to get coffee to go (other than mcdonalds black coffee). AND, i have become addicted to coffee in the past 3 weeks. i dont know how it happened, maybe it's the espresso. but those two things together are really making my life unhappy. in fact, living here at all is SO expensive. i didnt really understand before i came here, but a coke is 4 euros. it's kind of terrifying, and im a little worried about my budget at this point.

im pretty sure i live in a movie, life is so strange. i guess my life always was like a movie, but it's never been this... cute before, haha. i go to the louvre every week to draw the winged victory. actually, i go to draw all the sculptures, but the winged victory is the light of my life. i cant stay away. i miss good chinese food and nachos more than i miss most things (that doesnt include you mom, dont worry :)). and nutella +banana crepes are all i need to be happy in life.

and the adventures here never cease. we break into children's parks in the middle of the night and just hang out on the octagon. im becoming a poet; i dont write that often but when i do it pours out in waves. i am becoming a ninja with the way i can sneak (myself and other people) in and out of houses (dont worry about it). i live in a room with no furniture where we can see into all the windows across the street like a doll house. i found a flower shop and bought seeds so i can plant them everywhere. (the secret life of flowers... get it yet?) i walk on the seine river a lot; im really going to miss it. i live next to the bastille, NEXT TO THE BASTILLE NOT A JOKE OH MY GOD. its amazing. every day here is just... amazing. because im never going to get over the fact that im in paris.

speaking of which, let's talk about paris. paris and i are over the honeymoon stage, and we still love each other, but i think we're beginning to see the places where we dont quite match up. and, much as im in love with this city, there are things i dislike. and there are certainly things paris dislikes about me. i would live here for years i think, but not more than 6 at a time. and i would probably never consider myself parisian. i wouldnt raise my kids here. and i've been thinking about that a lot lately, and why that is.

im too different for paris. and worse, im too stubborn about it. its a very stereotypical american thing, but i am fiercely individual, and when the CEA people tell me i have to dress like everyone else and act like everyone else in order to avoid being harassed, it makes me angry. and sure, ill do it to a reasonable extent, like ill stomp around as if im having the worst day of my life (this is, im told, apparently the standard traveling mood of parisians), but im not going to change my clothes. im not going to wear black sweaters and black coats and gray pants and tan scarves, and im not going to glare at everyone i see as if they're not worth making my photoreceptors break a sweat. it's not that i dont like parisian culture, i LOVE it. it's beautiful. but there is a certain inherent worth granted to conformity that i cant deal with. which, incidentally, is why i wouldn't ever raise my kids here. because, assuming that my children inherit even 1/4 of the potential (and probably inevitable) strangeness that would come with being my offspring, and assuming that they end up- through biology and proximity- with even 1/4 of the odd traits, habits, and happenstances that i seem to have acquired, they would be MISERABLE here. earlier on, before i had developed the understanding that for me, the exception is the rule, that its ok that the other kids dont think what i think, that crazy sock gloves are cool JUST BECAUSE I LIKE THEM AND THATS ALL THAT MATTERS, i would have been MISERABLE here. and i want to teach my kids that their lives aren't supposed to be a performance, and that they're beautiful, even if they want to wear crazy colored boots and smile at homeless people and sing out loud walking down the sidewalk. and i hope they do! i hope i can teach them to smile at EVERYONE, not just pretty and clean-shaven people, and to sing and dance and run and enjoy life, even on busy streets. and i dont think that i could teach them those things here. it would be very hard. because paris is like a historically significant hollywood; it's glamorous and giant and full and beautiful and cutthroat and ancient and proud and magical and it will judge you- either you're in or you're not. and if you're not, no one will even give you a second look.

paris and i are lovers. we could love each other very much for a long time, but we wouldn't get married, and if we did it would be a disaster. so we'd be one of those couples that is on-and-off for their entire lives, where they're attracted to one another so much when they're together that they just gravitate closer and closer together, like zombie flies floating closer and closer to the light. but then, they get close enough to the light that it shocks them a little, and they get angry, and they fight, and they leave and don't see each other again for years, when the same process will inevitably take place again. this is how i feel about paris. we're like a sine wave and a cosine wave- we can chase each other around forever 3 inches away from each other, in love and angry and miserable because of those 3 inches, but we'll never in a million years totally match up.

so that's paris, and me.

p.s. i was planning to add a couple chapters to this, about bigger events that happened, like trips to versailles, the american movie festival, and our adventure to belgium and holland. but this post is becoming gimongous, and it's a little overwhelming. so another post should be coming with those stories in the next 2 weeks sometime. until then, content yourselves with lots of pretty pictures of beautiful paris. they should be up in the next 2 days. enjoy :)