omigoodnessvacationsalmosthere

and yes that had to be said as one word. the above picture is the happiness with hair and also new sweater. oo sweater.
the weather here has been gorgeous lately - well, today it was beautiful. i spent the day getting ready, cleaning the apartment a little, running to the caf office. this is a beautiful thing, the caf. apparently you are only supposed to pay a certain percentage of your paycheck in rent. if you pay more than this, the caf reimburses you. so i finally got all my paperwork in today, and according to the lady i spoke to, i should get a lump sum of reimbursements for october, november, december, and january within three weeks.
hallelujah. right at the end of vacation, which is when i'm normally paid anyways.
i also met the lovely whitney for coffee/hot chocolate (she's not much of a coffee drinker) so we could discuss life and enjoy the weather while i waited for my landlord to come back from lunch for some paperwork, and she waited for her teacher to call cause they had a rendez-vous today. had a nice dinner, and went for a two hour walk with jen all over the city tonight.
today was pretty wonderful, except for th fact that for some reason, my key will not work in the outside lock of the main door of our building. inside lock - fine. outside - doesn't go in. jens and alysons do, so i called the landlord and she said well you've been able to get in haven't you? and i said well yes after i call my friends or ring someone else's doorbell. she said oh well someone else had that problem too. she then told me there was nothing she could do about it.
this would all be fine, except for my key really. really. does not work. for the past couple months sometimes it didn't work, and i figured it was just the cold weather messing with the lock. but today, it hasn't worked at all. if it doesn't work tomorrow i'm going down there and telling the old woman to make me another - this is ridiculous.
what else is new? whitney's birthday party was a blast, got to see some familiar faces that i hadn't seen in a while - note pascal and hilary washout picture to the right. pascal is a friend through the italians - he's french (from savoie, the region where my french professor from college grew up) spent some time here in tours with his girlfriend (who is italian - from sicily) and now lives in paris. so it had been a while. this is pascal's angry face, and my it's almost one in the morning and these boots are hurting my feet and i'm tired and had champagne face. although there are some pictures of everyone having fun. i swear.
jen and i went for a two hour long walk tonight. i know i already mentioned that - but the long walk was long overdue. i had forgotten how much thinking gets done on a long walk. a wise woman once told me that when you're moving forward it helps your thought process move forward as well. it's true. it also helps to have a nice sounding board like jen, who seems to be able to get right to the heart of every problem you have. it's incredible. but the basic conclusion of the walk was that we're at a crossroads in our lives, and we need the freedom to take whatever path we want. like the walk we took tonight. we were kind of moving in a direction, but only corner by corner, street by street, and eventually, when our feet were tired, and we felt like we should go home, we decided to head in a definite direction. that's what this france trip is all about. bit by bit, figuring out where we want to go next. on our own time. at our own pace. and on our own. there will be parts of the journey where we have a friend with us, but for the most part, it's us. doing our thing. and that's quite alright. i've spent a lot of my life making decisions with everyone else in mind. i think now is about the time when i start making decisions for myself. really. the idea that i'm going to live my life based on anyone's feelings by my own - at this point - is asinine. i've always tried to live up to a standard, or i guess what i thought was a standard. i've tried to please everyone. you know something? you can't do that. i am too afraid to hurt people. and i wind up hurting myself.
so. a promise i made to myself, was that the next time i come to a crossing where i can go left, right, or straight; i'm not going to think about what the person to the left or the person to the right or the person directly in front of me is thinking. they're not coming with me. as far as i know. i'm gonna make the choice. all on my own. because this is my life. the people around me - i love them. and i know i need them around. because without them i wouldn't be who i am today. but this isn't any one of their lives. no, it's not. and at the end of the day, at the end of the journey, their decisions aren't the important ones, mine are. because it's my life.
so now i get to ride off into that sunset and take hold of what is mine.