Sometimes you have to laugh...

to keep from crying. It is a thin line that divides the two, and I have been walking it this week. I have my faults, but one thing I am usually good at, if I do say so myself, is finding the humor in life, even when it kind of sucks. I am writing this moments after having bid adieu to my landlord, but to really understand the stress his visit brought, I’ll have to give a bit of background of the week.

We are down to single digits of how many days of class remain in my tenure at ScPo (and of college, hopefully!), and so as you can imagine things are getting hectic. All the work is piled up for the end of the semester which would be stressful if it was in my native language, but in French it is just downright overwhelming. I have 2 oral presentations, 2 ten page papers, and one 4 page paper due within a week and a half’s time. This past week has been spent trying to force myself to work on oral presentation number one “L’imaginaire des jeunes saoudiens”- the imagination of the young saudis, or more or less, how the current generation of saudi youth see the world and why it matters. So I was talking abut reislamization v. reform. You have to talk for 10 minutes- no more, no less, and you can’t read the presentation. However, while the French students get nailed for breaking those rules, the professor made sure to say that that international students are allowed to read if language is an issue. So I was not real worried about the presenting part, since I was planning on reading mine, but it did have to make sense, and you also have to prepare an outline handout for everyone in the class. Anyway, so the week had been consecrated primarily to that task.

Thursday was the big day. Not only did I have my presentation, but it was also the longest day ever. It started out with my French foreign policy class at 8am, followed quickly by 2 hours of Arab World, and then a 2 hour “break” during which I practiced my presentation and tried to read for one of my other papers (but was too nervous to really pay much attention), then came 2 more hours of Arab World and my presentation. It went alright, he said I talked too fast because I read it but he wasn’t overly harsh as he is often with the French students. However, while he let most of the international students sit down directly after their presentation unless anyone had questions, he decided to ask me questions about Saudi Arabia, as did some other students. It didn’t help that the questions were vague and not really pertinent to my presentation, and me being nervous certainly did not improve my french speaking abilities. When I get nervous in French I basically lose all command of the language and find myself tuttoyer-ing (using the informal “you” form) older people and having the vocabulary of a first year french student. I stammered some grammatically incorrect and less than insightful responses, and stood to the side while he scribbled and rambled on about the Saudi line of succession for 10 mins and then finally was allowed to sit down. I got a 13, which doesn’t sound all that impressive, but it’s above the passing mark and probably a lot higher than he would have given me if I was French. The other international students in the class and I am pretty sure that he just gives all the international kids the same marks regardless of how well they do. We also got back our essay midterms. I thought I had done pretty well. I got an 11. Also pretty dismal unless you take into account that the grades ranged from 9-13 for the class, so then it’s not so bad at all. And once again, it’s above the passing mark. Annnyway, so I survived that exposé and then went on for another hour of planning for my next oral presentation- a news review for my french class with a partner. By the time I got home Thursday night I was ready to collapse having been at school for a solid 11 hours and having not gotten a ton of sleep the night before.

Friday I spent a good portion of the day at Reid Hall, where UF’s study abroad program is and where I studied last time, because it is quieter and less crowded than ScPo so I can work better.

Today I consecrated the entire day to getting my 4 page paper done. It’s 7pm and I haven’t written the first word. It was slow going on the research anyway, but it took a serious turn for the worse at 5:30 when someone started banging on my door. Now since I was going to stay in and work all day I was still in my PJs. Let me paint you the picture. Sweatpants, a rugby T-shirt, warm socks and my Gator Crocs, a fuzzy pink bathrobe, hair sloppily pulled up in a knot with a headband, and...no makeup. I was looking stunning, let me tell you. Anyway, so I was just sitting her peacefully trying to read the world’s most boring article about whether researchers influence the creation of political islam, when...BAM BAM BAM BAM! I sat quietly for a minute kind of hoping whoever it was would go away, but also really confused because other than a delivery or a visitor, the only reason someone would be at my door would be PROBLEM, and I was not looking forward to dealing with that if it was. BAM BAM BAM again. I opened the door cautiously. A short middle-aged guy was standing there, “Hello, I’m your neighbor downstairs and there’s a leak coming from your apartment.” Oh crap.
“Really?! Oh no! I had no idea!” said I.
“Yes, it’s coming from the area of your kitchen I think. Do you think you can turn the water off? Make it stop?”
“Uh, oh, um..yeah, I’m soo sorry! I don’t know what happened.” That’s when I realized, I DID know what happened. “Is there anything I can do? Is it really bad in your apartment?”
“Well it’s dripping into our bedroom, so if you could stop the water, that would be good, and we’ll call the landlord.”
“Oh yeah, of course, um, I think earlier, I was...it was...the...oh shoot I forget the word in French, the thing where you wash stuff...it was, at the bottom, it was blocked, and I tried to remove what was blocking it...and...”
“Ok, well can you turn the water off?”

I should probably back up and say that this afternoon I was going to wash some dishes and I noticed that the sink was not draining hardly at all, and I wasn’t about to get dressed and go to the store and spend an hour trying to figure out what Liquid Plumber is called in French and try to figure out those directions, so I decided I would try to clean out the drain if there was any junk in there. I don’t have a disposal which is a strange concept, and I try very hard to keep solid particles from going down the drain, but I’m sure it happens from time to time. So I unscrew the screw holding the drain cover in and take it off and wipe out the part I can reach and run a little water down in there and it seems to be working better. So I put it back on, and wash my dishes. Evidently, since I don’t have a screwdriver here and was using a knife to do the unscrewing and rescrewing...I didn’t get it tight enough. This was like 4 hours earlier though.

Well anyway, I promise the kind but annoyed neighbor that I will do everything possible to fix it and immediately go to look under the sink and see if there is a problem and there’s all sorts of water under there that had leaked out. So I mop it all up and check and take everything out from under the sink and as I’m doing this the phone rings. And it’s my landlord cause apparently he’s the people below’s landlord as well. So anyway he says he hears there’s a leak and he’s coming over to take a look and see if he can fix it, but in the mean time I should turn the water off on the main line. He’s on his way. Oh crap. Not only was I in a state of disarray, but so was the apartment. Anyone who has lived with me knows that when I am tired or stressed my housekeeping skills drop off dramatically. So after a stressful and hectic week the place was a wreck. Panic time! It was the fastest clean job anyone has ever seen. Granted it wasn’t a good cleaning job. I have no idea where I shoved things. I may never find them again. But I threw on some jeans and brushed my hair and tried to keep from giving the landlord a heart attack when he walked in.

He arrived a few minutes later with a tool kit and I explained what I thought had happened and he poked around and took things apart- showed me how to empty the trap that was clogged- and came to the same conclusion. I was apologizing profusely and he kept saying it wasn’t a big deal. He was extremely nice considering that I caused him and his other tenants a whole heap of trouble because I didn’t know that removing the drain cover also caused the sink to separate from the pipe underneath it. He tightened everything and double checked stuff and told me to watch it for a day or so and encouraged me to CALL HIM if I have any more trouble with a slow sink instead of trying to fix it myself. Oh my.

While I was waiting for the landlord to show up I was sitting in the kitchen trying to figure out what was the worst that could happen, when it occurred to me that I had been here before, metaphorically speaking. The last time I was here, when Lori and I were living on rue Vieille du Temple, the faucet in the kitchen was leaking around where it came out from the sink. One night while I was washing dishes I tried to tighten it, but it was really old and apparently rusted and when I twisted it, it broke off in my hand! I turned off the water until the landlord or plumber could come and look at it, but didn’t realize that you also had to turn the hot water heater off. So the hot water heater was still running without water and started flashing some warning code and wouldn’t work after we turned the water back on. We followed the directions and rebooted the water heater eventually, but the landlord’s plumber was in Israel having a baby so he was out of town for a month and we carried water in a pot from the bathroom to the kitchen for several weeks which was imminently annoying. So I guess it is par for the course that I should have some self-inflicted plumbing issue while I am here. At least my French abilities are better this time around, even if I couldn’t remember the word for sink or drain when I needed. I had to laugh because it’s always words that I remember being taught in French 1 and 2 in high school that I can’t remember. I remember thinking when we did the unit on tools when I was about 15- why in the world would I ever need to say screwdriver or nails in French!? I now know why. Because maybe someday you will be living in France and you will be talking to your landlord after you’ve flooded the apartment below you and you will need to tell him you removed a screw from the drain of the sink but didn’t have a screwdriver. It’s those vocab words that you never foresee needing to know that catch you off guard. Now if my landlord had wanted to discuss the political risks of foreign policy in the mideast, now THAT I can discuss in French. Sinks and gaskets and leaks? Not so much.

And so tonight I choose to laugh. With the stress of the assignments that I am vastly underqualified to complete and the lack of time to do them in, I was already dangerously close to a freak-out, and standing in my kitchen sopping up water while my Italian landlord talked on about gaskets and valves was enough to push me over the edge. And don’t get me wrong, a nervous breakdown can do wonders as far as clearing your head and helping you focus. But tonight instead of crying, I will choose to enjoy the humor of the disasters that add flavor to my life, and hopefully to yours as well.
Goodnight and Good Luck.