Long General Update:

Sharkboy is BACK! I drunk-dialed him last night, intending to leave a silly message on his voice-mail, but I got the real thing! Then it was awkward because he was really sober and hanging out with his parents. Haha. But we talked for a good while and it was great to hear about his trip.

Wine is horrible. I like how everyone always says, "Oh, this wine is so smooth, it goes down really easily." By this you mean that the wine that you usually drink goes down like burning gasoline and you are surprised and delighted when you taste a wine that you are physically capable of swallowing. But I'm in France, and drinking gasoline is part of the territory. Luckily a "delicious", "smooth" wine in France is like 80% of the cost of a comparable wine back home, so my strategy of poisoning myself to gain the social acceptance of my peer group isn't too hard on my pocketbook.

Last night I went out with some random french people including my co-worker and his girlfriend. I meet up with his girlfriend every Friday at a cafe. We drink hot chocolate or soda and practice speaking in English and French. She's actually really cool and I like her a lot. She was apparently talking to a friend of hers in Japan who said that she's having lots of fun because even though she's alone people invite her out practically every night. My friend was inspired by the story to invite me out with them because I was similarly alone in a big foreign city. Aw.

We went to a little bistro and drank red wine and ate an assortment of cheese and a charcuterie plate (assorted meats). They said that you really couldn't get much more french than that and that I should take a picture. I didn't, because I'm too cool and they were joking, but I wanted to.

Last week I had an "American" dinner for my friends. My new canadian best friend and I went to the American grocery store and bought a bunch of delicious items and then fixed them up for our friends. We wanted to serve things that were very American and that our friends hadn't heard of before. We ended up having Jell-O shots as an aperitif (served in champagne flutes, how classy!) We passed around a root beer so that everyone could try it, and to my great surprise not everyone hated it! For appetizers we had potato chips and sour-cream and onion dip, Nacho cheese Doritos, and little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I cut into fours and garnished with toothpicks. Everyone was sidetracked for a while admiring the jelly container, which was a squeezable type with one of those lids that dispenses jelly in a flat sheet so that you don't need a knife. I was so proud of the technical accomplishments of my fellow countrymen. For dinner we served a chicken and stuffing casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and another strange casserole with three layers: cranberry sauce, bacon, and mac n' cheese. The canadian said that she'd had it once at a restaurant outside of Boston, and while it wasn't strictly traditional American, it combined three things that were traditionally American, and it tasted fucking DELICIOUS. Holy shit it was so delicious.

After our guests had decimated all of these things, the Eiffel Tower started sparkling, and I told everyone that they should come and take a look. Everyone started moving from around the table, when suddenly my friend bumped the table and the entire thing collapsed. Considering that my tabletop is a giant slab of incredibly heavy wood, the collapse was catastrophic, breaking nearly all of my dishes and glasses and spraying onion dip, Doritos, and red wine all over the room. We were lucky that most of the guests had gone to look at the Eiffel Tower, or there could have been some serious injuries. Luckily we were finished eating, and the dessert was on the counter in the other room. For dessert we had cupcakes and a big cake with funfetti icing. The theme of the evening was "dinner from a box", so naturally we made nothing from scratch. Someone else brought Chips Ahoy, and the europeans brought macaroons and champagne and wine, so our dessert was a mix. Everyone was enchanted by the funfetti icing, and even though they all laughed and said they were full when I cut the cake after the cupcakes, they all ended up taking an extra piece anyway. The best part of the cake was that they only ate a third of it, so over this last week I have been pretty much eating the rest. We had a German, an Italian, an Ecuadorian, a Frenchwoman, a girl from La R�union (french overseas territory in the Indian Ocean near Africa), a Canadian, and an American (me).

Work is going ok. We are working on an important project, and the only outstanding part is my part. This is naturally stressful, since I am new to this field and not well-equipped to solve any of the many problems that I encounter. I was really starting to feel like a huge idiot, but my director came in and sat down and explained a lot of things to me, which helped a lot. Now instead of watching random numbers go by on the screen I feel like I can watch numbers and see the atmosphere breathing. That's pretty cool. Still, everything I try to fix the problem doesn't work, and it gets me down. It always seems like the other post-docs are progressing at a faster rate than I am. I also occasionally see the whole group having a meeting that I wasn't invited to. They have been testing out Python as a potential better programming language and I'm the only post-doc that wasn't asked to participate even though I've actually taken an entire class in Python programming.

At the end of my PhD I really had everything together, and I was at the top of my game. Now it's like I'm a freshman again and I know nothing. I know that it's better that way because I'm learning, but it's tough.
It's nice to be able to balance challenges areas with comfort areas. Right now I feel like I am living my entire life in a challenge area, where I'm an idiot at work because I'm not an atmospheric scientist, and I'm an idiot in every other arena of life because I'm a foreigner. [If you are ever feeling stressed about dealing with repairmen or cable companies or the government, stop and thank your lucky stars that you at least get to speak in your own language!]

For this reason it was nice to talk to my coworker, who while French, is also from outside the field. We finally talked about how frustrating it is to work with our current model and how we're making hardly any progress. He told me that he's always having to tell our director, "Everything you just explained actually means nothing to me," and the director has to start all over again. I had an idea to make the model more idiot-proof and I proposed it to the group but nobody ever got back to me. My coworker told me that he thought it was actually a really great idea. Thank you! I also talked to my director and we determined that the problem that I'm having is actually really complicated, instead of just something stupid. That's bad news for the model, but at least it makes me feel better for not being able to figure it out.

I went for a free tour of the Louvre, and I was the only one that showed up, so I got a private free tour. The lady was really nice and she said she didn't speak English that well so I said that she could give the tour in French. She asked where I was from and I said "the USA," and then she said, "Oh, well then I guess I should give the tour in English." I said that it was really ok so she gave the tour in french. She spoke slowly and I already knew a lot about greek mythology and european history, so she was easy to follow.

Hmm... what else? Ah yes, there is a giant mystery novel unfolding in the hallway of my apartment building, but that is complicated so I will leave it to another entry.

Someone I know on Facebook posted this photo:



And for some reason it made me soOOooo homesick for the USA. Nothing better than a little American BBQ with babies. =)

Yay for Sharkboy being back! I never tried drunk dialing anyone... I haven't got drunk before?

The smoothness of wine depends on a lot of things.. mainly the type of wine and the things you have it with.
» Nuttz on 2012-01-28 07:16:19

I always find it oddly fascinating when I read about people eating American food in other countries. I didn't realize peanut butter and jelly was an American thing? The mac and cheese/bacon/cranberry sauce casserole things sounds kind of horrible though.

Also, your description of wine is kind of hilarious. I can't stand the smell of it, so I've never tried it myself, but unless it tastes nothing like it smells, I can imagine you're pretty accurate about the taste.
» randomjunk on 2012-01-28 07:00:13

Lol! You're not a bad example, don't worry. "You class of drunkards" is what some people will say about my friends and I. Just cause there will be an invitation to go have a tower of a random cocktail or beer every week.
» Nuttz on 2012-01-28 09:37:06

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