le cinema

Today, Valerie and I went to go see Up in the Air (or, In the Air here, because I guess the studios thought that the French could handle 75% of the title in English but not the word Up).

It was worth seeing...I think. It was almost a not-s0-funny version of Intolerable Cruelty, but about airline travel and people getting fired. George Clooney was good, but I think that says more about George Clooney himself than the roles he plays.

I think I've decided to take Renaissance Art! I feel happy with this decision. I found instructions online in English on how to write a French dissertation-style paper so that takes some of the pressure away for Methedologie, which I still am scared of because I don't know what's being said. But at least I have more of an idea now.

I had a dream last night that my time in France was already over and I still knew as little French as I do now! UGH. But, I finally found my the French vocabulary exercise book that my Methodologie teacher told me to buy, so that's good. Today, it told me that one uses "au" in front of masculine, non-plural countries, while one should use "en" in front of non-plural feminine countries, which can be recognized because they end in an "e". But not the random smattering of the countries that end with an "e" that actually AREN'T feminine, just because. And Israel doesn't use any article before it.

I feel a little weird here, though. Everyone seems to care a LOT about their grades, in a way that I definitely don't. Most people have French majors to finish, or this is their last quarter in school, so I feel like everyone except for me is scrambling to finish requirements that I don't care about. Yesterday people were talking about someone they had heard about in the past who got Cs(!) in their classes here, like it was bad thing. Obviously, this means that I'm lucky, but I feel like because everyone is trying to get good grades, and I only care about how to not draw attention to myself in classes that are 2.5 hours long where I need to sit in the front now, that I seem like a bad student in comparison. And I absolutely HATE being a worse student than other people, almost more than anything, so this is a problem, and I haven't decided how to fix it. Hmmm.

I need to get over this aversion to studying/doing things, but I don't know how.