Currently Reading DREAM BOY: A Novel By Jim Grimsley see related

Bonne! Numero Uno: I got a new job!! yay! I got a new job at Twin County Credit Union. It is part time but the chance of it going full time is really good. It pays well and is permenent (lol I can't spell) and has benefits. Numero two...o :) I get paid tomorrow. Numero trace :) I got to hang out with a friend of mine that I haven't seen in a while and it was fun. Why, you may ask? Because I'm hoping said person, whom shall remain nameless for now, is interested in being more than a friend. That would be really cool. If not, I hope we remain really good friends. Numero quattro: My ultra cool friend Chelsea just got back from Honduras and is coming down to visit us Olympians soon. Yay...Becuase I am at work I have to stop typing now but I will add more when I get back from break.

Ok....I'm back from break...But I don't think There is much more to say. Pippin, the musical Shelly and I are doing right now, opens tonight. (side note...Julia, I vetoed using your oboe becuase all of your reeds are to soft and I can't find medium hard reeds in town. Thanks for letting me borrow it though) It is kinda like the Truman Show but on stage and set in like medieval times. Ummm...other then that nothing too exciting today.

P.S. The book that I am reading right now, or read, was recommended by a friend and is good but sad. The author is very colorful in is language and I read the book in one night.

Comme çi, comme ça. I haven't posted in two months...why...becuase I am a big procrastonator. (and a bad speller) What am I puting of you might ask. I went to france...and basically I didn't want to take the time to type about it so I thought "if I just don't log on then I don't have to type about it." I like my logic. Anyways I guess I will fill you all in on the last two months.

         First of on the 21 of June I left for France. We had to get to the airport freakishly early and then sit there until the plain got there. Funny moment #1...me and this other kid in the group wore the exact same clothes...I mean like same brand shirt and color, same jeans, same shoes...it was odd. Then we take the flight to Philly and have a like three hour lay over there, then to France. When we get to france we have to walk around Paris to kill time, not that I minded wandering around Paris, then we took a traint to our town. When we got there we met our families. After saying hi to my family and all that shit I asked them "Ou est-ce que nous sommes aller maitenant?" which means "where are we going now?" I said this three times and they finally responded with "Nous ne parlons pas anglais"..."we don't speak english" I was thinking  OMG is my french really that bad or are you retarded. This just prefaced the next 10 days perfect. 

              To make a long story short about the next ten days I will do it with elipses! Arrive...move in...go to town...come home...eat...talk...sleep*...wake up...eat bad cereal...watch tv...eat lunch...spend six hours trying to get phone card to work**...eat dinner...people come over...go to bed. Basically this routine continued of basically living life meal by meal because that was almost the only thing we did.

              The * and ** come with stories that I will not recount. *the first night I slept ther i moved around alot. Well somehow I managed to make all of the slats that hold the mattress of the bed fall away from the frame and the bed collapse. Some how this doesn't wake up a single person in the house. So, I put the bed back together, laid down on it flat on my back and slept without moving. This is how I slept for all of the ten days.** I decided to buy my phone card in France. Buying it was easy. Getting it to work was a whole different story. Me and my host sister went back and forth between the pay phone and the post office like 10 times before we finally got it to work. Mind you that not a single person in my town of 700 people spoke any english at all except the one guy that could say "I am zee best"

                   On the like third day my sister wanted to go to town so i could meet her friends and hand out with them. This involved going to the "big" town of Blois. Once we got there we walked for ever then we met like 4 people and walked to this court yard of this castle. It was gorgeous and a cool place to hang out. After like an hour of just sitting and talking, like 5 more people showed up and they started juggling and shit and bagging for money. It was funny. Eventually we emassed 15 people all of the age 14 or 15 with the exception of me. We hung out in the court yard for 6-7 hours. It was coll for like 2 and then ok for 2 more and then torture for the last 2.

                There were a quite a few fun times in my little village though. People would always come over after dinner and play cards or drink and watch tv it was pretty fun. One night we went to a meeting for the community soccer programm then watched the France v. Greece game in the club house. Fred (host sisters coach) would not stop giving me copious amounts of alcohol. Yet somehow at the end of the night (2am) he was way drunk and i was just fine. Every time I turned around someone was giving me some form of booze. After a while it got old. One night though, it was like 10:30 and we weren't doing anything so I thought I would go to bed a little early. Well I started to go up stairs when all of a sudden my host mom was like "lets go" I was like...WTF...we drove into the darkness and parked in a field then walked...and walked...and then all of a sudden there was a festival in the middle of BFN. There was a dance floor, rides, a DJ, food and two bars and then a fake house built out of shipping flats...this was, of course, lit on fire after the fireworks show...I still don't know why. ummm I'm trying to think of other fun things I did in Contre (that was my town)...my french got alot better. I started smoking...i drank alot...i taught my host sister and her best friend to say "fuck you bitch" becuase I knew how to say it in french. I met alot of cool people in my town and everybody understood me well except my family. Even the dad of one of the kids that my Host mom watched, when he came to pick up his kid, said i speak very good french, and when i protested he was like "no no its true you speak french very well" this made me happy. Now I will move on to Paris.

             Paris was fun. Basically we did lots of touristy things and got to hang out together alot and spent alot of time in Tamara and Leannes room. it was a blast. Funny story: on my birthday we were supposed to get on the metro and go to a museum and then have a free day because it was our last day in paris. Well we got on the metro and then all of a sudden I realized i was the only on still on the metro...so I had to go back to the hotel and sit there until they realized i was missing. Finally I got a call from Mme Parks and she tells me that they realized I was missing but thought that I would just find my way to the museum myself (despite the fact that she had lectured us about the fact that if we get seperated from the group to go to the hotel and wait) and becuase they split into two different groups each group though I was with the other group. that was nice. I finally met up with tamara and luke at Notre Dame and we had our freeday. Then we came home, after a five hour delay in Philly, most of it spent on the plan.

               Well that is a lot about france and that is the short version...I'll probly talk about it more in the coming weeks but for now I think I have carpal tunnell. Night

Ehhh...I can't believe it had been like 9 days since my last post. I have been soooo busy. The week after we got back from Canada was finals week for seniors so that was a busy week. Then saturday I had to work on an advertising project which my group is totally laming out on. Sunday I went to 6 different graduation parties. My god I got tired that day.

               (Look Mike...paragraph)Monday o monday...how little I remember of you! So monday was graduation. I went to college then had some free time until the practice at 12:30. After practice I went to lunch with Jenny and Jhaleh and then went to a marguerita party at Keely's. After that, we had graduation. I got to stand up becuase I'm getting my AA!!!Yay me!!! Anyways, now to explain the first sentence in this paragraph. After graduation, I went to a party....a big ass party...Me and Caroline (another exchange student whom I drove) were two of the first people there. I started out my evening with beer. Then after people started showing up I switched to shooting hard A. I took like 6 shoots, then Bruno gets there (yet another exchange student from belgium....god I'm worldly) and he wants to do shots with me. At one point I remember him saying to someone "we are on shot 10" and I thought...I already had 6...hmmm.....so we drank some more. I finally rounded out the night with 5 beers, 20 shots, and many drinks from many random bottles. Lets just say that I only get bits and pieces of the evening in my memory. The next morning (a mere 2 hours after I had finished drinking) I awoke to find myself on a cold tile floor shivering. At this point...I stood up and went to Chemistry!!! O man...chemistry test drunk....I took it in 7 minutes, stumbled to the teachers desk to turn it in and went back to the party. oo the fun.

                In honor of the fact that Quentin is leaving today and I wont see him for like a year...I will do a Biography of Quentin tonight. The first time I met Quentin was at the first french club meeting this year. He didn't talk much so I didn't pay much attention to him. At semester I was taking a class during my normal french period and he joined our french class. When I came back to french class, he was there and his job was to help us...ya. after about a month of trying to get him to talk more, we finally got him to open up a bit. So we started to skip french...Jenny, Quentin, and I. We would tell Mme parks that we were going to the library and needed Quentin's help and we would go to like the bagel place or something. Me and Jenny really got to know him so I invited him to a BBQ thing I was having. We all got together and had lots of fun. The next big thing the three of us did was go to Canada were he really opened up and became kinda crazy. Man was Canada fun. I've went to a couple parties with him including the aforementioned grad party and we have hung out quite a bit. Quentin is a really cool guy and I'm glad I got to know him (now I have a place to stay when I go to Belgium next summer). I think we are all going to miss him and we hope he comes back to america soon.

Currently Watching Law & Order Special Victims Unit - The First Year By Christopher Meloni see related

ehhh....I don't really know how I feel right now. One thing I do know for sure....Canada Kicks Ass!!!!! O my god. My trip to Canada was one of the coolest things I have done all year. I'll give you a little run down of the trip so you can understand just how kick ass it was.

     First, I picked up Quentin (belgian exchange student) at 6:45 am. He wasn't ready...in fact I don't even think he was awake when I got there. From Quentin's, we went to Jenny's to pick her up. Funny story number one: I knock on Jenny's door and her mom answers. She all like "O it's just Michael. You can see me like this" She was in her Pj's. I come in and she shuts the door. I was like "umm...you just shut the door in Quentin's face." We reopened the door and he was just standin there. It was hilarious. From Jenny's (she also wasn't ready to go on time, but she was WAY more ready than Quentin ) we went to a coffee stand and then arrived at the school late. We walked up to the bus and then Mme Parks comes up to me and said " Well everyone is ontime" We laughed. (I'm the president of french club so thats why she told me this) we get on the bus and me and Quentin sit next to each other, but like five minutes into the drive he is like trying to curl up into a little tiny ball to sleep so I moved so he could lay down. From there there is was like a five hour drive with maybe two stops. The seat I moved into was kinda lame too because I had this girl sitting in front of me that was annoying as hell. If it hadn't been for the other three people sitting around me (thank you Karen, Erin, and Liz) I would have gone crazy. We got to the hotel and put all of our stuff into our rooms, then met downstairs in the hotel to go shopping. Shopping was ok except for it was Quentin, me, Jenny, Karen, Erin, and Liz and because girls out numbered boys all the stores we went to were all girl stores. At one point though me and Quentin went into a sports store and then went to another store and got my ear pierced. From there we went back to the hotel and Mme Parks told us that we were going to walk to dinner. We groaned and she said it was only like a 30 minute walk at most. We start walking...it starts raining...and an hour later we get to the restaurant. Grrrrr!!!! I wasn't that bad for some of us, but the constant bitching to me from other people got really annoying. We get there and we all order in french and are all speaking french with the waiters. Me and Karen get our steaks and they are like raw in the middle. I ask the waiter (who probly spoke the worst french) in french if he could cook it longer. He takes it, brings it back and it is black on the outside...and still raw on the inside. I eat it anyways. The food ended up being pretty good and the company was great so all in all it was fun. When we left the resaurant, Mme Parks had called the bus, but a group of people (like 5) wanted to walk back. Mme Parks told them there was no way they were walking back unless I went. I agreed and got Quentin to come with. Like a 1/4 of the way there it started to pour. The rain was kinda reafreshing though so it was nice. On the way back, Quentin and I stop at a 7-11 so he can buy cigarettes (I swear ALL europeans smoke) It turns out that you have to be 19 in Canada to buy cigarettes and Quentin is only 18. Luckily I was there...lol....I whip out my fake ID (which I totally didn't expect to work) and they sold me the cigarettes. We go back to the hotel...watch a movie in the girls' room...and go to bed.      The next day we leave the hotel at 9 to go to breakfast. After breakfast we go to this stupid neighborhood called Gastown. The coolest thing: giant steam powered clock. Basically...if you want something with a red maple leaf on it...go to Gastown...Tourist Trap of Doom!!! From there we went to a cool park and chilled. After that we came back to the hotel and hung out for about two hours, then we organized into groups to go out for dinner. I was a leader again and took my group to a Crepe restaurant. It was good, but me and Jenny accidentally ate each others' dinner!!! On the way back to the hotel from dinner, we kinda took a detour and taught Quentin some cool american phrases like "Who's your daddy, Bitch?" and "I'm gonna bust a cap in your ass, Bitch" We came back to the hotel and watched movie, then everybody went to bed, except me and Karen. We went downstairs and sat on the couches in the lobby and talked. Then Steve came down because he was waiting on laundry. We talked forever...then Steve made a fort around him out of pillows...we talked more...and then went to bed at like 4 am. I didn't sleep though because I knew if I did I wouldn't wake up at 6:30 the next morning. The next day we went to a bilingual school and then a really cool market. After the market, we departed for home. The bud ride home kicked ass...we talked, laughed, made fun of each other (the sic of us: Jenny, Karen, Erin, Liz, Quentin, and I) and just had a grand ol' time. When we got back, the six of us went to Sheri's then I took Quentin home and then Jenny. At Jenny's house, I stayed and talked for like an hour and a half with her mom. Jenny's mom is very cool!! The trip was very fun which made me happy, but emotional things happened which made me sad aswell...just as I had predicted. Anyways, that was my Canada trip!!! Becuase it is like 11:34 pm and I have school in the morning...you don't get a biography this evening, but you will next time...if I feel like it.