Musings

I've been procastinating lately. It's taken me forever to get my hair cut, make an appointment with the eye doctor, get summer camps lined up for the kids. I have the French to handle these situations but still, it takes energy to think about the vocabulary I will need, imagine what I might hear and how to respond. Inevitably, it's never as difficult as I anticipate and even if I make a mistake, who really cares? But I guess I'm just not over that hump yet.

I remember reading in another expat's blog a while back that she never felt so alive as she did in Paris. At the time it didn't resonate with me at least in the exhilarated, thrilled sense of the phrase. I mean who can feel that way all the time? But then again, it's certainly true that living here takes a lot more energy than my old life ever did. And that's not to say I didn't enjoy my life in DC -- our neighborhood and friends, the kids' school, our family life, my job and colleagues. And I never did anything halfway. It's more that I really didn't have to stretch too much. It was more about the challenge of getting it all done and getting it done well than testing new experiences and going out of my comfort zone.

Even as certain aspects of Parisian life become more familiar, there's still a sense of newness for me, and as a result still an everpresent struggle to understand how things work and make things happen. Some days I'm completely up for it, others not so much.

There, now that that's off my chest, I best get off my butt and get to it.