Christina catches up

And I'm back! I'm sorry for missing last week's post, I was in my last days at home before returning to France. I was feeling stressed out and not-so-happy about leaving and wanted to spend all my time enjoying home, so I flaked. Punish me as you see fit! So, as you may have deduced, I'm back in France now. Now that I'm over my jetlag I'm feeling much better and less angsty, but I'm still looking forward to heading back home in four months. I don't dislike it here, but I've figured out that teaching is not what I want to do with my life and now that I know that, I feel a bit like I'm just wasting time doing it. Now that I know I don't want to teach, I'd like to move onto the next thing instead of having to continue with the thing-I-don't-hate-but-don't-love-either for the next four months. I feel like my life is... stalled for the moment? I think that's a pretty good way to describe it. Seeing all my friends and family also made me realize just how much I had missed them and now that I know that and I'm away again I miss them more. Waahhh waahh I live in France waahhh. I must be so annoying right now! I will say that something I love about this program is that I get to travel all over. I'm going to be in Amsterdam with my friend Beth at the beginning of February and am very excited to see her and visit a city which I've heard lots and lots about! Anyway, I just felt like giving a little update.

 Okay, moving on to the topics... relationships. Well, this is fairly short for me because I've only had two romantic relationships, one of which was official; the other was never actually labelled. My first boyfriend was in my freshman year of college. I knew starting off that it probably wasn't the greatest idea because we lived next to each other in our dorm... yep. Well, anyway, I suspected that he was interested in me when some people in our hall were all watching a movie together and I kept catching him looking at me. Then after the movie when we were all back in our own rooms he friend-requested me on facebook and my suspicions were all but confirmed. We started hanging out and talking and then he finally asked me out to a concert and dinner. It was all very nice but also quite awkward since it was the first date for both of us and neither of us really knew what we were doing. Well, progressing with the story, we ended up dating and then were "boyfriend/girlfriend." I realized at the time and especially looking back that I never liked him as you're supposed to when you're going on with someone. Okay, I was happy to hang out with him, but I wasn't infatuated and didn't have any of those crushy feelings like you're supposed to when you really like someone. I realize now it was really more of a relationship of convenience. I don't know how he feels now about the whole thing, but from my point of view it seems like neither of us had gone out with anyone before, we found someone we got along with and liked to a certain extent, and said "hey, why not." That relationship ended up lasting two whole months, at which point it just sort of non-violently imploded. We talked and still hung out  for a couple weeks after, but then just drifted apart and it became more and more awkward to talk until we stopped talking all together. I think I'm starting to hit ramble territory so I will hurry on to the second "relationship." I went a few years without going out with anyone else and then I dated one of my friend's old roommates for a couple months. It was very casual and I still really don't know what to call it, so I'll just say we dated. We would go to restaurants, the movies, hang out and watch tv, so I think dating is an accurate description. That "relationship" was actually, I think, much healthier than my first one. It wasn't awkward at all, we could talk and get along well, we liked many of the same things, and there were no expectations (living next to each other really does crazily raise expectations for a relationship). We dated for a couple months over the summer, but when it was time for him to move to New York for grad school and me to move to France, no one was heartbroken or anything. All in all, I enjoyed it a lot more than my first relationship (I actually liked him) and at the end of the day it was a good learning experience. Well, I hope you guys got something out of that because I feel like I just rambled for the past 40 or so lines.

I'm a fan of the list of random things that make me happy, so here are some things that come to mind at the moment:

-the family cottage in Connecticut and the campgrounds
-tomato, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil (aka caprese salad)
-hot tea
-novelty mugs
-Community
-the majority of the internet
-ice skating
-the winter Olympics
-Harry Potter
-seeing my friends and family (awwww)
-YouTube (I am pretty addicted)
-learning foreign languages
-speaking a language with little effort
-carnivals
-my hot water bottle
-reading!

I hope you're all having a good weekend and I'll see read you next week.