Nice quotes :)

Southern lady at the train station, talking about her place in Nice: “we found out that if we make a left turn from our place, we move AWAY from the water” (wow what a stroke of intellect)
Kristina: (talking about her baguette sandwich): This is really large, and hard to swallow.
Waheeda: That’s what she said
Kristina, while drunk: “I have no gag reflex!”
Waheeda: How did you find THAT out?
Fat woman: “c’est la mediterannee! Si vous imaginez une apartement mieux que ca, vous revez. Vous REVEZ ! »

sometimes i want to curl up and die. sometimes i want to run away so far and never come back. sometimes i want to go back in time, back to those moments that i love so dearly. sometimes i want to take a glance into the future and see how life will be when i'm older. the truth is, i'm scared. so scared. i'm terrified. i feel like being in your 20s is a bittersweet experience. i love being young. you can wear cute clothes, party all night, and be wild, and no one can say anything. but i hate not knowing what the future has in store. i hate having mixed emotions about things. that's the thing i fear the most about myself. i always think that the grass is greener on the other side. i need to just like things the way they are. i'm uncertain about my boyfriend, my career, everything. i don't know if i'll find a job as a teacher in this economy. why is everything so difficult?

smoke and mirrors

Smoke and Mirrors.I look in the mirror. I see a beautiful girl. Long, dark blonde hair and sad, hazy grey eyes. Bangs that sweep across my forehead just above my eyebrows. Pale skin. Humble-sized breasts. Large hips. Very tall. Yes, beautiful. Yet plain. A plain personality. An incredibly soft voice, sometimes only a hush, a whisper, barely audible. I long for someone to see beyond the plainness. Because plainness just doesn’t seem to stand out in this world. I just don’t seem to stand out. So I seek consolation and validation in another world.I take pictures. Beautiful pictures, capturing myself at my most perfect, beautiful angle. I brush my hair and do my make-up like so. To the point where I am hardly recognizable as plain, and instead, I look beautiful. I remove my modest clothes and put on revealing clothes, ones that show the curves of my body. I look like a model from the magazines. I look like I stand out from the others. I write information about myself, encapsulating my wit, my intelligence, and a few brief facts about myself. I post everything online and I feel spectacular.I wait a little bit for someone to respond to my virtual world. I long to hear a compliment. Any compliment. After a few moments, I get one.Hey hotty, what are your plans for tonight?I grin behind the computer screen. I feel a little twinge of happiness. Someone actually likes me- someone thinks I’m beautiful.I write back:Not much, u?I eagerly anticipate a response. In the meantime, my inbox is flooded with messages.hey I kno u’ve heard this before but i think ur really pretty- we should meet for coffee sometime.. where u from exactly?Hey beautifulur cuteThen I get a few strange messages:Hey, I’m just looking for some fun, nothing serious. Are you into something really wild? Me and my girl are looking to explore our options by bringing another girl into the bedroom. You interested?Ew. Delete.This one message in particular catches me eye. I decide to add the guy to msn. All of a sudden, I’m adding guy after guy to msn. It’s like an addiction. All I’m doing is talking to these strange men- boys, really. They’re all between the ages of 18 and 25. I look at all their pictures, and a lot of them seem really cute. Maybe one of them will want to meet me- maybe one of them could be the man I’ve been waiting all 19 years of my life for.

sad story

I should be happy to be a woman, but instead I see it as a curse. Time is my enemy. It keeps moving forward, and I am living in the past. I try to cling onto my youth, try and make it last forever, but instead, I feel myself grow weary. I see myself grow wrinkly and old, this putrid decrepitude slowly impending on me. As men grow more handsome and desirable with age; we women become frailer, our fertility disappears as we slowly dry up. I watch models in magazines; I see them smirk at me on the glossy pages but ha! I know that their youth too will one day come to an end. This life is shorter than we can ever imagine and all our dreams, everything we achieve will vanish in the blink of an eye, when the clock strikes the Inevitable Hour. The years creep on you and you can’t escape from them, try as hard as you might! I have bid adieu to my teenage years and I see nothing good in the road ahead of me. I am twenty one, and I will be twenty-two in five months. I feel as if I have been alive forever, I feel so old, so disgusting. Birthdays used to be something that I celebrated. I was happy to turn driving age, happy to turn drinking age, and now there is nothing left. My hair will grey and my skin will become sallow. I can’t even appreciate my youth because I’m so focused on it vanishing. Oh, how I envy those in their early teenage years! The difficult days of puberty conceal its true appeal- the journey into youth! How beautiful life would be if we just stayed a teenager forever! Why must things change? Why must we age? Why can’t we freeze our beauty? why can’t we become moving photographs? Why can’t I embrace womanhood as a gift? Why must I be so scared to leave this world? I’m terrified to enter into a world of nagging bosses, marriage difficulties, and whining children. I’m scared to bring a new child into this world; a world of chaos, a world of war and death, a world that sees beauty as a quality pertaining mostly to those who are rail thin, a world who valorizes the young, the young whose youth lasts only a few precious years. I’m scared to give birth to a child, who will live, and who may enjoy life, or who may be a lost soul like me, who does not want to be in this world, but who came into it nevertheless. How is this fair? Why am I here if I never even asked to be here? Is it fair to give birth to a child who shares the same ideas? A child who, as it grows, will realize that it is a soul trapped in a body with features beyond its control? How is this fair? How is birth a miracle? Having no say of anything, no control, as we watch the world change as everything around us becomes a fading blur, spinning out of control…

why?

Today I got pills. Pills that I felt for the longest time would be the answer, but I know they are not. I feel so many things that I don't think anyone else does. I don't think anyone will ever understand. I feel so trapped in the constraints of time, of humanity, of this world. I feel like I can't just live my life without worrying. I wished for the longest time that I had a boyfriend. Now I do, and I feel like my friendships are slipping away. Why can't I just be happy? I feel like there is no solution. I hate walking around places alone, going grocery shopping alone. But at the same time, sometimes I hate being with people. Sometimes people annoy me and I want to be away from them. Why can't I just be satisfied? I get high marks and I'm still not satisfied. Why? What's wrong with me? I have everything I could possibly want but I still feel sad all the time! It's not even that I'm anxious about school or about the future- it's just that I'm constantly sad. I try to help others, yet inside, I still don't feel fulfilled, I still don't feel like I'm worthwhile. I feel like I'm useless a lot of the time- sometimes I just want to jump in front of a train. I've thought about just running away, leaving everything in life behind me and just ending my life. I don't know what I'm living for and what the point of everything is! I'm so confused about everything. I feel like I'm too old for university but too young for the "real" world. I just want to be able to chill out, to relax, to enjoy. Why can't I?

france

wearing flipflops in november. swimming in the mediterannean.

dirty feet. crazy drivers. language barrier. wanting to tell someone off but not knowing how to word it in a way they'd understand. feeling foreign. etrangere. getting pissed off at having to constantly use accents on words when typing. having an absence of something. discrimination. inconveneince. lack of customer service. actually, having no customer service. expensive things. profs that speak quickly and you can't understand them.

canada. going to second cup with my mom. drinking coffee in the morning with my dad as my dog sits on the couch and keeps guard for squirrels outside. random trips to tim hortons with friends. going to lakeshore.

A Day in Baguette Land

So we have a grumpy old man in our building, who I decided to call The Blackhole of Fun, since he sucks the fun out of every situation. But Waheeda wants to call him Herpes or Turdsicle, and I think those work equally as well.. We were just talking at a normal volume in our room in our apartment and then old man walks in and yells at us and threatens to call the police on us. Then he tells his situation to the concierge.. who pretty much takes his side. I feel discriminated against because we're the only people under 30 in our building and we're english speakers.. i'm pretty sure if we spoke french or if we were more elderly he wouldn't complain. As I was walking in vieux nice today a woman carrying flowers decided to spit on me.. and she pinched a woman up ahead of us. And then, in our English class today, the text where we have to translate into English is short, yet the one that we have to translate into french is so long, and we're not allowed french/english dictionaries for our exam. It's times like these where I wanna fly back to Canada.. where people don't spit on you, and where we're not penalized for talking in our apartment.