All these sweet green trees that surround me are turning my eyes beet red. And my skin? My old friend “the curse of the Celts” is back! I’m as red as Christmas wrap. I look like I’ve been skiing all day in the blistering sun when in fact I’ve been huddling under a parasol for five days. No one seems to mind other than me, especially not My Frenchman, but I dread looking in the mirror. I miss my oh-so-milky white skin.

At least France kicked Portuguese ass today in le match de football! WOO!

The really good news, though, is that my agent loved the revised proposal for G3 I sent her. She had some reservations about the title, but decided that all it needs is a subtitle. I’m working on that tonight instead of the six and a half tons of “devoirs” I’ve been assigned tonight. Once I send that to her, the thing is ready to go to publishers next week! Of course, I have reservations about it going out during Mercury retrograde. It started officially on Tuesday, but it really started about three days prior and I fucking felt every minute of it. There’ve been many retrograde episodes:

1. Re-placing my network cable.
2. Re-turning to college.
3. Re-vising my proposal.
4. Re-viewing some basic French, as well as those incredibly funny French in Action videos.
5. Re-visiting the IT department over and over with My Frenchman as we try to fix our connectivity problems.
6. Re-jection of my ATM debit card by half the machines I’ve tried in Vermont.
7. Re-connecting with E and L (on the cusp of the Retrograde).
8. Re-locating in another state across the country.

I won’t even begin to go into all of My Frenchman’s Mercury retrograde woes. Wow. He’s getting hit like Wiley Coyote with the Roadrunner’s wrecking ball. Please note, however, that most of the activities mentioned above are related to Higher Education, Long-Distance Travel and Publishing. Mercury is retrograde in my 9th house, which rules those areas, as well as foreign countries. Tres magnifique, eh?

My teachers are still fantastic, but I don’t know how anyone can handle the pressure here as a “debutante.” It’s insanely intense. I nearly broke down in tears today over something not that serious because I was ready to snap from the tremendous energy drain. The effort it takes to stay immersed in a foreign language is enormous, especially when you can barely say anything coherent without sounding like a 3 year old. My fellow students are helping me figure out ways to get settled. One suggested to me today that I do what she did and get a copy of Interview with the Vampire with the French dubbing. My Frenchman is going to a special bookstore tomorrow, where he’s going to pick up some poetry for me (the usual suspects — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and another he likes from the same period who is supposedly “tres Gothique”). Maybe he can get me some Marquis de Sade in French — I’ll have to ask him. My Frenchman was dancing around the room today, singing about me signing The Pledge next week. Oh, God.

Oh God…