French macarons are my favorite cookies: it might be the slight bitterness, it might be the intoxicating sweetness, or it might be that you get two contradictory pleasures in each bite: the powdery delicateness of the almond meringue and the creamy lushness of the filling.
You see, I have a problem with choice in that it means “renouncing something”. I love complexity and I love change in every domain of my life. Trouble is, that’s an exhausting attitude – not to mention that it casts you in the role of the eternal dilettante.
Obvious, but I didn’t realize this until a few months ago. For ten years, I had been running after time, time for my loved ones on two continents, time for the late nights and incessant travels my career required, and time for all the things I like doing (translation, writing, traveling, reading, cooking, fashion, poker, photography…). Time to not have to choose between anything. It didn’t work very well, but I mostly got by, so I kept the juggling act up.
Then my company restructured and asked me to move to a state neither me nor my husband want to live in. The alternative was a nice financial package; I took it, thinking I would find a new job in a heartbeat. I didn’t. What I got, though, was time to remember that while there are many things I like, there’s one I love, one thing that has the power to bring me happiness no matter what, and that I have been neglecting it.
My favorite way to spend time in the whole world: the written word. Reading it, discussing it, creating it, understanding it. Feeling it. And I want to live with it. I want to do what I was scared of doing when I was a shy, brainy kid whose parents thought literature was for the lazy. I want to go back to school and study it, and then I want to pass this love on to others.
This is why I have decided to go back to school in Fall ’10, Fall ’11 at the latest, depending on admissions and finances. To study literature.
To be honest with you, I am scared. I love reading and I have read quite a few classics, but I feel that I will be behind every other student. I have never studied literature; I have “wasted” many a reading hour on a type of fiction I love and academia doesn’t – namely, fantasy; and my reading has been very centered on the French cannon (did I mention I’m French?)
This blog is one of the steps I am taking to this new life: it will be a place to document my “catch-up” reading, lest I forget everything too fast, and I hope it will help me hone my English writing skills. There will also be young adult/ fantasy/ fairy tales/ genre literature – because while I’m being virtuous by picking only one macaron, I can’t choose between the ‘literature’ confection and the ‘pixie’ filling. No, I can’t. Yes, that simile is awful.
Other than that, I am a 32-year old French woman, currently residing in Indianapolis, in the US heartland. That’s another long story.
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