So There

Today, I want to rant.

I know I'm supposed to go to bed every night listing five things that I'm over-the-moon happy about (yes, Duchess, I have been paying attention) but sometimes that's just not as fun as ranting.

So tonight, you're going to get ranting.

Here goes.

Rant #1
My knee hurts. Still. By the end of every day, the simple fact of having been in an upright position since morning makes my knee mighty sore. Add to that the pleasures of Parisian metro steps and the two stories of my parents' house, and sore becomes a serious understatement. It's been two months since the half-marathon. Two months without my normal exercise (and today my physio banned pilates for the next couple weeks).

Now, if I don't exercise, I put on weight. And if I put on weight, I get yelled at by the scary, skinny blonde lady at the beauty parlour. This is the real secret of why French women don't get fat, by the way: if they do, they get yelled at. Except what the Flabtator doesn't realize is that my relationship with weight gain and food generally is entirely governed by my German genes, not my French ones. Yup, the Germans won that battle as well...

The fact that I look better in a dirndl than those twiglet Parisiennes is a small consolation...

Rant #2
I'm frightened of my book. It's sitting in my room now (well, I should say my parents' guest room), neatly printed, hole-punched and organized in two old college binders I found lying around. And it's scaring the bejeezus out of me. What if I hate it? What if I can't make it better? What if I realize that I spent the last six months writing a load of hogwash? But what if I never bite the bullet and it never gets done?

It's at moments like this that I start eating cupcakes. Refer back to rant #1.

Rant #3
Tomorrow, I meet with my employment counsellor. She's going to ask me how my job search is going, and I'm going to put on a happy face and tell her it's totally under control, and she's going to be pretty worried nonetheless because the French state pays me a lot of money and it's beginning to dawn on them that they're going to have to continue doing so for some time as I'm completely unsuitable for just about any job they've ever even heard of.

What the heck does an international investor-State arbitration specialist do, anyway? (For the record, the simple answer is: sue countries for a living. And it's not like there's a whole list of job offers out there saying, "Hey, come work for us, we need someone who knows how to sue countries!")

In the past six months, I have found three jobs I'm sort of interested in. The first one (the one I had nightmares about, if you recall), turned me down. The second one is on the fence because I'm not French enough. The third one hasn't gotten back to me.

Fine, whatever. But the thing is, I will have to find a job eventually. And that eventually is coming fast and furious now that the book-writing hoopla is coming to an end.

If you're into pop psychology, you might infer a cause and effect relationship between rants #2 and 3. Just if you're into that sort of thing.