home / home?

One time I was talking with Micka about how last summer I lived in a house in Greensboro with three other girls. And he asked me, "well how did you do it?" and I said "quoi ?" and he said, "you know, like who did what in the house? Who did the cleaning? Who made dinner?" and I found it impossible to explain to him that we all kind of lived on our own terms, we all cooked for ourselves and rarely ate together because our schedules were vastly different. Really our only rules were to keep the common spaces clean and try to take care of things that need to be taken care of as you see them. He didn't understand. He explained to me that before he got married, when he was living in collocation, that he was in charge of cooking, and his roommates cleaned up. They had dinner together every night, like a family. At first I thought this absurd...how could twenty-something-year-old boys manage to keep up such structure in their lives? And wouldn't that remove some aspect of freedom? I suppose the answer is that yes, it would. However, lately I've been wondering to myself what it would have been like if we had committed to that. It would have been amazing! And economical, en plus. College students kind of write off home structure as impossible, undoable, ridiculous. In our house we "aspired" to have dinner together once a week on Tuesday nights, and we didn't actually do that a single time the entire summer. It's like the difference between living next to someone and living with someone. Structure (centered around meals of course) is so essential here. It does create kind of an obsession with food that I'm not always crazy about, but it is a kind of peace and solidity you can count on every day at least once a day (for many French folks it's twice a day...they often go home and have lunch with their families before going back to work). They even break bread together when they eat at MacDo...they sure love MacDo, but they sit down in the "restaurant" and eat it with other people. MacDo's in France are actually pretty hip places to hang out...they all have free wifi and a lot of young people just sit in them chatting away for hours like you would do in any café. I'm not endorsing MacDo...it is horrendous. But I have to admit that Europe's weird embracing of it is somewhat interesting.

The other day I bought my airplane ticket back to America. La fin commence.