GUR

Every week that I’m here life gets a little bit more stressful, and I suppose different metaphors could be made about moving to a new city… but there’s certainly a pattern—
Honeymoon phase—lasts about 3 weeks give or take a week. Month at most
Then reality sets in—you’re in a big new city, but not for me, I’m in a new fucking country! And shit is complicated sometimes! You want to go to the bank and open up an account? Try doing that while simultaneously taking a French test! Want to go to the grocery store? Want to get directions? Want to navigate one of the most impossible bureaucracies of the world? Want to sign up for a metro pass? Want to fend off beggars and muggers and talk to police and make small talk with a cashier??? Do it all while simultaneously taking a French test! A lot of the time I fail. Fantastic . All this shit happens to me, and now I’m broke as shit and have to pay my roommate 200 dollars for some fucking patented key made only in one store in Paris for whatever the hell reason the owner of this apartment decided to buy into this security system…”oh you got mugged—yeah but the only things he got were my keys and the metro pass my friend who’s out of town gave me” Shit, well now I owe this guy 200 dollars and I have to buy a metro pass which for the year is 300. FANFUCKING TASTIC. I need to buy books and food. I’m growing up a little bit more every day, and I hate it--- I can feel the naivety and innocent sparkle in my eyes fading (kind of, not that I had ever considered myself naïve and innocent before). I’m learning how to cook so I don’t starve to death or become malnourished from only eating bread and that shopping cart grilled corn. I have nobody to whine to in person so I instant message my mother in the fetal position while sobbing over my keyboard. FANFUCKING TASTIC. So moral of the story living in Paris is certainly not all glamour, wine and cheese—not that I expected it to be, but I did not expect it to be this hard.
But everyone I’ve spoken to says the same thing happens
--Things are shit for a while after you first get here, then you have the time of your life.
--Then you feel at home and are used to the city
--then you are forced to move back to where you came from.
This all happens in less than a year.
WOOOH. I’m going to do my best to get over the shit mound fast and start having the time of my life.
One of the most promising challenges will be hating school. So let it be known, I, Brandon Straus, hate business school. I don’t give a shit about spread sheets and figures and samples and case studies. I hate them. It’s not that it’s too difficult or anything, but it’s boring as fuck and all I can do to not go all exorcist and projectile vomit and stab myself in the genitals with a cross, is doodling in my notes…see below.

And if you’ll observe, the notes where there are less drawings are the classes that I hate the least; the teacher might actually be engaging the class and make a semi comedic remark every now and then, like my fellow American professor whom I’ve kind of taken a liking to, we’re both from the southwest.(apparently everyone else hates because she kicked out all the unprepared people, these kids have obviously never met the likes of UNM’s professor Ferguson who will shame you in front of a 300 person lecture class for going to the bathroom—this class is a mind-numbing cakewalk compared to world history). And the more detailed and angry looking the more dick face the professor is. For example, strategic marketing planning (woooooh sounds like fun!), this teacher explains things in the most back asswards ways. This professor is British, and he’s stated before that he does not like America, get where you’re coming from; but, fuck off. If you don’t have a personality your opinion does not matter. I’m tempted to flip over my desk like a Jersey housewife to see if his monotone voice can jump at least half an octave to keep me from gouging my own eyes out of boredom and confusion. This man looks like he does not have a thought in his head. So when I have a question in this class, I’m not shy about it, and I think it pisses him off because he sees me drawing a labyrinth in my notes which is besides the point. The point is even though it looks like I’m not paying attention, I’m listening. As English is my native language, the only student in the class whose native language is English I feel as if I don’t understand what the hell he’s saying the 15 shy Chinese kids who don’t really know how to speak English know what he’s saying either. For clarification for some lackluster acrostic poem/acronym to remember some minute aspect of something boring (he ironically used S.L.E.P.T. last week when I fell asleep) he explains things with more charts and graphs and things that the english speaker doesn’t understand! I ask a question for clarification…is that right? Well yes and no…there are several different facets of this situation and you have to consider blah blah blah blah blah blah I’m still just as confused as the Chinese are. COOL.

Sidenote: it’s also bizarre that I cannot at Office Depot find notebooks with regular college rule paper…what is this graphing paper bullshit, I’m not taking a mathclass, my letters and doodles cannot be contained by your tiny boxes!!
Another sidenote: where you see the asian characters on the doodles next to the bonsai professor heads and the wiener, that’s the days of the week in Japanese, I sit next to a lovely girl named Mi Suki (heehee) and she teaches me how to write things in Japanese. She wrote my name today, and in Japanese there is no alphabet, just characters for symbols of similar sounds but are also associated with more primal words. So my name in Japanese –brah-uhn-duhn – means managing storm strong man. That’s encouraging. 