French Doldrums

It's springtime here. The flowers just came up one night out of nowhere it seems. Red poppies that will die within a few hours of being plucked up, yellow daffodils that remind me of the ones that used to grow at Nonnie's and Poppy's house, little purple ones that Alan put in my hair one day when we were walking and got lost in the woods near the house. Its beautiful, really. Skies more perfect and blue than I've ever seen before, fixed clouds in the back, floating in the front, over seas of green farm fields and yellow flowers and church steeples in little villages so much like a storybook its crazy, I know there's a boulangerie on the corner there and on Sunday the people will line up at  the best one and wait for their baguettes and go home to lazy family dinners with plenty of time and more than enough wine. So why do I just not feel quite right, admist all this beauty? Part of it is my natural predilection towards laziness. Sleeping in the last two mornings, I did set an alarm last night but the alarms in this house have a way of never going off, no matter how many of them you set. I need to work more on my thesis, but for what? Graduate school here stinks compared to Austin. I'm not intrigued, not motivated and it won't matter anyways because no U.S. college will accept this degree, and for good reason. Part of me is bored. How many times can you mop up dog piss and fold clothes before it just gets old. I swear the old dog has some built in poofer where she goes around and simultaneously ejects hair and piss into any inconveniently out of the way crevice she can find. And then I feel like shit, cleaning, when I come across pictures of her when she was young and black in the face and her eyes are glowing and her teeth white and strong. And I forgive her for pissing now, in her 14th or so year, everywhere in the living room, for ruining the curtains and wanting to sleep all day on her worn bed and never go slowly outside. And then I spend too much time on this damn computer and hate myself for that. It felt so good that day that Alan left for work and forgot to give me the key after a lunchtime walk. I laid outside for 5 hours, watching the sun shine through grass blades. You can see the little bugs crawling on the top side of the grass. Little spiders crawl between blades on invisible strings. The littlest puppy has curly hair in the middle of her tail and the shy one, the one I call dinky-doo, has a spotted nose. I'd rather notice those things than read that Israel has bombed Syria or the Republicans are up to some more crazy shit or why can't we all just get along. We can't get along because some people are crazy and I'm tired of crazy. America you make me want to be a saint. But how can I be a saint in a house with 10 dogs and two cats and not enough books, basically a kennel and a storage facility for extended family, in a country where I'd give anything to just have a normal conversation at the grocery store or be able to eavesdrop on candlelit restaurant conversations. Saints live in little darkened rooms with wooden crosses on the dripping walls. This is not how I pictured my La Neuville Sur Oudeuil doldrums....