Let sleeping teenagers lie...

...in their beds while you wake up at six for class at eight.

This will be a fruitless action because no one else will be there at five to eight when you open the classroom door, and neither will they be there at five after eight, so you will have forty-five to kill waiting for the next class who may or may not show up as well. In which case, it's recommended to bring a good book, since you might be sitting alone in a room for the better part of a day. A really, thick, concussion-causing book like Anna Karenina in hardcover, or the Collected Works of Shakespeare will do the trick.

Don't throw your back out carrying it to and from school, now. You don't have a "real" social security number in France, so you'll be SOL if some sort of health problem should arise, not to mention sick days--HA! You think you get those?!

Not as a penniless teaching assistant you don't. Unless you come down with something like tuberculosis, in which case you'll get one sick day: the day they deport you for "medical reasons." The French government has a whole ministry devoted to weeding out people with faulty immigration statuses and infectious diseases.

Lucky you to be chosen, out of so many, to represent your country and culture for a school year in France!

There is no need for red-hot pokers*

Hell is French Bureaucracy.

Sartre had it wrong. Perhaps he was too enmeshed in it to totally see the horror.

The advice I was given by a PhD student and fellow American language assistant back in November was that those first three months of living in France always suck. I thought I'd be all in the clear come January, seeing as this would mark my three-month stint.

"Not so fast!" says the French government: "You have to sign some random form you've already signed (yeah, that other one was a FAKE OUT! LOLZ!) and photocopy it in triplicate, expedite it to our regional branch, national branch, and some other random branch we'll think of later...oh, PS, we need it by the end of the week, or you won't get paid this month, and possibly not next month, either. What's that? You haven't received that form yet? Well, don't worry. It'll come soon."

Yeah, like the package for Christmas my mother sent me on December 4 that I got on January 2? Efficiency and the French postal service are just a bit at odds.

I'm stressing out here. I didn't realize they could do that to us. In Austria, all I had to do was register with the police, snag my Aufenthaltstitel (visa) from the Bezirksamt (district agency...in Amstetten it was also the mayor's office) and I was good to go! No dragging out this immigration status b***s*** three plus months! I have the feeling I'll be doing this once a month until April--the necessity of which I will not understand, all the way through to the end.

Though, to be fair, I had plenty of annoying occurrences at certain magistrates to bog me down in Vienna...

*Borrowed, for effect, from the English translation of Huis Clos by Jean-Paul Sartre. The more famous, subsequent line is, "Hell is other people."