L'Auberge Espagnole

The entire summer that I was in Morocco, several of the American girls who I lived with would constantly reference the movie L'Auberge Espagnole, and talk about how we were a crazier version of the movie. I finally got around to watching it last night, and I finally understood what they were talking about. The movie follows a young french man, Xavier, who leaves Paris for a year to study in Barcelona, ostensibly to get a job in some type of European economics. He finds himself in an apartment with Brits, an Italian, a German, a Dane, and a Spanish woman. Somehow, through various languages, they manage to all communicate and survive an entire year in Barcelona, replete with breakups, infidelity, drunken adventures, and all other manner of human drama.
Anyways, my point in bringing up this movie for my first post here is that Xavier returns to Paris after his year abroad, walks into his new Economics job, and literally runs away within ten minutes, tie flailing behind him. He sees his life laid out before him and reacts to it. He decides to become a writer, soon tapping out "L'auberge espagnole" on a word processor, and attempting to make some sense out of what changed while he was gone, all the while recounting all of his adventures which he cannot let fade away.
While I have no intentions of running away from GWU when I head back to the states in the fall, I also realize that if I don't write down what I experience in Paris, at the very least for myself, I'm filing it away in some random drawer in my brain, where it might very well gather dust. It's the day before Christmas, and I'm sitting here, listening to a Hotel Costes CD, talking to myself in French (anybody who has spent enough time around me knows I'm prone to it), trying to keep everything in perspective before I do head out. I have family, friends, and plenty to do before I leave, things both middling and important. One way I'll hopefully always keep Paris in perspective is through this journal. If anybody decides to read it, great. I love comments and random emails (*cough* ibolger@gmail.com). If not, I think I can live with that, and I might keep on doing it just for myself.