Ma semaine de merde

 

Unfortunately, many life lessons have left me with no choice but to believe whole-heartedly in karma. And I must have a lot of bad karma that seems to take the form of total merde (meh-rd: shit), because this past week has been one big pile of feces after another, unfortunately sometimes quite literally.

I started teaching on October 1^st. A month and a half and 75 euros of my well-spent money on classroom materials later, and I've yet to see a paycheck. Anyone who's even spent a day in Paris will tell you that this ville (veel: city) ain't cheap. Trying to survive in this city with no paycheck while I still have rent, bills, and transportation to pay for is absolutely impossible.

It seems that the French have an innate ability to smell merde long before they ever walk in it. Grèves (greh-v: strikes) seem to be called on a weekly basis somewhere in France in opposition to the mere possibility of getting screwed over by the government. The rectorat (rek-tohr-ah) in charge of my pay seems to have built up an entire system devoted to ignoring people just like me, people who are simply trying to figure out why in the hell the government has chosen to merde all over them. Even the streets of France are every morning swept clean of the—more literal--merde left behind by their beloved petits chiens (peh-tee shee-yen: little dogs) by an incredibly ecologically wasteful but aesthetically efficient manner of washing down the sidewalks with industrial hoses to rid every last inch of the pavement from piles of dog crap.

But, just like the French, I've become well aware that because the karmic universe seems to have it out for me, where one pile of merde has been washed clean, along will most certainly come another. This was at least the case last Friday, when after spending a long, tiring day at work with still no news as to why I've yet to see a sous (soo: penny), I come back to my apartment building to find actual human diarrhea on every single step up the seven flights of stairs leading to my front door. My first reaction was absolute disgust, naturally, but I also have to admit that this was a very fitting end to my semaine de merde (seh-men duh meh-rd: week of shit). Or, at least, what I hope is the end. I'm trying to be very polite to everyone I run across in the métro (meh-trow: subway) just in case in the hopes of building up good karma points. Just one question, though: how many karma points does it take to get a paycheck?