The First Semblance of Structure

It didn’t take long to come up with my first idea to put some structure into my new life. The following structure for my weekday mornings, like all my better ideas, came to me on a long run. I put it into practice for the last two days with great success:

Rather than my old routine of getting up and making coffee at home, then drinking the coffee whilst pouring over emails that came in last night and all the while procrastinating about getting a workout in and eventually getting around to it sometime before lunch, on weekdays I will now get up, wash face, brush teeth, make hair presentable and do the two minute walk to the main square for morning coffee in one of the sidewalk cafes, with a notebook in hand. While sipping my one-ounce coffee (when will they introduce the grande? It’s a French word, for goodness sake), I will make myself read whatever the lead article is on the front page of any French newspaper, looking up the words I don’t know and making note of them. I then return home to change and get out the door for a training session.

This new structure accomplishes two things that are near the top of my new-life priorities list: I’m expanding my French vocabulary and I’m brushing up my knowledge of French current affairs. It's multitasking at it’s best: two tasks accomplished without a division of attention. My list of new words will go on the refrigerator and become my ‘words of the day’, to be practiced whenever I go to the fridge (which is a lot – I work from home, remember) and are subject to a self-administered test later in the evening. It took me an arduous thirty minutes to read this morning’s article on the results of a survey of what the average French person would do if they were President (bring back the Franc, increase taxes for the bourgeois, eliminate them for everyone else, etc.), but it still leaves me plenty of time to get a morning workout in and stops me from pushing it till the late morning; something that will become important when the midday temperature is 30C+. This new structure will also start my weekdays off right by getting me out of the house and around people before I have time to even think of holing myself up with my various inboxes, which in turn stops me stressing out about incoming items I can do nothing about until North America wakes up and I can get on the phone to my office and stress out in a more useful way: into somebody's ear.

Speaking of meeting people, I have decided it might be interesting to track the formation of the relationships that will make up my new community here in Narbonne, so yesterday I drew up a map of the first people I have made friends with and will map out the friendships I make as I go. I have eleven friends/acquaintances so far, which is really quite good – that’s one new friend per day and eleven more than I made in my first month in Switzerland. If I can keep this up, I’ll know the whole town in exactly 136 years (a population of 50,000, less the eleven I already know, divided by 365 days in a year). The rules are that I can only put a person on my friends and acquaintances map if I know their name. So the man in the market who sold me his homemade ratatouille and who told me about his brother who moved to Canada and he’s always wanted to go but hasn’t made it yet cannot go on the map because we have not exchanged names to date. But Caroline the esthetician who moved here from Carcassone fifteen years ago and who’s shop is across the street from my bedroom window and who exclaimed ‘nous sommes voisins!’ (we are neighbours!) when I introduced myself does make it onto the map. My banker, Mr. Perelez, who went to live in Paris for a while but came back to Narbonne to play rugby but says the team is not what it used to be, Renee the realtor at the rental agency and his secretary Helene, both of whom deserve some sort of medal for the help they have given me even though they speak three words on English between them, the owner of my apartment Mr. Levirat and his wife Marie Paul who both live upstairs and keep popping down to tell me something I need to know about he apartment, but that I don’t understand and have started to pretend to or they’d never go away, and two friends of Renee the realtor, Pascal and Babeth who invited me to have dinner with them at Pascal’s cousins’ restaurant by the beach last night and who both grew up here in Narbonne, married, have two children together and are raising them in the house next door to the house that Pascal grew up in, with Granny and Grandpa next door, are all on the map.

I’ve stuck my spidery pictorial representation of my first relationships on a cork board on the kitchen wall; it’s a structure of sorts to encourage me to keep working on the friend thing, and it will also remind me that I do, in fact, have a community of people around me and will thus (hopefully) ward off any panicky I’m-all-alone-in-France moments. I will just have to remember to take it down if any of these people are visiting, or it might raise some serious red flags and I’ll find myself quite suddenly and understandably cut off from a mapped friend.

One of the next structures I am going to get in place is joining Narbonne’s triathlon club. I’ve been in contact with them; I just need to do the paperwork and go to my first training session (which I’m hesitating over – a little like the impulse to tidy up before the housekeeper comes over, I feel like I need to get a few weeks of training under my belt so that I arrive at my first training session with a passable level of fitness). But I know that joining the club will have great implications for my friends and acquaintances map and I’ve left lots of room on the cork board for extra pages to be added to deal with the imminent explosion of additions. And it might just help me get ready for Ironman, too.