Perdre Ses Illusions

Have I really not updated this thing since January? Oops.
The last couple weeks have been a busy mixture of decadence and maudlin self-reflection on my life here. Part of it has sprung up from conversations I've had with the only other American student I've met at my school. What it comes down to is this:
I remember reading this book called "The Demon Headmaster" when I was little about a British school where all the kids were hyponotized by--you guessed it--THE DEMON HEADMASTER. The heroes of the book were a group of kids that were immune to hypnosis who ended up foiling the headmaster's dastardly plan to get on TV and take over the world.
I feel like me and the other American are those two kids at our school.
I remember my teacher telling me that L'Ecole Normale was the "Julliard of Europe." Either my teacher was slightly exaggerating this claim, or Julliard sort of sucks. Or maybe Europe sucks. Who knows?
I will not turn this into a "vent" post by spewing a metaphorical, viscous, black substance representing my discontent onto my blog readers. But, like the other American, I am far from happy with my school and living situation here.
As I've explained to a few people at this point, I don't feel like I'm in school. I feel like I live alone in Paris and take piano lessons once a week in a pretty, albeit crumbling Art-Deco building. I have classes three days a week, and most of them aren't worth attending. Examples of my classes:

SIGHTREADING: This may literally be the worst class I've ever taken in my life, at any school, and that's counting my 8th grade French class with Mrs. Wheeler. The class is supposed to be two hours, but people come and go as they please. The invariably intoxicated teacher puts random sheet music in front of us that we sloppily run through once or twice, as she cackles and screams about it being "horrible." The last time I went, she twisted my pinky and laughed when I winced in pain. The final exam has something to do with Bach chorales, but we haven't gone over this.
What am I getting from this class that I wouldn't get from playing around with my Stevie Wonder songbook for 20 minutes? It is a class about nothing, for no one.

ANALYSIS: This class is 2 1/2 hours long without a break. Maybe it ends with everyone breaking open a pinata and having an orgy--I wouldn't know, because I've never made it to the end without leaving.
Our weekly homework is to do pretty basic analysis on one or two short exercises. I have yet to see anyone bother to do the work. In class, we correct the exercises--what should take fifteen minutes is grotesquely inflated into a 2 1/2 hour class by endless anecdotes and lots of metaphors for what chords sound like. This is all done at a painfully slow pace.
Every week I tell myself that I'll make it to the end this time. And every week, half an hour early, I suddenly find myself running out of the door screaming "Sacre Bleu!"

MUSIC HISTORY: This is a Wikipedia article in class form. Our teacher shows us Powerpoint slides that list the works of Tchaikovsky. Then a slide that lists the works of Stravinsky. We learn little fun facts about their lives. I look around in amazement at the kids that actually manually copy this down. If our teacher is feeling especially silly, she'll throw in a picture of a cat wearing glasses, as she did for a slide about "Carnival of the Animals." I'm still laughing thinking about that slide today--a cat with glasses! How drole!

SOLFEGE: This is another class full of meaningless exercises, such as writing a minor scale in its three forms. If anyone is familiar with music, this is the kind of thing you do during the first week you start playing an instrument. My teacher asked me a week ago if I was familiar with the harmonic minor scale. Never heard of it. It's probably not important.

And there you have it.
Skipping class is a bad thing, and something I didn't indulge in too much at Carnegie Mellon. But my philosophy here, as it was at CMU, is that if I'm literally wasting my time when I could be practicing piano or staring at girls in the metro as I whittle wooden busts of them, there's no point in going.

This is an awful lot of complaining for one blog entry--but as with the other American, I find myself with endless stretches of free time with little to do and no one to see. Yes, making cocktails and serving salmon burgers in my pub has helped, as has some much needed "American study-abroad student" decadence, such as clubbing on the Champs-Elysees until 7AM (IES Paris '08!!!!! Shout-out to my pplz!)
But I don't like the creeping feeling of un-productivity and disillusionment that's been haunting me recently. And I am puzzled by those who seem to be paying attention and taking the classes seriously. I guess breaking out of THE DEMON HEADMASTER'S spell can be difficult.

A friend informed me that he would be putting together and sending me a "pornucopia" to cheer me up. I did not request such a thing, nor am I familiar with the term "pornucopia," and I'm not sure I really want such a thing in my apartment. But I'm still checking the mail multiple times a day.