About Me

No, I'm not in France yet. But I'm ecstatic that I have four followers and that two other people told me they read the first post, so I'm going to write anyway. People who have blogs seem to start by introducing themselves, as if they're writing to random strangers. I don't think I am, but my international fame will kick in soon enough, and then I will be. So hello, this is me!

I'm a 21 year-old college student who is not-so-secretly a princess. I am even engaged to Prince Charming, but you can call him Andrew. He's great. We met at Washington and Lee, a small fratty liberal arts college in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He graduated last year but I'm still here, majoring in French and European history. I just finished my minor in Poverty & Human Capability; I wrote my capstone paper on refugee policy in America, after interning with Refugee and Immigrant Services in Richmond last summer. Basically, being a refugee is hard so people should be extra-nice to them. My dream job is to be acting First Lady when my best friend Andy Budzinski becomes president.

I always knew that I would want to go to France at some point in college. I've been to Paris twice, for a week each time: with my grandmama, freshman year of high school, and with my class junior year. Both times I loved it and didn't want to leave. However, I fell so in love with W&L that I knew I couldn't pick any term to miss, so I opted for the summer. I chose IAU almost purely because my wonderful sorority sister Stephanie Dultz went on the Avignon program. But I'll be in Aix, which is pronounced like the letter X. Essentially all of my knowledge about it so far is from Wikipedia, but it seems absolutely amazing.

One of my favorite pictures from Paris junior year: in the Tuileries with my friend Lindsay.

I started taking French in eighth grade because my brother told me to. I love it a lot. It's fun to know another language, and to have different words for the same thing. But somehow it's always more beautiful and poetic in French. In high school, we'd try to find our favorite French words; some front-runners for me were noisette (hazelnut), flèche ('arrow,' and it has the accent that looks like an arrow coming down) and Sans toi les émotions d'aujourd'hui ne seraient que la peau morte des émotions d'autrefois. This last phrase is from Amélie; without you, the emotions of today would be nothing but the dead skin of the emotions of yesterday. It's pretty intense. As a final cadeau of glorious random Frenchness, I would like to share with you the brilliance of the Flight of the Conchords. When I was president of French Club, we did our own version, but the real thing is almost as good.