When I was approaching my thirties, I decided that something big, bad and remarkable had to happen.
The bottom line is, youth was too vigorous, abundant and uncontrollable for an inexperienced fool like me. I was always slow, ignorant and naïve. When other girls already figured out what life is about and sharpened their knives for all the victims, I was still happily laying under life’s guillotine.
On top of that, I worked day and night to enroll myself into one of the fancy MBA programs, to be precise, in one of the Grande Ecoles created by the defeatable but still glorious Napoleon, only to find myself surrounded by equally arrogant cretins wishing to upgrade their lives in the fastest way. Have you ever seen a hundred gamblers holding the same ticket claiming they won the same lotto number?
Worst, I have been sleeping with a man with above average sexual and social behavior scores. One night the man called me up, said that he was married and was expecting a baby, hung up the phone and was heard no more. I felt I was a religiously vulnerable martyr of hit and run, not to say the thousands of francs I spent to call him from my French scholarship! But after all, sentimental education is essential in the French system. It is money worth spending than many of the government sponsored programs.
So what can I do before I reach my 30s? A speedy marriage? Self mutilation? A murder or a suicide? I chose the pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres.
The advocates of the pilgrimage were some Colombians and a few officers from the military school Saint Syr in my class. One of the officers was an air force pilot, who was supposed to aim targets from ten thousand meters in the sky and fire precisely. In one of the speed reading classes, he was to find out a few words from a page but he never managed to do it. Another one was always selling fois gras from his father’s little village in Auvergne during class breaks, a business model he found much useful than the case studies taught. The third one was from the Navy, and brought me to his little flat that he shared with a comrade in Rue de Commerce. I saw a lovely and super clean apartment with a big bed covered in snow white sheet. An impeccably white cap with its golden cord sits in the middle of the bed. The French Navy indeed has great traditions.
