What parisians do best: complain about Paris

Being robbed in broad daylight at the ATM near my house has me in hyper critical mode at the moment about the city where I live and how parisians treat each other. I hate how how foreigners, especially single women, are vulnerable here. If I'd had a man with me this am, those 2 guys wouldn't have tried to take my money-- and considering the recent losers I've met, dated (once) and rejected, that pisses me off a lot. Believe me, these recent dates have absolutely NO positive qualities other than that fact that no one tried to rob me while I was in their company. And that wasn't much of a reflection on their personalities, mainly just their general existence.

Fete-ing the Cremaillere

My first of possibly multiple housewarming parties either in the current apartment (actually the way nicer bigger main apartment) or in a future studio was a blast. Maybe I'll warm the house once a month.

We successfully managed to avoid damaging anything in the landlord's apartment and the friends were all lovely, as was the cat and the weather and the wine and the snacks.

Later, Suckers

The last exam that I'll ever write for a certain university near Disney Land was just finished and emailed to the other TD professor for his comments (this being the French university system, I doubt he'll have any) and to be submitted Monday.

How I dreamed of being finished with that place all last year. How strangely indifferent I feel now that I am.

Email quote of the day

My mother on animal welfare, gender roles and French history, trying to encourage me to light a candle for Joan of Arc at Notre Dame as a feminist gesture and symbol of hope for the future:

"A culture that puts female cats on birth control really needs St. Joan of Arc as counterbalance!"

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes

I've recently been feeling lacking in many different ways-- disappointment that my 2 years teaching at Marne weren't more satisfying and that I couldn't make it a more positive experience, frustration in not feeling like I ever meet anyone or that the planet's male species ever even notices that I'm alive. I've been comparing myself a lot to other people I know in Paris, who are all, of course, doing way better than I am, with better love lives and professional lives, but they're not me and ultimately, despite some current frustrations, there's still a lot even just when I walk down the street that makes me happy in Paris.

Here is the same idea, just in a more articulate, literary and rhyming form.

Sonnet 29

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,--and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings'.

What Just Happened?

Will this never end? The eternal professional question in France after a job interview: what just happened? Do they want to offer me a job? Did they, in fact, just offer me one?

I had an interview today at a private university where I really wanted to teach and it sounded very non-commital. I answered questions, they asked what my interests were and what I'd like to teach. Interviewer and I seemed to bond about studying at Cambridge, etc. I told them 3 classes or so from their program that I was interested in and suggested a hollywood cinema class about the films of Stephen Speilberg and the reply was that "well, we already have a lot of cinema classes." Not much enthusiasm, eh? They also said that "it's all a bit of a chinese puzzle at the moment, we're still organizing the program" and the interview ended on the note "we'll let you know about openings," final handshake, goodbye. Definitely not a job offer, in my book. But then, I saw an email from the interviewer urging other people and me to sign up for training in September to use the new language lab at that school.

Does that mean I was I hired?

If so, I wonder what I'll teach and when.

Doctor's Note

I had to get a doctor's note today saying that there was nothing wrong with me that would prevent me from participating in a short charity race. My 400 year old doctor kindly agreed to see me today (since I need her authorization for the race tomorrow) and greeted me by shrieking about how she just shampooed the carpet and could I wipe me feet really well? Because she sees her patients in her house, as do most French doctors.

In France to be declared not even necessarily healthy, but without any "counter indications" that would prevent you from running a 1.5 mile loop, you have to have your heart listened to, and blood pressure taken. And then you have to do 30 squats and doctor repeats steps one and 2. I'm generally used to things I find slightly startling and ridiculous being the norm in France-- I have been here a while, after all, but when my doctor told me to start squatting, I thought she was kidding.

Since she was curious, I explained that to do a race in the US, the participant signs a liablilty form saying that they're aware that they could possibly injure themselves on the course, but that it's just up to the runner if they think they're in good enough shape to do the race and we don't need a doctor's note (or certificat medical-- so much more formal-- in French) to give us permission. She looked horrified, "but the participants could lie," she pointed out, "what if they're not healthy?"

My squat evaulation cost me 22 euros for which the French government will eventually reimburse me.

Run, Forest, Run

So, rather than cheering Forest Gump on, I'll be running around an actual forest on Sunday. It's to raise money for cancer research. Someone I was once very close to died of this illness and this event is more than partially responsible for my decision to follow a dream to Paris. Life is too short not to do these things, despite enormous student loan debt. That was 3 years ago, and I'm still in Paris, trying not to forget to seize the jour. This seems like a good reminder.

Cervical cancer (cancer du col de l'uterus) seems to have an enormous public awareness campaign in France at the moment and I'm always pleased to see any kind of focus whatsoever on women's health. (Even if some of it is clearly pharmaceutical marketing for the vaccination against this type of cancer, which is also enjoying a lot of publicity lately...)

The idea of this charity run is that there will be a short 1.5 mile course in the bois de vincennes (where I've never been but where I commute through) and you go around as many times as you can in 2 hours. For each loop, corporate sponsors make a donation to the charity 1,000 femmes, 1,000 vies which raises money for cervical cancer research/prevention/awareness.

At the university where I teach with an ongoing strike, one of the protests is called the "rond des obstines" where professors spend the weekends walking around in a circle to demonstrate how they're getting nowhere with the French government regarding the proposed education reforms. I feel like looping around the woods for my charity race is perhaps a better use of going round in circles.

Recent Work Emails (or MEN and Primordial Meetings)

Some recent highlights from my inbox:

-A 7-page venomous email about Valerie Pecresse (ministre de l'ensignement superieur) visiting UC Berkeley in what is probably a nefarious plan either to dominate the world or to destroy the French University (perhaps both simultaneously) from a French professor who teaches there and somehow has my email address.

-A similarly venomous email about some aspect of the strike or proposed education reforms (all my work related email these days is petitions and 7-page tretises about how the Public French University is Dead) titled "take a look at the website MEN." This was NOT anything related to porn or dating (then I probably would have looked at it). MEN apparently stands for Ministre de l'Education where something scandalous to my colleagues was posted about the role of an enseignant-chercheur as now imagined by the French Government.

-An email about a Big Important Faculty Meeting where we were supposed to decide whether or not to cancel the current (although nearly finished) semester saying that attendance was "primordial." I guess this is more intense than souhaité or obligatoire?

-An email flurry about what time the Primordial Meeting starts-- noon or 12:30? We perhaps had to verify with the mastadons and other primordial invités.

-An email from the director of the language department of our university apologizing for not attending last week's Primordial Meeting, and thus preventing any decision-making whatsoever from occuring (not that any often actually takes place in French meetings, though). She would like us to attend another meeting primordially next Thursday at either noon or 12:30.

Royaume Uni du Canal St. Martin

I now live in a strange enchanted castle-- not in Disneyland/ Marne-La-Vallee on the RER A (thank God), but in the 10th. Consider this: our house is a hidden canal-front fortress with a giant double deadbolt door and then, once you step into our narnia, there are no more locks. We are free to come and go into the Big House when The Owner is away and the first day I dared cross the threshold, there was a box of pastries waiting for us. This was effective positive reinforcement without the Pavlovian bell-- go into house, get treats. Now I always check the kitchen for stray religieuses.

The premises include: 2 studios, a small courtyard covered in an otherworldly jungle of houseplants, a rooftop garden above my apartment, and then the Big Apartment that belongs to The Owner. The Owner is a retired academic and being a retired academic is pretty much my dream and the closest thing I have to a life ambition... The Big House has about 47 strangely shaped octagonal rooms all with at least 3 doors, making each one exageratedly accessible and they're all lined floor to ceiling with books. The house also features an excessive number of well-trodden wooden staircases. It's kind of a French version of Vermont log cabin architecture combined with the Winchester Mystery House-- not that I ever went there because I wasn't a bay area tourist and couldn't be bothered to go to San Jose EVER, not even to see the famous haunted house with staircases to nowhere built by the guilt-ridden heiress to the Winchester gun fortune. Not that the Canalfront Empire feels tainted by spectral guilt. If anything, it is a small slice of Eden in this uncertain and indifferent world.

The Owner travels a lot-- being retired, this is his main occupation which he deserves after years of suffering the French public educational system (after 2 years and the current interminable strike, I'm also ready to retire), and when the cat's away, the mice will play. We, the tenants, of course, have no actual mice in our enchanted castle but take care of the actual cat and play with her. She is very sweet and chubby. In the Big House, we not only have access to our feline friend, but also those elusive luxuries like a washer/dryer, an oven, and a landline that only Real People have in their enchanted kingdoms in France.

I'm not the only tenant. There is a whole universe of inhabitants. There is, of course, the cat, my flatmate (who is, luckily, a friend and coworker), and a non English-speaking friend of The Owner's son who lives rent-free in the basement in exchange for remodeling the son's apartment. I joked to the flatmate that we're like individual nation states who all form the United Kingdom of 39 Canal-Front Lane. We decided I would be England, she could be Scotland, the Owner would be Northern Ireland, because he was frequently travelling off the main island and the basement carpenter could be Wales, since like Welsh street signs, we don't always understand him.

Geography is on my mind lately, since you have to reorient yourself completely when you change quartiers here. Each neighborhood, of course, has its own character. Everyone has their own image of Paris-- my Paris is different from even that of my best friend, and this Paris pretty much becomes the immediate 4-block radius around your house and your daily commute.

So far, here are my 4 blocks: there's the enchanted castle, the enchanted although sometimes pungent canal, and some lovely bars and restaurants, my current favorite of which is called the Goldfish. I've taken to running along the canal to la vilette in one direction and Oberkampf in the other, which is a great route.

For practical concerns, I also have the required constellation map of different grocery stores with varying prices and quality and some cheap takeout Indian restaurants identified. And a little shop where you can buy 3 euro belts.

On the gritty realist side, there's also the very unenchanted post office homeless tent city, but this is a reality in any big city-- not everyone can afford housing here. The flatmate and I are lucky to have the enchanted castle deal that we have.

The neighborhood reminds me a little of very different geography: the Mission in SF in a way, just with fewer Spanish speakers. We have different political demonstrations everyday at Place de la Republique, which is very San Francisco, and a young, artsy, and creative crowd. Hipsters and homeless people, however, live along the same street, which is also sadly very reminiscent of San Francisco. There's a cafe down the street that seems lifted straight off Valencia Street from San Francisco and plunked down in front of the Canal St. Martin which we now call the California Cafe. I sometimes feel like all my favorite places in Paris are ones that remind me of SF, but the French-speaking European version 2.0. You probably always superimpose your past cities on your current ones to some extent-- like when I moved from DC to SF there were lots of neighborhood equivlents to work out, like Dupont Circle was the DC equivalent of the Castro in SF, for example. Our French canal-front castle is maybe my version of 28 Barbury Lane, the equally eccentric and enchanted apartment building from cult San Francisco book Tales of the City.

Holidays and modern art collages

If Madonna were French, she wouldn't have had to spend the 1980s longing for a holiday and singing about it. Nearly every Friday in May is a national holiday. Today is Labour Day (fete du travail) in France and it is celebrated by a day of vacation and a big parade/protest (?) by various labour unions declaring their commitment to workers' rights. People also sell snow drops, those little white flowers, and sometimes lilacs and there are somehow symbols of May 1st. If someone gives you snowdrops on this day, it means you'll have good luck and loads of people carry around their little white flowers. I was no exception-- I was kindly presented with a small bouquet this afternoon which are now on the table in front of me, no doubt changing my luck as I write.

My snowdrops, a friend and I all went to the Marche d'art contemporain at Bastille. This is a bi-annual art fair with hundreds of different stands, each belonging to a different contemporary French artist hoping to gain publicity and sell some work. For us, the public, we get to see a ton of great art and talk to the artists who are all there hosting small aperatif parties and ready to answer our questions in the hopes of selling us an 800 euro canvas. The friend of mine who came with my snowdrops and me knew a scultptor exhibiting there, so we chatted with him for awhile about the event and his work (animal sculptures in bronze)-- and thanked him profusely for our invitations to the event which saved us each 8 euros. The marche d'art was actually a lot like the Salon du Vin that I attended last year, just with paintings, sculptures and artists' statements at each booth, instead of wine and marketing materials about the superior grapes from that particular region of France.

There were artists' booths both inside and outside, on either side of the Seine and one of the bridges reserved as the path to more art that day. The weather was beautiful and the artists outside were all having picnics next to their booths. While we looked at art along the river, we could hear shouting and chanting from the workers' rights rally outside at Place de la Bastille and an accordian softly played La Vie en Rose from the other side of the river.

I thought to myself that the protest, the art and the accordian, all combined at that very moment, defined to an extent my image of Paris, its creativity, political engagement against a conservative future and nostalgia for the romanticism of the past all rolled into one on a particularly lazy holiday afternoon. A lot of the modern art on display showed Paris cityscapes-- it seemed like everyone was shaping their image of this city, through art or political protest, all at the same time. I tried to fix it in my mind like some kind of modern art collage, like some I'd seen that day, with snapshots of artists, musicians and protestors, newspaper clippings about all the many recent workers' strikes and protests, springtime sunshine, snowdrops to bring good luck and some fragments of sheet music to La vie en Rose.

2 burners and a microwave

Like that song that goes "2 turntables and a microphone," 2 burners and a microwave describes my new kitchen. How musical it will be remains to be seen. We also have no kitchen sink so it's back to doing dishes in the bathroom, as it was for my first 2 years in France. Oh, Paris, how I long for luxuries like kitchen sinks and mailboxes. I've never had a proper mailbox here.

I have almost sans exageration ZERO euros in the old checking account and breathlessly await my salaries for the month of May as well as the end of the interminable moving process which I've been casually indulging in for the past 2 weeks.

The university is ridiculous and makes no sense anymore. Everyone is just going through the motions and none of the professors do what they say they do and the students are all dropping out. I can't get excited about going there EVER and wish the semester were already over. I still prefer and enjoy my other job, but teaching 7 hours straight and consuming countless cups of coffee at all hours of the day are both taking their toll... I'm mainly just a compulsive coffee drinker there because it's free. Which is a big advantage considering my current penniless state.

To be more positive, the new apartment is on the canal and should be lovely. I will get paid-- it should be any minute now-- and it'll be a bigger salary than usual since I had a lot of hours in my second job this month and should be paid twice as much as usual. The semester is almost over at Disney Land U, so even though it's ridiculous, it can't continue its ridiculousness for that much longer. I also cancelled my afternoon classes with the twins tomorrow, so I'll be free after 11 am and should finally AT LAST finish moving. If I have the time, also hoping to run along the canal for the first time ever. Which makes you ask yourself who really needs a kitchen sink or a mailbox anyway.

Moving on

Moving, like breaking up or like meeting someone new, is hard to do. Especially when it's just to move again in 3 months. So I'm trying to go through my stuff, decide what's a necessity and what isn't, give some of it away and then pack some of it up, only to be unpacked months later if and when I manage to find a permanent and legal Paris studio.

I've always seen moving apartments as a metaphor for life-- at one point in my life when I was a recent college grad, I spent a whole year moving every 3 months to avoid a real apartment lease that would Tie Me Down. I didn't like living in Washington, DC enough to make anything permanent there. A decade later, I find Paris an easier city to commit to.

I'm quick to over-interpret life's banal details and make literal things symbolic, but deciding what you want to take with you and what you don't, what weighs you down and what doesn't, what baggage you want to leave behind, etc., well, it all sounds a bit like a U2 song.

As Clive Owen says in the film Croupier-- the best movie ever made about casino sleaze, writing and roulette-- when he sells his rolex for maybe $30, hang on tightly, let go lightly.

Zee Funniest Blog on Zee Internet

For your daily dose of satirical observations about Parisians-- and lord knows, there are many qui le méritent...

http://www.o-chateau.com/blog/

Vanya on rue des roquettes

I heart Chekov plays in English. Vanya on 42nd Street is my favorite Wallace Shawn-Andre Gregory collaboration (film version of Uncle Vanya). I like it even better than My Dinner with Andre. And it has an actual famous actress is in it-- Julianne Moore plays Yelena, the young seductress married to the old professor.

I also heart Chekov plays in French. After Oncle Vania last week at the theatre in the round at Theatre de la Bastille, Evelyn and I decided that Chekovian humour translates well into French-- quiet tragi-comic afternoons at the country estate when in the course of your banal existance, you suddenly realise that you have no more money, and you've wasted your life and you spend the next 2 hours complaining about it and blaming others. Very Parisian. With lots of understatement. Did I mention that they also complain a lot?

For anyone not already familair with this charming personality trait, complaining and criticizing are essentially the main hobbies of all Parisians. The greastest compliment in the French language is to say you have nothing to say (j'ai rien a dire). It's implied that if you had anything to say, it would, of course, be critical (what else could possibly be worth mentioning?) Someone has therefore done something so incredibly well that there is miraculously nothing to criticize or complain about.

I guess I should spend my time seeing French plays in French; they do have some good playwrights, after all, but it somehow seems appropriately contradictory and contrary to see only Russian plays in French.

Some fun dialogue from Anton C. : it's a beautiful day. A beautiful day to hang one's self. (Vanya)

And: I am in mourning for my life. (Cherry Orchard)

J'ai rien a dire.

La Princesse de Cleves fait greve

I really understand nothing about the current strike at one of my work places. In all fairness, some of the proposed reforms sound bad, like budget cuts (the public French university is already essentially bankrupt) and suppression of teaching positions. The main reason behind the current strike according to the professors is that the French governement wants to change teachers' status so that they're no longer state employees with lifetime job security. As a non-French person and non-functionnaire from a land where few human beings ever attain lifetime job security, I was never really convinced that all teachers should be state employees with lifetime job security no matter how mediocore a job they did (French job promotions are based more on national exam results than actual job performance), but if this is something you are currently lucky enough to have, you will obviously fight to protect it.

As one teacher pointed out, the strike is a "French cultural experience." I feel that the cultural experience of the education strike is similar to some other equally horizon-broadening cultural experiences, like waiting in line, being constantly required to give the French bureaucracy some new type of attestation, a RIB, ID photos and a birth certificate (French translation, of course-- how else would they know that you were indeed born somewhere on a specific date?) and being pushed on the metro. Here is what I've observed so far about the nature of education strikes.

If you are a professor organising a university strike at a certain university in the valley of Disneyland, you apparently do the following:

-Receive the entirety of your monthly salary despite not working for political reasons. Wish they'd mentioned that we'd be paid for doing nothing-- maybe then the foreigners would have signed up for caring about the future of French fonctionnaires...

-Hold a general assembly every day.

-Have a demonstration every Thursday.

-Grow tired of actually being on strike and start coming in to see your students during classtime to talk to them about your reasons for being on strike and do "alternative activites" which seem to comprise communication games and strike propaganda.

-Not worry that your dramatic stance to Save French Public Education is causing students to stop attending class and drop out of school. You're striking for their future, too.

-Send email to the students directly inciting them to revolution.

-Except that when they do revolt, the president closes the uni upon hearing of student threats to occupy university buildings and break things.

-Email homework to your students and tell them how concerned you are about how they will pass their final exams with good results and be sufficiently prepared for next year's classes.

-Have a 3-hour meeting every Monday morning that always comes to the same conclusion: continue the strike. It's also always unanimous. Like Tom Petty, the professors won't back down, gonna stand my ground.

-Organise a public reading of La princesse de Cleves in multiple languages. Naturally, this is the only next logical step. But where do we go from here? On to Flaubert?

Students, apartments and chateau-neuf des papes

Life is a bit of a blur of prepping classes and attempting to charm new students-- be they CG artists, children, corporate lawyers or arms dealers...

Today, for example, is Saturday, but I now spend half the weekend-- Sat 10-16h-- with students, so feel a bit of the decalage with the normal weekend schedule world that I used to feel when I worked Tues-Sat at the animal shelter in Oakland. This just started, and part of me already misses my Saturdays, but I need the money. The Saturday folks are all pretty adorable, though, so in an odd way, it is kind of relaxing-- although still work. One of my students has already mentioned possible future translation jobs and I'm opportunistically hoping that this sudden new network of English students might help me find an apartment.

All my beginner English students have inspired me to learn German, I have a textbook with a CD, but I need to find a native German speaker willing to do German/English language exchanges with me. Not only will I learn something new, but I also think it's extremely important for all language teachers at all times to be able to put themsleves in the place of their students, as the language learner who has no idea what the question was, instead of the professor who asks the questions.

I feel very uninvolved with the university, despite it still offically (meaning fiscally) being my primary job. It was closed on Thursday because a band of rogue students announced their intent to occupy university buildings, disrupt classes and break things, so the president sent out a ludicrous email about the bande d'etudiants sauvages. After being throughly surprised that the university could become even more surreal and beckettian than it is already, I found it hilarious and promptly forwarded the message du president to all my friends, especially the ex-Marne colleagues.

I'm apartment hunting in earnest now and I've so far looked at 1 and loved it, but the timing wasn't right. It's still a little early to look for an apartment for May 1, but good to familiarise myself with the market and see how far my limited money will go. Everything costs so much-- life is expensive, and I'm already stressing about paying rent, a deposit and buying furniture and trying to think of ways to save money after the move, like cancelling my gym membership and changing to a cheaper cell phone plan. Am also prepared to sleep on the floor for awhile and furnish a new apartment over several months.

Ideally, I'd like to live in the 19th arrondissement near metro Jaures, since rents still seem affordable there, it's a safe area, unlike the 20th and near the canal st. Martin, 2 canal-side cinemas and the lovely park Butte-Chaumont.

Next weekend, I'll be in London for a friend's wedding and I'm looking forward to a little change of scenary. For her wedding present, I got a bottle of what France does best-- a chateauneuf des papes red. Jill and I got to be friends in Avignon (where the papes-- the popes-- lived and where the wine is from) during a summer study abroad program 10 years ago and I thought this bottle would remind her of our summer in the sunny south of France. I'm going to write in the card that she should let the bottle age for a year and then open it up to continue the wedding festivities and celebrate her first wedding anniversary. Besides watching Jill walk down the aisle, I'll also see some British friends and my godfather and hopefully, Camden, Brick Lane and a play at the theatre.

Montre-moi l'argent

Due to the university where I teach in my primary job being completely bizarre because of an interminable strike (rant about that one coming soon), I've become more invested and interested in my other workplaces. I don't really have an individual other workplace-- instead of an office, I spend my days dutifully trotting across Paris to different peoples' houses or fancy corporate offices where I go to teach English. I hope to do the impossible with these motivated adult students and have them answering phones like a native English speaker, writing perfect emails, planning a wedding in English and landing new jobs that require English fluency. While these new challenges are good for me and I genuinely enjoy my new students, I also enjoy extra income. Like many Americans before me, I am also a cold, calculated capitalist-- just not one who works in sub-prime, but in sectors equally, if not more, morally dubious.

I will teach ANYONE English for money as evidenced by the fact that I had only faint moral qualms upon learning yesterday that my newest corporate clients are essentially arms dealers. When you live in expensive-beyond-belief-Paris, arms dealers' money is an good as anybody else's. In fact, they probably tend to have more of it than people who actually improve the world. Yes, I recognize that this probably means I no longer have a soul, but when you spend your entire salary each month, who can afford moral integrity? I would just like to not overdraw my bank account and afford a new apartment come May 1st. It's also a legitimate government business-- at least it's not illegal arms trafficking and they don't make landmines that maim and kill children and they probably use recylced paper.

Elaborate overjustification, perhaps, but sometimes it's hard to feel good about what I do in France. Arms dealer students aside, I know I wouldn't be qualified to teach in an American university; it's a total fluke that I can teach in a French one in a temporary position that only exists for native English speakers. Although teaching in a university might sound impressive to someone unfamiliar with the French public university system, it's essentially just 3 extra years of high school with surly, unmotivated teenagers, the majority of whom drop out. I never studied to be a teacher and have no ESL background and feel like a big fraud more often than I feel like a good teacher imparting important wisdom about vital issues like when to use the present perfect tense. In my private lessons, it sometimes feels extremely dishonest to take peoples' money for chatting with them for an hour in my native language.

As usual, guilt and self-doubt persist in my career choices-- or non-choices. It's more France who decided that I would be an English teacher, not me. I just couldn't complain because it meant I had a job. All this, of course, contributes to the on-going existential crisis and fuels the "what am I doing with my life?" fire. But at least I don't sell or manufacture weapons.

Desperately Seeking...

Apartment for May 1-- preferably legal and stable living situation without evil 400-year old non-French speaking concierge; charming, mature non-commitment phobic boyfriend for whenever, reliable healthcare, a local cafe where everybody knows my name (not that they'd be able to pronounce it...), a well-paying teaching job where I could maybe do all my hours in one conveniently-located place, instead of scampering around Ile-de-France giving English classes in every arrondisement, payment-- long overdue-- for overtime hours unknowingly worked last year when the university blatantly tried to take advantage of foreign teaching staff, the illusory feeling of being accepted in busy, crowded, waiting in line-oriented, indifferent to my plight Paris.

The unbearable lightness of being (incidently one of my favorite films EVER)

Lightness might not be the right term; it's actually more the unbearable instability and uncertainty of being in France...

Uncertainty at the workplace:
Everyone at my primary job is on strike. Last week, I had no idea if I would have any students. Very few came. Some classes happened, some didn't-- it was about 50/50 on Thursday and then I only had 1 student on Friday. It's equally uncertain if I'll have any students at all this week. And then next week is vacation. Vacation from what, you may very well ask. This teachers' strike is on top of a general strike 2 weeks ago-- I have 1 class that I haven't seen yet since the start of the second semester! Will I ever see my writing class again so that I can tell them that we're changing our Friday class to Monday and thus give me a fixed, accurate schedule at the university? I only have 2 other jobs to fit the university hours around...

Uncertainty at the other potential workplaces:
I recently had 2 job interviews for part time teaching jobs, both went well and I was hired. Supposedly. No contract has materialized. One of the jobs hasn't yet answered my email accepting their offer and I have no idea if they've changed their minds or not and if there will be a contract to sign. I find it telling that in French "eventuel"/"eventuellement" doesn't mean that something will happen in the future, but that it might possibly happen... The other job seems a little more certain, although they don't know how many hours they can promise me because of my already planned vacation in the US in June and I just got a cryptic email about their schedule. I don't understand if this would be my proposed schedule or if it's just to give me an idea of the demand they have for English classes right now. Only in France would you wonder if you were really hired after someone said you were were...

Uncertainty about housing:
Will I be moving in May? Where would I live? It all depends on whether or not my landlord can renew her visa in Canada, which seems unlikely. She really wants to stay, but the Canadian government is under no obligation to make that happen for her...

Uncertainty about money:
When, O, when will the university pay me for the 100 extra hours I worked last year? An extra 3 grand would be welcome ANY TIME, especially considering the possible move.

Uncertainty about love:
Will I ever go on another date? Are intercultural relationships truly possible? How many successful intercultural relationships can I really think of? Does British/American count or are those already pretty close? It seems like all my college friends are getting married THIS year, the year we turned 30. While this sudden phenom is a little suspicious, it also makes me wonder, will I ever move in with someone? Marriage, I am not worrying about yet, I would content myself with moving in with someone eventually (ha, in the French sense, of course) and this seems like a rather necessary first step before considering marriage/pacs-ing or adopting cats together.