If We Shadows Have Offended: Shakespeare, Traditions and Ducks

One of my annual traditions is seeing the outdoor Shakespeare play every summer in the Shakespeare Garden. I like that woods in Paris have a Shakespeare Garden and lest the anglophone influence seem TOO strong, it's next to a fancy French restaurant catered by French gastro giant La Nôtre.

I come every year, rain or shine. Rain is often more likely, given terrible flip change rain-sunshine-rain again summer weather. One year they did Hamlet and during the scene when Claudius is trying to pray and repent for murdering Hamlet's father and failing, when he says, 'oh, all the rain in heaven couldn't wash my sins away,' there was a downpour. Everyone laughed, as we frantically dug out our umbrellas.

Last year they performed Macbeth and I found the witches slightly disappointing. This year, they did a comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is probably my favorite comedy and it was the best play I"ve seen in a long time. I laughed until I cried. I also really like this one because I was in a school production of it once, so I still know a lot of the lines. And the ridiculous acting troupe who perform the play within the play are just plain hilarious.

Confused lovers wandering through a forest-- it's kind of the human condition... The stage is a landscaped hill and part of the garden, so it was arguably the play that best used the natural decor to its advantage.

The play about the enchanted forest was really performed in a forest, the bois de boulogne just outside of Paris. This is the woods where I run around the lake and I love it. I find it a mildly transcendent place, in fact, on the days when I push myself and I've run some great races here. These woods are also the home of many an illicit tryst and lots of rough-looking prostitutes live in vans parked on the property.


Transcendent and squalid, fitting place for a Shakespeare play, then, largely about love, sex, fairies and manipulation...


After the play, we strolled about the garden and admired nature: we saw a mother with her baby ducks and everyone gathered around to ooh and ahh take pictures and admire the fluffy ducklings. Were they perhaps Shakespearean creatures of an enchanted forest? Or maybe they were only ducks.

Here are some of the more quotable lines from AMN'sD, from philisophical musings on the nature of man and love and the apology at the end.

The course of true love never did run smooth.--Lysander

Lord, what fools these mortals be!-- Puck/Robin Goodfellow

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended.
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear. --Puck/Robin Goodfellow

Ups and Downs, Highs and Lows

I don't have a lot to say, just that this week was a bit Dickensian in a very Best of Times, Worst of Times way. I couldn't really focus, spent a lot of time being miserable or pep talking myself out of the house in the morning and not enjoying being on vacation but mainly feeling like an unproductive and sometimes tearful bum. However, I also spent a lot of time seeing friends who really rallied around me and I'm so grateful to have them, training for a personal challenge: a competitive 10K (6 mi) run tomorrow, a new annual tradition for me which I started last year and making some important decisions about life, love and lodging (I'm moving to a way better apartment).

People disappointed me and amazed me this week. This week marked the end of a relationship that had delighted me up until about 3 weeks ago. Goodbye, long term plans with that specific person. Hello, long or short term personal goals instead that don't depend on anyone else...

So clearly, that accounts for the disappointment. The amazement is from the courage and self-awareness of a friend who just came out. My heart really bursts with happiness for him when I think how much more comfortable he’s becoming with himself and how honored I feel that he trusts me with a part of his life that was only deeply private until now.

I wrote about how hell was other people for Jean-Paul Sartre in a previous post. That's a little too simplistic. Heartbreak and joy are other people.

Last Tango in Paris with Mary Jane

Like Tom Petty once said, tired of myself, tired of this town. Tired, also, of the same existential crisis.

A Little Respect and Jean-Paul Sartre

Erasure once sang, "give a little respect to-oo-oo-oo me."

Sartre once said "Hell is other people."

I used to interpret that famous Sartre quote as describing the frustration of being trapped in a crowd in the metro where the foot traffic patterns seem purposely designed to be the least logical and efficient. Sometimes I took it to mean a mall food court and its crass greasy marketing and overweight American consumerism. I've also interpreted it as being trapped behind a wall of painfully slow walking people on a public sidewalk and being unable to step around them. I guess I instinctively applied it to other people en masse, more to crowds than individuals because public space in France is just so damn frustrating.

However, this week, I've changed my mind. Truer to the actual play that the quote comes from where a few people just torment each other for all eternity, I think "hell is other people" in fact describes the insult and anger of even just one or 2 individuals who show no respect for you rather than the annoyance of walking in a crowd. This attitude describes an awful lot of people I know at the moment and disappoints me. Life is just a set up for disappointment, Sartre would probably say and shrug and light a cigarette. Or turn up Erasure.

Sideways?

Sideways or upside down, I'm not really sure which direction things are going in these days, but it's definitely not straight ahead progress...

Some good points of late were a recent weekend in Norway, more travel plans in May, including a half-marathon with Tiffany and spending more time with my best girlfriends. The end of some of my classes and the start of spring break are also really soon-- only 2 weeks to go. Which is good, considering how annoying students with spring fever can be... Also planning on moving to a way nicer apartment in either May or June.

Some negative points are dealing with workaholism (not my own), seeing a previously solid work team unravel a little, having girlfriends who seem to require an inordinate amount of attention for simple things like planning to meet up, and being currently without a cell phone. The future move, while for the best, is also a source of stress in that it's not in the least bit organised yet and I'll have to break my lease to do it, and negotiate with my landlord and this, like many things in France, will be an ordeal.

Some points of suspense (I honestly don't know if they'll be good or bad) are that I really don't want to go back to my main job again next year, although I'm glad to have that option as a back up plan, so over spring break, I'll be job hunting with a vengeance. I'm also waiting to hear about another job next year. The nature of the job is changing, which will be a change for the better, but I don't know if that means that they'll still have a place for me or not or if so, in what capacity.

Bienvenue à Paris, Mom and Dad

Everyone's parents are visiting now. Seems that flights are cheap and agendas are open. I'm a big fan of having visitors, taking them around and planning tourist activities-- although I tend to avoid really touristy things like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre (shudder). They're on their own for those. I like feeling like I know Paris well and feeling like I have restaurants, walks or cafes worth showing them. You always rediscover your own city when you show visitors around.

I've had a spate of visitors lately. A friend from London came a few weeks ago and we had the best restaurant experience ever with friendly waiters who thought we were amazing. How atypical is that? We also took a freezing cold boat ride along the Seine at night so she could See the Lights of Paris. They were beautiful, as always, but by the end, we could no longer feel our feet. Will not be repeating that one with visitors until at least the month of May. I also have beloved friends from the Netherlands coming later tonight and one of them is staying all week.

I always think meeting parents is especially fun. I like spotting the family resemblance and catching a glimpse of who your friends grew up with and how it might have influenced them. As an only child, I am generally a fan of parents, since my family definition was really that: parents, with cats and cousins, as well, and no brothers or sisters. I think parents enjoy visiting their adult children, too, seeing the lives we've chosen for ourselves and generally marveling at the grown up-edness of their former 6-year old.

My big windfall of good fortune yesterday was meeting a coworker's mom who was lovely and even brought us back some English munchies from Marks and Spencer's on the Champs Elysées! What a shock to discover that she was French! I never knew this colleague was half-French, I thought he just had a fabulous French accent because he was brilliant. Needless to say, he's now my new go-to guy for weird cultural questions since he understands both perspectives.

Other parental units coming to town include my boyfriend's dad who visits a lot and will be here this week which is nice for them both and then my dad will be here the following week. My papa and I are planning on going to Strasbourg, tasting champagne in Reims and having lunch with my coworkers at the Good Job and an apéro with my anglophone girlfriends. My visiting friend this weekend will also host her parents in April. Maybe it's something in the perrier that's making everyone decide to visit their kids in Paris but les enfants in the city of light aren't complaining.

Transitions

Some ups, some downs and some possible new projects-- a new blog idea and a possible move.

I feel like everything will stay the same next year (same jobs, same friends, same country) but everything will also be different. In a good way.

Finger on the Pulse of French Teenagers...

Me, during a listening exercise to prepare my students for a crisis management meeting roleplay where they have to decide how to save their company's reputation when it's accused of causing food poisoning: "Come on, kids, I assure you, your classes today won't get any better than this! We're discussing severed fingers found in fast food!"

This comment was met with the usual student look which is a blank stare.

Bien Joué

Me: So, in French, isn't the expression "bien joué" always sarcastic?
French coworker: Of course not! What kind of French people do you hang out with?!

Pas de Grosse Pomme

Some conflicting news of late: I heard last weekend that I didn't get a job I applied for in NYC which would have been a good job. I also heard that I could keep my current job in France another year if I wanted to. In some ways it's not ideal-- mainly the groups are very large and it's a huge challenge to teach a class with 50 students, but class sizes are increasing everywhere and it's definitely a gift in the life of a teacher to be able to teach the same class a second year in a row. Even if class management will still be a challenge, preparation will already be done and my inner perfectionist loves the idea of getting a do-over and I really honestly think my classes (the content, anyway, if not the kids and their motivation level) could be awesome. I could also stay in my side job another year, too, creating online course content at another university and that would be good experience since I love working there.

After feeling like Paris was plotting to make me leave (my last job offer was a terrible unliveable wage, so I didn't take it and it made me just want to ditch the French job market all together), maybe the trend has reversed itself. The path of least resistance is to stay for another year and when you're not sure what to do, maybe resistance is a waste of energy. Just stay put and open your mind.

Something I Didn't Think I'd Say This Year

Feeling strangely optimistic about life in France. So far, 2012 has been surprisingly good. Although it's only been 2 weeks.

No Exit

A wise person said to me once that a lot of life was getting your exit cues right and knowing when to leave a job, a relationship, a country.

The problem is that when you make one of these decisions, you want to leave everything and remember everything else you've ever left, too.

Like poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg once wrote:

Life is a painful stammered-out emphatic
Pronunciation of the word goodbye.

Holiday Jollies

At last, as the song goes, something in Paris works and is positive and enjoyable! My vacataire job (meaning secondary and not primary employer) went from great to mindbogglingly fabulously great. Really excited about what we'll do there next semester.

And a language school wants to hire me as responsable pédagogique, but they can't afford me. They are ready to negotiate about it, but I not sure I am. I can't take the kind of pay cut the salary they offered would force me to take and they already made it clear that they can't really increase the salary by that much. Rather then being depressed about being offered a crap salary and a CDD that could someday be a CDI (instead of just the CDI at a reasonable salary that I was hoping for), I think I should just enjoy being sought after and feeling like I have options in the future.

And I leave on Christmas vacation in about 4 hours. This will be my first paid vacation in 3 years and the first Christmas I'll spend with my family in about 4 years.

Inner Beauty?

Friend: You look great!

Me: Thanks. This is how I look when I'm happy. Take a good look, though, because it doesn't happen that often in Paris!


Even if happiness is fleeting, I'm always realistic.

Waiting to Exhale

I hold my breath from Sunday night to Wed pm. In a work-related stress way, not a Stella Got Her Groove Back kind of way. Now it's Wed night and I can exhale and catch up on sleep and relaxation.

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Sometimes cancelling everything is the right choice. Today was one of those days. Tomorrow, too, I think. I already have to give a makeup exam at the university where I work and this will be traumatic enough.

The things I cancelled today included skipping my usual yoga class but I was cheered to see an email from my yoga teacher saying she'd missed me that am and hoped everything was ok. It's also because I poured my little heart out to her over email since I'd asked her if she'd be willing to do some private lessons to help me manage depression and anxiety. She said it would bring her a lot of joy if she could help me with these issues. While I know she's sincere, it would also bring her a lot of money. I feel like I maybe revealed a little too much.

I'm celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow and this will be the highlight of my weekend. And will have to keep me going to help survive next week, which I'm dreading a little. Each day brings me closer to winter vacation in the US, though, and the end of what may very well be my last semester ever working in the French Public University system. Each day also brings me closer to hearing back about the promising job that I'm waiting on and this decision will help me make decisions of my own.

Screwing Up

Oops. Just left an extremely personal comment on someone's blog and realised I couldn't erase it. D'oh!

Asked blog owner to delete it for me, but in kind of a negative anxious place now and revealing personal comments floating around cyberspace is not helping the anxiety.

I don't really know if I'm doing anything right at the moment. Life is mainly about sleeping on the way to work and on the way home on the metro and telling bratty talkative kids in my classes to be quiet before I throw them out.

I'm also really negative and grumpy these days. No fun at a social event yesterday and I worried a little about being Debbie Downer in a group of optimistic Americans. This behavior ostricises me from my fellow countrymen, yet is highly admired by the French. Such cultural conflict.

This is ultimately why I mainly stay home and cry instead of attempting to socialise.

Parisian Moment of the Day

Crossing the street on my way to the bus stop at étoile (I have the right of way), a car comes out of nowhere and swerves to narrowly avoid hitting me. Bon, I say to myself in matter of fact Parisian deadpan, too bad it swerved.

Sliding Doors

I'm in suspense about my last job application and will be until mid December when I leave for Christmas vacation. The semester is hurtling towards a close and I can't wait for vacation and for the first term just to be finished. There may not be a second term for me.

I'm trying to define my own terms and conditions and there are some jobs in this country that I'm just no longer willing to do. Simply living in a foreign country is no longer my goal, I'd like a little more: a certain quality of life, the possibility of meeting a life partner and a semi-interesting job with reasonable working conditions in a field I'm interested in where I can use other communications skills besides just teaching.

I have not found these things in France despite investing 5 years of my life here. How much longer do you keep trying? 5 years seems like a good time to cut your losses and try something else if you still don't have what you want and haven't made any career or personal progress.

From talking to a friend struggling to accept the tragic loss of her boyfriend in a road accident 3 weeks ago, life is too short not to take opportunities (this was the logic by which I moved to France in the first place). But by that same token, it's also too short to spend long periods of it unhappy. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that things hadn't gone better for me here, but I also think that I tried my best and don't see what more I could have done.

I hope things will work out one way, but it's not up to me so I just have to wait for a hiring decision about a promising job I interviewed for which would probably make another year here worth it. If I don't get the job, it's a sign for me that it's time to leave rather than staying on in a bad situation. Nothing is good or bad, to paraphrase Shakespeare, it's just the way we interpret things to give our lives meaning.

As I wait for the job decision, I feel a little like I'm in the film Sliding Doors suspended between 2 alternate possibilie realities. If you remember, one was great and the other was terrible.

Like a Tim Burton Film Combined with the Bitter Taste of Espresso and Disappointment

Ah, Paris, the city that inspired thousands of artists. It often also inpsires frustration (for me, anyway) but I like to try to Turn It Into Art, not to sound baguette-wavingly, stripey shirt and beret-wearingly pretentious in any way. Précieux? Moi? A Paris? Jamais.

I-- unpretentiously, of course, think of different Ideas for a Novel which I never actually develop or even write down. Since poser artists are too busy Thinking About Creating Art to ever actually create any. There's this joke that makes me think of Parisians a little. It goes, "how many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?" The answer: "it's a really obsure number, you've probably never heard of it." Here are some inspirations over the past years of intense existential suffering (it's really complicated, you probably wouldn't understand) in the City of Light:

Paris: The Video Game. The goal would be to walk on public streets, take the metro and go to a cafe and be as obnoxious as humanly possible and cause maximum inconvenience to everyone else you encounter. I swear this would be more satisfying than Grand Theft Auto where you just do mundane things like steal cars and murder women. Plenty of oppurtunites to be misogynist in this game, too. Like you'd get points for leering at women on the street, telling them that "c'est pas normal" not to give some creepy stranger their cell phone number and following them home at home at night, all behaviour considered relatively normal for Parisian men. You would also get points for everyone you managed to bump into or jostle on the sidewalk or in the metro, especially if you have to dart across the entire empty sidewalk just to bump into them. Extra points for sarcastic comments in the metro. And extra point bonus if you were a waiter (since there would be waiters, of course) who never brought the free water the clients ordered or who took like 45 minutes to make an instant coffee.

Another idea, inspired by my last job, was a corporate espionage thriller. I previously worked as a teacher who went to different fancy companies in the defence industry and taught English classes on the premises. I had a lot of access both physically to the different offices and was often left to wander unattended back to the reception area. Sometimes I also had talkative students who asked me not to repeat whatever corporate secret they'd inadvertantly divulged. I was kind of their therapist who also corrected their grammar. And as a foreigner in France, I'm frequently underestimated. Although it's annoying, I don't think anyone can help it, they hear that you speak with an accent (so cute!) and they assume that you're a little bit stupid. So my secret revenge fantasy was the idea of a corporate spy who worked as an English teacher to gain access to industry secrets, steal them, sell them to the competition and ruin the company. Although I never wrote a word of it, it was satisfying to imagine, especially since all my corportate students in their solipsistic vision of the universe assumed that I existed just to teach them English and probably wasn't smart enough to have an agenda of my own.

I then decided to write about teaching in France in general. Why invent things about corporate spies when I could just narrative what goes on in French higher education in all its mind blowingly dysfunctional splendor? To write about spies, I might also have to watch Julia Roberts movies as 'research' and that wasn't very appealing (didn't she have one called Spies?) I actually did write things down for this, but it kind of lost momentum, especially since I'm trying to be more matter-of-fact and less outraged and incredulous about being a teacher in France since I have to do it until the end of this year.

I had another idea today, though. This is inspired by recent exposure to a cult horror film which I had somehow never seen. I celebrated Halloween by watching the brilliantly suspenseful The Shining. It made me think that not only remote American towns with heavy snow fall could drive someone to madness. I started to imagine a horror film set in the neurotic depression urban capital that is Paris, with chase scenes through the endless corridors of Chatelet, or creepy shots in the Louvre or murder on a bateau mouche. After a partucularly gruesome scene, you could cut away to the Eiffel Tower sparkling. Kind of a Dexter-like contrast between horrible serial killer but so likeable and charismatic. Such a great smile. I think Paris has a quality of cold beauty and indifference that could work well in a horror film.

This city has a mental illness named for it, after all. (Google "Paris Syndrome" sometime). The museums and cemetaries of Paris would be perfect for a horror film. And the metro would have a starring role in inciting people to become aggressive. Which they already are under non-horror film circumstances. It would be hard to tell when evil took over.

I love the humor of TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer which puns on high school horror comedy, or this kind of silly but highly enjoyable horror film called Jennifer's Body which featured lines like:
"I don't know how to tell you this, but Jennifer's evil."
"I know that."
"No, not just high school evil. Really evil."

I'm sure you could easily write a similar scene about Parisians. Like:
"Jean-François is cold and unfeeling."
"Yes, he's Parisian."
"No, in fact, he's been dead for centuries."

Lately, I find Paris a "muse maléfique," really. Kind of dark inspiration in a lonely bleak sunless winter where the only color is several nuanced shades of gray. It makes you feel complex in your own particular brand of suffering and therefore interesting and clever. It has a kind of dark complicated beauty like a Tim Burton film combined with the bitter taste of espresso and disappointment.