T.S. Eliot et le reveillon du nouvel an

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.--T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding, 4 Quartets)

As you're all no doubt aware, today is the last day of 2008. Make it count and may you accomplish all you hope to and then some in 2009.

Que vous trouviez votre voix et votre voie en 2009.

New Year's Resolutions

I know it's kind of early-- I have a few more days to make the list definitive-- but it's never a bad thing to want to improve your life. Here are some fairly predictable new year's resolutions, in no particular order.

1. Exercise more-- start running again, do some races, like the Paris-Versailles one in September and hit the abdos-tailles (abs and waist) classes to lose belly roll which I can camoflauge, but I know that it's there. Mainly, after my hyper sporty California life, I know that only rigorous exercise (or an adoring boyfriend, but soyons realistes, ils ne tombent pas du ciel) can make me feel attractive and good about my body.

2. Eat well-- cooking fresh vegetables is worth the time it takes to stir fry-- and learn to make curry. Yum.

3. Be more positive and less cynical than I have been in the past-- create your own happiness, become the change you want to see, etc. Yes, we can!

4. Limit alcohol and caffine intake. Eat clementines instead.

5. Find new hobbies, like the ex-pat meet up group and the Attrape-Choeur singing group, as current hobbies can be summarized as wine-tasting (see resolution 4) and getting my legs waxed (these 2 activities are not practiced simultaneously).

6. Refuse to date anyone who informs me early on that he is unable to commit to a serious relationship. Not looking for a "cinq-a-sept," as they say, not taking any crap about it and men don't get to make the relationship rules. Be demanding and devastating.

7. Learn a foreign language-- either German or Spanish because I'd like to visit either or both of these countries this year. Tunisia and the Czech Republic are on the list, as well, but at the risk of sounding like a selfish traveller, not about to learn Czech and Arabic-- French should be fine in Tunisia, anyway.

8. Find the ideal teaching situation-- I've decided to make this my career, after all (France finds me qualified for it and I've got about 3 years of experience in it now). To that end, I will explore different classroom situations, like teaching business English to adults, continuing education students, private lessons, possibility of being a vacataire at a private university, etc.

9. Find a legal apartment rental when I have to move in May. This will be more expensive the the illegal sublets that everyone does, but it will be worth it not to have to move each year and to be in full control of my own space, like making my own decorating decisions and finally once again paying bills in my own name. At age 30, it's becoming important to put down my own roots here instead of temporarily taking over someone else's situation.

10. I'm not really sure what this one should be, I just wanted to have 10 instead of 9. Do some kind of volunteer work? As a former volunteer coordinator, this is an important value that I haven't been putting into practice lately-- lately referring to the past 3 years... In France, you sometimes need specific training to volunteer, so it should probably be something related to my various past and present careers, like education, translation (?) or-- I think I'm finally ready to let it back into my life-- animal welfare.

"I said what about Breakfast at Tiffany's"--Deep Blue Something

Remind me the next time I start to whine about my life, thankless job, hateful rudeness of the average person in this city, inability of any Frenchman to commit to anything even resembling a relationship, etc., that I have amazing friends in Paris.

As Bridget Jones once wrote (although probably not when she was sober), love the lovely friends with whom I had a fabulous holiday dinner on Friday at my favorite Indian restaurant.

And love the lovely impromptu and free winetastings. My last degustation was perhaps of the less elegant variety, since it was a plastic cup of the new beaujolais in the RER station. However, yesterday I wandered into 2 winetastings and a champagne tasting at the magical place that is Bon Marche. My beloved Jessica and I are of the opinion that Breakfast at Tiffany's should be remade in French and titled "Petit dej au Bon Marche" and Audrey Hepburn could taste champagne, go to the exhibit about Toyko and admire the light fixtures.

Inspiring Words From My Past Life Transmitted Via Facebook (What else, George Clooney?)

"Ha! That's awesome, I had no idea! Listen, whenever those dark, awful nights of endless grading are upon you just remember your old friend Clancy and these inspiring words: it's better to be an English professor slave in France than a Philosophy professor slave in Pittsburgh. Because? Really? Paris? Yes. Paris is good. Best of luck this end of semester!"

What Do Job Descriptions Look Like?

I was watching an older woman walk her small sweater-wearing dog this morning and as she, like every other dog owner in this city, ignored the little pile of goodness her well-dressed fashion poodle left on the trottoir, I joked to my friend Amanda that only in France was dog clothing mandatory while picking up dog shit was considered the optional and frivolous part of dog ownership. Yes, she agreed, it's not in their job description as French people. Don't get me wrong, if I lost my mind and ever owned a small dog, I'm sure dressing it up would be the highlight of my entire life and it would have tons of inexpensive yet stylish raincoats, and maybe even matching boots.

I liked her observation a lot about the French job description and hard work they must do to maintain cultural stereotypes, because as far as I can tell, no one in France really has a concrete job description-- my contract doesn't explain vital pieces of infomation like my salary or how many hours I really have to teach each semester (hence the reason I accepted all the hours I was scheduled for and did a ton of overtime without realizing it last year). Being in the throes of negotiating the right not to have to work any extra hours next semester and exceed my contract requirements, I'm definitely experiencing some fun surprise revelations regarding my job description, all of which were mysteriously not the case last year but are all, of course, highly convenient and all to my employer's advantage.

As I am fond of saying to other anglophones, it's no coincidence that Beckett wrote in French because everything is arbitrarily cloaked in mystery and the French administration only reveals little tidbits about your job, life, tax declaration, etc. one by one, much like a treasure hunt or a slow tantalizing striptease over the years and you, of course, never have all the information you need when you need it. The French bureaucratic universe really doesn't make any sense and seems mainly to be comprised of Rules That I Just Made Up. I once went to my bank 3 times within a 2 week period to make cash withdraws in person while I was waiting for a new ATM card and every single time, there was a different process to follow to make my withdraw. Psychotic, non?

On my way home today, I tried to imagine our linguistics professor's job. Who knows if she understands her contract or not, but when she takes the metro, she must always be on professional red alert. A large part of her class-- and I enjoy it a lot-- seems to be spotting metro ads with complicated linguistic puns that she can then make her students analyze and classify phonetically and phonemically. I like this because it is also about decoding a foreign system and often also includes new spelling rules that someone just made up. The ads are often way easier to understand than job contracts and French bureaucracy and at least the professor is there to explain them. Universities everywhere would probably have to stop teaching linguistics classes if advertising were suddenly banned from the metro. And there would probably be some convenient new line added to someone's job description to justify it.

Coffee Flavored Contradictions

I flipflop back in forth and lose myself in contradictions of the bittersweet espresso variety. Life in Paris is a coffee-flavored dream come true and I really have nothing to complain about-- only 12 hours of teaching at the university, which I must admit, is not the most demanding of jobs; I now no longer comprehend how people can stand to be away from home 8 hours a day, 5 days a week; I have the leisure time to take a linguistics class that I like, I have friends of all different nationalities and extracurricular activities like going to Picasso or Impressionist pastel exhibits and seeing any of 600 movies playing in town.

However, this semi-charmed kind of life takes its toll-- I miss an office and seeing coworkers regularly instead of students and having more of a raison d'etre than deciding who gets to pass my class and who doesn't. Despite only 12 hours of teaching per week, I'm constantly preparing my classes, constantly behind on grading and consistently unproductive 2 days out of the week and then trying to finish everything wednesdays before my Thursday-Friday "workweek" starts. I feel idle and embarassed that I don't have a job to go to every day yet, also stressed and rushed because my supposedly minimal workload is always more that I thought it would be, and always draining at the end of the day but also highly unrewarding for me. Despite being lucky enough to have a part-time job that I can support myself with, I don't appreciate it. I look forward to the end of my contract because it's one of the least satisfying jobs I've ever had and teaching will never be my vocation, like I once hoped it would be, although, unfortunately, it seems to be the only job that France has decided I am qualified to do.

I often feel like my life has evolved a lot over the years, and yet I also feel like nothing's changed. Just like when I was a 22-year old college grad 8 years ago, I'm still looking for the perfect job, the perfect apartment and the perfect boyfriend. Instead of these things, what I've found, with all its coffee and contradictions, is Paris.

Random Acts of Kindness

I've become somewhat cynical-- ok, extremely cynical-- about human nature after living in Paris for 2 years. I often joke that if I were to design a video game about living here, the object of the game would be to be as rude as possible to others in public places. For example, you'd get points for each time you bumped into someone on the sidewalk-- especially if there was plenty of room on either side of them and you could have easily avoided a gratuitous elbow jab. You'd get points each time you pushed someone on the metro, each time you sighed in frustration (there's a lot of melodramatic huffing and puffing to express general annoyance in Paris) and each time you said "pardon" in the rudest tone of voice possible and stalked past a group of confused elderly tourists stopped in the middle of the metro platform just to make sure they understood that you find them the most obnoxious creatures known to man, regardless of how much foreign money they pump into your local economy.

If you were a waiter, you'd get bonus points for each time you refused to bring clients the (free) carafe d'eau they ordered or refused to let them come in and just have a coffee between 12 and 1 pm at your restaurant because all the empty tables at that time are reserved only for imaginary hypothetical people who have not yet arrived, but there's a possibility that they might and they would order the whole overpriced brunch, which is often around 20 euros and you would therefore make more than 3 euros on these clients. It's kind of an all-or-nothing gamble of a business strategy and honestly, only Parisians would pay so much money for so little food. 20 euro brunch in Paris is essentially a glass of orange juice, coffee and yogurt and maybe a croissant, if you're lucky.

However, you'd get even more bonus points for random acts of kindness which are rare and miraculous in any capital city, but especially this one. I recently witnessed 2 and I now treasure these small considerate gestures in a city where the public sphere is often exasperating. On the RER last week-- and bare in mind that everyone is especially hateful towards others on public transit-- a foreign woman asked a French guy which stop Chatelet was. He said he thought it was in 2 stops, but then he got up and went downstairs to check the map and confirm. He then told her the names of all the stops before Chatelet and that he'd tell her when they were at Chatelet so that she knew when to get off.

I, of course, assumed that he would then ask for her phone number, or get off with her at Chatelet to follow and harass her and demand sexual favors in return. French men have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement when it comes to women and sex. For example, making eye contact or-- heaven help you-- smiling at a French guy will often result in extreme harassment and the assumption that after such provocative behavior, you clearly owe them some kind of sexual experience. However, RER Guy did not follow the tourist or ask which hotel she was staying at or even ask her phone number. Instead, he politely indicated which stop was Chatelet and wished her a good day when she got off. Wow, I thought, there's at least one decent guy on this train. Maybe there are even others, if he has brothers.

I was the direct recipient of the second recent random act of kindness, making it all the more extraordinary. I went to the Picasso exhibit at the Grand Palais Monday night with a friend and her coworker. Marion had a free pass that was good for 2 people, but since there were 3 of us, Marion and her friend were going to go in and buy her friend's ticket and then we would try to enter all together. However, the guy behind me in line has the same pass and no guest with him, so he offered to let me go in with him for free. He was really nice and he'd already seen the exhibit and told me which paintings were his favorites. He didn't hit on me, or imply that I owed him anything in return and after we entered together, we amicably went our seperate ways. After such rare and noble behaviour in a French man, I was actually somewhat disappointed that he hadn't asked for my phone number. I decided later that I should have offered to take him out for coffee to thank him.

I'd like to say to the stranger at the museum, thank you again and sorry I wasn't bold enough to offer you a coffee. I've resolved that if a stranger is ever nice to me again in Paris, I will not hesitate to propose a cafe de remerciement because positive reinforcement is the only way to encourage and reward desirable behavior, as any of the dog trainers from my last job would tell you. I also promptly decided that I wanted to get that same pass (a carte sesame, I think it's called) and that I like to think that I too would enable strangers to see world renowned exhibits for free when I didn't already have a guest with me. The ruder and more hostile your urban environment is, the more important it is to pay it forward. And that would be the only way to win my video game.

Goodbyes and bad love songs

I've been listening to this crooner James Blunt song called "Goodbye, my lover"-- I'm really not a fan, he's just somehow wildly popular in France-- but I suddenly find it achingly and heartbreakingly beautiful because of its use of the present perfect tense. It changes everything to say "you have been the one for me" instead of "you were". It implies that the singer is still in love with his ex because as any one of my students will tell you, we use the present perfect to describe experience and things that began in the past but continue into the present.

Unfortunately, the present is rarely perfect and sometimes you just have to change tenses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyggTKDcOE

The Parisian Experience

There are many quintessentially Parisian experiences-- like warm baguettes, strolling along the Seine, velibing along the canal, seeing the Eiffel Tower sparkle, attending wine tastings, having people in cafes tell you they just love your terrible anglophone accent, drinking 3 espressos a day and reading Great French Novels that are all set in Paris and mention streets in your neighborhood.

However, the Quintessentially Parisian Experience that I have reserved for myself today is one of the less glamorous variety. I will be cleaning spots of black mould off the bathroom wall with bleach in a futile attempt to avoid being infected by abspetos and dying alone in my cold, humid apartment built in 1850.

Welcome to the Real World

The Matrix has me. And I love it. It's about time.

After a record 5 month wait, I finally have internet in my house, so this has its useless time wasting advantages like facebook quizzes about which popsicle flavor/dog breed/celebrity midget are you (and then, of course, emailing your results to every single person you know) and more vital life-affirming ones, like actually being able to talk to the family without worrying about my expensive French cell phone minutes, and finding a job and an apartment for next year.

My internet/TV connection has transformed my miniture frumpy ancient rabbit-eared TV with bad reception and 3 channels on a good day into a towering and sleek digital panther who confidently roams the communications jungle and remorselessly hunts and kills the less technologically-advanced fuzzy jungle creatures struggling to make their way only with their wireless networkless antennae. In my now vast galaxy of home entertainment, I have access to every radio station known to man, Arte, the BBC and for a limited time only, Canal +, and about 15,000 other channels.

My TV now does everything short of my taxes and I feel like we're beginning a very intimate relationship, as it can serve as an alarm clock, voice mailbox, TiVo-like recorder, pay-per-view provider, fax machine, travel agent, domestic slave, and ATM machine. No, I exagerate. The TiVo probably doesn't even work.

I'm suddenly slightly afraid of all my formerly innocuous appliances and what they might now be capable of-- like what if the oven plugs in and starts operating by satelite or hooks itself up to iTunes or, even worse, to that souped-up monster truck extreme makeover television of mine and I'll have to operate it from a safe distance with an instruction manual, 2 remote controls and its own power strip.

Autumn Sonata

In an extremely monumental city what I find most breathtaking at the moment in Paris is not the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur or the Pont d'Alexandre III, but the leaves that are changing color at Parc Monceau. Mainly because all those other monuments are always there, and generally look the same rather than suddenly being orange, yellow and red for a limited time only.

Despite all the natural beauty of Northern California, where I used to live, I always missed the blazing color of autumn and the changing of the seasons.

As the Parisian catacombs will remind you, the changing of seasons and passage of time leads inevitably to your death when eventually someone will bury you under Paris, stack your bones into attractive patterns and charge tourists to visit them. However, going to the park to see the temporary abstract expressionist arboreal art exhibit is free-- and has no macabre quotes to force you to confront your own mortality and to refrain from flash photography.

Say It With Me: Yes, We Can!

French Phonetics

Love is like the "e instable" in the French phonetic alphabet. Even when it seems like it's there, it's still unstable and you're not sure if you should pronounce it or not.

And if you do, it somehow doesn't have the effect you hoped it would.

Je suis a la recherche d'un alphabet plus stable.

Pumpkin Sculpting

To translate "carving pumpkins" into French, it's more like "sculpting pumpkins" ("tailler les citrouilles"). And the translation of Jack O' Lantern is something excessively long and artistic-sounding like "a pumpkin sculpted into the form of a visage."

This makes carving Jack O' Lanterns seem on par with other artistic milestones such as Michael Angelo's David, when in fact, as my French friends will soon disover, it mainly involves shovelling out pumpkin glop and requires only a very rudimentary mastery of basic geometric shapes-- notably, the triangle.

Presidentielle 2008

I just sent off my voting ballot-- Fed Ex "special election rate" cost me 17 euros, but this is a small price to pay to participate in democracy. Especially democracy in the form of voting AGAINST McCain-Palin to try to prevent 4 more years of the same catastrophic Bush policies from ruining the country. I was talking to my dad recently and he said the image of America in the world made him so sad now. Once (like in 1850 during the potato famine), it was a way of life that people in other countries might have envied and admired and even immigrated to attain.

Now we have the 700 billion dollar bank bailout and the Republican party claiming that Sarah Palin seeing Russia from her house counts as foreign policy experience.

Lately with the election only a week away, I've spent a lot of my time defending the American public to the French and assuring them Sarah Palin is a wildly underqualified psychotic fascist and that we ARE ready to have a "president noir"-- and have become very passionate and defensive... Just because it would probably never happen in France, doesn't mean it's impossible in the US, as even Spike Lee once pointed out. I'm especially fond of quoting Spike Lee on this topic. And then the common response in France (from someone French or otherwise) is to inform me that if Obama's elected, he'll just be assassinated by one of his own bodyguards. This consipracy theory seems to come from a sketch on a news parody show called Les Gignols de l'info, which features muppets, one of whom is a Sylvester Stallone-like Obama bodyguard who suggests that his job is actually to assassinate his boss, not protect him. A little cynical, insulting and reductive about ethnic relations in America, non?

Many a francais seems to think this assassination theory is God's literal truth and that the political muppet show is actually a documentary about real life in the US, despite the puppets. Or maybe they think we all really look like Jim Henson's workshop, but fatter.

If I might make a small suggestion, maybe basing political opinions on puppet shows is not the most intellectual approach to international politics.

Obviously, I'm especially sensitive to the image of the US abroad lately because of the international scrutiny that the election receives, but also it seems like the more people here consider America, the more hostility is expressed. For example, it really seemed like my hairdresser recently was trying her best to recite every single negative annecdote she'd ever heard about the US. Like that 2 of her clients had disasterous hair cuts/dye jobs in New York and "you'd think that in the US they know how to do hair, but they don't." Since there are clearly only these 2 hair salons in all 3,000 square miles of America.

She also told me about an American client who only got her hair cut in France because all salons anywhere in the hexagon were better than those in the US. Really, I asked her, passive-agressively a la parisienne, among my American friends, it's the opposite. They wait to go back to the US for their haircuts because they don't trust French hair salons since they never listen to the client and think their opinion is always the right and only one.

Having exausted the errors of American hairdressers, Claire the coiffeuse then turned to politics and in typical French bulldog fashion when ahead and gave me her opinion of all political candidates, which I couldn't help thinking, if the roles were reversed and I were coiffing a French woman in the US, I would never say anything like as insensitive to a foreign person like, "oh hello, there. Sarkozy is a shallow racist bloodthirsy capitalist wannabe celebrity destroying French social systems, culture and democracy." Even if I wanted to express that same idea, it would be phrased more like: "in the US, the image we have of Sarkozy is that he likes fame and power and isn't a fan of immigrants, how do more people see him in France?"

Claire then mentioned a radio broadcast where conservatives were quoted as calling Obama "une singe" (a monkey), which is obviously some freakish fringe opinion since he's the preferred candidate at the moment and ahead in the polls. I can say with confidence that the vast majority of the American population is aware that he is a homo sapien. The singe story sounds typical of the French media to seek the biggest weirdos imaginable (unfortunately, folks like this are always around somewhere to oblige foreign journalists) and make it seem like they are representative of the entire American population. She talked at length about how outrageous this attitude was-- "can you imagine? They don't even recognize him as a human being!" Finally, to shut her up, I said, yes, it's deplorable, sounds like the Front National in France. "Oh, but it's worse," she assured me. "Ah, bon?" I replied witheringly, "didn't they almost win the 2002 presidential election?" The phrase "ah, bon" can express many varying degrees of disbelief, disapproval and outright contempt. French has so many polite ways of saying bugger off.

The other latest Annoying Election Question that even NPR-like radio station France Inter has started debating is why Obama doesn't call himself a "metis," because that's what he is as someone half white and half Kenyan (this translates as "mixed" or "half-blood"). And then they say that this all has to do with the history of slavery and American racism. Obviously, this history does color a lot of ethnic relations in the US and no country is a perfect racism-free one. I'm still trying to find a good way to explain to them that everyone in the US has roots in different countries, some European and some not, so we're all mixed, this term doesn't mean anything and we don't talk endlessly about it because unlike France, we don't actually assume that everyone should be white. Rather than having a uniform term for mixed ethnicity, I think we tend to be more specific about ethnic heritage through strategic use of hyphens, like Asian-American, Dutch-Indonesian, etc.

Anyway, despite the dire political asssasination predictions of the muppets in their oracle-like wisdom and the inability of American hairdressers to do a dye job correctly, I have confidence that Obama will remain ahead in the polls and that the rest of the world will see a new side of America come November 4. To which most French people would probably respond with an
"ah, bon?"

A Divorce, a Sensuality Coach and 5 Good Friends

I found myself eating a pastry called a divorce and watching Star Academy, a reality TV/karaoke competition (the French version of American Idol), while the wannabe future French Idols took sensuality lessons from a sensuality coach (as I often assure others when I tell any story set in France, I am not kidding) to prepare for a song called Undress Me. This was probably a new low in defining what it means to be single. It also occurred to me then that maybe I would feel more sensual if I weren’t stuffing my face with what is essentially a double chocolate and coffee-flavored éclair, or wearing 3 sweaters because for the first time in my illustrious career of illegal apartment sublets, heat is no longer included in my rent, or too lazy to unfold the sofa bed anymore at night. I’m used to sleeping alone, as well as watching tv and eating colorfully named pastries alone.

I gave my writing students an extract from Brigit Jones’s Diary this week and it made me think about being 30 and single in a European capital city. Although my friends aren’t yet divided into smug marrieds and singletons, in Brigitspeak, when I visited my friends in California over the summer, they were all paired off in committed relationships, living together in suburbs, tending gardens and it goes without saying, “I” was replaced by “we.” Maybe if I’d stayed in the US, I would have that, too and I’d also use the first person plural pronoun as there would be no other major challenges in my life besides relationships because language and culture would pose no problem.

A characteristic of American ex-pats, I think, is that we tend to think, arrogantly, perhaps, that after living in Paris, moving anywhere else imaginable would be easy, even a space bubble colony run by aliens on Mars. At least the bureaucracy is more reasonable here, all former Paris dwellers would say approvingly, and the sidewalks are cleaner. Living in dangerous, rude, pressed-for-time Manhattan would be like a walk in central park after the challenges of Paris. While there’s definitely the happy fluffy croissant side of life here, like watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle, seeing the dome of Sacré Coeur from in front of my house or sitting in a café for 3 hours with an espresso and no one rushing you to buy something else or leave, there’s also the negative side, maybe call it the boudin noir side, like the metro during rush hour where everyone glares, pushes and generally hates you, or the long lines at the grocery store at 7 pm, or waiting 6 months for internet installation.

What I’ve got in Paris is a circle of international friends, which is already something, and on occasion, I fold out my untrained in sensuality sofa bed. Quick, what would Star Academy sensuality coach do? Judging from the 2 minutes I saw of the show, she would wriggle her shoulders, ask me to imagine I were naked on a desert island, shriek, yes, yes, and then some teenage boy contestant would share with viewers excessive details about how hot the sensuality expert made him. I think making a teenage boy hot is not great evidence of advanced sensuality skills, more just of being a living, breathing woman.

In one of my favorite book series, Tales of the City, beautiful love letters to quirky liberal drug-saturated San Francisco in the 70s that some of my closest friends devoured when we were all together in California this summer, a character says that at this point in her life (she was probably 30), instead of having a lover, she’d settle for 5 good friends. I’d prefer to have both, since these don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but in reality they often are.

If I’d stayed at home, maybe I’d have a relationship, too, instead of my 5 good friends. In some ways, maybe my life hasn’t changed that much—I’m still single, I’m still ambivalent about my job and don’t think I’ll be making a career out of it, the only difference is that instead of eliminating animal welfare from the possible career list, this time it’s French national education. I still have an American best friend who I talk to multiple times a day, just in Franglais text messages instead of free Verizon network phone calls and who makes me dinner a lot, just in the miniature scale Parisian toaster oven that we all have here along with separate burners, instead of an enormous stove that combines both of these features and would be half the size of anyone’s entire French apartment.

But at the same time, everything is different: not just the people, the language and the way of thinking but also the cars, street signs, license plates, advertisements, lampposts— when I look around every day, nothing looks the way it did where I grew up or anywhere I used to live. After 2 years in France, I still marvel at the metro signs, the architecture and the miniscule smart cars; these are the visual markers of a different cultural life that I chose for myself and I relish this challenge (with whatever condiments are available in Paris).

One of the things I most appreciate when I visit the US is just the sheer familiarity of the whole urban landscape, but one of the things I find most stimulating about Paris is the utter lack of familiarity of this same scene. I spend a lot of time wondering if I’ll ever feel integrated into French life. I’m not even sure what this means to me. Understanding all cultural references in any given conversation? Having a French boyfriend always available to adore me and explain new vocabulary? No longer being surprised by any given situation? When do you start to feel welcomed and accepted in a foreign country? Sometimes I think on a very simplistic level, I’ll start to feel more integrated when I no longer notice the metro, the architecture and the cars. And maybe when I have 6 good friends.

Things I Learned in Film Analysis Class

-Jack the Ripper in French is Jacques L'éventreur which means "Jack the disemboweler" and sounds more gruesome than ripper, since ripper doesn't overtly specify that he ripped prostitutes' stomaches open...

-A cinematic shot that shows a character's body from their head to mid-thigh is called a "plan américain" because it was used a lot in westerns to show cowboys' guns.

-The average Hollywood film has between 800-1,200 shots. The average French film has about 600 and the average action film can have up to 3,000.

What a Long, Strange... Final Exam

It's a pretty rollicking time with the rattrapages (make up exams) at the surreal university where I work. All the other profs have left town and given the most implausible excuses imaginable for not actually proctoring and grading their own exams. 1 was supposedly detained in Canada and had all his money stolen (those viscious Canadians) and another was stuck in Kabul because Afganistan is SUCH the tourist destination.

Consequently, I have a ton of exams to grade and some of them (of course for classes I didn't teach) are really bizarre. One has loads of translation questions and no answer key, of course, so I'll have to look up about a million words and it seems like it's out of 5,000 points, so it looks like there will be annoyingly large calculations involved to convert everything to a 20 point scale.

One of the other exams I gave recently had a listening comprehension section on the weirdest news story ever-- it was about (get ready) magic mushrooms. Not that the students actually understood it, but maybe we shouldn't teach them vocabulary to describe hallucinogenic drugs, just une petite suggestion. Is that really an educational priority?

The tenuous news-worthiness of the piece was a Johns-Hopkins study that concluded maybe they could use the hallucinogenic drug found in certain mushrooms to improve the quality of life of the terminally ill. It started off by saying "maybe the hippies weren't just ON something, maybe they were ONTO something." Psychadelic fun with phrasal verbs, be still my heart! The professor who wrote this test was also under the impression that John (in the singular) Hopkins was a person and not an American research university as evidenced by the exam question Who is John Hopkins?

Obviously, I'm not a fan of the overly simplistic Just Say No To Drugs campaign (I lived in California, afterall), but this still didn't seem like the greatest material for a final exam... What, are we preparing first year foreign languages students for head trips or drug deals now? Should lead to a lucrative career, allright...

At least this should ease my worries that my lessons don't have enough educational value. Whenever I hear that critical little voice in my head which talks to me often, I will remind myself that at least I am not giving a final exam about psychadelic 'shrooms. The second part of the exam was a text about political spouses, as one would logically expect. I think someone was on mushrooms, alright, and it wasn't the 26 volunteers working for Mr. Hopkins.

The World Is Your Oyster

September 1 was my Paris Anniversary, although it somehow escaped my notice until today. All ex-pats celebrate their anniversary of moving to Paris. For one friend we drank champagne on her balcony and watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle. I don't remember what I did last year-- I think when Cory and Kim and I rode the ferris wheel at Tuilleries and had hot chocolate at Angelina's that was around the 1-year mark, and that was such an all-around lovely day, it'll count as the anniversaire.

I haven't really celebrated my 2-year anniversary with anything more than an afterthought and a glass of wine that I was already drinking anyway because of ambivalence about this year of Parisian life-- mainly because it hasn't really started yet. I'll be a full-time student (of something entirely useless career-wise but interesting to me: French cinema and literature) and part-time English professor and when added up, that's a lot of time. This month is the calm before the storm (except in Lousiana), and although I need the time to sort out what I'm doing in my classes, I'm also impatient for the wind and rains to start.

What I did on my anniversary, without realizing it was the anniversary: I saw a Belgian film, hung out with Franco-Peruvian friends and walked home from Hotel de Ville and saw the Eiffel Tower sparkle. Yesterday, however, I cried on a friend's French shoulder and felt like I had no goal in life, and had nothing to show for 2 years in Paris-- except for mastery of the art of social anxiety and disappointment. I realize that I tend to make my circle of friends overimportant, because that's all I have (I certainly don't have job satisfaction or feel like I belong in France). I tend to overanalyze all social situations-- did everyone have fun, was my French good enough, was there some hidden agenda, which has been an issue lately. However, my friends are only human and all have their own quirks, issues and problems.

Parisian mécontent is palpable as everyone just got back to town after their rapturous weeks of vacation in the south of France or wherever they go and they now have to readjust to life in the metropole and all its imperfections. As this feeling of disappointment is French, even more specifically Parisian, it is complex in all its contradictions-- like we hate all people, especially in the metro, yet wish we had friends yet never talk to strangers or do anything to reach out to others. I have to admit that the misanthropic aspect of Parisian culture is seductive and appealing in its own way-- all ex-pats kind of secretly love to hate Paris and its inhabitants.

But it also raises the larger question, how much should you rely on others? The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould once said that for every hour you spend in the company of others, you need X number of hours of solitude and that ratio is different for everyone. I've resolved to adjust my coefficients of X a little and devote more energy to interesting and self-sustaining creative projects and less energy to socializing. It's time to try to make myself happy, instead of hoping that other people will do it.

A friend of mine once said that Parisians were like oysters-- totally closed off in their own little shells surrounded by other isolated oysters, all alone together, even in crowded cafes... Maybe there are pearls inside, maybe not. Maybe I'll discover these pearls, maybe not.

Sarcasm is the Golden Rule

In American English, the Golden Rule that parents tell their children is “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” This biblical refrain is often mentioned in a shortened version (“do unto others…”) and everyone knows this little short cut and how the adage actually ends. Despite the lack of widespread usage of the archaic word unto, we all know that it means treat other people how you yourself would like to be treated. At the movie theater Silence is Golden. Other than that, I can’t really think of any other sayings that involve the word golden, and are mantras to live by that are oft repeated to children. Obviously, the US as a nation doesn’t really practice Do Unto Others, especially not where foreign policy is concerned. I doubt we’d want the Iraqi military to invade us, steal our oil and kill civilians, but these are still sayings that children learn about how to behave and there’s always an element of idealism and social hypocrisy involved in educating the young and naïve, as we don’t really want to reveal too much about the way things actually work.

I’m not sure what the Golden Rule is in France, as I have never been a French child lied to by French adults, but here’s a theory: sarcasm.

Consider this. I had a screenplay-writing former French professor and I foolishly lent him the film Supersize Me because it’s a fun documentary and French people are fascinated with how fat Americans are and think we’re just an entire nation of walrus-sized lard tub people. Obviously, some of us do cook vegetables, can’t remember the last time we were at a McDonald’s and don’t weigh 400 lbs and actually exercise and wear between a size 36 and 38 (this is between a 6 and 8 in the American system) which seems just fine to most people, except that in Paris this IS walrus lard tub huge, since all Parisian women weigh about 4 kilos and never eat but only smoke and use weirdo slim-fast like regimes they buy at pharmacies called cures minceurs. I don’t even know anyone who eats at McDo even once a week in the US, but then again, I also don’t know anyone who voted for Bush and he’s a 2-term president.

Anyway, my ex professor had Supersize Me for quite awhile, and each time I emailed him normal sounding inoffensive emails asking for the film back, he always either ignored me completely or ignored the general request and responded to some minor often vaguely flirtatious point instead. Apparently, writing something like “hey, I need my film back, can you drop it off? Thanks” might sound ambiguous to the French, or maybe it isn’t quite clear what I want, because I am being nice and uninsulting. At any rate, it didn’t seem obvious and important enough to Guillaume to rearrange his entire life enough to walk 3 arduous blocks down the street and slip my film in my letter box.

What we had here was the famous Cool Hand Luke failure to communicate.

Finally, I’d had enough of disrespectful Frenchman attitude—would he treat a French woman like this? Who thinks it’s ok to abuse someone’s good will generosity that much—AND blow them off when they attempt to reclaim their own property? Would he be this rude to a man?

Probably, in fact. Something almost comforting about Paris, in a dark and bitterly ironic way (dark and bitter irony is probably extremely comforting to French people), is that it seems like a city of equal opportunity poverty, rudeness and general hatred. I sent old film-hoarding Guillaume a final email and decided that if this last attempt at written communication didn’t work, I would consider having Xavier the Gendarme scare him a little with some kind of French law enforcement threat—or send him a bill for the cost of the film—plus interest since he was perhaps leasing with the option to buy for the past 5 months. So in my last-ditch attempt, I sent the following email:

Hi, I’m back from vacation, are you as well? I need my film. Are you writing a doctoral dissertation on it or what? You’ve had it for 6 months. Thanks in advance.

Or:

Bonjour, je suis de retour à Paris, vous y êtes aussi? Il me faut mon film. Vous préparez une thèse là-dessus ou quoi ? Ca fait 6 mois. Merci par avance.

And it was like we were communicating for the first time. If you are sarcastic in French, the French embrace you as one of their own. The terms “French” and “sarcastic” are almost redundant, as the 2 languages are one and the same.

My email got this response:

Excellent!!! I don’t know if this is a compliment or not, but that’s a perfectly French attitude! Remind me what your address is and I’ll drop it off right away, I’m so sorry.

Or:

Excellent! Je ne sais pas si je vous fais un compliment, mais voilà un esprit parfaitement français! Rappelez moi votre adresse et je déposerai votre film toute de suite. Mille excuses.

Shocked at the efficacy of sarcasm in French, I forwarded his response to 2 of my American friends. However, ever a realist, I thought that although this was way more progress than I’d ever had previously in trying to recover my long-lost film, I shouldn’t get too excited until I actually had it in my possession. Maybe despite his prompt response, he would still never actually return it. I gave him my address again and lo and behold:

The concierge knocked on my door with the film the very next morning.

Although perhaps it’s not the best idea to start business emails by resorting to it, it seems that when you’re being ignored, sarcasm gets results.

In fact, even agreeing with someone (which inherently seems like a positive and non-sarcastic idea) can involve sarcasm. If someone says something you find obvious and agree with wholeheartedly, then you say, “you surprise me” (“tu m’étonnes”). Obviously, what they say comes as no surprise to you at all, and that’s why you say it does.

Life in France is just full of little sarcasm surprises.

August 22

Yesterday I turned 30. Was it an epiphanal first day of the rest of my life? Or am I entering some nightmarish alternate reality of "30 and The Single Woman?" The jury is still out, leaning away from nightmarish alternate reality, but it's true that the initial euphoria did wear off a little in the days that followed. However, at least the actual day was amazingly pleasant.

Some of the highlights of yesterday were suddenly being struck by every sign that had 30 in it—lots of 30 km speed limit signs in my neighborhood that I never noticed until yesterday. Another highlight was a French karaoke singer busking on the metro who serenaded me with Dock of the Bay (it’s about San Francisco) and sounded very little like Otis Redding—instead of a bluesman growl he had a French accent and exaggeratedly perfect annunciation: "SittinG on zee duck of zee baie..." I felt like that was a good metaphor for my recent trip to CA and seeing that my friends were happy but also that we’d changed a lot in different ways, which wasn’t bad, it was just that my old California doesn’t exist anymore. I haven't heard the American version of the Dock of the SF bay recently, but that’s ok, since my inspiration doesn’t lie there anymore. This is the cultural hybrid French version of California on the Paris metro and it’s my version of it now.

I feel good about 30, oddly enough, possibly because I’ve spent the whole rest of my life having existential crises. That has to count for something and give you a pass for what is arguably the most stereotypically traumatic age for a single woman.

To celebrate yesterday evening, I went out for drinks and dinner with some of my favorite people in the entire world, a lovely international group of ex-pats who struggle to make their lives here like I do, and I thought, there’s nowhere I’d rather be and no one I’d rather be with.

We had drinks and went out for Indian food near La Chapelle and then had 1 more glass of wine in Montmartre. It was really the perfect way to celebrate and I know after my trip to the states that I don’t want to live anywhere else; I’m glad Paris is my home. I texted my friends the day after to thank them for a perfect birthday evening and they texted back that it yes, it HAD been perfect, hadn’t it? This is why I love them all. They brought me thoughtful quirky presents (they absolutely didn’t have to) that were all things I realized I wanted without even knowing it until then-- from books about the metro to a French translation of a Dutch novel set in California to green eye shadow and they even smuggled a birthday muffin into the Indian restaurant and lit a candle on top.

I brought them each a rose the color of a sunset just to say that I’m so glad we’re all friends under the soleil-challenged gray Parisian skies. If you can’t be sentimental on your 30th birthday, when can you be?

Viva Las Vegas

In the Vegas airport you can do the following:

-Gamble your entire life away as the airport is littered with slot machines and seems more like a casino where airplanes occasionally land.

-Work out. They have a gym there. Here's what their website says about it:

"Fitness Center: The first of its kind located inside a major U.S. airport, 24 Hour Fitness offers shower and locker room facilities, steam room and dry sauna, a cardiovascular workout area complete with big screen TVs, and a full compliment of exercise equipment. For more information, call 702/261-3971. Location: Terminal 1, Level 2, above north Baggage Claim. Hours: 24 hours, Monday - Thursday 12 a.m. - 11 p.m., Friday 6 a.m. - 9 a.m., Saturday & Sunday."

-The usual shopping, eating, checking your email.

-Shoot a machine gun. In all fairness, this is advertised in the airport but you have to take a taxi to get there. Even gun-happy America doesn't have shooting ranges in the airport. At least not while we are waging the so-called war on terrorism, anyway.

Read My Shirt

The main advantage to wearing t-shirts with words printed on them in France is that no one attempts to read them aloud, since their English isn't good enough and strangers rarely ever talk to you. No such luck in the US. Everyone here seems to read my t-shirt aloud within 3 seconds of seeing it. Maybe it's the American relational strike-up-a-conversation-about-any-old-thing mentality or simply the perfect justification for staring at a woman's upper body...

Only men seem to be the t-shirt readers and they always do it in a slow, evenly-measured, puzzled voice with obvious quotation marks. They also always just start reading, no "what does your shirt say?" or introductory framing question. Implicit in their reading is the need for an explanation or Funny Story Behind This Shirt. I should also point out that while never a fashionplate, most of my real clothes are in France and I mainly have my high school wardrobe available to me at the moment, which includes its fair share of shirts featuring complete English sentences. Here are some recent t-shirt reading experiences.

Stranger, shouting from across the sidewalk in San Francisco: "'The reason the world loves
me?'"
T-shirt actually says "The man who sold the world" and even those who read it correctly often try to strike up a conversation about Nirvana only to meet with polite yet withering scorn, as this is in fact a brilliant David Bowie song that Nirvana once covered.

Stranger, selling me fruit at the farmer's market in Delaware: "'Happy dreams opium den?' Do you go there often, ha ha?"
Shirt continues, explaining that this obviously fictional place is "where good fiends like to meet." I mean, really, who would advertise an actual crack den?

Stranger, drug store cashier who looks about 16, ringing up nail polish: "'Tears for fears?' Is that a movie?"

American Customer Service

This really happened at a DVD store called FYE (For Your Entertainment-- and no, despite dubious-sounding name, they do not sell porn, more like Disney-Pixar classics) when I went to the register to buy a DVD.

Cashier (bubbling over with customer service enthusiasm) : Hi, there, how are you today?! Did you find everything ok today?!
Me: Yes, thanks.
C: Can I interest you in a subscription to our special new DVD and video game release magazine? It has the latest insider information on all the hottest new entertainment!
Me: No, thanks.
C: Would you like to join our frequent buyer program and get 10% off your purchase today?!
Me: Um, no thanks, that's ok, I don't live around here.
C: Would you be willing to donate a dollar to the children's literacy program we support? It's strictly optional, but the proceeds all go directly to underfunded public schools!
Me (unable to keep from laughing): Wow, do you have to ask everyone all those questions every time they buy something? You must be exhausted at the end of the day.
C (acknowledging that his series of questions is, indeed, ridiculous): God, I know, you must be like, get outta my face, I just wanna buy my movie! How would you like to pay for this today?!

Time flies when your airline doesn't...

I've been spending lots of lack-of-quality time in airports recently, having just flown across the world in a record 5 million hours. Ok, it was maybe 10 hours of actually being in a plane, but really an entire day of transit. Actually, more than that. It only fit into one day because the US is 6 hours behind chez moi. I had the logical flight pattern of going Paris-Chicago-Baltimore. Chicago is approximately 1,500 miles out of the way.

When I left Paris, not only had the airport bus fare gone up, but terminal one suddenly seemed like it was in no longer located in Ile-de-France, but in Metz. I feel like I have never inspired so much suspicion in airport security staff people. It seems that leaving France on a British passport to visit your family in the US is now the equivalent of announcing your intent to blow up the entire world, one airplane at a time. They also suspiciously examined the macaroons I was bringing as presents in my carry-on. No doubt to verify that they did not contain bombs cleverly concealed by fluffy meringue. They even asked before I boarded the plane what I'd bought in the one cafe waiting room after I passed through security.

If Paris Roissy was an ordeal, I really hate Chicago O'Hare.

For the rest of my life, I will only associate Chicago with overpriced airport food, endless gate changes, terrorist threat alert Orange (some good old eye roll-inspiring Patriot Act paranoia to try to strip Americans of the few civil rights we've still got...), nearly bankrupt airlines who would probably charge you per individual pretzel, if they could and delayed flights. Without fail, I always have a connecting flight here and it's always delayed, except for the times that it's cancelled. Since I always have plenty of time to wait at O'Hare, until they announce the lastest gate change, I went to some airport bar (not one of the Starbucks that they have roughly every 12 feet) where they carded me (um, I'm about a decade over 21) and charged me $8 for a glass of red wine made entirely of sulfite.

Welcome back to the US.

It's so humid here that I started doing hot yoga because then the outside temperature seems bearable by comparison, and at least, once outside, you no longer have to hold warrior pose.

The airport fun doesn't stop. Off to California this Friday for an overnight flight that arrives in Oakland at 1 am and to BWI tonight to pick up a friend of mine, but at least the parking towers and skywalks are fresh in my mind. And at least it's not O'Hare.

Greetings from Asbury Parc des Princes

"Je suis venu a Paris pour vous," Bruce Springsteen told me-- and thousands of other people at his concert Friday night at French stadium Parc des Princes. With these words, he then played a heartbreaking piano solo version of the song For You off my favorite album, Greetings from Asbury Park, which almost made me cry and I now count among my greatest musical experiences ever.

Whatever Bruce Springsteen means to you-- lyrical poet, symbol of America, documentarian of Americana blue collar struggle, hometown nostalgia or inexplicable New Jersey cult aging rocker, -- he is awesome in concert. He played for 3 hours straight. 28 songs. Not only was this the longest concert of continuous music I'd ever attended, but he also interacted more with the crowd than any other musician I'd ever seen and-- get this-- he took requests. He was ready to play any one of his songs that night. Fans held up hand-lettered signs with the titles of their favorite songs (sometimes in broken English) or shouted their requests. "Dites-le-moi," said Bruce, backed by the non-French speaking E Street Band, "vous voulez entendre quelle chanson?"

The fact the Bruce is back with his original band makes me oddly nostalgic for a time that I never knew-- when he and the E Street Band used to play my hometown. New Jersey and Delaware aren't very far away and I embrace all Jersey cult bands as representing Where I'm From. Hearing Bruce sing about Atlantic City in Paris made me wonder if French people had ever heard of AC, as we used to call it back home. Yes, to me it's a romanticised version of Americana that all of a sudden it becomes about my life, but it also made me think of Le Spleen de Paris, Baudlairean prose poem still-lives about unheroic parisians-- another example of a region described by romantically unromantic images.

Paris is probably the most frequently romanticised place in the world-- often by Americans, often in annoying blog entries that make people who really live in Paris ask questions like, well, remember stepping in dog shit all the time? What about the lack of any form of customer service at all in Paris? Did you love the city of light when you had to argue with France Telecom for 12 weeks to get them to turn on your phone line?

Do I have the same lack of perspective when I start to think the Bruce Springsteen songs actually accurately describe my life in America? I've always listened to him away from the east coast-- from San Francisco and now Paris, and he always represented on some level something I left behind but that at the same time never really existed. I wasn't born to run, Thunder Road doesn't appear on my American road map and I've never hidden on the backstreets. The word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek "nosteo," which means to return home. As the cliche goes, you can't go home again-- but as the film Grosse Point Blank added, you can shop there. Delaware is the home of tax-free shopping.

After the concert, someone accosted me and asked if I were lucky enough to be from the same country as Bruce Springsteen. I assumed (given the influence of French irony and inability to give sincere compliments) that the guy was making fun of me, but turns out he was sincere. I don't expect anyone in France to be pro-American in any way, so this actual admiration of something American shocked me. I spend most of my time criticising Bush and American foreign policy with the French, agreeing with them that I hope McCain loses and Obama becomes president and rolling my eyes at them when they ask why Americans are so fat and why they eat Mcdonalds for every single meal, every single day. I wasn't born in the USA, but contrary to what the average French person and Ronald Reagan might think, that song is not a patriotic anthem, but a criticism of the Land of the Free. Bruce also supports Obama.

Seeing Bruce in Paris was a bit of a collision of worlds for me. And small things irritated me in this car crash (I'm sure there's some relevant Bruce song about such a topic that I could quote here). When Bruce said he came to Paris for us, some French smartass yelled that we were actually at Boulogne (Parc des Princes is a little outside Paris) and I wanted to challange this precision-seeking loser to construct one coherent sentence in English. In the French press, they also kept writing about Bruce and the E period Street Band (they always write it E. Street) , and it makes an American realise that the old world and city of lights will never get modern urban basics like building cities on grid systems. In Paris, instead of a grid, they have a star-with-no-individual-lanes system under the Arc de Triomphe.

The next day, the French paper Le Monde had a concert write-up, complete with the standard poorly punctuated band name, but it warmed my French-influenced but American heart nevertheless when they described Bruce as "le plus grand showman rock de son temps." Notice that this sentence also contains multiple English words...

Why I Don't Update My Blog Very Often

Have you ever noticed that the average blog entry reads a little like this:

"Dear World,

I am insufferable and pretentious."


As Stephen Crane once wrote:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,"
The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Let Them Eat... Un diner presque parfait (an almost perfect dinner)

The perfect metaphor for France is a reality TV show called Un diner presque parfait. It unites some elements that characterize French life for me—obsession with food, conviviality over food, competition, severe grading, and a slightly cynical expectation of mediocrity. (The grading and competition elements make more sense if you know that I’m a professor at a French university.) The show would be a failure in the US and would never dare air on normal TV but would be relegated to the Food Network or some equally obscure corner of the cable universe. However, it’s acceptable daytime television in France.

The show works like this: the producers pick a city (it’s currently Dijon, where the mustard comes from), and maybe 5 contestants and each one has to prepare a dinner—complete with appetizers, a main dish and a dessert. They each create a menu and distribute it to the others in advance, so that everyone can comment on it to the camera. Each contestant is graded by the others on the quality of the food, the decoration of the table and the general ambiance. Included in the general ambiance is the expectation of after-dinner entertainment. For example, Marie-Antoinette’s rollicking after-dinner entertainment was playing some tunes on her hunting horn. This utterly charmed all her on-screen guests and left me completely baffled. However, even the hunting horn didn’t make up for her undercooked duck. The winner, who is obviously not Marie-Antoinette (French women with that name just don’t seem to win), gets general acknowledgement of his or her superior cooking skills and 1,000 euros.

This show has a lot of faux suspense—like “will Marie-Antoinette’s duck be too dry?” Or “The guests arrive in one hour—will Claire finish her sauce in time?” Or “will the others appreciate an entirely vegetarian dinner?” There are also little interviews with each person—little play-by-play reactions from both the chef for that night and the dining patrons on everything from the pattern of the napkins to the escargot appetizer to the chocolate covered pear and clementine pudding for dessert.

The last time I watched, Claire was in the lead with her entirely vegetarian dinner—which excited me to no end to learn that there is at least one other vegetarian in all of France. I wanted to call Claire up to talk about ways to cook lentils. However, I think someone knocked her out of top position—not Marie-Antoinette with her duck of shame, but Claude the retiree who never finishes all the food on his plate and consequently makes all the other contestants nervous or maybe Xavier, who in a rare confessional moment, told the camera that he’d decided to pretend he knew all about food and lie to everyone all the time and say things like, “I only buy fresh snails and then freeze them myself; I’d never buy frozen ones, quelle horreur.” Because of his arrogance, everyone believes him that he’s a great authority on French cuisine and he always looks very pleased with himself when he tells the camera for the umpteenth time that he just can’t believe that the others are falling for his act of gourmet chef expert foodie.

The average grade so far for our gang of wannabe chefs in Dijon is a 6.8 out of 10 and none of the contestants ever expect to do well—which we know since they are always asked to predict what grade they think the other will give them and they always expect a lower grade then they actually receive. They do, however, tend to grade each other severely as they have all survived the French school system. They give a lot of 5s and 6s since this is la moyenne (the average). Although they tend to be more generous with the decoration grade. Claire the vegetarian draped vines all over her table to highlight the evening’s organic theme and they liked this immensely. Marie-Antoinette had matching china and mystery gift envelopes containing a small shiny piece of paper you used to create a funnel and pour a cocktail. I’m not the greatest interpreter of French culture, but she seems pretty bourgeois, that Marie-Antoinette. Besides her hunting horn and paper cocktails, she also has a white poodle that she brought to Claire’s house for dinner without asking first, which Claire revealed to find slightly horrifying in an exciting play-by-play reaction to the arrival of her guests.

Unfortunately, I somehow missed 3 episodes of my new favorite program—it’s like the new Seinfield where nothing ever happens but everyone always eats… I didn’t see Claude, Xavier and Bertrand’s dinners, however, I caught the end of Real World (of Food) : Dijon this morning and learned that apparently for the first time in Un diner presque parfait history, 2 contestants were tied with the French all-time high score of 7.3 out of 10 and both won 1,000 euros. The winners were dainty-eater Claude and know-it-all Xavier. I hope their episodes will be rebroadcast every hour on the hour so that all of France and I can witness an outstanding 7.3 dinner on the Richter dining scale. The other contestants probably all killed themselves with shame. No, just kidding, they probably just said, “bof” and shrugged. And went to go have something to eat.

En Attendant Godot

Life in France often feels a little like Waiting For Godot. By that, I mean, surreal and uncertain (if you want examples, see every other blog I’ve ever written). I think it’s no accident that Beckett wrote this play in French. The caprices of the French bureaucracy, for example, usually have a Beckettian logic (meaning none at all, really) about them. You also tend to wait in line in Paris all the time—to go to the movies, exit Chatelet, get into any museum, get a table at a restaurant, buy your groceries, etc. The latest in French bureaucratic surrealism: my friend Angela recently went to a bar where they asked patrons to make a deposit if they ordered a certain kind of beer called Kwak because apparently you have to drink it in a special glass that is expensive. Seriously—you purchase beer, but it’s like you’re renting the glass you drink it in and you have to pay a “caution.” This is the same word you use for the deposit you make on your apartment when you move in. You probably also have to wait in line to make your beer glass deposit.

Lately for me in France, there’s this perpetual longing that makes me feel a bit like I’m waiting for an impossible Godot-like miracle, which would be, in my case, a sign that moving to Paris was the right thing to do, that I fit in here, I can make a life and long-term plans here, rather than just going from year to year, and that I have many important and convincing reasons for staying. Maybe it’s restlessness brought on by spring, or the fact that I’m on vacation and so I now have plenty of free time to worry about the future, but lately, I feel like I’m waiting for the future to start. I’m moving in a week, the semester ends 2 weeks after spring vacation, and I’ll have the summer off. I’ll visit my family in the states and I’ll celebrate my 30^th birthday (gulp) in Paris in August, I’ll have the same job at the university next year and hopefully it’ll be easier the second time around. But like the Bruce Springsteen song goes (it’s off his new album, Magic), we’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet.

I’m also waiting for more impossible things that the future might or might not hold—like the perfect job at an NGO so that I can speak French and save the world simultaneously—or for my current job suddenly to become more satisfying, or the discovery of some well-hidden talent that chooses to reveal itself in Paris, like cinematography, writing or oil-painting that would make my life fulfilling and would remove all my doubts about everything, or, finally, the perfect relationship-- which would more or less do that same thing. To some extent everyone lives in the future and hopes for things like these and this is the human condition— just ask Samuel Beckett. But this phenomenon suddenly seems way more intense in a foreign country where you live with more uncertainty in your life than you did back home and you’re culturally more on the periphery (or péripherique) of Parisian life looking for the right exit to get into town, and not in the center of the city where all the museums, theaters and restaurants and clubs are.

There’s this Portishead song that I love (Glorybox off the Dummy album) and it goes: “give me a reason to love you…” and I feel like the lyrics should be: “give me a reason to stay in France.” I want France to convince me to stay forever. I want feel like I belong here. Guess I’ll have to wait for that song to be released. And then they’ll probably want a deposit before you buy the album.

"Le meilleur vrai réseau" or How Weird is French Advertising

It often arrives to me-- ok, I'll recommence and try to sound like a normal human being instead of a franglais-speaker who has a tortured relationship with both the French and English language. Thanks to the horizon-broadening experience of living abroad, I can now no longer start normal-sounding sentences or spell in French or English. But lingusitic confusion pales in comparison to cultural confusion. I usually find myself completely baffled by French advertising. This is due to the simple fact that it is completely baffling.

First of all, the most frequently advertised products on French TV are cheese and perfume. I'm not kidding. I've never seen so many cheese ads since moving here. Dairy products in general are well represented in French marketing. Yogurt, especially and there's this one freakishly weird ad-- I'll try to download it, since otherwise no one would believe me-- for dairy products in general the features little skeletons dancing around a giant cow whose udder explodes and bathes them in a fountain of milk to an aggressive club remix of Stayin' Alive and then one of them jumps on the cow and starts drinking the milk. It was actually kind of disturbing to watch. ads involving miniature skeletons, the BeeGees and cow udders are pretty unusual, you have to admit. This doesn't seem to scream Winning Marketing Formula to me...

I saw this other bizarro ad yesterday for the metro. So this seems odd, since the RATP owns all forms of public transportation in Paris, so they pretty much have a monopoly. Even Velib, the rent-a-bicycle service is affiliated to the RATP, I think. I mean their competition is what, taxis or people who decide to walk? Or not go out at all?

And this ad seems like it advertises a video game at first. You see a digital image of a man-- he has pixels and he comes in and out of focus, and he's walking around outside in the "real world". You see him marvel at the sky above, the heat of the sun on his skin, singing birds, etc. and he looks intently at the real people who pass by. Oh, how he longs to be a real boy, you can almost hear him say. Then you see him go down into the metro-- St. Lazare specifically, because we recognise that weird glass igloo/pyramid thing, and he puts his hand on the escalator railing and marvels at its feel beneath his hand. Then his train comes and the doors open and-- surprise!-- he's face-to-face with his human, flesh-and-blood alter ego. The ad ends here and then gives the tag line, RATP, the best real network. Or the best network that really exists. To explain, the word network in French can mean a transportation network or a communications network, like for wireless internet or your cell phone.

So, I find this a strange ad. It's kind of post-modern in the message, take the metro because it's real, it exists, unlike a computer network or a video game. I described it to my friend Josie, and she thought it was a mistake to stress the realism of the metro. It's true that often the tactile or sensory experience in metro stations is fairly unpleasant. In other words, you generally smell urine and vomit. Why didn't they just say, "the metro: come smell the vomit for yourself," Josie joked. Who knows, maybe this is the next ad campaign for the best real network that actually exists.

No Exploding Cars, or the Surrealist French Highway System

If you saw the above image on the road, what would you imagine it meant? This was all over certain French highways. My American friends and I wondered, does it mean your car isn't allowed to explode on this highway? Does is mean beware of spontaneous combustion because other cars DO tend to explode on this road? Beware of car bombs? Is it a really dramatic warning against overheating your engine? The Exploding Car Sign baffled us completely and seemed like a slightly inauspicious beginning to our Great Alsacian Roadtrip Adventure. We had a cute little blue Peugeot rental car and I really doubted that Europecar auto insurance covered us against French highway-induced spontaneous combustion...

I feel like driving is the one area in which I really cling to my Americaness, where France really does seem foreign to me. I'm used to signs that hang above lanes of traffic that give maybe one or two pieces of information at a time, not clusters of 5,000 different arrows pointing in the directions of 5,000 different towns that are displayed only along the side of the road where you often don't have time even to read them all. Even glancing at speed limit signs and my spedometer was a foreign experience at first, as it's all in kilometers so speed limits tend to be 130 (if it's not raining), instead of 65 and the spedometer went up to 230 instead of like 130.

I come from the land of freeway systems with colverleaf pattern on-ramps, where exits are well marked as are the ROADS themselves, and where you have a map of everything. Everyone in CA had these spiral-bound notebook maps (the Thomas map, I think it was called) that show all roads in the state. Such a thing doesn't seem to exist here and even the 15 maps we brought along were somehow all inaccurate and useless. And a waste of paper, as they don't print maps double-sided in France. Navigating downtown San Francisco, tolls on the Bay Bridge, highway 1 along sheer cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean-- these are all easy and logical driving maneuvers to me. The French highway system, however, was a little like driving on another planet that somewhat resembled my own.

On Planet Autoroute Francaise, tolls were very different. They're called peages, which made all us non-native French speakers think of pieges (traps). In CA, you only pay tolls for bridges. In France you seem to pay them every 5 feet on the major highways, maybe to pay for all the exploding car signs which might be expensive to manufacture. We saw some pretty shocking driving and indulged in some, too. We had this one toll plaza experience where everyone started backing up an changing toll lanes. It was total chaos and I ended up changing my lane, too, since there was a tractor trailer engaged in a customs battle with the toll attendant. After waiting 10 minutes, I, too, reversed across 3 toll lanes in front of about 15 enormous trucks to change gates. This remains to date one of my sketchiest traffic maneuvers ever... However, roadside rest areas are pretty similar to what we have in the states and we felt almost shamefully at home at the gas station mini-mart where we stopped somewhere between Metz and Paris.

In the French countyside, they didn't even really label the roads. The Alsacian wine route is actually 3 roads and looking for the little wine route sign made this drive a bit of a scavenger hunt experience... There was also this very misleading sign advertising parking, and I foolishly believed it and ended up more or less driving into the courtyard of an orange monestary converted into a winery. We also sometimes lost track of the main road and ended up in front of cathedrals in little French towns smaller than the average Parisian metro station.

I do have to admit, though, that I really enjoyed driving in France-- it made me feel like I was conquering France to speed down the autoroute in a Peugeot at 130 km/h. We spent most of our time at first being lost, but figuring out the signs and trying to navigate this strange system succfessfully was definitely like a big puzzle to figure out. I felt like we were lab rats slowly learning to negotiate the maze successfully and then we would be rewarded with cheese, which we were in Strasbourg where everything edible is covered with delicious munster cheese.

And the actual answer to the exploding car sign? It means that vehicles carrying flammable materials aren't allowed on that road. Which never occured to us, in all our various attempts to interpret it and makes me wonder exactly how many explosive materials are transported in France, considering how often we saw this sign.

Lonely Planet

People are like planets. Sometimes they're aligned and going the same direction, then sometimes one-- or both-- abruptly changes course and returns to its own orbit.

And sometimes when one of these planets tries to find direction again, it feels like, for the moment, the universe is composed of nothing but dust and empty space.

Le chien qui regarde en bas

Ok, I don't really know how to say the names of yoga poses, as my French yoga teacher doesn't often name them and is very non-new agey. He doesn't dwell on aligning the chakras or anything but is more mater-of-fact than Californian zen crystal moon goddess yoga instructors who play ritual chanting music by candle light and whisper profundities like "be mindful." Of your chakras, I guess. French yoga instructor's main comments on finding inner peace are, "do yoga. It'll calm you down and it won't piss you off."

This is one rare instance where French understatement and restraint is welcome, although I generally don't appreciate it in life outside the yoga classroom. Like, for example, in the French way of giving very backhanded restrained compliments, if they give any at all. Like, "she's not stupid," actually means "she's highly intelligent." Or, "he didn't leave me indifferent" means "I really like him." I'm irrationally pleased when my French boyfriend speaks English with me and starts to use my vocabulary and says something like "amazing," instead of "not bad." I'm still not foolish enough to expect any actual compliments, though.

The family discovers macaroons from La Duree

"Each one is like an epiphany in your mouth."