A rant...
There’s this song by some crazy rock band that goes "I’m not a patriot, I’m not a fugitive, I’m an American, I’m an American..." I don’t know how the rest of the song goes because I’ve never stopped to really listen to it. But as for the bridge, I agree.
Because I’ve never really been all about the USA. I mean, I celebrate the 4th of July and Thanksgiving with the best of them, but I only have ever voted in presidential elections (though let’s be honest, I’ve only been eligible for, like 4 elections or something), and I don’t watch the Olympics or the World Cup, but if I did, I’d totally be rooting for France. And obviously I am not that attached to my country or I wouldn’t have just chosen to spend a year in someone else’s. But I do have a problem with people who come over here (France, Europe, really anywhere other than the US) and suddenly pull a Natalie Maines. You don’t do that. You don’t show up in another country and then start bashing your own. It’s just bad form, particularly when you are from a country that’s as hot to discuss as the US. You don’t need to stir controversy when it comes to us. Like, if you were from Switzerland, no one would care, because the Swiss have pretty much never in the history of the world done anything bad. Their whole army does nothing but sit around and make knives, for crying out loud. Oh, and I heard they branched out to watches too, but still– you could, if you were Swiss, go anywhere you wanted and whine about Switzerland, and everyone would just think you had lost it, because Switzerland never does anything objectionable to anyone.
But now Natalie Maines has made it all hip to leave the US when people start burning your CDs and show up in some other country to bash Americans, and everyone thinks they ought to do it. Though why anyone would ever want to pattern their lives after a Dixie Chick is beyond me. (By the way, I find it ironic that she has so much animosity toward the US when her band is named after, oh, the confederacy.) One could argue that Billie Joe Armstrong and the rest of Green Day did the same thing by touring for an album so obviously anti-American that the title refers to George W. as the "American Idiot." And Johnny Depp, from my old Kentucky home, lives in France because he doesn’t like the US. I am less mad at them though because they, you know, are actually cool. But then there are also people like Brandon Flowers, who tours Europe and completely leaves out the fact that he is American, going so far as to come down on Green Day for their overuse of anti-American symbols in places where they are misconstrued and un-understood.
I am not saying that, as ex-patriates, we should be pro-US. I am not saying that we should all tie yellow ribbons ‘round our old oak trees or even that we should shop at Wal-Mart. Heaven knows the sight of GAP in France makes me want to go say a prayer for the souls of anyone who sets foot within.
But I am saying that, no matter your feelings on the US, if you are an American citizen, then at least do your best to not create more controversy. I’ve lived here for five months now and have taken part in political discussions, and I can vouch that there are ways to do it where you don’t come out banging the dead horse of anti-Americanism.
I’m not particularly pro-Bush, though to be honest it’s been so long since I’ve thought about it that I don’t really know what I think anymore. I’m not pro-war, either. I mean, think about it: I am 21 years old, the people fighting over there are my peers, and some of them are my friends.
It’s not just the war and the president, either; I realize that Europe does things differently than we do, but that’s all it is, different. With most policy issues, it’s not better or worse, just different. They don’t have a perfect education or healthcare system, and neither do we– their drawbacks are just different from ours. So for goodness’ sake, don’t you dare show up in France and two days later start railing on the USA for not having a socialized medical plan. If you’re gonna knock it, at least wait until you’ve been sick enough that you’ve had to use it, and then tell me that lab techs who don’t wear gloves and thermometers that still contain mercury are really the wave of the future.
The problem is that for the crowd my age, the hip thing is to be against the government. We’re not the first generation that has decided that the government became lame when we turned 18 and we should all go anarchist. But we are the first generation that has the opportunity to broadcast those views as widely as we do. I don’t care what your views are, just keep them to yourself. You aren’t here to rag on the US, you’re here to learn a new culture.
To people who would show up here and try to do everything the American way, shopping only at GAP and buying Starbucks’ coffees, I would say the same thing, because that drives me even crazier. You are not here to spread American culture and globalism, you are here to learn a new culture. So forget, for a moment, that you are from the United States of America, and live like a French person for a day. Trust me, walk a mile in their stiletto boots and you will be reminded that the things here are not so much worse than for us and not so much better either...
So dang it, just learn to keep your mouth shut.
You gotta fight (for your right)
~Beastie Blair
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
"...It’s music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows that you’re being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you are carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead."
~Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
I start classes tomorrow, which should be interesting, since two of my classes are upper-level classes at the French university.
Also, all my classes this semester will be at the French U.– last semester I had a grammar class with other Americans, taught in French, but still– it felt like a copout to me. This semester, though, I am rolling hardcore.
Somehow I managed to schedule my four classes not only in four different buildings in Paris, but in four different arrondissements. Arrondissements (Awhh-roan-deese-mon) are districts– they are the ZIP CODES of Paris, which means I am going to be doing an awful lot of commuting throughout the day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But this semester I only have to go to Tolbiac (the third-world internment-camp-looking university still littered with remnants of last year’s riots) once a week for one class, instead of almost every day like last semester. This does two things in my life: 1) improves my general sense of well-being and outlook on life, since I no longer have to look at that disgusting place every day and 2) cuts my time on the Metro by nearly half. Furthermore, instead of taking classes there, my classes this semester are at:
1) The Sorbonne. Can words express how cool that is? The Sorbonne. Say it, let it roll off your tongue. The oldest U. in Europe. I’m going from studying in a building built in the 1970's by the lowest bidder, with nicotine-coated windows and graffiti on the walls that says things like "THE REVOLUTION BEGINS WITH YOU" and "MUSIC WILL ROCK THE NATION" to a building that no one even dares mess with because the place is, oh, you know, on par with Notre Dame on the list of Oldest Buildings In Paris. The Sorbonne is basically the most beautiful building I have ever seen. It’s around the corner from the Pantheon, which is awesome, in the heart of the Quartier Latin, surrounded by libraries, bookstores, papeterie, and panini bars that all have student discounts to the nth degree. It’s a giant square building, with a huge courtyard in the middle, all cobbled. Standing in the courtyard at this time of year is like stepping back into another century. Imagine it– I’m trying to check the room of my classes, so I have to find an obscure hallway on the fourth floor of the Hugo wing (named after guess who?) where the fliers are posted on the wall. I have to show ID to get in; it’s how they keep tourists out, which means that the doors are guarded by 2 or 3 gendarmerie, the policemen with the round flat hats and the old-fashioned looking rifles. The doors to the place are wood, at least ten inches thick, with iron hinges and designs across them that stretch twice as tall as me. Through the doors is the courtyard, all the wings look into this central area, paved with round gray cobblestones. To enter the actual building, I choose my door, each marked with the name of a famous Frenchman– "Hugo" or "Dumas" or "Richelieu." Climbing the ten or so marble steps to the (smaller this time) door, I realize that this was what I always envisioned studying in France would be. Winding marble staircase with a wrought iron banister on my left, window looking out to the Pantheon on the right, inlaid wood hallway laid out before me. I have never seen anything more beautiful or more academic in my life. It just begs me to get out my ballpoint pens and square French paper and prepare myself for notes and lectures and being astute, collegiate, scholastical, and educated. I wish I wore glasses, just to add to the feeling of academia. The hallways glow golden with the soft light, so different from the harsh, often-burned out fluorescent bulbs at Tolbiac, in the center of Chinatown, where I studied last semester. It’s warm inside, enough that I ditch my scarf and coat while I meander the halls, until a professorial-looking man stops me to ask if I need directions. Forgetting that feeling educated does not mean being educated, I asked for directions to the bureau I needed, and he helped me out in true professorial form. I checked my class times, then walked back downstairs and into the courtyard. I had re-bundled up just before exiting the building, but stepping back into the courtyard with the wind whipping my hair into a panic and the grey Paris sky over me, all I could think was that this is what all University campuses everywhere ought to look like, because if they did, the world would be an awful lot more stoked to be educated. And this is coming from a girl who goes to Emory University, Atlanta, GA– arguably THE most beautiful college campus in the US.
2) Michelet Building. This is an archaeology library on Rue Michelet somewhere just on the Sixieme side of the Latin Quarter, the place where I took the oral exam the day I returned to Paris in January, with the winding halls and the hardwood floors and the cracked plaster walls. It looks like the Egyptian library from the new version of The Mummy– the one with Brendan Frasier. (Which reminds me that I love that movie and have realized of late that I have a penchant for B-rate movies with B-rate actors, but that is neither here nor there.) It’s next to the jardin de Marco Polo, which is this beautiful hidden little island of green in the middle of the Quartier Latin. No one pays any attention to it because the expansive Jardins du Luxembourg are so close, which makes it even cooler because this one is so unknown. One of my favorite fountains (a far distant second to the Fontaine des Medicis) is in the center of the jardin, which is really more like a median that has been highly decorated and beautified. Anyway, the Michelet building looks out onto that. The Michelet building also exemplifies Frenchness quite well. The second time I was there (just to check my class times), the stairwell doors were shut (of course, there is no elevator) and there was a sign on the door that read "Escalier Interdit au Public"– stairs forbidden to the public. Great, now how am I supposed to get off the rez-de-chaussee, the bottom floor? I stood there staring at the door for a moment, wondering what to do, then went to the welcome desk, this terribly unwelcoming corner of the foyer where you have to speak and listen through a glass window to the person on the other side. I have a hard enough time making myself understood, I don’t need glass to further inhibit the process, thanks. Anyway, I ask the old man how to get to the second floor, and he looks at my like I am crazy, and then says (in French), "Why Mademoiselle, it is just through that door!" and points to the one I had been standing in front of, the one marked, "forbidden." Either the forbidden was just a suggestion, or I am not the public... But either way, it was so typically French.
3) Maison des Mines. A part of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways), the premiere architectural school of France. The Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees is a school I studied in art history classes back in the US... it’s kind of a big deal, and rather ironic given my predilection for jumping off bridges.
4)Tolbiac. In the heart of Chinatown, far away from everything except sketchy men at fruit stands and discount shoe stores. This should not be considered Paris. The building, as previously mentioned, has a metal gate at the front that can (and has been) rolled shut to lock students in... or out... during riots, sit-ins, and protests. It’s where I got gum on my jeans and had to cut a 4-inch square out of the left ankle of my favorite pair of pants. It’s where the student riots of 1968 (basically the French equivalent of Kent State, only WAY WAY more hardcore) were centered. It’s where I was asked to join the Communist party. And the Socialist party. In the same day.
If I seem a little hostile, it’s because I can’t stand the place. Although in December, during my last week of classes, three days before Christmas, I sat in my archaeology class on the corner of the top floor of that building (number 13), and we could, quite literally, hear the wind howling around the building. There’s no word for it but howling... it was amazing. And then one leaf lazed by the window, floating upwards on the wind instead of falling downwards as leaves are supposed to do when they leave a tree. I will say, other than the floating leaves, the view from the top floor is pretty good... Invalides, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Chappelle... BUT not nearly as cool as the Pantheon outside the Sorbonne, and thus the building still all around bites.
After all, Miss, this is France...
~B
~Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
I start classes tomorrow, which should be interesting, since two of my classes are upper-level classes at the French university.
Also, all my classes this semester will be at the French U.– last semester I had a grammar class with other Americans, taught in French, but still– it felt like a copout to me. This semester, though, I am rolling hardcore.
Somehow I managed to schedule my four classes not only in four different buildings in Paris, but in four different arrondissements. Arrondissements (Awhh-roan-deese-mon) are districts– they are the ZIP CODES of Paris, which means I am going to be doing an awful lot of commuting throughout the day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But this semester I only have to go to Tolbiac (the third-world internment-camp-looking university still littered with remnants of last year’s riots) once a week for one class, instead of almost every day like last semester. This does two things in my life: 1) improves my general sense of well-being and outlook on life, since I no longer have to look at that disgusting place every day and 2) cuts my time on the Metro by nearly half. Furthermore, instead of taking classes there, my classes this semester are at:
1) The Sorbonne. Can words express how cool that is? The Sorbonne. Say it, let it roll off your tongue. The oldest U. in Europe. I’m going from studying in a building built in the 1970's by the lowest bidder, with nicotine-coated windows and graffiti on the walls that says things like "THE REVOLUTION BEGINS WITH YOU" and "MUSIC WILL ROCK THE NATION" to a building that no one even dares mess with because the place is, oh, you know, on par with Notre Dame on the list of Oldest Buildings In Paris. The Sorbonne is basically the most beautiful building I have ever seen. It’s around the corner from the Pantheon, which is awesome, in the heart of the Quartier Latin, surrounded by libraries, bookstores, papeterie, and panini bars that all have student discounts to the nth degree. It’s a giant square building, with a huge courtyard in the middle, all cobbled. Standing in the courtyard at this time of year is like stepping back into another century. Imagine it– I’m trying to check the room of my classes, so I have to find an obscure hallway on the fourth floor of the Hugo wing (named after guess who?) where the fliers are posted on the wall. I have to show ID to get in; it’s how they keep tourists out, which means that the doors are guarded by 2 or 3 gendarmerie, the policemen with the round flat hats and the old-fashioned looking rifles. The doors to the place are wood, at least ten inches thick, with iron hinges and designs across them that stretch twice as tall as me. Through the doors is the courtyard, all the wings look into this central area, paved with round gray cobblestones. To enter the actual building, I choose my door, each marked with the name of a famous Frenchman– "Hugo" or "Dumas" or "Richelieu." Climbing the ten or so marble steps to the (smaller this time) door, I realize that this was what I always envisioned studying in France would be. Winding marble staircase with a wrought iron banister on my left, window looking out to the Pantheon on the right, inlaid wood hallway laid out before me. I have never seen anything more beautiful or more academic in my life. It just begs me to get out my ballpoint pens and square French paper and prepare myself for notes and lectures and being astute, collegiate, scholastical, and educated. I wish I wore glasses, just to add to the feeling of academia. The hallways glow golden with the soft light, so different from the harsh, often-burned out fluorescent bulbs at Tolbiac, in the center of Chinatown, where I studied last semester. It’s warm inside, enough that I ditch my scarf and coat while I meander the halls, until a professorial-looking man stops me to ask if I need directions. Forgetting that feeling educated does not mean being educated, I asked for directions to the bureau I needed, and he helped me out in true professorial form. I checked my class times, then walked back downstairs and into the courtyard. I had re-bundled up just before exiting the building, but stepping back into the courtyard with the wind whipping my hair into a panic and the grey Paris sky over me, all I could think was that this is what all University campuses everywhere ought to look like, because if they did, the world would be an awful lot more stoked to be educated. And this is coming from a girl who goes to Emory University, Atlanta, GA– arguably THE most beautiful college campus in the US.
2) Michelet Building. This is an archaeology library on Rue Michelet somewhere just on the Sixieme side of the Latin Quarter, the place where I took the oral exam the day I returned to Paris in January, with the winding halls and the hardwood floors and the cracked plaster walls. It looks like the Egyptian library from the new version of The Mummy– the one with Brendan Frasier. (Which reminds me that I love that movie and have realized of late that I have a penchant for B-rate movies with B-rate actors, but that is neither here nor there.) It’s next to the jardin de Marco Polo, which is this beautiful hidden little island of green in the middle of the Quartier Latin. No one pays any attention to it because the expansive Jardins du Luxembourg are so close, which makes it even cooler because this one is so unknown. One of my favorite fountains (a far distant second to the Fontaine des Medicis) is in the center of the jardin, which is really more like a median that has been highly decorated and beautified. Anyway, the Michelet building looks out onto that. The Michelet building also exemplifies Frenchness quite well. The second time I was there (just to check my class times), the stairwell doors were shut (of course, there is no elevator) and there was a sign on the door that read "Escalier Interdit au Public"– stairs forbidden to the public. Great, now how am I supposed to get off the rez-de-chaussee, the bottom floor? I stood there staring at the door for a moment, wondering what to do, then went to the welcome desk, this terribly unwelcoming corner of the foyer where you have to speak and listen through a glass window to the person on the other side. I have a hard enough time making myself understood, I don’t need glass to further inhibit the process, thanks. Anyway, I ask the old man how to get to the second floor, and he looks at my like I am crazy, and then says (in French), "Why Mademoiselle, it is just through that door!" and points to the one I had been standing in front of, the one marked, "forbidden." Either the forbidden was just a suggestion, or I am not the public... But either way, it was so typically French.
3) Maison des Mines. A part of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways), the premiere architectural school of France. The Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees is a school I studied in art history classes back in the US... it’s kind of a big deal, and rather ironic given my predilection for jumping off bridges.
4)Tolbiac. In the heart of Chinatown, far away from everything except sketchy men at fruit stands and discount shoe stores. This should not be considered Paris. The building, as previously mentioned, has a metal gate at the front that can (and has been) rolled shut to lock students in... or out... during riots, sit-ins, and protests. It’s where I got gum on my jeans and had to cut a 4-inch square out of the left ankle of my favorite pair of pants. It’s where the student riots of 1968 (basically the French equivalent of Kent State, only WAY WAY more hardcore) were centered. It’s where I was asked to join the Communist party. And the Socialist party. In the same day.
If I seem a little hostile, it’s because I can’t stand the place. Although in December, during my last week of classes, three days before Christmas, I sat in my archaeology class on the corner of the top floor of that building (number 13), and we could, quite literally, hear the wind howling around the building. There’s no word for it but howling... it was amazing. And then one leaf lazed by the window, floating upwards on the wind instead of falling downwards as leaves are supposed to do when they leave a tree. I will say, other than the floating leaves, the view from the top floor is pretty good... Invalides, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Chappelle... BUT not nearly as cool as the Pantheon outside the Sorbonne, and thus the building still all around bites.
After all, Miss, this is France...
~B
Monday, January 29, 2007
Just when you think you’ve come to grips with your own stupidity (or perhaps ineptitude is a better word) at the French language, someone comes along and convinces you that, just maybe, there is a chance for you after all.
Probably I should be grateful for the encouragement, but since I think it will be not long until I find myself in some other uncomprehending hole dug by my own misinterpretation of the situation and/or language, I am a little loath to get my hopes up.
The class that I missed the final for was called Techniques des Arts Plastiques– it’s an art history class, but I am not going to attempt to translate the title, because the concept of "Plastic Art" has not really reached the majority of the US population yet. (Hint: it has less to do with dear Uncle Chink’s macrame and more to do with Rubens, Durer, Warhol, Vermeer, and the unknown mosaicist of "La Bataille d’Alexandre" at the Maison du Faune in Pompei.) It’s my second favorite class of college, after the first-semester frosh class for which I peaked with my synopsis of Eminem as a modern-day Elvis.
The writing has all been downhill after that.
Anyway, Techniques des Arts Plastiques was amazing, and even though I didn’t do well on the midterm, I loved the class. My TA was this gorgeous French woman who would come flying into class 10 minutes late in the most elegantly chic but simultaneously trendy European outfits with Parisian accessories; she had this fantastic red overcoat that seemed to match whatever she wore, and though she was only about 5'5", she still wore flats almost always, really cute ones with adorable fancy tights underneath. She got to teach classes at the Louvre and was the reason I discovered just how much cooler the Louvre is at 9am on a Thursday than, you know, on a Monday afternoon when the Musee d’Orsay is closed. AND while the class was taking the midterm, she sat at the front of the classroom studying for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), which made her, somehow, even cooler (though I had no idea she spoke any English at all).
Basically I wanted to be her.
So this week she sent my grade to Emory, my school in the US, and– now, get this– it is actually pretty good. I only had one grade for the class– the midterm (since I missed the final and have not done anything about it yet), but she gave me a pretty decent-for-being-in-another-language grade. AND on the comments section (I feel like the parent of a kindergarten student bragging because the teacher has written on the kid’s report card that he is good at blend ladders, only I’m bragging on myself, which somehow makes it even lamer) she wrote that "Blair speaks very good French. She is attentive and interested in the material, but her writing is weaker than her comprehension."
She said I speak good French!
The coolest Parisienne I have ever met thinks I speak good French!
In other news, this weekend I found myself contemplating buying, I kid you not, a black pair of fingerless gloves, made out of something cheaper than but vaguely resemblant of leather. I know for a fact that I would never have actually bought them– I am too clumsy to spend 20Euro on a pair of gloves– not even a pair, but half a pair since the fingers were somewhere else. Anyway, I was trying them on in Pimkie, but they were clipped together, so I had my hands kind of clenched in front of me to fit both on at the same time, looking fierce, as people who wear black fingerless faux leather gloves are wont to do, trying to examine how they look and whether I could pull off the "Yes, I am wearing these bad boys and if you mess with me I will bash your face in" look necessary to own them, in Paris or elsewhere. But the thing is that leather gloves are (who knew?) extremely difficult to put on (actually, we all knew it– it’s probably the sole reason OJ Simpson is wandering golf courses all over the US right now instead of chilling in the Pen). Anyway, I wrestled them on (even more difficult since they were clipped together), and then was standing there practicing my tough face, when my friend joined me at the mirror and said, without pausing in her search for the perfect pair of shimmery black pumps, "Oh, those totally look like you."
"Thanks," I responded, without really thinking about it, until I realized two things:
A) There is a very subtle but important difference between "Those look great on you" and "Those look like you." Usually the second implies the first, but in this case I do not think they were necessarily indicative of the same sentiment on her part.
2) I don’t actually know if it is a compliment that black fingerless leather gloves are enough my style that my best friend in Paris didn’t even flinch as she saw me flexing in front of the store mirror.
Oh, the worst part? They had knuckle holes.
If the glove fits...
Blair
P.S. Today I was grocery-shopping at Monoprix/Inno, and as I walked into the section that used to be chocolate, I noticed a butcher block-type of stand sitting in the middle of the store with some kind of metal apparatus holding an entire animal’s leg on it. The machine was clamped around the ankle of either a deer or a cow (is it bad I couldn’t tell the difference?), and the whole thing, all the way up to the thigh, was just sitting there, ready to be cut apart as people decided they wanted some. The ankle part still had the hoof (how I deduced deer or cow), but above the... knee was just raw meat. As I walked by, I heard someone blurt, "Gross, man," in a terribly Valley-Girl-or-Surfer-Boy voice, and I immediately looked around to see who it had been, until I realized... it was me. Something about living in a country where I don’t think people can understand me, and now I start talking to myself out loud in the section formerly known as candy at Inno Plaza? Further reasoning for how convinced I have become that, upon re-entry into the US, I am going to go back to the world of the peaceful and be a veggie again.
Probably I should be grateful for the encouragement, but since I think it will be not long until I find myself in some other uncomprehending hole dug by my own misinterpretation of the situation and/or language, I am a little loath to get my hopes up.
The class that I missed the final for was called Techniques des Arts Plastiques– it’s an art history class, but I am not going to attempt to translate the title, because the concept of "Plastic Art" has not really reached the majority of the US population yet. (Hint: it has less to do with dear Uncle Chink’s macrame and more to do with Rubens, Durer, Warhol, Vermeer, and the unknown mosaicist of "La Bataille d’Alexandre" at the Maison du Faune in Pompei.) It’s my second favorite class of college, after the first-semester frosh class for which I peaked with my synopsis of Eminem as a modern-day Elvis.
The writing has all been downhill after that.
Anyway, Techniques des Arts Plastiques was amazing, and even though I didn’t do well on the midterm, I loved the class. My TA was this gorgeous French woman who would come flying into class 10 minutes late in the most elegantly chic but simultaneously trendy European outfits with Parisian accessories; she had this fantastic red overcoat that seemed to match whatever she wore, and though she was only about 5'5", she still wore flats almost always, really cute ones with adorable fancy tights underneath. She got to teach classes at the Louvre and was the reason I discovered just how much cooler the Louvre is at 9am on a Thursday than, you know, on a Monday afternoon when the Musee d’Orsay is closed. AND while the class was taking the midterm, she sat at the front of the classroom studying for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), which made her, somehow, even cooler (though I had no idea she spoke any English at all).
Basically I wanted to be her.
So this week she sent my grade to Emory, my school in the US, and– now, get this– it is actually pretty good. I only had one grade for the class– the midterm (since I missed the final and have not done anything about it yet), but she gave me a pretty decent-for-being-in-another-language grade. AND on the comments section (I feel like the parent of a kindergarten student bragging because the teacher has written on the kid’s report card that he is good at blend ladders, only I’m bragging on myself, which somehow makes it even lamer) she wrote that "Blair speaks very good French. She is attentive and interested in the material, but her writing is weaker than her comprehension."
She said I speak good French!
The coolest Parisienne I have ever met thinks I speak good French!
In other news, this weekend I found myself contemplating buying, I kid you not, a black pair of fingerless gloves, made out of something cheaper than but vaguely resemblant of leather. I know for a fact that I would never have actually bought them– I am too clumsy to spend 20Euro on a pair of gloves– not even a pair, but half a pair since the fingers were somewhere else. Anyway, I was trying them on in Pimkie, but they were clipped together, so I had my hands kind of clenched in front of me to fit both on at the same time, looking fierce, as people who wear black fingerless faux leather gloves are wont to do, trying to examine how they look and whether I could pull off the "Yes, I am wearing these bad boys and if you mess with me I will bash your face in" look necessary to own them, in Paris or elsewhere. But the thing is that leather gloves are (who knew?) extremely difficult to put on (actually, we all knew it– it’s probably the sole reason OJ Simpson is wandering golf courses all over the US right now instead of chilling in the Pen). Anyway, I wrestled them on (even more difficult since they were clipped together), and then was standing there practicing my tough face, when my friend joined me at the mirror and said, without pausing in her search for the perfect pair of shimmery black pumps, "Oh, those totally look like you."
"Thanks," I responded, without really thinking about it, until I realized two things:
A) There is a very subtle but important difference between "Those look great on you" and "Those look like you." Usually the second implies the first, but in this case I do not think they were necessarily indicative of the same sentiment on her part.
2) I don’t actually know if it is a compliment that black fingerless leather gloves are enough my style that my best friend in Paris didn’t even flinch as she saw me flexing in front of the store mirror.
Oh, the worst part? They had knuckle holes.
If the glove fits...
Blair
P.S. Today I was grocery-shopping at Monoprix/Inno, and as I walked into the section that used to be chocolate, I noticed a butcher block-type of stand sitting in the middle of the store with some kind of metal apparatus holding an entire animal’s leg on it. The machine was clamped around the ankle of either a deer or a cow (is it bad I couldn’t tell the difference?), and the whole thing, all the way up to the thigh, was just sitting there, ready to be cut apart as people decided they wanted some. The ankle part still had the hoof (how I deduced deer or cow), but above the... knee was just raw meat. As I walked by, I heard someone blurt, "Gross, man," in a terribly Valley-Girl-or-Surfer-Boy voice, and I immediately looked around to see who it had been, until I realized... it was me. Something about living in a country where I don’t think people can understand me, and now I start talking to myself out loud in the section formerly known as candy at Inno Plaza? Further reasoning for how convinced I have become that, upon re-entry into the US, I am going to go back to the world of the peaceful and be a veggie again.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Conversation of the week, as had by another expat and me at Bistro Romain, Paris Iere:
Laura: "...So then Jared got mad, I guess, because Bilbo Baggins had insulted him in Jane--"
Me: :Why in the world would anyone get mad because Elijah Wood had insulted you in a magazine? I mean, he doesn't even date anyone famous."
Laura: "I don't know, you'll have to ask Jared Leto. So anyway, he got mad when he saw the Hobbit at some after-party, and that's when he tried to strangle him."
Me: "It's too bad that didn't work out for him."
Laura, horrified: "DIDN'T WORK?! But... But... if it had, there would be no more hairy-footed Hobbits! Plus, I hope you realize you are now on the side of a gout-infected strangler."
~**~
Last night (Thursday) my friends and I went out. Going out in when it is freezing cold is difficult, and being in a huge city makes it even worse. I’ve been out a few times since coming to Paris, but last night... might have been the craziest. We went to this club on the Champs-Elysees... Well, actually it was a party for international students at Planet Hollywood.
During a Justin Timberlake song, I danced with this guy who asked me where I was from in French. I told him in French, and then asked where he was from. His answer?
"I am from dee United States of America as well, but I leeve een Paris now." And all I could think was, "My foot you are from the USA." Not only does no one there say "United States Of America," but the guy had an accent like Jacques Cousteau.
At one point, the DJ played this American rap song by... I forget, I think one of Eminem’s posse, but the song begins with someone saying, "Everybody put your hands in the air for Detroit," or something, and the song is all about the wonder that is Detroit. The song never really took off that much in America, but they love it here. Perhaps because they have no idea where in the world Detroit is, or that it is basically the grossest place ever in the world. I’ve never even been there and I know that. At one point my friend Rachel and I were trying to get rid of these two awkward french guys that kept trying to dance with us– I was trying to tell mine that we both had boyfriends (obviously a lie) and she was trying to tell hers that she had promised she wouldn’t abandon me, her friend, that night. But instead of saying friend, I am pretty sure she used the slang-y "petite amie," which would insinuate that not only are we friends, but also lovers. Because all of a sudden, one of the guys says, "well, do you want to kiss her then?"
"Ahh... I think I need some air," she said, pulling me, mouth agape, off the dance floor. I mean, how do you respond to a question like that?
Despite the slight sketchiness of moments like that, it was fun times, the kind that you come home from with ringing ears, smelling of smoke and sweat and dance floor, exhausted but too wide awake to sleep. Somehow I missed the Noctilien bus, and the Metro was closed by the time we left the club around 3am, so I shared a cab home with Rachel, which was only 5Euros from the Champs. I probably could walk there and just never knew it.
But the highlight of the night came just before we left, when The Weather Girls’ "It’s Rainin’ Men" came on. This is one of the songs I remember most clearly from high school dances– they always played it, and whenever they did, Rachel, Emma, and I would search each other out on the dance floor, no matter where we were, push our way to the middle, and dance it up like wild girls. So when it came on last night, I found myself dancing the exact same way, singing at the top of my lungs with them, and for a second I forgot I was 21 years old and in Paris, at a club, full of people I don’t know, instead of at a 17-year-old high school senior at a dance at a country club somewhere in Wake County.
Learned at the Erasmus party:
*My hair, when properly sprayed, straightened, and pomaded to within an inch of its dyed little life will stay put and not go flat after a night of dancing and wearing a hat to and from the club.
*My eyeliner will not.
*If you open your mouth and say, "Heyyyy," they won’t even ask for ID proving you aren’t French.
*Just because it looks like juice, if it is being served for 100Euro a bottle, there is probably something else in there too.
*The French may have a Planet Hollywood, but it’s full of stuff they would never understand– a blue Power Ranger falling from the sky, the Flintstone car over the DJ platform, giant ant models from "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids," and this crazy mirror shaped like a pair of sunglasses that made me think I had walked directly out of 2007 Paris and into 1985 Ridgefield.
Takin’ it to the bridge,
B
Laura: "...So then Jared got mad, I guess, because Bilbo Baggins had insulted him in Jane--"
Me: :Why in the world would anyone get mad because Elijah Wood had insulted you in a magazine? I mean, he doesn't even date anyone famous."
Laura: "I don't know, you'll have to ask Jared Leto. So anyway, he got mad when he saw the Hobbit at some after-party, and that's when he tried to strangle him."
Me: "It's too bad that didn't work out for him."
Laura, horrified: "DIDN'T WORK?! But... But... if it had, there would be no more hairy-footed Hobbits! Plus, I hope you realize you are now on the side of a gout-infected strangler."
~**~
Last night (Thursday) my friends and I went out. Going out in when it is freezing cold is difficult, and being in a huge city makes it even worse. I’ve been out a few times since coming to Paris, but last night... might have been the craziest. We went to this club on the Champs-Elysees... Well, actually it was a party for international students at Planet Hollywood.
During a Justin Timberlake song, I danced with this guy who asked me where I was from in French. I told him in French, and then asked where he was from. His answer?
"I am from dee United States of America as well, but I leeve een Paris now." And all I could think was, "My foot you are from the USA." Not only does no one there say "United States Of America," but the guy had an accent like Jacques Cousteau.
At one point, the DJ played this American rap song by... I forget, I think one of Eminem’s posse, but the song begins with someone saying, "Everybody put your hands in the air for Detroit," or something, and the song is all about the wonder that is Detroit. The song never really took off that much in America, but they love it here. Perhaps because they have no idea where in the world Detroit is, or that it is basically the grossest place ever in the world. I’ve never even been there and I know that. At one point my friend Rachel and I were trying to get rid of these two awkward french guys that kept trying to dance with us– I was trying to tell mine that we both had boyfriends (obviously a lie) and she was trying to tell hers that she had promised she wouldn’t abandon me, her friend, that night. But instead of saying friend, I am pretty sure she used the slang-y "petite amie," which would insinuate that not only are we friends, but also lovers. Because all of a sudden, one of the guys says, "well, do you want to kiss her then?"
"Ahh... I think I need some air," she said, pulling me, mouth agape, off the dance floor. I mean, how do you respond to a question like that?
Despite the slight sketchiness of moments like that, it was fun times, the kind that you come home from with ringing ears, smelling of smoke and sweat and dance floor, exhausted but too wide awake to sleep. Somehow I missed the Noctilien bus, and the Metro was closed by the time we left the club around 3am, so I shared a cab home with Rachel, which was only 5Euros from the Champs. I probably could walk there and just never knew it.
But the highlight of the night came just before we left, when The Weather Girls’ "It’s Rainin’ Men" came on. This is one of the songs I remember most clearly from high school dances– they always played it, and whenever they did, Rachel, Emma, and I would search each other out on the dance floor, no matter where we were, push our way to the middle, and dance it up like wild girls. So when it came on last night, I found myself dancing the exact same way, singing at the top of my lungs with them, and for a second I forgot I was 21 years old and in Paris, at a club, full of people I don’t know, instead of at a 17-year-old high school senior at a dance at a country club somewhere in Wake County.
Learned at the Erasmus party:
*My hair, when properly sprayed, straightened, and pomaded to within an inch of its dyed little life will stay put and not go flat after a night of dancing and wearing a hat to and from the club.
*My eyeliner will not.
*If you open your mouth and say, "Heyyyy," they won’t even ask for ID proving you aren’t French.
*Just because it looks like juice, if it is being served for 100Euro a bottle, there is probably something else in there too.
*The French may have a Planet Hollywood, but it’s full of stuff they would never understand– a blue Power Ranger falling from the sky, the Flintstone car over the DJ platform, giant ant models from "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids," and this crazy mirror shaped like a pair of sunglasses that made me think I had walked directly out of 2007 Paris and into 1985 Ridgefield.
Takin’ it to the bridge,
B
Well. There you go then, if you want to know what it feels like to be stupid, move to a foreign country.
No, that is not quite right. Because I recognize that I am not stupid. So I should say, if you want to know what it feels like to have everyone else in a room think you are stupid, move to another country. Because the thing is that it is way worse to have everyone thinking you are stupid– because in that situation, you are completely aware that they think you have fewer brain cells than Paris Hilton, but the kicker is that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Whereas if one were actually stupid, one would not be aware that the overwhelming majority of people know it.
Every time I think I have made it to a point in my life where I could never again feel stupid– every single time, what happens? Something dumb.
What happened this time? I went to take my archaeology final tonight– it was a huge classroom with all the archaeology kids in it, probably close to 200 of us. I flash my student ID as I walk in, but no one is really checking it, it’s just some kind of thing that they pretend they do to keep you from cheating. Anyway, I go in and take my pick of seats, sitting close to the front, on the end of a row, and pretty soon this girl comes in and starts talking to me at top speed.
"Ahh, pardon?" I say, trying my best to look like the reason I am asking is because I didn’t hear her and not because I have no idea what she just said to me.
"Yardel yardel grefluckenspiegmeisterhaus?" she says.
"Was that even French?" I ask. No, wait, I just thought that part. Living in a foreign country, it is necessary to have two default answers: one for yes or no questions, one for things that you think are questions but aren’t really sure, but you know you must respond to them anyway. My two are, respectively, "oui," and "je pense," meaning "yes," and "I think so..." I pulled out my "I think so" on this chick, and it worked, because she left. But then she came back, and this time I knew I was in trouble.
"Grefluckenspiegmeisterhaus!" she says with much more surety this time around, moving toward my seat and beginning to take off her coat.
"Oh no," I think to myself, "she wants to fight me!" In any other situation, the fact that this was the first thing to cross my mind should really say something about my psyche or something, but for the moment all I thought was "Dang it, how am I supposed to take her down in peserk boots?!" So I stand up, hoping to intimidate her by sheer stature, but alas, I stand up, and instead of throwing the first punch or cowering back in fear and running away like a scared french poodle, she just sat down in my seat.
"Darn it," I think to myself, "I think I just lost." I don’t know what I thought I lost, since I had no idea what was happening, but she looked so smug and for all the world like she had just beaten me at something that I decided she must have, which was awful, because I didn’t even know if I should be running away. So I gathered my belongings and went outside the door for just a second, where she had gone a moment before. As I stuck my head out the door of the amphitheatre, this proctor/hall monitor woman pulled me out and shut the door of the classroom behind us. I didn’t actually know if she was a hall monitor, by the way, I just deduced that later on because she happened to have this heinous beige coat with fake fur trim kind of similar to the hall monitor that checked my student ID as I walked in. It seems kind of an odd work uniform, but that’s not the point. She pulls me outside and points out this huge sheet with all of the student’s names written on it, assigning us all seats. Only, of course, I had no idea the French would be so weird about that. I should have known, they did indeed invent the dinner party. I check for my name and of course, like clockwork, it is not there. By this point, the hall monitor in the bad coat is of the mindset that I am simple, and she very slowly asks for my student ID. I hand it to her, making sure it is the right one (I have three, all with different names on them), because she thinks perhaps that I do not know alphabetical order and thus can’t find my own name. I wanted to tell her that I spent the better part of high school sorting books for money at a library and that I probably know the Dewey Decimal system better than anyone else in Paris, but I kept my mouth shut for obvious reasons. Mostly the fact that I had no idea how to say any of that. And also because being a librarian doesn’t do much for you in the way of cool points. So she searches for my name and also finds nothing. I probably looked panicky by this point, since she had shut the door to the room after we left it, and at Emory there are all these weird rules about coming in after a final starts, so in a valiant effort to calm me down, she tells me, very slowly while making sure to make eye contact, that because my name is not on the list, I need to be sure to write "foreign student" in the secret anonymous part of the test booklet, in French so they know what it says.
"Ok," I respond, not really caring about the foreign student thing, "but more importantly, where do I sit?"
And she says, in a fit of unrestrained typical frenchness, "Anywhere you want."
Obviously that is not going to work, lady, I just tried that and got kicked out of my chair by that chick over there, who I totally could have taken if it had come to blows. Or thumb-wrestling. But I keep that thought to myself, because I am not sure if the French even do thumb-wrestling. Instead of saying that, I just kind of looked around the room helplessly (she had let us both back in by now, and we were standing at the front of this stadium seated room which held 200 french 20-somethings, 3 really ridiculously handsome french professors, a hall monitor who thought I was simple, and me, the girl who wanted to yell, "I MADE THE DEAN’S LIST AT EMORY UNIVERSITY!" but for the fact that I thought it would only cement in their minds my simplemindedness), then looked at her helplessly and batted my eyes (before I realized that this was a woman old enough to be my mother, and no amount of eye-batting would help this situation) and finally she goes, "Over there, perhaps, or here..." motioning next to the girl who I almost had to fight. Oh, yes, like I am going to go sit next to her now, Miss Already-Checked-The-Seating-Roster. So I go to the middle of the class somewhere and pick a seat that I hope is not going to belong to anyone else, and try to focus on the test. Probably not very well, but that had less to do with the seating than it did with the aforementioned professors and the fact that I am not, contrary to whatever I may tell myself, French.
Also, it’s become cheek-numbingly, eye-wateringly cold. Way below zero, and I have no idea how to handle it– today I wore heeled boots all day just because it meant my legs would be warmer. And tights under my jeans. Any weather that gets me in tights under pants is pretty insane. Despite the fact that the only exposed skin on my body was my cheeks and nose, I found myself freezing every time I set foot outside today, but being inside doesn’t really help much... in my room I have the radiator, but the room where we took the final was freezing. I had to pause to think as often as I paused to rub my hands together in a vain effort to increase the circulation in my nearly-numb fingers. I don’t mind it the way I do January everywhere else in the world though; there’s something still romantic about Paris in the cold, as if this is the way this city is supposed to be, all grays and silver and sepia, which is the way Paris was meant to be seen. I mean, think about it, how many full-color photos of Paris have you ever seen (this blog excepted)? None. That is because this city is, quite naturally, black and white. Or perhaps sepia and beige, with the occasional warm golden streetlamp on the corner.
To not leave you on a lownote, I got my ticket for next week’s concert in the mail today. A week from Friday, and I will be at the Bataclan, in arguably the second worst neighborhood in Paris (after Pigalle, the place I went to see that American concert in October), rocking my face off to the coolest, most ridiculous band of people too old to be rockstars... ever.
Wish me luck.
~B
No, that is not quite right. Because I recognize that I am not stupid. So I should say, if you want to know what it feels like to have everyone else in a room think you are stupid, move to another country. Because the thing is that it is way worse to have everyone thinking you are stupid– because in that situation, you are completely aware that they think you have fewer brain cells than Paris Hilton, but the kicker is that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Whereas if one were actually stupid, one would not be aware that the overwhelming majority of people know it.
Every time I think I have made it to a point in my life where I could never again feel stupid– every single time, what happens? Something dumb.
What happened this time? I went to take my archaeology final tonight– it was a huge classroom with all the archaeology kids in it, probably close to 200 of us. I flash my student ID as I walk in, but no one is really checking it, it’s just some kind of thing that they pretend they do to keep you from cheating. Anyway, I go in and take my pick of seats, sitting close to the front, on the end of a row, and pretty soon this girl comes in and starts talking to me at top speed.
"Ahh, pardon?" I say, trying my best to look like the reason I am asking is because I didn’t hear her and not because I have no idea what she just said to me.
"Yardel yardel grefluckenspiegmeisterhaus?" she says.
"Was that even French?" I ask. No, wait, I just thought that part. Living in a foreign country, it is necessary to have two default answers: one for yes or no questions, one for things that you think are questions but aren’t really sure, but you know you must respond to them anyway. My two are, respectively, "oui," and "je pense," meaning "yes," and "I think so..." I pulled out my "I think so" on this chick, and it worked, because she left. But then she came back, and this time I knew I was in trouble.
"Grefluckenspiegmeisterhaus!" she says with much more surety this time around, moving toward my seat and beginning to take off her coat.
"Oh no," I think to myself, "she wants to fight me!" In any other situation, the fact that this was the first thing to cross my mind should really say something about my psyche or something, but for the moment all I thought was "Dang it, how am I supposed to take her down in peserk boots?!" So I stand up, hoping to intimidate her by sheer stature, but alas, I stand up, and instead of throwing the first punch or cowering back in fear and running away like a scared french poodle, she just sat down in my seat.
"Darn it," I think to myself, "I think I just lost." I don’t know what I thought I lost, since I had no idea what was happening, but she looked so smug and for all the world like she had just beaten me at something that I decided she must have, which was awful, because I didn’t even know if I should be running away. So I gathered my belongings and went outside the door for just a second, where she had gone a moment before. As I stuck my head out the door of the amphitheatre, this proctor/hall monitor woman pulled me out and shut the door of the classroom behind us. I didn’t actually know if she was a hall monitor, by the way, I just deduced that later on because she happened to have this heinous beige coat with fake fur trim kind of similar to the hall monitor that checked my student ID as I walked in. It seems kind of an odd work uniform, but that’s not the point. She pulls me outside and points out this huge sheet with all of the student’s names written on it, assigning us all seats. Only, of course, I had no idea the French would be so weird about that. I should have known, they did indeed invent the dinner party. I check for my name and of course, like clockwork, it is not there. By this point, the hall monitor in the bad coat is of the mindset that I am simple, and she very slowly asks for my student ID. I hand it to her, making sure it is the right one (I have three, all with different names on them), because she thinks perhaps that I do not know alphabetical order and thus can’t find my own name. I wanted to tell her that I spent the better part of high school sorting books for money at a library and that I probably know the Dewey Decimal system better than anyone else in Paris, but I kept my mouth shut for obvious reasons. Mostly the fact that I had no idea how to say any of that. And also because being a librarian doesn’t do much for you in the way of cool points. So she searches for my name and also finds nothing. I probably looked panicky by this point, since she had shut the door to the room after we left it, and at Emory there are all these weird rules about coming in after a final starts, so in a valiant effort to calm me down, she tells me, very slowly while making sure to make eye contact, that because my name is not on the list, I need to be sure to write "foreign student" in the secret anonymous part of the test booklet, in French so they know what it says.
"Ok," I respond, not really caring about the foreign student thing, "but more importantly, where do I sit?"
And she says, in a fit of unrestrained typical frenchness, "Anywhere you want."
Obviously that is not going to work, lady, I just tried that and got kicked out of my chair by that chick over there, who I totally could have taken if it had come to blows. Or thumb-wrestling. But I keep that thought to myself, because I am not sure if the French even do thumb-wrestling. Instead of saying that, I just kind of looked around the room helplessly (she had let us both back in by now, and we were standing at the front of this stadium seated room which held 200 french 20-somethings, 3 really ridiculously handsome french professors, a hall monitor who thought I was simple, and me, the girl who wanted to yell, "I MADE THE DEAN’S LIST AT EMORY UNIVERSITY!" but for the fact that I thought it would only cement in their minds my simplemindedness), then looked at her helplessly and batted my eyes (before I realized that this was a woman old enough to be my mother, and no amount of eye-batting would help this situation) and finally she goes, "Over there, perhaps, or here..." motioning next to the girl who I almost had to fight. Oh, yes, like I am going to go sit next to her now, Miss Already-Checked-The-Seating-Roster. So I go to the middle of the class somewhere and pick a seat that I hope is not going to belong to anyone else, and try to focus on the test. Probably not very well, but that had less to do with the seating than it did with the aforementioned professors and the fact that I am not, contrary to whatever I may tell myself, French.
Also, it’s become cheek-numbingly, eye-wateringly cold. Way below zero, and I have no idea how to handle it– today I wore heeled boots all day just because it meant my legs would be warmer. And tights under my jeans. Any weather that gets me in tights under pants is pretty insane. Despite the fact that the only exposed skin on my body was my cheeks and nose, I found myself freezing every time I set foot outside today, but being inside doesn’t really help much... in my room I have the radiator, but the room where we took the final was freezing. I had to pause to think as often as I paused to rub my hands together in a vain effort to increase the circulation in my nearly-numb fingers. I don’t mind it the way I do January everywhere else in the world though; there’s something still romantic about Paris in the cold, as if this is the way this city is supposed to be, all grays and silver and sepia, which is the way Paris was meant to be seen. I mean, think about it, how many full-color photos of Paris have you ever seen (this blog excepted)? None. That is because this city is, quite naturally, black and white. Or perhaps sepia and beige, with the occasional warm golden streetlamp on the corner.
To not leave you on a lownote, I got my ticket for next week’s concert in the mail today. A week from Friday, and I will be at the Bataclan, in arguably the second worst neighborhood in Paris (after Pigalle, the place I went to see that American concert in October), rocking my face off to the coolest, most ridiculous band of people too old to be rockstars... ever.
Wish me luck.
~B
Friday, January 26, 2007
The last few days here have been bitterly cold, which is fitting for Paris in January, and so I don’t really mind. I don’t suppose it’s really any colder than it gets in, like, Kentucky, but way colder than Raleigh and Atl. Even with my Coat to End All Coats, it’s still been pretty wicked. The kind of weather where you will wear stiletto boots all day long just because it means your leg is covered over your jeans up to the knee. People walk around with their scarves pulled up over their mouths, and I find myself wearing my Uncle Chink hat more and more (for racially sound definition of Uncle Chink and his hats, please see entry from earlier in January sometime), mainly because not only does it keep my head warm but it also keeps my hair out of my face, so I look less like Jade Puget and more like a 21-year-old girl who happens to have hair vaguely similar to his. Sans hat, my hair is not only in my eyes (because the way it is cut that is kind of to be expected) but also in my mouth and all over my face. But the thing is that it’s only really cold because the wind chill is so far below zero– people walk around looking at the ground in front of them, because if you look up your eyes start to water and your nose runs even more. I still love it. Babies wrapped until they look more like loaves of bread in their strollers, kids who you could roll to school in their thick parkas, businesswomen on bicycles with their scarf tail flying out behind them, trying to change gears in thick winter gloves... love it.
But life is still, as always, ridiculous. I think the person I am in Paris is so different from the person I was in the US– perhaps this will be a lasting change, or perhaps it is just a result of being a foreigner and existing in my second language all the time. I found out today I missed one of my finals. Oh, yes, I rater-ed it completely. I assumed it would be during normal class time, but of course I was wrong, and today when I showed up to take a different one, I happened to notice a sign posted with the exam times. Suffice it to say, I had no exam today. One yesterday and one tomorrow, but the problem is that the one I missed is for a class that I only have one grade for, and to get credit at Emory, I obviously have to have more than that. So this could be quite bad, but as I was getting back on the Metro to go to my program center to tell them, I couldn’t compute it in my head. This situation should have a lot of gravity– I potentially could have just failed that class. But all I could think was "this would never have happened to me in the US. And if it had, I would have gone to pieces." But here, it’s just, well, to be expected. Not because I am irresponsible– this one I just misunderstood. But it’s expected because the French are so different from us in everything they do that I just had no idea I had to go to some out-of-the-way little bulletin board to find out when my exams were. No one told me, and I’m not claiming they should have. I am living in Paris on my own, there ought to be some level of self-reliance, right? But alas, I screwed up. And the really ironic part is that it’s for a class I actually love– one of my two favorites since coming to college. Which says a lot, but too bad it doesn’t count for much when it turns out that half my grade for that class is a zero.
Tomorrow I go back to the University to see if there is something I can do about it, a makeup date or something... this is going to be awkward, I can tell already.
But honestly, the academic firsts in this country for me are just... astounding. First failing grade, first pop midterm, first missed final... It makes me sound like a real winner, eh? But it’s so hard to get worked up about things like that when... you live in Paris. And it’s really more important that you be able to function every day in another language than it is that you pass your classes.
I wasn’t in this jovial of a mood to begin with, just for the record. But after I found out, I did what any sensible person in Paris would do– headed straight to my favorite boulangerie, thinking that sometimes the only thing that can fix a bad day is a macaron au chocolat. And I push on the Desgranges door and realize, of course, it’s Tuesday, and Desgranges is always closed on Tuesdays. See, this is what the stress does to me– I forget the schedule and operating hours of the best bakery this side of... well, anywhere. So I continued down the street, to one that is highly overpriced and where I went one time to find they had run out of croissants, so I have never been back. I boycott them really because I can’t afford them and they are located almost a mile from my apartment, but I like to think I’ve taken the moral high road and am not patronizing them because what kind of a bakery in Paris runs out of croissants? I had to make an exception today, though, because of the inconvenient closing of Desgranges, so I bought a meringue and went to the gardens of Luxembourg, to my favorite place in Paris, the Medici fountain, and sat there for awhile, watching the ducks sleep and the bare trees and feeling the wind in my hair and listening to the kind of music that is so wild you can’t listen to it with out lip-synching along, probably further cementing the fact that Paris has indeed made me lose my mind. But it obviously helped, as now I can’t help but laugh at the fact that I missed a final. How many people who go to Emory University can claim that?
I dyed my hair dark dark brown right before I left the US– like, extremely dark brown. If you looked at it in the dark, it would look black– that kind of a color. Although I guess if you looked at anybody’s hair in the dark it would look black, so that’s a terrible description. When I walked into the program center today, the first thing the woman that works there said was, "Oh, have you changed your hair color? It’s such a contrast with your eyes!" So that is what I get. Not, like, "Oh, it looks so natural" (although it doesn’t really) or "How lovely!" (Which is not what I was going for anyway), just "it contrasts with your eyes." What is one supposed to say to that? It’s not really a compliment... but you still have to respond. So I said what anyone else in that position would have said in French, "Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I was going for."
Everybody run now,
B
But life is still, as always, ridiculous. I think the person I am in Paris is so different from the person I was in the US– perhaps this will be a lasting change, or perhaps it is just a result of being a foreigner and existing in my second language all the time. I found out today I missed one of my finals. Oh, yes, I rater-ed it completely. I assumed it would be during normal class time, but of course I was wrong, and today when I showed up to take a different one, I happened to notice a sign posted with the exam times. Suffice it to say, I had no exam today. One yesterday and one tomorrow, but the problem is that the one I missed is for a class that I only have one grade for, and to get credit at Emory, I obviously have to have more than that. So this could be quite bad, but as I was getting back on the Metro to go to my program center to tell them, I couldn’t compute it in my head. This situation should have a lot of gravity– I potentially could have just failed that class. But all I could think was "this would never have happened to me in the US. And if it had, I would have gone to pieces." But here, it’s just, well, to be expected. Not because I am irresponsible– this one I just misunderstood. But it’s expected because the French are so different from us in everything they do that I just had no idea I had to go to some out-of-the-way little bulletin board to find out when my exams were. No one told me, and I’m not claiming they should have. I am living in Paris on my own, there ought to be some level of self-reliance, right? But alas, I screwed up. And the really ironic part is that it’s for a class I actually love– one of my two favorites since coming to college. Which says a lot, but too bad it doesn’t count for much when it turns out that half my grade for that class is a zero.
Tomorrow I go back to the University to see if there is something I can do about it, a makeup date or something... this is going to be awkward, I can tell already.
But honestly, the academic firsts in this country for me are just... astounding. First failing grade, first pop midterm, first missed final... It makes me sound like a real winner, eh? But it’s so hard to get worked up about things like that when... you live in Paris. And it’s really more important that you be able to function every day in another language than it is that you pass your classes.
I wasn’t in this jovial of a mood to begin with, just for the record. But after I found out, I did what any sensible person in Paris would do– headed straight to my favorite boulangerie, thinking that sometimes the only thing that can fix a bad day is a macaron au chocolat. And I push on the Desgranges door and realize, of course, it’s Tuesday, and Desgranges is always closed on Tuesdays. See, this is what the stress does to me– I forget the schedule and operating hours of the best bakery this side of... well, anywhere. So I continued down the street, to one that is highly overpriced and where I went one time to find they had run out of croissants, so I have never been back. I boycott them really because I can’t afford them and they are located almost a mile from my apartment, but I like to think I’ve taken the moral high road and am not patronizing them because what kind of a bakery in Paris runs out of croissants? I had to make an exception today, though, because of the inconvenient closing of Desgranges, so I bought a meringue and went to the gardens of Luxembourg, to my favorite place in Paris, the Medici fountain, and sat there for awhile, watching the ducks sleep and the bare trees and feeling the wind in my hair and listening to the kind of music that is so wild you can’t listen to it with out lip-synching along, probably further cementing the fact that Paris has indeed made me lose my mind. But it obviously helped, as now I can’t help but laugh at the fact that I missed a final. How many people who go to Emory University can claim that?
I dyed my hair dark dark brown right before I left the US– like, extremely dark brown. If you looked at it in the dark, it would look black– that kind of a color. Although I guess if you looked at anybody’s hair in the dark it would look black, so that’s a terrible description. When I walked into the program center today, the first thing the woman that works there said was, "Oh, have you changed your hair color? It’s such a contrast with your eyes!" So that is what I get. Not, like, "Oh, it looks so natural" (although it doesn’t really) or "How lovely!" (Which is not what I was going for anyway), just "it contrasts with your eyes." What is one supposed to say to that? It’s not really a compliment... but you still have to respond. So I said what anyone else in that position would have said in French, "Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I was going for."
Everybody run now,
B
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Quote Of The Day: "My favorite food is... FLAXSEED."
Today I was on the Metro to go to my program center to find out when classes actually begin (no answer– this is the thing about living in a foreign country, I never know what is going on) and also to make sure my academic career was not over because I may have missed both of my finals last week, which could be quite detrimental.
Anyway, I’m sitting on the Metro, headphones on as always, and this man goes to get out, and leans over to talk to me on his way out. People in Paris are constantly doing this, and not just to me– I’ve witnessed it many times. If the headphones are in, then the music is going, and probably the person can’t hear you. Particularly if you are on the Metro, where the roar of the engine makes the music be extra-loud in your ears. Especially if you are American anyway, and more interested in the 30 Seconds To Mars song coming through your earbuds than you are in the old man getting out of the Metro. Until he stops to talk to you. But this one wasn’t a crazy one, or even the type that would be asking for money, so I actually tried to listen to what he had to say, but I only got about half of it. It started with (in French, obviously), "Mademoiselle, you have such long legs," or something, because I had been kind of blocking the door with my Chuck-Taylor clad feet, but had moved them when I saw him coming. Then he continues with, "You should not be listening to your music, you should be singing it! You ought to be over there [he gestured toward the middle of the Metro car] singing for us all to enjoy! A pretty girl like you, you would make so much money, but only if you are not sitting by yourself in the corner like this!" Or something. Had he been not old and grandfatherly, I would have been way sketched out, but since I am not even really sure that he said that, I just thought it was funny. To his credit, there is a good chance I had been mouthing the words without realizing it... and I know I had been tapping my foot. And now I have this crazy dark emo hair, so maybe he thought I was a musician... or maybe he was just being a funny old man. But either way, the thought of me singing in a Metro car is hysterical. Really, the thought of me singing at all is hysterical... Anyway, he finished his speech and got out, and I caught the eye of another old man sitting in the car across from me, who just kind of shrugged and nodded. It was at this point that I realized that, just because I can’t hear my foot tapping to the music doesn’t mean they can’t hear it. I should really be more careful about that. And that lip-synching thing too...
Madame fell today in the entranceway to the apartment, because, get this: there is this crazy Spanish woman who lives on the bottom floor of our building and like... delivers our mail. I think she’s also in charge of putting up the Christmas tree in December, but other than that, I don’t know what she does. No, wait, that came out all wrong. The crazy Spanish woman did not do anything to directly cause this incident, but she lives there full time, she’s the gardienne, and Madame thinks she is stupid because she has lived in France for 20 years and still speaks French "beaucoup plus pire que toi, mon cherie!" (Much worse than you do, my love!). So the gardienne was at Monoprix buying tomato sauce, and turned her head and cut her lip on a grocery shelf. Madame gets home the same time she did and was standing in the entranceway examining the gardienne’s lip to make sure she didn’t need stitches, and when Madame finished, she stepped backwards and fell down the entranceway stairs. Which are marble, and she is old, so this is not at all funny. But then she is telling the story, and she detests the gardienne, and she says, "Just think, I am trying to see if she needs stitches because she is so stupid, and then, what happens, I fall down and hurt my shoulder! Who is the stupid one now?" I wanted to explain the concept of instant karma to her, but I thought that may be a little over her head, by which I mean out of the bounds of my vocabulary. And of course, she is convinced she is fine, but I could tell it was hurting her badly. So I offered to go to the pharmacie for her, and she lets me, which is a sign it was hurting way worse than I thought, because she never lets me help with stuff like that. I get to the pharmacie and realize I have no idea what the word for swelling is, and Madame was like, "just make sure they know I am 80, so they don’t send you home with something for kids." Now imagine, me, having awoken from a nap approximately three minutes before, standing at the pharmaciste’s, trying to explain, "I need something for an 80-year-old woman who fell on her shoulder." The pharmacist, of course, says, "What do you need for an 80-year-old woman who fell?" And I think to myself, "I don’t know, that is what I am trying to find out. Any ideas?" But then they need to know if she is on any other medicines, and I am sure she is... but I have no idea what they are. So I hedged for a second, and the pharmaciste gave me this cream stuff that smelled like those little vials you break and rub on your skin that makes you go numb. And then I came home, and for once it was like the situation was reversed– she couldn’t lift anything and I wouldn’t let her if she had tried, so I served dinner and poured the wine and did the dishes, and she just sat there and kept me company. Usually we do it together, or if I am going somewhere, she always tells me to leave and let her do the dishes because "you are young! You have better things to do than this!" Ahh, I love her.
Sidenote: Everyone complains about the effects of going to the grocery store hungry, but I have never had a problem. I come home with enough food to last a whole week if I go hungry. But today I went thirsty and not hungry– I came home with 2 liters of milk, a liter of grapefruit juice in a box, and a liter and a half of sparkling water. Oh, and a box of cereal.
Excellent. Great. Not only was it heavy as heck walking the kilometer home with it, but once I got here I realized that I bought pretty much nothing to eat. Ha.
~B
Today I was on the Metro to go to my program center to find out when classes actually begin (no answer– this is the thing about living in a foreign country, I never know what is going on) and also to make sure my academic career was not over because I may have missed both of my finals last week, which could be quite detrimental.
Anyway, I’m sitting on the Metro, headphones on as always, and this man goes to get out, and leans over to talk to me on his way out. People in Paris are constantly doing this, and not just to me– I’ve witnessed it many times. If the headphones are in, then the music is going, and probably the person can’t hear you. Particularly if you are on the Metro, where the roar of the engine makes the music be extra-loud in your ears. Especially if you are American anyway, and more interested in the 30 Seconds To Mars song coming through your earbuds than you are in the old man getting out of the Metro. Until he stops to talk to you. But this one wasn’t a crazy one, or even the type that would be asking for money, so I actually tried to listen to what he had to say, but I only got about half of it. It started with (in French, obviously), "Mademoiselle, you have such long legs," or something, because I had been kind of blocking the door with my Chuck-Taylor clad feet, but had moved them when I saw him coming. Then he continues with, "You should not be listening to your music, you should be singing it! You ought to be over there [he gestured toward the middle of the Metro car] singing for us all to enjoy! A pretty girl like you, you would make so much money, but only if you are not sitting by yourself in the corner like this!" Or something. Had he been not old and grandfatherly, I would have been way sketched out, but since I am not even really sure that he said that, I just thought it was funny. To his credit, there is a good chance I had been mouthing the words without realizing it... and I know I had been tapping my foot. And now I have this crazy dark emo hair, so maybe he thought I was a musician... or maybe he was just being a funny old man. But either way, the thought of me singing in a Metro car is hysterical. Really, the thought of me singing at all is hysterical... Anyway, he finished his speech and got out, and I caught the eye of another old man sitting in the car across from me, who just kind of shrugged and nodded. It was at this point that I realized that, just because I can’t hear my foot tapping to the music doesn’t mean they can’t hear it. I should really be more careful about that. And that lip-synching thing too...
Madame fell today in the entranceway to the apartment, because, get this: there is this crazy Spanish woman who lives on the bottom floor of our building and like... delivers our mail. I think she’s also in charge of putting up the Christmas tree in December, but other than that, I don’t know what she does. No, wait, that came out all wrong. The crazy Spanish woman did not do anything to directly cause this incident, but she lives there full time, she’s the gardienne, and Madame thinks she is stupid because she has lived in France for 20 years and still speaks French "beaucoup plus pire que toi, mon cherie!" (Much worse than you do, my love!). So the gardienne was at Monoprix buying tomato sauce, and turned her head and cut her lip on a grocery shelf. Madame gets home the same time she did and was standing in the entranceway examining the gardienne’s lip to make sure she didn’t need stitches, and when Madame finished, she stepped backwards and fell down the entranceway stairs. Which are marble, and she is old, so this is not at all funny. But then she is telling the story, and she detests the gardienne, and she says, "Just think, I am trying to see if she needs stitches because she is so stupid, and then, what happens, I fall down and hurt my shoulder! Who is the stupid one now?" I wanted to explain the concept of instant karma to her, but I thought that may be a little over her head, by which I mean out of the bounds of my vocabulary. And of course, she is convinced she is fine, but I could tell it was hurting her badly. So I offered to go to the pharmacie for her, and she lets me, which is a sign it was hurting way worse than I thought, because she never lets me help with stuff like that. I get to the pharmacie and realize I have no idea what the word for swelling is, and Madame was like, "just make sure they know I am 80, so they don’t send you home with something for kids." Now imagine, me, having awoken from a nap approximately three minutes before, standing at the pharmaciste’s, trying to explain, "I need something for an 80-year-old woman who fell on her shoulder." The pharmacist, of course, says, "What do you need for an 80-year-old woman who fell?" And I think to myself, "I don’t know, that is what I am trying to find out. Any ideas?" But then they need to know if she is on any other medicines, and I am sure she is... but I have no idea what they are. So I hedged for a second, and the pharmaciste gave me this cream stuff that smelled like those little vials you break and rub on your skin that makes you go numb. And then I came home, and for once it was like the situation was reversed– she couldn’t lift anything and I wouldn’t let her if she had tried, so I served dinner and poured the wine and did the dishes, and she just sat there and kept me company. Usually we do it together, or if I am going somewhere, she always tells me to leave and let her do the dishes because "you are young! You have better things to do than this!" Ahh, I love her.
Sidenote: Everyone complains about the effects of going to the grocery store hungry, but I have never had a problem. I come home with enough food to last a whole week if I go hungry. But today I went thirsty and not hungry– I came home with 2 liters of milk, a liter of grapefruit juice in a box, and a liter and a half of sparkling water. Oh, and a box of cereal.
Excellent. Great. Not only was it heavy as heck walking the kilometer home with it, but once I got here I realized that I bought pretty much nothing to eat. Ha.
~B
Saturday, January 20, 2007
In apparently no particular order because that is the way this computer rolls...
Vertical spooning on top of Wolf Pen with Cliff and Joey because (notice how dark it was) it was freaking cold.
Vertical spooning on top of Wolf Pen with Cliff and Joey because (notice how dark it was) it was freaking cold.
I noticed this sign at Montparnasse, probably the second busiest neighborhood in Paris. It means "This area forbidden except to emergency vehicles." I HAVE NO IDEA WHY THE COW IS ON THERE.
This was approximately 6am, and neither me nor Cliff had been to sleep yet.
A really bad picture of the night of the day I got my haircut in Paris with Laura, notice how Parisian it looks?
And the sunset we waited hours for, view from the back of the top of Wolf Pen.
~B
Today has been one of those days...
Still no wall in the kitchen, and this morning I microwaved a mug that was apparently non-microwavable and thus have probably radiated myself because I drank the tea anyway...
I somehow didn’t understand the ticket website and ended up spending WAY more than intended to go to this concert on February 2...
I wanted to wander the 16th a little bit, so I left my house under the January Paris sun, unseasonably warm, and since I didn’t want to wear my heavy coat, I didn’t bring any jacket. In the course of the 10 minutes I spent in ProMod, the weather outside went from 15degrees to 3degrees, the sun disappeared, and it started to thunder. (I think– it might have just been a delivery truck or something.) So I leave ProMod, and no sooner have I set foot out the door than the heavens opened. It was like they were just waiting for me to get out there, so they could completely douse me. Thanks. No umbrella, no hat, no hood, nothing to even pull over my head, and my computer is in my non-waterproof bag, so that was extra-good. The rain is coming in through my flats (dagnab discount Chinatown shoes), my tights are soaked, and the good hair day I was having? Yeah, instead of smelling rain, all I can smell is my hairspray running down my back...
And perhaps the crowning achievement: I went into my internet bar after a stop at home to put on something less... wet. I went to the counter of the bar to order an Orangina, because if I have to drink one more espresso I might go postal, so I say to the new bartender (you know it’s bad when you can identify the new workers), "Je voudrais un Orangina, s’il te plait." And he repeats it back to me– "Un Orangina?" Or something that sounds kind of like that, but there is this weird German techno playing in the background so I can’t be sure. I nod my head, though, which has unfortunately become my default response when someone says something I don’t understand. But then he walks over to the espresso machine, and I can’t even help my reaction: My face fell, mouth agape, shaking my head like a crazy person, watching him make the drink I don’t even want a little bit, knowing there is really nothing I can do about it. He turns around a moment later with my espresso, though apparently it is not exactly normal espresso– this time it came in a full teacup, tasting exactly like normal espresso. Maybe it was a double? But he charged me the same price as always, so I don’t really know. WHEN WILL I GET RID OF THIS ACCENT ENOUGH THAT I CAN AT LEAST ORDER A SODA WITHOUT SCREWING IT UP?
And how, pray tell, did he get "espresso" out of "orangina." They don’t even have the same number of syllables!
But on the bright side, lately at cafes and such, the servers have been teasing about my accent (in that awkward flirty foreign way) but not meanly, and despite the teasing they still speak to me in French, which has got to mean SOMETHING, right??
~B
Still no wall in the kitchen, and this morning I microwaved a mug that was apparently non-microwavable and thus have probably radiated myself because I drank the tea anyway...
I somehow didn’t understand the ticket website and ended up spending WAY more than intended to go to this concert on February 2...
I wanted to wander the 16th a little bit, so I left my house under the January Paris sun, unseasonably warm, and since I didn’t want to wear my heavy coat, I didn’t bring any jacket. In the course of the 10 minutes I spent in ProMod, the weather outside went from 15degrees to 3degrees, the sun disappeared, and it started to thunder. (I think– it might have just been a delivery truck or something.) So I leave ProMod, and no sooner have I set foot out the door than the heavens opened. It was like they were just waiting for me to get out there, so they could completely douse me. Thanks. No umbrella, no hat, no hood, nothing to even pull over my head, and my computer is in my non-waterproof bag, so that was extra-good. The rain is coming in through my flats (dagnab discount Chinatown shoes), my tights are soaked, and the good hair day I was having? Yeah, instead of smelling rain, all I can smell is my hairspray running down my back...
And perhaps the crowning achievement: I went into my internet bar after a stop at home to put on something less... wet. I went to the counter of the bar to order an Orangina, because if I have to drink one more espresso I might go postal, so I say to the new bartender (you know it’s bad when you can identify the new workers), "Je voudrais un Orangina, s’il te plait." And he repeats it back to me– "Un Orangina?" Or something that sounds kind of like that, but there is this weird German techno playing in the background so I can’t be sure. I nod my head, though, which has unfortunately become my default response when someone says something I don’t understand. But then he walks over to the espresso machine, and I can’t even help my reaction: My face fell, mouth agape, shaking my head like a crazy person, watching him make the drink I don’t even want a little bit, knowing there is really nothing I can do about it. He turns around a moment later with my espresso, though apparently it is not exactly normal espresso– this time it came in a full teacup, tasting exactly like normal espresso. Maybe it was a double? But he charged me the same price as always, so I don’t really know. WHEN WILL I GET RID OF THIS ACCENT ENOUGH THAT I CAN AT LEAST ORDER A SODA WITHOUT SCREWING IT UP?
And how, pray tell, did he get "espresso" out of "orangina." They don’t even have the same number of syllables!
But on the bright side, lately at cafes and such, the servers have been teasing about my accent (in that awkward flirty foreign way) but not meanly, and despite the teasing they still speak to me in French, which has got to mean SOMETHING, right??
~B
Friday, January 19, 2007
Last time I went to church, I met some friends-of-friends, and when I told them I was from Georgia (the default state I tell people because it’s too complicated to try to explain anything else), their faces lit up immediately. "Do you know so-and-so and her husband, what’s-his-name?" Cool as it would have been had I knew them, I did not, of course, and they looked so disappointed I wanted to explain to them that the state of Georgia is, oh, approximately the same size as their entire country. Because despite the fact that France is the biggest country on the European continent (except Russia, which they conveniently count as Asian), it is still smaller than California. I don’t know exactly where it matches up, but it’s much smaller than one would think...
Down the street from my apartment, next door to my boulangerie, there is a clockery. In French, it’s called an horlogerie, but their business is to fix and make watches and clocks. Above their front door there is a giant clock meant to be an advertising device for them– but it is broken. Every time I walk by it makes me laugh.
Last night I got in late, and when I did I found a note from Madame saying she had decided at the last minute to go to Nantes to celebrate her grand-daughter’s birthday and she would be back in two or three days. No big deal, she left her daughter’s number to call if I had any problems or whatever. But then this morning I woke up at 8am and when I walked into the kitchen (in my pajamas, thinking no one was here), the repairman was standing in the middle of the kitchen. We had a conversation, and I can’t really remember what was said, but then I left the kitchen and didn’t go back for a few hours. I noticed a mitre saw (sp?) And some plastic sheeting folded up in the dude’s tool box, which should have been a good hint, but I was sleepy and didn’t think about it. At some point he left, and when I walked back in we are missing the back wall of the kitchen! I feel like I could end up in trouble for this one– because Madame always warns us if someone is coming, and DEFINITELY if something big is going to be done, like, you know, the removal of a wall, structural or not. There is plaster dust everywhere and it’s just an empty space now, down to the pipes and stuff. Who has a repairman come do something that intense when they are not even going to be here?? I’m a little nervous for her to come back and discover it.
Fascinated with the echelon,
B
Down the street from my apartment, next door to my boulangerie, there is a clockery. In French, it’s called an horlogerie, but their business is to fix and make watches and clocks. Above their front door there is a giant clock meant to be an advertising device for them– but it is broken. Every time I walk by it makes me laugh.
Last night I got in late, and when I did I found a note from Madame saying she had decided at the last minute to go to Nantes to celebrate her grand-daughter’s birthday and she would be back in two or three days. No big deal, she left her daughter’s number to call if I had any problems or whatever. But then this morning I woke up at 8am and when I walked into the kitchen (in my pajamas, thinking no one was here), the repairman was standing in the middle of the kitchen. We had a conversation, and I can’t really remember what was said, but then I left the kitchen and didn’t go back for a few hours. I noticed a mitre saw (sp?) And some plastic sheeting folded up in the dude’s tool box, which should have been a good hint, but I was sleepy and didn’t think about it. At some point he left, and when I walked back in we are missing the back wall of the kitchen! I feel like I could end up in trouble for this one– because Madame always warns us if someone is coming, and DEFINITELY if something big is going to be done, like, you know, the removal of a wall, structural or not. There is plaster dust everywhere and it’s just an empty space now, down to the pipes and stuff. Who has a repairman come do something that intense when they are not even going to be here?? I’m a little nervous for her to come back and discover it.
Fascinated with the echelon,
B
Thursday, January 18, 2007
I realize that probably half of what I say is about the language barrier, but it’s because a) it is the common denominator of everything that happens to me here and 2) it is something I never understood the depth of until I was living in it. When people ask me what’s so spectacular about Paris, why I enjoy living here so much, I never feel that I can adequately answer. How can I encapsulate all the fun and magic and beauty and fabulousness that fills this place in one or two sentences? It’s somehow worse when Parisians ask me, because then not only am I doing it in my second language, but to them, Paris is just where they live. It would be like someone spouting to me how wonderful it is to live close to the beach– I agree, but to me it is nothing special, it’s just a fact of life, because that is where I grew up.
So what do I say when they ask? The same thing every time. "I love Paris because it’s like everything here is a grand adventure just waiting to be had; nothing is simple, nothing can ever go as planned, it is always much more glorious and much more complicated (and thus much more hilarious) than life anywhere else." I’ve come to understand my life in Paris as a product of the language barrier: multiply a normal 21-year-old by another language in another country, and there you have it. Because it seems that, in Paris, I only ever understand somewhere between 65% and 75% of what is happening. I am completely ok with that, which is what makes it weird. Because when you factor in my lack of knowledge of what’s going on and add that to the different culture, you end up with... well, adventure. And I love that about living here. Once I came to grips with the fact that everything will take longer and I generally won’t understand why, things came to be much more interesting.
But sometimes I have to remind myself of how much I love that. Like today. First of all, I left the US a week ago, but since all I have had to do since then is hang out with my friends and go shopping, I haven’t really bothered getting back on Paris time. It is difficult to get adjusted when flying East (much worse than when going West, particularly if one doesn’t sleep on the plane), and to really do it requires wandering catatonically for several days until your body gives up on catching up and just starts over. I hate that feeling, so I tried to do it gradually. I realized today that I have done a horrible job and am, in fact, not living on Paris time, but not on US time either– I’ve invented my own time zone, somewhere neither North America or Europe, and I think now that I have made this mess, I should just be locked in a pitch black room for 30+ hours and then be woken up one morning just in time for sunrise. Anyway, that is subsidiary to the real story of today:
Last night I had a church thing and didn’t make it home until midnight, which was fine, but this morning I was supposed to be awake at 7am to get ready for class. This should have been fine, but I couldn’t fall asleep. So at like 130am I gave up trying, turned on my computer, and watched Willy Wonka (the new version), which did nothing for me except convince me that I have been doing a terrible job on my Johnny Depp quest. (What quest, you may be asking, to which I respond, The same quest any woman would be on when put for 10 months in the same country as Jack Sparrow. I want to meet him. He lives here somewhere, it can’t be that difficult, right?) Anyway, after the movie I laid back down and still couldn’t sleep– the last time I looked at the clock, it was 5am. So I somehow wrestled myself out of my warm bed this morning at the crack of dawn.
7am: Alarm goes off, I hit snooze. ("I’ll just hurry.")
710am: Alarm. Snooze. ("I won’t straighten my hair.")
720am: Alarm. Snooze. ("I won’t wash my hair."
735am: Alarm. Snooze. ("I won’t shower.")
750am: Alarm. Snooze. ("How badly do I really have to go to this particular class?")
8am: Alarm. I get tangled in the duvet and fall out of bed, luckily not breaking my wrist this time. Without even thinking about what I am doing, I somehow make a pot of coffee before realizing I have no time to drink it, as I must be out my door in 20 minutes. Shouldn’t be a problem, except of course it is. So I pull on yesterday’s clothes and try to cover up the circles under my eyes, which couldn’t possibly have worked, but I leave anyway.
When I get to the metro, there is, of course, some kind of delay, so I am now going to be late for sure. Eventually I get to the stop (a 10-minute walk from the University), at the exact time class is supposed to start. Perfect. So I go as fast as I can, but of course am late. I get to the classroom 10-ish minutes late, but there is no one there. Excellent. I missed class last week because I was... well... out of the country, and so I decided they must have met at the Louvre this week and I was just not aware. Oh well, hour and a half wait till my next class, so I wandered Chinatown listening to the Gin Blossoms for awhile, and then came back for the second class. I was 20 minutes early, but that usually doesn’t matter because French kids are always early. No one there. So I wait. And wait. Until the time class is supposed to start, and still no one.
Which means: I had no class today and gave up my bed for nothing, and more importantly but less immediately painfully, I thus have no idea when my finals are for those two classes. And of course, I am the only American in them and hence have no one else’s contact info from those courses. Perfect. My life is amazing.
Otherwise...
I have a Chink hat. Now, before you get all politically correct, let me explain. I had a great-great-uncle or something whose name was, quite truly, Chink. I am 21 years old and to this day have no idea if this guy even had a name other than Chink. He lived somewhere far away and by all accounts was slightly crazy, but one of those crazy people that you want to get to know because they are so cool. Despite me having never met him, when I was young he made my entire family Chink hats, which are basically just loose stocking caps. Not extremely useful in Florida, and thus I don’t believe I ever wore mine– it was never cold enough. But when I moved to Paris, all that changed. And the weekend I spent in Austria in the fall was cold enough that I decided I needed one. So I bought a legit Swiss one, much to the chagrin of my family when they found out I had paid for one. ("I have a whole box of them you could have picked from!") My respect for Uncle Chink has skyrocketed every time I wear the hat. Not only does it keep my head dry and warm, it also is perfect, as I now know, for covering up day-old bedhead. I didn’t even brush my hair this morning– just pulled my black-with-embroidered-flowers stocking cap on as I ran out the door to the Passy metro, and all was well.
And now, a rant. What I have to say in the next paragraph is not going to be worth reading, and I know that despite having not written it yet. So you should probably just stop here. But I am going to write it anyway. I hate ticket scalpers, and I particularly detest the newest breed, the cyber-scalper. One of my favorite American bands (I realize I say that a lot, but it’s always true) is coming to Paris in a couple weeks. The tour was announced while I was in the US, so I only found out about it a few days ago, and it was sold out, despite their lack of fame here. Naturally, I was confused, but the woman at Fnac (French equivalent of ticketmaster) told me I should check Ebay France, so I did, and what do I find? Loads of tickets. Ok, some people are selling one or two– that is exactly the amount I need, and quite honest. A friend bails out, you miscount when you order, whatever, and somehow end up with 1, max 2, extra tickets, so you sell them on Ebay with that feature where you put it on at face value and wait for someone to buy it, not auction it off. THEN I find seller after seller with 17, 20, or 30 tickets for auction, which means, of course, they are going for upwards of 30Euros each when they were sold originally for 12, which makes me unbelievably angry because they not only hog all the tickets, but then we, the unfortunate ones who were unlucky enough to be in this country when tickets went on sale, are completely suckered into pandering to their every demand– the band comes out even on this one, because they get paid the same no matter how much we pay for our standing room ticket. The fans come out way behind because they get stuck paying 30 or 40 Euro for a nosebleed or moshpit ticket, to a person who is now going to use that cash to buy more tickets to the next concert coming to town, making it a terrible vicious cycle, and the worst part is that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do– ticket limits work (sort of) in the US because virtually everyone orders tickets online or over the phone, but here, since Fnac is a storefront found in nearly every arrondissement, people pay cash and buy as many as they want.
But I don’t want to end on that note, so I will also tell you this: remember when I bought that Killers ticket, in, like, NOVEMBER for a concert in March? My french friends from church all teased me about it, because I guess the Killers aren’t as big here as I thought, and my French friends were all, "Oh, I can’t believe you bought your ticket already! The concert is 5 months away!" and "I bet it’s in a frame on your wall!" "No, I bet it’s under your pillow when you sleep at night!" and "How can you listen to music by a band with a name like that!? It sounds so violent! I bet they are like, hard metal death rock, aren’t they?" but obviously they are not. So over Christmas break I made my Swedish friend a mix CD with a couple Killers songs on it and she loved it, enough to go buy their newest album. She shared it with her roommate, and the two of them convinced another mutual friends to come, and now they have invited all kinds of people from church, so what was Blair going out on a Thursday night to the Zenith alone to see her favorite Vegas American band (which I totally didn’t mind) has become, as of the church meeting thing last night, over a dozen people, most of whom have not heard their music! I had no idea it would grow so big, but I’m psyched now– it’s gonna be even better with 20 of us than it would have been with just me.
Linguistic challenge of the week: trying to explain last night in French the music style of the Killers. Yo, try it in ENGLISH and you will see how hard it is; the best I could do was compare them to other indie American bands, which obviously did not help with this particular crowd.
Smiling like I mean it,
B
P.S. In case this has given you any ideas, I ALREADY HAVE BOTH OF THE KILLERS ALBUMS (hence them being my favorites), but I don’t have "30 Seconds To Mars" by 30 Seconds To Mars... just throwing that out there.
So what do I say when they ask? The same thing every time. "I love Paris because it’s like everything here is a grand adventure just waiting to be had; nothing is simple, nothing can ever go as planned, it is always much more glorious and much more complicated (and thus much more hilarious) than life anywhere else." I’ve come to understand my life in Paris as a product of the language barrier: multiply a normal 21-year-old by another language in another country, and there you have it. Because it seems that, in Paris, I only ever understand somewhere between 65% and 75% of what is happening. I am completely ok with that, which is what makes it weird. Because when you factor in my lack of knowledge of what’s going on and add that to the different culture, you end up with... well, adventure. And I love that about living here. Once I came to grips with the fact that everything will take longer and I generally won’t understand why, things came to be much more interesting.
But sometimes I have to remind myself of how much I love that. Like today. First of all, I left the US a week ago, but since all I have had to do since then is hang out with my friends and go shopping, I haven’t really bothered getting back on Paris time. It is difficult to get adjusted when flying East (much worse than when going West, particularly if one doesn’t sleep on the plane), and to really do it requires wandering catatonically for several days until your body gives up on catching up and just starts over. I hate that feeling, so I tried to do it gradually. I realized today that I have done a horrible job and am, in fact, not living on Paris time, but not on US time either– I’ve invented my own time zone, somewhere neither North America or Europe, and I think now that I have made this mess, I should just be locked in a pitch black room for 30+ hours and then be woken up one morning just in time for sunrise. Anyway, that is subsidiary to the real story of today:
Last night I had a church thing and didn’t make it home until midnight, which was fine, but this morning I was supposed to be awake at 7am to get ready for class. This should have been fine, but I couldn’t fall asleep. So at like 130am I gave up trying, turned on my computer, and watched Willy Wonka (the new version), which did nothing for me except convince me that I have been doing a terrible job on my Johnny Depp quest. (What quest, you may be asking, to which I respond, The same quest any woman would be on when put for 10 months in the same country as Jack Sparrow. I want to meet him. He lives here somewhere, it can’t be that difficult, right?) Anyway, after the movie I laid back down and still couldn’t sleep– the last time I looked at the clock, it was 5am. So I somehow wrestled myself out of my warm bed this morning at the crack of dawn.
7am: Alarm goes off, I hit snooze. ("I’ll just hurry.")
710am: Alarm. Snooze. ("I won’t straighten my hair.")
720am: Alarm. Snooze. ("I won’t wash my hair."
735am: Alarm. Snooze. ("I won’t shower.")
750am: Alarm. Snooze. ("How badly do I really have to go to this particular class?")
8am: Alarm. I get tangled in the duvet and fall out of bed, luckily not breaking my wrist this time. Without even thinking about what I am doing, I somehow make a pot of coffee before realizing I have no time to drink it, as I must be out my door in 20 minutes. Shouldn’t be a problem, except of course it is. So I pull on yesterday’s clothes and try to cover up the circles under my eyes, which couldn’t possibly have worked, but I leave anyway.
When I get to the metro, there is, of course, some kind of delay, so I am now going to be late for sure. Eventually I get to the stop (a 10-minute walk from the University), at the exact time class is supposed to start. Perfect. So I go as fast as I can, but of course am late. I get to the classroom 10-ish minutes late, but there is no one there. Excellent. I missed class last week because I was... well... out of the country, and so I decided they must have met at the Louvre this week and I was just not aware. Oh well, hour and a half wait till my next class, so I wandered Chinatown listening to the Gin Blossoms for awhile, and then came back for the second class. I was 20 minutes early, but that usually doesn’t matter because French kids are always early. No one there. So I wait. And wait. Until the time class is supposed to start, and still no one.
Which means: I had no class today and gave up my bed for nothing, and more importantly but less immediately painfully, I thus have no idea when my finals are for those two classes. And of course, I am the only American in them and hence have no one else’s contact info from those courses. Perfect. My life is amazing.
Otherwise...
I have a Chink hat. Now, before you get all politically correct, let me explain. I had a great-great-uncle or something whose name was, quite truly, Chink. I am 21 years old and to this day have no idea if this guy even had a name other than Chink. He lived somewhere far away and by all accounts was slightly crazy, but one of those crazy people that you want to get to know because they are so cool. Despite me having never met him, when I was young he made my entire family Chink hats, which are basically just loose stocking caps. Not extremely useful in Florida, and thus I don’t believe I ever wore mine– it was never cold enough. But when I moved to Paris, all that changed. And the weekend I spent in Austria in the fall was cold enough that I decided I needed one. So I bought a legit Swiss one, much to the chagrin of my family when they found out I had paid for one. ("I have a whole box of them you could have picked from!") My respect for Uncle Chink has skyrocketed every time I wear the hat. Not only does it keep my head dry and warm, it also is perfect, as I now know, for covering up day-old bedhead. I didn’t even brush my hair this morning– just pulled my black-with-embroidered-flowers stocking cap on as I ran out the door to the Passy metro, and all was well.
And now, a rant. What I have to say in the next paragraph is not going to be worth reading, and I know that despite having not written it yet. So you should probably just stop here. But I am going to write it anyway. I hate ticket scalpers, and I particularly detest the newest breed, the cyber-scalper. One of my favorite American bands (I realize I say that a lot, but it’s always true) is coming to Paris in a couple weeks. The tour was announced while I was in the US, so I only found out about it a few days ago, and it was sold out, despite their lack of fame here. Naturally, I was confused, but the woman at Fnac (French equivalent of ticketmaster) told me I should check Ebay France, so I did, and what do I find? Loads of tickets. Ok, some people are selling one or two– that is exactly the amount I need, and quite honest. A friend bails out, you miscount when you order, whatever, and somehow end up with 1, max 2, extra tickets, so you sell them on Ebay with that feature where you put it on at face value and wait for someone to buy it, not auction it off. THEN I find seller after seller with 17, 20, or 30 tickets for auction, which means, of course, they are going for upwards of 30Euros each when they were sold originally for 12, which makes me unbelievably angry because they not only hog all the tickets, but then we, the unfortunate ones who were unlucky enough to be in this country when tickets went on sale, are completely suckered into pandering to their every demand– the band comes out even on this one, because they get paid the same no matter how much we pay for our standing room ticket. The fans come out way behind because they get stuck paying 30 or 40 Euro for a nosebleed or moshpit ticket, to a person who is now going to use that cash to buy more tickets to the next concert coming to town, making it a terrible vicious cycle, and the worst part is that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do– ticket limits work (sort of) in the US because virtually everyone orders tickets online or over the phone, but here, since Fnac is a storefront found in nearly every arrondissement, people pay cash and buy as many as they want.
But I don’t want to end on that note, so I will also tell you this: remember when I bought that Killers ticket, in, like, NOVEMBER for a concert in March? My french friends from church all teased me about it, because I guess the Killers aren’t as big here as I thought, and my French friends were all, "Oh, I can’t believe you bought your ticket already! The concert is 5 months away!" and "I bet it’s in a frame on your wall!" "No, I bet it’s under your pillow when you sleep at night!" and "How can you listen to music by a band with a name like that!? It sounds so violent! I bet they are like, hard metal death rock, aren’t they?" but obviously they are not. So over Christmas break I made my Swedish friend a mix CD with a couple Killers songs on it and she loved it, enough to go buy their newest album. She shared it with her roommate, and the two of them convinced another mutual friends to come, and now they have invited all kinds of people from church, so what was Blair going out on a Thursday night to the Zenith alone to see her favorite Vegas American band (which I totally didn’t mind) has become, as of the church meeting thing last night, over a dozen people, most of whom have not heard their music! I had no idea it would grow so big, but I’m psyched now– it’s gonna be even better with 20 of us than it would have been with just me.
Linguistic challenge of the week: trying to explain last night in French the music style of the Killers. Yo, try it in ENGLISH and you will see how hard it is; the best I could do was compare them to other indie American bands, which obviously did not help with this particular crowd.
Smiling like I mean it,
B
P.S. In case this has given you any ideas, I ALREADY HAVE BOTH OF THE KILLERS ALBUMS (hence them being my favorites), but I don’t have "30 Seconds To Mars" by 30 Seconds To Mars... just throwing that out there.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
While I was in the US for Christmas, my aunt asked me if I had been forced to eat anything really gross since coming to Europe. The worst thing I could think of was the Croque Monsieur I had once ordered by accident. All that is changed now. Tonight Madame invited me to have dinner with her (and her 8-year-old granddaughter). I of course accepted, since I hadn’t been to the grocery store yet. So I walk into the kitchen and she has made paella. Or perhaps she ordered it from somewhere, but the point is, she puts it on the table and it is full of whole shrimp (still looking at me– maybe they were crawfish or something because they were huge. And their antennae had come off and were all through the bowl of rice. And their heads and legs and shells were all still attached.), whole cracked oysters (with shells), and... I kid you not, as though the shrimp were not bad enough, miniature whole octopi. That is, more than one octopus. Or squid, I don’t know. But they had these yellowish round heads the size of a cherry tomato and then eight short little legs (either they were babies or a very small species of octopus. Either way I am NOT okay with that). And what are you supposed to do about that? One has no choice but to eat it, so I took mine in big bites with lots of saffron rice, chewing only as much as necessary and then swallowing quickly.
For dessert we had a galette de roi (King’s Pancake), which is of course not a pancake at all but this large round flaky pastry thing that the French eat from January 7 to the 31st to commemorate the gifts brought to Jesus by the wisemen. Somewhere in the cake, there is hidden a feve, a tiny present for whoever bites down on it first. So you have to eat the cake all in one sitting, and in order to prevent cheating by the server, the youngest person at the table climbs under the table, and the oldest person serves it. As the server cuts each piece, she asks the kid under the table who to give that piece to, and since the child can’t see, it is all fair. So tonight Camille is under the table and Madame is serving, and I am just sitting there confused until I bite onto something porcelain and pull from my bite a tiny Egyptian painting. That is what the prize was, a scene of three Egyptian people making papyrus, painted on porcelain. How cute of a party, though! Madame asked, "Are you Catholic, or Protestant?" as though those were the only two options, and when I said Protestant, she asked, "Oh, well then do you know the story of the Magi?" And I do, but not nearly as in depth as Catholic French people, apparently (I thought, according to tradition, they arrived at the manger on January 6, Epiphany on our calendar. But Madame said they only eat Galettes de Roi from January 7 onwards because that is when they arrived.) And I also only knew the name of one of them– Balthasar. 8-year-old Camille knew all three.)
I think I must have eaten five or six of Ariel’s friends, and I can never call myself a vegetarian again... I ate an octopus.
~B
For dessert we had a galette de roi (King’s Pancake), which is of course not a pancake at all but this large round flaky pastry thing that the French eat from January 7 to the 31st to commemorate the gifts brought to Jesus by the wisemen. Somewhere in the cake, there is hidden a feve, a tiny present for whoever bites down on it first. So you have to eat the cake all in one sitting, and in order to prevent cheating by the server, the youngest person at the table climbs under the table, and the oldest person serves it. As the server cuts each piece, she asks the kid under the table who to give that piece to, and since the child can’t see, it is all fair. So tonight Camille is under the table and Madame is serving, and I am just sitting there confused until I bite onto something porcelain and pull from my bite a tiny Egyptian painting. That is what the prize was, a scene of three Egyptian people making papyrus, painted on porcelain. How cute of a party, though! Madame asked, "Are you Catholic, or Protestant?" as though those were the only two options, and when I said Protestant, she asked, "Oh, well then do you know the story of the Magi?" And I do, but not nearly as in depth as Catholic French people, apparently (I thought, according to tradition, they arrived at the manger on January 6, Epiphany on our calendar. But Madame said they only eat Galettes de Roi from January 7 onwards because that is when they arrived.) And I also only knew the name of one of them– Balthasar. 8-year-old Camille knew all three.)
I think I must have eaten five or six of Ariel’s friends, and I can never call myself a vegetarian again... I ate an octopus.
~B
Monday, January 15, 2007
Maybe I am getting sick. Maybe I am just getting old. But I feel like I have been run over by a herd of grizzly bears. I got in yesterday morning, by the time I got to my apartment, it was 10am. The woman I live with had a vase of cottage roses waiting for me in my room, and a new-to-me duvet. So I started unpacking, decided that was a stupid venture, showered and went to bed. For three hours. Because I didn’t sleep on the plane– at all. But then I had to get up and go straight to take an archaeology oral final in a language I had not spoken in two and a half weeks? Bad, bad idea. Whatever, I got myself there, to the Michelet building, and I wish there were words to describe this place. It is a building off of a public library, Lord only knows what it is supposed to be used for, but it is about three blocks from the restaurant district in the Latin Quarter (named for the language, not the region of Central America). I walk into the public library by accident first, which has these creaky iron doors at least twice as tall as me and twice as thick (this place had to have been some kind of medieval fortress– it’s only a couple blocks from the ruins of ancient 1st-century Paris). So then I am trying to figure out where I am going but all I see is a statue of Tiberius from ancient Rome... Emory has a cast of the same statue in the art history department building, but as I look around the Michelet building here in Paris, I realized that the statue here is likely the original, as the building appears at least that old. I found a passageway to the building next door, and then took a creaky cast-iron elevator to the top floor. When the doors open there, I am faced with this monstrous hallway stretching before me for what looked like kilometers. Apparently I just have an irrational fear of long hallways devoid of people, but it kind of creeped me out. All the doors were shut, and all I could hear was my heels tapping against the hardwood floor. Peeling paint. Tall doorframes on each side of me. I get to the end of the hallway and see a tiny handwritten sign directing me to the left, where another hallway stretches endlessly. This one, though, is lined on one side by windows that I can’t see out of because of the weird glare, but they stretch to the ceiling, at least 10 feet above my head. Finally I make it to the end of that hallway, and there is nothing there but a chair and an unlabeled door. Now, I have a completely rational fear of chairs sitting in the middle of nowhere by themselves. It probably has something to do with the place I worked last summer, but that is another story for another day. So trying not to be scared, I listened at the door of the unlabeled room, trying to determine if there was anyone inside. Hearing nothing, I sit down in the empty chair and try to review my notes... because... oh yeah, those three hours I slept? Those were my study hours. Thus I had somehow managed not to study... again. Ten minutes later my prof comes out and I am sitting there, probably looking sheepish, and he immediately starts speaking at me in rapid-fire French.
"FOCUS, B, JUST FOCUS!" I think to myself.
"Vous pouvez entrer maintenant pour votre examen orale, si vous voulez. Choisissez une option ici et puis vouz avez quinze minutes pour decider ce que vous voulez dire pour une presentation sur ca. D’accord?" Or something like that, he blurts out. I make my best, "I understand but will you please say that again" face, but it doesn’t work and I am stuck trying to figure out what to do. I notice the pack of Camels on the desk and all I can think is "perhaps I ought to take up smoking because maybe then when things like this happen and I have no way to respond, I could just take a drag and it would give me another moment to think. I wonder if he’d let me bum one? NO, NO, NO! Forget that plan! No ciggies! Just because all the French do it does not mean it is a good idea. They also drink coffee out of bowls. Shoot, he is still waiting for an answer..." But out loud all I say is "Ok... ca va bien." "Alright, that sounds good." And then choose a topic. Wonder of wonders, it is one I actually know about (or so I thought), and he looks disappointed that I have chosen it. Incidentally, it was the same building about which he called on me during class in November sometime, and I still didn’t know any more about the dagnab peristyle au fond. Anyway, I take my moment to prepare and then start talking about it, and he keeps writing things down as I speak and interrupting with "Ahh, oui!" and "Exactement!" enough that I know I am doing decently well. Then when I finish, he says, in French, "You mentioned that this room is a cubiculum. Are you sure about that?" But whenever a teacher asks that, you know that you, in fact, were not sure at all, despite how fervently you believed it three minutes ago while in the midst of your presentation. So I figure out what that room actually was, but in the process have to use the word for "roof." Now, this should not be a problem, right? I know words like that. BUT the thing is that the word for roof sounds very much like a dirty word in English. So I rarely use it. Actually, I have never used it. Because I can’t say it without thinking of the dirty English word, which makes me afraid I am going to pronounce it wrong and people will misunderstand. Gravely. And I definitely don’t want to make that error in front of my terribly glamourous French archaeology prof, so I rack my brain for another word. "Ceiling? No, I don’t know that word. Wall? No, he will have no idea what I am talking about. I got it! Top!" So I say something about the top of the building and he says, "Oui," and repeats the word for roof at me, clearly expecting me to repeat it, which usually I would do without hesitation, but this time I can’t do it with a straight face because it suddenly occurs to me that we are nothing but two 20-somethings sitting in the back deserted room of an ancient building in the middle of Paris at 630 on a Friday night talking about... well... I can’t even say it in English, but you get the idea. Something bad. So I look at him and try to remember that he has probably never even heard the word in English and so even if I mispronounce it, he won’t notice. But remember, this is the same professor to whom I asked, with regard to this exam, in a moment of language-barrier induced confusion, "do you want me?" and the thought of that freezes me up even more. But he is still looking at me waiting for me to repeat the word and go on with the sentence, and I can’t do it. I put on my best, "I still know what I am talking about even if it doesn’t seem like it" face, smile graciously, thank him, and continue, all without using the dreaded word.
Eventually I finish my explanation, and he says, "Very good, only why did you start at the back of the building? It would make much more sense to start from the front and work your way back..." and that was his biggest criticism. He gave me a nice speech about how difficult it must be, and taking that into account he was going to give me a 15. A 15 in France is like... I think... the highest B one can achieve (not to mention over twice as good as the grade I got on the written midterm I didn’t study for), so I was thrilled. I must not have looked it, though, and so he tried to explain... "15 in France, what is that like in the US? You use all those silly letter grades, so what would this be?" And so we sat there, with the Eiffel Tower blinking far out the window behind him, discussing the grading system in the US versus France, and then the fact that people in the Roman Empire ate in the same position in which they had orgies. Lovely, I don’t know how he knew that one, but it came up because he said I had described the triclinium wrongly. "It’s not just the dining room, it’s also the room where they hosted the orgies." I must have looked shocked, and he said, "That is why there were three walls of long benches all the way around. So people could lay on them while their servants fed them grapes." At least I think that is what he said. I kind of got distracted after the orgy part, which I only understood because it is pronounced the same in both languages.
From my favorite movie, paraphrased for this situation: "Honestly, anyone who can’t handle making a fool of themselves doesn’t deserve to [learn another language]."
Making a fool of myself daily in the name of Americans everywhere,
B
"FOCUS, B, JUST FOCUS!" I think to myself.
"Vous pouvez entrer maintenant pour votre examen orale, si vous voulez. Choisissez une option ici et puis vouz avez quinze minutes pour decider ce que vous voulez dire pour une presentation sur ca. D’accord?" Or something like that, he blurts out. I make my best, "I understand but will you please say that again" face, but it doesn’t work and I am stuck trying to figure out what to do. I notice the pack of Camels on the desk and all I can think is "perhaps I ought to take up smoking because maybe then when things like this happen and I have no way to respond, I could just take a drag and it would give me another moment to think. I wonder if he’d let me bum one? NO, NO, NO! Forget that plan! No ciggies! Just because all the French do it does not mean it is a good idea. They also drink coffee out of bowls. Shoot, he is still waiting for an answer..." But out loud all I say is "Ok... ca va bien." "Alright, that sounds good." And then choose a topic. Wonder of wonders, it is one I actually know about (or so I thought), and he looks disappointed that I have chosen it. Incidentally, it was the same building about which he called on me during class in November sometime, and I still didn’t know any more about the dagnab peristyle au fond. Anyway, I take my moment to prepare and then start talking about it, and he keeps writing things down as I speak and interrupting with "Ahh, oui!" and "Exactement!" enough that I know I am doing decently well. Then when I finish, he says, in French, "You mentioned that this room is a cubiculum. Are you sure about that?" But whenever a teacher asks that, you know that you, in fact, were not sure at all, despite how fervently you believed it three minutes ago while in the midst of your presentation. So I figure out what that room actually was, but in the process have to use the word for "roof." Now, this should not be a problem, right? I know words like that. BUT the thing is that the word for roof sounds very much like a dirty word in English. So I rarely use it. Actually, I have never used it. Because I can’t say it without thinking of the dirty English word, which makes me afraid I am going to pronounce it wrong and people will misunderstand. Gravely. And I definitely don’t want to make that error in front of my terribly glamourous French archaeology prof, so I rack my brain for another word. "Ceiling? No, I don’t know that word. Wall? No, he will have no idea what I am talking about. I got it! Top!" So I say something about the top of the building and he says, "Oui," and repeats the word for roof at me, clearly expecting me to repeat it, which usually I would do without hesitation, but this time I can’t do it with a straight face because it suddenly occurs to me that we are nothing but two 20-somethings sitting in the back deserted room of an ancient building in the middle of Paris at 630 on a Friday night talking about... well... I can’t even say it in English, but you get the idea. Something bad. So I look at him and try to remember that he has probably never even heard the word in English and so even if I mispronounce it, he won’t notice. But remember, this is the same professor to whom I asked, with regard to this exam, in a moment of language-barrier induced confusion, "do you want me?" and the thought of that freezes me up even more. But he is still looking at me waiting for me to repeat the word and go on with the sentence, and I can’t do it. I put on my best, "I still know what I am talking about even if it doesn’t seem like it" face, smile graciously, thank him, and continue, all without using the dreaded word.
Eventually I finish my explanation, and he says, "Very good, only why did you start at the back of the building? It would make much more sense to start from the front and work your way back..." and that was his biggest criticism. He gave me a nice speech about how difficult it must be, and taking that into account he was going to give me a 15. A 15 in France is like... I think... the highest B one can achieve (not to mention over twice as good as the grade I got on the written midterm I didn’t study for), so I was thrilled. I must not have looked it, though, and so he tried to explain... "15 in France, what is that like in the US? You use all those silly letter grades, so what would this be?" And so we sat there, with the Eiffel Tower blinking far out the window behind him, discussing the grading system in the US versus France, and then the fact that people in the Roman Empire ate in the same position in which they had orgies. Lovely, I don’t know how he knew that one, but it came up because he said I had described the triclinium wrongly. "It’s not just the dining room, it’s also the room where they hosted the orgies." I must have looked shocked, and he said, "That is why there were three walls of long benches all the way around. So people could lay on them while their servants fed them grapes." At least I think that is what he said. I kind of got distracted after the orgy part, which I only understood because it is pronounced the same in both languages.
From my favorite movie, paraphrased for this situation: "Honestly, anyone who can’t handle making a fool of themselves doesn’t deserve to [learn another language]."
Making a fool of myself daily in the name of Americans everywhere,
B
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Guess who’s back... back again...?
I spent the last 15 days in the US, living it up like a true gypsy. I spent 5 days in my car, hitting up each of the places I have called home, and generally making a whirlwind tour of the Southeastern US. I visited my favorite coffee shop in Raleigh with a friend from high school, snacked on pancakes and fried egg sandwiches at the best diner in Atlanta ("serving food that pleases since 1929") with an Emory friend, saw people I had not seen in 15 years at my family’s old church in Florida, spent the night on my aunt and uncle’s farm in central GA, ate bacon with a friend who never thought he would see the day I became a carnivore, reminded the congregation of Community Christian Church in Beattyville that the Rodeo Queen lives, and realized that being in shape and climbing around on mountains all summer does not mean that eating croissants and quiche every day is a good idea.
The highlight of the vacation-from-my-vacation-life-in-Paris, though, was definitely the night I spent on The Mountain in Kentucky. I worked last summer at this ridiculous and completely insane pseudo-episcopal camp exactly 1.3 kilometers from the dead Center of Nowhere, USA. (See entry from mid-November trip to Alsace for exact location of Centre de Nul Part, France.) That means that the exact Center is on the property of this camp. The camp happens to be the place where one severely handsome Backstreet Boy grew up, and that is a huge part of the reason I took the job to begin with. Because let’s discuss the concept of me working on a mountain for 10 weeks. First of all, I went, nearly immediately, from an electricity-free mountain to freaking Paris, France. But if you can get past the culture shock there (which I nearly didn’t), there is still the fact that it was me working on a mountain. I am not even Episcopal! I showed up for my first day of work only to find... no one. So I drove the circle of camp, and the first living soul I saw was this crazy Jesus-hippie-grizzly bear looking man on a roof. All I could think was that there was no way I was going to blend in.
Anyway, I, little Miss pretend-I-am-French, lived on this mountain, away from civilization, air conditioning, and the real world, for two and a half months or something. I wore no makeup (none, not even concealer. Not even lip gloss, I was down to just chapstick!)... let my hair air dry every morning and then put it in a ponytail (which for me is huge because if there is one thing you should know about me it is that I. Never. Put. My. Hair. In. A. Ponytail.). I even wore a polo shirt every Sunday for this place. Now that is dedication. (But I still rolled the sleeves up to make it a little less New England rich lame Jcrew prepster.) And then, to top that off, I lived in a building shared with several mice, hiked mountains in pouring rain or blistering sun (dragging kids along with me), and spent mornings at least once a week clambering through a cave full of bats by choice. I sweated through my shirt (like, literally through it) almost every day, but the kicker is that by 10 in the morning I was counting the minutes till I sweated through it, because once you do that, you cool down much faster. If ever there were a preconceived notion about me, if ever there were a situation that the majority of the world could not see me in, this would be it. The only thing I could see myself doing less than that would be hitchhiking. Or being put in jail. One down, one more to go, I guess. Anyway, despite my huge fear that I would not fit in, that I would be fired for being too prissy, that I would be the only one there who didn’t know everyone else, etc., it ended up being one wicked cool summer.
Hence the highlight of my trip. So I am getting dressed to go to the mountain last Saturday morning, and all I can think as I am trying to figure out what to wear is, "I really don’t want to go hiking. I am not in the shape I should be to do so, and plus it is cold. So, what can I wear that will be a legitimate excuse to not hike in? I know! Concert tee, black jeans, Chucks. Perfect." Little did I know what was in store...
The entire staff sans one showed up for the night, and we all decided to spend the night. So my boss tells us we can have Patterson, the building where the Bish stays when he comes to visit, so in theory it should be nice, but everyone knows that not only is it haunted but it is also crawling with mice and the value it is insured for, I suspect, greatly outweighs the value of the building. This summer the toilet in it broke, we found multiple dead (and worse, live!) mice, something went wrong with the electricity and the faucet on the outside wall started electrocuting people every time they touched it, the PA system running through it never worked, and there was at least three well-documented ghost sightings in the building. But with five ex-summer staff sleeping there, we thought we’d be fine. Oh, the mice didn’t get me. And the ghosts left us alone. But the rest of the staff? That’s a whole ‘nother banana.
We started the night at the campfire, where we made s’mores until the fire started to die and none of us could handle the idea of more soggy graham crackers. Post-campfire, we headed to the dining hall, which has this industrially-equipped restaurant-style kitchen that no one uses in the middle of the night... except us. So at midnight we stood in there, leaning against the counters and cooking chicken wings, fried cheese sticks ("what do you think would happen if we baked these?"), and spaghetti, and gorging ourselves on peanut butter brownies and cupcakes left over from dinner. Just like old times.
Eventually we head back to the building where we are going to spend the night, turn on the flame-lit furnace-slash-heater, and hang out doing absolutely nothing for hours at a time. It was just like over the summer after the kids had gone to bed, except that this time we didn’t have to be awake at 730 the next morning.
At 300am, we raided the cupboards of the building where we were, finding nothing but a freezer-burned bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit and a half-empty box of nutri-grain bars. I am 100% sure that I ate the other half of that box over the summer when I was hanging out in that building.
At 330, someone turned on Seinfeld.
At 345, we actually ate the Nutri-Grain bars... AND the biscuit.
At 4, I decided to go to bed, on the loveseat where I was laying.
At 405, the boys sneaked up behind me and roared loud enough that I jumped out of my skin and rolled onto the floor, giving me too much adrenaline to go back to sleep... for the moment.
At 500, I declared it really was time for bed, and that I still hate Seinfeld.
At 510, someone dogpiled me on the loveseat, but when I refused to move, I was picked up and carried across the room, in the arms of a guy three inches shorter than me.
At 515, only the three guys and I were awake. Suddenly one of them declared, "we’re going for a sunrise hike!" I quickly realized the ramifications of this proposition and immediately played possum, thinking maybe then I wouldn’t have to go.
At 517, he tried to pull one of the other guys into the hike, who replied, "I’m not going unless Blair does," knowing there was no way I would go.
At 518, I looked at the clock and realized I had to be up in 3 hours anyway... so why not?
The four of us– three ridiculously buff mountain men and me, the girl scared of cave crickets– headed to the camp store to equip ourselves, more out of force of habit than the actual need for provisions. Armed with nothing but a room-temperature bottle of water stuck in my back pocket and a worn-out hoodie, we took off. The trail was thick with fallen leaves, it was dark, I was in Chuck Taylors worn smooth from miles schlepped through the Paris subway, and it was muddy. But we made it... nearly. They were all fine... but I nearly bit it twice. Once I started to slip, remembered I was in my favorite black jeans, and managed to break my fall without my pants touching the mud. But I had forgotten what it was like to live on the mountain. Before I had hit the ground, before I even really knew I was falling, all three of them were laughing at me. But that is how you function when you live on a mountain in the general vicinity of Nowhere. If it had been them (which it never would have been), I’d have done the same. We got to the bottom of the cliff thing you have to climb up for the view of the sunrise, it was still foggy, and we realized it was still just as dark as it had been at midnight.
"What time is sunrise again?"
"Oh, I don’t know, somewhere between 7 and 830."
"What time is it now?"
"545."
They had decided we would watch it from the top of Wolf Pen, my favorite hike and probably the only reason I decided to go with. But to get to the top of Wolf Pen, you have to pull yourself up this mega-rock with ropes that have been there for ages. Not a problem if it is hot, and you are in hiking boots. Also not a problem if you are named Cliff and one of your parents is a mountain goat. But if you have spent the last four months climbing nothing more strenuous than a pseudo-mountain somewhere in Spain to see an ancient military fortress... and it is dark... and you are wearing tractionless Chucks...it’s a little more difficult. Because when it is cold, grabbing a rope just burns. But somehow we made it to the top, where I was convinced I saw an actual wolf. After ten minutes of hanging out on the top, one of the guys voted for leaving:
"Look how dark it is! The sun has got to be hours from rising! Let’s go get breakfast. I bet the cooks are here already..."
Another mountain goat-boy replies, "No, come on, we’ve got to stay! We’ve made it this far, and plus, everyone knows that it’s always darkest right before the sun comes up!"
The rest of us exchange looks.
I call him out on it: "Look, I am not even from the country and I know that bluegrass gospel song that says so... but I really think that is just a song meant to be, you know, figurative? I think once the sun is down it is dark, and if it’s dark, how can it be any darker? There are degrees of light, but not really degrees of dark. Either something is dark or it isn’t."
Long pause.
"The sun will be up soon. We’re staying."
We clambered around on the top, noticing the places where names are engraved, and how completely different the view is when there are not leaves obstructing it. We re-enacted our favorite hikes from the summer; "YOU ARE LOST!" and "Just take your time, there’s no rush..." and the girl who we had to carry up and the one that kicked Trina in the face, and the time I tried to run back from the Saddle, wiped out and still have the jagged scars to prove it and the time my boss forbid us to go and the time we girls went anyway, bear whistles blowing intermittently all the way. And then, what else are you supposed to do when you find yourself on a mountain, in the cold, before dawn? We spooned.
Anyway, soon the sun began to rise, lightening the whole sky almost immediately. We stood around and watched it and tried to stay warm with the geek button and hoods and whatever else we had, until we realized it was too cloudy for a good one, but we could see the parking lot and the cooks’ cars, and we knew breakfast was calling our names. I think that morning was the first time I ever made it to breakfast before my boss. Wearing last night’s clothes but otherwise none the worse for wear, we served breakfast and I remembered just exactly why, despite never meeting anyone more famous than Andy himself, I loved the mountain. (Hint: large kettles of grits, pans of country ham, fresh hot coffee at all hours of the day, and free Ale-8 in returnable bottles, the only kind worth drinking.)
Said my goodbyes after breakfast and took off, back to Beattyville, where I somehow managed to stay awake until 9pm (that has got to be some kind of record, really...). And before that weekend, the last time I stayed up all night by choice and not to study was... well... a really long time ago.
Thanking God I’m a country girl,
B
I spent the last 15 days in the US, living it up like a true gypsy. I spent 5 days in my car, hitting up each of the places I have called home, and generally making a whirlwind tour of the Southeastern US. I visited my favorite coffee shop in Raleigh with a friend from high school, snacked on pancakes and fried egg sandwiches at the best diner in Atlanta ("serving food that pleases since 1929") with an Emory friend, saw people I had not seen in 15 years at my family’s old church in Florida, spent the night on my aunt and uncle’s farm in central GA, ate bacon with a friend who never thought he would see the day I became a carnivore, reminded the congregation of Community Christian Church in Beattyville that the Rodeo Queen lives, and realized that being in shape and climbing around on mountains all summer does not mean that eating croissants and quiche every day is a good idea.
The highlight of the vacation-from-my-vacation-life-in-Paris, though, was definitely the night I spent on The Mountain in Kentucky. I worked last summer at this ridiculous and completely insane pseudo-episcopal camp exactly 1.3 kilometers from the dead Center of Nowhere, USA. (See entry from mid-November trip to Alsace for exact location of Centre de Nul Part, France.) That means that the exact Center is on the property of this camp. The camp happens to be the place where one severely handsome Backstreet Boy grew up, and that is a huge part of the reason I took the job to begin with. Because let’s discuss the concept of me working on a mountain for 10 weeks. First of all, I went, nearly immediately, from an electricity-free mountain to freaking Paris, France. But if you can get past the culture shock there (which I nearly didn’t), there is still the fact that it was me working on a mountain. I am not even Episcopal! I showed up for my first day of work only to find... no one. So I drove the circle of camp, and the first living soul I saw was this crazy Jesus-hippie-grizzly bear looking man on a roof. All I could think was that there was no way I was going to blend in.
Anyway, I, little Miss pretend-I-am-French, lived on this mountain, away from civilization, air conditioning, and the real world, for two and a half months or something. I wore no makeup (none, not even concealer. Not even lip gloss, I was down to just chapstick!)... let my hair air dry every morning and then put it in a ponytail (which for me is huge because if there is one thing you should know about me it is that I. Never. Put. My. Hair. In. A. Ponytail.). I even wore a polo shirt every Sunday for this place. Now that is dedication. (But I still rolled the sleeves up to make it a little less New England rich lame Jcrew prepster.) And then, to top that off, I lived in a building shared with several mice, hiked mountains in pouring rain or blistering sun (dragging kids along with me), and spent mornings at least once a week clambering through a cave full of bats by choice. I sweated through my shirt (like, literally through it) almost every day, but the kicker is that by 10 in the morning I was counting the minutes till I sweated through it, because once you do that, you cool down much faster. If ever there were a preconceived notion about me, if ever there were a situation that the majority of the world could not see me in, this would be it. The only thing I could see myself doing less than that would be hitchhiking. Or being put in jail. One down, one more to go, I guess. Anyway, despite my huge fear that I would not fit in, that I would be fired for being too prissy, that I would be the only one there who didn’t know everyone else, etc., it ended up being one wicked cool summer.
Hence the highlight of my trip. So I am getting dressed to go to the mountain last Saturday morning, and all I can think as I am trying to figure out what to wear is, "I really don’t want to go hiking. I am not in the shape I should be to do so, and plus it is cold. So, what can I wear that will be a legitimate excuse to not hike in? I know! Concert tee, black jeans, Chucks. Perfect." Little did I know what was in store...
The entire staff sans one showed up for the night, and we all decided to spend the night. So my boss tells us we can have Patterson, the building where the Bish stays when he comes to visit, so in theory it should be nice, but everyone knows that not only is it haunted but it is also crawling with mice and the value it is insured for, I suspect, greatly outweighs the value of the building. This summer the toilet in it broke, we found multiple dead (and worse, live!) mice, something went wrong with the electricity and the faucet on the outside wall started electrocuting people every time they touched it, the PA system running through it never worked, and there was at least three well-documented ghost sightings in the building. But with five ex-summer staff sleeping there, we thought we’d be fine. Oh, the mice didn’t get me. And the ghosts left us alone. But the rest of the staff? That’s a whole ‘nother banana.
We started the night at the campfire, where we made s’mores until the fire started to die and none of us could handle the idea of more soggy graham crackers. Post-campfire, we headed to the dining hall, which has this industrially-equipped restaurant-style kitchen that no one uses in the middle of the night... except us. So at midnight we stood in there, leaning against the counters and cooking chicken wings, fried cheese sticks ("what do you think would happen if we baked these?"), and spaghetti, and gorging ourselves on peanut butter brownies and cupcakes left over from dinner. Just like old times.
Eventually we head back to the building where we are going to spend the night, turn on the flame-lit furnace-slash-heater, and hang out doing absolutely nothing for hours at a time. It was just like over the summer after the kids had gone to bed, except that this time we didn’t have to be awake at 730 the next morning.
At 300am, we raided the cupboards of the building where we were, finding nothing but a freezer-burned bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit and a half-empty box of nutri-grain bars. I am 100% sure that I ate the other half of that box over the summer when I was hanging out in that building.
At 330, someone turned on Seinfeld.
At 345, we actually ate the Nutri-Grain bars... AND the biscuit.
At 4, I decided to go to bed, on the loveseat where I was laying.
At 405, the boys sneaked up behind me and roared loud enough that I jumped out of my skin and rolled onto the floor, giving me too much adrenaline to go back to sleep... for the moment.
At 500, I declared it really was time for bed, and that I still hate Seinfeld.
At 510, someone dogpiled me on the loveseat, but when I refused to move, I was picked up and carried across the room, in the arms of a guy three inches shorter than me.
At 515, only the three guys and I were awake. Suddenly one of them declared, "we’re going for a sunrise hike!" I quickly realized the ramifications of this proposition and immediately played possum, thinking maybe then I wouldn’t have to go.
At 517, he tried to pull one of the other guys into the hike, who replied, "I’m not going unless Blair does," knowing there was no way I would go.
At 518, I looked at the clock and realized I had to be up in 3 hours anyway... so why not?
The four of us– three ridiculously buff mountain men and me, the girl scared of cave crickets– headed to the camp store to equip ourselves, more out of force of habit than the actual need for provisions. Armed with nothing but a room-temperature bottle of water stuck in my back pocket and a worn-out hoodie, we took off. The trail was thick with fallen leaves, it was dark, I was in Chuck Taylors worn smooth from miles schlepped through the Paris subway, and it was muddy. But we made it... nearly. They were all fine... but I nearly bit it twice. Once I started to slip, remembered I was in my favorite black jeans, and managed to break my fall without my pants touching the mud. But I had forgotten what it was like to live on the mountain. Before I had hit the ground, before I even really knew I was falling, all three of them were laughing at me. But that is how you function when you live on a mountain in the general vicinity of Nowhere. If it had been them (which it never would have been), I’d have done the same. We got to the bottom of the cliff thing you have to climb up for the view of the sunrise, it was still foggy, and we realized it was still just as dark as it had been at midnight.
"What time is sunrise again?"
"Oh, I don’t know, somewhere between 7 and 830."
"What time is it now?"
"545."
They had decided we would watch it from the top of Wolf Pen, my favorite hike and probably the only reason I decided to go with. But to get to the top of Wolf Pen, you have to pull yourself up this mega-rock with ropes that have been there for ages. Not a problem if it is hot, and you are in hiking boots. Also not a problem if you are named Cliff and one of your parents is a mountain goat. But if you have spent the last four months climbing nothing more strenuous than a pseudo-mountain somewhere in Spain to see an ancient military fortress... and it is dark... and you are wearing tractionless Chucks...it’s a little more difficult. Because when it is cold, grabbing a rope just burns. But somehow we made it to the top, where I was convinced I saw an actual wolf. After ten minutes of hanging out on the top, one of the guys voted for leaving:
"Look how dark it is! The sun has got to be hours from rising! Let’s go get breakfast. I bet the cooks are here already..."
Another mountain goat-boy replies, "No, come on, we’ve got to stay! We’ve made it this far, and plus, everyone knows that it’s always darkest right before the sun comes up!"
The rest of us exchange looks.
I call him out on it: "Look, I am not even from the country and I know that bluegrass gospel song that says so... but I really think that is just a song meant to be, you know, figurative? I think once the sun is down it is dark, and if it’s dark, how can it be any darker? There are degrees of light, but not really degrees of dark. Either something is dark or it isn’t."
Long pause.
"The sun will be up soon. We’re staying."
We clambered around on the top, noticing the places where names are engraved, and how completely different the view is when there are not leaves obstructing it. We re-enacted our favorite hikes from the summer; "YOU ARE LOST!" and "Just take your time, there’s no rush..." and the girl who we had to carry up and the one that kicked Trina in the face, and the time I tried to run back from the Saddle, wiped out and still have the jagged scars to prove it and the time my boss forbid us to go and the time we girls went anyway, bear whistles blowing intermittently all the way. And then, what else are you supposed to do when you find yourself on a mountain, in the cold, before dawn? We spooned.
Anyway, soon the sun began to rise, lightening the whole sky almost immediately. We stood around and watched it and tried to stay warm with the geek button and hoods and whatever else we had, until we realized it was too cloudy for a good one, but we could see the parking lot and the cooks’ cars, and we knew breakfast was calling our names. I think that morning was the first time I ever made it to breakfast before my boss. Wearing last night’s clothes but otherwise none the worse for wear, we served breakfast and I remembered just exactly why, despite never meeting anyone more famous than Andy himself, I loved the mountain. (Hint: large kettles of grits, pans of country ham, fresh hot coffee at all hours of the day, and free Ale-8 in returnable bottles, the only kind worth drinking.)
Said my goodbyes after breakfast and took off, back to Beattyville, where I somehow managed to stay awake until 9pm (that has got to be some kind of record, really...). And before that weekend, the last time I stayed up all night by choice and not to study was... well... a really long time ago.
Thanking God I’m a country girl,
B
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)