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