Top ten ways you know you’ve been in France too long...

1. You wonder if McDonald’s in the US is serving a McRoyale Tartiflette right now.
2. You wonder on a fairly regular basis what the likelihood of H&M hiring you to be their next model is, given that you have begun to wear only their clothes.
3. You wear solid black, head to toe... twice in a week.
4. You own at least one of each of the following, which you use at least once a week: cigarette pants, heeled boots, stocking cap, silk camisole, carte orange.
5. A Nutella crepe does not seem like an unsquare meal.
6. You can’t remember your size in the US, and saying "I wear a 38" no longer seems like such a big deal.
8. When you do something stupid, you no longer mutter "dang it," but "zut alors..."
9. You find yourself wondering why you don’t take the bus more often in the US.
10. It’s been five months, three weeks and two days since you ate a bagel.

You may notice that I skipped number 7. It’s because I have a party to go to and need to get out of here. Alors, bon soiree!
~B

"And in this moment, I am happy...
I wish you were here."
~Incubus, Wish You Were Here

Tonight I went to see "L’Ami Alleman" with some friends... "The Good German," in English. I went with four French people and a Canadian. This is the movie I said would never go over well here because no one would want to see a movie about "good" Germans. I was wrong, because the whole premise of the movie is that there are NO good Germans. Actually, the tragic main character is Cate Blanchett, who plays this villified German Jew married to an SS officer. I think she is supposed to be ironically the good German, BUT she sends twelve of her Jewish friends to the camps, then becomes a prostitute, which, in combination, save her from being sent to the camps.
It may take the cake as the worst movie I have ever seen, ever.
I like George Clooney, but he got the bejeebees kicked out of him in this, and after the first fifteen minutes, I found myself glad, because anyone who makes a movie that BAD probably needs some sense kicked into them. It’s in black and white, with cheesy old music and lots of scenes straight out of other movies– Casablanca, Pearl Harbor, etc. No plot, really, just a lot of German names that I couldn’t keep straight, AND it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who I feel like used to direct really lame teen movies or something, but I can’t remember.
BUT now that I have seen it and am qualified to make a statement about it: I was wrong, the French will eat this up because, as we all now know, there is no such thing as a Good German. According to the movie, and this is a quote: "They should probably all be hung, because every last one of them knew what Hitler was doing and no one lifted a finger to stop it."
I’m not saying it’s true. But according to the movie, and probably French people, it is. So there you go. But save your $8, and DO NOT go see it... because not only is it bad, it’s just BORING. Nothing happens, and then it ends, and not like one of those foreign films where you are left to tie up the loose ends in your head, but just... it ends, and you don’t know HOW or WHY or WHEN or WHO... Lame.
In other news, one of the French guys at the movie asked me if I was from New Zealand (because approximately 98% of the English-speaking population of my church is from NZ or Australia). I answered, in French, "No, I am american." In French, like in English, this takes four words to say, and thus should not be that complicated, especially since I have to say "americaine" all the time.
So I say, "Non, je suis americaine," and the other French girl standing there goes "amehhhhricaine," making fun of the way I said it, and then snickered. I don’t mind when people correct me, and I love it when they help me out with expressions I don’t understand, whatever... but these people KNEW I didn’t speak French well (I don’t front about it like I’m fluent or something) and it wasn’t like a teasing ‘let me help the poor american’ kind of thing, it was just mean. Especially because she had asked me something in English earlier in the evening that didn’t make sense at all– her English accent is as bad as my French one, and she actually speaks WORSE English than I do French, and still she has the nerve to make fun of me to my face? I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t, at that point, been the only non-French person in the group (the Canadian had not arrived yet), and I had only met two of them before, and all the French guys are standing there listening to me, and I realize that I probably make a fool of myself with my childish phrases and Valley Girl accent every time I say anything, but at least you could be nice about it?
But on the bright side, she’s the only person that has ever been outright rude to me about my french, and when I mentioned it to my Swedish friend (who is fluent in French), she said the girl is always mean like that to everyone.
At least I’m still trying...

I’m going to try to stop babbling about California, because it’s so far in the future that I might as well quit thinking about it, though I am so excited, you have no idea how little sense that makes. (Every time the subject comes up, I gush. Maybe I am prone to gushing anyway, being that I am sort of an overdramatic girly girl that never really outgrew the chick flick stage, but I’ve never noticed it about myself except with regard to this particular job. I mean, literally– I hung up with the guy from LA in my phone booth, danced IN THE PHONE BOOTH like a crazy person [who dances in phone booths except for the mentally ill?] then picked the phone back up and called my grandmother, who probably couldn’t understand anything I said because it sounded less like a coherent human voice and more like "OMIGOSHYOUWILLNEVERBELIEVEWHATJUSTHAPPENEDTHEGUYGAVEMETHE
JOBIAMGOINGTOCALIFORNIAHEDIDN’TWANTTOINTERVIEWMEHEJUSTWANTED
TOGIVEMETHEJOBANDNOWIAMGOINGTOCALIFORNIAIMEANNOTRIGHTNOWBUT
ATTHEENDOFTHESEMESTERFORTHEWHOLESUMMERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
CANYOUBELIEVEITBECAUSEICAN’TIAMTOTALLYSTILLINSHOCK!" That is a direct transcription of the whole conversation. Anyway, the point of all that is to say that I danced in an all-glass phone booth on the Boulevard Sebastopol, one of the main streets in Central Paris. Alone. I think I still had the phone in my hand, waving it over my head, which makes the whole thing even less charming and more just... awkward.)
So after this, no more California, except for updates when something new happens.
BUT I read this book during the beginning of my freshman year of college by John Eldredge, who is usually theologically shaky but interesting reading nonetheless, and filled with good quotes by people who are not theologically challenged. And when you put down one of his books, you always feel better than when you picked it up. But this particular one had an introduction that I actually read (I never read introductions, this was a major step for me), and I don’t remember anything about it except that the last paragraph talked about how miserable our daily existence is (the premise of the book was to teach the reader how to improve that miserableness or something, I don’t know.), and the last sentence said "Imagine that you somehow found out that this, the way you live now, your obligations, job, responsibilities, routine, your daily life right now was going to be the same for the rest of your life. It would never get worse, but it would never get better either. Think about this, and you will realize something important. It is hell."
Ok, that’s like three sentences, but still. The point is, I got through the introduction, read that sentence, and thought to myself, "but he’s wrong!" Because if I could have frozen that period of time forever and just lived like that, it would have been perfect. So I put the book down and thought "Well, eventually I’ll be mature enough to understand that, and then I’ll read it for real."
The summer after freshman year came and was somehow even better than freshman year. Then was sophomore year, which, even with a broken arm and a lot of roaches marring the semesters, will still go down in history as amazing. Last summer came, and begged to be extended for so much longer than it could be... Living in Paris finally happened, and was so amazing I chose to stay an EXTRA semester. And now I am going to LA, to do what I’ve always wanted to do, ever since I was old enough to have a legitimate career plan that didn’t involve being in the circus (which is the first thing I remember ever wanting to do with my life).
I never read past the intro of poor John Eldredge’s book, because with a hook like that, I figured there could be nothing in it for me.
I guess we’ll never know if I was right, because I still don’t plan on reading it anytime soon. Though I think he lives in California, so maybe his people can get in touch with my people (because that’s how they roll in Cali, I think) and we can do lunch to discuss it. In English.
~The non-fluent B

"Jacob... is that a Jewish name?"
"No, but the way you’re eating that ham could make anybody go Kosher."
~The Good German

Interactivity!
A Quiz for you:
Which of the following has NOT happened to Blair in one or another of the jobs she has worked in the past seven years:
A) A 30-year-old murder weapon falls into the linoleum at her feet as she is trying to open a jammed file cabinet.
B) She gets to go home from work early because Clay Aiken has made it to the American Idol finals.
C) She gets to go home from work early at a library because the police are called in.
D) She spends all afternoon playing football in waist-deep mud.
E) David Crowder opens a trunk that should have contained a lighting truss to find Blair holed up inside waiting to surprise her boss.
F) She ends up at a Waffle House somewhere in Wisconsin at 3am, drinking hot chocolate and eating apple pie at a table with four professional musicians.
G) She works for... 30 Seconds To Mars’ record label. ‘Nough said.

Tricked you again... ALL TRUE. (The first one I was only witness to– someone else was actually trying to open the cabinet, but I watched the whole thing happen, so that is cool.) The last one is still to come, but if I have the job secured, I can still brag about it, right?

Saturday night I went to a Canadian bar here to watch a rugby game. There are many factors about that sentence that I never would have done in the US. The first match was England/Ireland... so I am an American getting hit on by a German in this standing-room-only Canadian bar full of Brits on the banks of the Seine in the heart of Paris, with my group of French friends, who were the only natives in the place. And the game is roaring on the tv screens, and the Irish are roaring louder, because the beer has been flowing since 17h00, and they are beating England for the first time in forever.
And then Ireland wins, and the German turns to me (now he has time for me since he doesn’t have to pay attention to the game) and says "So what are you doing in Paris?" and I tell him and return the question, and he says "I work for thurpeenynyun." And, thinking this must be some weird German thing, or perhaps that I just heard him incorrectly, I respond with "WHAT?" and he says "The European Union! You know, the one with the blue flag and the little yellow stars?!" I may be an American and we may be by nature ignorant, but come on, give me some credit, man. Haha.
Just then my Swedish friend appears starving, and wants to share something to eat. But the only thing on the menu is burgers. And beer. But we aren’t thirsty, and I think they must have run out of beer by then because it was flowing like milk and honey in Canaan. Anyway, she wants to share a burger. But I was a vegetarian for four years. And I quit eating ground beef even before that. And I have not missed it or wanted it since I went back to eating meat this year. I haven’t had a burger in probably six years. BUT... what else am I supposed to do?
But if you’re going to go, go all out, I say.
So she orders us a bacon cheeseburger with onions.
Do I need to even say that it was divine? I sat and looked at my half for a long time before I took a bite because the thought of ground beef also really freaks me out, but then I ate it, and it was like... I don’t even know. Good. I don’t plan on eating any more burgers any time soon, because it feels too not glamourous to do it on a regular basis. But when you are in a freaking PUB with one-third of the population of Ireland watching RUGBY?
When in Rome...

After the England/Ireland game, we left the pub to go to a friend’s apartment in the suburbs to hang out. So four French girls, me, and a French guy pile into the guy’s car and he drives us to Levallois, a suburb just Northwest of Paris. I hate the suburbs, remember? But we’re going to a friend’s house– this crazy guy raised in South Africa and fluent in French, English, and whatever they speak in South Africa and (I have heard rumored) Dutch. Basically he’s like my idol. And since we are with Kelvin, a french guy who looks Cuban and speaks nothing but French BUT has a car (this is unheard of with 20somethings in France), we get to DRIVE to Levallois instead of take the Metro. But there are way too many of us in the car, and suddenly it feels like being at Emory and driving from one end of campus to the other when it is winter and too cold to walk. We’re listening to rap music from America, and I am the only one that can understand it, but they are all trying to keep up with the words, and we’re laughing hysterically and suddenly someone realizes we can’t show up at Jaco’s apartment (the South African) without some kind of gift. But where are you going to get anything edible at 1130 at night in freaking Levallois-Perret? We found an alimentation– basically a Parisian convenience store– and bought a 12-pack of Kronenburg, a bag of bacon-flavored chips and a bag of paprika-flavored chips. When we get to the apartment, there is 6 or 7 French guys, the South African, my Swedish friend, the French girls that came in the car with me, and moi (the token American). We offer the Kronenburg to Jaco, who can’t find a bottle opener, and so we crack open the case and everyone starts drinking warm beer because that is what you do when you are watching rugby in France in the middle of winter. (Oh, yeah, there is another game on now: France/Wales, and this is big, because it’s France playing.)
So we sit down on the floor to watch the game (this maybe a French bachelor pad, but it’s still a bachelor pad), and I, of course, can’t keep up. But I’m the only one there that doesn’t know the rules... I didn’t even know rugby was played with a ball– I think I had it confused with, like, Cricket or something, which is probably also played with a ball because what else could you play a sport with, unless you were like the Mayans and used human heads?
Anyway, soon France scores or something, and suddenly everyone is waving their bottles in the air and shouting something in French. I can’t follow at all, but I raise my bottle dutifully and try to figure out what is happening... they finish chanting, everyone clinks bottles, and I whisper to the girl next to me "what just happened?" and she says, "Oh, honey! You don’t know that song?! It’s the Marseillaise!"
Which is the French national anthem.

Only she said it loud enough that everyone else heard that I didn’t know the Marseillaise. No one can believe it. ("AND YOU’VE LIVED HERE HOW LONG?") I respond with "But I know the Canadian national anthem!" And the Canadian among us says, "Sing it to me!" So I start to sing, "Oh Canada, Oh Canada... thy leaves are so--" here he cuts me off.
"That's 'O TANNENBAUM,' you American!"
So I ask one of the girls to teach me the Marseillaise... I got a quick lesson, but mostly what I got was the translation, which goes something like "Raise the bloody flag, take down the German foe... the time has come to restore what is ours from the Frankish enemy..."
People talk about OURS being graphic? Theirs has explicit references to their Northern neighbor AND includes the adjective "bloody."
The French are so hardcore.
Wishing I was as cool as them,
B

"Oh, oh, California in the summer
Uh-huh, and my hair is growing long
...Yeah, we can live like this"
~Jack’s Mannequin, Holiday From Real.

I GOT THE JOB! I GOT THE JOB! I GOT THE JOB!
French people always say things three times for emphasis. It’s this weird habit I’ve picked up from them.

Last year I spent the better part of spring semester trying to find a summer job. I think I applied for over 20. And I didn’t figure it out until the week before I was supposed to start.
This year, from halfway across the world, it’s not even March yet and I have THE TOP CHOICE JOB I COULD EVER IMAGINE.
Prepare your faces.
There are three things that make a job good, right?
Company.
Position.
Location.
And this one? Every single thing about it is perfect.
An high-profile independent record label.
Publicity/Marketing Intern.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.
DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS? I SUBMIT THAT IT CAN NOT.
The home of such acts as Incubus. Korn (Lame, but whatever, they’re still famous). 30 Seconds To Mars. Waking Ashland. (Or maybe it’s Aslin... Ashlin... I don’t remember.)
Basically the coolest indie rock label... ever. And who’s their newest intern? Oh, yeah... ME.

The story of me getting this job is kind of ridiculous... and of course terribly French, as is everything in my life lately, so here you go:
I sent my resume and a cover letter to... someone at this record company, not even knowing if they HIRE summer interns, but hoping that if they do, I could be one of them. [Author’s Note: Apparently this is not a normal way to garner a job, as afterward I was telling a friend, and she said, "I wish I could be cool like you and just email people asking for jobs. You think it’s always that easy? Like, if people would just email each other asking for a job, you think they would get it?" So I guess there is usually some other MO for acquiring employment, but the thing is... I have no idea what it would be.] So I send off my resume about a week ago, and get an email back from their VP Marketing like the next day saying he’d "love to chat" about their internship possibilities and to give him a call. But LA is NINE time zones away from Paris, so I thought it perhaps would be better to get a more specific time from him than that. So we arranged it and I was supposed to call him tonight at 7pm for me, 10am for him.
So at 7, I walk into a phone booth outside my church, since church starts at 730 and I was already down there. I have my phone card in hand, and I am ready to go. I dial the phone, and then... I hear "BEEPBEEPHello?BEEPBEEEEEEEEEP" and I say who I am, and then the beeping gets so bad I have to hang up. Excellent. So I try to call back and this time it doesn’t work at all. Yes. There is one phone booth in Paris for every pigeon, and I walk into THE ONLY ONE that doesn’t work. Now I am freaking out, so I exit the phone booth and take off at full power walk for the next block, where I am praying there is going to be another booth. In short sleeves, because I left my coat in church. So with this bitter wind in the middle of the night, I am flying toward a dark street corner, because the quieter the better... except that the quieter the sketchier too. So I get into another phone booth, desperately stick my card into the phone, and just as I am dialing the number, a guy walks into the booth attached to mine and starts WAILING into the phone. I have no idea what language this guy was speaking, but it wasn’t English and it sure wasn’t French, and I am actually fairly confident it may have been Hittite. I have no idea what the conversation could POSSIBLY have been about, but the guy on my end was howling. Literally. There is no other word for it, he sounded like one of those people at funerals. And I have my finger shoved desperately in one ear, clicking the volume button furiously and trying to edge as far away from his side of the booth as possible when the California guy answers the phone. And then an ambulance goes by. So I am standing there in the pitch dark in the most hip district in Paris, everyone else on their way to a bar, and me on the phone, conducting a major job interview in a PHONE BOOTH. In Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, there’s this scene where the main character is in jail and trying to sell off one of his antiques, so he calls the broker from Christie’s or whatever, and just as the broker answers, another one of the prisoners starts barking like a dog, and the broker can’t hear him at all. And the guy is trying not to let the broker know he is in jail. And now imagine me, trying to front like I know what is going on, like I am sitting in my room– no, my office– being Very Official, instead of an underdressed 21-year-old on the side of the road at 730pm on a Friday.

But the guy, as it turned out, wanted more than just to chat about the job... he wanted to GIVE me the job. He said "I think it’s pretty cool you’re willing to move across the country for this." I wanted to remind him it’s more like across the world, but I decided he got the point already.
So I’m ending up in LA anyway.
Working for THE LABEL I’ve dreamed of.
For the whole summer.
Do you know anyone in LA? Where will you live? What will you do for money? How will you get around? What if there’s an earthquake? you may be asking.
All valid questions, except the last one, which is lame. But the thing is that none of those matter, because there is no way my life could get any cooler than it is.
Plus, I mean, honestly, let’s not rain on the parade. I have, like, three months to figure out the answers to those questions, which are, as of now, of course not, tentatively UCLA, I don’t know, and ditto.
But the important thing is this: I LOVE MY LIFE! And suddenly returning to the US does not seem nearly so bad.

On such a winter’s day...
~B

Let’s play a little game, shall we? I was hanging out this week with some friends and we started playing "Two Truths And A Lie"-- that ice breaker game where you tell 2 facts about yourself and one made-up one, and everyone else guesses which one is bogus. If you are reading this, you probably know me, at least sort of well. Or else you have been reading this enough that you might as well know me pretty well. These are some examples of what I used for the game, so based on what you know (slash have read), which of the following is not true:
1. I once fell asleep during a first date.
2. I jumped off a bridge... because all my friends did.
3. I got pulled over for driving too slow in a car that had no speedometer.
4. I learned to ride a bike at the age of 20.
5. The bassist of The Elms knew my name.
6. I once singlehandedly caused a car wreck, from the sidewalk, on foot.
7. I have broken each of my arms in two places.
8. I hitchhiked through Northern France.
9. I lived in the president’s suite of a frat house on frat row at Emory U.
10.I lived for two weeks in a building where the toilet had fallen through the floor.

Wait a minute, dang it... I just finished that list and realized... well... none of them are lies. Which is what makes it even better, because I could not make this stuff up if I had to. Ye Gods, what memories!
A word of explanation:
1. Doesn’t really merit an explanation. It happened in the car on the way home, I was embarrassed, but the guy handled it well.
2. I was 18, had been at college for, like, two weeks, and when there is a philosophy major talking you into it and all your new collegiate friends cheering you on from a riverbank, come on, you would totally do it too.
3. Only because I didn’t want to be going too fast. Guess where that one took place.
4. In the hall way of someone else’s frat house, and then on a parking garage roof.
5. Now there is a claim to fame. AND he gave me his pick.
6. All I did was walk down the sidewalk, and the blue-haired driver of a dark green Mazda was yelling at me instead of paying attention to the road when he ran a red light and T-boned someone else’s car. No one was hurt, which is why it is a great story.
7. Thumb: car door. Pinkie: trampoline. Elbow: horse. Wrist: bed.
8. See entry from November trip to Alsace. It was really cold... what can I say?
9. For the entirety of sophomore year, baby. Shared with a really cool roommate and some not-so-cool roaches.
10.And it was supposed to be the best building on that mountain.

I'm just saying...
~B

"But where’s your heart?"
~My Chemical Romance

Sometimes I feel like such an academic cliché because I spend rainy February mornings sitting in spacious classrooms discussing such metaphysical and crucial questions as "what is Art?" and when that is solved, we move on to "what is art?" and argue the difference between modern and Modern or modernism as noun and Modernism as movement, or even just modern vs. contemporary...
Because when you live in a European capital and spend time doing things like that for a whole year... well, there really is no word for it but cliché– intelligent, perhaps, but nevertheless, the breeding ground for people who wear bad shoes and cheap dresses and stand around sipping red wine at someone’s gallery opening. Much though I enjoy these classes and even these types of discussions, I am not ready to devote my life to being a bespectacled art historian in bad need of defrizzing serum and a good pair of Manolo Blahniks.
But then I walk outside and see the butcher across the street with whole pigs hanging in the window, and suddenly I realize that I am in no danger at all.
Here,
B
P.S. I will say, though, that the last time I walked past Les Invalides (the mostly-gilded building used as a military fortress under the early Louis’, and later Napoleon’s burial place), I found myself looking up at it and thinking (even while singing along to some superfluous punk song) "Wow, check out how they used the Doric columns on the bottom and then moved to Ionic on the middle levels and Corinthian at the top, just like at the Coliseé in Rome. Wait a minute, Coliseé Coliseé, what is that in English? Oh, duh– Colusseum. Anyway, they are totally copying the Classical Roman architecture with this one... OH MY GOSH AM I JUST SITTING HERE THINKING ABOUT THE PILLARS OF LES INVALIDES INSTEAD OF JUST ENJOYING IT FOR BEING A BUILDING MADE PRIMARILY OF GOLD? I AM SUCH A NERD! I should probably never tell anyone about this..."

And the Tuesdays from hell continue...
I spent an hour with Fabrice this morning, reviewing with him for some final thing he has to do. I learned the word for "gun," he taught me the word for "gangster," and then he asked me what "lawn" means.
But how are you supposed to explain the concept of a lawn to a kid who has never lived in anything but an apartment, in a city where there are NO HOUSES. Literally. You want houses, hit up the suburbs. The rich distant ones, not the closeby ones.
"C’est... un peu comme un jardin."
"It’s kind of... a garden." True, I could have gone with something less logical but more accurate– "It’s the place in front of a house where there are plants...?"
Yesterday I was hanging out with a Swedish friend and inadvertently used the word "tingle." And of course, she had no idea what it meant. Her English is fluent, but how often does that word come up? And HOW IN HEAVEN’S NAME DO YOU EXPLAIN IT, in English or otherwise? "It’s, like, when something feels... kind of... prickly, but in a good way? You know, it’s refreshing, and... it feels... like... cold on your skin?"
I am a terrible ambassador for this language.
After Fabrice’s, I went to my architecture class. No, wait, it’s not an architecture class, it’s an art history class focused on architecture of the Renaissance. So we should be STUDYING buildings, not designing them. But I walked in today, and the prof greets us with, "Oh, good, you’re all here for our design class." I choked. Apparently he had announced this on the first day of class, which I did not attend because I was not yet registered, and he didn’t tell me the next week. I have never in my life drawn a blueprint, and to be perfectly honest, whenever there are plans and layouts in anything I have to read for school, I look at it as a free page that I don’t need to read and skip right over it. So I start to freak. And then he says, "I want you to do a geometric plan of this building." First of all, I’ve only BEEN in that building four times, and every time straight to the same room. And secondly, the word geometric in itself is enough to make me shudder like the hyenas in Lion King. I thought seriously about pulling an Uncle Jessi– "I have to go to the bathroom," and then just not coming back, but I couldn’t figure out a way to get my bag and coat out with me just to go to the bathroom. And he starts using these words in French that I don’t understand about weight bearing and outer walls versus inner walls and beams and "Oh, don’t worry, only include the masonry of the building," in French, but I don’t really even know what masonry means in English, except for FREEmasonry, and that really doesn’t apply here. And now that I think about it, I really don’t know that much about that either...
But all those daggum Frenchies pull out their extra-large onionskin design paper and their sketch pencils– the fancy kind you sharpen with a knife– and their stupid gum erasers, which are probably my favorite thing in the whole world, and suddenly I am so jealous of their gum erasers because I haven’t had a new one to play with since high school, and I feel like the stupid kid (again) because I forgot to bring my homework with me, only it wasn’t homework and no one ever told me I needed to bring it. Though to their credit, even if they had told me, I would not have had any idea where to go buy the stuff. And the prof starts drawing a generic geometric plan on the board, in chalk over the chalk already on the board, so I can’t see what he is doing and it’s all full of diagonals to show weight, and I have no idea what any of it means.
So I draw a square, very lightly. Because I don’t know architecture and all I know about math is that I hate it, but I do know art. A little. More than the average person, perhaps. But not much more. And this to me is not art, this is design, and math, and engineering, and there is a HUGE difference.
I know enough to know you draw lightly and that the human wrist moves in a circle, so if you are not wanting to draw a circle, then you have to pick up your wrist. But I am also American, and apparently the American way of doing things when it comes to plans is wrong– you don’t make gentle little sketch marks when you are trying to draw a straight line. You run your hand across the paper in the trajectory that you want one time for practice, and then the second time you draw the dang line. In one smooth gesture. With your right hand, obviously.
This is something else I forgot to mention: there are no lefty Frenchies. I don’t know if they stifle left-handedness in France the way they did in the US back in the day or if it is more subconscious, but there are none. But I am left-handed. So I stick out like a sore thumb at dinners or in class when I am constantly bumping elbows with whoever is next to me.
So the professor is walking the class looking at everyone’s work, and I borrow the only extra sheet the girl next to me has, and start drawing with my stupid mechanical pencil a square made out of gentle sketch marks. He comes over and says, "Oh, it should be much more dirty than this, not nearly so neat, and don’t do it the American way, do it smoothly, like this..." I don’t think he meant it as an insult, I think he had forgotten I was American at that point. He takes my pencil, does the line, and then draws over it much darker than it had been. So I start drawing everything darker.
And he comes back 10 minutes later, and tries to erase one of my lines, and says, "Oh, this is much too dark, much too much, you must go lightly so that it can be erased." And I’m acquiescing silently, willing him to talk quietly so everyone else doesn’t realize how inept I am, when he walks away and opens the black curtains. And lo and behold, the windows that I assumed were rectangular, as windows are wont to be, are round. Which makes no sense, because who in their right mind has round windows? AND the ones on the other side of the room are rectangular and everyone knows the French are all about symmetry. But the roundness has thrown my outline off completely.
AND then there’s the fact that I still don’t really have any idea what I am doing, and my square is not centered and my center axis is leaning and my pillars are the same diameter as the windows, a gross error in scale, and my center beam is more like a 2/3 beam, re-erased so many times I can’t even tell where it actually is.
I learned the French word for the prong on a belt today– not the belt buckle, but the little prong thing that goes into the holes on the other end of the strap. I learned the word for that hole too. And while I was talking to Fabrice today I forgot the French word for skirt and had to explain it with "you know, it’s like a dress, but only the bottom half?"
I also learned a new French concept– diontologie. I don’t think we have this concept in English, though it might be like nihilism, solipsism and pastiche– words and concepts that exist in the English language but which one only knows if one has been through Dr. Busonik’s AP English Lit class (gag me with a spoon). Anyway, diontologie is not only a word we don’t have, but really the whole concept doesn’t exist in the English vocabulary– it’s used to refer to the obligations, mainly moral/ethical, but also just in general, of a profession. So medecine’s diontologie would be, like, the Hippocratic Oath, Doctor/Patient privilege, etc. Law’s would be attorney/client privilege... etc. I realized after I learned the word that it’s a pretty cool concept, more complicated and elevated than ethics, but still practical... but alas, nothing I want to do, ever, for the rest of my life, has any sort of diontologie. So hopefully once I graduate Emory and can quit worrying about the Honor Code, my life will be completely free of obligation, moral or otherwise. Wow, I just read over that to make sure it made sense, and I realized I spelled "medicine" the French way, but I feel like it is so applicable that I am not changing it.
Ha.
Pardon me while I burst into flames,
B

I am ill.
But not in the cool "ill jacket, yo," sort of way. Just plain ill.
I’ve narrowed it down to one of three maladies:
1. Avian Flu as a result of the quail I ate for dinner last night.
2. Blood Poisoning.
3. Mononucleatic reprise, since life was just looking up.
At least we know it’s not the Bubonic Plague, since I already had that during freshman year.
I spent yesterday wandering the Marais– literally, "The Swamp," so called because it was a swamp back in the day and the Parisians drained it and turned it into what it is today: the Jewish and gay district. Don’t ask me how it ended up that way, I am sure it has a history, but I have no idea what it is. The swamp was drained a really long time ago, before the Revolution I think... but it probably only became the Jewish/Gay Quarter after World War II, I would assume.
Anyway, I hit it up because I heard there’s good shopping to be had there, and oh, how true it is. It’s full of artsy boutiques no bigger than my freshman dorm room, full of handmade purses and drag queen shoes (literally– they are women’s shoes in men’s sizes, found in a boutique called "Drag Queen Apparel" next door to a salon called "Space Hair"). I bought a pair of silver earrings sold by weight at a tiny jewelry store I found, but that was all...
Except...
Well, here comes another story. So I am wandering the Marais, feeling sorry for myself because I felt so awful, sneezing every thirty seconds, and I am thinking to myself every time I blow my nose, "WHY DOES THIS COUNTRY HAVE TO BE SO ANTI-HEALTH? If I were in the US, I would go treat myself to the biggest smoothie I could find, filled with things like citrus and vitamins and minerals and echinacea and plants and chlorophyll and fruit and vegetables and seeds and roots and berries and nuts... THAT is what would make me feel better, but instead I am stuck here where I would be lucky to find a place that sold JUICE not at room temperature!"
But what is the primary lesson I have learned since coming to France, my friend?
Don’t touch things in the Metro? No.
Don’t kiss people, you might get a disease? No.
Jeans don’t need to be dried? No.
Nutella Crepes can serve as any meal at any time of day? Yes.
But the SECOND most important lesson is as follows:
Ask and you shall receive.
Or, perhaps put more aptly, whine about it in your head for awhile and suddenly there will be magic and whatever it is you were whining about will be granted.
Because I have never, ever, since coming to this country seen a smoothie store. They just don’t know what they are. But probably 10 minutes after this litany went through my head, I saw a sign for a place called "Wanna Juice." I told myself not to get my hopes up, but it was too late– they were up. And I was rushing toward the store, face pressed against the glass in hopes it was not a myth. I walked in, feeling vaguely like Dorothy before the Wizard, thinking I had found the cure to all my problems, and the woman greeted me with a cheery "bonjour!" and the menus were all in citrusy colors just like in the US, and all the drinks had stupid names, just like in the US, and suddenly my nose cleared up, I stopped sneezing, and my throat felt brand-new. No, wait, that last part is a lie. BUT I chose my drink (hakabaka detox, just for the record) and then looked down behind the counter only to see that this place did everything completely legit– no strawberry compote for them like in the US (I don’t know what I expected– nothing would stay open here if it was bad quality). But this was, like, uberfresh. Whole pomegranates sitting in a bowl waiting to be cut, kiwis in the middle of being sliced, fresh raspberries in a colander in the sink...
I paid 4Euro for my 33cl smoothie, but it was worth every last sip, if only because I know now that I will get well.
But then I went to church last night and found out that every girl in my small group– every single one– is ill right now. Two of them missed church because of it, the German one told me "oh, it is awful, ven I sneeze, it hurt so bad!" So perhaps we are all having our blood slowly poisoned, I don’t know. That same German one later saw me playing with my earring during the service and said, "Blair, stop playing vith your jewelry, it is not polite. I vill buy you a Kinderegg, and you can eat it, and then you vill play vith the toy inside it instead. Just be sure you do not eat the toy by accident!"
A Kinderegg. In case you don’t know, because I don’t know if we have those in the US or not, Kindereggs are chocolate eggs about the size of regular eggs, hollow with a toy inside. A lame toy, nothing as exciting as a cereal box toy, something lame like a Cracker Jack toy or those stupid jokes that come around cheap bubble gum. But they are still fun to eat. And German. And apparently the only type of toy they have in Germany, as that is what she is going to buy for me.
Today I spent the morning with my Swedish friend and the German one aforementioned at the Swedish one’s apartment. Lydia (the Swede who lives there) made scones for us, and we showed up to, in theory, have a small group meeting, but since we were the only three that made it, we really just ended up hanging out blowing our noses and sneezing for three hours. We ate the scones, laid around wrapped in blankets talking for awhile (all three of us are sick), and then Lydia said, "It looks like it’s a pretty day, we could go to the Tuileries for awhile and sit in the sun?" And we all looked at each other and said "Well... we could... Or we could stay here where we are already sitting, where it is warm and cozy and there is no moving required..." So that is what we did. Eventually we got hungry again, and this is what happened:
Lydia: "I’m hungry. Let’s eat something. Shall I make some popcorn?"
Cindy: "Oh, that would be good..."
Lydia: "Or carrots! I have carrots! We could eat those! Blair, what do you think about carrots?"
Cindy: "She will want popcorn only if it is salty because that is how they eat it in the US." [Transcriber’s note: In France, they only eat popcorn sweetened.]
Lydia: "Oh, Blair, you do not know how to eat a carrot with us because you are American!"
Blair: "What does that mean?"
Lydia: "Oh, you know, they don’t eat vegetables in the US, but that’s ok, I’ll go get the carrots and you can try them. Make sure you eat the whole thing, especially the middle part, because that is where all the vitamins are!"
She came back with three whole carrots, unpeeled, with the plant still attached to them. We commenced eating them, feeling like Bugs Bunny, and then Lydia suggested we go sit on the roof terrace to eat them.
Lydia: "But we will have to be very careful when we get up there, because it is very dirty up there."
Blair: "Then what will we sit on?"
Lydia, pausing with her carrot still in her mouth to see if Blair is serious: "Chairs, of course!"
In other news, Madame did a cooking workshop here Thursday night with her friend Jacqueline. The two of them made salmon pate, quail with grapes, and lemon tart for us all to eat– there were five kids from my program, plus the two of them, and it was amazing. Because it would be too complicated to have us all trying to cook, they did the cooking, explaining as they went, and then gave us copies of the recipes so we could do them ourselves. The five of us students sat at the breakfast nook table, all in a row like little angels, while they made everything right there before us, just like Emeril. They had already measured out almost everything, and all the ingredients were in little bowls just like on cooking shows. It was so cute– the two of them are adorable, and when they get together, it’s ridiculous. Lots of cries of "Zut!" and "Ahh, qu’est-ce que tu fait, ma cherie?", which mean, respectively, "Zut!" and "What in God’s name are you doing, my love?" Zut is hands down my favorite french word. There really is no translation, and it’s really not a very polite thing to say, but it’s not a curse word either... I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that there is no situation that can not be ameliorated with a wholehearted cry of "ZUT!"
And Jacqueline told us about how, back in the day, there were some kind of bird in France that were such a delicacy you could eat the whole thing, bones and all– they were super-expensive, but they served them at state dinners and fancy restaurants and things, until, sometime in the 20th century, the things went extinct, all because of the Parisians’ appetites! We had quail as the main course– the vegetarian in me was saddened at the sight of the serving platter with seven tiny birds on it, but then I tasted one and it was so good I decided to quit fronting like I care about animal rights and just eat the silly thing.
But here is the best part: the salmon pate (which was amazing) is made with canned salmon, which in France (as in the US) comes with bones still in it. Jacqueline suspected that would freak out the Americans, so she did her best to pick all the bones out, but she missed some. So she warned us as we were about to eat it and said, "But don’t worry, it’s just a little bit of calcium!" All the girls at the table flipped out and could hardly take a bite without first mashing it to smithereens to make sure there were no bones– the guys didn’t care, but I think that was only because their French was not very good and they didn’t understand what had just been said.
I, on the other hand, thanks to my real-life education in the proud hamlet of Beattyville, didn’t care one way or another whether there were bones, and even found myself HOPING for some in mine, because two summers ago (or something) I worked in Beattyville and ate salmon patties from Fonda’s Deli at lunch all the time, but was always way grossed out by the bones, until some guy convinced me to eat them. It took me weeks to be convinced, because I always just picked my bones out and the guy who swore by their goodness ate them. But then I learned, and there was no going back. At first I was proud of myself last night for eating them, then I realized that’s what everyone in Beattyville warned me about when I started eating them: "Oh, Blawr, you know eating salmon bones is only one step away from being a real Beattyvillian. You drink Ale8 and peanuts, and now you eat salmon bones, you are on your way to becoming an honest-to-goodness mountain woman!"
This could be a problem.
Thanking God I’m a country girl,
B
P.S. While I was on my way to school a couple days ago, a motorcycle policeman with his siren going whizzed past me, and then another, and then a bunch of police cars, and then a limo, and I thought to myself, "Wow, there goes an autoclave."
And then I started thinking about it, and I realized that, in fact, an autoclave (spelling?) is the thing used to sterilize instruments in a lab, and not a herd of cars guarding a famous person. So I tried to think of the right word, and this is what I got: autoclave... mobileclave... mobicarte (this is, incidentally, the company that provides minutes for pre-pay phones in France)... automobilator... autocade... mobilecade... MOTORCADE! But it took me that long to figure out the right word, further proof my English is deteriorating at a rate much more rapid than that at which my French is improving.

There’s a movie being advertised all over Paris right now (actually, the ads for it are mainly just on those tall round pillars that hold posters underneath the glass– very very 1940) called "L’Ami Alleman." "The German Friend." It’s an American movie, and I don’t know what the American title was, (they usually change them a little bit) but I know it has George Clooney and Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire in it, so I am sure it was a hit in the US. (When it was there three months ago.) But I am also fairly certain it is going to tank in France. Maybe not as badly in Paris as the rest of the country, but there is no way a movie about World War II told from the point of view that there are ANY good Germans is going to skyrocket to the top of the box office here. Maybe I am exaggerating. But I don’t think so. There is still so much prejudice against Germany here... not overt, not obvious, but it is just kind of assumed by people– even people my age– that the Germans would still be plotting against the rest of Europe if they could be, that the majority of people my age in Germany are probably still members of the Hitler Youth, etc. I have a German friend here, however, who doesn’t do much to convince me otherwise– she moved to France about a year ago because (she is 24) and she says that in the countryside where she lived, everyone expected her to be, these are her words, "a Nazi, you know, like everyone else." Because everyone’s grandparents remember what it was like to watch the Germans march through the Arc de Triomphe. Madame’s family heard that the Germans were coming to Paris (as did everyone else) after they had invaded France, (she was somewhere around 16 at the time) and she took off on what they call "the pilgrimage of the youth." Cars were still rare then (cars are still rare today in Paris) and even if they had one, there was no gas, and no one to drive it. Parents mostly stayed in the city, to go to work and front like everything was normal (talk about cinematic), and the kids just... left. Madame walked from Paris to Chartres. I talk about walking home from Chatelet like it is this big deal– Chatelet is still IN PARIS. Chartres is... well, suffice it to say, it is NO WHERE NEAR HERE. It’s days of walking from Paris. Which sounds so unsafe and so Woodstocky of them, but the truth is that walking through the countryside was the safer alternative to staying in Paris and waiting out the invasion of the Germans. And with most of the population of Paris under 25 on the road, what could possibly happen?
I never get tired of her stories. But it’s so hard to get them out of her, not because she doesn’t want to tell them, she just acts like she is this little old woman, and then every now and then she will say, "Oh, yes, this bottle of wine we are drinking? See the chateau on the label? That window right there, third from the left on the second floor, that is my room. It’s my husband’s parents’ chateau, you see."
Lately I’ve done a lot of stupid things, and I was kind of worried about it, thinking "What if I go down in history as the dumbest/worst/most useless/least fluent/rudest student Madame has ever had?" Because she has had two or three Americans a semester for over twenty years. Which should have been my first clue that I could never be the worst. Tonight she started telling us stories about them... anything that could have gone wrong here has.
She had one that didn’t show up for dinner one night, and when she called the University, they told her she was being overprotective and the girl was probably eating dinner at a friend’s. 24 hours later, the girl got brought home by the police– she had stolen an 3000Francs from Madame and the other student’s American Express card, gone to FNAC and spent so much money that the police got suspicious, and, despite the fact that she knew the AmEx had been reported stolen, tried to use it and was arrested. The police brought her home, she got sent back to the US, but her dad was a lawyer and got all the charges cancelled. The girl sent Madame a letter a month after she left that said she was sorry, she was sick, and she knew that if she tried to use the stolen credit card, she would be arrested and then she would have to stop stealing, but she didn’t know how else to stop.
She had one that threw herself out of a window the semester after she left Madame’s house in Paris and returned home. I think. Something got thrown out of a window, but I am not entirely sure if it was the girl herself or something else.
She had one that kept complaining about gaining weight in Paris because the food was so good, and then Madame realized that "she was only gaining weight in her belly." The girl was pregnant, and luckily the baby wasn’t due until just after she was going to return home.
She had one who won a scholarship to come here, and so she came to France, leaving her husband behind in the US to wait for her. They talked on the phone every night (this was way before email) and wrote letters everyday, and the girl would cry and cry for him, and the day she flew back to the US, he met her at the airport and told her it was over, he found another woman while she was in France.
She had one that hated living here– the girl wanted a family with young boys. Madame said that was fine, she understood if the girl wanted to try to find another family, but instead of leaving the girl was just mean and rude the whole semester.
She had one (when her youngest daughter was only 14 and still living in the house) who insisted on walking around the house naked all the time.
And then she had Alain, an exchange student from Utah who, at his going away party, met Corrine, Madame’s oldest daughter, for the first time, and was married to her a month later.
Kleptomania. Suicide. Pregnancy. Nudity. Divorce. Marriage. I mean, honestly. And she just kept on bringing them in, no big deal.
I told her I was impressed that she still liked Americans at all after all that, and even more impressed that she kept on letting them live with her. She said "Oh, but of course, ma cherie! You have to deal with a few bad ones, but for the most part, they have been lovely!"
The least screwed up one,
Blair
P.S. I got a Christmas card today from my ex-boss. I thought to myself, wow, that is really late, but they are busy people, so I understand. But then I looked at the postmark– December 7. The card was sent TWO AND A HALF MONTHS AGO AND I JUST GOT IT TODAY.

Today I walked home from Chatelet on the other bank... a beast of a trip.
It was a great walk home, though... I just love being here, I love feeling like a native and feeling like I don’t know what I am doing and feeling like every single moment has so much adventure and so much power to change the rest of my life, because here in Paris... it somehow does. The movies got this one right. I once told a close friend that my life is cinematic, and he ended up making the best present for me based on that one statement.
I still say my life is cinematic– not in a cocky way, but it just so happens that I was born with this innate inability to do anything the simple way, I always have to complicate the bejeebees out of it, which, really, is the essence of any good chickflick/indie/artsy/fill-in-the-blank film.
So put me, the cinematic girl who plans the soundtrack to every moment as it is happening, in the most romantic, touristed city in the world, and what do you get?
Every film cliche come true.
But they only become cliches because they are true, right?
I mean, honestly, at one point I was crossing from Left Bank (the South one) to Right Bank (the North one), and I am standing on the Pont des Arts in front of the Assemblee Nationale, with the tricolor waving in front it, and the wind whipping through my hair so hard I finally put on my hat because I couldn’t see anything. So I am standing on the bridge with my hat on, and some of my hair has come loose and is still in my eyes, and it is cloudy, just the way Paris ought to be, and I look to the left, the East, and there is Notre-Dame. And Sainte-Chapelle. And the Ile-de-la-Cite. Keep turning... Assemblee Nationale. Keep turning... Eglise Americaine. And now I am facing right, to the West, and there is the Eiffel Tower, and the looming steeple of the Cathedral de Saint Pierre, and the golden angels guarding the Pont d’Alexandre III, and the Seine winding into the distance. And I stop walking for a long minute, trying not to look like a tourist, but thinking about how beautiful this city is and how everything here really is like in the movies– foggy grayish days with this soft light that makes everyone look good, and nights bathed in gold light from the lampposts that are electric now, but the same gas posts that have been there for 100 years, with cast-iron ivy latticing up them, or fat cherubs chasing each other toward the light on top. The kind of light that makes you think the men should be in fedoras (is that what they are called? Dick Tracy hats, I mean.) and the women should be in elbow length gloves.
And, just then, as I am thinking all this and relishing the overcast Paris February day, as if on cue, just like all my stories end... it started to rain. Only not a drizzling foggish rain like usually happens in Paris, because it was wicked windy, remember? And I am walking against the wind. And suddenly the cinematic moment is over, and I am just a 21-year-old poser, on a bridge about to get splashed by a red double-decker bus driving through the mud puddles past me. And the tiny drops of rain are being flung into my face with bitter intensity, to the point that, even with my head bowed, collar up (sailor-style, not Yankee-esque), and hands in my pockets, it feels like I am being pelted all over with this needling mist. I keep walking– what choice do I have? But before the rain stops I am offered shelter by one maitre-d and two janitors standing in a doorway for a smoke break.
But I turned them down and kept on walking, singing in the rain...
Saturday night I went to the Opera. My program got us all tickets, and this semester I went to the Opera Bastille, the new modern opera house, not the ancient historic and beautiful Opera Garnier where I went last semester. Garnier is better. The Opera Bastille, from the outside, looks like one of the works of post-modern architecture of Paris. From the inside, it looks exactly like the auditorium I graduated from high school in: completely non-descript. Absolutely nothing remarkable about it. No great chandelier, no fancy ceiling painted by Chagall, no post-modern sculpture, nothing. But the weird part is that at the Opera Garnier last semester, the opera I saw had absolutely no scenery except for the back wall of the stage, which was painted gray like cement and had "VIETATO FUMARE" painted in red block letters high above the heads of the singers. Which means "No Smoking" in Italian. But the singers for that one were in period costume. So much artsyness I can hardly handle it.
THIS one was the "Contes d’Hoffmann," a legit French opera. All the characters were in period costume, and the scenery was amazing, complete with a fully-stocked bar in one scene and a reverse-stage in another, so that we as the audience were looking at a stage made to look like a stage facing another audience on the other side. That doesn’t make any sense. But suffice it to say it was amazing. Scenery-wise, anyway. But I would love to read the original script or whatever you call the manuscript of an opera, because I guarantee it was not nearly this sketchy when it was written in 1881. I realize that operas are meant to be scandalous and whatever... and I am ok with that. (I am the girl that spent last weekend at a concert where the band emerged wearing solid black and ninja masks, remember?) Weirdness is ok with me. But this? It was still good, but I think perhaps there was [excessive] directorial license taken.
Included in the main storyline were a coke-snorting devil (who obviously was not using the real stuff, as the guy was huge. They could have at least made him LOOK like a crackhead if he was going to play the part, right? Requiem for a Dream-style, that’s all I ask), a pimp-looking man clothed in a purple crushed velvet leisure suit, and, my personal favorite, Olympia.
The name Olympia, in French culture, has all kinds of significance, as it used to be (and perhaps still is, though I don’t know for sure) the generic term for all prostitutes, especially upper-class ones. Hence the rejection of Manet’s Olympia from the Salon when he painted it– Shakespeare was wrong: had he called it by any other name, it would have just been a nude, but since it was Olympia, the French took it to be a prostitute, which it was, and wouldn’t let him display it. Luckily they got over that eventually and now it’s in the Orsay or Louvre or something. That, however, is a grand sidenote and further proof that I find it completely impossible to stay on track.
So in the Opera, this mad scientist type character makes the perfect woman– Olympia– who then comes out and sings a song and Hoffmann, the star, falls in love with her. But this particular Olympia was pregnant– in real life. SO pregnant, in fact, that I kind of worried she would go into labor right there on stage and they would have to call for a doctor in the house. So this woman who looks like she is about to topple forward because she is so front-heavy is standing there singing this ridiculous solo, and the audience knows she is a robot in the opera, but Hoffmann thinks she is real. And pretty soon, with her jerky robotic movements, she pushes Hoffmann into a haycart, climbs on top of him, and... well... you figure out the rest. Only I can’t seem to get past the fact that it is a REAL PREGNANT WOMAN on stage, which seems some kind of error in casting, I feel, because who falls in love with an 11-months-along automaton with an I-Dream-Of-Genie ponytail? Anyway, then, after that lovely scene, she, still singing, climbs out of the haycart, walks to the front of the stage, and the mad scientist guy pulls a Justin Timberlake, and, as it turns out, she’s wearing a tearaway dress, and the mad scientist rips her entire outfit off. On purpose, though. And underneath it, this heavily-with-child woman is wearing... well... nothing. Except a bodysuit, which looks like a fatsuit, because, again, she must be carrying quadruplets or something. So now there is a pregnant woman walking around the stage, for all intents and purposes nude, singing "Voila la chanson d’Olympia!" while Satan paces in the background, snorting coke through a rolled-up 100-Euro note.
And all I could think was "surely this is not what poor Offenbach had in mind when he wrote this." Still, it was a good experience. I didn’t wear my Opera dress– a brown flowered tea-length strapless thing I wore last semester– because I thought it might be too formal for a Saturday night opera. During the first intermission (there were two, because this particular Opera lasted THREE HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES), I was standing at a mirror in the bathroom fluffing my hair, and I looked behind me and caught the eye of an old woman giving me her best evil eye. She quickly whirled away when she saw me seeing her seeing me, but I almost burst into hysterics. She had Cruella DeVille hair, black with white streaks at the front, and her eyebrows were missing but she had painted silver ones on in their place. And dark lipstick on her tiny line of a mouth. But I guess french-emo hair is not really appropriate for the Opera Bastille. I couldn’t do anything about the hair, though. The outfit was fine, though– I had on a nice skirt and a fancy turtleneck and I even wore pantyhose and heels... come to think of it, the ankle straps of the heels were undone (because I couldn’t sit there with them on for the duration of the fourteen-hour-long opera) and that is probably what her disapproval was in reference to.
In other news, I think perhaps word got out about my complaints concerning the behavior of Frenchmen with regard to talking to me when I am wearing headphones, because today I was walking to the Metro, headphones on, poker face on, because when it is so cold, I find it hard sometimes to look happy. I am walking along, shoulders hunched in the wind, and there are two men coming toward me talking to each other, and just as I get within earshot, the one on my side makes this elaborate hand-kissing Italian-style gesture, you know, the terribly cliche thing Italians do when they kiss their fingertips and then do that thing in the air? So he does that, very elaborately, somehow involving both hands, and I am watching him puzzled, when he finishes and says, "Tu es magnifique, mon petit chou!" "You are magnificent, my lady!" and then finished with, "Please let me see you smile!" in French. And I couldn’t help it, because he wasn’t sketchy about it, he was just so ridiculously French that my face went from completely blank to completely aglow– the smile was so sudden I didn’t know it was coming, and it was one of those smiles that are not just a smile, not even just a grin, but like, the kind where you feel like any moment you are about to burst into laughter. And as I smiled hugely, his friend smiled shyly back and said, "Ahh, c’est encore plus belle, n’est-ce pas?" "She’s even prettier now, isn’t she?" I shook my head and kept walking, but it made me laugh all afternoon.
Also, it was the first time I’ve been called "petit chou," which is, literally, "little cabbage," but this great compliment in French. Their other main term of endearment? "Petit puce"– "My little flea."
Smiling Like I Mean It,
B
P.S. I got a care package from the US today– YES! This one had in it, I kid you not, a Spanish magazine called "Vanidades." Which probably means "Vanities" or something, but I wouldn’t lay money on it, as I am more than a little rusty with my español. I did study it for about a million years... but you know how they say that learning a new language makes it easier to learn another? It’s bogus. The more French I learn, the more my Spanish goes to pot. Well, not really– I can still speak it, and when I was in Spain last fall, I did. BUT I speak it now with this great FRENCH accent, to the point that the people in Spain kept asking, "Ahh, Señorita, tu parles français?" switching to French instead of English because they thought I was French. And occasionally a word comes into my head and I have no idea if it is French or Spanish, and then I try it with a French accent, which sometimes works and sometimes not, but you know, I take what I can get. Anyway, the thing is that I am almost out of books here (I’m on Tale Of Two Cities, and then I have none left), which means that after Dickens, I will probably revert to reading Vanidades because... well, what else am I going to do? Plus if my Spanish serves me right, there is an article therein about "the new man: ubersexual is in, metrosexual is out." And with hooks like that, it’s gotta have some life-changing advice inside, right?

"Oh, B, you’ve done it now..."
~The Killers.

Yesterday my program people called me wanting me in the office at 10am today to take that exam that I missed. But the problem is they gave me, oh, what, 15 hours notice? So how much studying got done? Well... not a lot. Not... any really.
Because see, I have learned something terribly important in the last few weeks.
It is so much more fun to be irresponsible than it is to be responsible. And honestly, you can believe that, because it is coming from me, who spent the first 20 years of my life being Exceptionally Responsible. And then I show up in this country and it all goes out the window. First because I had no idea what was going on, and then because I still didn’t know what was going on, but I realized that the world wouldn’t end if I didn’t have all my ducks lined up. And I don’t do it on purpose (yet), but there is just no reason (if you live in France) to get stressed about anything, or really to pay attention to anything that bothers you. If it is annoying, bothersome, nerve-wracking, or otherwise problematic, just ignore it. Eventually it will take care of itself (if you live in France). If you don’t live here, however, I can’t speak for you. Actually, I can, because I used to not live here. And that is the problem. Because if you go to a school like Emory, it is absolutely faut that you be responsible. Terribly so. Because if you aren’t, what will happen? Someone else will get better MCAT scores than you (gasp). Or someone else will get that internship you needed. Or you won’t get into grad school. Or asked to join the firm straight out of undergrad.
And lately I am so sick of thinking of all of that. I kind of just want to be... well... irresponsible and allowed to do what I want instead of what I should. And if you live in France, that is not a problem. But I won’t live here forever, and what then? I have to go back to living a real life with worries and stress and no cheese and no wine.
Why did I ever think that was an ok plan?
Yesterday I found myself at the Notre-Dame end of Boulevard de Sainte Michel at 1330, with nothing to do until 17h00, so I walked to Notre Dame and looked at the towers... and then started walking down the Seine with no particular destination in mind. Except home. Which is probably 10 kilometers from Notre Dame. But I live in the best place to live in Paris: on the bank of the Seine across from the Eiffel Tower. Which means that, from nearly anywhere in Paris, I can get home without a problem because one of those two things is almost always visible, and I just follow the flow of the Seine or the general direction of the Tower, and eventually I make it to my place. Lovely. The Seine curves, though, so it is not particularly a direct route... but whatever. I walked and walked and walked, passing the Galerie Kevorkian, an art gallery in the 1st whose owner I pity, and a life-size replica of the Statue Of Liberty’s flame, given by the US to France on the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty being given to America by France. The torch has a nice message inscribed on it (in French) about the US’s good relationship with France... But the odd part about the whole thing is that the torch is placed directly in front of the underpass where Princess Di was killed 10 years ago. (Just for the record, it wasn’t really a tunnel– it’s more of a long underpass) Anyway, because she was killed there, people are always coming and leaving her notes and flowers at the torch, which is probably Elton John’s fault (as most world problems tend to be), but the torch has been there for a million years and has nothing to do with her. That sounds callous– that’s not what I meant. But Madame Laudet was the one that told me about it all (we only live about a mile from it), and she said that she just "can’t understand it– it’s not the Princess’s statue, and when she died all the FRENCH people went to the torch and cried, and why in the world should they be crying, when they can probably everyone one of them trace their history back to someone that was killed trying to get rid of the French monarchy!?"
I ended up walking all the way home, crossing two of my top 5 favorite bridges in the world... A list, just so you know:
1. The unnamed bridge somewhere in North Georgia that I once jumped off of. (If all your friends... well, yes, quite honestly, I would.)
2. Pont Neuf, Paris, France, Ile-de-la-Cite to the Right Bank. Once completely covered with roses by Kenzo as a statement of modern art.
3. Marienbrucke, Fussen, Germany. 1500 meters or something like that above the water, in the mountains, built by a crazy king who was eventually drowned by a jealous brother in the waters below.
4. Pont Alexandre III, Paris, France. Gift of the Russian Empire in a vain attempt to keep Napoleon from invading. Or something. At least one fact in that sentence is wrong, but I am not sure which one, and I like my version the best.
5. Sunshine Skyway, Tampa, Florida. If you have ever driven over this, you will know why.
So I walked home, in the shoes I call my Cinderella shoes– they cost 10Euro at Cote-a-Cote, the cheapest boutique in the Latin Quarter, and they are made out of something shinier and cheaper than vinyl, but they are plain and flat and look exactly like the shoes Cinderella and Snow White wore before they became, you know, princesses. However, they are also falling apart, probably because they cost 10Euro and I’ve worn them... well... a lot, because they are princess shoes, so how could I not? Which means every time I step in a puddle (a rather frequent occurrence in this blessed city), the mud leaks in the front a little bit. But until they bite it, I refuse to quit wearing them.
I got talked to twice by guys walking the opposite direction by themselves; this is what I don’t understand about Parisian men: I have my headphones on, and (as previously mentioned sometime in January) can thus not hear what is going on outside them, the point of headphones. BUT if you are going to talk to me, then start when you are still in front of me, because if I see your mouth moving, I will assume it is because you are talking to me and not yourself (not always correctly) and take out one earbud (only one, so you know that I can easily put it back in and ignore you if you are lame and also to show you that you are not quite important enough for me to completely stop what I am doing. This sounds hyper-rude, but the first thing you learn living in a foreign country is not to walk around answering every person who talks to you) and answer you in a timely manner. But if you stare at me the whole time we are coming toward each other, and then wait until we are right next to each other and say something, you get nothing from me because all I end up hearing is "Mumblemumblemumble TAKES MY PAIN AWAY... mumblemumblemumble" and the "pain" part is what was coming through the headphones, not what is coming through your mouth. You are the other part. So don’t do that, because not only is it just annoying, but it also makes me curious as to what you could possibly have to say that you were afraid to say to my face AND then you stop walking as I keep going, as though I’m going to answer you instead of continuing to listen to Jimmy Eat World which is way more interesting and significantly more intelligible than you.
It’s kind of a shame that, at the ripe old age of 21, I have had the opportunity to perfect my "Leave me alone, I am ICE WOMAN and if you talk to me I will breathe fire in your general direction like venom from a snake straight into your eyes, temporarily blinding you and rendering you permanently infertile." But obviously that same threat has to be completely readable on my face in French and not in English, because if it is in French, the English-speaking sketch-os automatically lay off, and the French ones, if they think you are native, take the threat seriously and leave you alone. But I spend too many nights coming home on the Metro alone at 1230am to feel comfortable looking friendly.
~Miss Murder

An excerpt from a recent instant messenger conversation with my best friend at Emory:

Emorly: So how are you?
Moxie Ringwald: Oh, you know... I’m young and single in Paris– how much better does it get, I guess?
Emorly: Yeah, when you put it that way, you’re pretty much the cover girl for Cosmo.

And I don’t know about that, but I do know that for the most part, it rocks to be here. But being single and young in Paris on Valentine’s Day? Suddenly that first part loses all its appeal.
But I refused to let it get me down. Mostly. I mean, except for the past two weeks that I spent dreading today.
This morning was cloudy and gray, and it rained all day. At first I thought that was good, because if I am going to be stuck single in the most romantic city on the most romantic day of the year, at least the weather could sympathize with my mood. But then I remembered how Paris was just made to be seen in weather like this. Which made me angry. Until I realized that I could still enjoy this city, even though I was doing it alone.
In the US, I would have planned something with my girlfriends, or with all my single friends, or whatever, but HERE... We all know I have a limited network of friends here– I haven’t been here long enough to be a total social butterfly. But every single one of my Parisian friends is in a relationship– two of them are out of town visiting their significant others, a couple more have significant others visiting them here... and the rest live here all the time and are doing something romantic together. Lovely. But this morning I decided I didn’t care... so I went to my sociology class, and then in the two hour break between classes, I wandered the Latin Quarter, looking for the Rue Mazet– a tiny street I stumbled upon one night really late after everything was closed. I finally found it today... amazing.
It’s between Bd. St. Michel and Bd. St. Germain in the Latin Quarter, a street so tiny and short it doesn’t even make it onto most maps. It’s closed to cars, primarily because if the center of the street is at sea level, the left curb is –10 inches and the right curb is +6 inches. And halfway between the center and the right curb is probably +15. Cobbled, of course. Which means that trying to trek it in anything but sneaks is a bad idea. Especially in the rain, like today. Luckily I was wearing my beat-up Chucks, which are right now in my garbage can, because I left my apartment this morning at 928 and by 931 the shoes were soaked– from the bottom up. I somehow wore a hole in the front of both of them, so the water soaked in from the front somewhere, and I had on bad socks that were eaten by my shoes by 935. That is probably, other than wearing rain-soaked pants, my least favorite feeling in the world– eaten socks, I mean.
Wait, that was a total irrelevance.
Focus.
Ok. So I get to the end of Rue Mazet, and I’m wearing my long coat, scarf, gloves, the works, with the hood up, since I have no umbrella with me. I push my hood back and can finally see, and wonder of wonders, the street is covered by this... I don’t know, glass kind of canopy thing. I pass Salons de Thé, Papeteries, Cadeaux, etc., and then I am at the end of the street, where the iron gates are opened for the day. I walk through the stone arch and the iron gates and realize I have nothing else to do for the next two hours, so I go back down the street and stop this time at La Jacobine, which translates as "The Jacobine," probably the coolest place I have eaten since coming to Paris. Actually, I didn’t even eat, I walked in and the guy told me I could sit where I wanted, so I nestled myself in a booth in the far back corner, facing the restaurant. I ordered a Café latté frappé vanille... which is way too many adjectives for me to translate. I don’t know what it was, but it was cold and coffee, and in a country that doesn’t believe in ice, it was delicious. They served it in a sundae glass, and I sat there reading my (English) extremely beaten-up copy of The Phantom Of The Opera, sipping my café frappé delicé caramellé whateveré it was, listening to their soft classical music playing... it was amazing. They had the day’s desserts sitting out to choose from, Cromble des Fruits Rouges, Tarte Tatin, etc., all lined up there, but I just looked... and drank my coffee. The place was so cozy (or cosy? One of them is the English way and one is American and I forget which is which...???) and warm... the whole front was windowed, and I looked out onto the rainy street, and realized the place could easily have been next door to the library in the opening scene of Beauty & The Beast. You know the one– "Have you got anything new?" "Not since yesterday..."
I left eventually and went to my photography class, and then got out of there and decided to walk home. From the Latin Quarter. Which is pretty much about the distance from... I don’t know, Atlanta to Tampa. But I took off, refusing to use my map, just going left over and over until I could see the Eiffel Tower and then following it. It took me about an hour and a half to get home, but it would have been much quicker had I not been in such a mood. I wasn’t mad about being single anymore, but I was still listening to feel-sorry-for-myself-in-the-rain music when I started walking, until I remembered that (this is quite embarrassing) I have this mental block thing and I have to walk in the rhythm to the music coming through my headphones. Well, I don’t have to, I suppose, but I find myself doing it all the time, quite without thinking about it. And since I started out with acoustic uberchill music, I was crawling. I finally had to switch to screamo-metal to get myself going at a normal pace. I passed about sixteen florists on the walk, which was kind of uncomfortable, since they were all full of men standing in line with huge bouquets of roses...
But it was a great walk, I came up behind the Eiffel Tower, a view of it I don’t usually see, and was reminded again of how much Haussmann did for this city.
A petite bit of history for you: In the late 19th century, Baron Haussmann was paid to completely remodel Paris. The streets were too small for carriages, and there was no system to the layout of the city– streets wound and curved randomly, it was nearly impossible to get from one place to another. So he redid everything, knocking out buildings where he didn’t want them, getting rid of an awful lot of history, but preparing Paris to be PARIS for another few centuries. He is the reason this city has so many trees– for a big metropolis like it is, there are trees EVERYWHERE here– in the big parks and gardens, obviously, but also all over the sidewalks of almost every street. Art historians love to hate him for the buildings he got rid of, but Parisians are just sort of indifferent to him. In all the art history classes I have ever taken, he’s treated as this villain roughly the Hitler of architecture. But Parisians just shrug their shoulders– probably because they actually live here and know what a nightmare it would be to get around without him. Paris never would have survived the advent of the car if he hadn’t come along before its invention and prepared the city for it.
Anyway, of all the questionable things Haussmann did, the only really fabulous one is that he somehow managed to unite pretty much every landmark in Paris. Thus if you stand on the Trocadero platform (my favorite view of Paris), you look straight ahead (to the South) and see the Eiffel Tower, and through it the Champ de Mars, a big grassy strip, and just past that, the Ecole Militaire, and behind that, Les Invalides. Or stand at the West end of the Tuileries– look East and see the entire Tuileries garden, then the grand Louvre arch, then the courtyard of the Louvre with the glass pyramid in the center of it. Turn West and see the Place de la Concorde with the Champs-Elysees stretching in front of you, finishing with the Arc de Triomphe. Or go stand at the Opera Garnier and look straight and see the Colonne de 14 Juillet with the great gold statue of Jeanne d’Arc in front of it. Paris is full of crazy vistas like this, where you can walk down one street and pass famous thing after famous thing. So I guess if this little history lesson has taught us anything, it is that I am hip.
Also: There are these electronic boards around Paris that are used like the ones on the interstate in the US– they warn about bad traffic, protests, remind people to recycle, etc. Today the city of Paris ran some kind of promotion and people could pay to have their love note put on the boards. But the thing is that it really took off– it was kind of a big deal all day. And every time I passed one on my walk home I read the notes... Again, the movies got the romantic nature of Parisians right. When I see couples making out all over Paris, I try to tell myself they are tourists. But tourists obviously wouldn’t have used this method– the ads had to be bought and paid for weeks ago. And every one of the messages were things like, "Etienne, You are my shining prince charming, my eternal love, the light of my life, and I love you with all my soul. Kisses, Helene."
Or "Yucal, Je t’aime. Te amo. I love you. Ti ame. We speak all these languages but the one I love best is your own. S."
Ha. Oh, how I love this city.
Also, I learned the word today for crenellation. AND the fact that the crenellation is actually the gap between the stones– the stones themselves have a whole different name. I have no idea what the word for either of those in English would be, but I can tell you both in French...
Doing my best to avoid the red clichés,
B

Tuesdays are going to be this semester’s day from hell. Every semester has one, except last spring, of which every day was hell, and last semester, which didn’t have any, probably to make up for the terrible semester before.
But this semester, it will be Tuesday. Today started with me tutoring Fabrice, an 11-year-old in the French equivalent of sixth grade. He’s been studying English for a couple years, but his parents wanted someone to be able to help him get better faster– he’s already quite good, but voila BLAIR. Middle school (called college in French) doesn’t start until 10am, so I showed up at Fabrice’s at 830am to work with him for a little over an hour, until he had to leave for school (literally around the corner from his apartment. He walks there). He has an English quiz this week, so we spent the first half of the hour going over quantificateurs– have you ever tried explaining, in YOUR second language, the difference between "some" and "any"? Try it in English. Now imagine that difficulty multiplied by MY second language, multiplied by explaining it to an 11-year-old.

Blair, in French: "Ok, let’s practice. I’ll ask you a question and then you answer, ok?"
Fabrice: "Oui, d’accord."
Blair, in English: "Fabrice, do you have any pencils here?"
Fabrice looks at me blankly, then asks, in French: "I don’t know– do I?"
Blair, in French: "Ok, yes, you do."
Fabrice, in English: "Of course! You have any pencils!"
Blair: "No, wait, not quite... I mean... no, presque, mais il faut que tu... que tu... change le sujet de la phrase, tu comprends?"
Fabrice: "Oh. Of course! I have any pencils!"
By the end of the lesson, he pretty much had it down, but try as I might I could not convince him that "of course" is not a necessary precursor to the answer to any question. The poor kid was so good, all the way through it, though I know he must have been bored out of his mind. Finally we quit and he read Dr. Seuss’s Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? to me. This should have been a cinch, because he reads quite well, and there are two books I have memorized– Marvin K. Mooney and Goodnight Moon, each from different babysitting jobs, but both because I had to read them over and over for an hour straight to lull a desperate toddler to sleep. BUT whoever told poor Fabrice’s parents that Dr. Seuss books are a good way to learn English was sorely mistaken. I mean, at first glance it would appear that way, right? But think about it– every Dr. Seuss book (including The 500 Hats Of Bartholomew Cubbins, my personal favorite though no one else has ever even heard of it) is full of made up words and made up things. So we’re reading it, and he gets to a sentence that is something like "You can go in a Crunk Car if you like," and he just keeps going, and at that point I realized he was just reading and not comprehending. So I stop him and ask if he understands, and he (of course) says yes, and so I ask him what just happened, and he says "Blair, what’s a Crunk Car?" And I wanted desperately to tell him it’s the thing Snoop Dogg drives in his videos, but looking into his big blue eyes, I couldn’t do it. But imagine how hard this is for me: I grew up playing Balderdash, the game of made-up definitions, with my family every time we got together. I come from a family of practically professional teasers, AND in order to answer questions like that, I have to know the corresponding word in French. So for that one I just told him that it’s an imaginary thing, but later on I found myself having to explain the concept of "crisps," a word I firmly believe should be wiped off the face of the earth.
In an effort to keep it from being TOO dry, I finished with a useful word for him– Ow. In French, if you hurt yourself, you say "Aie," pronounced "Eye," so I taught him to say ow, which was more difficult than it would seem, since it is not at all a French sound.
Next week’s word: ILL. As in "Those are some ill kicks you got there," or "Did you see those ill moves?"
I mean, you need things like that much more than you need words like pants and butter and pen, right?
That was the highlight of the day. But back to the day from hell– I went to bed at 230 last night, was at Fabrice’s at 830, which is a half hour Metro commute from my place, and then from there straight to my photography class. That lasted an hour and a half, then I had an Architecture of the Renaissance class (my first meeting of that class), and the prof talked so fast and mumbled so much I could barely understand any of it. Then 20 minutes to make the 30 minute trip to the other piece of the University for my Archaeology of the Middle Ages class, an hour break, and then my second meeting of that class for the day. Meaning no time for lunch until 4pm, when I have an hour break. I finally finish at 6, then Metro it home in the dark. Not so cool. But my teachers are nice, so there’s that.
And this new Architecture of the Renaissance class is in the building with all the old statues– the one with the winding hardwood halls and the 15-feet-tall windows. The building itself, by the way, is crenellated. That’s right, I go to school in a converted medieval fortress. And this new class is in the old part of the building– so there are glass fronted cabinets exactly like the kind that hold the hymnals in the Cathedral at the place I worked last summer, and exactly as dusty. The cabinets line the whole back wall and the whole front wall, except for where a giant mural of some Classical scene is centered on the front wall. The professor writes on a chalkboard, one of those old-school kind that flips, and instead of pointing at things on the SLIDE PROJECTOR with a laser pointer, he uses a wooden stick. I haven’t had a teacher use a slide projector... ever, and a wooden stick? Haven’t seen one of those since first grade when my teacher threatened to beat us with it. She probably would have too– she was mean, and old enough to be above the law.
Am exhausted. I sat through SIX FULL HOURS of class today, which is more than I’ve done since graduating high school. Intense.
In the great green room there was a telephone... and a red balloon... and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon...
~B

P.S. So today Fabrice started trying to explain something to me about soccer, in French, and I had no idea what he was talking about– something about Paris St. Germain and some British team... I don’t know. But I have had this mad desire since I arrived in Paris to go to a French soccer game. Which you would understand if you had ever met me, and knew what a HUGE soccer fan I am. I mean, huge. Like, I play it all the time. I had to make room in my suitcase when I came to France for my cleats and shinguards. I’m pretty much known as the next David Beckham, only the female version. Which is why I want to go to a French soccer game.
Actually, all of that was a lie, in case you did not pick up on it. The only thing I have in common with Beckham is that I dressed up like Posh Spice for Halloween one year. But I still want to go to a soccer game here, because they are CRAZY and generally involve painted faces and a lot of french drinking songs. And if that’s not a good time, then I don’t know what is. Plus I live like three metro stops from Parc des Princes, the biggest soccer stadium in Paris, so it would really be quite handy. And then maybe I could have something to talk to Fabrice about... And I won’t just be fronting. I do kind of like soccer as a sport– at Emory I used to go to games all the time... so I mean... I’m practically a pro, right? Plus I have that whole Posh thing in my favor, so...
I feel like I still need some kind of crash course first.

I wish you could sit in on a dinner I have with Madame.
Tonight we had this stuff kind of mashed potatoes with crust and meat..., and then rocket salad, and of course cheese, and then for dessert these little glaces things, basically just raspberry sorbet and pistachio cake surrounded by fromage blanc (literally, white cheese, but really it’s has the consistency and texture of plain unflavored yogurt, and tastes only slightly worse. The French eat it as a dessert or sometimes as breakfast– added to jelly or heaps of table sugar, it is not that bad). The little dessert things were then dusted with gold sugar and garnished with a single raspberry on each one. I don’t know what gold sugar is made out of, it might just be gold dust for all I know, and for the wealth that inhabits the arrondissement in which I live, I would not doubt it. At boulangeries all the time, though, there are things in the window with just the slightest sifting of gold powder on top, or sometimes there will be a cake sitting in a bowl of silver... things the size and shape of almonds, but shiny smooth silver, and completely edible. I have a theory they are those same things that used to garnish cakes in the 80's, the ones my cousins and I used to eat by the handful until my grandmother read that they were full of mercury and made us stop.
But the French still use mercury thermometers, so I guess that is why they don’t care.
Anyway, at dinner tonight, other than the fact that it was super-elegant, Madame’s five-year-old grandson is in town, so he ate with us. All through dinner, I just kept thinking of how much he reminded me of the five-year-old boy I nannied for last year in ATL. So adorable, so shy, and so much more fluent in French than I am. Madame made him say "Bonsoir, Blair" when I walked in, because, as she said, "It is so difficult in France to teach children to address people when they greet them! Always, it is just ‘bonjour,’ or ‘bonsoir,’ and never with the appropriate title!" He was so well behaved, sitting still and grinning when Madame realized halfway through dinner that he had lipstick on his cheek from where she had kissed him and tried to wipe it off for him. He blushed bright red but didn’t even flinch, and all I could think was "If only I could introduce him to my favorite babysitting charge ever– Victoire and FG would be such good friends!"
Today I went to the Grands Magasins, primarily because I forgot how much I detest them. The Grands Magasins are the huge department stores one street over from the Champs-Elysees in the 9eme arrondissement. At Christmas they turn into the general equivalent of Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, and Saks in NYC, with huge window displays and amazing decorations. The only difference is that they are exactly that busy all year long, which I don’t understand at all because 1) tourists don’t know about them and 2) the French hate places like that, preferring to do their shopping in boutiques. The woman I live with, for example, when she goes grocery shopping, goes to Monoprix for food, then on the way home stops at the boucherie for meat, the boulangerie for bread, the marche for fruit, and the fromagerie for cheese, and that is not unusual. Anyway, I don’t detest the Grands Magasins, really, but I only really enjoy going if I have no great purpose and just want to wander around for awhile seeing the great things that rich people buy. But if you actually need something, whether it is a jacket or a purse, or (God forbid) a piece of jewelry, you are basically out of luck, because the places are so dang huge that there is no way you could ever see it all, which is so intimidating to me... and then of course everything is grouped by brand instead of article, so you have to wander through all of Marc Jacobs formalwear just to get to the Christian Leboutin pumps you wanted to check out, before you realize they cost approximately the same as a semester at Emory U. There are really two specific grands magasins– Printemps and Galeries Lafayette. Galeries Lafayette (the women’s part) covers a full city block and is 10 stories tall. The men’s part is half a block and 9 stories, and the other half of that block is the "home store," where they sell everything that is not men’s or women’s clothing. The other grand magasin (which means, literally, "huge store") is Printemps, the layout of which is significantly more confusing, but the prices of which are slightly more affordable. It was here that I first saw absinthe for sale in Paris, a pyramid of it in the middle of the men’s necktie section (what did I say about the organization?) for the bargain price of 95 Euro a bottle, glowing so green it might turn those who drink it into radioactive kung-fu practicing, sewer-inhabiting turtles.
BUT the cupola of Printemps makes it all worthwhile; it’s a wonder of Art Nouveau architecture, all stained glass that makes the Notre Dame rose window look tiny. PLUS you can climb up into the cupola, and all the way around the bottom edge there is the most amazing panorama of Paris I have ever seen. My two favorite views of Paris are the view from Trocadero, which is high enough that you can see just the landmarks, from East to West, the Sacre Coeur, Saint-Sulpice, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Invalides, and Tour Montparnasse. And it’s about a block from my apartment, so that makes it handy too. On top of Printemps, though, all you can see is just layer after layer of hundred-year-old Parisian buildings, stretching into infinity. It’s amazing. Pink, beige, gray, brown, cream, white and yellow, one after another, with their terra cotta chimneys sticking up from the roof, broken up occasionally by a roof terrace garden, a tiny blip of green in the otherwise quaintly industrial civilization of Paris. And the deli on that top level is bon marche enough that even American college students can afford to eat there.
I think the reason so few French people move to the US is simply that. If you’ve spent the first half of your life in the capital of a city so consumed with the idea of beauty, how could you leave and go to America, which is full of beautiful things and amazing sights and places, but also full of things like... subdivisions. And gas stations. And cars with fake wood paneling on the sides.
I’m not saying I’m from an ugly country. I’m just saying the beauty of "the New World," even now, is in the wild parts– the woods and the lakes and the mountains and the fields and the beaches and not the man-made architectural wonders the way it is here. Which is due to the mindset of the people that settled it and even more the financial status and prioritization that was necessary when they exited the Mayflower... plus it wasn’t Columbus’ fault that he discovered it after the end of the Baroque period, when architecture when downhill permanently.
I’ve taken too many art history classes in the last 2 years.
As always, if it’s not baroque...
B

I am kind of afraid that I am going to jinx myself...

because I do still have one class left to go to, but as of now...

I love my classes for this semester.

This is probably going to be kind of a boring update on my life, but just for the record, I have been stressing about how to graduate on time since... well... I started college. Because I went from being "undecided" to "undeclared" to "English" to "American Studies" to "French," which makes me sound like an academic flake, but it wasn’t that at all... At first I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college, then I decided that didn’t matter because I wanted to take classes like my American Studies seminar on rock music for the rest of my life, then I realized I couldn’t take classes like that in France... blah blah blah, the point is that, though I have taken at least one French class every semester since getting to college, only two of the ones I took before arriving here actually counted for anything. And I thought this whimsy-based and slightly capricious decision to stay here all year would mean major overloading both semesters of senior year. If I play my cards right and the administration is on my side when I go back, I’ll only have two French classes left, though I will still have to take three PE classes (Nothing in my life ever changes, in high school I dreaded the one that I had to take enough to put it off until senior year... I spent all of college denying the requirement of Emory to have three PE’s, and now here I will be 22 years old and doing freaking yoga at 830am two days a week just to be able to someday have a degree from Emory U on my wall. Dagnabbit, why can’t they count cave-exploration and the conquering of Wolf Pen as academic credit?) And also I still have a lab science to do, but since I’ll be a senior, all of these can be registered for easily... and I’ll still have enough time for an internship and will be able to graduate in four years simple. I’ll be the first in my immediate family to do that I think...
But the real point of this is that, for the first time, the end is in sight and I am not dreading it...
And get this: for the first time in EIGHT YEARS (that is over 1/3 of my life) I AM NOT TAKING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE GRAMMAR CLASS. Granted, I am taking all of my classes in a foreign language, but that is different. Really, it is. Because I have spent at least four nights a week for the past EIGHT YEARS doing grammar homework out of those stupid workbooks, doing exercises in direct objects and verb conjugations and fake conversations with sentences like, "Yes, Pierre, I would like to go to the movies tonight," and "No, Jose, I do not want any more paella," and "Only the good die young, Aeneas." First in Latin, then in Spanish, then in French... and though the only Latin I remember is "agricola" and "vir," meaning, respectively, "farmer" and "man," it probably was a good base for the 5 years of Spanish that came next (and of which I remember much more, like "un sapo verde eres ti," or "you are a green frog," which we sang to the tune of "happy birthday" every time someone had a birthday. I don’t know if my 21-year-old Spanish teacher that year made it up, but I do know that if it weren’t for that song I never would have learned the Spanish word for frog). And that was a good base for attempting to become a green frog here in France.
But no more listening to those stupid tapes and trying to respond quick enough to not fall behind...
No more vocabulary quizzes...
No more making up and performing lame skits...
No more memorizing poems in another language phonetically and never really understanding what they mean...
No more diagramming sentences...
Because now I have conversations in which I have to try to respond quick enough to not fall behind. And every trip to the grocery store is a veritable vocabulary quiz. And every attempt at conversation is a lame but hilarious skit. And now I read the poems posted in Metro cars for practice. And... well... I can’t think of anything that bites as much as diagramming sentences, except for living in a building with roaches that live in the bed with you, and I don’t have to do that any more either.
Blair (proper noun used as subject) is (3rd person singular conjugated present tense verb) happy (predicate nominative modifying subject).
~B