The West Coast is the Best Coast

At my mom's urging of "Why don't you finish it?" in regard to this blog, I am finally posting my got home safe entry. I'm in my pajamas on a Thursday morning(ish) getting ready to go to the public library to sit quietly at my computer and apply for jobs online. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington and the Northwest School Summer Camp already have copies of my resume. I plan to apply until someone says yes.

Being home has been good. Part of being away so long is that it's hard to immediately miss where you lived before. And in a lot of ways, I realized this year that I am a Seattle girl. I love Paris, but I don't think I will ever love it the way I did when I was seventeen and it was magic, and that's okay. I also forgot how good it is to be around friends and family. Constantly. Until they begin to annoy me.

Finally, I'm going to yoga with my mom, meeting old friends for Greenlake walks, running into people I knew in high school all the time, watching bad TV with my brother and whatever cadre of college brahs he brings home with him, calling up my dad with questions about the new espresso machine, and getting back in touch with people I used to call all the time before I left.

It's nice to be home. Being on my own in Paris was an adventure, but this is where I live. This is my home base. There is no smoking of Gauloises in public parks or drinking a beer with new friends at the foot of Notre Dame. But as weird as it may seem, I don't really miss those things. Because I really missed Seattle. And it's really good to be back.

I'll post pictures in the next few days. But for the moment, this blog is done. I made it through the year. I survived my crappy job. I made it home. It's now been a year since I graduated from college. My mom suggested that I keep this blog going, but I'm pretty sure that chronicles of job applications and going to my parents' yoga class belong elsewhere. Although as it turns out, they aren't so bad. Sometimes I forget that the simplest things are the ones that make me happy. Like sunsets over the Olympics or driving to good music or watching the rain fall, comfortably inside. The farther away I go from home, the more I know it's where I'm from. Maybe it took four years in Massachusetts, four months in Dakar, and a school year in Paris to remember that there is really no place like Seattle.

Oh yeah, sometimes I do write poems...

This is not going to be my departure bye-bye France post, partly because I don't want to write that yet, and partly because, thanks to our friend Eyjafjallajokull over in Iceland, my flight got delayed/partially canceled. I still will probably be home tomorrow, but for the moment I don't know when. I'm really frustrated about this, but I'm posting one of my Paris poems, because I've been writing them all year, and this one kind of sums up the best of Paris. FYI, a berceuse is a lullaby. It's not totally polished yet, just something I felt like writing.

Berceuse

I’m lying on the grass, eyes up to smoke winding like shadow on blue sky
from the Gauloise between my teeth, and when your laughter crashes into me
I catch it in my own throat, lightness remembering something I forgot I forgot.

Below us, the children of drunk Parisians brandish sticks,
collide through streams as planned as stalagmites
in the cave where waterfall echoes interrupt baisers.

Weeks from now, I’ll be on a plane,
you’ll be somewhere on the map
we’ve carried in our minds all year
of ways to get out of Paris,
and those of us with more adult lives
will go back to living them.

But for now, our steps zig-zagging into each other,
we catch the old Nerf against our bare toes
and as the children sneak in with us, the echoes are ours.

Paris is the three cans we abandoned at the foot of Sacre-Coeur,
it is a dotted path between alimentations generales
and lives displayed in rectangles of light,
the clinking of broken glass against the steps
and Hey Ya, the acoustic version, as we walk home
the roofs spreading out like playing cards
you hold in your hand.

OMG IT'S YOU!

Today I spoke to Agnes Varda in the street in my neighborhood. This is incredible. I knew she lived around here, but I've been to her store and I've wandered around Denfert Rochereau and I've never seen her. So, today I finally went to see "Les Plages d'Agnes," her movie that's been playing at the Denfert cinema forever. A friend told me she sometimes introduces the movie, so I looked around the cinema from the balcony hoping to spot an old woman with two-toned hair. No dice.

The movie was good. She had a lot of locations in the neighborhood, so on the way home, I wandered down Rue Daguerre, where I passed her house (used in the movie!) -- it's right across the street from her store. I stopped for a moment in front of it, thinking how maybe I could camp out at the cafe across the street and wait to see her, when I turned around and there she was! Coming out of her store to cross the street to come home. I stared at her awkwardly, and then we had a conversation:

Me: You're Agnes Varda?
Agnes Varda: Yes.
Me: I just saw your movie!
AV: Which one?
Me: "The Beaches of Agnes"!
AV: Where?
Me: At Denfert.
AV: Did you like it?
Me: Yes!
AV: We're right in front of the courtyard in that movie, you know.

At this point I felt like I should probably head home, so I turned around to do just that, when:

AV: How many people were there?
Me: What?
AV: How many people were there? 5? 10?
Me: Ten.
AV: (in the cutest way possible) Oh, c'est sympa!

Then I headed home and she went into her house. I smiled at everyone on the walk home.

And I did not get the gender of film wrong.

Paris, je crois en toi

I just got home from a dinner at some family friends' apartment in the 13th, not far from where I used to live. It was really nice to see them again, and really nice to understand everything that was said at dinner. I started thinking about my list on the way home.

I like making lists a lot, although I don't always cross the things off of my lists. But given how little time I have left in Paris, I just revisited an old list of things I wanted to do before leaving Paris, and it's just silly to look at now. So many of these things ended up being kind of impractical or boring or just not the things that I love about Paris, which I stumbled into for the most part. In any case this is it:

see Agnes Varda at Denfert-Rochereau (not for lack of trying)
write at Les Deux Magots (one of Ernest Hemingway's hangouts)(this seems so touristy to me now, I've walked past it many times)
go running in Luxembourg Gardens (not as romantic as it would seem; there is traffic on the way)
buy Ben Simon sneakers(naturally, I accomplished the shopping goals)
see old French movies in theatres(eh, they weren't French, but I've seen a lot of old movies, so I think I can cross this off
go to Musee d'Orsay, Musee du Quai Branly, Jeu de Paume, Fondation Cartier
go to the Brigitte Bardot exhibition(I missed this one. Tant pis!)
ride a Velib' around my neighborhood
learn how to make lasagna, enchiladas, and a crustless pear tart(I didn't do this but our oven broke, so I don't really care...)
eat Senegalese food again
go to The Red Wheelbarrow (English-language bookstore in the Marais)(This just sounds really boring and touristy to me now)
find a third job(two tutoring jobs!)
traveling: Amsterdam/Berlin/Prague with one of my oldest friends from home (coming up in February), London, maybe Barcelona
Bikram yoga in Montmartremore trips to the Butte de Montmartre
see a movie at the film institute
drink cheap wine beside the Seine
go out for onion soup and cafe creme at the brasserie near my metro stop
have a picnic in Parc Montsouris
cardboard box dinner parties
go to the top of the Eiffel Tower
visit Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway's houses
go out for moelleux au chocolat and ice cream sundaes
visit the Centre Pompidou permanent collection for free with my visa
get a Jean Seberg haircut and frolick around Paris in a red dress(Not quite Jean Seberg, but it is really short)
read a book on a bench in Parc Montsouris

And this is my new list of things I want to do before I leave Paris in two weeks:

go hunting in the vintage stores in the Marais
go back to Musee d'Orsay to see the portrait of Berthe Morisot looking badass again
Cluny Museum
ride a Velib'
blueberry pancakes at Breakfast in America
go back to the Pompidou permanent collection
see more old movies at the Filmotheque du Quartier Latin
pick up coffee at Starbucks and lounge in the Tuileries
photography the quartier
eating: felafel at L'As du Felafel in the Marais, crepes at Le Petit Grec in Rue Mouffetard, massive amounts of pastries from Dominique Saibron and my neighborhood boulangerie, cafe cremes, pastry and coffee at Miss Manon in the Marais, salade nicoise/Orangina at a brasserie, picnics, and tons of street food...
go on the Left Bank writers walk mapped out by Lonely Planet (hi, I'm a nerd, and, also, what up Ernest Hemingway's old house, salut, Edith Wharton's place!)
picnic in Parc Montsouris
Indian food in the Indian quartier near Gare du Nord
work on the chapbook in the Cafeotheque and La Mer a Boire (favorite cafes)
running in Parc Montsouris
Catacombs
SEE Agnes Varda, or at least her movie, "Les Plages d'Agnes," playing perpetually at the movie theatre near where she lives at Denfert Rochereau
Berlin part deux
see people I can only see in Paris
cook black beans and rice and pancakes on the stove top in my kitchen
go back to Bikram yoga if it's not prohibitively expensive
shopping: Uniqlo, espadrilles, H&M, etc.
get my short hair niced up by Daniel of the Rue des Malesherbes Franck Provost, the best hair stylist in Paris
read a book beside the Seine
buy presents for people I need to buy presents for
do nice things for the people who have helped me immeasurably since I moved here: dishes and cooking for the roommate, flowers and massive thank-yous for the family friends, declarations of undying devotion to my friends, etc.

When I look at this list I get really excited for the next two weeks. And really glad that I've gotten a chance to get to know Paris to the point where I even know the things on this list exist. And I'm really hoping that I'll have an Agnes Varda sighting, although I would probably say something dumb, like, I'd get the gender of film wrong. In front of Agnes Varda. Which -- who am I kidding? -- would be AWESOME.

Mostly I'm grateful for the people. Who would have thought you could make a family out of time spent over small cups of coffee and hours in parks and watching soccer games and half-understood conversations? And I'm grateful for the Paris I've discovered beyond the one I fell in love with when I was 17. Sure, the village-y neighborhood my aunt and uncle live in is probably the most beautiful, vibrant place in the world, but it's nice to know where to find the cheap Indian food and where to stalk Agnes Varda and what cafes will allow you to work on poems at a table for hours. It's not like living abroad is ever easy, and I still have a lot of angst over what happens when I come home. But I guess once we peel back the imagined Paris and the years of dreaming, we all have to make our own versions of Paris. This is mine. I believe in it.

Paris, je t'aime?

No. Paris, je fucking t'aime.

That's more like it.



(Latest favorite metro song.)

La demoiselle et le soleil

If there is a better feeling than that which accompanies being 23, drinking a Dutch beer in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont at 4:30 in the afternoon with two friends while eating Petit Ecolier cookies, lying in the grass looking up at blue sky while smoking a Gauloise (yes, smoking is bad, I don't do it, but it was to celebrate), and watching children run around brandishing fake guns and chasing after each other while a friendly Parisian sun shines down on it all with work finished last week and a few weeks left to enjoy Paris, then it can only be playing soccer with aforementioned people and random kids inside of a cave beside a waterfall in the same park around 5:30. Although I can't say for sure what time it was, because I left my watch at home.

I'm on vacation this week. My parents were supposed to be here, but couldn't because of the volcano in Iceland and subsequent ash cloud looming over the continent and subsequent cancellation of transatlantic flights. So instead of biking through Normandy with my mom and dad, I'm spending this week with my Paris friends, doing Paris things, with the knowledge that I'm coming home soon, so I only have to budget three more weeks, and also with the sense of relief that only comes from surviving a truly crappy job. On Monday I finally went shopping with a friend of mine, and then we had delicious Mediterranean food at a place in the Marais with terrible service. We talked and ate and complained at our sidewalk table until after the sun went down. On Tuesday at the Parc des Buttes Chaumon, we watched kids run around and torture each other. We had to wear our sunglasses. And it was t-shirt weather.

Today I went back to Belleville to plan a trip with a friend. We met at the best cafe in Paris, right next to Parc de Belleville. It has ginger juice that tastes like Dakar, cheap coffee, and cheap platters of cheese and meat, outdoor seating on a quiet corner in Belleville, and it's kind of hidden as well. I'm really starting to love Paris's more fringey places. Belleville is out of the way, and it's full of poor people and hipsters. It has excellent parks, the aforementioned best cafe in Paris, and a view of the Eiffel Tower. It also has little Turkish grocery stores where you can find black beans and rice and all manner of deliciousness. The old men who run them are usually friendly and French is their second language too, so no getting corrected on the proper gender of, say, a bag of rice. I kind of like the unattractive parts of Paris. In some ways, they're the best. Although my pretty little quartier is nice too.

And I'm going back to Berlin next Thursday, then Seattle on May 10. The time has gone by fast, although at times it felt glacial.

So, to date, the best memories I have of Paris:
1. the afternoon spent in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont
2. the first French party I went to, where they played "Rock the Casbah" and one of my best friends and I drank gin and talked to French boys
3. that night I went to the movies alone, saw a homeless man get treated cruelly, gave him a euro coin, and thought about how much this year has changed me
4. standing in front of Notre Dame with my parents and Owen on Christmas Eve
5. the entire weekend I spent in the UK
6. ditto Berlin
7. the moment my class of 7-year-olds started rushing me for hugs and good-bye bisous on my last day teaching them -- when one of the little girls said, "Tu vas nous manquer, Megane!" ("We are going to miss you.") I just about lost it
8. any time anyone referred to me as "la demoiselle." I don't care if this is belittling. I think it's cute.
9. watching a video installation outside Centre Pompidou with someone I had just met on Nuit Blanche in October and knowing that we were going to be friends
8. coming back from Italy and realizing that I could speak French
9. going to the top of the Eiffel Tower with Michelle on her last night in Paris
10. writing in cafes for hours for no other reason than I feel like writing some poetry

This list is clearly incomplete.

It's been a weird week since I was supposed to be in Normandy with the family, but it's also been a good week. This post-work time in Paris has this vibe of revelry. It's like carnivale. Like, okay, we made it. We did the hard part. Now we can just enjoy the intensity of being 23 and in Paris until it's time to go home and face the reality of a job and saving money.

And in the sun, Paris is a different city. After a gray winter and a crappy job, I'm ready for it. Here comes the sun.

Weekend in the Homeland, or, Hitsville UK

(I originally wrote this on Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 10:07 p.m.)

I’m on a train between London and Paris so this post will not be in realtime. I’m listening to “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and I already miss England. My Eurostar ticket was my birthday present from my parents, and it’s probably the best birthday present I have ever received. I arrived Friday night in London, found a bus to Oxford (I actually miss long bus rides!), and met up with one of my friends from Smith who’s doing a master’s there. We found dinner (quesadillas!) in a pub, and then on Saturday we walked all over Oxford (There are tiny sculptures of baby dragons! And rowboats on the Isis, which is part of the Thames! There is a mound no one is allowed to climb on! There is a college called Jesus! There is a college called Magdalen, but it’s pronounced Maudlin! I thought that was pretty funny…) then spent very little money on a lot of clothing at Primark, which is like Forever 21 with H&M styling and Wal-Mart prices. And it’s British. In other words, the holy grail for those of us who make our living (ha) teaching English to French kids, or are working on postgraduate degrees in very expensive England but still like clothing. I finally got a blazer so I can look like every other girl in Paris, and a purse for 3 pounds. I am not kidding. It was kind of a madhouse, but it was worth it.

We capped off the day with a walk into North Oxford and half-pints at a pub in a meadow that had everything in common with the site of Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday except for fireworks and actual hobbits. We sat outside and watched cows bob across the field, surrounded by babies tugging prayer flags and chasing each other with toy guns while their parents drank some pints and a hen party (bachelorette party) raged in the background. The women in attendance wore fuzzy pink antennae. It was a good look. A bluegrass band played CCR covers. “Bad Moon Rising” never sounded so good. 

We then made our way to a new pub for half pints of cider and veggie burgers stacked with pickles and curry mayo with baskets of fries. We sat under walls decorated with records by the Smiths and the Sex Pistols and They Might Be Giants beside armchairs, wood furniture, and bookshelves and talked about the Clash and life after Smith and that particularly scary prospect that it is the future. Especially for me, MFA school reject. But things are looking okay, actually. I have my job at 826 and a place to live in Seattle and friends I am really excited to see pretty soon actually. I’m going to spend a year writing, working, earning and saving money, and figuring things out. I’m actually excited for it. And I might reapply to schools in the fall if that’s what I want to do. We’ll see. I like the openness of it all. For once, I feel like I’m not on anyone else’s clearly-defined track to such nebulous concepts as fulfillment and success. And that feels kinda nice. Okay, when I’m honest with myself, a lot nice.

So back to Oxford. We ended up eating Ben & Jerry’s (MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN HOW I HAVE MISSED THEE) Phish Food and watching “Taking Woodstock,” which featured upstate New York heavily, which is none too far from the old alma mater, aka the piece of my heart I left in Massachusetts. Back at the Jesus College house, I listened to “Sandinista!” and read Kavalier & Clay as the sounds of the university and locals out at pubs rustled in through the half-open window.

It was a good day.

Sunday was London. After picking up coffee at an honest to God real coffee shop (France! Look what England can do! You can do it too!) and Marks and Spencer sandwiches, we hopped back on the Oxford Tube, had a picnic in Hyde Park (full of daffodils!), saw Westminster Abbey from the outside, rifled through the goods on display at an outdoor book market (I am not kidding—I found a volume of Alan Bennett’s diaries and was filled with giddy glee and nostalgia for my seminar on him that I took in my last year at Smith.), and then went to the Tate Modern, where I saw a collection of interesting photos taken by Bruce Davidson in the New York subway. It was interesting because I often think of how cool it would be to photograph people on the Paris Metro. It’s such a strangely public, somewhat threatening everyday place where everyone is thrown together out of what is essentially necessity. So cool to see it documented in his photographs. The photos were the highlight. Seeing Andy Warhol stuff for real was cool too. They also had some Pierre Bonnard paintings, which I love as well. It was a quick visit, but we did a lot and we had a lot of fun.

And I was really struck by how quickly at home I felt in England. No language barrier, people are friendly, and there are just a lot of small things about it that I am completely enchanted by. For example, almost obsessively detailed signage (example: Please put your dogs on leashes in this area, because otherwise there is a chance they may disturb the waterfowl, which include pelicans—only a little exaggerated, en fait). It was such a comfortable place. Different enough to feel like a different country, similar enough to feel right. There’s a lot of square-ish architecture which reminded me of Smith, real coffeeshops, video stores, highways that look like the ones at home, cheap lip balm at Boots (does not exist in Paris)…and then there are the bookstores, the Oxford University colleges, the history, the literature. I mean, it should be no surprise that I love England. I was an English major. My favorite authors are British. English literature has been known to make me cry/shiver/salivate. I like things like clever wordplay and absurdly detailed signs. I actually laugh at these things. I love Virginia Woolf and Alan Bennett and I’ve been a fan of Jane Austen since I was fourteen. The Clash is my favorite band. So of course I like England. There’s also that whole thing where it’s the homeland.

Still, I wasn’t really expecting to get so excited by just seeing things like the Victoria line to Brixton—“Brixton! Like ‘The Guns of Brixton’! I need to take a picture! On a subway platform!”

This is probably what I get for waiting until the age of 22 to go to England.

I even liked the tube. It’s way cleaner and smaller than the metro. So, after, visiting a whole slew of European countries, I think Germany and England are the winners. And England is my favorite. I can’t wait to go back. I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow, but it’s the beginning of my last week of work, and then just a little while before I come back to the US. With a trip to Normandy with my parents and maybe a chance to see one of my cousins and do Paris things like see movies and hang out with my friends before heading home.

But I don’t want to be leaving England. Well, they do have an MFA in creative writing at Oxford. And I have a couple more Clash songs to get through. So I think I’ll just bask in my good weekend for a little while.

My friend said something funny to me while we were at the pub the first night I was there. After I’d talked to her a little bit about living in Senegal vs. living in Paris. Something to the effect of, “When you have kids someday, they’re going to think you’re really cool.”

And I don’t know about the kids part. Because I’m only almost 23 (Friday) and I don’t always love the kids I work with. But I like the idea of someday showing some hypothetical children my passport from the past couple of years, with all of its stamps and visas, and saying, “That was when I lived in Senegal and Paris. This is what it’s all about. Collecting stamps on your passport. Where do you want to go?”

My friend Michelle has this wonderful theory that the meaning of life is nothing more than puppies and babies, and sometimes I think she’s onto something. But I would adjust it a little bit. I would add in passport stamps. Because I think that they’re pretty wonderful too. My passport is my biography. My passport stamps are evidence of everywhere I’ve been. My visas are evidence of the places I’ve lived, the times I’ve changed my address and had to survive in a different language, the times I’ve met people who have given me so much that I know that returning it in kind is impossible. My Senegal visa reminds me of being twenty and learning abruptly how to live in the present moment. It reminds me of dust and heat and one dollar rice and fish and eating dinner every night with my host mom and sister with the door open and the Spanish telenovelas on. My France visa reminds me of coming to Paris this year with a set of expectations and having to completely remake them. But mostly, my passport stamps remind me of where I come from, what I’ve made it through, what’s been hard and what’s been fucking transcendent. I know the next stamp is coming from the US border patrol when I go through customs to go home, and after that, the ever-present question returns. Where’s the next one gonna come from? Where do you want to go?

I’m still deciding.

How could you be so heartless?

Rejection hurts, man. I had a pretty good day overall -- a birthday brunch for a friend of mine involving pancakes followed by "Dear John," a Nicholas Sparks adaptation that was just bad. But in a good way. But here's the thing. My heart is broken. Not in the traditional way, but via email, letters that were lost in the mail, and -- most cruelly -- by some 18-year-old who said, rather bluntly, "Oh, but you didn't get in."  Over the phone. After butchering my address and kind of laughing about it. Rad.

What am I supposed to say? Unbreak my heart, NYU. I don't want to walk on broken glass, Michigan. You didn't stand by me, Iowa. No not at all. You oughta know, Madison. Irvine was not strong enough to be my man. I know this is my Paris blog, but I'm going to break out of Paris mode for just a moment, and while it may perhaps seem foolhardy to list every grad school that has rejected me for an MFA in fiction next fall, it's also cathartic. I'm still waiting on BU and Columbia, but my breath is no longer bated. It's time to figure out what the next step will be if all the snooty MFA programs I applied to don't deem my fiction worthy of perfecting.

Which, I just have to say, is kind of stupid. If it was truly terrible, a couple MFA rejections wouldn't stop me from writing it. But MFA rejections feel personal in a way that few other rejections are (well, aside from those of the actual interpersonal variety). But dude. That's ME in my work. More than it is in anything else I produce. Even when it's clearly not me. And no, I didn't base that character on you. What are you talking about?

But I digress. I'm going to make a cup of tea and ponder a couple other things for the moment. Freelance writing and photography. Law school. Writing the fucking Great American Novel sans MFA. Ha, that'll show 'em. An MFA in poetry. I know that it comes more naturally to me anyway. I know that there are more options and that I will figure this out in time. But for now it feels like getting dumped. I guess it's time to blast the Clash and reassess.

At least Paris will still be there in the morning.

Of haircuts, mistakes, travels, and nostalgia

It's about time I posted! I'm back in Paris, and my friend I was traveling with left on Monday, putting a stop to our shenanigans. Our trip was amazing. It was crazy and stressful, but we had a lot of fun and we saw a lot. We took massive amounts of pictures, stayed in an array of hostels ranging from amazing to scruffy (and Christian), met some interesting people, saw castles, rode trains, ate goulash, and drank a lot of coffee. I can't really describe it all, but here's how the itinerary turned out:

Paris --> Luxembourg --> Brussels --> Bruges (day trip) --> Brussels --> Amsterdam --> Berlin --> Prague --> Rome --> Paris

Meanwhile, back in Paris I'm realizing with a combination of glee and confusion that my contract ends in four weeks, and then it's no more fake teaching job for me. I'm also coming home pretty soon, and I am pretty excited about that too. I love Paris, but there are definitely people and things I am looking forward to returning to.

Among them:
-my family, my friends, and the great state of Washington
-being able to see mountains in the city
-driving (nothing like driving around Seattle at night listening to some choice tunes with a little drizzle pitter-pattering on the hood)
-drip coffee
-burritos
-bagels
-going out to breakfast (I'm dreaming of a stack of blueberry pancakes and a cup of coffee at Mae's as soon as I'm back -- who's with me?)
-not having to spend most of what I'm paid on rent (yay for being a twentysomething living with one's parents)
-being able to go running without being the only girl out there
-the video store
-the laid-back way people in Seattle dress; hello, Gor-Tex, oh, I am now allowed to look like a slob? Awesome.
-replacing my fake job with happily providing free labor at 826 (i.e., helping out with creative writing workshops for kids instead of repeatedly saying, "Hello! How. Are. You?")
-the San Juan Islands

And then there are things I'm going to miss about Paris:
-my friends
-reading on the metro
-people-watching everywhere
-lazy cafe cremes at cafes with a book, or not
-after-work pastries
-never having the feeling of being too dressed up
-living in a neighborhood that feels like downtown
-my two favorite boulangeries
-Notre Dame
-adventures in the city at a moment's notice
-seeing movies in French theatres
-crepes
-picnics
-close proximity to other European countries
-and though it feels impossible now, probably the free time and independence
-low-budget dinner parties
-French groceries. So cheap and so good.

Still, it's nice to be getting back into my Parisian routine of seeing old movies in little theatres in the Latin Quarter ("Strangers on a Train" is probably the most bizarrely cutesy Hitchcock movie I've ever seen), meeting my friends at the places we have made our own for espresso in tiny cups and chocolate-studded brioches, and making new discoveries all the time. Yesterday afternoon was spent browsing thrift stores in the Marais with one of my friends, and we made some crazy discoveries. Vintage dresses for ten euros, abandoned military jackets that probably once belonged to boys in a band, newsboy caps, buckets of scarves at 3 euros a pop, and enough people squeezed into the stores to make it a little like the metro at rush hour. This is where I'll be shopping when I get paid again. We also found a hot dog stand on Rue du Roi de Sicile, where we had a delicious carnivorous dinner on the sidewalk. They have chili dogs. I am not kidding.

Also, I cut off a lot of my hair. Or rather, paid someone else to. Why? Because I keep seeing Parisian women with these chic short haircuts, so I decided that I should probably get one. At first I hated it, and I was a little worried that my brother's uncharitable comparison to Justin Bieber was not unfounded. But I actually really, really like it. It takes five minutes to wash, and it makes me feel way more European. I'm glad I took the plunge. Because it turns out that hair grows back, and at a certain point, holding yourself back can be just as bad as making a mistake. I'm trying to remember that mistakes can sometimes be good. And informative. And useful. Living in an academic environment like Smith, where so much is based on achievement and doing things correctly and not making errors is not exactly good preparation for living in Paris. I've had to change my thinking from never make a mistake, to please go ahead, make some mistakes. It's taken me a long time to realize that perfection is out, and it's about time. As Neko Case puts it, "I try my best, but I'm made of mistakes."

Mistakes are what make us who we are. I've just begun to realize that this isn't a bad thing.

At Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin:

No hair! + steak frites on Michelle's last night in Paris:

Have a good night.

I returned to Paris on Thursday morning after an overnight train ride from Rome with Christian teenagers from America and the zenith of discomfort known as the "couchette" -- it's like a shelf, but for people, on European night trains. You're supposed to sleep on them. I don't know who thought of this, but it is probably someone on a par with whoever invented CD packaging. Because they are painful. We visited seven countries in two and a half weeks. Berlin was far and away my favorite place. We also saw Luxembourg, Brussels (don't go to Brussels), Bruges, Amsterdam, Prague, Rome, and Vatican City. I'm not counting anywhere we made train connections.

It's good to be back in Paris. I'm realizing that I speak French well now. Like, I'm sort of, you know, bilingual. I just find myself so much more comfortable speaking with people on a regular basis, joking around with strangers and waking up other passengers on the metro when they've fallen asleep at the terminus. It feels good to be able to do that. It's something I definitely wouldn't have had the balls to do when I first got here.

Tonight I went to a movie, thus getting back into my Paris hobby. I see a lot of movies here. The earlier showing I wanted to go to was sold out, so I found myself taking line 4 to Shakespeare and Company to peruse, then leaving because it was too overrun with tourists and people speaking English and this weirded me out, picking up a crepe at the stand I know at Odeon, and then wandering Montparnasse before my movie. And something strange happened. I was crossing the street away from Le Select, one of Ernest Hemingway's old haunts, when I saw a panhandler man wearing a giant wooden cross around his neck. I almost felt compelled to say, "Dude, that's some cross you got there," but I make a point of not talking to homeless men ever since one beamed me with a beer can when I first moved here. Then I noticed the restaurant he was standing in front of. It looked nice so I swooped into see how exorbitantly priced the drinks were, when a waiter came out with a plate of oysters and a tub full of water. As he balanced the plate of oysters on one hand, he used the other to dump the tub of water onto the homeless man. He then proceeded to yell at him. I guess they had asked him not to panhandle in front of the restaurant. This seemed like such a cruel, uncalled for thing to do. I mean, Paris is full of homeless people, but aside from that one experience I had, I don't usually see them as being dangerous. So I stood in front of the tabac next to the restaurant and pretended to look at postcards while I watched the homeless man hobble away from the restaurant. I looked to my left and spotted a homeless woman at the metro stop. She was packing up her bags for the night, and nestling a puppy into a little bag. I looked at her, and the man with the wooden cross, and remembered how many homeless people live in Paris. And then I did something that I never do. Knowing full well that my bank account has been hurting since my trip and that what I was about to do next might just help this man buy beer, I reached into my wallet, took out a euro coin, walked over to the man with the wooden cross and put it in the paper cup he was holding. My reservations didn't matter. After all, a euro can also buy you a baguette.

"Bonne soiree," I said. Have a good night.

It was a small, timid action, but it felt like the best I could do. Sometimes the right thing is really pretty obvious. The man inclined his head towards me, almost bowing. And as I walked away from him, feeling a little cowardly, a little better, and a little confused, something occurred to me. Seeing someone treated that way upset me because it's happened to me. Because in November, a homeless man threw a beer can at the back of my head, and it made me feel small and vulnerable and insignificant. I didn't realize it when I gave the guy a coin, but I felt some kind of understanding that I don't think I would have had otherwise. We are all small. I'm small. The man with the wooden cross was small. The waiter who threw water on him is small. The man who threw a beer can at me is small. Everyone is small. But no one is insignificant. As Unitarian cheeseball as it may sound, everyone matters. We all have the capacity to connect with other people in a way that isn't destructive. And I thought back to the night of the beer can incident. I was wearing the jacket I was wearing that night. And it felt so circular. I felt so far away from the girl who ran down Rue de Tolbiac in a state of shock and panic, already worried about the dry cleaning costs. I couldn't see beyond myself that night. A few months ago, the man with the wooden cross would have scared me. But I also know what it feels like to have someone you don't even know treat you cruelly for no reason. Somehow, that incident opened me up in a way I didn't realize until now. And, most likely not unrelatedly, Paris has become my home. And it feels fucking amazing.

Berliner

I am drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. It tastes like a little piece of New England and I am in love with this city. After stops in Belgium and Amsterdam, I´m loving being in a place I´ve never visited before. I don´t speak the language, hardly know how to take the U and S Bahns, or even the difference between them, and we´ve been getting lost constantly. This place is beautiful-- old & new buildings, the glass-domed Reichstag, sites where construction is going on and will be for a long time, it seems, modern buildings, a huge TV tower, open spaces, wide roads, people who seem warm and open and friendly without any of the pretensions of Paris. Berlin wears its scars well, without covering them. If you had its history, you would have a lot of scars too. The Holocaust memorial, over 1000 slabs of concrete on an open square, took up most of our day. The memorial is beautiful and simple and disorienting to walk through. The information center is intense. I was completely overwhelmed and drawn in by the information at hand. Mostly I just found myself wondering why it took until 1945 for the allies to intervene. We found the double line of cobblestones that marks where the Berlin wall used to be. There are so many markers of the atrocities this city has experienced. But this place feels so in the present too, not clinging to some mythical past, but acknowledging its history and living in a place in between acknowledgment and recovery. We´re staying in Mitte, the trendy part of Berlin, where people sit in coffee shops and are so cool-looking without the jeans-boots-black uniform of Paris. I don´t know what I love so much about Berlin, but maybe after so many years of chaos and violence--or maybe because this place is just different--people here don´t seem as willing to waste their time being shallow or pretentious as they are in Paris. And everything is in flux, reminding me that the other side of uncertainty is always possibility.

Ich bin ein Berliner. I don´t even know what that means, but it´s the only German I know. I feel like I´m cheating on Paris a litte, but I also am happy to have discovered a new city I already love this much.

Embarcation

I'm working on my BU application at Centre Pompidou, one of the few places in Paris where there's coffee and free wifi in one place, but I'm feeling pretty antsy. Because tomorrow, I'm going to get up painfully early, take the RER to CDG, and meet one of my oldest friends from Seattle. On Saturday, we are leaving Paris for an adventure across Europe, that's going to go something like this: Paris --> Amsterdam --> Berlin --> Prague --> Salzburg --> Paris. We're backpacking across Europe. But we both have train passes, so we can change our plans at any moment. I'm really looking forward to this. I picked up my interrail pass (like the Eurail, but for residents of the EU, and I am one of those!) today at the Montparnasse train station, and we're slowly making hostel reservations, reading up on the cities we're going to, and trying to connect with anyone who will let us stay with them while we're traveling. I've already been to Amsterdam, so that will be familiar -- part of the plan, so we don't get lost and confused immediately -- but I'm so excited to be in the cities I've never visited, unable to speak the local language, and having some adventures. It's just a lovely feeling and really exciting. I love traveling. Well, obviously. And when you live in Paris, it's a mix of awesome and terrible, but the feeling of newness that you get from being a tourist dissipates after a while. Reality sets in. I still love Paris, but I love ordinary things about it. I'm less enchanted by the things that caught my attention the first time I came here. I love getting a cheap coffee and pastry at the bar at my favorite boulangerie after work, and reading some James Joyce for a good hour. I love my friends. I love knowing exactly where to go on the metro. I love knowing I can go to Centre Pompidou to look at art whenever I want, and then not going very often. I love the rare sunny days when I can wear my obnoxiously American knockoff Ray-Bans, and I love getting to know the city beyond what originally drew me to it. On some level, I even love knowing that there are things about Paris that I actually really dislike. That's what makes it feel like home, I suppose.

But that said, I'm looking forward to going somewhere new, with one of my oldest friends, and not-too-well-laid plans and an open-ended train pass, and a backpack, and some books, and my camera.

Sometimes I still wonder what I'm doing here. I have those moments of utter confusion and uncertainty. Sometimes I really miss being at Smith, where the feeling of being productive and using time well came from getting the reading done or finishing papers. But that's a cheap way of assessing success. It's a limited way of measuring what it means to be a good person, which, ultimately, isn't something that needs to be measured, it isn't possible to measure. So I think what I'm doing here is pretty simple, when it all comes down to it. I'm just living my life, however scary and strange that may feel. But I think that's why we have things like friends and James Joyce and 1 euro espressos and sunny days in Paris and petite tartes au sucre and knockoff Ray-Bans and public libraries and mix CDs sent across the Atlantic by close friends that are far away and Interrail passes and soft American Apparel v-neck t-shirts and postcards of Sonia Delauney paintings and crepes with Nutella and banana and black beans and Wes Anderson movies and Bikram's yoga and and Skype and bookstores and window-shopping and adventures across Europe with old friends and, very occasionally, interactions with strangers that leave us feeling better rather than worse about the world.

Calls to mind something from one of my favorite movies, Stranger Than Fiction:

As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be ok. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true. And, so it was, a wristwatch saved Harold Crick.

When all of this freedom gets daunting, these are the things I like to remember. In the meantime, away we go to Amsterdam.

Etonnez-Moi, Francoise!

The French will never get over the sixties, I don't think. And I can't blame them. They have a lot of icons from that period, but while most people have heard of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot, my favorite is Francoise Hardy. I mean, just look at her. Where do you think Cat Power got her look from?

She's a contemporary of Jane Birkin, but while Jane Birkin has always just been too breathy for me to take, Francoise Hardy has this complicated old school charm. She sings about the sensation of being a single woman surrounded by happy couples, and wanting to be astonished by Benoit, and she does an awesome cover of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne." Paris has a massive history of style icons and actresses like Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot (I love Brigitte Bardot too, more on that later), but Francoise Hardy just epitomizes this smart, kind of badass, laid-back style that I really love. She's complicated and interesting. Which I think is a big difference between the United States and France. I get the sense that women like Francoise Hardy are more likely to be popular in France than in the United States, where we can't really seem to get more creative than Audrey Hepburn. And no offense to Audrey Hepburn, but Francoise Hardy isn't cute. There's no aiming to please or adhering to a preconceived notion of femininity going on here. And yet, Francoise Hardy was and still is a huge popstar.

Anyway, I love Francoise Hardy. Her music, her leather jackets and striped t-shirts, her style. And I think that Cat Power, Jenny Lewis, and any woman in indie rock with bangs and angst is pretty indebted to her.  And I love them too, but you can't really dispute this:




Monday was crazy as per usual. Bikram yoga in Montmartre was just right though. Maybe if this writing thing doesn't work out, I'll just become a yoga instructor. I can just see it -- shouting "Tirez! Tirez! Tirez!" to a room full of suffering French and American yogis and yoginis trying to balance their entire bodies on one foot. Or I could just have two professions that pay terribly.

In the words of Francoise Hardy, je suis bien perplexe.

This Is Just To Say

I don't know how this happened. It really makes very little sense to me. But I think I might kind of like teaching.

Also. A cheap way to enjoy Paris is to share a bottle of wine with a friend whilst wandering through the city. It's like 4 euros and there aren't any open-container laws for pedestrians.

J'habite Ici

I don't like Mondays. I'm up at 6, on the metro by 7, in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois at 8, where I wait in the cold for a bus to take me to school. This is normally not a very fun thing to do, but it being Monday, I'm invariably on a totally different schedule from staying up incredibly late on the weekends. My friends and I all do this -- sometimes we're actually out, other times we are on Skype. Gotta love that time difference. So anyway, by Monday morning, I'm a zombie, and that's when I get to go teach children. I then have two days off and it's back to work on Thursday and Friday. It's a strange schedule. However, yesterday afternoon I got on the metro to go to my yoga class, and when I got off in Montmartre, an unexpected feeling came over me. There wasn't anything special about that moment -- really, not at all, I was bleary-eyed from going out the preceding two nights, and shuffling around in my sweatshirt, and I had taken that route so many times, but as I walked out of the metro, I realized that that was exactly the point. Paris is just where I live now. When I first got here, I had visions of never dressing down, and flitting around the city having deep thoughts and being serendipitous. But this is not something you can keep up perpetually. Not if you actually live here. It becomes more of something you do when you have time for it. Sooner or later, you find yourself wearing a sweatshirt in public on your way to yoga class. Harried. Not smooth. And it was a weird feeling, because I was rushing to my class in Montmartre passing these Haussman buildings and the costume shops you see in "Amelie," and it felt like such an unspecial, ordinary, commonplace moment that could have happened anywhere, except it was in Paris. And that in itself was good to know. I am never going to be Parisian, and living in a different culture means tiny frustrations every day, and the missing people and feeling the distance from home never really goes away, but it was a moment where I just caught myself comfortable, and thought, Okay. This is home. I live here. There was nothing glamorous or stereotypically Parisian about that moment, and in a way, that was the beauty of it.

On Saturday night, one of my friends and I watched "Paris Je T'Aime" and made a huge salade nicoise. On Sunday, post-yoga, over cafe au lait, we started talking about these small moments where you really do feel comfortable here. Like maybe you're in love with Paris and it loves you back. They're so mundane. Perhaps because in a city so full of elegance and history, the real surprises come from ordinary things.

Tu Vas Faire Attention!

Things that have risen in my estimation this week:
Hand sanitizer
Barack Obama (still pissed about healthcare and how centrist he is and also Afghanistan but I watched the State of the Union and it helped)
the French healthcare system
movie passes that allow you unlimited movies for cheap
my job (well, making my job enjoyable through reading Vonnegut during breaks, planning ahead, telling the kids, "tu vas faire attention" -- you are going to pay attention -- or "je m'enfiche" -- I don't care, and having more of a sense of humor about the whole thing)
Kurt Vonnegut
Jens Lekman
after-work pastries in the afternoon instead of after dinner (my, my, I am becoming so French)
ordering a cup of tea in a cafe
the tramway at Porte d'Orleans

I also capped off a ridiculous day at work during which I ran a videoconference with the British kids because neither teacher could speak the other's language with the Serge Gainsbourg biopic. It was utterly ridiculous. Pretty, for sure. But made me think Serge Gainsbourg was kind of an ass. Also, Jane Birkin's French was apparently terrible. Brigitte Bardot was also a character in it, though, and livened it up. Made me want to wear copious eyeliner and order strange men to take care of my dog while requesting croissants. She was just that ridiculous.

And here's some really good commuting on the train music:



And my pinkeye is almost all better.

What Red Eyes You Have

My ridiculous weekend was followed by a harsh realization: I think the kids gave me pinkeye on Monday.

Cue tea-drinking and the French medical system. Let's hope they're as good as everyone says they are. This just reminds me of when I got pinkeye from a microscope in high school and had to be at orchestra camp with a hugely swollen, red eye. Playing my oboe. Incidentally, that was also the first time I heard the Postal Service, so it wasn't a lost weekend after all.


I guess this is what happens when you work with kids and forget hand sanitizer. Lesson learned. Now I need to get me some antibiotics.

Nocturnal Wanderings, Frivolity, Museums, Chanel/Stravinsky, and a 5 Euro Formula for Happiness

This weekend went by in what felt like a matter of seconds. I had some adventures with several different people. These things happened:
-two museums in two days: Pompidou on Saturday, Rodin on Sunday, both for free with my visa -- Pompidou's permanent collection is a floor of awesome. They have Diane Arbus, Lisette Model, this painter I really like, Sonia Delauney, this insane surrealist photographer whose name escapes me, Matisse's paper cutouts, Karel Appels and people like him, and Chagall and Dada and other stuff I can't think of right now. Amazing. I love Centre Pompidou so much. Rodin is good too, but especially the garden and The Thinker
-nutella/banana crepes, shawerma, beer, chocolat chaud, and late-night quesadillas in my kitchen
-a movie, "Coco Chanel et Igor Stravinsky," with my French fairy godmother, this wonderful lady professor I'm friends with who will take me out for coffee or to see a dumb movie and remind me that it's okay to be confused when you're 22. The movie was kind of dumb, but with "The Rite of Spring," playing constantly. I love Rite of Spring. Also, the actress who played Coco Chanel made me want to become a fashion designer just so that I can dangle a cigarette in one hand and pins in the other while I adjust something on a dress someone's wearing. That I designed. There was also a subplot involving the inception of Chanel no. 5. Frivolous, pretty, fun.
-Rue Mouffetard/The Latin Quarter, the Marais, Saint Michel on both days
-party in my apartment on Saturday night after wandering the city until after midnight. I played cards with my roommate's friends until I couldn't keep my eyes open. Not as riveting as the Risk night, but it's a nice feeling to come back to your apartment to find a party is going on.
-things I did not do: laundry, grocery shopping, enough running, sitting alone in a cafe writing
-wandering from the Marais to the Latin Quarter to Montparnasse and back again
-so much good conversation with wonderful people
-starting my day with a latte, Pema Chodron, and the New York Times

I'm beginning to think that all you really need in Paris is somewhere to walk, ~5 euro for coffee or beer, and someone to talk to while you wander or sit down to said beverages. It is easily my favorite thing about this city.

Back to work and reality tomorrow. Things are certainly still hard. I still have no idea what I'm doing when my contract ends in April. Uncertainty and confusion are daily companions.

But this felt like my first real weekend in Paris.

Here Comes the Sun In My New Notebook

I just got home from work, exhausted and cold, a sketchbook and a notebook richer, with some obscene opera on Arte and a demi-baguette in my stomach. Yum. Today was ordinary, but I made a great discovery -- Gibert Jeune. Gibert Jeune is like Powell's, but French, and bigger than a city block. I went there today on the way home from work, because my moleskine's full up and I am very much dependent on tiny notebooks. It's right outside the Notre Dame/Saint Michel metro stop (where I get the RER) and I love it. Just floors and floors and piles and piles of books and notebooks and art supplies. I wanna live there, but my sweet new 14th arrondissement apartment is pretty okay too.

Something occurred to me this week -- well, a lot of things did -- but one that I should have noticed before is that I don't really like my job. I mean, when teaching is going well, I love teaching, but a lot of it is struggling against shitacular bureaucracy, attempting to make sense of a colossally disorganized system, dealing with bratty children and cranky teachers, and commuting an hour and a half to and from Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois. It's not like I don't have good days, but this is definitely not something I would want to do in the long term. Part of what I'm grappling with right now is that awful question people ask you daily when you're a senior in college -- whatcha gonna do after you graduate? When I graduate from my year of working as an English assistant here, I hope that I'll be going to grad school, but the grad school gods may disagree. They might want me to have more life experience or something. I think back to my time at 826 this summer a lot, and hindsight is 20/20, as per usual. That's the kind of teaching I could see myself doing in the long term. It's meaningful and fun and generous teaching, it's really something that those kids can't get anywhere else. It's an offering. It's something I wish they had for grown-ups. Suffice it to say that I don't get the same validation from saying Myyyyyyyyyyy. Naaaaaaayyyyyyy-muh. Izzzzzzzzzzzz. repeatedly.

Although having the kids sing Beatles songs on Monday was a nice change. They actually had fun, I think. And tried to sing "Here Comes the Sun," which I translated as, "Ummm...le printemps arrive et on est content. Le soleil arrive."

Any you know what? Spring is coming. It's slow to arrive, obviously, especially given Paris's cold snap of the century. But there was a little blue sky peeking out today. And things felt almost indetectably lighter, the way they do when winter starts to give way to spring. There's this tentative warmth that calls attention to everybody's hunched shoulders and itchy wool hats, and you begin to unpeel your winter mask without even noticing. I like this time of year. Although now that I rely on public transportation, I kind of wish it would hurry up.

A lot went on this week. I wandered around the Latin Quarter, played Risk with a bunch of hashish-smoking French boys until the wee hours of the morning, went running at night in my quartier because I could, and explained what the word "riot" means to the guy I tutor in business English. I finally started reading Kurt Vonnegut and it turns out I love him. I made a date to visit one of my friends in England, and realized that I have to start planning a European adventure with one of my very best friends from home. We leave at the end of February.

So in other words, I guess it's good I got a new notebook.

Pictures, because, come on, it's about time:

The fam at Jane and Fred's apartment.

 Me + elles@centrepompidou. Taken by Mom. Get it? Gotta love feminist art.

Constant Vigilance, Meet Yogini Française

As crazy up and down as things have been, I feel like I'm gradually finding my center again after moving, my family's visit, and the end of vacation. I finally started going to a yoga class here. It's expensive, like everything in Paris, but well worth it. It's at a Bikram studio tucked away into a courtyard in the sketchy part of Montmartre. They even have a few classes in English, although it's yoga, so if you can see the instructor, it's very doable in French. And I forgot what a good workout it is -- the last French yoga class I went to felt very much like organized nap time for grownups, so a 90-minute workout with much sweating and kicking your legs in the air and spinal twists is just what I need. Especially when Paris's impression of western Massachusetts means running is a little limited. Although today there was some blue sky, and Montsouris is a really wonderful place to run. It's two minutes from my apartment and just really beautiful and almost always full of other runners.

Then I realized that my job contract ends in April, and I decided that I needed to make a list of things I want to do before then:

see Agnes Varda at Denfert-Rochereau
write at Les Deux Magots (one of Ernest Hemingway's hangouts)
go running in Luxembourg Gardens
buy Ben Simon sneakers
see old French movies in theatres
go to Musee d'Orsay, Musee du Quai Branly, Jeu de Paume, Fondation Cartier
go to the Brigitte Bardot exhibition
ride a Velib' around my neighborhood
learn how to make lasagna, enchiladas, and a crustless pear tart
eat Senegalese food again
go to The Red Wheelbarrow (English-language bookstore in the Marais)
find a third job
traveling: Amsterdam/Berlin/Prague with one of my oldest friends from home (coming up in February), London, maybe Barcelona
Bikram yoga in Montmartremore trips to the Butte de Montmartre
see a movie at the film institute
drink cheap wine beside the Seine
go out for onion soup and cafe creme at the brasserie near my metro stop
have a picnic in Parc Montsouris
cardboard box dinner parties
go to the top of the Eiffel Tower
visit Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway's houses
go out for moelleux au chocolat and ice cream sundaes
visit the Centre Pompidou permanent collection for free with my visa
get a Jean Seberg haircut and frolick around Paris in a red dress
read a book on a bench in Parc Montsouris

Okay so that list is just going to grow.

Also, you know you don't go to Smith anymore when you get back to your apartment after dinner with your closest friend in the Marais to find it full of French guys smoking, drinking, and playing a guitar while listening to French rap, offering you whiskey and Coke, and asking you if you know who Kurt Cobain was because you happen to be from Seattle.

And okay, so that kind of made me happy.

Every morning, I wake up and listen to NPR on my computer, and I keep hearing about the earthquake in Haiti. It goes without saying that while I wish no horrific earthquakes on any countries, I think about Haiti, and I just think, why did it have to happen there? It's very devastating and the images on the New York Times web site are really disturbing. And I realized that this is the first time I've been hearing about such a significant tragedy in the news and haven't been at home or at Smith. At home, we would talk about it at dinner. At Smith, we would be talking about it everywhere. In Paris, I'm not sure who to talk to about it. My friends and I talked about it for sure, and it's been in the newspapers (well, the free ones I read on the way to work, anyway) but it's disorienting to be living abroad when things like this happen. Sometimes the language barrier really bothers me, and not being able to talk about what's going on in the world with other people is something that really gets to me. Dear Megan's French, please improve soon. I also wish I could contribute money, and I would have when I was in college, but my budget doesn't really allow for it right now.

Here's something that bothers me about Paris, and the Haiti thing made me think about it. There are a lot of homeless people here. You see them pitching tents in swanky neighborhoods, perched on stairs in the metro, sitting on the ground outside the metro, begging outside of Notre Dame, sleeping at metro stops, sleeping on the metro. This confuses me for a couple of reasons. First, I kind of always thought that a country like France, which has such a good healthcare system and resources for its citizens, wouldn't have such a big problem with homelessness. Secondly, a lot of the homeless people here are really aggressive about asking for money. When I lived in Northampton, it was full of homeless people, but I would always say hi to the guitar dude outside of CVS, or the marimba man, or the bucket-playing Motown guy. It was always a gesture I could provide even if I couldn't or didn't want to give these people spare change. In Paris, I feel like I can't even do that, and that's hard for me. A certain level of vigilance for my own safety kind of takes over, which ultimately is probably a good thing.

And I really love cities. But I don't think that this kind of adopted hardness is something that I would want to keep up for too long. And I guess that's why Bikram yoga has been so important to me lately. It's a chance to acknowledge strangers and focus on the present moment, something that can be nearly impossible when you're in a crowded metro car.

It reminds me of that dumb graduation speech song. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in southern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. It's all about balance, I guess. And it makes places like Northampton and Seattle look pretty good.

Then I remember that I live in Paris. Paris is my present moment. It's where I wake up and open my shutters every morning. It's where I go grocery shopping. It's where I meet my friends for coffee. It's where I friggin' go to yoga class. And as hard as it can be sometimes, I am really lucky to call it home.

On est toujours "in flux."

A lot has happened since the last time I posted. I managed to keep a regular blog when I studied abroad -- it's a little harder to maintain for a year and not four months. ANYWAY. I had Christmas with my parents. Owen and I went out with my friends to the Latin Quarter on New Years. I finally had a solid day of (maybe) good teaching. I moved! I'm now living in the 14th arrondissement in a technically-one-bedroom-but-we-actually-have-two. My roommate is perhaps the most chill, nice person I have ever met. Our apartment has an oven (in which I have already made enchiladas!) and a shower that will provide you with more than ten minutes of warmth. We even have a washing machine. Our metro stop is flanked by cafes that are open late and two movie theatres, and we're within walking distance of really good shopping and a street where there's always a market. The buildings are elegant, we have a lot of wonderful boulangeries, lovely Parc Montsouris, and even a neighborhood giant -- it's a decoration on a building...pictures to come.

Okay. So now for the bad news. My new commute takes an hour and a half, and I have to time it pretty carefully because I take the metro to one train line to a different train line to a bus. This is okay, although not ideal, but today Paris and its environs had a collective panic attack because it's been snowing lately. Now, Paris is a lot like Seattle in that people do not know how to handle snow. But it's even worse because everyone relies on public transit. During last year's snowstorm in Seattle, the buses hardly ran, and it caused a lot of problems. And not very many people in Seattle even take the bus. In Paris, we've got the metro, RER, and then transit systems in the suburbs, that -- with the exception of the miraculous metro -- are fraught with delays, accidents, and interrupted commutes. Just to give you a better idea of what happens -- today, instead of the metro, two trains, and a bus to get to work, I took the metro, a train, another metro line, another train line, another train line, and finally a bus to get to work, all because of a technical problem at one of the stations in Paris that kept traffic from leaving towards the southeast all day long.

And yesterday the bus I take to work didn't even come, so I walked from the train station to school. An hour.

I just got home from work today after too many transit connections, and a long walk through the neighborhood. It feels good to be home in my cozy but freezing apartment with a cup of tea.

I still feel like I'm in a bizarre state of missing my family who just returned to the States and getting used to being on my own again, except with a roommate, so that's different too, and I'm getting oriented to the new neighborhood as well. I really love it here, and I don't miss the 13th at all, but sometimes I just expect these transitions to be seamless and they never, ever are. I'm honestly quite frazzled at all of the organizing things I have to take care of, so I'm taking it one day at a time. And trying to manage my time better -- which, by the way, is way harder in real life than it was in college, when I felt like I was always being productive just by reading books and doing art projects. It's hard. It really is. Although I know objectively that pretty soon this will just be home. Until then, I'm contenting myself with baguettes tradition from the boulangerie and learning how to cook pork and potatoes and going on long walks in the quartier and sitting down to many a cafe creme. And enjoying the perks of having a roommate. Dinner parties on a cardboard box  with "Franco-Mexican cuisine" have already begun. And by Franco-Mexican, I mean we couldn't find all the right ingredients.

A la prochaine!

Bonne année.

I just made some espresso, heard from my parents who are at CDG heading home. My roommate is in our tiny kitchen making quiche lorraine, I'm about to head out for a croissant before hitting the Columbia app, and some of my Michigan materials are taking too long to come in, which stresses me out, and right now, this is how I feel about Paris:



Welcome, 2010.