You can't make me not love Paris.

I am not Amélie Poulain. I'm probably that introverted, but as it turns out, I don't really like living alone. I realized this yesterday morning when I woke up in my quiet, tiny apartment. I thought to myself, oh yes, this is all very bohemian and writer-ly, but... dude. I need people. I need someone to say hi to when I come home, even if it's just someone I share the apartment with. I live in a big city, and I have friends, but living alone in a tiny, only moderately cheap studio isn't worth it. Colocations are way cheaper, and the apartments are often nicer. I mean, my place is cute, for sure, but sometimes I feel like it's la Maison Bric-a-Brac, like if I stomp around too much one of the walls might begin to fall apart.

So I'm looking for a new place. And more importantly, I'm looking for roommates. It's a bit dramatic, because I have to break my contract with my landlord, but according to French law, you can get out of a lease without penalty if you give 30 days notice. So I only hope the gnome is up on his French law, because I really want my security deposit back.

Things have been really up and down lately. Like, on Sunday, I was walking down Tolbiac and this drunk homeless man kept trying to talk to me. So I ignored him. Because I do that. And then, just as I was passing him, he launched his beer can at the back of my neck.

Okay, a few things:
1. I'm glad it wasn't a bottle, and also that he was too incapacitated to throw that hard.
2. Still. It was almost full.
3. Dude wasted his beer.
4. And got beer all over my wool bomber jacket.
5. Can I just say, I was terrified. I ran.

I called the police and when I returned to Tolbiac the next day, the sketchy homeless guys had apparently been removed. Now, I do feel a little weird about calling the police about homeless people. But I also need to feel safe where I live, and I shouldn't have to cut into my budget to dry clean my jacket because it got drenched in cheap beer because this guy wanted me to talk to him.

So I was pretty bummed after that. Paris is Dreamland for me, and so when very real things happen, it shakes me up. Then yesterday morning, feeling residual angst over Beer Man and getting ready to launch my new housing search, I went to my quartier's marché. I picked up my apples as usual, and then, because I was feeling down, I went to the flower man to buy some little yellow flowers for my apartment. I think he could tell that I was sad, because he said, "Ça va?" and when I gave an unconvincing, "Ça va," he picked out a small pink rose for me from his stand and gave it to me for free with my little yellow flowers. It was such a small, sweet gesture, but it did make me feel better. And it was the antithesis of the creepy guys hitting on you all the time in Paris. Sometimes I think it's these little interactions that make Paris what it is.

That afternoon, my head full of images of shared apartments with clean, new bathrooms and washing machines, I got on the metro to meet one of my closest friends at the Abbesses metro stop in Montmartre. Montmartre is my favorite place in Paris, and it was the reminder I needed if why I love Paris. We wandered to Sacre-Coeur, and through the gloomy mist of a rainy Paris evening, we pointed out Notre Dame and l'Hôtel de Ville and the towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale far off in the distance. It looked magical and tiny in the layer of fog and rain. Paris looks so small from Sacre-Coeur - like a toy Paris. I love seeing it from that perspective. It reminds you of how many people live here, of how many tiny worlds exist here. As we wandered down to Pigalle (hello sex shops, hello red-light district, hello tourists in line for Moulin Rouge) we said good-bye to the winding streets, the tall old buildings leaning into the Butte, the Christmas lights strung along the narrow alleys. I might go back tonight. So take that Beer Can Man. You can get beer on my jacket, but you can't make me not love Paris.

Everything sucks until you find out Wes Anderson is your neighbor.

So, this week was kind of insane -- my apartment had hot-water issues, I found out the French government is definitely not paying me until December, my phone broke, and the French educational powers that be made me want to cry on several occasions. I also convinced myself that I had a bat bite, because I had a bug bite that looked kind of weird and even though I have never seen a bat in my apartment, I decided that the holes in my walls are big enough to let them in. I would blame this on the fact that my house at Smith had actual bat problems and so I'm a little abnormally paranoid about these things, but really? Anxiety overload causes bizarre worries and fixations. Sometimes being a grown up sucks, and it really is strange that I'm figuring out how to be one in Paris, of all places.

Then I found out that Wes Anderson is practically my neighbor. According to a profile in the New Yorker, he lives in Montparnasse. Montparnasse is a few stops away on the metro from the 13th, aka right near where I live.

Wes Anderson is also my favorite director. Well, actually Agnes Varda probably is. And I bet she lives in Paris too. But my favorite movie is "The Royal Tenenbaums" and he directed it.

But really. My job stuff is driving me crazy right now, and I had an insanely stressful week, but Wes Anderson is pretty much my neighbor.

Sometimes Paris makes me feel like crying and then sometimes I find out my favorite director lives on the left bank, which is also where I live, which is also where Ernest Hemingway lived, which is also where Man Ray and Simone de Beauvoir are buried, and you know what? It kind of puts the other things in perspective in the most surreal, wonderful way that will only ever happen in Paris.

So I guess that's pretty cool. And I guess I'll be on the lookout for an awkward gangly blonde-haired man in custom-made suits and Rivers Cuomo glasses. Because it might be Wes Anderson!

Getting better and writing poems with L. Cohen

Disclaimer: The following contains references to my brief medical anomoly-hood this summer that some readers may find upsetting. Proceed with caution, dear readers -- however many of you there may be...

Today I swam for an hour, and I realized that I am getting much stronger after the excision of the Mini Cooper tumor this summer. Or maybe I'm just a faster swimmer because I'm not hauling around 7 extraneous pounds. It felt good, more than I can put into words. Getting better felt good, being better -- hell, just being okay -- defies description.

Also -- French pools sell swimsuits in vending machines, and require women to wear swim caps and men to wear speedos. Supposedly "hygiene" is the reason for this. I have my doubts.

Then my swimming friend and I stopped for a coffee at a small cafe across the street from the pool. It was the perfect antidote to swimming-induced aching (in a good way) limbs. Back at home in the 13th, I went grocery shopping, made dinner, watched "True Blood," drank tea and ate some pain au chocolat, wrote a poem, and listened to Leonard Cohen before bed. "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "So Long Marianne" and especially "Last Year's Man" sound different here. Better, if that's possible. Or maybe I'm just better.

I like Paris. It's been said but it bears repeating.

Noble Art and Cheap Beer with Ernest Hemingway

It's funny how teaching at one school I work at makes me totally drained and stressed out, and the other has just the opposite effect. I work at one school Thursday and Friday afternoons, and it's only been a week but I love it. Today I taught colors in one class and had my second class choose their "prenoms americains." We talked about English names they already knew last week, and as a result we now have a Brittany (because they all know who Britney Spears is), a Hannah (Hannah Montana), a Leia (like the princess), and I even agreed to let one of my students call herself Megan on the condition that if it gets too confusing she'll change it to something else. In the colors class, we discussed the difference between "blue" in French and English, and decided that in English it's just a longer "o" sound -- BLOOOOOO. They practiced saying this over and over again, as well as the "r" in orange. I was kind of stressed this morning, because I interviewed for a babysitting job and while I'm pretty sure I didn't get it, I had to to the Metro out to the wealthiest district in Paris at 8 a.m. - kind of a trek for me, as I live in Chinatown and everything - and suffice it to say that the person who interviewed me had a suit and an attitude to match the 16th. At 8 a.m. We have already established that I am not a morning person.

So the moment I stepped into the classroom and started going through "what's your name?" and playing games with the colors in English, it was an instantaneous mood upgrade/change of pace. Teaching can be really hard and hectic, but when it goes well, it's almost an antidote to those things. It's impossible to not be totally engaged.

I read Ernest Hemingway on the train to work and felt both precious and blatantly American. I like his take on Paris, in some respects, although most of the book can be summarized by the following:

"I met up with F. Scott Fitzgerald and we got totally wasted all day long. Writing is a noble art. Oysters. Whiskey. Wine. Cafe cremes. Zelda is such a bitch. Also. I hate punctuation. Shakespeare and Co. shout-out!"

Okay so that's not actually what it sounds like. But I'm definitely not grabbing a double whiskey every morning or deciding on the cheaper oysters at cafes. It's more like a quick coffee in my apartment before I go to work, and deciding on the cheapest everything everywhere. Our Parises are very different places.

I really loved some of his thoughts about Paris, though. Here are a few:

"He [FSF] was always trying to work. Each day he would try and fail. He laid the failure to Paris, the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is."

And in the restored edition's additional Paris sketches:

"The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of cafe cremes, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed."

EH is totally right about Paris. It is the best place I have ever been for writing. I don't think I've ever been anywhere else where it's completely acceptable to sit and write in a cafe all day if you buy one cafe creme. And the city is basically structured for wandering and concurrent pondering and existential musings. That may sound trite, but it's really true. Even in my quartier, there's a small park, and every time I go past it, there's always someone reading on a bench. The bigger parks are full of destination readers, who sit on benches and just read. And the Metro is always full of open books.

And I love that so much. It makes me feel infinitely more Parisian to have a book on the Metro, and it's one of my favorite things about Paris. People read here. Its history of writers is just kind of a nice addition to the foundation that makes the city itself so hospitable to people who want to make their mark on the world by making up stories and poems. It makes me think that maybe EH's and my Parises aren't as different as they could be.

So. That being said, I haven't really written much at all since I've gotten here. I should get on that.

I've been distracted by the fact that I live in Paris. And learning how to budget and cook for myself and clean my apartment all the time (it turns out that when you have a tiny space, it gets messy fast) and read on the Metro without missing my stop. Last night I had a cheap beer at a hipster bar in the 11th with a friend of a friend whose band opened for Yo La Tengo a while ago. He and his friend told me to be aware of the changes in Paris, that I am living in "a dying city" that will one day just be a museum full of bourgeois people who can afford to live in the center of Paris, and that the Montparnasse Cemetary is okay, but Pere Lachaise is where it's at. Jim Morrison is buried there, as is Picasso, and it's also where you go to smoke pot if you're a Parisian high school student.

They were impressed with the fact that I have a driver's license at home, because though they are both in their twenties, growing up in Paris meant that getting a license was too hard and unnecessary. When one of their cell phones died, and I said, "Oh, that's too bad," they both looked at me like I was crazy and said, "No! It is such a relief to not be able to be contacted."

Then I realized that I was having a beer with two French guys I had just met, one of whom is in a band that opened for Yo La Tengo, in a hipster bar in the 11th in Paris and it was more than a little surreal. Okay, so I really hope Paris doesn't become a museum, and I sometimes get a little panicky when my cell phone dies, and I'm following up that night out with a night in cleaning my apartment and mastering vegetarian cooking and going to work again tomorrow, but really? On the way home, I watched the right bank turn into the left, and it struck me that Paris is a city big enough to house Ernest Hemingway's whiskey-infused meanderings and a hipster bar in the 11th that serves cheap beer to a clientele of musicians and girls with long bangs and the most awkward French hipsters you will ever see. But I said it before and I'll say it again. I don't think they're really that different after all.

Also, I may not live in the trendy part of Paris, but Ernest Hemingway lived on the left bank too.

It's out of focus. But it just seemed appropriate. I spotted it near the Corvisart Metro on my way to get apartment insurance yesterday. "Poetry is an extreme sport."

Sharif don't like it.

I just returned from my first Parisian party, where I discovered three things:

1) You have never really heard "Rock the Casbah" until you have heard French people singing along to "Rock the Casbah."

2) You know you don't go to Smith anymore when you go to a party and men are just there, voluntarily, hanging out, the music is American rap when it isn't "Rock the Casbah," and although your command of the language isn't perfect, you're pretty sure no one has used the word "hegemony" in the last hour.

3) The Metro runs until 2 a.m., and even if you live in the sleepiest part of the 13th arrondissement, you won't be the only one coming home on the Metro late at night.

Good to know.

The End of Ikea

The French have it in for flat sheets. They like fitted sheets, and they're big fans of duvets and huge, fluffy square pillows, but flat sheets are like the annoying thing that comes in between you and your duvet. They hate them so much that at Ikea you can't buy them in any color besides white, which is kind of a drag if your fitted sheet is dark blue, and you bought two of them thinking one was a flat sheet, and you only brought one back to Ikea to exchange it for a flat sheet... Yeah, I now have mismatched flat and fitted sheets. What of it?

The good news is that I finally conquered Ikea. As in, I walked in, got the stuff I needed, scrutinized over prices to make sure I didn't get anything too expensive to be worth it or too cheap to be functional, and my apartment is now fitted out with a flat sheet, a new paper lantern over the naked bulb my bedroom came with, a mattress pad for my futon/sofa/bed (they call them clic-clacs here, way less complicated...), and a bedside lamp. In the interest of being a Responsible Adult, I set a spending limit for today's trip, and I did not exceed it. Now, this may not seem like a big thing. But I have a weakness for pretty things, and Ikea casts this glowy fluorescent spell on me that last time made me buy a gratuitous pair of slippers and picture frames that are too big for the photos I brought from home, so it's kind of an accomplishment that I didn't buy anything cute and stupid that I didn't really need.

Because really, this is Paris. Beautiful clothes can be had here at very cheap prices. If I'm going to blow my money on things I don't need - and I don't even really want to do that - they might as well be clothes. Or lavish meals. Or cafe cremes outside at cafe-brasseries.

I am never going back to Ikea. From here on out, it's flea markets and things I stumble upon in Paris. Scandinavian design has a special place in my heart, but I can get it at home.

Something I can't do at home is wander around Montmartre. And that is what I did after rearranging my furniture and making my Ikea spoils make my place feel more like home. I took the Metro to Montparnasse, then to Montmartre, where I meandered up to the Butte and my favorite view of Paris from Sacre-Coeur. I tried to find my neighborhood, but either you can't see it from there or my Paris geography is still iffy. Montmartre is always full of tourists, no matter what day it is or what else is going on or how many other places there are to be in Paris. But it's probably my favorite place in Paris, and I plan to go there as often as I can while I live here, no matter how many mimes try to talk to me or how many guys on the street try to sell me Eiffel Tower key chains or beer. After getting a look at the view, I decided to go back down the back of the hill rather than the (touristy) front, and as I wandered down the hill, I walked right through a movie set. I mean, a movie was being filmed on a street in Montmartre not far from the Montmartre Museum, and the actors were there as well as the camera crew, and they were just letting people walk through where they were filming. It was crazy. I guess I live in a city where movies get made now. It must be something that Parisians and New Yorkers are accustomed to, but it was really strange that the area they were shooting in wasn't blocked off at all.

I walked from Montmartre into the 17th arrondissement, where I found a wonderful bookstore at Place de Clichy. They had so many books, and I even found Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath translated into French. I was tempted to buy Mrs. Dalloway, because it's my favorite, but then I decided that if I read something in French, it should probably be French. I should be reading someone like Camus in French.

I also walked past the Montmartre cemetery. I'm not suddenly a cemetary fan, but it is also cool looking, although I think Montparnasse is really much prettier. Montmartre is darker and more gothic looking. There's something a little Buffy the Vampire Slayer about it, like you could picture an undead Jim Morrison wandering around if you went there late at night...

On the Metro home, I read the biography of Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth, and as I looked around the Metro car and thought of people I've spotted all over Paris, I thought that Diane Arbus would probably have a field day with Paris. There are so many weird looking people here. I keep reading Patricia Bosworth's descriptions of the people she photographed, and they're really sensational, as if Diane Arbus's subjects were really that unusual. And I think, definitely with the exception of the giants and dwarfs, they all sort of look like people I've seen on the Metro in Paris.

After my Montmartre walk, I came home, put on Duke Ellington, made a ham and brie scramble for dinner and realized that one of the best things about living in Paris is looking out your window at night and seeing all of the other windows around you lit up in the darkness, and knowing that each one is its own small world.

Paris in the Rain

Another beautiful night in Paris. It was raining, but this was more than made up for by Nutella and banana crepes on Rue Mouffetard, followed by kir (white wine + creme de cassis) and conversation at a sidewalk bar followed by a bottle of cheap wine in the ancient, fancy apartment one of my friends has been staying in with a quirky old lady while searching for housing. Everyone I know, through some protracted search or a bit of luck, has now found a place to live.

I caught the Metro back by the Bastille - only the top of it was bright enough to shine through the rain - and then back to my little corner of the world on Rue du Chevaleret. Life is good.

Sometimes being here is all about the simple pleasures, like reading on the Metro or having someone ask you for directions in French for the sixth time or the way the way the Bastille looks in the rain. Those are the things that make me happy I live here.

This is what it's like to live in Paris.

This is what it's like to live in Paris. I think I get it now. You live in your small apartment and cook simple, cheap staples for yourself, and then spend lots of money on delicious Mediterranean food and red wine when you go out with your friends. You live in a neighborhood that isn't touristy at all, because it doesn't have any tourist attractions in it, but it does have a lot of Parisians in it, of every imaginable appearance and age and ethnicity and religion and socioeconomic status, and sometimes you take the Metro into the more touristy or especially beautiful parts of the city to get felafel at that one place in the Marais, or to meet friends, or to go to Musee d'Orsay because it's your favorite, or just to wander around because you live in Paris, and no matter how much you wander through Paris, you will never see or understand or experience all of it. After your time in those places, you come back to your Metro stop and get off with everyone else who lives in your quartier, walk a few blocks from the Metro, type in your Digicode, enter your building's courtyard, type in your Digicode again, enter your building, and climb six flights of stairs back up to your small apartment to wash your face, hop in bed, and call it a night.

Because you live in Paris. And you don't have to do everything in Paris in one day. Because you know you can't.

Or maybe that's just me. I just got back to my apartment after the aforementioned dinner in the Marais, and I realized as I crossed the Seine in the Metro that this is how it's going to be. It's not too different from my life in Seattle, really, except that I got to stop and stare at the Bastille before catching my train back to the 13th.

God damn. I love it here.