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.