Trois mois

When we were sixteen and seventeen, my Xavierites and I dreamed of expatriate life. I longed for it. Even thought I might be meant for it. In those days, to me, it meant England or Italy. I'd been to both, albeit briefly, and liked them. Even so, as we wove our shimmering, fragile collective dream, something always nagged me: the anxiety, even the belief, that I would always be too scared to take the plunge. That I wouldn't have enough money, or wouldn't find something besides pure caprice to bring me there, or that people would talk me out of it and I would listen.

Of course, in the end, we wove a different web, casting out to different coordinates of the country. Of all of us, I'm the only one who ended up moving abroad. It turns out that reasons to become a foreigner don't find you; you must find reasons. There's a whole host of reasons people don't do this. It's hard. It's frustrating. It's expensive. You lose your identity; you regress; you reforge; you metamorphose into something quite different. No one warns you about how lonely it is, or how humiliating. And when folks back home ask you, how is Paris? is it wonderful? you don't want to spoil their lovely, shimmering candy-floss dreams. You say, yes, it's wonderul, it's amazing, it's everything I dreamed of. Because it is. It's also everything I feared, and many things I neither dreamed of nor feared.

Now, mes amis, it's official. I have been here for three months.

Or, myrrh et encens

Mes nounours, we are approaching Christmas. C’est-à-dire: the gold standard of kitsch, against which lesser kitschy holidays (and let’s face it, they’re all kitschy) must be unfavorably measured.

I love it. 

Before and after the mercifully brief spell of Catholic fervor that invaded me in my teens, Christmas had, and has, no taint of spiritual significance. This is a time to disregard good taste and return to the blithe freedom from self-restraint we had at five, when we insisted on wearing Superman capes and tiaras and sparkly shoes to the grocery store. One need deny oneself nothing, from the mawkish to the outlandish to the cloying.

Accordingly, my childhood love for Christmas was founded on my inexhaustible capacity for the saccharine. 

I mean that literally as well as figuratively. Even among Americans, who crave sweeter sweets and more of them than most of the world’s population, my current capacity for all things sucré rivals the average twelve-year-old’s—as those of you who have seen me eat an ice cream sundae can attest. Imagine, then, dear readers, how hungrily I ate up as a child every syrupy morsel of the American Holiday Season™: those silly polar bear ads, the stop-motion animation atrocities and the holiday music on 99.9 FM that started just after Thanksgiving. And—of course!—the sweets, especially the endless cookies and fudge and hot chocolate we made at home. I was mad, mad for it all.

Of course, even my starry eyes eventually opened, and even the girl who once sucked happily on sugar cubes must someday close the lid of that C&H box. 

But when Amy suggested we go to a Christmas market, that little Princess Superman within me awoke with a cry of joy. A Christmas market! I imagined it as the Platonic ideal of Christmas: quaint kitsch, carols, traditional food and hot drinks, delicate lights and ornaments, pines and pitched rooftops frosted with snow like unblemished, delicate cakes. In short, the stuff of European Christmases promised to me by endless carols and storybooks. 

Thus, on Saturday, we found ourselves shuttling along on a TGV toward Strasbourg, chattering in broken, enthusiastic French, in hopes of discovering our fairytale Christmas.

Fair warning: this is a long post. Cuddle up with a cup of something warm and stay a while.

La neige

Although I am suffering from sickness and foggy head, in part because of the cold my thin lizardish Arizona blood was just not designed to take...

I can't believe. It is snowing. In Paris.

Having spent my childhood and adolescence in the Southwest and my young adulthood in California, I find snow startling. Like those falling leaves, snow was something that happened to storybook children. I remember one book in particular, beautifully illustrated in watercolor, in which a child made snow angels in a virgin blanket of snow imbued with every color imaginable. That's what I want, I thought. I want a December like that.

A week ago, I stopped on a whim at the patisserie just before the steps of Cardinal Lemoine, the Métro stop closest to school, and bought myself a wedge of pastry with custard filling. On the surface of the pastry was a thin layer of coarse, matte, opaque sugar, grains as big as peppercorns, so light a breath could scatter them. The pastry was divine, but the sugar was my favorite part. Paying no attention to the judgmental French people on the platform as I waited for my train, I licked my finger, picked up a few grains, and dissolved them one by one on my tongue.

Lo and behold, when I emerged from Convention, my stop, I found soft little grains falling from the sky. No, I thought. This is impossible.

But yes: snow the exact color and texture of my sugar was beginning to freckle my black wool coat. Granules that resisted my warmth and perched on my hands and scarf, allowing me to dart out my tongue furtively and feel them crumble, cool, in my mouth.

Today it snowed again. I could see it falling in the courtyard. When we were released from class, as Emily and I trudged back, well-wrapped, to Cardinal Lemoine, I made her stop and look up. An eddy of weightless snowflakes circled a yellow streetlight, little live insects of precipitation. She seemed amused at my enchantment. After all, she's lived in several places where it snows--a lot. To her, snow is ordinary.

And after all, it wasn't very much snow. The only surfaces where it gathered unmelted were the windshields of cars and a few untrodden corners of sidewalks.

But on my way back from choir tonight, the French girl who also takes line 12 and with whom I chat on the commute told me that I was witnessing something very special. Snow here, she tells me, is a very rare occurrence.

Perhaps my wonder is not so extraordinary.

My delectable capons, I know I am supposed to be writing about Paris. I've included the names of my Métro stops in order to lend the post a Parisian flavor. But in the end, I just longed to share my desert native's enchantment with Magic Sky Sugar.

My Favorite Things

So much of the joy of living somewhere consists of the small things. So small we never could have predicted them. Yet they're the things we miss the most when we leave a place.

When I moved to San Francisco, the first thing I missed was Southwestern food. With a father from Roswell, New Mexico, the state with the hottest Mexican food I've ever tasted, I was raised from toddlerhood to love the kind of food that would require a stomach transplant for a Midwesterner. I learned to replace it to some degree with Thai food, but my first request every time I go home is always to go to our family's longtime favorite hole-in-the-wall for a good Sonoran enchilada. For those of you who have not had the pleasure: tortillas stacked like pancakes, layered with cheese and green onion, covered in hot red chili sauce and topped with a fried egg. Its essence is beyond description.

When I moved to Palo Alto, I missed the homeless fights on line 38 of the MUNI, ordering Thai at 2 am, good karaoke, drinking as much as I wanted without worrying about driving home, and the pleasure of flâner, which the city introduced me to for the first time. One stumbles upon things in San Francisco; one discovers. And now that I'm in Paris, where Neutral reigns queen, I miss the weird and fearless fashion.

And of course, I miss now the luxury of making business calls, reading bills, ordering food and asking for directions in my native language. I have dreams sometimes in which I understand every word that is said around me, in which I don't have to dredge up the word for, and the word for, and the equivalent phrase for, and and and. Yet it's not bewildering anymore, not in the way it was, and the dreams seem part of a world that has largely vanished. Being foreign is part of my life now. I live comfortably with frustration; I've developed that blend of humility and patience that acts as its antibody.

Although at two months in I feel it entirely possible and desirable, I'm ultimately too restless, I think, to stay in Paris forever. So I wonder what I'll miss.

Here are some guesses.

N'importe quoi

I was reflecting today on narrative: that is, the way we make sense of our lives through organizing central filaments, selecting some details and rejecting others as superfluous.

One could even call this process inevitable. Len, my ex-roommate, who does research in neuropsychology, tells me that creating narrative is an indispensable part of human consciousness. He also points out that even in the world of science, which holds objectivity as a central goal, it's not the data that gets attention and notoriety: it's the researchers who can create the most compelling story to fit that data.

This tendency is even more pronounced in writers. Just as growing up in a language forms our sense of hearing (something I learned recently in my French linguistics class), so growing up with my nose in books and notebooks shaped the way I put together my experiences.

I can't help making stories.

But I just spent several hours hunched over dense academic treatises in French, and so I'm inclined today to indulge my--and your--lighter side with a few bits of miscellany. Less stories than vignettes.

In order to take this even less seriously, I have labeled the sections in Carrollian fashion.

Proust Questionnaire: Or, Shameless Navel Gazing

Mes petits, today marks one week before my twenty-fourth birthday.


Instead of telling you about Paris, I'll hijack my own space for some reflection on Identity. Mostly mine. But there will be an opportunity for audience participation.


If you're in the mood to gaze at some navel (and for two German compound nouns in one post--what a deal!), on y va.

Being, In Paris

There's a reason for the comma.

It's all well and good to be a tourist in one's adopted home. There's a courtship ritual. I'm glad I got to have so many fantastic dates.

Now, Paris and I are in a relationship. And as such things go, we're starting to settle down.

I've got my permanent Métro pass. I no longer travel: I commute.

My weeks are programmed. I have activities (i.e. my mémoire, which requires me to read a lot of Proust and academic research in very dense French), classes (all in French, bien sûr), and bureaucratic activities that require a taxing level of my new language, using jargon I have to learn as I go along.

But it is structure, ultimately, that allows us to flourish. Academic, bureaucratic, even culinary (my friends and I made cookies last week, which required the mastery of unfamiliar verbs): practice makes--well, if not perfection, at least improved proficiency.

My former task was Being, in Paris. Now, I am being in Paris.

In a way, it's exactly what I was hoping for. I know my boulanger and my épicier; they recognize me on the street and say bonjour. So does the security guard on my block. I'm a staple of the neighborhood: a cog in the wheel of my petit quartier within the 15e.

I can even make a bit of small talk now.

But the principle remains: the more competent one is in reality, the less competent one feels. The ignorant feel invincible with a phrasebook; the scholar feels dreadfully unequipped with the Petit Robert in hand.

My new teacher--actually, my now belovèd camarade de classe--impresses upon me that this is normal. She speaks what sounds to me like beautiful, nearly impeccable idiomatic French, and she tells me that she still apologizes to native speakers. 

I used to tell my students constantly that to learn a language is to learn a way of thinking. Now it's time for me to follow my own advice.

And to try, as much as I can, to get used to--defying the urge to be in Paris--simply Being: In Paris. 

On the upside, I've accomplished mountains of Novel.

Memento Mori

Mes petits vivants, this is a long post with diverse offerings. But the first and longest leg of the journey takes place in the catacombs.

I offer you the same warning the signposts outside the catacombs offer visitors. Those of you with weak hearts or stomachs may be upset by what's ahead. For the rest of you with a taste for the morbid--greetings, brothers and sisters!--welcome to L'Empire de la Mort: the Catacombs of Paris.

À la recherche de Marcel Proust

Yes, petits, I have done it. That most misguided form of literary worship, the pilgrimage. 

We forget sometimes that writers' experiences are not in themselves unusual; it's the prowess, the vitality with which they describe the ordinary that consecrates their particular experience as notable. The reality will undoubtedly be a letdown: a narrowing to concrete form what was before a beautiful amorphous visualization, imbued with our experiences, and thus the emotions and associations by which we connected to that author in the first place. For me, volumes II-IV of Proust will always be interwoven with where and when I read them for the first time: in Victoria and Vancouver, Canada, at age seventeen, to the soundtrack of an Elly Ameling album of Schubert lieder I had uploaded from a CD I borrowed from the library. Like Proust's narrator, who falls in love with Gilberte the moment he sees her among the blooming hawthorns in the garden at her family's estate, I fell in love with not only Proust's work but the milieu in which I encountered it.

But how could I be within an hour and a half of Combray and not see it?

So I  bought my ticket at the SNCF boutique and set off Saturday for my pilgrimage. I present the results, narrated with pictorial assistance.

Mon ancien quartier, le 6ème

As promised, my pictures from playing tourist on my last day living in the 6ème. I'm of the opinion that a person can see better (read: professional) pictures of major monuments and attractions by doing a good ol' fashioned Google image search. I've included some links to get you started.

Instead, I prefer to show pictures that show you a perspective, that capture a particular instant or help one occupy better a described space (the occasion for my next picture post). So here's my 6ème; enjoy.

Des Pensées Academiques

This is the first of several posts for tonight. I've been busy, but the fruits of my exploration are ripe for internet harvest. My blog is one of feast and famine, mes petits. 

First: the results of my placement test, and the events that followed. The whole thing was rather a shock to my system, and a contributing factor to the latest delay.

With my kindergarten-level street French and very short career of study, I was pretty confident of what to expect. I certainly didn't expect to be at absolute débutant level, nor were the upper reaches of avancé orsupérieur in my line of sight, but I was rather worried about whether I would place in elementaire or intermédiare. You see, without going into too much depth, one's niveau affects what kind of classes one can take. I had signed up for civilization lectures open to intermédiare students, hoping that I wouldn't score too low to take them.

On Monday, shortly after I posted, I reported to the secretariat to claim my classes. When the man who was handing out the class assignment cards and inscription sheets slid over mine with the word supérieur, I think I stared at it for about a month. Surely, I thought, they must have made a terrible mistake.

But of course, I'm human. So as I strolled down Boulevard Saint-Michel, giggling now and then like a crazy person, it began to feel right. I adjusted my self-image from someone with atrocious French to someone with atrocious spoken French. 

Long story short: I went in to change classes, took a three-hour-long essay test, and was admitted into the French literature Masters preparatory program. It's very exciting.

Still--it doesn't do to get too cocky. After writing an eight page essay in French deconstructing the use of tense and leitmotif in Proust, Colette and Duras, I left the building and walked to an Orange store to try to sort out a problem with my iPhone (which is currently functioning as a delightful iPod Touch rather than a proper phone), where I struggled with relatively simple sentences like: "The 3G reception seems to be working, but I can't make or receive calls." And when employees at several Orange boutiques told me to call the help line, and I asked how I could call a help line when the whole problem is that I'm unable to make any calls, I prayed I sounded indignant and not confused.

Well, learning a language is a process. So is French bureaucracy. With work, I hope to become fluent in both.

Truancy

I have relocated to the 15th; it is quiet and lovely--and remote.

As promised, I did take many pictures. Give me a little while to upload and sort through them. Only the best for you, coucous.

Meanwhile, I have received my iPhone. It took a lot of running around in digital circles on the French-only website (acknowledged even by the employees as onerous), and two trips to the Orange store armed only with my pathetic French, but it's finally up and running.

O, mes choux, I am a Believer.

Loving details soon. About France, I mean: not about the iPhone. Listening to someone rave about a new gadget has all the charm of listening to a new mother talking about Baby's First Everything. Or "cute" stories about someone's cat.

Meanwhile, off I go to the Sorbonne to get my class information. While I'm in the neighborhood, I will probably wander around in the neighborhood I do, as predicted, miss terribly.

À toute à l'heure. Je vous promets.

Moving On

The last week has been at once a time of settling and upheaval. I present, once again, some findings.

As promised.

I've already filled half a notebook with my daily activities and circuitous reflections, which are deadly dull to anyone but oneself. Alors, I shall concentrate for you my first week in Paris.

Here in Paris

And much is happening. I promise, mes petits choux-choux, that I will post an unconscionably long dissertation in the next couple of days. I've kept faithful notes on the good, the bad and the ugly. It's been overwhelming, glorious, and très compliqué. 

To immerse oneself in a language in which one is barely proficient requires a great capacity for humility, frustration and constant mental effort. But it's been surprisingly good for me. I feel properly cleansed of hubris. I get to reinvent myself, to sketch a new self. Unfortunately, I must currently do so with crayons.

À très bientôt, mes amis.

Au Revoir, Les États Unis

My last night stateside. Dinner with my parents. Gorged on tamales, chili relleno, rice, beans, green chili. Collectively we drank two bottles of California wine: both Zinfandels, the quintessential American grape.

I've been sating, in my last couple of weeks here, a preemptive craving for Americana.

Ultimately, it's impossible to divine what one will miss. We can take our best guess. Mine? Hatch chili (just in season this glorious month, for those of you unhappily not situated in the American southwest), my darlings (of which I am already missing my Bay Area contingent sorely), fluency - even modest expertise, if I'm generous to myself - in the language.

But it's said that once we are abroad, we discover our national identity and where we fit in. And in my last few days, after a long stint of Francomania, I have switched to steeping myself in my own culture. America, with all of its ugliness and frankness and friendliness, its overbearing Christianity and its paternalism. And most of all, its passion: monstrous, indomitable, dogged, gorgeous. Guess I'll be asked to answer for it.

In homelier thoughts:

I leave tomorrow morning - not dreadfully early - and arrive at 6:40 am at CDG on the 14th. I have an abysmally long list of things to get done once I get there (most of them in French, which is terrifying) but I have a feeling I'll spend most of the day trying not to sleep - halfway through which I'll succumb to my body.

Keep up on the grèves over the raised retirement age in the news. I'll be reporting during the next couple of weeks on the theater.

D'abord

Two weeks from departure date. I begin this blog, gentle readers, with no promises and no stated objective. Follow me, if you like, to Paris: as to where we end up, voyons.