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.