Accouche!

Coucou mes lecteurs!

My recent purchase of a used book full of day trips in the outskirts of Paris has proved a rich source of escapades, none of which I have yet shared with you. Hundreds of pictures document these excursions, as well as sojourns closer to home and, most recently, a weekend trip to Bordeaux. I even thought of you, dear readers, as I sketched in my mental notes and framed my photographs.

As I contemplate the task ahead, I am reminded of an expression in French: Alors, t'accouches! Roughly the equivalent of "spit it out," it literally tells the listener to give birth.

Which in turn reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with my thesis advisor. A beautiful, passionate Frenchwoman with whom my classmates and I all have devastating crushes, she is always telling us ne vous inquiétez pas, don't worry. She had just finished forbidding me to worry (again) a few weeks ago, when I'd only drafted a page, but I wanted to assure her quand même that I'd done plenty of research, that I just hadn't yet gotten the chance to transform what I'd gathered into written pages.

C'est comme si j'étais enceinte (It's as if I were pregnant), I tried to explain. In marked contrast to our first dogged communications, we can now converse fluently and spontaneously, which leads to debates about the feminization of French métiers and the etymological evolution of spelling. But now and then I still make weird mistakes, and the flicker of confusion in her brow told me she suspected this was one of those times.

Enceinte? she repeated. Vous ne voulez pas dire... enceinte (You don't mean, pregnant)? She made a hand motion to indicate the shape of a pregnant belly.

Si, I insisted. Je me suis remplie de pensées, et maintenant il ne faut qu'accoucher (I've filled myself with thoughts, and now I just need to give birth).

Ah, je comprends, she laughed. And after I sent her several pages with translations four days later, she remarked that I'd fulfilled my promise.

Today I found out that Proust used the same metaphor when discussing his novel. A metaphor that's good enough for Proust is certainly good enough for me.

So I promise to you, mes tulipes, very soon, an accouchement. The labor will be intensive, but I hope the results will be worth all of our trouble.

Meanwhile, here are a few miscellanous Paris pictures to tide you over, with flighty, springtime-appropriate commentary, possessing neither continuity nor cohesion.

Dans le jardin de ta pensée

Mes lapins, it is back to school with me. Having some structure again spurs me, in general, to get more done. So here I am, presenting some findings.

Several of you suggested the Jardin du Luxembourg. This is for all of you, but surtout for Katie, who suggested it first.

To live an experience in order to recount it later is to don a pair of mental bifocals. On one hand, you focus on your own sensations, your own present experience, your own habits, in interpreting the world around you. On the other, you understand that you see that others may see.

Remember we are flânant, not speed-walking. So be prepared to take your time.

Follow me.

The City of Lights

Paris is not entirely clean of Christmas, even now at the cusp of the second week of February. A full month after Epiphany, the traditional galettes des rois, a flaky round pastry filled with a crumbly marzipan, still peek at onlookers from patisserie windows. Just yesterday, while strolling through the back streets of the 15e, I spotted a tiny nativity scene still installed, a blithe seasonal anachronism, in the shop window of a confiserie.

But little by little, they have mostly disappeared. I’ll tell you what I loved the most—and now miss the most. The lights.

Here's an impressionistic, woefully incomplete sample.

A lick and a promise

When I was younger and still living in my parents' house, my mother would refer to surface cleaning, the kind you did when you were either too busy or too lazy to break out the heavy duty cleaning products and roll up your sleeves, as "a lick and a promise."

This, mes lapins, is a lick and a promise. I have let you go too long without a peep, and want to let you know I'm still here, still Paris-ing, and have not forgotten you. A preponderance of photographs begs - begs, I tell you! - to be uploaded and shared, with copious commentary.

A hint of what lies in your reading future, among other assorted sweetmeats: my family's visit, a little of Germany, Paris during the holidays, and some reflections on the rentrée and finals season.

Now I leave you, to prepare myself something hot - milk with brandy and honey, perhaps, which is one of my favorite treats when I have a cold - and sleep. Tomorrow is my last final, and then I will have no excuse but to break out the iPhoto, roll up my sleeves, and begin to make up for lost time.

Bisous to all. A bientôt. I promise.

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.

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.

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.