After watching Le Chef: contre-attaque with Cyrille Lignac on M6 tonight, a show which is all about slowing down and reclaiming France’s gastronomic heritage in a world of plats tout-faits (pre-made meals) and microwavable everything, I realized that some of the advances in the last century that have allowed us to accelerate life to its dizzying modern pace haven’t all been the Heaven-sent blessings they were cracked up to be. Well, that and the fact that the quick dinner I grabbed was served to me by a conveyor belt in meticulous and efficient Japanese style. We do eat too quickly and we don’t really take any joy in preparing our food these days, it’s true, and I’d love to get back to the days when that was possible. Hell, when it comes to food preparation here in France, I’d settle for an oven!
On a similar but non-food-related note, I think I’ve also been settling for the insipid, rapidly digestable, refined carbohydrates of literature lately which is nothing like the slow readings I enjoy putting on my mental back burners to stew and simmer for hours, adding the spices I find during my daily routine for flavor. Cramming all these books down my gullet at such breakneck speed just to get through them only ensures I end up with the flimsiest understanding of the basic plot. The idea of broadening my horizons through slowly peeling back the many layers of meaning just brings tears to my eyes and is fairly laughable given my impending deadlines.
Why did I opt for an accelerated master’s again? Why did I opt for an accelerated life in general? Is there something so wrong with doing things slowly and well? Blergh, I don’t have time to think about it. I need to take a power nap, get up early, drink some instant coffee, sprint to class, and speed-read all day tomorrow. At least darting around from one task to the next like a hummingbird has to burn lots of calories, right?
So this is it: the end of winter vacation. Tomorrow begins the spring (and final) semester of my master’s degree with a bucket of ice cold reality being poured over us in the form of last semester’s grades in the morning. I should have been more academically productive with my time over break, but life got in the way. I’m not sorry, it just means I’ve got more reading to do this semester; c’est la vie. It might have been unproductive, but it certainly was fun! I got to see most of my friends back in the States, visit with my family, spend loads of time with Donna (and her cute friend with the curly hair), finally really talk to and befriend krazy Kate Billingsley, and to actually enjoy Paris for a week without the same feeling of the Sword of Damacles (or Paoli as the case may be) hanging over my head.
I don’t have anything particularly deep to say tonight, so I’ll keep this brief, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do when June rolls around, and I’m sort of at a loss. Do I move to Boston to be near my family and friends on the East Coast? Do I move to NYC and try my hand in the Paris of the West now that I’ve become accustomed to life in the big city and want to keep it going? Do I move to California in preparation for a Ph.D. program at Berkeley? Maybe I just move back to Burlington where you can rent a fantastic apartment at unreasonably low prices. Or should I go really crazy and move to Puerto Rico so I can work on my Spanish in an organic way?
More importantly than where I move, what will I do when I get there? With the economy on shaky foundations that have been ravaged by financial earthquakes and which could be toppled by future aftershocks, what will I do with my M.A. French? Naturally I could teach at a private school or perhaps as an assistant or adjunct professor, but will that provide sufficient remuneration? No, probably not, but it’s still an option. Does anybody have any suggestions as to go about finding a good school to teach at? If I skip the teaching, do I go back to hospital administration which pays well and which I know fairly well, but which gives tedium new and more Hellish meaning? These decisions are not easy, my friends, and applying for jobs is not precisely what I wanted to do while working on my thesis. Le ugh.
Maybe I should just stay here in Paris. Sure it’s expensive and far away from home, but it’s still pretty great! Naw. After all my friends head back to the US or to whatever new and exotic place they might be going, Paris might be a pretty boring place. Besides, I miss my friends back home and as most of them are young professionals in their 20′s just starting out, they probably won’t be taking too many European vacations to come visit me. Add to that aging grandparents and it seems like living in North America might be a better option. That is, of course, assuming a high paying job doesn’t fall in my lap. If that happens, all bets are off and Paris could easily become chez moi.
Life would be boring if it were straightforward, right?
Oh! Before I forget, I wanted to mention Le lustre noir (The Black Chandelier) which is a lesser known club that Donna and I got to visit over the weekend in the Third. It’s kind of a neat little place that had German punk pop blaring when we got there, and whose eclectic East meets West decor, Woody Allen movies playing from plasma TV’s, and good selection of wine and pizza make it a must see for a low-key evening on the town with friends. I hear they even serve spaghetti dinners with sauce and garlic bread faits maison (homemade sauce) on Saturdays. It’s worth checking out if you can get past the doorman!
The French, people say, are pessimistic. Robin Williams gave an excellent example of the stereotypical attitude in his “Live on Broadway” performance where he offered a cigarette to a baby saying “Life ees shit! Get to know zees now!” I wouldn’t say this is entirely accurate as there are a good number of fairly upbeat people here, but I would say, in my experience, this is definitely a more glass half-empty country than not. After studying some of the great playwrights of the 20th century, it’s really small wonder, as one of the large movements during and after World War II was existentialism. After Nietzsche proclaimed that “God [was] dead,” thus removing all inherent meaning from the universe, it was really all downhill from there. Suddenly, people are writing plays about how life is meaningless, and that there is no such thing as fate. Actually, existentialism, at least as Sartre sees it, very much agrees with my own personal internal locust of control way of viewing the world (i.e. we make our own destinies, there is no path laid out for us), but, after studying how Beckett went a step further and pointed out that, if God is dead, there is no afterlife, and therefore we work our asses off just to die, thus rendering our efforts absurd, well, that really threw a wrench into the works for me. I’ll level with you and say that I’m agnostic, so I wasn’t convinced there was a pearly gate waiting for me (or people in red pajamas ready to poke me with pitchforks), but the idea that all we do is absurd, that “ce n’est pas la peine” (it’s not worth it) to do, well, anything, is not helping me to motivate myself academically. When you throw in the fact that I’m really not sure this master’s degree is going to get me anywhere career-wise without either continuing on to a Ph.D. or getting another master’s in something else, “what’s the point?” seems to be the question constantly on my mind.
I guess, until taking “Le retour du tragique” this semester, I had known what existentialism was, but never really felt its message was relevant to my life. Up until now, I had the same relationship with its philosophy as I did with the fact that World War I ended in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles: I could define what it was, it was good fun to talk about at parties, and French people dug it The end. Now that I have a more intimate understanding, I feel almost like I’ve been infected with a virus; every time I do something I find myself asking, “why? What’s the point? What meaningful impact could this possibly have?” Friends, this is not good when the workload is nearing its peak and I have loads of papers and presentations to write before finals week hits in a month.
So what can I do? For my own sanity, I think that I’m going to say Beckett took things a little too far. Although I can appreciate his efforts, I don’t think I buy the philosophy his plays are trying to sell. I agree that there is no inherent meaning to things, and that good and bad are cultural constructs which differ all over the world. Universal suffrage, equal rights for all people, gay marriage, and abortion are all topics on which I have very strong opinions, but I don’t think there is anyway to say that I am right, that somewhere in some giant illuminated cosmic book there is a list of all that is right and wrong. I do, however, believe that morality evolves in such a way among all cultures to protect the race and ensure its survival, which I think is a good base for any absolute moral code. I guess you could say I base my values on a combination of Hammurabi’s Code (“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”) or, if you’d prefer, the prettier version of The Golden Rule (“Do unto others” and so forth) and say that the purpose of life is the continued survival of humanity (i.e. not just the people themselves, but the accumulated achievements of our many civilizations throughout the ages), but beyond that, it’s sort of up in the air. Does that mean I’m wandering blindly in the dark? No–so all you overenthusiastic people with your pamphlets, your perfect double Windsor knots, and your uncannily persistent smiling can just stay at home–but it does permit me to see the world through other people’s eyes sometimes and to re-examine my own values without any notion that doing so is somehow going against a divine will. Of course, while I think this is ultimately a good thing, I’m thinking it might be more useful to ponder the nature of morality say on December 19th after my finals while I’m flying back home. What better place to ponder the universe than high above the clouds? And hey, if I see Saint Peter or angels walking around, I’ll have my answer, right? That, and about 10,000 “Our Fathers” to say upon landing.
If nothing else, I guess this program has got me thinking, so that’s a plus. I’m not quite sure, assuming these chain-smoking moody philosophers were right, what to say gives most meaning to life, but I know it’s there. For me, there is a purpose to life, even though I’m not entirely sure I have distilled it sufficiently in my head to write down, nor do I have the audacity to think I’ve figured out the universe at 25. On a side note, is it weird that I get visions of a venerable Native American woman next to a fire talking about earth spirits while drawing ancient symbols in the air with her sage brush as I write about the meaning of life? I thought I was only 1/8 Native American. Odd. Maybe the world really is a flat disk carried on the back of a turtle, standing on a turtle, standing on a turtle, and so forth, all the way down.
Sometimes I take life for granted. I mean, here I am, living in Paris with a view of three famous French monuments visible from my small but well placed apartment, and I actually have the gall to complain about life on this blog. As one of the 25% or so of Americans with higher education who has always lived a comfortable life and who is now enrolled in a graduate program in one of the most desirable locales in the world, I should pretty much always be happy, right? I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I think it is important to count your blessings sometimes and to do so publically if you say, oh I don’t know, write a blog.
Today started out much the way most Saturdays do for me in France. I slept in, took a few hours to get ready to go face the outside world (before my face sets back into place after waking up, I keep both padlocks tightly fastened), and debated doing work while inevitably choosing to do everything but. Earlier in the week, thanks to my combined shrinking and lack of foresight packing, I had decided to go on a quest for a new coat for fall, and Whitney, in a similar predicament (we both have coats, just not the one that matches the particular waterproof, wind-resistant, but not too hot prerequisites of a Parisian autumn), was to accompany me today after her visit to the Musée d’Orsay. Naturally, having the steel trap mind that I do for details (read: I’m lost with out my crackberry and my crackberry is lost without American CDMA towers), I went to the wrong metro stop, thinking Whitney’s trip had been to the Louvre (which is literally steps from the Musée d’Orsay, but having the somewhat un-smart phone that I have here and my less than stellar command of geography, I didn’t realize that), and ended up caught in the rain trying to track down her and Allie to have coffee with them before our shopping spree. Seriously, their directions were perfect, but as someone who has previously gotten lost on the way from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower, it took me the better part of them getting through lunch to find Café Le Bizuth on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Thank God I wasn’t born a homing pigeon.
After running into Citali very unexpetedly on the street, and doing one of those double take “I-think-I-recognize-you-but-it’s-Paris-so-I-couldn’t-possibly- know-you-oh-wait-I-do!” moments, I made it to the wonderfully heated café (my apartment, with it’s “ambient heat” which consists of somewhat warm pipes that keep the dishes in my cupboard toasty but do little for me, is often pretty nippy) where the self-professed number one fan of my blog (who knew?) and Whitney were wolfing down something that looked like a delicious cross between a pizza and a quesadilla. Full on quiche lorraine from lunch, I just had a couple café au laits, but we all had a good conversation. We spent some of the time complaining about life in France and about how getting setup here is worse than learning how to perform your own root canals at home, but Allie brought up a good point: while things are tough now, after the dust settles, after we really get into a routine and our days of registering for classes, getting forms in triplicate for the carte de séjour, and inconveniently timed convocations médicales (I STILL have no idea why they don’t have you do your health screening Stateside like China did, but that could be just me), we’ll realize that we’re in Paris, that we’re living in the City of Lights, eating French pastries, actually listening to French accordeonists play as we sip coffee brought to us by sometimes rude French waiters at a sidewalk café overlooking Notre Dame. We really should keep in mind that some people would literally kill to be in our shoes so life can’t be that bad.
Le Grand palais sur les Champs Élysées
After passing through H&M and Zara only to make my only purchase of the day at Starbucks, on my walk home I realized that things were actually pretty good here. I don’t know if it was the crisp autumn air or the good company, but today, somewhere between Place de la Concorde and l’Arc de Triomphe, I realized that despite all the bullshit, despite all the things I miss about the U.S., and despite the exorbitant cost of living here, I’m actually in Paris. When I get really pissed off by the effort it takes to get things done here, when I think I could be furthering my career and earning money back in the US and berate myself for choosing the dream over the sensible choice, I just look out my window or take a walk and I realize that it’s all OK. Il vaut la peine (it’s worth it) because, for once in a life of rather sensible choices, I’m actually living (and probably longer as happiness is much better for your health than money statistically). I’m purposefully making the “stupid” decision so I can be happy and like my grandmother always tells me with her iron, bone-crushing grip on my forearm, once you’ve got something in your head, once you’ve had a genuine life experience from which you’ve learned in a way no number of books, classes, or National Geographic documentaries can teach you, those memories are yours and no one can take them from you. No matter what happens after France, even if I end up working at McDonald’s (not my goal, but life is unpredictable), I will have been one of the very few people lucky enough to have lived a dream. For that, I am very thankful, and for that, I guess I can deal with a little hassle.
Moving to a foreign country is always a little tricky. Even though I’ve studied the French language and French culture since 8th grade, there’s still no way to be completely prepared when you move abroad. As much of a pain as it was first getting setup here, I do feel as though Paris really suits me. Granted, it would suit me better if I had a larger income than a grad student (more on that later), but I think I’m making real strides in integrating into the local fabric (you didn’t think the title of this post referred to calculus, did you?).
First and foremost, I finally met Guillaume in person Thursday night. He and I have been penpals for years and years, but we’d never actually met face to face before this week. I’m really glad we did, because he’s even more interesting and dynamic in real life (i.e. he’s a real person, who knew?). We met at the café at 80 boulevard Hausseman (which is cute, but expensive) after he finished work at i-TELE (a TV station where he works as an anchor’s assistant) in one of those moments where you look at someone, you look again, and then say, “Guillaume?” It was odd because he looks pretty much exactly like pictures I’ve seen, but it still took a second to recognize him. Anyway, we got a table, he ordered a Perrier (though in some sort of special way which meant I had absolutely no idea what was going on) and I went with my standard café au lait which I absolutely love (more so when I’m not wearing it). I was self-concious of my French at first because, let’s face it, being French his was great, and being one of my friends, he knows his grammar inside and out, so I knew he wouldn’t miss any mistakes. Of course, after the first few awkward minutes, I realized that I really did know him well, even though we’d never met before, and the conversation became more natural. He’s a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders, though he’s in the same place I was at 22: he’s trying to figure out how he can make the life he has now into the one he aspires to have. Good luck, Guillaume, that’s a tricky one.
After an hour or so of French, we started talking about English, a topic which fascinates him (he’s sort of me on the other side of the mirror). He had always told me he spoke English with an American accent, but I had my doubts. I mean, I REALLY did. Not that I didn’t believe that he tried to speak English with an American accent, but in China, people that said they spoke with one accent or another invariably spoke with just a Chinese accent. The end. There’s no way you could construe their English as being from one region or another of the anglophone world. But, to my great surprise, I was totally wrong about Guillaume. After showing him what people sounded like in the South and the Midwest (he was curious, and I like doing accents, so it worked out well, though I must admit, it’s a little uncomfortable talking like a cowboy in English in a Parisian café), we actually started speaking English. And wow. Just, wow. His accent isn’t flawless and he sometimes Frenchifies his grammar, but when he said “daughter” with the correct emphasis, the correct vowel sounds, and the rhotic ‘r’ in it’s full glory, I was astounded. Good Lord, he DID speak with an accent that was clearly American! Evidently, they teach a sort of neutral version of English here (what on Earth would that sound like?), but he learned how to pronounce things from watching American television and listening to American music. Evidently, despite the disdain that the French supposedly feel for America, some of them really like they way we work. Actually, if you look at all the anglicismes here, all the culture, all the brands of clothing and the marketing techniques which basically say “wear these jeans to be as cool as Americans,” we can’t be all bad in the US. Most French people aren’t anymore prejudiced than we are toward them on the other side of the pond, and like we hold their culture and products (e.g. wine, chocolate, cheese, etc.) in a certain esteem, the feeling is evidently more mutual than I realized.
Anyway, it was a real pleasure meeting Guillaume, and after hours of chatting, we decided we should meet up again really soon. Walking home from our rendez-vous I realized that I actually really like the French because they are way nicer than people ever give them credit for. Maybe it’s because I’m from New England where people can be downright cold and mean (well, at least it can seem that way), but so far I’ve only met decent people here. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, who knows?
One that is clear is that real integration is possible. People on the street evidently think I’m French because I get stopped all the time by people looking for directions. “This line stops at the Bastille, right?” “Do you know where avenue Charles de Gaulle is?” “Can I take the RER to Orly from here?” If these people were tourists, that would make sense, but in every case, they’ve been French! How odd. While I’m not so deluded (which I used to spell “diluted” because I always thought it meant watering down your own bullshit until it was clear enough that you could almost believe the lie you were trying to tell yourself) as to believe that I’ve somehow magically mastered the mysteries of France in three weeks, after my interview yesterday, I at least know it’s possible.
You see, I met a woman named Melanie yesterday who runs the English department at a polytechnic school here in Paris. As it turns out, she’s also from Vermont (Newport) too and is very likeable. Actually, it’s a really good thing I took Eddie to Québec just before coming here, because I had refamiliarized myself with the geography of that part of the state on the way back, so we had loads to talk about. The interviews were normally about 20 minutes, but mine went on for almost an hour. Even if I don’t get the job, I had a good chat with her and it proves that some people really do live the dream. She got a Master’s in French from Middlebury too, and went from a conversation tutor to the head of an English department that she created, and has been living here in Paris for the past ten years running it. How cool is that? She wanted to come to France and stay, and she made it happen not just be finding a job, but by creating her own. That takes some drive, and I hope, should I still be in love with Paris at the end of the year and decide that Europe is the place for me, that I will be equally motivated.
I got up late today so I missed the trip to Versailles, but honestly, I didn’t really feel like going anyway. To be honest, the great monuments of Europe are very interesting, but it’s the little things off the beaten path, the things that not every tourist on the planet has seen, that interest me more. So, my mission today is both academic and fun in that I have to go scrounge through bookstores until I can find what I need for my classes. That might be a pain in the ass if I didn’t like shopping for books so much. After that, I need to get my ass in gear and turn my reading up a notch to make sure I’m caught up in all my classes. I guess, even though my day won’t be filled with golden archways, velvet draperies, and musical dancing water shows, I’ll at least get some learning done and feel a little of what it’s like to be a French student in the process.Tant mieux really, tant mieux.
