JohnQ's blog

Who will save Gregory Peck from his humdrum life as a newpaper reporter . . .: Princess-in-disguise Audrey Hepburn, or the city of Rome?

Reading De Botton's piece, I found myself experiencing some minor feelings of frustration in that I think in his writing about travel, he often comes to points and ideas which I think are not about the experience of travel, but the experience of being a human being and a thoughtful being.  There is of course the obvious point: that's his goal, to show the universality of the experience of travel and its applicability in our lives, but I think he often becomes complacent to simply lead a reader to the edge of an idea, as though it were a canyon, point out the miraculous view of it, and then turn around and go back to the trail of his original topic, instead of going rogue explorer, as would be so appropriate considering what he's writing about, and climb down into that canyon and start exploring the crevices, fault lines, and unknown depths of the idea he has arrived at.  He doesn't get the bottom of things, is basically what I'm saying.

In particular with On Habit, what I thought was: isn't this the key to being 1) a writer or artist of any sort, and 2) a happy individual?  As a writer, my constant inner monologue when consulting something is, what is in front of you?  What can you see here, what can you recognize, what significance, that you could bring to someone else's attention in your work and as a result contribute positively to their lives?  This is what art is, the selecting highlighting of elements that otherwise go unnoticed.  And, as anyone who's ever seen an american romantic comedy can tell, happiness is falling in love, and falling in love is having some quirky girl show up just as your getting fed up with your boring job and slubby friend and shake things up by making you pay attention to the world around you (Audrey/Doris/Barbra/Diane/Goldie/Meg/Julia/Winona/Reese/Kirsten/Drew, I'm looking at you).  But seriously, doesn't life play that out?  When you feel great, doesn't it feel as though you're seeing everything for the first time, and when you feel awful you feel a million years old and incapable of being surprised by anything?  I just felt like what he was getting at was pretty standard, pretty obvious, unless you push it into deeper territory.

What he's suggesting, at its heart, is that travelling is a mental exercise more than anything else, and can be simulated simply by greater attention to detail.  But what are the implications of this?  In thinking about this, I recalled an article I had read a few years back, one of those freak-the-crap-out-of-parents magazines put out now and then (I believe this one was Time).  The cover read, "What's Wrong With The Boys: why our nation's young men are dropping out of school and ending up in jail" (Oh sensationalism, is there nothing you can't make seem terrifying?)  The article of course had much less to report than the title suggested, and took a decidely limited point of view.  It pointed out that there has been a slight spike, starting in the nineties, with prison rates among young men (even though the prisons have always been crowded, and young men have always comprised the largest number of inmates,) and that young women are now performing better in school grade-wise than young men and getting into better colleges in slightly larger numbers.  (Nevermind that we are as a country now 51% female, so having a 51% female graduating class at most liberal arts colleges shouldn't be that surprising, or that fact that as a culture we are much faster to demonize female criminal behavior than male, or that the majority of politicians, doctors, lawyers, and CEOs remain male, so it's pretty hard to argue the American male is in trouble.)  The article also tried to allege a connection between the increase in diagnoses of ADHD and Asbergers, two disorders which are more common than men, (although the increase in diagnoses in both genders has been proportionally the same, and the prevalence among males is easily explained by basic genetics) with the mild hike in prison rates, which makes no sense and is borderline offensive.  So, in short, it was a very poorly written article, ad wasn't helped by it's oldschool boys v. girls gender politics.  But one thing I read in it did catch my attention.  A sidebar described a school for boys in Texas which had recently implimented a new discipline policy which has dramatically decreased the number of behavior problems they had with some of their more troubled students.  The school had adopted the policy that, whenever there was an altercation between two male students, (which apparently had become a very regular problem) two aides would immediately remove both boys from the classroom and take them for a walk around the neighborhood while the boy was allowed to talk through what happened.  Only once both students had described the incident thoroughly and calmed down were punishments allotted.  While it seems fairly logical that allowing children to work through their problems aloud one-on-one would help significantly in preventing the problem from reoccuring, what the article really emphasized was the walking.  It appeared that the strategy of making the boy change location and move while thinking majorly improved the kids' capacities to explain their thoughts and feelings and even improved the quality of their memory.  The results were so immediate and overt that a local psychologist and neurosurgeon teamed up to investigate, and found after doing a test group experiment involving brain scans from children from different school of both genders, that high rates of testerone seem to create a link between the parts of the brain that controls movement and mechanical observation (sidestepping a puddle, things you do almost subconsciously) and the part that controls critical thinking, empathy, and communication.  (This study had not been substantiated at the time of publication, and I didn't check to see if it has been since.)  The exercise of physical movement and adjusting to new surroundings facilitated quicker and more direct evaluation of self, others, and the past.

The article decided to stick to such banal applications as sports, saying that it seemed boys were more suited to play baseball and basketball because they could strategize better while running, (ignoring the fact that testosterone levels, especially in children, fluctuate so quickly and differ so much on an individual basis that there is more variance within the sexes than between them.)  But I thought that, as an idea, the implications were rather astounding.  Historically, it goes almost without saying that explorers were men.  Isabelle Eberhardt, Jane Franklin, Helen Thayer, all notable in their own way, were never permitted to go anywhere their male counterparts had not already explored, and were considered incredibly eccentric and suffered under enormous social pressures in their day.  I personally am somewhat critical of overly psychological and physiological approaches to behavioral study, preferring to side with nurture and sociology over the preconceptions of nature, but regardless of where you side it is fascinating to consider how much the history of the exploration of the world was reliant on masculine identity, the social demanded (or biologically instilled, if that's your preference) need to travel, to escape, just to process, while women were shut up and home and, trapped without means of travel, provided the audience needed to facillitate the invention of the modern novel.  I thought of "My Own Little Corner" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella and wondered if de Maistre was getting credit for a technique women around the world had been using for years to maintain their sanity, and if this technique, to force one's mind to reconceptualize one's surroundings, was new only for men unhabituated to it and now increasingly needing it, having run out of continents to explore everytime we have a crisis.

So I leave it out there, because I don't have an answer: does gender change the way you travel?

Monoprix, for those who don't know, if the Target of France.  It has clothes, paper goods, a pretty wide selection of groceries and food items, and toiletries.  In the French tradition of the marche, in which their is a different store for each of these items and even for subcategories within these items, this store is considered a sort of necessary evil: life doesn't allow for you to spend all day running errands from place to place to buy everything you need, but my Lord do the French wish it did.  Personally, for this reason, I love Monoprix.  As fun as the French marches can be on a leisurely Sunday afternoon, I really enjoy the occasional return to the space of buy-everything-you-need-right-here, a very American thought process.  I especially enjoy it because, even though the goal is the same, the set-up differs in some specific ways, which makes air-apparent certain differences between French and American culture.

But probably the thing I love most about Monoprix are the people who work there.  Most of them are immigrants, like me, who speak someone limited French.  One of my favorite experiences was buying cheese there from the man working the cheese wall (they have a cheese wall! See what I'm getting at here?) who, upon realizing I wasn't natively French and came from the Americas, became very excited.  I realized that he thought I was from south of the border somewhere and spoke Spanish, and he himself was a fairly recent immigrant from Spain and rather anxious to meet someone whom he could speak his native language with.  I was very sorry to disappoint him (I know no Spanish) especially because I could understand so acutely how desperate the desire can be to communicate with someone without having to translate.  But he took it in good stride and we ended up getting in a long conversation, in both of our broken French, about being an immigrant here and missing home.  I found this man was less the exception at Monoprix than the rule, and I really got to like hearing where various employees were from and how this place differed from their home.

But my favorite person, one who I rarely got into conversations with but always looked for, was a woman who looked to be in her late 40's, maybe even early 50's.  She was notably older than the average Monoprix employee.  She has no discernable foreign accent, and while I don't recall her exact name I do remember glancing at her nametag in curiosity and noting it was a typically French name.  She was of asian heritage, her long black hair pulled back in a headband and always wearing shimmering light blue eye shadow thickly applied.  She had the raspy, rich voice only produced from decades from smoking.  I only spoke to her when she rang up my purchases at the check-out line.  Her smile when she greeted you, while always the same, somehow always seemed genuine; when she rang things up and then placed them neatly into bags, she did so with the speed and precision that only comes from years of practice.  I found her fascinating.

Working in a grocery store is a sucky job, especially on Monoprix which, to Parisians, is a shit store.  And having worked sucky jobs before, I recognized her right away: the lifer.  Sucky jobs are typically filled by young people or new arrivals to the country who are just trying to put away some money for at most a few years while looking for something better.  They do a good job but have little investment in what they do beyond not getting fired.  A lifer, on the other hand, is a person for whom the sucky job is not a sucky job, but a career.  For whatever reason, they have decided to work there for the rest of their lives, not pursuing any other options and actively seeking to earn raises and greater benefits but not promotions.  There are a wide array of reasons someone becomes a lifer within a company, but no matter what it requires a special type of person to succeed at it.  You have to have a remarkable level of self-confidence and independence: you are surrounded all day by young people with big dreams and plans which they talk quite confidently about fulfilling, while you yourself have little to no ambitions to speak of.  You, as the senior member of the team, are obligated to train these young people, knowing that often within the span of months they will be replaced by someone else nearly identical to train, while you will still be here.  And you must find a way not just to make do, but to be happy with your choice, to like your job, to be friends with your obnoxious twenty-something co-workers.  I've met people who have done it, and people who have been trying to do it and clearly on their way to developping a drinking problem.  This woman always struck as someone who seemed to be doing it successfully.  I never really wanted to know her backstory; I preferred to let her remain a mystery to me.  This figure: the woman who seems to be getting by on her own in a dead-end situation, who wears a lot of make-up, who's nice even when people are jerks, is so familar in American culture that she's become a cliche.  But in France, especially in the Monoprix in the 16th arrondisement, Paris' upper-east side, she seems practically unheard of.  Already inside this place which seems an abomination in French culture (they even play bad American pop music a lot - I've sometimes shopped longer just to finish dancing to Hot and Cold or Bleeding Love) to find her here, a legitimate French person, a strong reminder that culture cannot overcome the daily problems of survival.

I hope this brings a little pang of nostalgia to any NYU in Paris pals who happen to read it.  Out of all the amazing restaurants in Paris, yellow awning place is the one I, and I believe the rest of NYUP, have visited the most frequently, the unifying experience between all of us.  It of course is not really called yellow awning place.  But when we got here, when we were all to insecure to want to test our french comprehension, we would ask people who worked at NYUP where a good place was to go grab a cheap lunch, and they all recommended a little boulangerie (bakery that also sells sandwiches and various lunch items, for those of you unfamiliar with the venerable French cultural institution,) just down the street, and after we stared at them, blank-faced, when they said the name in French, they quickly supplied, "it's the place with the yellow awning."

That was easy enough to find, and it has become it's official moniker.  I've bought my lunch at the yellow awning place atleast 2 days a week every week all semester long.  They have a cheap lunch menu (sandwich, drink, and dessert - because apparently no lunch in France is complete without dessert - for 5 euro,) and you can even skimp more and get just the sandwich for just 3 euro.  And they are big, baguette sandwiches; I always get the vegetarian-friendly gruyere (a white cheese) and crudites (the french term for tomato and lettuce, or as they conceive of it, filler) with mayo, and I kept some seedy French mustard stored away nearby to add when I got too bored with that.  The place, with the best deal in the area, was always busy, so when you went anywhere from 11 to 3 you would need to wait in line, which was comprised both of NYU students and a large number of French who lived and worked in the area, and often led out the door and down the block.  But the line moved quickly, thanks to the friendly staff which worked quickly to disperse it.

There was the guy who looked about late 20's with the glasses who did sandwiches sometimes, and then the four women: the one with the dark hair always pulled back who I think ran the place because she typically worked the cash register, the woman with the cropped, dyed red hair who seemed like she had also been there for a long time as she always knew how much everything was, the woman with the shoulder length brown hair who worked sandiwiches when the guy wasn't there, and the woman with the cropped blonde hair who worked desserts sometimes - these three, the two last women and the guy, were all part time I think.  I would guess the woman to all be in their late 30's to early 40's, though I horrible at judging that.  They were all really nice, although the redhead and the dark-haired women had a sharpness to them, especially during the lunchhour, that comes from working at one place for a long time; the only way I found to get a smile out of the dark-haired woman was to have exact change, and on particularly busy days even that wasn't a guarentee.  Other than sandwiches, they had salads and pasta (neither of which I ever sampled - their salads didn't have dressing on them, a French thing I could never get behind, and their pasta looked iffy to me).  But they also had quiche, which were wonderful - I can particularly vouche for the broccoli-cherve, which was a cheap and delicious masterpiece.  Let's not even start to talk about the desserts; that would take up another whole blog entry.  Let's just say, imagine absolutely amazing French pastries and tartes, and know that unless you've been there, whatever you're imagining: it was better than that.  I can't say at this point I'm worried about missing yellow awning place.  I ate there so often that it often seemed dull, and I'm really craving the variety of lunch options America (and New York in particular) offers.  But I know that with time I will have pangs for that place, and it - not the Eiffel tower, or the Louvre, but the local boulangerie - will always be one of the main places that defined my Paris experience.

Umm . . . Spoiler?While I'll been here, I've been thinking a lot about music.  I'm not a musician - I love to sing but I'm not particularly good at it, and I know next to nothing about music.  Whie over time I've developped the ability to objectively evaluate and examine the attributes of a piece of literature or a film, and am slowly developping a vocabulary around the visual art, music remains a mystery to me.  For all my favorite books or films, I can explain at length technical aspects of the work that elevate it above other similar attempts (nd acknowledge moments of Icarus-like failure, when hir astounding ambitions evade the artist's grasp).  But while I do like often enjoy songs that others whose tastes are more mature and educated than mine (friends and/or critics) also appreciate, there are a lot of songs I like that I know are objectively terrible.  Even for the songs that are widely beloved, my ability to analyze them is limited to the lyrics (which is why, I think, I typically struggle to enjoy classical as a genre) and general subjective statements like "her voice just doesn't sound good there."

I've been thinking about this a lot I think because one, I've found music to be the best salve for homesickness, which has often left me pndering why certain songs just signify home to me, and two, I've started going to the opera, which has undoubtedly been the greatest gift Paris has given me.  I'd never seen or heard an opera before coming here, and having taken the opportunity to see several in close proximity to each other has majorly altered my conception of music.  The layers of expression in an opera, (the written text, the acting out of that text, the written score, the live performance of that score by both the orchestra and the singers working in harmony, the incredible costumes and set pieces, and the intellectual challenge of the director to render accessible this incredibly stylized art form,) this enormous effort from all of these people coming together across time to produce this, it's truly awe-inspiring.  To attempt to "sell" his music to the audience, not as a writtn and pre-conceived work, nor even as a choreographed "number" (as Broadway typicaly trades in) but as a spontaneous expression of emotion from the character, requires an almost unbelievable suspension of disbelief from the audience, and yet I have witnessed occasions where, for me atleast, they pulled it off, and I'm still trying to figure out why.

The opera that has been the most successful for me was far-and-away La Boheme, Puccini's seminal classic which I have recently learned is also performed in New York (meaning I can go see it there too!!) As a depiction of Paris, Puccini manages to both evoke a very specific period of history and also give a general sense of the culture and feel of the city.  Having seen the city now at Christmas time, I think the opening scene of Act II where several choruses sing around and among each other while shopping in the cold captures the city in a way Larson's equivalent scene in RENT tries to do but just doesn't quite manage.  The scene that follows in the cafe, if done as well as it was done here, so perfectly mimicks the hustle of paris cafes in the winter when everyone comes in seeking shelter from the cold as much as anything and thus wait to order, go through cup after cup of coffee, and never ask for the check, using the strong sense of Parisian hospitality as an excuse to keep warm.  The characters themselves, it seems to me, are exactly the way Parisians want to see themselves depicted: smart and idealistic, passionate, resourceful, creative, and fun - constantly ready to adapt to any situation to get the most out of life.  But of course, the last scene is the most incredible.  A professor here, showing those who were going clips of a broadcasted version in preparation from the live event, said "Did you get a lump in your throat?"  (I did.)  "That's the cello.  It's a great manipulator; it's the instrument with the closest tone to the human voice.  Composers love to pull it out just for moments like this."

I was completely astounded.  Can you believe that humans can listen to a piece of music, and the tones in it that mimick a human voice will actuall cause an emotional reaction?  And, on top of that, some people were able to figure that out and harnass that power in great art?  Thinking about that, I asked a friend of mine, an actress who plays music as a hobby, what art form she found the most emotinally impactful.  She answered music right away.  I said I thought I agreed, but that I felt awkward saying so; my mode of expression, the one I depend on and through which I hope to influence others, is writing.  But I have to admit, even though as a writer I think I'm more attuned to the written word than most, I am not frequently profoundly moved by a book.  I have never wept over a piece of visual art, very rarely over live theater, and only occasionally over a film.  But there are some songs which, no matter how many times I hear them, I tear up.  My friend pointed out that the progression of musichas been toward an increasingly individual experience, going from public concerts to the radio, to records where most families only ad one record player that was shared, to CD's by which point parents and kids could have their own, to Walkmans and eventually Ipods, where the music of your choice can play alongside you all day, through all your highs and lows, in your head sundtracking your every thought and emotion.  No other medium is as accessible and personal, she said.  And thinking about it, I think I agree with her; I think one of the most significant questions to our generation is what music do you like?  (Anyone besides me willing to 'fess to having dismissed someone as a friend-option because of an abiding love of, for example, pop-country?)  You would think, though, that acting wuld be stronger since you're seeing a fellow human being, right in front of you, undergo an experience.  But somehow I think knowing it's fake allows us to disassociate, whereas some part of us still believes in the singer-songwriter tradition and sees singing a song you wrote for someone else as the most pure expression of inner feeling.  That's definitely how I felt watching the end of La Boheme; whether it's beautiful or terrifying or a bit of both that the human voice has the power to affect us that way, outside of any sort of logic or reason, is something I think we each decide for ourselves.

Beautiful. Don't You Just Hate Them?

Being here, you can understand why peole think of it as the city of love.  The presence of human attachment, the desire to share what you experience with another person, is palpable nearly everywhere you go.  But so is the absence of the fulfillment of that desire, and so I say that Paris is the best place I can imagine to be depressed in.

New York, by contrast, is the best place I've ever lived (admittedly a somewhat short list) to be enraged.  Like Paris, New York is perfect for lovers, but New York, I think, is too high energy to allow for depression in the face of domestic bliss.  Anytime I find myself depressed in New York for more than a day, the hard edge of the city creeps into my apartment and finds me, and soon I'm having one of those days where I'm just walking around, waiting for someone to do something that justifies me telling them to fuck off (and luckily, being New York, I don't have to wait very long.)  In the absence of positiv human connection, New York facilitates a negative one, and just walking down the street you can see those people who aren't getting any and as a result have become ticking time bombs just waiting to explode.

But Paris, the birthplace of ennui, raises loneliness and depression to an art form, even a religion: a communal, ever-present, transcendant state.  While spending a Saturday night drinking by yourself in Nw York makes you a loser, in Paris every night of the week you can see at any bar a couple guys, of a variety of ages, often good-looking and well-dressed, sitting by themselves and knocking one back, looking for all the world like this drink is all that's keeping them from offing themselves.  On even the most popular streets in the trendiest quartiers, you can always spot that woman in her bathrobe, standing on the balcony of her second story apartment, smoking a cigarette and watching the happy drunken children stumble home, cat-calling and scream-laughing into the night as the take leave of the friends.  The look on her face, the woman, envy and self-preserving disgust, it's a familiar feeling to anyone who's spent enough time here and no one would hold it against here.  You are never alone in your loneliness; in fact, you are reenacting a tradition as Parisian as cheese plates and hating the Eiffel Tower.  Compounded with the loneliness of being an American, the one who can understand the language but doesn't get the jokes, the weight of it can be staggering, crushing, unlike anything I've ever experienced in New York.  This feels almost ancient, more primal - like grieving for something you weren't alive to remember. 

During bouts of home internet access, the soundtrack to my homework has been video after youtube video of bitter anti-love songs which best fit my mood - I will forever associate writing in French with Carly Simon.  As a result of these elaborate searches, my sad sond reportoire has expanded tremendously.  So quick shout-out to my latest fave: anyone else know Josh Rouse?  If you don't, next time you feel homesick, listen to "michigan."  And have a box of tissues handy.

My Feelings, As Summed Up By A T-Shirt

I think my problem with Paris was that I never really wanted to study abroad in the first place.  I remember so well the months leading up to my departure, the reactions from friends and family when they heard I would be spending the next semester in Paris.  I tried resolutely to mirror that excitement, that anticipation, that awe back to them, hoping that by pantomiming what I was supposed to be feeling with enough gusto I could make it real. Those two words are probably the heart of how I ended up in Paris: "supposed to."  I'd been studying French ever since the 7th grade, and every teacher that I'd ever had in the subject, noting my hard work and terrible accent, said I should study in Paris.  Within weeks, they claimed, you'll be fluent, and it'll be the greatest experience of your life - if you have the opportunity, you simply must go.  Studying in Paris was basically the point behind studying French - a semester eating croissants justified the hours spent memorizing irregular verb conjuations and faux amis.  Coming to NYU, I was immediately interested in the study abroad program, because smart, cultured people studied abroad, and NYU's program was supposed to be one of the best.  Most people, I learned, went their junior year; it was presented as much of an expectation as anything else.  And you'll love it, was the unanimous opinion of those I spoke to about it.

Love would not be le mot juste.  I don't regret going, if only because if I hadn't I would have wondered forever what it would have been like.  And that has been the common thread of my experience of Paris - trying and learning new things, if only for the sake of knowledge.  I've learned a lot of things about myself that I didn't know before.  Maybe the biggest one: I always characterized myself as a city person, and now on further reflexion I'm not sure that's true.  I haven't felt a particular connection with Paris, or London, or Chicago, or D.C.  I always thought the big draw of New York for me was its size, and the glorious anonymity that came with it.  But Paris, as a place to live, i too large for me, too disconnected and distant.  I greatly preferred Marseilles, which was smaller and more intimate and thus totally goes against my own understanding of what I look for in a place.  I've theorized that this stems from the fact that Paris is a comparable size to New York and as a result, the two share several similarities, which causes me to think of New York often during my day and inevitably make comparisons.  In all the differences between the two cities I always prefer New York, so Paris suffers for my scrutiny.  Marseilles is too small to suggest such comparisons, so I could just judge it based on its own merits.

Also, I was only there a weekend.

NYU in Paris: Where I Am When Not AsleepI live very close to the NYU in France building, where I work and go to school. I spend roughly 10 hours per day there Monday through Thursday, with short breaks during the day when I run out to grab food which I bring back to eat. A lot of days, when I leave the office around 8 pm, I crawl home, microwave something easy for dinner, rush through some homework, and collapse, exhausted, falling asleep instantly, between 10 pm and midnight. I’m taking a full course load and working longer hours than I ever have before during the school year. I also don’t get a lot of downtime during my job to work on homework, so I usually have to find other time to do that. I really like my job, its definitely got perks, I just often wish I had more downtime. On Friday, when we are all lucky enough to not have class or work, I always plan to do a lot of things but end up just sleeping in, facebooking, getting some homework out of the way, doing laundry and only leaving my place for the occasionally emergency baguette run to the nearby bakery. Luckily that still leaves me Saturday and Sunday to go out and see Paris and have fun with my friends. This schedule though leaves me feeling burnt out a lot, a feeling I don’t get as often in New York. That’s odd, because New York definitely has a faster pace to it, but I think the faster pace invigorates me, gives me more energy, while the slower pace of life in Paris leaves me constantly wondering where the time goes.

I’ve worked my finances down to a pretty fine science. Breakfast, when I wake up on time, is a piece of toast with nutella and jam or a bowl of cereal; when I wake up late, which is not as rare an occurrence as I’d like, breakfast is the first thing thrown out of the schedule. Lunch is paid for out of whatever pocket change I remembered to grab on the way out. Typically, this means a sandwich or quiche for 2 or 3 euro, or, if I’m celebrating something, the 5 euro menu which is comprised of the sandwich with a drink and a dessert. If I’m running really low on change, lunch is a smoothie, which can be purchased for less than 2 euro. Dinner almost every night consists of pasta and sauce. My roommate and I take turns making nearly a pound of pasta once a week and then refrigerating it so the two of us can eat off the leftovers for the rest of the week. In addition to this I usually have some cheese and bread and a salad. And maybe a glass of wine if we have a bottle open. To summarize: Four days a week I buy lunch (2-5 Euro) and a baguette (1 Euro). Weekly I buy cheese (I try a different type each week,) and salad (~4 Euro). Every two weeks I buy a bottle of wine, a loaf of sliced bread, and a bottle of milk, and a jar of sauce de Provence (the best pasta sauce you have ever had.) (15-20 Euro) (I buy the sauce, roomie buys the pasta.) Monthly, I buy jam and cereal (~6 Euro). (Roomie buys nutella.)

I usually eat out about twice a week depending on how my back account’s doing, maybe one night at a friend’s for dinner where we all bring ingredients for a big meal and on Sunday usually to one of the fantastic Japanese or North African restaurants nearby where I try not to spend more than 20 euro. I give a euro to the Church every week at Mass, and of course have incidental expenses like train tickets or rushed opera tickets. I also buy a monthly Navigo pass, the unlimited monthly metro pass which, because I know how much it costs, provides the extra kick that gets me out the door, down into the metro, and out into the city. And, when the day comes that my pay-as-you-go plan runs out, I will have to refill it. I could probably write a whole blog entry about the anxiety that comes out of the pay-as-you-go plan, but that’s for another day. Happy weekend everyone!

I started reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast on the metro ride home from Saint Germaine, after buying the slim volume at Shakespeare and Co.  I felt like a cliché.  The place was crowded thqt afternoon; I've never heard "excuse me" in so many different languages.

I read the first section, where Hemingway describes eating oysters and drinking at the café while writing, and seeing the young girl.  I'm ashamed to say I've never read the book before - it always seemed so stereotypical and I was never in the right moment to take advantage of it.  The passage made me hungry.  Hemingway always lines his sentences up with such devastating cause and effect.  He talks about feeling cold and empty and ordering a drink and feeling it fill him with warmth and being able to write then.  The man was a excellent, well-practiced alcoholic.  I spend the train ride home reading and wondering if it's okay to go through life satisfying our own most basic urges, the urge for warmth and comfort and satisfaction, pushing ourselves to do what we don't want until we can't bear it and then giving in and doing what we want.  I tend toward moral asceticism - I think a lot of learning and growth comes through suffering, less than through pleasure - indulgence is meant to be rare and serves to ,ake suffering more acute.  You save a lot of money on this philosophy.

The next day I read further, through the first section he talks qbout Gertrude Stein qnd her partner.  I'm reading whgile having lunch at a café by myself.  I'm late lunch, it's nearly two, so the place is nearly empty but the waiter still manages to appear harried.  I order wtare and orange juice and an omelette with a salad.  The omelette is much less flavorful than I anticipated but it's warm and this October day in Paris is unseasonably cold - the wind already bites the way NYC reserves for another month.  The orange juice is fresh-squeezed and you can tell, it's like a sun-burst in your mouth.  I haven't been writing very much while I've been here, barely at all, and I realize now it's because I spend all my time reading and writing and trying to think in French.  I can understand French, but I communicate in it very simply - I have to give up the complexity, the nuance and metaphor and subtlety that I'm used to English.  And so my internal monologue, usually zipping along in English and providing me with ideas to write about, has fallen silent, stupefied.  But reading Hemingway always makes me start thinking in short simple sentences and I realize how much I've missed being able to read literature and not have to worry about understanding on the basic level of plot and vocabulary and structure and focus on bigger choices the writer is making; what a gift is fluency.  I finish my orange juice.  The waiter brought me bread but I've decided not to eat any of it.  I eat so much bread here, I have plenty of food, I don't need more enriched flour.

I love the way he describes Getrude Stein.  He clearly respects her even as he levels criticism at her both as a writer and as a person.  It reminds me so much of friends at home.  I think most people who are really passionate in a field keep an ever changing list of ten or so people who they know in that field whom they think are really spectacular; I'm blessed to be close friends with most of my ten.  But even though I think they are way more talented than most young writers out there, all of us are extremely different sorts of writers and we believe very different things about the nature of writing and art, and I know each of us think thqt we are right and the others are wrong.  Wanting to be a writer by nature is a somewhat arrogant goal, and if one were to make a judgment, arrogance might be a defining flaw of the job.  But that's how it goes - your best friends are the people you can argue angrily with and still like.

The Mediterranean: I swam there!  (It was so warm and beautiful you guys, no joke)This weekend I went with some friends to Marseille, France's second largest city, the most ethnically diverse city in the country, and one of the oldest ports in Europe. It was amazing. I wasn't planning to write this entry about this trip, but it was such an overwhelming experience I just really feel the need to share some of it. The first day we were there, we took a ferry to the Ile d'If, where the Chateau D'If, the prison featured prominently in the Count of Monte Cristo and the Man in the Iron Mask. The prison is enormous, winding, easy to lose yourself in - terrifying to imagine being locked up in. But it's also beautiful, a true chateau, and the island even at this time of year is warm and almost tropical. The ferry ride there, knowing that we were on the body of water which touched the coast of Africa, Italy, and Greece, this body of water where Odysseus and Aeneas in legend once sailed, to be there now was thrilling.

The next day we took a long hike through these enormous rocky foothills. The views from the top were absolutely breath-taking. After over an hour of hiking we finally descended to a pebble beach on the other side, where we swam in the Meditteranean. The water was incredibly clear, green, warm and comfortable even in February, and the sun shone done and glistened on the surface of the water. Those are just two huge highlights of the trip. Honestly, it was what I might describe as a life changing experience. I can't say why. I just have been replaying every minute of it in my mind since I've got back to Paris, and having been gone and returned I feel so profoundly renewed, so much more prepared and confident to explore Paris and try to gain deeper insight into it. I've talked to my parents and several friends over the course of the day, and have been shocked at my own inability to adequently explain how great it was and what was so great about it.

I've become used to spending my days struggling to express myself in French and knowing that a lot of what I want to say isn't coming out right, but English has been my refuge, where my thoughts come quickly and easily. Now, for whatever reason, I am finding English wanting - this is the most intense case of "you had to be there" I've ever had. Part of me thinks the reason this was so impactful for me is that for the first time since I left the states I just let myself be a tourist. I spoke French, but I also walked around with my map out and did all the touristy things and didn't worry about apeaking Englishly loudly in restaurants - I was on vacation! But for some reason my vacation has given me a renewed sense of security about my status as a visitor, about my ability to adapt and adjust and learn and change without having to give up my identity. So, if I were to offer a piece of advice, it would be this: if you haven't yet, take a night away if that's available to you. I didn't realize how much I'm enjoying Paris until I left and let myself get excited to come home.

Hey fellow bloggers!  Sorry I'm running behind, my internet access at home has been sporadic.  As a result, expect some more saved up posts from me coming soon, and I am excited to read your wonderful words and leave comments!

In de Botton’s second chapter, he writes extensively about transitory experiences and airports. Personally, I felt a lot of anxiety leading up to leaving for Paris, all the way to the flight itself. I don’t think I wear my religion on my sleeve too much, but there are two times which, regardless of my company or circumstances, that I cross myself. The first, which happens more frequently, is whenever I see an ambulance go by with its siren on. There’s something mystical and eerie about ambulances – conversations stop, cars pull over, everyone looks. It’s this public acknowledgement – one of us, no one knows who, might leave soon. Who are we loosing? How might the world change because of it? This is the sort of thing that, for me, just instinctively calls for prayer.

The second is whenever I see a plane take off. Especially so if I’m in it, or if someone I know is in it, but I often feel the impulse to do so even if I have no personal investment in the flight. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of flying – I’ve never had a panic attack or hyperventilated or had to be removed from a plane, it’s never been a serious problem for me the way it is for some people. And besides, I wouldn’t describe it as a fear. I would say that a fear is generally against something that isn’t a real threat, (like spiders,) and that it’s against something avoidable that you can actually control (again, like spiders.) This I would describe as a terror, which I see as something different altogether. A terror I would define as a sort of transcendence, when something occurs that makes you register, in a very direct way, your own mortality. You’re not afraid of whatever the basic occurrence is, (in my case, the ambulance going by or the plane taking off,) but what suggest, what they point to.

Joseph Campbell, (author of Hero with a Thousand Faces, among other excellent works,) theorizes that all narratives have at their core The Hero’s Journey, a basic narrative that he believes describes the emotional process of making a major life change. That is not an excellent summary of his work, and I highly suggest you read his books if you haven’t yet had the opportunity, but my poor approximation will have to do for now. I tend to agree with Campbell, and I have always been especially drawn to his conceit of the Whale. Campbell states that all journeys, or life changes, require one to destroy a part of one’s self that is no longer useful, sort of like shedding your skin, in order to reach the next phase of life. The most obvious application here would be that, in world views which believe in an after life, one must shed one’s earthly existence when one dies in order to pass into the next life. But Campbell also suggests that one must, for example, sacrifice a certain amount of innocence and dependence on others in order to achieve adulthood, and in a deeper way, any change – quitting a job, moving away from home, getting married or divorced, becoming a parent – requires us to descend into a deeper part of ourselves, sacrifice an aspect of lives that we no longer consider essential, and, freed from our previous limitations, move more confidently forward to face the trials this change has wrought for us.

Campbell says that within our narratives, we often make this experience physical as well as psychological, and as evidence he turns to the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. (Seriously guys, I didn’t think this post was going to be super Christian – I honestly don’t usually talk about religion this much.) Jonah gets devoured whole by an gigantic whale, and he lives inside the stomach of a whale, who is swimming through a turbulent storm, in the middle of an enormous ocean. He’s about as deep as you can get. He spends several days in the whale, and finally something in him changes, and he prays to God to save him and he promises, once rescued, to do whatever He commands (Jonah had, before being devoured, been fleeing from God’s orders on a ship sailing to a distant land.) God saves him by making the whale vomit Jonah up on a distant shore, and Jonah returns home, having found a deeper faith in both his God and himself to be able to accomplish what God asks of him.

But to do this, he was SWALLOWED BY A WHALE. If you get eaten by an animal, you die; even ancient people knew that. Campbell argues that Jonah’s doubts, about both God and himself, had to perish inside the whale so that the better version of himself could go free. There are many other examples: Odysseus and Theseus and Aeneas and Hercules must all venture into the underworld, effectively die and reemerge, before truly attaining the glory that is their destiny; they all must descend into darkness, suffer in turmoil, before they can move on to the real challenge. The plane, the ambulance: these, I think, are our whales. To get to wherever we are now, I’m pretty sure at some point all of us walked right into the mouth of a huge metal bird, which flew long and far, then vomited us back up, exhausted and disoriented, on a distant shore. And it is this, I think, which inspires my terror on planes: not only that flying can be dangerous should something go wrong, but in a deeper sense, that even if I arrive wherever I’m going just fine, some part of me will still die during my journey. When I return home, I will be most likely be different, be altered. Who am I? Because very soon, I may not be so sure – you better take inventory now. What will I be loosing? No way to know. How will my world be different? Completely unanswerable.

Another reason to read Campbell is this anecdote (which must have been popular in the second half of the twentieth century because Robert Bly stole it later): there are tribal communities, around the world, which share a common ritual for marking the passing into puberty of males. Boys in these communities will often sleep with their mothers until they are eight or nine. Then, on a pre-appointed night which neither mother nor child have been informed of, the father, who does not normally sleep in the same lodging, will paint his face and clothe himself as a monster, then burst into the mother’s home and drag the terrified child into the night. There he will meet up with other men of the tribe, and the group will ritualistically circumcise the boy. That is the embodiment of the terror though, that fear of the unknown when the unknown if being irrevocably hoisted upon you: a monster, oddly familiar somehow, that wakes you for sleepy comfort and drags you screaming into the night.

I found this terror missing from de Botton’s description of the anticipation of travel, and for me personally it’s an integral part of travel and definitely my study abroad experience. So the questions which I now ask others: do you have other places of terror, other whales, other monsters in the night? And what are you afraid of loosing – what are your foreskins? (Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself – how often do you get to write that sentence?!)