It began as an unremarkable Tuesday. I got up far too early to attend a class that lasts far too long, especially considering it concerns grammar that I fear that I will never really grasp.
Afterward, I needed to go downtown too pick up some necessities (wine, cigarettes, and, because I am still American after all, toothpaste). I walked to Monoprix, somewhat of a French equivalent of Target, which, like Target, I frequent way too much.
I picked up a baguette at “Le Petit Chou,” the veritable golden child of boulangeries in the area. Feeling brave, I even bought that day’s newspaper, in hopes of being able to siphon out at least the main points of various current events.
As I was doing all of this, walking purposefully through shortcut back-alleys, answering shopkeepers’ questions and pleasantries, loading my Carrefour reusable grocery bag with Camembert, plain yogurt, and Nutella, I admit I was probably a bit too self-congratulating.
“How comfortable this all feels now,” I thought to myself. “I must really be quite adapted to French life.”
With all of these rather pretentious ponderings nestled in my brain, I entered caught the next tram back to my dorms. As I entered and took my seat, I noticed a woman clutching her chest briskly walking in and standing by the door, with a hint of discomfort. Curious to what her problem may be, I continued to surreptitiously spy on her.
As the tram lurched at the next stop, the woman tentatively pulled at the neckline of her sweater and peered inside.
Slowly, a furry set of ears emerged from behind her wool collar. Smiling into what should have been just cleavage, she reached into her shirt, and pulled out, with one sweeping presentation, a tiny dusty-gray kitten.
The jig ostensibly being up, the woman seemed to have no fear of reproach as she brought the kitten lovingly up to her cheek, and patted it affectionately on its kiwi-sized head.
No longer concerned with social norms regarding staring, I could not tear my eyes away from this woman and her cat as I tried to diagnose her particular mental neurosis. Surely some nice men in white coats would be swarming her soon, attacking her with a syringe and a lint roller.
However, as I looked around, it seemed that no one else seemed to be anticipating any sort of intervention. Indeed, perhaps more surprising than the tiny creature on the tram was the fact that I seemed to be the only one disturbed by it. Apparently, to the French, kittens are as commonplace as iPods on public transport.
To clarify, I do not believe in signs; I believe in irony.
But even I will accept that perfection in timing of this event. And, I am glad that I was not allowed to be too self-satisfied for too long.
The beauty of being foreign is being surprised. I do not want everything that happens here to be completely natural, mundane. What is the point of being abroad if you become so accustomed to your area that you no longer able to see with an outside view? I want to see things differently, because, I believe, that is how I am able to value everything I see to this extent. I pray that I will always see magnificence of my surroundings, that I will always appreciate the differences in culture and history, and that whenever I see a domesticated animal being pulled out of someone’s clothing on public transport, I will laugh until my stomach hurts.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Bad Of The Country
The funny thing about writing a blog is that it makes you think of your life as chapters in a book. How can I give this week a plot, a beginning, climbing action, climax, and conclusion? A thesis, an argument, a rebuttal?
I was thinking about tackling the subject of homesickness this week, and of course it would be simplest to treat it like any other chapter in any other work of fiction (as one really should approach any blog they read). Indeed, there exists a very clear format that can be followed by anyone.
All you have to do is commence with something that would make me miss my family, my home, my friends. Maybe how the constant rain reminds me of walking through downtown Portland with soaking wet hair, how the glow of the city lights somehow seem more beautiful against the angry gray sky. Or how talking about politics makes me think of the evenings in my living room with my family, screaming and laughing and debating every subject spanning universal healthcare to the best Star Wars movie.
Then you begin to tie these things together, make them gather on each other, until every thing I see reminds me of home. You could add a scene where I am contemplating buying plane tickets, one where I am calling home every minute, another where I am begging people to come visit me. You could draw on psychological models, make references to Greek Mythology, add in some talking animals, if you want, whatever you like as long as at the climax of the story I reach acceptance.
The falling action of the story would be simple. As I felt more at home in Caen, I would be able to start appreciating the differences from the familiar. Caen would become my new home, my new place of comfort and safety. I would long for my dorm room bed. A galette would replace my mother’s apple crisp. French children would become my new nieces and nephews.
Homesickness plot over. Turn the page and move on to the following conflict in the following episode.
However, all that would be a lie.
Homesickness, as with everything else in life, cannot be confined to a chapter. There is no clear beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it branches out, it disappears and emerges. It does not respect the two dimensional neatness of a piece of paper or computer screen. To make it obey these conventions, I would have to resort to gross exaggeration and flat out lies.
Homesickness is not a chronic disease; it is an acute pain that happens from time to time, more like heartburn than cancer.
I never pine for my home or my life before I came here. This experience is too exciting, too rich, and too glamorous in my eyes for that. I have never wasted hours wishing for my bed or spent days imagining my friends joining me here. I cling instead to the moment I am in now, because I know it won’t be long before I will be missing it.
But sometimes, when I least expect it, I feel a pang for what I have left behind. I want to go feel the cool urbanity of Seattle. I want the warmth of the fireplace in my house. I want to pick up my nieces and nephews. I want to surprise my brother at high school with a slurpee.
This lasts for only a few minutes generally, and while they are unpleasant, I don’t wish them gone. These are how I am going to get to the airport on December 23rd. How I am willingly going to return to Ellensburg, WA. How I am going to appreciate these miniscule little details of my life when I return.
In all honesty, I believe that while this version is less dramatic, it is more meaningful. Aside from the simple virtue of it being the truth, this story reveals the moments that are truly important in my life. They are a clear vision of what makes me happy; a guide to what I should maintain when I get home. A brief revelation of who and what I will be when I return.
And so I will welcome mal au pays or rather, when I am homesick for English, “bad of the country”.
I was thinking about tackling the subject of homesickness this week, and of course it would be simplest to treat it like any other chapter in any other work of fiction (as one really should approach any blog they read). Indeed, there exists a very clear format that can be followed by anyone.
All you have to do is commence with something that would make me miss my family, my home, my friends. Maybe how the constant rain reminds me of walking through downtown Portland with soaking wet hair, how the glow of the city lights somehow seem more beautiful against the angry gray sky. Or how talking about politics makes me think of the evenings in my living room with my family, screaming and laughing and debating every subject spanning universal healthcare to the best Star Wars movie.
Then you begin to tie these things together, make them gather on each other, until every thing I see reminds me of home. You could add a scene where I am contemplating buying plane tickets, one where I am calling home every minute, another where I am begging people to come visit me. You could draw on psychological models, make references to Greek Mythology, add in some talking animals, if you want, whatever you like as long as at the climax of the story I reach acceptance.
The falling action of the story would be simple. As I felt more at home in Caen, I would be able to start appreciating the differences from the familiar. Caen would become my new home, my new place of comfort and safety. I would long for my dorm room bed. A galette would replace my mother’s apple crisp. French children would become my new nieces and nephews.
Homesickness plot over. Turn the page and move on to the following conflict in the following episode.
However, all that would be a lie.
Homesickness, as with everything else in life, cannot be confined to a chapter. There is no clear beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it branches out, it disappears and emerges. It does not respect the two dimensional neatness of a piece of paper or computer screen. To make it obey these conventions, I would have to resort to gross exaggeration and flat out lies.
Homesickness is not a chronic disease; it is an acute pain that happens from time to time, more like heartburn than cancer.
I never pine for my home or my life before I came here. This experience is too exciting, too rich, and too glamorous in my eyes for that. I have never wasted hours wishing for my bed or spent days imagining my friends joining me here. I cling instead to the moment I am in now, because I know it won’t be long before I will be missing it.
But sometimes, when I least expect it, I feel a pang for what I have left behind. I want to go feel the cool urbanity of Seattle. I want the warmth of the fireplace in my house. I want to pick up my nieces and nephews. I want to surprise my brother at high school with a slurpee.
This lasts for only a few minutes generally, and while they are unpleasant, I don’t wish them gone. These are how I am going to get to the airport on December 23rd. How I am willingly going to return to Ellensburg, WA. How I am going to appreciate these miniscule little details of my life when I return.
In all honesty, I believe that while this version is less dramatic, it is more meaningful. Aside from the simple virtue of it being the truth, this story reveals the moments that are truly important in my life. They are a clear vision of what makes me happy; a guide to what I should maintain when I get home. A brief revelation of who and what I will be when I return.
And so I will welcome mal au pays or rather, when I am homesick for English, “bad of the country”.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
My Cousin Committed Suicide
The first day I was here, I was immediately startled by what appeared to be a large mosquito. With spindly legs sprawling out the distance of your average coffee mug, they certainly looked menacing. Afraid that it may give me malaria, I killed it with a piece of my room insurance paperwork.
As I learned in my writing class later on, these are not in fact mosquitoes, but simply a harmless, though ubiquitous, relative. I still don’t know the name of them in English, but here they are referred to as un cousin.
In France, there is a proverb that refers to these cousins, one that celebrates their apparent powers of divination. It reads:
Araignée du matin,
Chagrin
Araignée du soir
Espoir
This roughly translates to “you see this bug in the morning, you’ll be depressed. If you see it at night, you’ll have hope.”
Neither the most insightful, nor the most vivid of poems, but you do you have to congratulate it for its succinctness.
With this knowledge in mind, this morning, when I was taking a shower, the bathroom was full of the cousins. Of course, I paid this no heed, as they are generally omnipresent morning, noon, and night, and somehow I have still managed to be rather content.
But, as I was nodding off in the hot water, one cousin in particular caught my eye. He had been flying above my head for some time, nonchalantly. Now, I know he must have been working up his courage.
Taking a nose dive from the corner of the shower, he flew directly and purposefully into the drain in the center of the floor, disappearing down into the pipes and beyond immediately.
This makes me wonder, if the mere presence of un cousin is going to make my day shitty, what will witnessing the insect’s suicide result in?
While I find that question perfectly valid, you have to wonder if that attitude is why he took his own life.
Maybe he just wanted to stop the mania of predicting humans’ moods. To take control of his own life, his own day.
Maybe he really wanted to be eulogized in some random person’s low profile blog. To be a martyr of his race. So that humans will no longer look at him as solely an annoyance, a war game, a prophet, a loser in the Darwinian game show of life, but as a fellow creature of this world, with his own problems, his own love, losses, mind, body, soul. So that we can learn to treat the cousins that live on with the respect of fellow autonomous beings.
But then again, he could have just been a really fucking stupid mosquito.
As I learned in my writing class later on, these are not in fact mosquitoes, but simply a harmless, though ubiquitous, relative. I still don’t know the name of them in English, but here they are referred to as un cousin.
In France, there is a proverb that refers to these cousins, one that celebrates their apparent powers of divination. It reads:
Araignée du matin,
Chagrin
Araignée du soir
Espoir
This roughly translates to “you see this bug in the morning, you’ll be depressed. If you see it at night, you’ll have hope.”
Neither the most insightful, nor the most vivid of poems, but you do you have to congratulate it for its succinctness.
With this knowledge in mind, this morning, when I was taking a shower, the bathroom was full of the cousins. Of course, I paid this no heed, as they are generally omnipresent morning, noon, and night, and somehow I have still managed to be rather content.
But, as I was nodding off in the hot water, one cousin in particular caught my eye. He had been flying above my head for some time, nonchalantly. Now, I know he must have been working up his courage.
Taking a nose dive from the corner of the shower, he flew directly and purposefully into the drain in the center of the floor, disappearing down into the pipes and beyond immediately.
This makes me wonder, if the mere presence of un cousin is going to make my day shitty, what will witnessing the insect’s suicide result in?
While I find that question perfectly valid, you have to wonder if that attitude is why he took his own life.
Maybe he just wanted to stop the mania of predicting humans’ moods. To take control of his own life, his own day.
Maybe he really wanted to be eulogized in some random person’s low profile blog. To be a martyr of his race. So that humans will no longer look at him as solely an annoyance, a war game, a prophet, a loser in the Darwinian game show of life, but as a fellow creature of this world, with his own problems, his own love, losses, mind, body, soul. So that we can learn to treat the cousins that live on with the respect of fellow autonomous beings.
But then again, he could have just been a really fucking stupid mosquito.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Raisins [Grapes]
Exactly two weeks ago from this moment, 5:34 am (Pacific Standard Time), I was sitting in the dim florescent light of SeaTac, drinking a Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks and reading the New York Times: a distraction to abet my nerves as I awaited my first flight that would carry me to France.
Two weeks later, it is 14h34 (Central European Time), and I am sitting in my tiny dorm room, watching the sunlight shine through a spiderweb and eating grapes that I bought yesterday at the marché en plein aire. I feel like that airplane didn’t take me to a different country; it took me to a different world.
These grapes are different than any that I ever bought in the United States. With a certain chaste sweetness, yet stubborn flavor, a taste that can only be described as grape-ness, they are somehow more natural, more uncivilized. Perhaps because they contain seeds; I sometimes suspect that all fruit modified to be seedless have staged a protest by ridding themselves of all discernable flavors.
These grapes taste exactly the same, however, as the grapes that are growing right this moment at my grandparents’ backyard in Oregon. Playing there as a child, my brother and would stage large make believe productions that always included scenes of Dionysian consumption of grapes. We were weary knights that celebrated a battle by eating the grapes we found on the trail home. Or we were prison breakouts hiding in the nearby tree, who would spend the winter drinking “wine” (grapes crushed into a slime-like pulp) and eating “grape stew” (grapes in water, eaten with a spoon). We’d spit seeds at each other (because ex-cons have no use for manners) and laugh until we almost fell out of the tree.
These grapes were a prop that took us to a world of our own making.
Ever since I arrived in France, I can’t shake the same feeling of surrealism. The possibility that any moment, I will wake up in my grandfather’s backyard, after one of my better dreams. That this mystifying reality will be snatched away as easily as my childhood fantasies were with a call to dinner.
I hope that by the end of this semester, I will have bridged the gap between the continents in my mind. That I will believe that both France and my small corner of the United States...Portland, the Tri-Cities, Ellensburg….that they could possibly exist in the same world. That the difference between us are some customs, some history, some words, but that there is also some core of unity hidden somewhere.
I’ll do this, or at least to begin this, not by calling on sweeping historics; not Descartes, nor Lafayette, nor D-Day, nor the fact that many of our great-to-the-twelfth-power grandparents came from Europe. That, I believe, will get me nowhere but to equally sweeping generalizations.
I will start small. With the grapes that I could have picked in the small backyard of my family, or here, in a place becoming a little less foreign all the time.
* Note: All times were correct when I first wrote this. It just took me another week and a half to edit it.
Two weeks later, it is 14h34 (Central European Time), and I am sitting in my tiny dorm room, watching the sunlight shine through a spiderweb and eating grapes that I bought yesterday at the marché en plein aire. I feel like that airplane didn’t take me to a different country; it took me to a different world.
These grapes are different than any that I ever bought in the United States. With a certain chaste sweetness, yet stubborn flavor, a taste that can only be described as grape-ness, they are somehow more natural, more uncivilized. Perhaps because they contain seeds; I sometimes suspect that all fruit modified to be seedless have staged a protest by ridding themselves of all discernable flavors.
These grapes taste exactly the same, however, as the grapes that are growing right this moment at my grandparents’ backyard in Oregon. Playing there as a child, my brother and would stage large make believe productions that always included scenes of Dionysian consumption of grapes. We were weary knights that celebrated a battle by eating the grapes we found on the trail home. Or we were prison breakouts hiding in the nearby tree, who would spend the winter drinking “wine” (grapes crushed into a slime-like pulp) and eating “grape stew” (grapes in water, eaten with a spoon). We’d spit seeds at each other (because ex-cons have no use for manners) and laugh until we almost fell out of the tree.
These grapes were a prop that took us to a world of our own making.
Ever since I arrived in France, I can’t shake the same feeling of surrealism. The possibility that any moment, I will wake up in my grandfather’s backyard, after one of my better dreams. That this mystifying reality will be snatched away as easily as my childhood fantasies were with a call to dinner.
I hope that by the end of this semester, I will have bridged the gap between the continents in my mind. That I will believe that both France and my small corner of the United States...Portland, the Tri-Cities, Ellensburg….that they could possibly exist in the same world. That the difference between us are some customs, some history, some words, but that there is also some core of unity hidden somewhere.
I’ll do this, or at least to begin this, not by calling on sweeping historics; not Descartes, nor Lafayette, nor D-Day, nor the fact that many of our great-to-the-twelfth-power grandparents came from Europe. That, I believe, will get me nowhere but to equally sweeping generalizations.
I will start small. With the grapes that I could have picked in the small backyard of my family, or here, in a place becoming a little less foreign all the time.
* Note: All times were correct when I first wrote this. It just took me another week and a half to edit it.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Debut
It started like this:
Ever since I was six years old, I have been one of those people with an odd infatuation with France.
I am sure you have met at least one before. Like girls that have an obsession with dance or horses, these people decorate their notebooks with meticulously drawn Eiffel Towers. They pepper their everyday speech with French words, not unlike Miss Piggy. Who sample the small fraction of France’s 300+ cheeses available at Yokes Fresh Market. Who against all reason, all practicality, take high school French classes so that they can order crepes at the mall with the correct accent, which, incidentally, sounds somewhat like flattened “crap.”
And so, as I entered what is technically my senior year at Central Washington University, I jumped at the chance to spend a semester in France.
Here I am in Caen, France, a place I had no idea existed before this little adventure (It’s in Normandy, near the English Channel, to save you the trip to Google Maps). Endless paperwork, a trip to San Francisco, a few nervous breakdowns, and unrelenting parental support have gotten me here.
Now that I am here, living the dream, what am I going to do? Well, I am going to do what any self respecting Journalism Major would do. I’m going to blog about it.
Ever since I was six years old, I have been one of those people with an odd infatuation with France.
I am sure you have met at least one before. Like girls that have an obsession with dance or horses, these people decorate their notebooks with meticulously drawn Eiffel Towers. They pepper their everyday speech with French words, not unlike Miss Piggy. Who sample the small fraction of France’s 300+ cheeses available at Yokes Fresh Market. Who against all reason, all practicality, take high school French classes so that they can order crepes at the mall with the correct accent, which, incidentally, sounds somewhat like flattened “crap.”
And so, as I entered what is technically my senior year at Central Washington University, I jumped at the chance to spend a semester in France.
Here I am in Caen, France, a place I had no idea existed before this little adventure (It’s in Normandy, near the English Channel, to save you the trip to Google Maps). Endless paperwork, a trip to San Francisco, a few nervous breakdowns, and unrelenting parental support have gotten me here.
Now that I am here, living the dream, what am I going to do? Well, I am going to do what any self respecting Journalism Major would do. I’m going to blog about it.
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