Monthly Archives: March 2005

if you like pina colada…

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why anyone would like getting caught in the rain is beyond me.  don’t get me wrong– I love the rain when seen from the inside out, from my apartment, or a car.  but getting caught without an umbrella in a downpour does not say "party!" to me the way a pina colada does.  I don’t remember who sings that song (Barry Manilow??) and I’m too tired to look it up, but whoever you are, you are Wrong.

It’s been rainy quite a bit in my world lately– not metaphorically, but quite literally.  Big plunking raindrosp falling on my head every time I turn around.  Last week, all weekend, this week… we went to the Bourgogne for Easter weekend and dropped off a friend at some obscure mountain aerie she called her house, and on the way back down the mountain the gods began throwing ice cubes down at the car.  That’s some hail the French weather system managed to come up with.  The party another friend hosted Sunday night? a giant rainfest.  the drive back to paris? rain, with a generous helping of traffic.

But despite the fact that it’s always raining, I seem to have difficulty remembering to bring an umbrella.  You know the line that says something about how umbrella are never really "yours," they’re just on loan from the universe? (I’m fairly positive that’s from an episode of "Seinfeld.") Well, normally I am very surveillant of my umbrella.  I rarely lose them.  I just forget to bring them.  Or, like Helen Schlegel, I steal other people’s.   

Last week, however, I began the curious habit of borrowing umbrellas.  On thursday I was bustling down Blvd Saint Michel on my way to the Luxembourg RER, when I ran into Kaitlin.  It was pouring and I grabbed her under an overhang to moan that I had forgotten my umbrella and was soaking wet and had a meeting to go to in Chatenay-Malabry.  Kaitlin, ever the kindest of souls, offered me hers, which I surprised myself (and possibly her as well) by accepting.  I was desperately unhappy and soaking wet and K’s red umbrella made all the difference.  (I should add that at the moment she was wearing a hat and had the umbrella in her bag, so it’s not like I took the shelter from over her head).  We made a special trip to the 5th arrondissement on Saturday morning before heading out of town to put the umbrella in Kaitlin’s mailbox.  The End.

This week, I again set off without am umbrella, and it again began to pour while I was out and about.  This time I was in the 17th, giving my weekly English lesson to a charming 10 year-old named Louise.  When the lesson was over and I was leaving, her father noticed I had no umbrella and insisted I borrow one of theirs, which I again gladly accepted. 

Today I left the house armed with Louise’s father’s umbrella (I have an aversion to bringing my own umbrella, it seems, but I’ll bring other peoples’–??).  It was sunny all day long.  Then, around 6, it started to pour.  By this time I had made all of my rounds around the city, and was warmly ensconced in the reading room of the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve.  I heard the echo of the rain on the dome above, and thought to myself "My, how lucky that I brought an umbrella" followed immediately by "Shit I left Louise’s father’s umbrella at Le Cercle," the cafe where I had been at 4 pm.

I rushed back to the cafe, all of a sudden nervous that in the downpour, someone would make off with my lent umbrella.  I got soaked between the library and the cafe, and when I arrived I looked like someone had soaked me with a water balloon.  I said piteously to the barman, "Please, sir, I’ve forgotten my umbrella." The gallants gathered around the bar began to hoot.  "You needed it five minutes ago, mademoiselle!" they choked out.  The barman presented me with the umbrella and asked if that was the one.  Since it was not really my umbrella, I didn’t recognize it right away, but sort of looked at it and blinked before saying yes, yes, that’s the one, thank you.  Of course more derision followed as if to insinuate that I were accepting any old umbrella.  How could I explain that it wasn’t really mine, but a lent umbrella? Who were they to enforce some kind of rule of ownership on an object said to belong not to any human but to all humans?

I’m home now, and I’m dry.  But watch– next tuesday I’ll forget to bring the umbrella back to Louise’s father.

gay messiah, or what is religious “truth”?

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Last week the Vatican finally spoke out against the bestselling and awkwardly written "The DaVinci Code."  This constitutes news because the book alleges that Jesus and Mary Magdalene got it on and had a child who went on to found a line of– royalty, was it? or just intellectual elistists?– well at any rate, a line of descendents in France apparently still procreating today.  While tour guides and booksellers are making a mint off the book, historians, literary critics, and the Catholic church find themselves for perhaps the first time since the Middle Ages all on the same side: that is, anti-Dan Brown. 

All three groups are offended by the book’s atrocious lack of quality or accuracy. But it is the Catholic church who has perhaps the most tenuous case of all.  The BBC reports: ‘The archbishop told Il Giornale: "The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true."’

Now, hold on a second.  According to the Catholic church, Jesus did some rather extraordinary things, such as being born of a virgin, walking on water, turning water into wine, and not staying put in his tomb.  If you are Catholic, you believe in those things, just as other religions believe in their own manifestations of godliness. 

So who’s to say that a group of people with no literary taste (that is, the people the Church fears are dumb enough to believe what Dan Brown writes)  can’t believe that Jesus had a sex life and a kid? Why can’t we believe what we want to believe? Why is it "false" to think maybe some of the stuff Dan Brown writes about is any truer than the Immaculate Conception, just because people have believed longer in the latter idea? What I’m asking is, how does a religious belief become validated?

I’m not at all launching an attack on any form of religion, by the way (just a disclaimer), I just wonder what makes one belief acceptable, no matter how outlandish or incredible, and another idea an attack on the Church.

By the way, adventures in the Land of Shaygitz continue.  The last boy was at least an "athiest"– but the new boy is from an actively Catholic family. Yikes. um…. happy easter? he is very open-minded about religion, which is great, and I look forward to having him to my franco-american seder in april once passover (or "jewish easter," as they call it in french) rolls around.  But still– oy.

stale as a day-old baguette

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man, I’m sorry I’ve been so lax about posting in the last week or so– this copy is getting pretty stale! it’s just that any creative thinking and writing I’ve been doing recently has been limited to the thesis I’m working on for my DEA, reportage on the French Jewish community, and basically looking after my academic career: applying to doctoral programsin paris, arranging a cotutelle, submitting abstracts to conferences, writing a *gulp* faux-dissertation prospectus to submit to *gulp* potential French dissertation advisers. then there’s the social life, which I’m not even going to get into here because I’m bound to offend someone in my life, be they part of my past, present, or future. jeez. can’t catch a break.

so tonight I’m yielding to the calendar and going out to get properly soused for st. patrick’s day. that ain’t no blarney. cheers.

fandom

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OMG u guyz.  June 13: me n tori (n a bunch of other people who don’t matter) @ the zenith here in paris. how cool is that? i luv the way she puts the damage on. somebody hand me my leather.

Ok; but seriously– I know Tori Amos has her teenybopper fans, certainly, and I well remember the day when I was one of them, in a Tori chat room on AOL when I was fifteen, having overly intense discussions about themes running the gamut from fairies to rape. But eleven years on she’s still making great music and I’m still buying all of her albums… the last one that came out, "The Beekeeper," I’m still getting used to. there are some great songs on there– hello, "hootchie woman"?!–but I think the whole "sinsuality" thing that is the basic theme of this new tour doesn’t quite work.

tori’s always been about either attacking or recuperating christianity and female sexuality from the hands of the egoist male chauvinists who run the show– cf. "Icicle"– and so on the new album features the song "original sinsuality,"with lyrics like  "original sin/no I don’t think so…no it should be original sin-suality" to a sort of contrived, cutesy, trippy little melody that is belied by the more complex harmonic progressions that ensue… but I think she’s more effective when she keeps to exploring random feelings ("the power of orange knickers") and musing over failed relationships ("mother revolution").      

nevertheless I’m totally psyched to see her play in paris. something that poses a bit more of a problem: who to take? I don’t think any of my girlfriends here are particularly big tori fans. And god knows what will be happening with the boys by then.  So I will hold a contest to determine who can come with me.  Here’s how to enter: tell me what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts.  Whoever has the best answer and can be in Paris on June 13th can come with me.

baxter does the moonwalk

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I’m sitting up in bed reading my email, getting over a massive combination hangover/migraine.  Baxter was just over on his wee-wee pad doing, well, what he does there.  When he finished, he started doing the strangest thing–  moving himself in a backwards direction while trying to dig up the carpet with gusto.  I looked at him with one eyebrow raised.  He caught my eye and froze mid-moonwalk, and then righted himself, as if to say,  "ahem. excuse the lapse into common dog behavior."  It was a very Brian on "The Family Guy" moment.

One of my recent  interludes did the moonwalk for me.  Who was it? I hardly know who to look back on fondly, wryly, because they’re all collapsing into each other. That’s the problem with dating around, instead of staying with one person: it’s hard to remember who said or did what clever thing.

ouch! she said as she tumbled from the wagon

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the gorgeous two-week (non) vacation’s over and today I went back to work.  First stop: my class on 20th c. avant-garde French literature, where we were lectured by a visiting Japanese Proust scholar on the connections between Apollinaire and Picasso.
Then I had to be up at the IUFM 30 minutes north of the Sorbonne and I had 20 minutes travel time and the Proust man with his slides and his darkened classroom had me falling asleep (literally nodding off– my head was doing that thing where your chin is drawn down to your chest and then you jerk it up and then it bobs down again and you want to give in and sleep but you’re in the middle of class and your research director is watching you and you jerk it up again and nearly give yourself whiplash) and so heaven forgive me–

I went to Starbucks.

The shame, the shame! The ignominy! made so much worse by the fact that they asked my name and WROTE IT ON THE CUP. I ran to the subway and realized I was sitting there holding a Starbucks cup with the word "Lorraine" written on it.  At least it wasn’t my name, I reasoned. But still– that I should be seen in public carrying a Starbucks cup and that the fellow riders should suppose my name to be "Lorraine"  sounded the depths of humiliation.  I put on my best snotty girl-on-the-subway face and tried to hide in my iPod.

What was I to do? I needed caffeine! There was no alternative! No time to sit in a cafe! No instant coffee machine nearby! Couldn’t wait to use the one at the IUFM because the caffeine needed time to seep into my bloodstream before I was awake enough to teach!

So this is what life looks like at the bottom of the barrel.

Leaving New York– over and over

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Today I was reading an article about French immigration to Israel called "Au revoir Paris; Bonjour Israel!" The front page of the article featured a shot of the Eiffel Tower and the surrounding neighborhood at dusk juxtaposed with an El Al plane taking off.  Much as I loved visiting Israel and would love to spend some more time there– well, call me a blasphemer but to leave Paris for Israel seemed sacreligious. I felt a reaffirmation of my choice to live in Paris swell up in my chest.

But really, it’s just a question of exchanging one set of symbols for another.  I mean, come on– I should be embarrassed to have had such a visceral and cheesy reaction to the Eiffel Tower, no? It’s cool to be unimpressed by it.  As Aleksandr Petrofsky’s daughter put it so eloquently in the last season of "Sex and the City": "It’s heedyus. Just heeeeedyus."  But then, I’ve never been able to pull off deadpan.

Anyway, on my recent trip to London I spent some time with my Emily.  On the Tube, we discussed our feelings toward New York right now.  Neither of us felt any active desire to be there– more just an occasional nostalgia for the past brought up by random evocations of Houston Street or the FDR Drive.  No, we decided– we were both completely happy in London and Paris, respectively.

But then I read this article on Slate this week, and I realize that my relationship to my "hometown" (ok, I’m originally from Long Island, but 8 years in Manhattan I think gives me the rightt o call it my "hometown") is more complex than the occasional twinge of nostalgia.  If you’ll allow me to quote the author, Inigo Thomas, at length:

"In his book Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan, Phillip Lopate writes that New York is the saddest of cities—saddest because of its incompleteness, the feeling that nothing there is finished or fulfills its potential. Such an observation might seem a bit overdramatic; aren’t other cities equally sad—how about Havana? And just how do you measure sadness? Yet I know what he means. Perhaps it has something to do with New York having once been a port, where there was all this coming and going. And yet the port is no more, and the arriving and departing is now invisible, and it’s sometimes difficult not to be nostalgic for another time, when you could watch your boat come, or look back at last summer when life was better than it is now. Sitting on a bench on Hudson River Park starring at the sunset can be unbearable, the light inspiring an overpowering nostalgia, which encroaches even more strongly in the fall, as evening approaches, when colors caught in turning leaves resemble stained-glass in a cathedral or another place of mourning."

I can’t generalize about why New York is the saddest of cities like Lopate– I can only speak for myself.  Personally, New York is the saddest of cities because it represents who and what I will never be.  That is–content to be where I’m from.  A local.  Why did I never fit in in a place where everyone is supposed to fit in? and why do I now feel that I fit in in a place that discourages heterogeneity?

But going beyond  banal discussions of "fitting in," whatever that means– mentally putting myself back in Riverside Park at sunset brings tears to my eyes, like pushing on a recent bruise.  And it’s not as much about the beauty of the leaves or the colors or the light or the river– although all those things are crucial–as it is about being twenty years old again, in the middle of my college years at Barnard, with my entire future in front of me, with New York City, and therefore the world, opening wide its doors. 

At some point those doors began to close, and that’s when I needed to leave New York.   I no longer view the world in terms of an opening and closing of opportunities.  I try not to push on bruises when I get them.  There will be other sunsets in Riverside Park in my future, as I return to New York for various personal and professional reasons for various lengths of time.  But every time I think about what I’ll never have in New York, and what I ought to have had there, it’s like saying goodbye over and over.

I fought the law and the law won

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Well, today I had my first run-in with the French authorities.  I emerged from it a sadder but wiser girl, poorer twenty-five euros for the experience.

To add insult to injury this happened as I was returning from a dentist’s appointment in a banlieue called Suresnes to fix a filling that cracked when I flew back to France in January.  I had been putting off making an appointment because I hate the whole experience of the dentist’s office– from the shot to the loss of motor skills to the drilling and the spitting and then the bill and the residual pain from a decreased bank account and the promise of more dental work to be done or face the imminent collapse of all the other fillings I’ve been accumulating since the age of fourteen.

The crazy thing about the banlieux is that they are considered Zone 3 by the RATP. My carte orange limits me to zones 1 and 2.  Did I know this? On some level, yes. But when I passed through the gate to enter the RER at La Defense, pas de probleme avec ma carte orange.  I went on my merry way, boarded the Tram to Suresnes, and arrived at the dentist.

My trip home was another story.  When I descended from the tram and attempted to enter the RER again, my carte organe was denied.  I realized for the first time that I was in fact in Zone 3 and my ticket really wasn’t going to work.  So I bought a supplementary pass for 2 euros, put it in the machine, and continued on my way.

Til I approached the actual entrance to the RER (different from the Tram exit).  I slid my ticket in the slot– and it didn’t work.  Confused, I turned to an RATP employee standing guard, making sure no one jumped the turnstiles.  "Monsieur, I don’t understand why my ticket won’t pass?"

He looked at my ticket, on which was printed very clearly, "Zones 1 & 2."  "where are you coming from?" he asked.

confused, I said "New York." He laughed.  "No, today?"

"Oh. Suresnes."

"How did you get to Suresnes with this ticket?" he asked sternly.

"I don’t know. I took the RER.  And I bought a little purple ticket to get onto the tram."

He wanted to see the tram ticket, which I hadn’t kept because I thought the machine ate it.  Without the ticket, he had no proof that I had paid to be where I was.  So I was considered "in infraction" of the law.  And I was given the RATP equivalent of a speeding ticket.  And forced to recount my story to several (male and leering) RATP employees who each referred me back to the original guy.  I was the rush hour entertainment for these guys.  I’m still angry about it.  But what can I do? I should have kept the freaking ticket stub! That was a very expensive metro ride, it turned out.  I just feel so violated.

a brief non sequitur to cap off the day, before I throw in the towel and beg for mercy: I hate, but absolutely hate, the city of Portland.  I know, I know, get over it, the best is yet to come, blah blah blah, pace my mother and my best friend and my conscience and Frank Sinatra, but I find a certain measure of comfort in directing my anger toward an entire city, so it can shatter into as many fragments as there are inhabitants of that godforsaken excuse for a metropolis, and in fragmenting, disperse and settle like so many raindrops, increasing the deluge on that rainy locale.  may their sunshine be limited and their women hairy. amen.