Category: solipsism

Underwater

So, um, yeah, I guess I kinda went MIA there for a little while.  I went to Berlin, which was delicious, and I want to tell you all about it.  I was staying with my lovely friends and their three year old, so most of my time was spent shooting the shit with them (which we can do copiously), drinking beer, eating yummy things, and chasing the kid around with glee.  When it came time to sit down at the old blargh in the evenings, I instead collapsed and dreamed of wooden trains and wurst. I came back to Paris on Sunday, so I don’t really have a good excuse for not posting until now. Well, there were those several huge piles of midterms that I needed to grade.  There is also something else, but I’m worried that if I blog about it, I will sound verifiably nuts.

I think I’m allergic to my apartment.

Or maybe Paris.

Or maybe I’m just allergic to not being in Berlin.

Either way, I’ve been congested since I my first lungful of French air. Last night, all the snot climaxed into this bizarre thing where it felt like my ear was filled with the kind of pressure you get on the plane or underwater or when driving up to my mom’s house in Colorado, except it was a thousand times worse. I’m such a hypochrondriac that I began imagining all kinds of crazy scenarios, including early-onset deafness or black mold growing somewhere in my apartment. I even entertained the idea that an earwig had crawled into my ear canal and taken up residency. Isn’t that why they are CALLED earwigs in the first place? An hour or so on WedMD confirmed my worst suspicions, and I called B crying and spluttering that I was going deaf and if I wasn’t going deaf I was surely going mad. To his credit, he came over and watched me writhe around like a jackass for a few hours, never once remarking that I was being kind of a huge baby about some ear pressure. I think he even at one point promised to learn to sign if I was indeed going deaf. A swell guy if I’ve ever met one. My ear finally popped, slowly and pathetically, and I collapsed from all of the self-induced stress.

I still feel woozy and my ear still feels like I’m scuba diving.  I’ll get to some restaurant reviews soon, and I’m really sorry to those people (Hi Mom and Dad!  Hi M!  Hi Londoner!) who come here everyday hoping for a post.  Right after I chew this pack of gum and yawn for a couple of hours, I’m on it.

If you want something sumptuous to read (I’d say “in the meantime,” but let’s be honest, nothing I’m going to tell you about currywurst would deserve that adjective), I would you suggest you visit my friend Brandon’s new food blog Terre et Mer.  The world of foodies can be broken into two camps:  fat kids and gastronomes.  I think it is pretty clear on which side of that fence I fall.  Brandon, on the other hand, is of the latter persuasion, and when he isn’t watching Agnès Varda films, collecting rare Armagnacs, writing about Proust, or learning his ninth foreign language, he is probably eating something so rarified and delicious that the rest of us plebs can only dream about it.  He’s also sharp, funny, and appears to have some serious chops for this oh so lofty blarging genre. Check him out.

Until soon, my patient, dearest reader. My jeans are tight from all the research I did for you. You’re welcome.

“Homeless” is probably a bit of an overstatement

As of tomorrow, I’ll be homeless for a week.  This isn’t a very big deal, though I’ve done a remarkably large amount of grumbling about it.  My landlady and I agreed when I took my apartment that I would vacate it for one week in the summer so that she could stay here during a conference.  Somehow “summer” turned into “the middle of the spring semester,” but at any rate, I agreed to this arrangement a while ago and now have to shut up and vacate the premises.  File this under “one of the many consequences of having nothing in writing.”  Rental contracts are totally bourgeois, man.

I’m still debating whether or not to show her the little trick for making the hot water in the shower work.  Right now I’m fifty-fifty on whether or not I let her suffer through icy cold showers for a week.  You know, as a simulation of what the first two and a half months of my stay in Paris were like.  A little taste, you might say.  Let’s see if she isn’t grumbling like a high-maintenance American after a few days.

The good news is that I’ve decided to take advantage of both my temporary eviction and my enviable “work week” to go on a trip to Berlin.  I’ll be staying with three of my favorite people in the world and visiting some old haunts (as I’m sure you suspected, most of my “haunts” involve eating delicious things.)  After a few months in Berlin two years ago, I swore that I would never need to eat German food again.  Ha!  I’m already dreaming about all of the leberwurst, blutwurst, currywurst (I know!) and pickled mackrel that I’ll be eating, washed down with copious amounts of Dunkel and Schwarzbier. Clarence is going to Berlin, people! It’s going to be great.

In the meantime, I hope you have a great Easter.  Regardless of your convictions about that whole resurrection thing, I think that spring is something that everybody can get behind.

Booze or lose: Cannibale Café

Cannibale Café

93, rue Jean Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris

Métro: Couronnes

http://www.myspace.com/lecannibalecafe

So I’m realizing that Booze or Lose might be the most short-lived of these “features.” While I find myself happy to describe in excruciating detail everything I eat, I find myself reluctant to tell you about bars I like.  This isn’t because I think I’m too cool or in the know (believe me, it’s never ever because I think I’m too cool or in the know), but mainly because there are only so many ways you can say “well, they have a zinc bar, good lighting, and I suspect that everyone who frequents this place shops only at APC and has better taste in music than I do.”  Basically every bar I like in this town would fit that description, and it’s kind of boring to see that rehashed weekly on a blog.

I will mention the Cannibale Café, however, because it seems to do aforementioned combination quite well.  Plus they have a lot of live music and what they describe as a “copious brunch on Sundays.”  I haven’t been to their copious brunch, but I like that particular adjective when paired with brunch very, very much.  One downside is that their pints of 1664 (totally hip and darling to buy in the US, more or less like PBR over here on this side of the pond) are a whopping 6.50€.  That’s like thirty-seven dollars or so.  Conversion humor!  Always a giggle.  Well, not quite as much as it used to be, as apparently the euro is tanking.  While I know that there are much larger forces at work behind this economic development, I can’t help but suspect (in my own admittedly solipsistic way) that it has something to do with the fact that I’m finally getting paid in euros.  Where was Greece when I was hemorrhaging cash in Europe circa 2008?  Anyway, however you do the math, it’s an expensive beer.  An ex-boyfriend of mine had some kind of theory about what he described as eight-dollar-beer places.  I don’t exactly remember the theory.  I think it was mainly an attempt to talk into frequenting places with sticky floors and bargain pitchers of Coors Light.  But he did nail the price point and the sheer ridiculousness of an eight-dollar beer has stuck with me.

This isn’t a very sunny review.

I do really like this place!

One particularly enjoyable evening at Cannibale recently included a performance by Hold Your Horses, a Franco-American group that is getting a fair amount of internet buzz because of their video for “70 Million.”  Have you seen it yet?

Who am I kidding?  Not only have you already seen it, half of you have probably already integrated it into your Art History 101 syllabus. You are such savvy pedagogues, you 50% of my readership. But anyway, I like this video very much. It’s one of the better things to go viral in the past month or so.

Speaking of going viral, I now bring you a Pettiness Campaign 2010 update. I’m pleased to related that Hold Your Horses has over 10 times as many views as an unnamed other person’s video, which has stalled slightly in its exponential ascent to that peculiar heaven inhabited by Glenn Beck.  B convinced me that there was no way I could possibly continue in my contempt-filled, elitist-expat lifestyle without actually watching some of Mr. Beck’s videos.  I am finding them to be like ill-reasoned, sputtering crack cocaine.  I like it when he gets so worked up that he just starts shooting off a series of random, unrelated nouns. I also kind of lose my shit every single time he turns to the chalkboard.  What an amazing prop!  Depressingly, if success can be defined in quantifiable terms (does late capitalism really teach us any other lesson?), Mr. Beck is more successful than anyone else in the universe.  He also can apparently charge $120 for the privilege of going to a stadium and watching him rant about progressivism and fuck around on his chalkboard on the Jumbotron.  I don’t have any pithy commentary on that little gem of a factoid, as all I could do when I looked up his ticket prices on Ticketmaster was soundlessly open and close my mouth in a piscine gesture of disbelief.

This entry is becoming entirely unrelated to Cannibale Café.  I’ll end it now, before some poor soul seeking a bar recommendation on Google has to slog through another six paragraphs of my bullshit.  Sorry poor soul!  I’d definitely recommend you go to Cannibale!  Just order wine, okay?

It is interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools.

My students informed me today that I am supposed to go on strike tomorrow. None of my supervisors have mentioned this, so it came as a bit of a surprise. I knew that they were threatening another transit strike for tomorrow, but those barely faze me at this point. Transit strikes don’t prevent me from getting to work, they merely make it a longer, harder, more frustrating commute. But now I’m worried that I’ll do battle with all the other annoyed commuters tomorrow, only to arrive on an empty campus.

When I asked them why I should be striking, they responded with the ambiguous explanation of “labor problems.” When I probed further, they settled on “employment issues.” I tried to change tactics and turn it into a discussion about the French proclivity for striking.  But my students didn’t really have much of an opinion about striking. It’s like bad weather, one kid explained. It’s going to happen, there’s nothing you can do about it, and there isn’t any point in getting worked up. It half-occurred to me that they might be fucking with me in hopes that I would cancel my classes and tell the other English-speaking lecturers to do the same. At the same time, I think these students actually like me and might be trying to do me a favor. In these situations I can’t help but feel like the dumb American monkey that has been imported to France to provide these students with “a native speaker.” Unless someone tells me otherwise, I’ll schlep to work tomorrow, bring a book to read in case nobody shows up, and shoot the shit in English with the few errant students who do show up. I think that the last thing is basically what they are paying me to do anyway.

My cluelessness about the mechanisms of French bureaucracy was terrifying when I first moved here. Now I’m just pleasantly amused by the perpetual confusion that surrounds me. The French university system is a bona fide mess, but on the whole I’ve found the individuals that inhabit it to be well-meaning and generous to the hapless American. I will admit that I feel as though I’m playacting as a teacher here. When someone enters my classroom and uncertainly asks if I am the professor, I nod and smile, but it is always tinged with uncertainty. Yes, I am the instructor of record, but no, I don’t know if you can technically register for my class, or where room 407E is, or if the university is on strike tomorrow. But we are reading about shark hunting and learning funny idioms today, not because there is a curriculum that demands we do so, but because it was what I managed to come up with. Join us! English is fun for everyone! It reminds me of a passage in Don Delillo’s Underworld where he is describing the selves that we are at work:

“I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you are pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.”

* * *

Photo courtesy of the comely M. Starik.

It’s spring, maybe.

Oh, I have a blog.  That’s right.

I’ve been thinking about posting for the past couple of days, but honestly I’m running low on ideas. Suddenly it’s spring in Paris and all I want to do is sit on a bench in Place des Vosges with the sun on my face, soaking up all the Vitamin D that I’ve missed out on in the past four months of grey gloom.  It’s making me single-minded and boring as hell.

One of the things that bother me the most about my parents is that they incessantly talk about the weather.  My mother is as close to a weather hypochondriac as one can possibly be.  We are always on the verge of “the biggest snowstorm of the year,” “the driest summer in recorded history,” or “a hailstorm with hailstones the size of a baby’s fist” as far as she’s concerned.  She’s especially smug when the weather does match or exceed her fatalistic expectations.  My mother rocks the “I told you so!” like nobody’s business.  On the other hand, my father is more or less a professional snowboarder at this point in his life, so our conversations always begin with a detailed account of the snow conditions at the local ski areas, despite the fact that I live on another continent.  I keep telling him that he should start a blog of snowfall and grooming reports – he could probably make a killing in the Colorado ski community.  Anyway, if you are someone who happens to believe in the magical power of one’s own thoughts to change the world around you (remember, Freud tells us that only savages, children, and the mad believe in such a thing), I suspect that my parents are actually just canceling each other out in their extreme weather augury:

Mother:  “Please, please don’t let it snow six feet tonight!”

Father:  “Please, please let it snow six feet of feather-light power tonight!”

Anyway, this is longwinded way of explaining that I hate how much my parents talk about the weather.  And yet, and yet, and yet I suddenly find myself PHYSICALLY UNABLE to speak of anything except the weather: how grateful I am to see the sun, how lucky we are to be able to leave our windows open for a few hours, and how pleasant it is to see everyone in Paris out and about and enjoying a reprieve from the blistering cold.  Adulthood has been for me a slow, but steady realization that I’m not nearly as different from my parents as I might have hoped, and that it is actually okay.  My parents are pretty awesome.  My mom hopes it doesn’t snow tomorrow because she is probably going to go for a killer hike if the weather holds.  My dad is praying for snow, but that’s because he is the only 65-year old I know that snowboards over a hundred days a year.

I used to think my parent’s near-maniacal obsession with being outside was annoying – why couldn’t we just be sedentary like so many other families I knew?  Why did we have to live in this spectacularly beautiful and entirely inconvenient place?  Why were we always DOING things TOGETHER as a family, like skiing and bicycling and hiking and camping at the beach?  Why did I have to have a father who described the ski area as his own personal church?  HOW WEIRD.  Now that I’m older and see that my parents are happier, healthier, and just generally more terrific to be around than most people their age, I realize that they had the right idea all along.  When in doubt, go outside and move around.