Weak Ties

    Humans, I have learned, are like strings bound together in loose knots, the associations that bind and tie us to one another. Most often, we stay within the realm of our own little knot. We dare not free ourselves, take a leap, bind ourselves to other people, places, things. The ties are weak so we can move freely, so we can connect one another, swinging like monkeys from branch to branch. This is how jobs are filled, friends are made, first dates are planned.

     Admittedly, it can be scary to let some slack in and use one's weak ties.

     But oh, what is so possible when we do.

     Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist, gave a talk at TED that I have since watched and has rattled me
( in the best way possible ) about my twenties, especially since they are passing so, so, so quickly. She argues that there are three things twenty somethings need to do to take advantage of our 20s, the very most epitome of adult development:

      1) Get some identity capital: aka, stop worrying about who you are and start being who you are. Figure out who you are and what you love and go after it.

       2) Experiment in fruitful ways: do stimulating internships, take positive risks. These are not years to waste, but years to take advantage of. Not extra time, but extra mileage

      3) Use your weak ties to find the positive risks: too many twenty somethings huddle together with like minded peers who aren't going to challenge them, but it's in stepping outside the inner circle that we break

        In the spirit of weak ties, I decided to go to a UC Berkeley alumni event this evening at the France-Ameriques salon to welcome the new chancellor.

*  *  * 

        The France-Ameriques salon is appropriately on the avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt near the Champs-Elysées. The salon is a converted mansion, an hôtel particulier, called le Marois, built under Haussman near 1863. A marble foyer is attended by beefy, imposing stair case saturated in oil frescoes and gilded rails. In this lovely mansion Berkeley alumni gathered for cocktails.

          One of the downsides of being such a young expat is that more often than not, I often find I am the baby of such events. Naturally, I am often at first at a loss for bearings. Such was the case tonight. There were maybe five guests under the age of thirty at this event, me included.

          I started chatting. Then I saw a gentleman who HAPPENED to look under the age of thirty with a nice smile, smart glasses, a crisp white button down, and a Burberry tie, so I did what I always do: I said ¨bonsoir¨ with a smile.

           And then we started talking. A Frenchie. Did his Masters at Berkeley. Had just returned from three years in the States in March. Had launched his own startups. Was doing quite well it seemed. I don't know if it was the glass of dry white wine I had in my hands, but he was attractive. And not a jerk, either! Oh my. I turned out to be the baby of the two of us: he just turned thirty. And he spoke fluent English. Gulp. This one might actually be on my level. 

            Brown hair, ice blue eyes behind a pair of glasses. Sense of humor. Smart as hell. Oh my...

           I didn't think it would be possible to erase the French Wine Baron from my mind in the blink of an eye, but WHAM. Gone.

            I coyly said that if he worked in startups, I knew entrepreneurs he might be interested in working with. He held out his phone and told me to add myself on his LinkedIn account. I did. We kept talking most of the evening. He playfully teased me about staying in France:

             ¨ You know, if you want to stay here, you should just marry a Frenchman...¨
             ¨ Every time, every time everyone says that, I'm sick of it!¨ I laughed.
            ¨ I was told the same thing in the States,¨ he said, then added with a laugh ¨But I dated a German girl there for two years...¨

            Then of course we started talking philosophy of America vs. Europe and I suggested an article for him. He said to send it to him and then we could discuss it if I invited him to a fourth of July party next week, as he could then invite me to a Bastille day party.

             He waited, as I saw from the corner of my eye, for me to finish talking with another alum so he could say goodbye before he took his leave. He bise'd me on the cheek and went to get his coat.

             I went to the métro down the street with a bounce in my step, a levity of heart, a smile at the infinitely possible, the sort of feeling that makes you want to leap up onto a dinner table for no reason at all and start singing at the top of your lungs...to a song that sort of goes like this. 

             At home, I accepted his request on LinkedIn and then more than flirtily sent him said article...

             So, let's get this straight universe: you seem to have sent me something I didn't think existed, which is an older than I am, bilingual, funny, attractive, BERKELEY GRAD FRENCHIE.

           HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

            We'll see what happens next.

            Weak ties, after all, are good for something.

         

       
   

 
   

A dream.

          Last night, I dreamt of you.

         We hadn't spoken in far too long, but in my dreams we were for some stupid, Freudian reason in the grocery store. I turned the corner and there you were in the aisles and I could only stand there, bouche bée. For reasons unknown your family is with you.

          The next thing I know, I am crying hard in your arms, so so sad at all that has passed between us. My tears somehow give me the illusion that it has all changed, has all shifted so much that we can try and repair it all again, put together the pieces.

          My conscious, half awake self knows far too well we cannot.

          But dream you is hugging dream me and stroking my cheek to wipe away the droplets dampening the curve of my face. Yet I continue to cry.

          I awake and the tears eviscerate into the dark matter of existence.

          My mourning remains.

Heaven on Sundays is called the Marché d'Aligre

     In the absence of any love interest in my life, I've been taking the time to figure out just what it is that I love: about my life, about Paris, about being single. And certainly, one of the things I love the most of all right now is cooking. It keeps my hands busy and my mind moving when I need something calming to occupy me, and unlike writing, it's something I can usually share, and moreover, nourish others with. Nourishing, I suppose, is an absolute need of mine, because I can't go long without doing so.  It seems I wasn't a nanny for nothing.  Nanny in French is the term nourrice, or ¨nourisher,¨ as from the days when a newborn child was handed off to a wet nurse who nourished ( literally! ) the infant. I'm no longer a nanny, but I do love to feed myself and others very, very well.

      One of my greatest pleasures and loves of the moment is vegetarian cuisine. ( Yes. I came to the land of delicious delicious meats and I became a vegetarian. ) Once, at the age of 11, I attempted vegetarianism and failed miserably. My stepdad and mother still tease me about this. Now I have the last laugh.

        That said, you cannot be a vegetarian in the land of meat if you do not like to cook, it just isn't going to work. When you say you're vegetarian in France, people will ask you if you still eat chicken. When you kindly explain that you don't eat meat at all, they'll ask if you eat fish. If you ask a waiter at a brasserie to hold the ham on that croque madame, you will still inevitably find the slice of ham in your croque madame. Vegetarianism, and furthermore, veganism, is an unknown, strange, and somewhat sacrilegious phenomenon to French culture, thought it is slowly taking root here.

          My vegetarianism, let's make one thing clear, has nothing to do with my enjoyment of meat or animal products. I happen to thoroughly like  duck, pigeon, and poulet rôti. I love cheese...how can one not love cheese when you live a mere three minute walk around the corner from Nicole Barthélémy? Yogurt here is to die for. I just prefer not to eat meat and a lot of these things from a health standpoint. This might have something to do with my first visit to my general practicioner in Paris.

          My GP  is a bilingual, squat woman of probably 51 or 52, with friendly blue eyes and a deft manner.  Her cabinet, in the fifth near rue Monge on a seemingly medieval street tucked behind cheap tourist restaurants whose offerings are greasy fondue and decent omelettes, sits on the third floor where the floorboards creak. The first time I came to see her for a standard check up, she examined me, weighed me, made me sit down on that annoyingly wrinkly, barely opaque white paper that is universal in doctor's offices, took some notes, and then said to me:
 
            ¨You are overweight. You cannot afford to gain more weigh. Watch your red meat, do not eat a lot of cheese or charcuterie.¨

             I was mightily taken aback.

             ¨I am nearly almost entirely vegetarian!¨ I exclaimed, adding that I'm a hard core marathon runner who trains and races. At that point in my stay in France, I'd already lost twenty pounds since my arrival, was the slimmest I'd been in years, and felt so good about my body. But she blew that out of the water faster than a hand grenade thrown into a box of TNT.

             Let's get this straight: this 5'4, 135 pound marathon runner is OVER WEIGHT!? Are you KIDDING ME?

             I let it go and decided that this was just another cultural imperative of the French. I will never have French body structure; I am not menue like French women are. I have hips, breasts and curves, I am pulpueuse and not straight up and down. And I am fabulous with that so long as I eat well and eat from the earth.

*  *  * 

               One of the joys of learning to eat ( for it is a re-éducation ) in France is learning to eat from the earth: eating in tune with the seasons, picking out fresh produce culled from the fields that same day at open air markets around the city. My favorite is the Marché d'Aligré near Ledru Rollin. One of my good friends here, who has subsequently returned back to the States, and who also happened to be vegetarian, introduced me to this market not long ago, and I fell in love. 

                The Marché d'Aligré isn't like the marché biologique on boulevard Raspail, though you can certainly find all things biologique at the Marché d'Aligre without chopping off an arm and selling your liver to pay for the produce. This is just my kind of heaven on a bright Sunday morning. I stop first at the Arab traitors to buy black beans, bulgur, barely, couscous, lentils. The walls are lined in piles of dried raisins and nuts and rices, spices from all the corners of the globe and if the gentlemen who man the store find you attractive, they will call you Mademoiselle and thank you with warm smiles that invite you to return again soon. Outside the marché hums with the farmers who yell like colporteurs selling newspapers freshly printed but they are not selling stories, but figs and asparagus and cherries, whatever is growing right now. There are small mountains of avocados that will never do California avocados justice but are acceptable substitutes. 

                   Today my treasures are apricots and leeks, ruby red cherry tomatoes that could be threaded into a necklace and eaten for their bright bursts of sugar. I cradle them in my re-usable Carrefour bag and walk the ailes of the Marché, on Safari for the grassy, beautiful melody of basil in the fresh air. I find my herb seller, wearing his usual glasses and his yellow grin and ask him for basil and oregano, but he has no oregano so I happily take just the basil. 

                   This is pure, unadulterated pleasure for me. The women and the men too'ing and fro'ing with their children and their rolling paniers and their wide, searching eyes. Touching, feeling, smelling the eggplants and the mushrooms which lie sleeping in beds together, on top of one another. This is beautiful, eating from the earth, eating so good and so at its finest that it is beyond delicious and in no way do I realize that I am not eating meat. When done right, when done for pleasure, from the terroir to the table, if you know how to cook in the way a vegetarian foodie needs to cook, you do not realize you are missing animals at all. In fact, you wonder why you ate them in the first place. I love that in the absence of dating, I have the time to do this, to cook like this and to fly about the kitchen like a banshee, for me, and for those I love. I love the open air markets of Paris. 

                      Heaven is a place on Sundays, after all, called the Marché d'Aligre. 

                 

   

The Girl Without an Accent

       When I was in high school and beginning my French language study, I dreamed of one day parading around in public in the States speaking French as a joke to see if I could actually pass for French. I was no where near fluent and this was nothing but a pipe dream.

       Eleven years later it is not such a pipe dream.

*  *  * 

       I don't know how to describe my abilities with languages other than the fact that they are natural, innate. Woven into the very fibers of my being. At six months old, I started speaking my first words. My mother drove me to the Stanford campus where I was a test dummy in language labs. We still have the certificates of appreciation they gave us, embossed with the university seal, at home in California. 

       By the time I reached four, I was reading. I memorized the books my mother read to me nightly and soon enough I was reading them back to her. Recall, I can, the  summer afternoons thick with heat spent in our garage, in the house we lived in before my parents separated, tracing invisible letters in the air to form further invisible words  that I leapt about writing with the tips of my fingers. 

       When I entered first grade, I could already read, and this just plained pissed me off because I was obligated to "learn" to do so amongst all the other children, so I faked paying attention, and was bored out of my mind. A year and a school transfer later, I would be sent to other classrooms for higher levels of reading and literature and math, finishing up one teacher's work and upon return to my own teacher, undertaking and completing her work as well. By third grade, I was reading voraciously, everything and anything I could get my hands on. I'd exhausted Road Dahl and childhood classics like The Phantom Tollbooth. 

         I lasted one more year at that school before transferring to another one for gifted and talented programs. 

*  *  *

          My first year in France, a mere three months after arrival, I started receiving "No Accent Comments" from native French speakers with whom I was conversing. The first of these came from one of my host mom at the time's friends, Valerie, who had stopped by briefly and was on her way out the door to run errands. 

           " You have no accent!¨ she exclaimed. 

           " I don't?" My mouth was still lumbering to get used to the jaw gymnastics that any anglo-saxon who is developing immersive fluency in this language will describe: it is pure and utterable fatigue. Holding the necessary tension in the mouth in order to pronounce vowels and nasal sounds is a workout. 

           I then explained to Valerie that I found her comment bizzarre but accepted the compliment, but that yes, this was my first time in France and I'd never been before, so I found it hard to believe I had no accent. 

*  *  * 

             Not only are languages my thing, but it seems I'm rather musical too. I played the violin as a child, sung in the shower all the time, and don't have a terrible voice. I'll thank childhood choir for that. But this musicality thing, I suspect, might have something to do with my accentless-itis. 

              One round of vacation in my now past life as a nanny, I was on the island of Mauritius with my two girl charges and their professional musician father. The younger of the two was decently far away as I was drawing a bath. I heard her call and I responded, at which point dad walked by and said to me: 

              ¨You have good ears.¨

              At other points, I've been out in the backyard of his country home and sat around the pool while he and friends strummed out strands of Oasis on their guitars. I joined in singing. 

               ¨You have a nice voice,¨ they added, telling me to lower the key on sections of Wonderwall.  ¨ There you go. Not so high.¨

               ¨Yeah, I'm a soprano," I replied. 

               ¨Not bad at all.¨

               We continued singing as I watched the kids in the pool. 

*  *  * 

                Last evening I was at a French housewarming, also called a pendaison de la crémaillère, which translated means the hanging of the hook necessary to hold a cauldron over a fire. Back in the day, it was the last thing one did when moving in. Now a days no one really hands pots anymore, so the thing is just called a pendaison. 

                A this particular pendaison, I met more Frenchies. One was a young woman about my age. 

                ¨ Wait...are you French or American?¨

                ¨American.¨

                ¨Not possible! You have no accent! That's crazy."

                I smiled. Then explained I've been studying this language for eleven years, three of them in France. 

               ¨Still, that is NOT NORMAL!¨

               This was the general theme of the night. I met a pair of gentlemen my age. 

               ¨C'est DINGUE comment tu parles français!¨

               And it has been two years of comments like these.  A few weeks ago I was out on a Saturday morning run with friends from a running group. R is one of them and she brought F, her French BF. I hung back to get to know him better and speak French with him. Apparently, he told R afterward that I have no accent. That it's crazy. She relayed this to me one Monday and it made me smile wide. 

              This genre of comment does not stop. I suppose it only took eleven years, but I can finally pass for French. 

*  *  * 

               Is my Accentless-Itis a result of my language abilities, my musicality, or something else? My second year in France, my family and I discovered we are French. On my mom's side of the family tree, I have a credible amount of ancestors, a chunk of them Parisian, who left France under Louis XIV to go to modern day Canada and found Quebec. They eventually found their way south and ended up in places like New York and Michigan.

                This was slightly eery, as a few years prior I had decided to devote myself to study of 17th century literature after having fallen in love with it. I felt chills roll up my spine and into my throat when we discovered this. I study the very period, feel a strong affinity for, the century in which they lived. 

                 And every time someone tells me I have no accent, I wonder if these are just my genes and heritage playing themselves out. Or if I am a reincarnation of one of my ancestors back here to take care of unfinished business. 

                  Whatever it is, this Accentless-itis makes me believe that there is more than meets the eye about my Frenchiness, that there are higher, more mystical forces at play. 

*  *  * 

                   
                   French is musical and beautiful, elusive. Hardly phonetic, as scribes and clerics decided as the language evolved to gard the Latin etymologies and spellings in the written form, so words hardly sounds as they look. This Girl Without An Accent ( GWAN ) knows that Accentless-itis is a non normal phenomenon. Any professional linguist will tell you that after the age of 12,  language acquisition is harder because the brain's ability to hear and register phonetic sounds and reproduce them is exponentially more difficult once puberty hits. I started at 14.

                  My being the GWAN used to make me feel mixed: fabulous because it meant all my years of hard work were paying off, sad because it also made me feel like a linguistic refugee. Having an accent means having the firm and irremovable impression of one's native home, traces of one's roots and culture, imbedded in one's very voice and ability to express oneself. If I have no accent, have I lost that trace? Have I lost my culture? This thought, two years ago, was distressing because I thought it meant I was unbound, unrooted, transitory, and I was uncomfortable being nebulous.

                  Now being the GWAN is a source of pride. A sign of assimilation, pure and unadulterated.   A queue to me from the heavens and powers above that I absolutely belong here. A reminder to put my head down, keep my faith, stay the course, and figure out a way to make this work, because another good French friend texted me yesterday after reading my post about my job rejection:

                  ¨ Don't give up on the job hunt, you are French!¨

                 

       

No, It Won't All Go the Way It Should...

      Goddam you France. Damn you damn you damn you for this irrational piece of whatever the hell you want to call this...this...this love I have of you. Because you SURE AS HELL are not making it easy for me to stay here.

       Yet another full time job rejection today. Yep, this one had a visa too.

       SLAP.

       The rejections are so regular I verge on apathetic about them now.

       Except I can't be because...I kinda of need a job to stay in this country long term.

       Maybe this is the universe just telling me to give up, pack up my bags, and get the hell back to America, except for the part where I feel like my soul would just wilt and shrivel up and die.

        And I'd kick myself for giving up.

        And I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

        So I beat on, a boat against the current.

       

Also, John Mayer is a genius.

       Because I have this song on repeat, and it hits me so hard in the heart every time that I want to weep. And there is always another layer, another chord, another je ne sais quoi to discover with every listen. My Fitzgerald in musical form.

       I'd just also like to state at this point that THANK SWEET BABY HIPPOS I am not seeing anyone right now, because life is so complicated and so hard to figure out right now that I can barely handle myself, I don't know how I'd handle another someone in that picture...

       For now, France and I are going steady and that's enough for me.
     

     

The Point of No Return

          Weather has been glorious the past two days in Paris. Sun shine, clear skies, mid seventies...the kind of weather we dream about longingly all winter. The exact opposite of the weather we had upon my return from America, of the gloomy nights when I woke up at three in the morning en pleine panic attack. 
         
          I suppose that's because I'm at the point of no return. Literally.

*  *  *

         For as much as nannying kept me from my life, I've been making up for lost time this week.  Coffee in the afternoon on Monday with a wise, older expat friend of mine followed by weekly apéro with R. We sat there in the cool caress of the wind sipping timid mojitos discussing how the two of us could not have possibly survived this past year without our Monday ritual. 

         This was followed on Tuesday by meeting someone I've been dying to meet for a long while for un verre at about 17h ( so much fun, if you're reading, thank you! ) and then movies with E later that night. E can CAN IT for all I care right now. I'm not happy at all with him. 

         My first night back in France, we grabbed dinner and then coffee. At which point we were discussing my stay-in-this-nation strategy, and at which point he stated that I reminded him of his Ex. GODDAMN IT CAN YOU JUST STOP COMPARING ME TO YOUR EX!? 

        ¨I. am. not. your. ex.¨  One sentence. Firmly said. He tried to change the subject. I reeled in back in, fuming. It is hardly a compliment to be compared to her. 

        ¨Let's make one thing clear: I am not your ex. I am not staying in this country for a man, I'm not even seeing anyone.¨

        ¨You have to bring it back up?¨

        I didn't say anything. 

        ¨Look, I'm probably not going to say anything well tonight,¨ he sighed. Awkward silence. I asked if he wanted to go home. He said yes. So we left. 

         I didn't hear from him for a week. 

         Then saw him Tuesday night. Showed up to the movie theatre. Promptly stated he'd just returned from Belgium. Oh, I know who's in Belgium: the woman in a relationship he broke up with me for and who he's been seeing furtively for about a year. 

          ¨ Oh,¨ I said. ¨Well, did it go well?¨

  

          He'd said that it did and when I was trying to ask him about it he cut me off and changed the subject. Then WHY did you bring it up you moron? Also, if you haven't figured it out already,  IF SHE HASN'T LEFT HER BOYFRIEND yet, and she hasn't chosen you, THEN SHE PROBABLY NEVER WILL and you are just an amusement. 

           This is not a jealousy thing. I have no desire to be in a relationship with E. As a friend, I am livid with the passive-aggressiveness ( says the queen of passive-aggressive behavior writing on this blog..): why tell me you just got back from Belgium if you don't want me to ask you about it? You're not going to inspire jealousy, if that's your goal. You are only going to lower my opinion of you. 

           And maybe this is super American of me, but I have NO RESPECT for someone who doesn't even a) have the decency not to see someone already in a relationship and b) doesn't have enough self-esteem to say they deserve better than to be someone's toy, because I can nearly guarantee you he is a toy. 

            Needless to say, after the movie on Tuesday, I haven't texted him once. 

*  *  *

            Wednesday night, I had intended to stay in.  But then another French friend H, whom I met at American university club events this past fall ( he did his Masters at a not so shabby school in California), wanted to know if I was interested in grabbing Japanese with an American buddy of his from said school. Friend, whom I'll call Z, also happened to speak fluent French. A dude. An American one. Speaking French. Has hell frozen over? Not to promote stereotypes or anything, but my major wasn't dominated by females for nothing! 

          So I said what the hell and said yes. 

          We were all seated around the table when said friend brought up something I have since been pondering: to stay, or not to stay, that is the question. He too is 25. Oh, it has come on so fast, this mid-twenties thing. Full of choices, and responsibilities, and serious decisions, such as this ¨where do I build my life?¨ sort of thing. Which is precisely what we were discussing. He is deciding whether or not to build his here, a building I am pursuing unabashedly. 

         What if I fail? 

         This is why, last week, at three am, in the dead of sleep, I awoke in a panic attack. 

*  *  *

         The point of no return is this: I'm really, truly, entirely, assimilating. And it is both wonderful and terrifying. I bring you the proof: my mother and I got into a blow-out argument about me correcting her grammar and language on Facebook. Why did I feel the impulse to correct her? Well, that's easy: I get corrected all the damn day, every day, when I use French. It's just the norme. The French are notorious for policing one another and their language use. It's a big cultural thing. E corrects me all the time, to the point where I just say ¨thank you Mr Grammarian¨ and smile. I used to get annoyed, thinking he was condescending,  but I eventually realized this is just average French cultural behavior. 

         I've gotten such in the habit of it now, even with my own American friend's speaking French here, that I don't think much of it anymore and correct people. It isn't necessarily a condescension thing, it's just something I've absorbed. But my mother didn't take it so well...and I don't blame her. I probably wouldn't have either if I were on the other end of it and this were several years prior to France. We eventually got over the argument. But language use is rigid in France and dare I say it, it's affecting my use of English and transforming my behavior around language. Here's to attempting to be more aware of my shifting behaviors. 

         Assimilation, point: 1. 

         It also occurred to me again how much I'm assimilating when I was home. I became seriously offended when my mother did a small half laugh after a comment one night she made in the kitchen. I thought she was really mocking me. I got angry. Then I thought of how my oldest girl charge, when I was a nanny, thought I was making fun of her when I would half-laugh after comment I'd made. 

          ¨You're mocking me!¨ She'd cry out, upset. 

        You see, a lot of Americans have a weird habit of just laughing to themselves for seemingly no reason after making a declarative statement, and the French find this gesture truly bizarre. E has pointed this out to me on more than one occasion. I know I do it intuitively, but I've been away from other people doing it around me for so long, and from its social code and context, that I too didn't immediately pick up on the social cue until after ward, when I stepped back to analyze the situation. 

          Assimilation, point: 2. 

         There was also the fact that for the first week or so, I couldn't stop myself from saying things like ¨Buh...¨ right before I'd start to speak. 

          Assimilation, point: 3. 

*  *  *

         Is this the point of no return? I don't know. It sometimes feels like it. I'm terrified either way.