Why Men Don't Have Balls Anymore

So, in an attempt to bring myself some peace of mind, I've turned to the blogosphere ( yep, always a fabulous idea, I know...).

I read this article last night while I was up in a translating frenzy (let's just say I spent another five hours on robot dialogs. It's been one faaaaabulous party.).

I have seen #2 in action. I know MORE than a handful of Frenchmen who have been the victims of their own self imposed #2.

Let's add to this that I'm not numbers #3 or #4.

I'm brave enough to make the bold gestures and I have a tough enough shell to deal.

So I'm dealing away.

By writing on this blog.

Go figure.

OHM: One Hot Mess

 Oh, you are turbulent, life of mine. I am OHM: One Hot Mess. I can't handle it all right now, I'm afraid I'm reaching my upper limit. Between my personal and professional life, I'm reaching the breaking point. Let's explain:

  In the past two weeks, I have juggled not one, but four, jobs. I've continued to freelance for the boîte I worked for this summer. I'm now working on the editorial projects for one of their clients for two months one to two days a week. I'm enjoying it, really.

   Ok, this is all good and fine.

   Then I had an offer to do the editorial and communications for a start-up accelerator here. I agreed to do this part time on the days I was not doing said freelance editorial for other agency.

    Ok, good and fine. I got this. 

   This was promptly followed the same week by an intense, three hour, in your face, go go go go go interview with an amazing (get this) ROBOTICS company that needs an American native speaker to do all their English language dialog. They want me NOW. NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. I'm translating their dialogs using my freelance status and they're working on my full time contract with a visa (cross your fingers).

     But this is France and I don't trust anything till contracts are signed. Willy rascals.

     Let's get back to this boîte for whom I've been doing freelance editorial. You know, the one I've been trying to get to HIRE ME for EIGHTEEN MONTHS. Their business development manager called me in a panic a week and a half ago to ask if I could come into the agency for two days to write a corporate brochure for the same client for whom I'm writing website content. I went in for two days straight to work on said brochure.

      Ok, ok, I got this, it's all good... HOLY PUMPERNICKEL ON A BALEINE WHALE WHY HAVEN'T YOU HIRED ME ALREADY!?

       So, I'm cozy by myself working in house at this company when low and behold, the head of HR comes and introduces herself for me to the first time. She proceeds to ask to speak with me about a major major major blogging project for  a massive French telecommunications company that wants an English speaker to write in English for six months full time...and they want to present my profile. But the blog gig is cool. SOOOO cool. So cool it could involve travel to *drumroll please* things like the Cannes film festival. HOLY MOTHER OF CHICKEN CLUCKING ROOSTERS IN A CANDY CANE FOREST! give it to me NOW! Give it to me yesterday! PRESENT MY PROFILE AND I GUARANTEE you you crazy mo-fos, I WILL WIN THIS contract for you and I WILL ROCK THE CRAP out of it!

     This job could also finally MEAN FINAL FULL TIME STATUS. OH MY BUCKWHEAT BARBECUED CHICKEN WAFFLE PANCAKES!

     HIRE ME PLEASE!

     I proceeded to get entirely overwhelmed and very stressed because the universe just seems to keep piling things on. I decided to turn down startup accelerator.

      (Let's not forget to mention that in the meanwhile I'm spending about 20 hours a week translating robot dialogs AND a huge four volume series of comic books for a company in LA that is happy with my work...)

      SOMEBODY SAVE ME. NOW.

     And that, my friends, is just the professional portion of this little hot mess of a life over here. The universe is also MAJORLY SCREWING with my heart strings.

      I mentioned about a week and a half ago the in the post "Oh, the irony" that This One's friend was clearly interested. Yep. No doubt now. Clearly. After two weeks of pursuing me, he finally asked me to hang and get a drink Friday night. So I said yes. We had planned to meet up around 10pm after his martial arts class.

      BUT WAIT FOR IT. WAIT FOR IT. GET THIS.

      Guess who called out of the EFFING blue to say he was in town and wanted to give me a book he'd bought for me and a *drumroll please* bottle of wine he'd picked out for me?

       YEAH. YOU GOT IT. THAT'S RIGHT. THE MOTHER EFFING WINE BARON. OF ALL PEOPLE! OF ALL PEOPLE!

        WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING UNIVERSE?

        Composure, composure. You got this Lindsay, you got this, keep your cool. 

        Naturally, far too nice and far too hard to anger and not one to stay angry (oh, why can't I be someone who just stays ANGRY!?) I said yes to seeing him. I told him I had plans so I couldn't chat for long, but I honestly had a good time seeing him. With my guard up. WAY WAY WAY UP.

        I don't know what he wanted, but if it was a hookup, he didn't get it. Not even a kiss. He got a bise. But I can't say that I didn't enjoy seeing him. I did. It's a lot more complicated than that, really. Honestly. BUT WHAT THE HELL IS IT WITH HIM COMING AND GOING AND COMING AND GOING? WTF!!!

         Then I was off to see This One's friend, whom I'll call Ambroise. Ambroise is a lovely gentleman. We have a lot in common. A lot of complicity. I had fun. I met his friends. We had great wine. He took me back to this place for more wine and wooing me with guitar. And you know, French smoothness. As in going in for the kiss. I kept it classy. I'm a classy lady. But he has clearly NO IDEA This One and I ever dated. EVER.

          Ambroise proceeds to tell me things about This One that I have never known. About how This One moved back to France for his Swedish GF, who proceeded to dump him. And break his heart. And how Ambroise didn't know why This One had been single for so long. How he didn't even approach women when they were out together.

         Naturally, again, I had only a handful of assumptions:

         1) Oh gawd. You're gay and don't know it!

         2) Oh sh*t. YOU JERKFACE. I was just a fling and you used me and were ashamed about it and so you never told your friends. crap crap crap crap crap.

          3) Oh poor guy. you had your heart ripped out of your chest and can't get over it. I feel so bad for you. No wonder you've been keeping me at arm's length with iron walls around your stone cold heart.

          4) I AM ABSOLUTELY LIVID YOU DIDN"T TELL YOUR FRIENDS LET ALONE THIS FRIEND BECAUSE NOW I AM IN A TERRIBLY AWKARD POSITION OF HAVING TO EITHER TELL THAT FRIEND OR YOU HAVING TO DO IT AFTER SAID FRIEND SAYS TO YOU HE'S SEEN ME AND KISSED ME AND IS POSSIBLY EXCITED ABOUT IT.

        So I did what I had to do. Mostly for me and my conscience screaming at me about how this did not feel right at all.

        Oh my I SO DO NOT THIS! THIS IS NOT OK, MY LIFE IS LIKE THE VOLCANO EXPLOSION AT POMPEII SPEWING DESTRUCTION EVERYWHERRRRRRE. 

       I texted This One saying I needed to talk to him. He asked if something was wrong. I was brutally, unbearably, terribly vulnerably honest. I said I didn't feel comfortable with his friend not knowing we had dated.

         This One gave me the go ahead to tell him and that if I wanted to date him I had a green light.

         Ok. I swallowed even harder and summed up a lot of *ahem* cahones I didn't know I had and said this:

          ¨Honestly, he's not the one I want...can you please just tell me right now if I should give up on you entirely?¨

           To which he responded essentially yes: we'd had our time and place.

           Band-aids hurt to rip off, but if you do it quick, it's over fast. It hurt. It sucked. My ego hurts a little bit. I'm definitely down about it. But at least I have an answer. And at least I don't feel like I'm going to cause a whole lot of mayhem between two really good friends.

            I just don't know what to feel about anything or anyone right now; I can barely handle my own life. I don't know what will happen at all between jobs and men and quite frankly, I don't know whether to scream and rip my hair out or crawl into a corner and bawl my eyes out.

            I don't know if I've ever lived anything this intense before. And this has just been the past two weeks. I'm run absolutely ragged and exhausted. I'm so busy I can barely sleep enough right now. Can it all just settled down, please universe?

             (Did I mention that AMBROISE works for the crazy company with the blog deal and that if I got the blog deal I'd be working in the same office as him? OH LORD.)

              I'm so stressed and so high strung and so worked up right now I can't decide whether to punch something or coil into the fetal position. I kinda wanna do both.

            I am OHM: One Hot Mess.

There will be time, there will be time...

      

          My thoughts are larger than the heavens. They have my body leaping out of itself, bursting forth as do the stars, a return to the dust. Today the sun rose and the sun set. In a city named Paris I wandered streets and tasted clementines in cold markets and sipped coffee as somewhere, by the circular orb and arc of the heavens, it all culminated in this moment and thought. 

*  *  *

           This moment is but an instant in a suite of instants. 

           Like so many who have preceded me here on this hollow ground, Lutetia, I was and am your artist, you sacred catalyst. More and more the world around me grows silent and I need the quiet so. 

          My singular obsession calls unto me like the sirens of the Greeks. 

*  *  * 

         I sing of clocks. Lights go out. I am an artist. I cannot be saved. Neither can it. I become more Gallic by the day.  Tides I've tried to swim against. Oh, I beg. And plead. 

         Memory persists. 

*  *  *

        That time exists, I am not sure. That it does not exist, I am not sure either. Of what am I sure: that it has me in a head spin, the sort of existential acid trip that winds me up and drops me from the upper stratosphere of my own incredulousness. 

        I suppose you could say this trip started long ago, and where it ends, or shall end, I do not know, nor may I ever. You may all thank Paul Ricoeur for that. 

        Of what else am I sure? That there exists a clear, indisputable, and terribly hard to decipher--but oh, at last, I have done it!--difference in American and French perceptions of time. 

                                                                                           *  *  *

          The ligne de faille which made it all evident to me, I suppose, has been my struggle to understand just where in the world This One was coming from when we chatted weeks ago. Some of the things he said, though he said them in English, baffled me. 

           ¨ I can't give you what you want right now. But I still want to see you. Maybe I'll regret this decision in two months and be banging on your door. Who knows? You're still here until at least next November, nothing has really changed, but I can't give you more right now. And I can't deal with the pressure of feeling like you expect more from me.¨

           He mentioned not going about things the American way, that he didn't want to stop seeing me. The two seemed like a deep and brutal paradox, one in which the underlying presupposition is that if he couldn't be with me, I would not want to continue to see him anymore...which I admittedly agree is fairly true of American dating culture. 

           But the door did not seem fully closed on romantic involvement either. Why would he spring so far ahead into the future? Why the insistence on the now and the far ahead? 

            This One was angry with me because I had forced him to play his cards. He was upset because I had done things the American way.  ¨You're in France,¨ he insisted. ¨You have to play by French rules.¨

            I countered that while I understood where he was coming from, while we were both bilingual, his reactions would never be knee jerk American ones, and that mine would never be knee jerk French ones. That there would always exist a couche culturelle. 

             What was I missing? 

           And then, like Athena from the head of Zeus, epiphany sprang. 

                                                                                           *  *  * 

           The French manner of courtship differs from the American one because of a radically different underlying perception of and subjective relationship to time. The evidence is myriad and clearer than Swarovski now, but it took me three years to grasp the weight of it all; I see it in our languages, in our relationship to space and distance, and in the religious backbones of our larger cultures. 

            In language, it goes to the very root of the verbal system. If languages are systems that shape our cognition, in the way we structure and perceive the empirical world, then it makes sense that a verb system would structure the way we experience the world and its dimensions. English verbs are based upon Germanic systems without much inflection. Our tenses (the very facet of a verb that locates a situation in time)  and our aspect (the part of a verb that denotes how an action relates to the flow of time) do not align. 

           French, suffice it to say, is Latinate, and not Germanic. 

           With that in mind, it is not surprising that our discourses around time differ so. For the American, time is a precious resource, itself a Master to whom we are made to heel. On birth, we receive a set quantity of this commodity and we chose how we use, or spend, it. 

            My father used to say that if you don't have time, you make time. Time is money. Don't waste your time.  The American prizes punctuality. 

             Time heals everything. 

             Only time will tell. 

             For the American, it is time who has the agency, and not he. 

            The French find this absolutely ridiculous. They complain that Americans are ruled by their watches and find this disdainful. For the French, man is the Master and Time is the servant and what will be will be. Life is complex; if you spot a friend or a family member on the way to an appointment, it is surely of greater importance to chat with said person than to rush to an arbitrary deadline! 

            Why then are Americans so insistent upon seemingly arbitrary deadlines and definitions, of defining limits and imposed

            It has everything to do with our cultural geography and space. The land and the terroir cannot be excluded from this reflexion. It really is that simple. In a nutshell: America is much bigger than France. The American country spreads across three time zones. If we do not impose deadlines, or boundaries, upon ourselves, we would in a sense glide forever through what Jean Baudrillard calls our primitive desert. We impose deadlines because we cannot function otherwise, us Americans: there is no limit if we do not.

             France has not this problem. A country 1/18th the size of America has a more human scale. There is no fear of the limitless because no matter how far one may go on French soil, within several hours, one hits the limit of the sea. Space-time imposes its limits much more quickly on the French psyche, which is safely bound the borders of its hexagon. On such a small scale, the French dominate Time. So why worry? Time is not the Master, Time is the servant. And what will be will be.

              Even Proust implies that Time is the servant: the title of his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, implies that the narrator Marcel is the Master who, with personal agency, has lost his own time and is actively looking for it. And the French actively look for their time. Ricoeur speaks of the triple present and of the present of the past. In France, the present of the past is everywhere: how many Parisian structures have plaques commemorating someone's birth or death transfixed to their walls?

              The capstone for me is the religious underpinning. At the base of it all, America is a Protestant nation and France a Catholic. And religion has much to do with what are conceived as the Six Times Zones that human beings live in, which also has a correlation to geographical space. Protestants tend to be what Phillip Zimbardo calls Future Oriented: they work rather than play because working is a way succeed and to demonstrate that you are God's chosen people, and Protestant nations have higher GNPs because of this. Conversely, Catholic nations tend to be part of the Global South, and the closer one is the Equator, the less one has an impression of seasonal, and hence cyclical, time change. Time becomes homogenized and thus seems to slow. There exists less pressure to produce as time seems longer, more available, with less of a deadline.

              I do not mean to say that if one is Protestant one is a workaholic and if one is Catholic, one is lazy, nor do I intend to say that every person in America is Protestant and every person in France Catholic, but more that these are the large scale, historical cultural cradles from which the two nations have risen, and to deny the effect that have had on those cultures and perceptions of time would be foolhardy.

                                                                                          *  *  * 

              What happened between This One and I is nothing more than a gigantic clash of cultural misunderstanding. 

              As the American, I wanted to impose the limits and boundaries, because I felt enough time had elapsed in order for me to define what we were; I needed to define it and wrestle it so that it would not stretch out indefinitely. I was the Servant asking Time to impose a definition on what we were. 

             He was the Frenchman with the understanding that relationships evolve naturally and as they are supposed to, so there is no need to impose upon them. As he said it, ¨there are no rules,¨ alluding to the American propensity for dating codes and procedures ( you have to wait three days to call, what?). 

            As the American, I interpreted his statement of ¨I can't give you what you want right now,¨ as ¨I am not interested enough in you to seriously date you and this is my way of letting you down.¨ I interpreted it this way because my culture teaches me that if a man truly wants to be with me, he will, and if not, he's just not that into me. I explained this to a French male friend, who then replied that it seemed like ¨an easy way to rip the bandaid off and move on,¨ instead of confronting much more nuanced and complex circumstances. The way of making things black or white in the way that Americans do instead of dealing with the ambiguity of grey area, because culturally we like black or white, heaven or hell, instead of black, grey, white, or heaven, purgatory, and hell. 

             For the Frenchman, ¨I can't give you what you want right now,¨  literally means ¨I cannot give you what you want right now, I am not available in the way you want me to be right this second,¨ with the underlying implication that ¨but that doesn't mean it might not work at another moment.¨

            Because truly, the French are more fluid about time and relationships: I'm not available now for whatever reason ( I'm with another person, I have too much going on in my life, I need to figure a, b and c out before...) but it doesn't mean I like you any less, and it doesn't mean that life permitting, we might not work later.  Hence, his allusion to my being here until at least November of 2014. 

             I am not making excuses and I won't not see other people if that's what happens. I am simply attempting to understand, in a more nuanced way, the cultural forces at play. 

                                                                                    *  *  * 

            Will I sit away pining? Will I play the stranded princess? No. Things will happen the way they are meant to happen. And while this has been tough, I have a profound understanding and way of interpreting all these cultural subtleties. If it's the only thing I get out of the thing that happened between This One and me, then it was worth it. 



             Que sera sera. 

            

          

Oh, the irony...

  The pace of life has me overwhelmed right now. It's a Friday night and I willfully admit I am camped out in my studio, avoiding the buckets and buckets of rain I hear tumbling down from the Parisian night sky. Tonight I am cuddled with my narratology books and my blankets and--as my sixth grade teacher would have it--enough work to choke an elephant.

    Four volumes of comic book translations for a freelance project, commissioned by a publishing house in LA.

    An entire masters thesis. A fiction theory course.

    Another freelance editorial gig for this damn boîte in the 10th that just can't seem to figure out, after eighteen months, if it wants to hire me.

    A country that alternately DOES and DOES NOT want me here.

    Another editorial gig starting on Monday for a startup accelerator that wants me to handle all of their press...from web to press relations to everything in between...deep breath.

     A non-fiction memoir to write as a personal project for fam.

     And enough Frenchmen popping out of the woodwork to have me shriveling back into my cave of solitude.

*  *  * 

      Oh, the irony. It's about all I can say about my life right now. On Tuesday I went to the Berkeley Club of France's fall reception, and even though This One had been texting me that day and emailing me, he didn't mention a word about going. Knowing him, I figured he'd be too busy. 

       Lo and behold, who shows up? This One. He bises me hello tout d'un coup, out of the blue, while I'm making conversation with other people. 

        I'd volunteered to help run the show, so I was detained checking people in. I'd set my purse next to him on a chair, but a friend of his showed up and displaced it by the time I rejoined them for the lecture. He then spends the rest of this talk, on the other side of his friend, who is the buffer between us, fidgeting and checking his phone, texting, and what seems to be stealing glances at me. 

         At one point, I turn my head to the right and catch him face on, and he pops a big grin and turns back to his phone. 

          I start chat whispering with his friend, who figures out that I'm American. 

         Cocktail hour ensues. 

         Cocktail hour ensues and friend is avidly chatting me up while This One is cornered by a bore from the Ecole Normale. Friend asks me for my number. Friend gets my number. 

          This One leaves with a dash rather suddenly, rather early, exclaiming loudly enough for me and for his friend to hear, ¨On s'appelle, Lins!¨

           *  *  *

           Ô, the irony is that I don't want your friend calling me, you fool. Oh, the irony is that when you had your talk with me weeks and weeks ago when you proclaimed you didn't have the time to give me what I wanted, you said that maybe in two months time you'd regret it and be pounding on my door. 

            Oh the irony is that I do not know that you regret it, I suspect it, but I think you have far too much pride to ever explicitly announce this. 

             Oh the irony is that the second I start to really detach from you, I have Frenchies coming at me from every angle: your friend, the friend of another friend I met last weekend while out. The list goes on. 

             The irony of it all is that I do not want them, all I really want is you. But such is life. 

             And while I wish you would just figure your shit out, I cannot and will not sit around like a stranded princess waiting for you, because real men know what they want and they go for it, and the tough reality is that you did not go for me, for whatever reason that may be. 

             Oh, the i-ron-y....