snowBound

I am on board the Paris-Zurich train for a weekend of snow and ski. The bunny hill and ski instructor will probably feature prominently in the next few days seeing as this will be my first time skiing. Growing up in Florida, skiing always seemed like such a terribly exotic (and privileged) thing to do. And wearing my recently-purchased ski goggles around the house the past few days still made it feel that way. But I love how strange I feel when I say “I am going skiing.” Before time and repetition erode and render mundane the mystery of existence, I want to experience as many new things as possible. So off I go. To ski. To watch water metamorphose into snow. I will navigate the beginner course with the 5-year olds. I hope that it will help me to begin to measure the distance between ocean and snow.

strings of epiphanies

I'm a new soul I came to this strange world hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take. But since I came here felt the joy and the fear finding myself making every possible mistake - "new soul," yael naim.

I think that marketing groups have me in mind when constructing their cunning campaigns to instigate overpowering waves of lust for whichever coveted item is being mythologized: I saw the ad for the new macbook air. I fell in love. I went to the itunes stores to download the song to my new ipod nano (then youtubed the video to my video ipod). I am now completely convinced (programmed) that the only thing that yael naim and I need to safeguard ourselves from every possible mistake is a new macbook air. I do. I really believe this. I also do know that this hysteria will ebb in a few days, when I stop soundtracking all my Parisian peregrinations to this song. But for now, I am going to ride this string of lights. Just a little bit longer; just as long as it takes for me to realize that these mistakes I think that I am making are actually not mistakes. They are just me re-framing...that silence that I think is fear is only that wonderful moment when the walls fall down.

hermit in paris

The past five weeks in Paris have been surrounded by transport strikes, racial violence and student riots. Another transport strike is scheduled for tomorrow. But supposedly, the students have once again outnumbered the riot police at the university, so I shall brave the barricades for the sake of metafiction. If I can catch a train.

thanksgiving wishes

the day after thanksgiving, i find myself ensconced in my robin-egg blue apartment, reading george lamming's "the pleasures of exile." this was a title i chose from my pile of exam books primarily for its title, hoping to counteract the last conversation i had with my mom. while trying to share with her the sense of emotional alienation i was feeling, thinking of all the family back in new york, around the most inviting table which marie-hélène and micah had set, she said - in what i am hoping was a very tough love sort of wisdom: "well, i have already given you many warnings of exile..." and perhaps it is this line that i am trying to navigate: the line which inevitably draws together the multiplicity of the exilic experience - the hybridity and the isolation.

what does help to serve as a beacon during this navigation is this sort of email which i received from my advisor in bloomington: "...Just to say I'm thinking of you. Trust you didnt' forget Thanksgiving..., or Bloomington..., or a friend that loves you. I'll call soon..."

a buoy for which i am grateful

thanksgiving in paris

This is my second Thanksgiving spent in Paris. And with this cyclic repetition, I feel as if my life here is gaining some sort of primacy as opposed to a feeling of seasonal aberration. Last year, I had a very late Thanksgiving dinner in a 24-hour Parisian bar with my two favorite Buddhist lesbians who were visiting me from Chicago. This year’s celebrations involved drinking cranberry-flavored liquor before an evening of French comedic theater and Chinese food with my Italian lover.
Such moments of joy fill the hollows that are carved out by the suspicion (the fear?) that your life is elsewhere. Because in moments of so many family reunions, the panic that geography – that tricky shapeshifter – has foiled you once again, can be overpowering.
These moments (the ones in which you realize that the people you love are there while you are here) can make you remember, with a thud, that geography is not a metaphor. And while this lack of abstraction can be existentially troubling, the palpability of this displacement can be liberating. I have been dislocated from my own center of the world, and that world has been shifted from my center. But for this possibility of imagining different stories for myself, I am grateful.

the return

September was silent. No blog entries, but many exits – out of Florida, out of the summer, out of the state of suspension in which I was inhabiting. The ambiguity which thrived in that state (do I stay or do I go), has given way to something a little more concrete. At least in the sense that I am here. I am in Paris. I arrived a little over two weeks ago. I am again surrounded by all the cafés, the yellow mailboxes, the bridges. I love living in a city which is stitched together by so many bridges: 37 bridges in a city which covers an area of only 40 square miles, connecting the Right Bank to the Left Bank with all the islands in between. Bridges featured prominently in my own Parisian love story last year, and here's to hoping that this year, again, Paris will help me to stitch together all the various parts of myself into something as beautiful.

moonlight and periwinkles

I spent my evening swimming by the light of the full moon. Floating periwinkle blossoms brushed against my skin. It has been much cooler in Florida these past few days, which balances nicely with the subtle electricity that always simmers the night before a departure: Mom and I are driving four hours south to Miami tomorrow morning to process her immigration papers at the French Consulate. We will try to drown out the influence of any nefarious, French bureaucratic dramas by meeting an old friend at our favorite Miami restaurant, The Rusty Pelican, and swimming at South Beach. We are going so that she can renew her carte d’identité, her French identity card, which has to be done in person. Ever since marrying my American father and up until a naturalization process which she attempted to initiate at the start of the second Gulf war (fearing the anti-French sentiment that the freedom fries were heralding), she has vehemently refused to take American citizenship. This vehemence always confused me growing up since her love and appreciation for America has always been absolute: she loves the fact that strangers smile to each other on the street here as opposed to the French personal indifference; she loves knowing that 24-hour grocery stores here are always open instead of needing a lunar calendar to know the working hours of most French stores; she loves the ideal of American customer service whose goal it is to not, in comparison to French customer service, brutalize the customer. These small details of difference between the two countries are high-lighted in her constant cultural comparative analysis. This process is, of course, taken up in reverse whenever we are in France. “In America…” she will begin, whenever some vaguely sociological topic might come up, or not, in the conversation. I am sure that the constancy of the comparisons unconsciously led me, with the subtlety of a foghorn, to study comparative literature. There always had to be something that the current experience was compared against; a mirroring, a doubling, of any situation was always necessary in order to understand and appreciate.

And so in Miami tomorrow, at the French Consulate, she will continue shuttling between a documentary allegiance to a country she left 50 years ago and a lived love for a country that she will not claim for her own. She floats between these two worlds while I try to find direction among the periwinkles.