Archives: December 2005
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A fair amount of this past trip home was spent wondering what I am doing with my life. I ask myself this question frequently. The first week of my vacation was luxurious - I read and watched TV and generally spent my time rediscovering what it's like to live with little stress and a full night's sleep. Most mornings, I would get up before or around seven. Most nights, I was in bed before or around ten. It's amazing to spend an entire day with sufficient energy. It made me realize that, if given the choice, I am an early riser and that my lifestyle here is not conducive to getting enough sleep. Something needs to change. Sleep is an awesome natural force.
In some ways, I was dreading the return to Paris. I can honestly look around at my life right now and say I'm overwhelmed. It was so nice to not have to run around all day, to not have my usual worries plaguing me. Taking myself out of my everyday life for a few weeks was revealing: I can live better than this.
However, I did want to come back. I missed The Boy, of course, and I have things here I am excited about. Although I loved spending time with my parents, there are small inconveniences - namely that I'm not in my own home and that my mom kept putting out bowls of readily available chocolates.
Read more »I made it. Let me just say: I hate Chicago-O'Hare. I have slept in that airport due to snow storms. I should have known not to pass through there again.
Let me give you a breakdown of my travels:
2.00 am, morning of departure - Finish packing. Send final emails. Prepare paperwork to be sent on the way to airport.
2.40 - bedtime
3.30 - wake up to phone call from my father, worried about meeting points
4.00 - attempt to fall back asleep
5.00 - dream of missing my plane, wake up in panic
6.30 - wake up for real
7.30 - leave house, after discovering some odd sort of goop leftover on my suitcase from the last trek to the airport. Scrub, scrub, but damnit, I'm going to have to deal with the goop because it's there to stay.
8.10 - show up at neighbor's to pick up (the famous - in certain circles) jillyc, to trek to airport together. She has heavy bags, so I carry one. We embark.
8.20 - We stop to catch our breath. Did I mention the heaviness of the bags? Yeah...
8.30 - More breathing required. After being sick for several days, my muscles are working on 50%. Plus, I am painfully aware that I have 0 nutrients in my system.
8.30 - 9.15 - Lots of train changing, stair-climbing, and breath-catching.
9.15 - We learn that the train going to the airport is, in fact, never going to actually go to the airport. The workers are on strike, so we opt to take a cab. Fuckers. Had we known, we wouldn't have destroyed our back muscles in the metro for an hour.
10.15 - Arrive at airport and meet up with the FellowMichigander
10.15-12.00 - Hang around the airport in our exhausted delirium.
12.00 - Seperate to go to our respective check-in counters. Mine is just beyond the terminal that has been closed off due to a bomb threat. Great. I opt to walk outside to the terminal.
12.30 - 13.30 - Check in and stand in longest security line ever. French woman tries to cut in front of me and the 55 people waiting behind me and I am not about to let that shit fly.
13.30 (Paris time)-17.00(Chicago time) - Air time. This is definetly the best part of my travels. I watch 'Mona Lisa Smile' and 'Madagascar' and two episodes of 'The Amazing Race.' I recognize that I am hormally at a fulcrum when I start crying at how beautiful the ostriches are on 'The Amazing Race', and then cry AGAIN when the husband in one of the couples cheers his wife on in the most supportive and adorable way. Nine hours and fifty minutes of air time pass, but oddly, I don't sleep. For the first time in days, however, the food stays in my system. I actually have a moment where I feel wholly and entirely content as a result of the food.
Already I am exhausted. But wait, it gets better.
You Take the Good, You Take The Bad.
(you take them both and there you have....)
The BAD:
1. I have been sick for the last three days with NO END IN SIGHT. I'll get better for awhile. Today, for example, I managed to walk from Chatelet to Saint Michel to Les Invalides to Concorde and back to Chatelet. That is hours of walking, and I thought it meant I was on the road to recovery. Then I ate when I got home and I realized? NOT BETTER. I just spent the last two hours recovering from the four squares of chocolate that I ate.
2. Consider number 1. again and then add to this that I will spend my day on a seven-hour flight tomorrow. Toilets are small on airplanes, and occasionally they require stepping over people. Cabin pressure is not the best. No matter what the in-flight entertainment is, I hope I will not be made into a spectacle as I struggle to keep my irrational body in line.
3. Part of the plan for today was to go do the laundry. I don't like the idea of stranding The Boy with his own dirty clothes - and then adding 3/4 of my wardrobe to the pile. Yet, that is the situation we are facing.
4. I went to buy my brother-in-law's present today. I realize this is last minute, but he was the only person for whom I even knew what I wanted to buy. BUT I COULDN'T BUY THE PRESENT because of the rain. Hard to explain without giving away the gift idea (saved for next year, I suppose) but there you have it. I hate myself. So I only have two quasi-gifts ready. Another one of my quasi-gifts got lost at the bookstore. Great.
THE GOOD
(always end on a positive note)
Read more »Also. I am very sick - I get dizzy when I stand up, have the body aches, and have had three fevers. This is NOT the way I want to travel (leaving in 36 hours).
Dude, I LIKE The Colbert Report. What are the Americans on American soil thinking?
That guy is ballsy in the interviews. Gotta respect that.
I just went crazy and totally re-organized my bookshelves. I have two of them, and they were overflowing. Overflowing onto the floor in the bedroom, onto the chimney, onto my desk. Since college, I have been a borderline freakishly organized type, and this lack of finesse to my bookshelf techniques was just not working for me.
I began by trying to move my crappy Ikea bookshelf in order to make room for my Senegalese chairs. My Senegalese chairs? Awesome. My Ikea bookshelf? Crappy. Dude, every time I tried to push it, it just leaned from wherever I was pushing... holy shitty bookcase, Batman! So I ended up pulling almost all the books off and lifting the damn thing.
Once all my books were on the floor, I began considering organization styles. I've known that I needed a change. So I made the judgement call: I would begin doubling up.
Now I have two, double-layered fiction shelves on my main Ikea bookshelf. Of course I had to put my faves out on the front (Auster, Boyd, Doyle, Atwood, Coetzee) and hide a few embarrassing pieces of literature (Da Vinci Code, anyone?). I got to thinking about how I should collect some books to sell at the secondhand shop soon -- I've got enough crap that I'm willing to part with that I think I could get 15 euros or more for.
It's interesting, too, to make a mental inventory of the things I am obviously interested in, judging by my books: tons of fiction, cooking (they just took over the entire fireplace), languages, linguistics, travel, knitting, nutrition, gluten-freeness, alternative health, Africa, world events, and political theory (surprising). Probably in that order.
Books that need to be reviewed on Odessa Books:
- The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
- The Sea by John Banville
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Ok, that's a good starting list.
Books I am thinking of taking home with me on Thursday to read:
- La Casa de los espiritus by Isabel Allende
- Child's Play by David Malouf
- Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (with TheKnitters permission)
I shouldn't bring any books at all, because as soon as I go back I am booking it to Borders. It's just obligatory. So I should only bring one, maybe two for the plane. Otherwise, I'm just adding more weight to my bag.
The amazing thing, though? Remember that REALLY expensive bracelet The Boy bought me? The one that was the first gift he had given me in four years? The one that I totally loved but was a little loose? And that I lost?
I FOUND IT!!!!!
A few days back, The Boy and I had an all-out, screaming, terrible argument. It's the same all-out, screaming, terrible argument we had a few weeks prior, and the same as the one two weeks before that.
It's funny: I guess I always saw couples and their problems and thought that I just wouldn't be that way. But The Boy and I have some major stumbling blocks, and we both know it. I got mega-upset the other day (perhaps enhanced by some off-kilter hormones... a story for another day) and knew, just KNEW I was easing my way into hot water. And yet, I pushed the issue (rather shrilly, I admit) and he responded with his usual "Oh please, this is just annoying..." One word to the fellas out there: never, ever say that to a woman already bordering on tears. She'll get REALLY mad. And she'll cry. Lots.
Anyway. Post-fight, I spent a long while a bit upset about it. And then I went out to dinner with Kathypath, and she said, "One thing I have to admire about you guys is that you fight so hard to stay together. If there's an effort to be made, you'll both try to make it, even if it doesn't totally work. That's what adults do in adult relationships. They try."
And I realized she's right. We DO work to stay together, even when we're tearing each other's hair out. That's love, I guess.
Today is Sunday, and I spent all night sick and feverish. I took two naps today and I still have a sore neck and back in that way they can get all icky when you're sick. The Boy has been cute; we spent most of the day just talking quietly. We got some work done, and he urged me to take it easy. And we both sort of apologized, without really saying it, by being extra snuggly with one another.
He's a gem. Talk to me in a few days, and I'll probably bitch about him. But I know he's worth fighting for. And with.
We have a few regulars who come to the store and we give them money. I realizethat in the retail industry, the exchange is supposed to work in the opposite direction, but Vegas has a major pitfall: he's just too damn nice. The guy is pretty severely in debt, but he still gives two euros per week to a variety of homeless types who know where to find someone they can count on. This duty was initiated by Vegas years ago, and although I have taken over his place several days per week, I can't exactly tell these guys "Tough shit, buddy!" So I cough up whatever amount Vegas has told me each one of them is habituated to - "The guy who has the sort of funky left arm? He's two euros. The other one, who sorta walks sideways? He comes in on Wednesdays and Sundays. A euro or two, and he's good to go..."
One of these guys - let's call him George - is severaly mentally impaired. I'm not sure if it's years on the streets, repeated alcohol consumption, or some pre-existing condition that has done him in, but he sure has a hard time getting words out of his mouth. To his credit, he puts forward a massive effort each time just to thank me and say "Have a good day" That's about a minute-long sentence, coming from him. But I appreciate it.
George is a two euro, every Friday type.
Vegas told me that one time he woke up in his apartment to the sound of someone screaming. It was George, sleeping in a doorway across the street. He was having a terrible nightmare, and Vegas swears he has never heard suffering so clearly.
I've always liked George, but he makes me nervous because he is often quite drunk. I don't fear him - he's a really gentle type who seems genuinely sweet and docile - but the fear of him vomiting puts me on edge. I know severe drunks don't vomit often, and every Friday, I repeat it in my head like a mantra: "He will not vomit on me, he will not vomit..." Still, in the last few months I've gotten better about my rather irrational fear of his puke, and we've even managed to have some short, but very slow, conversations.
Today, George came into the store - an unexpected surprise for a Thursday. Still, I figured he must have another appointment tomorrow (naturally), so I forked over the two euros and wished him well. The following conversation ensued:
Read more »Today was a little insane at work. I was alone all day - a bit uncommon for Saturdays as we generally have more people than during the week (or on Sunday, when it's painfully slow). Fortunately, the wind and rain kept a lot of people out, and I was able to handle the trickle of clients that came in. I do have to say, however, that something must have been in the air today: all of my customers had something unique or different about them, and it made for a more challenging day.
For example, the first people into the store were two girls. Neither spoke French or English. As a matter of fact, neither spoke. They were both deaf, and wanted to know how to get to the Eiffel Tower. The problem? The Eiffel Tower is pretty far from where I work, and I had to explain how to take the metro from my bookstore to the necessary stop. Exclusively using hand motions. Not so simple. You should have seen how the first girl explained to me the Eiffel Tower in the first place. She employed moves reminiscent of voguing.
Then I had a regular come in who wanted to lend Kathypath (who wasn't there) a Bridget Bardot movie. She still doesn't know why. He gave me a Rolling Stones book. For no reason.
Next, a friend of the owner - who is officially a bum now, and sleeps in the metro on the weekends - came by to say goodbye. He's leaving town, for the zillionth time. This time, however, it's for good. Just like last time. His face was covered in bruises; apparently he was beaten up last night by some young people, across the street from the police station. I might sound cold-hearted for not believing him, but the guy is completely bonkers, and has been known to thrown bags of paperwork into the gutter at the bookstore in the middle of the night. There is no real explanation for this behaviour, and he thinks "other people" are doing it in the night Regardless, maybe the beating yesterday really happened, maybe it didn't. In the end, he walked out of the store today with his bruised face while muttering to himself about a good shower.
Finally, I had a nice, decent, normal customer who was excited about our 50% off on contemporary art catalogues party. Upon discovering that her 20 euro purchase only amounted to 10 euros, she attacked the contemporary art section and found another 10 euros worth of stuff. She giggled alongside me when our regular Saturday bum came to pick up his weekly two euros from our cash register. Not because she was giggling at the bum, but because I thanked him as he left, even though I had given him money. I automatically thank anybody when they close the door on the way out. Habit.
When Normal Girl finally came to the register to pay, I thought, "At last, a normal person." During our exchange, a high-strung woman came in and actually said, "Madame, can you help me? I am desperately searching for the Centre Pompidou, and I fear I will never find it!!!." Seemed a bit dramatic, but I gave her the appropriate directions. As she was shutting the door, the Normal Girl looked at me apologetically, as if to say, "Bums, directions, craziness here all day, eh?"
Just then, another woman beelined in the door, thrusting pamphlets in my face. "Take these, and hear the words of Jesus. He's the only thinkg that can save you in life. Without him, you cannot do anything!!!"
A little overwhelmed by her exhuburance, I just waggled my finger (something I never do, for fear it's a little patronizing) and murmered a low, but stern, "Noooo...."
The woman backed off, perhaps a little shocked that I didn't want to hear the Word of our Lord, when Normal Girl sort of barked out, "We can do lots of things! Look! I can smile!"
And with that, she smiled, thanked me, and took her contemporary art home.
Fun times.
