Osmosis

occurs not only on a cellular level. It's the reason why this bloke in my Paris in Lit's Imagination class refused to read Hemingway. Osmosis of language. He was terrified of taking on Hem's sentence structure if immersed himself, dunked his head in the unconcentrated solution of A Moveable Feast. Hypertonic, he was scared water would osmose from Hem's Seine into his writing. Afraid adjectives'd diffuse from his head to pages to solve the imbalance, correct the concentration gradient. And he was right. It's a natural law. Unfortunately for you I'm reading Nick Hornby's crap novel. Might have guessed if you've been unlucky enough to pick it up. Usually he's got it, but the new one's shit. (And not the shit.) Could claim reading it out of loyalty. And it is partly out of affection for About a Boy, High Fidelity, Polysyllabic Spree I inhaled with glee. But it's mostly because I'm addicted. And now his language diffuses across the semi-permeable membrane of my mind. And I'm tempted to write in crap confessional style like his crap characters. As I a) have not tried to kill myself recently, or ever, and b) do not commit felonies, fabricate scams, or go on benders or breakfast talk shows, I have significantly less to confess to. I do find myself, however, with my own apartment in New York City. It's not a brownstone or anything, but surely what with the lack of housing around here, my occupation, not just of a room of ones own, but of an entire loft, should be something to be guilty of. And living no roommates, no cats, does come with its set of advantages to confess to. The highlights: music as the mood minds me. Whatever I want. Playing records of Roches, Joni Mitchell, Grateful Dead, Elvis Costello large enough to fill the entire apartment. Eating pasta out of the pot, no plate, no utensils. Nudity. No, I don't sit around dinner table naked, but rushing after a run mornings, jumping into, out of shower, looking for clothes from closets, dryer, or mostly unpacked suitcase, it does make things easier. And when wearing clothing, get a kick out of my flip flops, gym shorts, and old lower school phys ed shrunk shirt walking out of Met foods, groceries in hand past the feet of laughable ladies in stilettos and hair narrowly escaped from iron bondage. My apparel says this is a neighborhood and it's mine. I belong to it. They belong to Tiffany's or Prada. That's what their chains say. I also have to admit to being pretty happy with my job and to witnessing the live dissection of Carassius auratus, or the common goldfish. It was a dissection/murder, depending on your point of view. Mine was quite good. There was a microscope camera view of the brain on a screen and I was close enough to peer over shoulder of the post-doc performing the prep. Fish immobilized by prongs and drugs, first she exposed a piece of the spinal cord, a wiry white line. Tough but also terribly thin, feeble fragile for its importance. Then she took tweezers to the cranium. I could hear the crack as the tool chomped and peeled back skin and flesh to reveal the soap bubble layer of fat insulating the brain. Ok, ok, swear I am not just writing this because it might make you twitch like the half open goldfish when the anesthetic ran out and she was poking around its brain and she had to add more. Really got a thrill when she pulled back the cerebellum and there were two halves of the medulla oblongata. Shiny white mounds. Stimulated the eighth nerve next to the medulla and also the spinal cord to create an electrical field to find our Mauthner cell. Electrodes and dissection and directly manipulating a neuron, making the mind react like it'd heard a sound when it was only the ghost of current. So cool. Oh and my main confession. I am really unreasonably rich. The communist of spiritual and emotional wealth complains to me that these resources are unfairly divided. I am too lucky. This is not just because I am reading a book about suicide and depressed Brits or spend two hours a day traveling through the Bronx and not the part like Riverdale. Not just because I got to go to Paris or because I got to come back to my family and to doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Not just because I found out the fear is unfounded that I wouldn't like labs and lab work and lab people and now I can safely and happily imagine myself in one for a long time surrounded by not stupid minds intent on what they're doing. Not only for friendship expectedly and unexpectedly. And not just because I get to go back to my other home in the fall or that I'm pleased with all my major decisions (save one) like the English major/science coursework plan or Yale or choosing to be born into my family or to be happy. But those might be some of the variables and constants that are contributing factors.

Paint Paris by Numbers

Wrote reviews of Paris on portable mediums, postcards and notebooks. Could not quote Hemingway’s habits with a laptop. In black pen, over a café crème and a morning, I wove French and English. Hurried handwriting and under edited thoughts, theories take up trip and two French notebooks. Instead of translating, attempted an accounting en attendant Godot and an airplane last week lugging laptop anyways across the ocean. In whirl of getting new job, starting new job, and returning while moon in retrograde and everything crazy with family, forgot about blog. But here’s what meant to post:

1 am. British Isle time. Heathrow. Have not slept properly since Sunday night. It’s transitional Tuesday Wednesday time now unwitnessed by sound sleeping bodies. An airport allnighter might slightly dampen my excitement at them. Provisions, grace à Danielle, are box of startling quality Monoprix cookies, bag of cerrises, banana, smallest bottle of Johnnie Walker from flight. Hastening computer’s death, I am recklessly listening to itunes as I type. Quickly killing battery but boredom demanded a soundtrack. Started with Garden State music. Saw it Sunday with unsubtle subtitles in French. This is the liminal moment where with the fore and hindsight of Janus, in the portal between pays, one is supposed to come to conclusions on the grand adventure and what it means. The idea this is the moment of revelation is disingenous. Reflected all along, my reflections of Paris plonged and scattered in Seine. Besides, Hem didn’t sketch his Paris till more than thirty years later. By then nostalgia set in and that could be a dangerous disease because my Paris so rosy already. But I’ll have to take the chance at least of a day because too ti-red now to give more than John Sterling style seventh inning scoreboard of city.

Scorecard:
12 movies, include 4 seen in 3 days during Fête de la Cinema. Three days when all movies ever anywhere were 2 euros. First three (Clash by Night, Douches Froids, Jules et Jim) were three themed, fourth tagged along as part of a Truffaut festival. A little giddy. Meant they didn’t show private screenings for me like when I went to see Sideways in a basement and it was just me and the projectionist. First time, besides when we went to opening night of Les Poupées Rousses when there was a queue for the theater. But it was brilliant. Desperately hot day, I shot up the Truffaut festival. Went to see Jules et Jim. Left the theater, melted, turned, got a ticket and sat back down for L’amour en fuite. No where else wanted to be than in the climatized dark.
1 carte d’orange or infinite mobility for month of june
2 carnets for le métro three days of may and week of july
1 Paris skirt
5 sparklers
2 fancy chocolateries
2 plays
1 opera
too tired to count number of crèpes
same for hot chocolate
4 yoghurts and many masquerading items Danielle disguised by the name yoghurt but were really cheese or a variation on the theme of rice pudding
18 Seine sunsets
3 sunrises
1 cup of coffee
1 drunk teacher
1 book from a vending machine, Roméo et Juliette, 2 euros. The machine advertised books at all hours, in case you woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly desperately needed Shakespeare or la Fontaine or how to conjugate an irregular verb that minute. How civilized or silly. Almost died with delight.
many many many paninis, pain au chocolats, pain de campagnes, champagnes
2 Musee D’Orsay visits
5 Friday night dates au Louvre
3 grecs
1 indigestion from grec, my first, had just roamed halls du Louvre like a hungry animal in search of food, found dead nature (still lives) but didn’t still my hunger, kicked out at 9:45, made way to Marais where I wanted a falafel. Forgotten Friday night and the Jewish thing, everything closed. Grabbed a Grec and regret. Other two were much better. One from place called Istanbul was actually quite enjoyable experience of the junk food of Europe.
a number higher than you can count in French of camemberts, baguettes and bottles of cheap wine
4 thunderstorms
so many saunas of le métro
8 and a half experiences of air-conditioning. All 8 were movies and Charles de Gaulle can’t completely count, airports are limbos.
2 killer meringues. Largest I’d seen. Ate one with glee waiting on pont saint michel as wind blew whiteness all over me.
1 best ice cream cone on either side of Atlantic
1 jazz festival
1 Bloomsday brought to you by Shakespeare et Co. complete with a screening of the new Bloom with the new Bloomeuselam
5 officiel des spectacles
infinite spontaneous spectacles as city decided to amuse us
at least 7 moments when I was sure I was the luckiest girl in the entire world at that exact instant
2 cemeteries
18 arrondisements experienced
1 Scottish bar
2 and a half bags of carambar, l’original
2 glasses of water poured on host sun by host mother
How many picnics? Define picnic, if it means sitting and sometimes a blanket but always a spread of cheese, bread, wine, the number might not exist yet in your imagination.
uncountable cafes but not as many as you might think
1 proper bistro, this little place down an impasse that cornered to create sense of intimacy. Involved foie gras on mash potatoes almost as good as dad’s, second best meal I’ve ever eaten
2 trips to Normandie, once to Cabourg, Proust country, with Danielle and Réuel and once with the gang to Deauville/Trouville (think Monet painting of Trouville hotel fronting the beach)
5 innards of cathedrals (and a Sunday Mass at Sacre Coeur)
5 train stations (Gare du Nord me manque.)
24 hours of Amélie. Morning run by canal St. Martin, evening skipping stones on canal, night drinking by canal. Montmartre meandering, photo booth posing and posturing, fruit stand frequenting, blind man by arm to help him navigate the underground streets of le metro, her café, yann tiersen-esque accordian melody moments in the streets, cracking crème brulée crust.
1 time lost, actually did not know which streets to take to get home
2 crazies on my chelou nocturne bus in all nights of riding it. Nocturne bus runs after the metro shuts down at the unsociable hour of 1 am. After the first week where stayed out till 5:30 cause hadn’t figured out bus, took it all the time and actually, cough, parents please don’t be worried post-paris, quite safe and full of normal young people. But the crazies are more interesting illustrations of social strains. First crazy complained about white women. Yelled how they married and then left you. How superior he was, how many he’d been with. How he was an African and he would stay an African no matter how long lived in Paris. I read. Provoked diatribe on how women were always reading. Always reading. Didn’t matter what. Not a word stayed in their head. Second crazy pulled a Samson with a French flic. Blasting boom box in back of bus, a cop came up to him and told him to turn it off. He did. As cop walks away, crazy curses. Cop turns towards. Do you curse at me, he asks. No, crazy replies. Cop turns away. But I curse. But I might my thumb, sir.
about 30 brioches, the official breakfast chez Méghira, Réuel ate his with excessive Nutella. Jam and cheese also always part of petit dejeuner.
1 magician
3 fire twirlers
1 dramatic full moon, pink. Found us Fête de la Musique. First, no one knows how to faire une fête like French. Le 21 juin every year entire country celebrates. Orchestras and garage bands compete on cattycorners. We danced from one street party to next. Walking down Saint Germain de Près, moved from a mob of metal, heads flying, young all in black, to sweet old French chansons, to pure pop, teens jump and jiving. Everyone out and everyone happy or intoxicated or both. Started off the evening with a sweet swing band in square between the mairie of the 4th and the mairie of the city. Old couple kept time and danced darlingly. Young boy swayed, arms curved copying clarinetist. He pretended to be pied piper and led littler brother. Seemed a neighborhood scene. Then across town to meet Rebecca to see Seu Jorge. Thrilled we spilled from Olympia afterwards. Stopped by an orchestra wearing strange headgear and straddling the steps of l’opera garnier. They played the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly under hats with propellers or lobster claws. I laughed. My favorite was the small hot air balloon rising from the head of the tuba player. Wandered back towards the center of the city. Halted to join jazz or rock out in rues, so crazy about Paree. Crossed courtyard of Louvre and came out by Seine. And that’s when I saw it. A pink full moon heavy and huge but rising over the city. Could not have been staged better. The choreography of the summer solstice moon ripe and rising over the island, the river, then the left bank was almost too much as an opera singer sounded in the background. And as crowds of people surged across le pont des arts and an imitation Bob Marley benefited from the acoustics under the bridge, I was frozen from fresh love for France. Bought bottle of champagne and bubbled over, moonstruck.

The list could go on but it’s a cheap way of writing, not even episodic storytelling. Forgive me. But it is 2 am and I will be at this table in the Caffe Nero, asymptotically approaching its namesake’s insanity, starved of computer, staring contest with the guy at next table, amusing myself retelling own anecdotes and other Americans’ take on Paris, entering into an existentialist play waiting for nothing to happen. Besides, the list should cut off midway. Paris does not have an ending. Holding onto what Hem said to stave off sorrow of parting from Paris.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to Paris no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
– A Moveable Feast