The Paris Routine

I have finally decided all my courses. For my friends in school in the U.S. who are going through midterms right now, yea, sucks to be you. In Paris, there are no midterms, and school doesn't start til October, and not even really then because they have to strike about some things for a while first, so we're just now getting going. (Apart from cancelled classes for a few days and a more-crowded-than-usual metro, the strikes haven't really affected my life.)

Ok, so here are my classes: at Dauphine (Paris IX) I'm taking Economy of Development; at Nanterre (Paris Ouest) I'm taking a Cinema Studies course on fantomes and fantasmes and an Art History course on the internationalization of Dadaism and the surreal. I like the latter two the best. I'm really only taking the Economy course because I feel like I can't consider myself a student of post-colonial theory without understanding the mechanism of imperialism (which is capitalism and our contrived economic structure). Plus, every time I say I go to Dauphine, everyone always acts really impressed, so that's fun. Required by and taught by APA are also French Culture and a French language course. I managed to get myself into the top level of the language course (couldn't weasle my way out though) and am taking the advanced writing course through APA, where we're supposed to be learning stylistics, but really we don't do much of anything.

I'm going to be doing a ton of reading, that much is clear, but I won't have more than three graded assignments for each class, apart from the writing course where we turn in something every week. My favorite course is my cinema course. I mean, it's Friday morning for three hours, so it has to be really good to keep me from doing what all my friends are doing on Friday mornings, which is sleeping or nursing a hangover. It's a Masters level course (I did weasle my way into that, at least), and there are about nine people in it. The professor is a tiny little woman with big glasses and short hair who talks to us intellectually about movies like The Shining and our incest taboo and why we hate dead bodies. Oh, and there's this cute boy in it who gave me his email address in case "I ever missed a class and needed his notes." Hehehe...

Courses only meet once a week for three hours, so I've got some free time to fill. I am doing a once-a-week conversation with a French student at Dauphine who wants to work on his English. We're alternating talking in English and French. I am also going to be volunteering in an elementary school English classroom, and hopefully take some jazz dance classes too if I haven't missed the regestration deadline. I eat dinner three times a week with my host family, so the other four nights I either have a baguette or get together with two of my friends and cook dinner. Most students opted to have dinner six nights a week with their host family, but the three of us were the cheap ones. Fortunately, we all made friends with each other before knowing that we had the same meal plan, so we've started cooking together to eat more cheaply. We've been doing dinner for three on about 7 euros total.

Apart from that, I spend (like I said) a LOT of time on the metro, so it's good that I consider public transportation one of the wonders of the world (put into the context of the post-industrial revolution world; I still think the industrial revolution was no good; buy my future book if you want my full, not-so-educated opinion on the topic). I am also knitting myself mittens and have gotten sort of addicted to How I Met Your Mother and I'm writing a decent amount. I would love to travel, but now that I have a Friday class it's going to be difficult to schedule. Plus, it's expensive.

So that's about it! Life on the farm feels pretty far away...

La ville d'amour

Well, I'm all moved in! Finally in Paris...although I got a facebook message from Willa today all about her life on the farm since I've left that literally made me tear up. I knew I would get nostalgic, but the emotion is still surprising every time it hits me.

The weather in Paris right now is beautiful. I'm sitting on this bench in this little rose garden by my metro stop writing this, and it's so much fun to see everyone outside in their pretty summer clothes. I'm carrying around with me a batch of eclaires that I made to take to the APA office. They're okay, the eclaires. Not great. The oven runs hot, so the pate a choux is too crunchy, but what can you do. It's always an adventure cooking in a new kitchen. I learned today, for example, that my host family does not possess a pot. Any sort of pot. How a family can exist for 30 years without accumulating a single pot is completely beyond me, but I swear it's true. They do have a fondue thing, so I used the pot for the machine on the stove to make the pate a choux and the creme. I don't think I ruined it. Anyway, there is also no plastic wrap or aluminun foil in the house, and the lids to the tupperware containers have long since been lost, so I covered the containers of eclaires in trash bags and carried them out. And yes, I can already see the chocolate smeared all over the bags. But whatever. Julia Child says to never apologize for bad cooking, so I will serve them with a smile. I can't keep them for myself, as I made about a dozen. And my host family consists of only a mother and a father -- their three kids have moved out -- and the father works away from home during the week and the mother already ate one eclaire with lunch.

My host parents are very sweet and very bourgieous. Their apartment is absolutely beautiful. I have French windows and a tiny balcony in my room, and a fire place. I also have a salle de bain (bathroom minus a toilet) to myself. It's sort of the anti-WWOOF here: everything is beautiful and clean and fancy, but I have only had one family dinner with them since arriving last Friday. I have complete independence, which is great, but I will have to find my own entertainment or risk getting a little lonely in this giant, empty apartment (the mother and I cross paths everyday, but she works full days and usually goes out to eat, um, obviously since she owns no pots). This family also has some sort of obsession with Chanel. Obsession isn't even a strong enough word. I peaked in the mother's drawers in her bathroom: she wears only Chanel makeup and perfume and nail polish. In nearly every room, at least one bottle of Chanel perfume is on display. In the bathroom with the toilet, about eight bottles are set in this alcove, all ranging in size, the largest about a gallon. Yes, a gallon of Chanel perfum. It has never been opened. Somebody printed out a color picture of Chanel perfume and carfully cut out around the edges of the bottles and stuck it to my door. I find it all a very intersting interior decorating decision, but who am I to judge? I have a black and white picture of Coco herself as my computer background.

I am determined to make French friends. I don't want to get sucked into the trap of only hanging out with Americans and speaking English all the time. I am so happy I spent the summer in France. I am one of the only students who consistently understands what's going on, and who isn't afraid of speaking French to actual French people. I am learning, though, that I may want to unlearn some of the stuff that I picked up on the farm. Yesterday I told the director of the program -- a very sweet, old fashioned, proper lady -- that "ça me fait chieé," which is basically, "that really pisses me off" in English. I didn't have the slightest idea that it was a vulgarity. I mean, that's what everyone on the farm said.

Classes haven't started yet. I've got a meeting in an hour to choose my classes, and after going through the course book, I think I'm going to be taking all geography/economy/political theory type classes. That's what really interested me: no art history, no literature...I feel a little bit like I've come into some understanding of what I want to do with myself by choosing these classes. I'm not really sure what it is, but something concrete, with the developing world. Ideally, I would just sort of turn them all into self-sufficient, Marxist societies (ooh, I bet I have an FBI file for putting that on the internet) but I have yet to hear of a job with that description.

Anyway, now I've got to jump on the metro, and head from the 17th arrondissement, where I live, to the 14th, chez APA and meet with Mme Suraqui, the director of this program. I will try not to offend her this time with any French vulgarities. Oh putain...

one week to paris...

One week until Paris! Well, one week til I leave for Nice, and then two days after that I leave for Paris. I have really reached my limit of being in isolation. I know this because I’ve started online shopping. Well, okay, I haven’t actually bought anything yet, but I’ve drooled a lot.

I also have done lots of escaping into the world of Harry Potter. Willa and I have been listening to the seventh book on tape, or on iPod I guess, while we cook, and it’s really invaded my real world. Willa and I recently became full nerds when we wrote a rap song about Harry. I guess wrap: wizard rap. It’s great, and as soon as we get the music video up on youtube, I will let you know. We also have created a Harry Potter fan club headquarters. Valerie moved to her own apartment, and Willa took her bedroom. So we turned Willa’s old bedroom into a living room. Her bed and pillows has become a couch, and we turned a sort of shelf into a coffee table. And we’ve made lots of posters and signs and hung them all over. One says “Potter Fan Club, Long Live the Chosen One.” Having this area of our own is actually really nice. There’s a sort of freedom in the privacy it gives us. Most of what we do in this room is just watch trashy American television (there are some free downloads on iTunes) and drink tea.

We continue to cook two meals a day from scratch, as well as work in the garden. Yesterday we started gathering wood for the winter.

There are three dogs here, and two of them have been pregnant. One of them had her puppies probably the day before yesterday, and last night I found them with their mother. The mother dog is very sweet and trusting, and she let me pick up her puppies without any sort of nervous reaction. Of course, they were adorable. But Claude had been saying ever since it was obvious that the dogs were pregnant that he would have to drown the puppies. He doesn’t have the money to get his dogs fixed, or the money or will to have any more dogs. All the farmers around here get rid of their newborn dogs and cats. So this morning, I unhappily told Claude where I had found the puppies with their mother, knowing exactly what would happen next. It seems crueler to me to let all the puppies live and have them starve to death than to kill them quickly and keep the population in check. But after Claude took them, their mother started frantically looking everywhere for her puppies, shacking and panting and whining imploringly, especially to me, I think because I was the one who found her with them. All day, she’s been acting just like a mother of any species who can’t find her children. The only thing that could make the situation worse is laughing at it, and that’s exactly what Claude has done. He keeps making jokes to the poor dog herself about how her puppies took a nice swim today and how she’s better off without children to bother her. It makes me want to throw up. And he thinks he’s being cute, or showing how manly he is because he can laugh at killing things. Frankly, I think it’s just redneck. It’s a trait that I have seen in other people who live close to the land like this. Not everyone, of course, but some people with a similar lifestyle have Claude’s same attitude of needing to show their toughness and their disregard for anything “city people” think is pretty or sacred. It’s as though he’s showing how he can kill puppies without a second thought to prove his paysan-ness. But somehow I don’t find it tough or paysan to laugh at a mother whose babies have just been killed, even if that mother is not human. Maybe I’m being too hard on Claude. He made it clear that he doesn’t like to have to kill puppies. But I just don’t think the way of dealing with mercy killing is by being flippant. The real icing on top of the cake was when the dog found her dead puppies in the garbage and tried to take them back and hide them in the house. And I feel responsible because I was the one who told Claude she had puppies. But I don’t know what else I could have done; he was bound to find out at some point. So all in all, it hasn’t been a great day.

The Eclairs

Ok, so in the end, it all worked out. But it's not nearly that straight-forward. In fact, cooking and 18-year old boys end up going together quite well, because somehow during the making of the eclairs, I got one of the boys really mad at me. I'm still not sure what I did because he talks really, really fast, but let me start at the beginning.

So there is a small pool at Claude's. I have been thrown or pushed into this pool about six times so far by a friend of Kin's named Jean-Luc. I went outside (next to the pool) to ask Kin if he could light the oven for me, because I had never done it before. Jean-Luc was there also and tried to throw me in the pool. I tried to say, "Non, non, stop! I have to make eclairs, I don't want to be wet," but that just seemed to goad him on. In the end, after 15 minutes of serious struggle (Jean-Luc has joined the army and likes to do push-ups whenever he thinks people are watching), I managed to get myself back inside, but not before Jean-Luc had run the hose over my head. I was just a little pissed off. Later in the day -- I was still making eclairs, it took about four hours, but I'll get to that next -- Jean-Luc came in to see if I needed help. I said no. Because I didn't. I also said that I was mad at him because he tried to throw me in the pool. Well evidentally one cannot be mad at Jean-Luc, because from that moment on he gave me the silent treatment. He also refused to eat the eclairs, but his loss, because they were finished. Finally, last night, he drank about a third of a bottle of whiskey (classy, I know) and started yelling at me because he thinks I talk to him like he's a dog and I think I'm better than him and blah blah blah. I think it's because the moon was full recently. You know, hormones raging or something. At any rate, he leaves tomorrow, but it's been a little tense...

Ok the eclairs themselves: so my celebrated-Danish-chef cousin commented on my last post and said that I need to watch out not just for the flour but also the oven. There's a reason she's a celebrated chef (just so you know, staying at her house is the greatest thing that can ever happen for you. You actually want to gain 10 pounds the food is so good). I converted the recipe from American measurements to metric, a task much more difficult than you'd expect, even with the internet. But I was confident I had got it right and had all the tools I needed, so (with wet hair and t-shirt) I got started. Originally, the pâte à choux went very smoothly. I've made it before, I thought I knew what to expect, etc. But, I was cooking in a small gas oven that doesn't have a very precise way of adjusting the tempurature, which was in Celcius -- yet another obstacle. In the end, I had to take out the pâte à choux early because the bottoms were getting to dark, although I could tell that the middle wasn't quite finished. But the oven was as low is it would go and I didn't know what else to do. The crème was a little less smooth. Again, I've made it before, I know to stir lots, to not cook with a too high flame, to taste it after it boils to see if the flour is fully cooked. But the stove, again, threw me off. The lowest flame possible was still too hot, and within minutes and way before it boiled it got too thick. (To be honest, maybe it wasn't the flame, maybe I misconverted the amount of milk. Or something. Chemistry is not my strong suit.) So I frantically reboiled more milk -- I had given up measuring anything at this point -- and mixed it in with Kin's help and lots of swearing in English. Stir, stir, stir, ten minutes later again too thick, and it still had not boiled and still tasted of raw flour. So I started swearing louder and boiled more milk, seriously worried that I'd have to throw it out and restart, and near tears trying to explain to Kin that I just couldn't mess up a French dessert in France. (He actually made me feel quite a bit better by sarcastically saying that he would judge me very harshly if my eclairs sucked.) Anyway, the second batch of boiling milk did the trick and the flour cooked enough, but the crème was really thick. "Collé" Kin called it, which means glue. So I hoped for the best and began mixing in egg whites hoping that they'd take away the stickiness. In the end, I think I got lucky. The egg whites worked perfectly, I added just the right amount of rum for flavoring, and I used very good milk chocolate on top of the eclaires. Six people (seven were there, but of course Jean-Luc didn't contribute) ate 10 eclairs, and an amateur of pâtissière told me that no, the pâte à choux was not quite fully cooked, but the crème was very good, and all in all they were delicious. She ate one and a half. Kin, for the sake of culinary criticism of course, ate all the crème that was left over (nearly half), all the melted chocolate that was left over (a lot), and two eclairs.

I cooked dinner that night too, and in total spent about six hours straight in the kitchen. I haven't touched a pot since. But I'm thinking of making brownies tomorrow. It's much safer to cook American desserts I've decided.

For the sake of giving a little more merit to my stupid fight with Jean-Luc, I'll over-intellectualize it. Really, it's made me understand extremely acutely the relationship between identity and language. Ok, this idea is not a new one: a pillar of deconstructionist criticism (yes, I'm really over-intellectualizing it, but I really like deconstructionism) is the fluidity of language. We've all experienced in our native tongues the frustration of not being able to express ourselves, and even had major fights that have come from a simple misuderstanding caused by the fluidity of language. But in a second language, everything becomes that much more complicated. I don't even know who I am in French, because I'm never quite sure that what I'm saying is what I mean to say, and I'm never fully in control of how I express myself. Laetitia, Claude's daughter who lives in Spain and experienced the same phenomenon in Spanish, said that she is who she is only in French. In effect, she doesn't have a complete identity in Spanish. This year is seeming a little daunting. Furthermore (and this is the real cause of the argument between me and Jean-Luc), there is a very large gray area between funny and insulting in any language. In English, I can manoeuvre this area. I typically risk being insulting for the sake of making a joke, and have continued to do so in French. The problem though is that I really don't know the boundaries of humor in French, both linguistically and culturally, and I'm afraid it's gotten me into a bit of trouble. From now on I intend to choose bland and safe over funny and possibly rude, and in the process actively construct my French identity (as somebody a little on the bland side). But without a doubt, I miss the ease of English.

Last thing: I've finally uploaded my pictures onto my computer, and today or tomorrow will try to figure out how to post the better ones on my blog.