Wild things

“the book is probably better” but still…this is promising to be a breath of fresh air, compared to all the crap that we usually pay ten dollars to see in theaters. Admit the preview made you smile…

Epic confusion

I’m back from my trip in France. After the short and disappointing visit to Bretagne (I was so sick we only made it out to the beach that one time), I went to Auvergne where our family home is, in a village in the high mountains above Le Puy en Velay. I ate cherries from our tree and non-pasteurized cheese, fresh foods prepared by mom, and slowly got my health back. Then we visited a couple of castles in the Loire valley between Orleans and Tours before my flight home.

You never know what life has in store for you. I wasn’t expecting to be sick for five weeks when I left Pasadena, or to feel so anxious about my future while I was away. From the conversations I’ve been having with friends about life choices, different paths, new careers, changing directions, going back to school, trying to “figure it out” and find what it is you really want to do, and what it is you’re really good at, it seems like a lot of us are in the same boat. Single, married, parent, just out of school, in your thirties or in your forties, with a masters or without, with a long career behind you or a string of short-term jobs, a lot of us are sharing in this confusion, and it’s not a very happy place to be right now.

“what am I going to do with my life?” seems like the scratched record soundtrack of my days, in between applications, inquiring emails, personal moments of reflection. What’s strange is that in this miasma of confusion, I’m still best placed to see clearly, better placed than career advisers, job search experts, but I still can’t find my way out of the murky waters. Deep down I know from observing other people’s lives that this confusion is temporary, but on the surface, it truly feels like it will never ease, and I will forever stay far from the comfort of knowing my path and having confidence in the direction I’ve chosen.

So when I found this quote by JK Rowling (of Harry Potter fame) I felt comforted, strangely. It’s nice to know someone who has made it so successfully felt the same way I do at one point in her life. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” That’s really interesting…

“A mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. … I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Virginia Woolf’s stones

I tried to imagine what was going through her head, as she walked to that river around where she lived and wrote, her pockets filled with heavy stones, marching to her death. Probalby not very close to reality, or what that moment was like, but I always loved that scene in The Hours, with an unrecognizable Nicole Kidman playing the role of a tortured, strange Woolf, walking into the river with that heavy step. 

It was more or less easy to imagine because there I was, at a late dusk–the sun goes down around 10 PM these days and it was around 9–with my sweater pockets filled to the brim with at least a pound each of heavy grey stone pellets, walking straight into the receded Atlantic on a beach deserted of everyone except my mother, a crab and a couple of hungry seagulls. 

Granted, there was nothing suicidal in my march, just a desire to walk into the sunset, straight towards the freezing ocean with heavy pockets. I hate wet feet, so I didn’t even get that close to the water. 

I get it from mom, that love of walking on the beach and looking for stuff. We do it for hours, when we’re together. Walking on empty beaches, looking at pools of crabs and anemones, moss, and sea snails, lumps of snot (I’m sure even they have a name), mussels, oysters, all kinds of other shells. Picking up sea glass and shells, stones and handfuls of sand we stuff in our pockets to find months later and remember what that late afternoon was like. 

We’re in Bretagne right now, in a beautiful untamed part of the French coastline called “les cotes d’Armor”, a fiercely beautiful and proudly guarded part of the natural national heritage. Britons are extremely independent and have a regional identity almost separate from their national one.

For example, all French highways are toll-roads–they’re the most beautiful and best-maintained roads on earth and they are expensive as heck to drive on, tolls can be up to a couple hundred bucks for a long trip. Well…in Brittany, there are NO toll roads. There’s a story behind it, about Britons never having bowed down to paying for roads and they had it written in stone that they would never allow toll roads to go through their country, and they haven’t.

They’re just “insoumis”, indomitable. You’ve read about Asterix and Obelix…well, this is their country. It’s beautiful, it’s wild, and it’s as indomitable as the people. Sweet, loving, butter-and-crepe-and-cider-loving people but with a temper. 

Everything is beautiful here and everything is green. Little tiny two-lane roads that curve around stone houses with slate or thatched roofs and blue shutters, huge, wildly colored flowering bushes up to six feet high popping your eyes with the brilliant hues, the sweet smell of sea-water and wild flowers everywhere in the air, mixing in with the cooking coming from houses and small cafes. Fishing boats and yachts in the distance, a rugged coastline with perfectly maintained paths. Overlooks into the ocean speckled with  hundred-year old crosses signaling a lost boat or deaths at sea. 

This is beautiful country. This is my France now, I prefer to come straight here, rather than spend any time in Paris, that I know too well and where I can too often predict the altercations over silly stuff. You’ll hear people say it often, here too. Life is more “human” in these parts. And they have all kinds of fun stuff on the beaches to fill your pockets with. 

This is where I am, courtesy of Wikipedia:

And this is what it looks like, a half-mile from where I’m sleeping:

life in the fishbowl

We saw a movie tonight, called “Le hérisson” with three stellar actors, which you should bookmark if you like the following movies: Cinema Paradiso, As Good As It Gets, The Visitor, Lars and the Real Girl, The Girl in the Cafe, Bella, The Lives of Others, Sex and Lucia, Children of Heaven, The Red Balloon, Happy-Go-Lucky, Kolya, King of Masks, Whale Rider or any movie that is touching, sensitive, intelligent and understated.

I don’t know why I added the IMDB link since it is useless. I don’t think it even has a synopsis. The cast of three main actors are an utterly unrecognizable Josiane Balasko as an aging morose but innerly rich concierge, a breathtaking Garance LeGuillermic as a suicidal 11-year-old and Togo Igawa as a perceptive loving new proprietor in the building who brings with him Japanese culture, a shared love of Tolstoy and a sense of humor that will bring all three lives colliding together in a happy ballet. 

Josiane Balasko is a little of the Nicholson from As Good As It Gets in her solitary habits of an aging antisocial, with kinks and habits but without the crippling OCD and inability to function successfully. She’s a little similar in the sense that she gets yanked out of her daily routine of decades against her will (and way more directly than Nicholson), by a child, and finds herself transformed permanently by the interaction. 

The movie takes place in the Paris of the very privileged, in the 16th arrondissement, in a family where no one is happy and the precocious and depressingly aware 11-year-old suicidal daughter decides to chronicle the unhappiness in a hand-me-down super-8 camera she carries everywhere. The way she sees the world, and the way you learn to see the world through the eyes of the three main characters, the touching moments of inner life that you glance, almost always non-verbally, through sheer brilliance of acting, facial expressions, tone of voice, looks, notes, details in the apartments or props makes the movie a real emotional feast. 

I hope the movie comes to the States, it would do everyone good to see it. It’s a rare, rare gem. 

sick on a trip

I don’t like being sick on a trip because I’m not as comfortable as when I’m at home. I never like being sick, anyway. I’ve been sick so much, I’m pretty sure, after hours of internet, that I know what it is. I got some sort of E-Coli bacteria with a meat I ate (the times I wish I was a vegetarian), because all my symptoms check out. The treatment is basically: drink lots of water and don’t take over the counter medication. 

So I’ve been pretty sick, and sleeping a lot, getting better at computer card games, getting online and wasting time, in between bouts of feeling better and strutting around the town with mom. But when I get sick, all I want to do is lie down and sleep and stay in my PJ’s. That’s basically what I did in Morocco on my 12-hour layover. I had wanted to discover Casablanca, having dreamt of that moment for at least twenty years since I first saw Bogart walk into Ric’s Cafe Americain, but when I get sick, I just curl up and sleep. 

So today’s post of the day is a boring post about being sick on a trip. It’s even lame because I repeat the same words over and over again like “sick” “trip” “sleep” and “like”. 

One positive point: the yeast medication I’m taking to soothe my digestive tract comes in a nice old-timey glass bottle, that is so pretty I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it. Can’t you just imagine it coming straight out of an apothecary?

Boring life.

I used to live here

I’ve lived in 6 cities long enough to know them like the back of my hand: Kinshasa (then Zaire), Brazzaville (Rep. of Congo), Newark (Delaware-USA), Haifa (Israel), Paris (France) and Pasadena (California-USA). 

Walking through Paris today was interesting because I instantly relived my time here in overheard bits of conversation, the whiiiiisssssshhhhhh of the departing metros from their platforms, the natural instinct I’ve always had about the city streets and finding my way around even the most obscure parts of the city. 

You would think Paris is the hardest place to get over leaving. The city equivalent of “the one that got away” whom you’ll always wonder about, even when you’re happily married, one hopes not, but still. I may even have posted something about this a few years ago, when I was still in love with Paris, and had just moved to Pasadena, and was still feeling around the shape of my heart, worried that it was the shape of Paris, and would never conform to any other city. 

In the end, Paris was just another city. It wasn’t hard to get over, but I love to write, and when I write about places, I get questions about how I can love all these cities, and do I love them equally, how can I bare to leave them if I love them so much, and how I can live in other places, don’t I feel like I’m cheating. It’s almost as if we were talking relationships, and we are. For city girls, the city is a relationship, just ask Carrie Bradshaw. 

The truth is, I love and I leave, at least cities. I need it to keep writing, I need it to feel like I’m alive. I’m someone who cannot have a routine even for the most mundane of things, like driving to work, foods I eat, things I do, and so it naturally extends to places I live. 

I’ve noticed that between two and three years of incessant exploration is my quota for a new city. After that time, I need a new city to explore, and maybe I can keep coming back to it. I just keep adding notches to my belt, and each one is like I never left it. there’s something deep inside of me that needs to feel all these comfort zones, all these cities all around the world that I can be dropped in, at a moment’s notice and be able to disappear in, swim along, and never be found, because I know them, like the back of my own hand, I know them with my eyes closed, I’d know them by sight.

I think that need is deep-seated in me. Much more powerful and deep-seated than the need to settle down and own a house. And I think that need comes from the fact that I was a kid who grew up astride five cultures: American and French, Middle-Eastern and African, and finally Baha’i, and I’m never comfortable choosing one. I’m sort of a bee that way, I like my garden vast and diverse. 

What’s the opposite of a bee? A sedentary animal…Are there any? I wonder.

4-strap heeled sandal at Maje

Congo photos

 

 

Some of the pics I took are up on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/threeleggeduck/

screaming taxis

You know you’re in Paris (and therefore no longer in Congo) when you get yelled at by cleaning ladies for asking why the only bathroom in the baggage claim area is closed. 

You know you’re in Paris when a screaming match ensues with a cab who refuses to take you because he thinks you chose his cab instead of going to the first cab in the order of arrival (who had refused you because you had four suitcases). He then proceeds to insult you. 

You know you’re in Paris, in case you were a little confused, when the next cab refuses to take you solely because he saw the last cab driver refuse you, without asking you why the cab refused to take you. You then have to patiently explain the entire last ten minutes of argumentativeness and close-mindedness on the part of the last cab driver before this guy starts yelling at you, telling you that you should have reported the abuse, and that this, my friend, this, is why Paris cab drivers have such a terrible, and unjust and undeserved reputation. You comment he refused you without investigating, he says, well, you know, I wasn’t going to take a chance. You wonder why people wonder what’s wrong with France. 

You know you’re not in Congo, however, when you’ve gone through customs and haven’t been asked for bribes. When you’re wearing sandals and your feet aren’t dirty. When you turn on the shower and the water pressure actually feels strong. When you’re surfing on the internet, and there is no loading time for anything. When random people who don’t know you insult you. This just goes to show that my theory that you will always enjoy Paris more if you’re a little clueless. If you’re French and have lived here, the amount of smugness, rudeness, underhanded comments, just plain mean-spirited things people say are enough to never make you regret your decision to leave this town. I find Paris easier to love and fall in love with in transit. Less bull-’merde’.

up in the air

Today was spent traveling. We left the hotel at 6:30 AM, and went straight to the airport, of course the usual mayhem. One guy checking all the papers in front of a small entrance into the room where the check-in counters were. And the traffic jam that ensues from this poorly placed checkpoint. We managed to check in rapidly enough, and then proceeded to have our papers, and tickets and bags checked four times in rapid succession, with very un-subtle hints about whether we had cash, or money, or whether we were transporting currency, or whether we wanted to buy them coffee, or whether we felt we could let go of a little money and did we have money, and were we carrying cash. 

Below is a picture of Congolese paperwork, from a window into an office in the Brazzaville airport: 

 

 

After the last useless check, we found a quiet place to sit, and I curled up on the benches, already sick, and fell asleep for a good hour. We boarded a little later, but not before standing with all our carry-on luggage in our hands, in a cramped crowd, precariously balanced on steep stairs. Yes, that’s where they chose to check our papers again. While we were walking down the stairs. The lack of intelligence of officials in Congo is staggering.

One of them stopped me and pointing to my current 3-month Congo visa practically yelled at me: “Where is your visa?” I looked at him and pointed, “right there”. He said “that’s a 2007 visa.” Completely stunned, I took the passport from him, looked at the visa, handed it back to him with my finger on the 2009 date and said “it’s 2009, read it!”. His tone totally changed and he smiled, a little surprised, and said “wow, you’re smart” and let me through.  

We were so late leaving, and arriving in Douala, and the new passengers were so late getting onto the plane, that we barely had fifteen minutes to transfer planes in Casablanca. Of course, we still had to get boarding passes. We ran through the airport halls, and were stopped by guards who told us to, get this “Take.off.your.glasses” before going through the doors to the transit area. They had to repeat it twice because it was so weird. In the end, they needed us to take our glasses off, so the infra red sensors or whatever could trace our profiles without the glasses. Very strange. 

We got our boarding passes and ran through the airport, again, arriving to the top of an escalator and all falling one on top of another, suitcases and all because this, my friends, is where a Moroccan safety official decided he would best be able to control our papers. At the very top of the escalators, almost causing an accident of monumental proportions. He finally agreed to listen to us and move his checkpoint away from the top of the stairs of death. 

The rest of the trip was OK, but it was only 2 hours long from that point, not enough to make up for the 12 hours of insanity up until then. This is a picture of sunset over France.

 

common death

Our friend died this morning. We found this out from dad, after we’d landed in Brazzaville. He is the friend who we had gone to visit a week before, and had spent time with. Mom and I kept cheerful memories of his ravaged, skeletal body, and his excitement at talking about the FC Barcelona’s upcoming season, though he often had to stop to catch his breath.

Mom and I sat silent after we heard, crying a little in the cafe. We’d literally talked to him and laughed with him four days ago, and now he was dead. We’d joked about rotisserie chicken, and I’d gone straight from visiting him to buying him a chicken to make him smile, and sending it to him with a friend of ours whom he’d complained had not come to visit him either during his stay at the hospital or since his discharge. He had been adamant that we send the friend to visit him.

Mom remembered that afternoon and turned to me asking “do you think he was saying his goodbyes?”

I’m pretty sure he was. He had lists, and was receiving visits from all his friends for the last two weeks. A few months ago, when he started having the tell-tale AIDS signs, dad had pleaded with him to get tested and he had refused. He also refused to get tested in the hospital, and so it can’t be said that he died of AIDS, which is how he wanted it, since there was never a conclusive test. He had a wife.

Ignorance about AIDS, and the taboo surrounding it are so hard to deal with. Death like this is unheard of in the US. When is the last time your twenty-something friend wasted away and died in front of you? Here that is common. Common and heartbreaking. Death is an everyday possibility.