Mad About You Baby . . .
2.18.08
I’m in kind of an odd mood. Today started off badly and at the time, it felt like a bad omen for the week. Ok, it’s slightly melodramatic to say that it started off badly because the “it” to which I am referring is simply my breakfast. As I have recently mentioned, I have a banana sliced up in a bowl of Greek yoghurt every morning and sometimes thinking about getting up for breakfast is what finally gets me to get into bed at night. The repetition of the same thing every morning for breakfast has yet to become boring and I find both the food and the routine a comforting, secure way to start the day. If nothing else, breakfast is something that I can expect.
OH! And I cannot believe that I have not yet written about my amazing breakfast discovery yet! This is a complete side note, but very important for me to mention. I was sitting eat breakfast the other morning, contemplating a box of granola and thinking about the word “breakfast.” Earlier this year I explained to Lise that the verb “to fast,” means to go without eating and so breakfast is the ending of your nighttime fast. Several months before I explained this little linguistic tidbit to Lise, I was living with Ikram during Ramadan and she spent her days fasting. I could never remember the French word for fasting because it sounded like two different words for me and I had a hard time keeping it straight. Either the verb was “gener” which sounds either like the verb that means “to bother/annoy” or when conjugated the word for “people,” or it was “jeuner” which sounds like the word that means “youth.”
WELL my friends, finally about a week ago this all somehow sorted itself out in my brain and I realized that the word for breakfast in French is “petit dejeuner.” DeJEUNER, you know, like the verb “jeuner,” which means to FAST. So it is basically the same! You are un-fasting. Of course the word “petit” or “little” is thrown in there first and “dejeuner” all on it’s own means lunch. But whatever, it has the verb “to fast” in it. I was incredibly excited when I realized this. Of course I was eating breakfast by myself and had no one with whom to share my epiphany. So now I share it here. I bet no one gets quite as excited as I did. Losers.
Anyway, back to the tragic bad omen that was today’s breakfast. I ran out of bananas yesterday and because it was Sunday and not a lot of stores are open, I did not get around to picking up any more. I noticed that Jacqueline had some in the kitchen, so I figured I could swipe one of those and then go out and buy more at Carrefour after class today. When I went into the kitchen this morning I looked at the two bananas in the bowl, which didn’t look very ripe and then noticed that there were a lot of apples. That was when what I thought was genius (turned out to be dumbness) struck and I thought, “Hm, why not try slicing up an apple in my yoghurt instead of a banana!” Sigh. After following my instinct and going through the very messy process of slicing a strangely juicy yet not very flavorful apple up into a bowl, I discovered that it was too watery, thus diluting the yoghurt and it was simply the wrong kind of sweet. There was no saving the yoghurt, which was my last, and so I suffered through the mess that I had made. Then I dragged my ass through the rest of my morning routine, despite that I accidentally made, and obviously then had to drink, four cups of coffee instead of my regular two.
I got to the train station at 11AM to find the next train to St. Quentin leaving at 11:34. My first class on Monday begins at 12:15 and the train ride is at least a half hour long. Obviously this was cutting it more than close seeing as once I get to St. Quentin I have to walk from the train station to campus. Then of course there is the hassle of getting my classroom unlocked and today I had to administer a listening test, which involved first getting the materials out of the office – luckily it was open – and recording the tape onto the machines. The train was late and I made it to the main office on campus by 12:15. There I was told I’d have to wait five minutes before they could open the room, so I ran up to the third floor (well, fourth if you are American) to see if Sarah had gotten the text I sent asking her to grab the materials for me. She had not gotten the text so I bolted up another two flights to the office, said a very frantic hello to Ewa, grabbed the tape and questions and ran back down to the third floor. One thing that went right was that the tapes recorded fine, though the exercise was ten minutes long, which is longer than normal. Because I was running late and in such a tizzy, I skipped announcements all together and set the kids up with the test right away. I listened to the recording the first time through, as I had not listened to it beforehand, and then read for the rest of the time. Most of the students in my first group finished late and then I repeated the exact same thing with my second group.
I was done by 2:30, and Sarah and I headed to Carrefour so that I could get bananas and more yoghurt – I will no longer be messing with my morning routine, that’s for sure! It was nice to catch up with her because we hadn’t seen each other all weekend. We got to the train station at about 3:08. I swiped myself through the turnstile, looked up at departures screen to see that my train was leaving at 3:10 and made it to the platform in time to watch my train pulling away. The next train that I could take left in another . . . thirty minutes! My solace was being able to hang out with Sarah for about fifteen minutes until her train came. I finally got back into Paris at 4:15 or so and was back at my apartment around 4:45. Now, I realize that my workday was in reality quite the opposite of stressful. I was late with no consequences and spent my two hours of work reading a novel for pleasure. But because I am me and cannot help but to complain, I do need to point out what a pain in the butt it is that I left my apartment at 10:30AM and got back at 4:45PM for a grand total of two hours of work. And the only thing other than working (and waiting for trains, duh) that I did was to go grocery shopping.
I did manage to get up the energy to go for a walk after a quick bite to eat and a round of slap with Lise. I started out with a burst of energy as I listened to Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. I got to thinking about how my iPod is an interesting measure of my mood. For example, on the train today I was half asleep but convinced that I was awake and with it. Then I would realize that I was listening to something bizarre and totally unappealing that had come onto my iPod, something that a conscious, not asleep version of myself would have skipped over. And once I realized that I would sometimes fall back asleep, reawake and realize the song was STILL playing and finally muster up enough energy to skip to the next song. And THEN sometimes the next song would suck but I would fall asleep again before I could skip it. When I got back to Champs de Mars “Sweet Baby James” came on, which usually I would skip but I got this incredible wave of nostalgia thinking about driving to Skinner Mountain for a summer picnic with my summer wards and ended up listening to the song twice. A few days ago a Christmas song came on and I listened to the whole thing. I think that is a real indicator of homesickness for me – listening to holiday music when it is not the holiday season.
And that brings me back to why I started writing this. I’m in an odd mood and it has been creeping up on me for a few days now. I’m thinking that it might be the full moon that is on its way (total lunar eclipse on Wednesday, in case you were unaware). It’s not quite homesickness, but almost. My parents are in Florida on vacation and knowing that I can’t get in touch with them is kind of odd. And I feel like I’m going back and forth between longing for some sort of romantic something and being so happy to not be involved with anyone.
On my way to meet Tanya for dinner tonight I was thinking about how easy having low standards for food is. That is to say, give me a restaurant where I can get a reasonably priced salad and I’m more or less content. I don’t have a very discerning palette really. Sure I can tell decent from crap, but that’s not so hard. Then I got to thinking about standards and expectations in general and I was thinking about how one thing that makes relationships and dating hard for me is that I am actually a rather picky person. And I don’t know that it is really about having high standards so much as it is that I am just particular. Furthermore, I have spent so much of my life thinking about it, dreaming about it, concocting silly scenarios and all of that highly embarrassing stuff that most people do. But I guess I get too caught up in my head and reality can never really quite match it. Plus I then fall into the bad trap of looking for what is in my head instead of looking at what is out there. And it makes sense then that I want what I can’t have because if I can’t have it, there is the possibility that it could be what I’m looking for or it could meet my standards or being particular in the way it needs to be for me. And of course the whole question of what I want is a funny one because really I don’t have an answer for it. In some ways I think it is easier to talk about what I don’t want.
Anyway, to make matters more jumbled up in my head, I watched the series finale of “Mad About You” tonight because I have it on DVD. The last episode is really interesting and it jumps around in time so that you see all of these really hard, emotional moments that Jaime and Paul go through. It is shot like a documentary made by their now grown-up daughter who narrates the whole thing and the whole time you don’t quite know if they are going to end up together or not. In the end they do, despite a lot of hard times and it is this very sweet ending that is kind of a happily ever after thing, but it feels like there is a level of reality or honesty in that in order for them to get there they go through all sorts of crap, including a divorce. And you know that the crap won’t just magically go away or be all better because they kiss and make up. And sure it will in some ways make them stronger, but even then it will still be baggage. I feel a little silly having been so moved by and invested in this episode, but for some reason with all of the drama going on in the universe that I keep hearing about and with my strange moods recently, it just struck a chord with me.
It also reminded me of a conversation Tanya and I were having over dinner. For some reason we were talking about going through particularly emotional and challenging moments in life, broken hearts, broken friendships, etc. and the cliché phrase, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” or something along those lines came up. We were talking about how a broken heart can be pieced back together and grow stronger. Tanya mentioned that it will always be scarred though, no matter how much super glue or staples or duct tape or stitches is used to reform it, there will always been rough edges and evidence of whatever it is that caused the fracture in the first place. It was kind of a depressing thought and after a pause, all I could think to say was, “yeah, but scars make for seriously great stories.”
Since this summer I seemed to have accumulated several physical scars and I suspect that, for whatever reason, my skin scars much more easily here than at home. On my right hand one of my knuckles has a small, round scar from where it bled when I accidentally brushed it up against a rough, stonewall at my first and only visit to the Louvre. Both of my ankles have deep purple scars from where the straps of my shoes dug in and made them bleed on a very, very rainy walk through Paris with the wrong socks and the stupidity to keep on walking. On my right ankle I have a very, very deep purple pre-Paris scar from riding Tucker’s bike through Worcester and catching my ankle on the chain while trying to hop off or something. My ankle started bleeding profusely and was dripping onto my brand new earth shoes. Several blocks from home and in a residential neighborhood, I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I remembered that I had my red sports bra in my backpack, so I tied it tightly around my ankle to stop the bleeding. The fact that the bra was red seemed rather fortuitous. Incidentally, I had to stop wearing those new shoes because the cut into my heels too much. I also have a less noticeable scar on my right foot from a pair of flip-flops I bought this summer and ended up leaving with Andrea after they gave me major blisters on a long walk before I had had the chance to break them in.
Of course the scars that Tanya and I were talking about are the invisible kind. The kinds of scars that keep me interested in what I can’t have and make me finicky about what I will and will not allow in my life. They are the kind of scars that at times make me appear as cold or distant. They also allow you to recognize and relate to similar pain in other people’s lives – a sort of common ground on which we can relate to one another based on our similar emotional experiences. Sometimes the common ground is good for laughter and the realization that we all take ourselves too damned seriously. Other times it’s a good place to remember that we need to take ourselves seriously and to treat ourselves with kindness, patience and compassion. And then there are also other other times, maybe some of my deviously favorite times, when we meet there to rant and rave and allow anger to swell up until it is all we can do to keep from screaming. And for me at least those are the times that laughter comes too. I mean it’s all connected anyway – laughter, crying, yelling – a good jolt of feeling so strong that you have to react physically. I’m not sure how I got to talking about this or where it is going, but I am finding a lot of people around me these days to be nursing new wounds or picking at old scars and while there is a lot of sadness, anger and confusion in the air, it is making for some interesting and powerful bonding experiences.
I talked to Jayney on the phone yesterday because I decided that Tanya and I should head to London this weekend, which we are totally doing (!), and I asked her if she is going to miss England when they move back to the States at the end of this year. She replied in that flat, blunt, no bull shit eight-year-old way, “No.” It seemed a shame that two years of living abroad and she still misses home so much that she can’t wait to get back. At the same time, I tried to point out to her that when she is back in the States she will probably find herself missing things that she never even really took notice of in England. It a bit of a complicated idea for her to process and maybe I’m wrong. But I know that what I miss is usual the day-to-day bits and pieces of life that I don’t always appreciate or notice when they happen. Anyway, I hope it turns out to be true for her because I think it makes life a lot easier when you can learn to appreciate the small stuff. Um, it is late. How did that happen?
