A is for Asylum

Those of you who have been following me for a while (and by that I mean all three of you), will know that I have a tumultuous history with my neighbors. Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself, but since my idea of loving myself does not exclude wary observation of my own behavior, I figure wary observation of my neighbors’ behavior is totally legit. And trust me, their behavior warrants all manner of wariness.

In years past, I have written here and here about the hijinks of the co-inhabitants of our apartment building in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, and here about the hijinks of the co-inhabitants of our first apartment complex in the leafy western suburb of Maisons-Laffitte. But despite the very high bar of outlandishness set by these previous co-inhabitants, the co-inhabitants of our current residence have managed to outperform them all. How? I’m glad you asked.

Our condo is calm, quiet (except for us), and even leafier than the last place. When we first moved in, we were by far the youngest people there, as well as the only family. Over my many years of life in France, I have made multiple moves from apartment to apartment, and with each move I have gotten closer and closer to the ground floor. Thus, my original 86-step walk-up is now a 0-step garden-level, wheelchair-accessible walk in the park. Literally.

By the time we moved in, our new neighbors already had a vendetta against us owing to the four months of renovations we had to have done prior to our arrival. I say “had to,” because the former occupants, while charming, had decorative tastes strongly evocative of World Market, and by that I mean the entire store: we’re talking ornately carved Aztec-style framed mirrors and multi-colored Moroccan wall hangings, disco ball facets covering vast swaths of bathroom wall space and a giant golden Buddha head reigning over the living room. The whole kitchen was painted silver, which made for quite a contrast with the coral lacquer of the cabinetry. Then there was the garden: a soggy jungle of disintegrating wooden boards, fake plants (your guess is as good as mine), former Christmas trees well on their way to becoming a forest, and a yucca so large and so spiky that its purpose was surely more defensive than it was decorative. Anyway, the place needed work.

So after many months of dust and demolition, we moved in. No one knocked on our door with a plate of cookies (not that anyone does that anymore, even if they SHOULD), but at least no one yelled at us about our improperly-folded cardboard boxes or our inordinately loud soup machine, which was something of a victory compared to the dubious welcome we received at our last place. The first few months went by, and I gradually came to “know” the people sharing our condo. Allow me to introduce them:

The lady who’s in charge of everything: I don’t know who went and put the lady who’s in charge of everything in charge of everything, but it must have been someone for whom money was no object because her passion seems to be making unilateral decisions on behalf of the entire residence with various third-party service providers (gardeners, plumbers, renovators, public lighting specialists), which all of us other residents then get to pay for. My husband became so fed up with the whole “outrageous expense” thing that he went and got himself elected president of the co-owners’ association so now technically he’s in charge of everything, which means my title is now technically “the lady married to the guy who’s in charge of everything,” which is pretty decent as far as titles go. I mean I’d rather be “Madame la Duchesse” but this will have to do for now.

The lady who’s friends with the mayor: do you have neighbors you try to avoid because you know that if they catch you they’ll talk and talk and talk and talk and you’ll be late to whatever you were intending to go do, even if it was just meander around the park? The lady who’s friends with the mayor is super nice, so this is not a criticism per se. Plus she’s supposedly friends with the mayor. But man does she talk. In France (and probably everywhere else), if you hear someone in the hallway whom you’d just as soon not run into, you wait behind your door until you hear them go away, and only THEN do you venture out (quickly). I do this with the lady who’s friends with the mayor. I mean unless I have unlimited time on my hands, which is rare because meandering around parks is more time-consuming than you might imagine.

The paranoid guy: this dude is super scared that our residence is going to be attacked by Saracen pirates or marauding bands of brigands from the less desirable parts of the Paris region like Saint Denis or that sketchy town on the other side of the bridge. He went and had a surveillance system installed at every access point of the property, including a metal perimeter gate that can only be opened with a swipe card. However, no sooner had the system been installed than some ne’er-do-well actually succeeded in breaching it, only to be deterred by the double doors of either building. In response, the paranoid guy decided that we need more cameras, and maybe a few drones (preferably the flame-throwing kind). Surely that will do the trick. I’d like to suggest we dig an alligator moat and install a portcullis, but so far only my kids are on board.

The friendly entrepreneur: we should have known something was up when he began talking to us like we were actually people worth befriending or some similarly absurd notion. One amiable chit-chat led to another, and soon he was pausing to say hi over the fence on his way past, or coming over for drinks with his girlfriend. He even invited us to pay him a visit some time at his vacation home in Avignon. His job seemed a bit out of the ordinary; he ran a medical magazine from his studio apartment, but as a fellow freelancer who am I to judge? Then one day we came home at midnight after a long road trip and found a moving van parked across from his garden. We later learned that he had not so much moved precipitously in the middle of the night as he had been evicted for being an occupant sans titre, in other words a squatter. Something tells me he doesn’t have a vacation home in Avignon. Or maybe he does, only it technically isn’t his.

The “sack guy”: I like to shop—or used to before I had kids—but the sack guy doesn’t just like shopping; he has made it his raison d’être. Every day, and I mean every day, I see him leave the property armed with sacks of various sizes, and every day I see him return laden with merchandise of various kinds. Food, six-packs of bottled water, electronics, shoes, you name it. Sometimes he turns around and heads out again the same day. At worst, he waits for the next day. We haven’t exchanged many words, but the few we have exchanged have been pleasant. However, we haven’t quite reached the point in our relationship where I can nonchalantly say, “So, what’s with the sacks? Are you a hoarder? Are you housing illegal immigrants in your basement? Where’s your wife whom no one has seen in over a year? Why don’t you ever open your shutters?” It’s all the more bizarre considering his apartment really isn’t that big. Where does he stock all the stuff? Does he eat it? He has been accused quite vocally by our next-door neighbor of making a lot of noise at night. Could he be holding midnight feasts? If the police ever show up, my only question will be what took them so long. Normal people don’t go shopping every day. Not for six-packs of bottled water anyway. Plus it’s Cristaline. I mean come on. 

The Mexican expats: these folks are a mystery. I only know one other Mexican in France, and the fact that I’m Californian makes me want to be friends with this family except they seem to be kind of scared of me, possibly because my kids got into a fight with their kids one summer and now when they see each other they stick their tongues out. Thanks, guys. Way to make it easier for mom to drink margaritas with people who actually know how to make them. The fact that they seem to have mistaken their front yard for a playground has made them rather unpopular among the other residents, in particular the angry guy who lives just above them. Their yard measures about 500 square feet but that has not stopped them from constructing a full-scale tower-slide-swing set, nor from importing an adult olive tree in a gargantuan pot, which had to be driven into the residence (a BIG no-no) and unloaded by two men with a hand trolley. I think my favorite moment was when they threw a birthday party and rented a ginormous inflatable bouncy castle with a dragon’s head that reached the first-floor balcony. The angry guy above them was STOKED, believe me.

The angry guy above the Mexican expats: I think the name says it all. Anger issues. Probably related to a lack of bouncy castles in his youth.

The illegal photographer: co-ownership rules clearly forbid the exercise of any professional activity involving receiving the public, but that does not stop our photographer neighbor from operating a photography business dedicated to recently married couples and/or young families practicing a fairly conservative form of Islam. I’m pretty sure she has a corner on the market here, and since she remains perhaps the most discrete of anyone living in the residence (the exact opposite of us), the non-legality of her business doesn’t seem to pose a threat. I mean why would it, compared to the sack guy? That dude is up to something.

The lady who won’t say hello: any well-meaning tourist to France knows that even if you can’t speak the language, you still HAVE to master basic etiquette if you expect any kind of respect whatsoever. This means at least saying “bonjour” and “au revoir” when you enter and exit shops (although it applies to most other forms of human interaction as well). If someone says “bonjour” to you, you say “bonjour” back. That is the bare minimum of all bare minimums. Thus, if you say “bonjour” to someone—for example, your neighbor—and they say NOTHING in return, that’s potentially bad but also potentially explainable especially if said neighbor is elderly. However, if you say “bonjour” to that same someone repeatedly, and they STILL say nothing, that’s not potentially bad but actually bad. It probably means they hate you, which is a bummer.

The guy who won’t say used to not say hello: while initially wobbly, my relationship with the guy who USED to not say hello (no relation to the lady who still won’t say hello) has evolved to the point where when I run into him in the hallway and say “bonjour,” he actually says “bonjour” back. That’s a solid win in my book. He managed to install his own private sprinkler system in order to water his miniscule front yard, which part of me kind of admires. I mean it’s totally against the rules, but that’s the subversive French mindset for you. “Give me a rule so I can break it!” Ride on, brother. Ride on.

So those are the all-stars of our current neighbors. I’ve left out the dude next door, who is straight-up schizophrenic and tends to ring our doorbell at odd times of the day to see whether my husband can come do some random repair job (my husband is a banker), but he may pop up in a future post. I was telling one of my brothers-in-law about these colorful characters the other day, and when I’d finished, he looked at me and said, “I think your condo might actually be an unregistered asylum.”

He may be on to something.

The good fight

Not to knock parenting, because it is 95% awesome, but that crappier 5% seems to be getting the better of me these days. I looked in the mirror a minute ago and realized I’m starting to resemble a White Walker: pale, gaunt, unblinking.... Now why would that be? Oh yeah—“we” are in the throes of toddlerhood and frankly, it is, as the French would say, compliqué (which is just a euphemism for “horrendous”). At 18 months, we are discovering what the “first adolescence” is all about. Basically, it involves one’s toddler responding in the negative to all questions asked, refusing to eat, refusing to sleep, and generally asserting his little self through opposition. 

Go on—ask me anything.

Here’s what meal time looks like these days:

I try to put little g. into his high chair.
Little g. says, “Non!” (He is half French after all—I obviously blame that half for all of this.)
I manage to finagle him into his seat and place food in front of him.
Little g. says, “Non!”
I try various tactics: explaining, demonstrating, bargaining, pleading, threatening, shouting, etc.
Little g. says, “Non!”

Here’s what bath time looks like:

I announce that it is bath time.
Little g. says, “Non!”
I put him into the bath and ask him to please sit down.
Little g. says, “Non!”
I finish bathing him and hold out a towel.
Little g. says, “Non!”

Diaper changes are similar, with the addition of flailing arms and legs, sometimes accompanied by bellowing—just to really drive home his message.

In addition to this first adolescence thing, we are also dealing with the dreaded “18-month sleep regression.” No one forewarned us of this of course, but it turns out that there all kinds of sleep regressions. There’s the 4-month one, the 9-month one, the 12-month one, the 15-month one, and now, the 18-month one. In between, there’s teething, sickness, separation anxiety, nightmares, and a host of other reasons why “sleeping through the night” has become a distant memory—if it ever even existed at all (it may just have been another hallucination, like pleasant meals). The irony of course is that real adolescents love to sleep, yet whoever came up with this miniature version (I think it was Satan) conveniently left that part out. Eating disorders and general defiance, yes; appreciation for sleep, dream on.

Anyone else miss high school?

I love our pediatrician’s responses to all of these issues—everything is always so obvious to her:

Me: “My son keeps waking up screaming at 2:00 am and 4:00 am.” 

Doc: “Close the door.” 

Me: “My son has discovered how to make himself gag for fun.” 

Doc: “Don’t react.” 

Me: “Should that vaccination mark still be on his arm?” 

Doc: “It will fade.” 

Well OK then. But €50 later, I get home and realize she’s either childless, or the mother of robots, because if things were that clear-cut then typing “child sleep problems” into Google would not yield 27 million results, closely followed by “child eating problems” at 26 million. Plus, close the door? I’ll let her explain that to our neighbors, who all seem to be suffering from acute noise intolerance (in addition to general intolerance).

The more compassionate say to hang in there, that this will not last forever. I don’t know why, but whenever anyone pronounces that phrase—this won’t last forever—I just want to cry. Maybe part of me doesn’t believe them: yes it will last forever! Waaaaaaah! But of course I know they’re right. So what do we do in the meantime? Enjoy it, I suppose (that’s the other thing they say). What’s truly insane is that in the midst of wondering whether I’m winning any battles, let alone the war, I’d kinda like to add another little soldier to the opposition army. Damn you, maternal instinct! I used to think you didn’t exist, and now I can’t shut you up!

Maybe I should just embrace my new look.

Leave sleep to the mortals! *Sob*

Champignons de Paris

Those of you who have been following me have probably figured out by now that I most emphatically do not have a green thumb (but even if I did, it would still have no prints). That used to be a source of deep personal anxiety, as I had once heard somewhere that if you can keep from killing your houseplants, then you can move on to domestic animals; if you can keep from killing them, then you can go ahead and procreate. Well, in the big Pass/Fail that is gardening, I have so far scored a big fat F. I’ve owned all manner of plants, and have managed to over or under water/heat/love virtually all of them into oblivion, but that certainly did not stop me from having a baby and HE is perfect, thank you very much (crazy parents notwithstanding).

So about those plants. After the death of our cactus, we decided to replace it with a Pachira Aquatica, which Wikipedia says is a “tropical wetland tree native to Central and South America, where it grows in swamps.” What it was doing at our local Ikea is beyond me, but we bought it—primarily because it’s fun-looking, which is as good a reason as any.

See? Fun.

I somehow managed to knock a good third of its foliage off between the store and the car, but we got it home in one piece (sort of) and it seemed to be happy enough in our living room for a few weeks. But then it started to look a bit sad, so I gave it extra water and put it out on the balcony to get some sunlight (just like a South American swamp! Right? Right?). However, that turned out to be too much for it, so I took it back inside and figured to hell with the sunlight—I’d just stick to watering. Then, the other day, I was bending over to pick something off the floor next to the tree, when I noticed that an entire colony of mushrooms had spontaneously sprouted out of its pot. Beyond what that says about my ability to care for plant life, it begs the question: why do mushrooms seem to follow me from one apartment to the next?

Like this, only way less cute.

Because they do follow me, you know. My first Paris apartment, which was a 1-bedroom dive (albeit a “big” 1-bedroom dive) in the northern 18ème arrondissement, had this funky bathroom that I painted yellow. And repainted yellow. And repainted yellow again—all in a vain attempt to cover up the scary black mold spots that kept materializing on the walls every few months. One day I went into the yellow bathroom to take a shower and found a full-sized mushroom growing straight out of the caulking around the shower door. I took a photo and sent it to my parents—you know, to reassure them about my life abroad. Then there were our infamous ceiling fungus issues in the 15ème arrondissement, which I shant get into here, namely because I’ve moved on with my life, but in case you’re interested, I wrote all about it here and here.

And now this family of ‘shrooms in an otherwise hot, dry environment. Maybe they’re a desert subspecies. Interestingly, they are different from my old shower mushrooms, which indicates that interior fungi are surprisingly diverse here! But in all seriousness, what’s the deal with the mushrooms in Paris, or rather, in my Paris? Is this a karmic thing? Is it metaphorical? And if so, what does it mean that I have champignons growing in what is otherwise known as a “Money Tree”? Maybe it’s the universe telling me to leave gardening to the bees and embrace the wide world of fake plants (thereby saving mucho Euro-dollars by not having to replace them all every six months).

Come to think of it, why stop at fake plants?

The timing is actually pretty good, as this weekend I was intending to go buy a bunch of spring flowers for the balcony. Do you suppose fake geraniums exist? Actually, about the only plant of ours that seems to be thriving IS a geranium—a real one—that was lobbed at our balcony in the middle of the night about a month after we moved in (no doubt a token of friendship from our new neighbors). In an illustration of the well-known adage, “When life chucks a geranium at you, plant it,” we did, and now it’s blooming away. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Climate change

I spent the better part of my young adult years living in drafty apartments. The drafts didn’t matter much when I was in college, mainly because my college was in Texas and the winters didn’t last that long to begin with. Then I moved to Paris, where draftiness is a way of life, so I sucked it up and shivered along with everybody else. Winter after winter I would turn on my crappy electric wall heaters, complain about their inefficiency, then get that first electric bill of the season and decide that I’d rather just freeze. At some point I went and bought a portable space heater, which I would aim at my feet while hunkering over a bowl of coffee in the morning and then cuddle up with on the couch in the evening. Then I met G., who is a sort of human radiator, which helped (somewhat). But hey, winter in Paris only lasts what, six months? Eight at the most?

But who’s counting?

Then we moved to the suburbs and discovered collective heating. Gone are the hefty electric bills, as it’s simply factored into our rent, and the day it was turned on my memories of being even remotely cold indoors instantly vanished. Why? Because our floorboards kick out so much heat that we could pretty much dress in swimwear all winter long and be just fine. Our jar of Nutella has melted for Pete’s sake. I don’t know who exactly decides what temperature our apartment is heated to, but I suspect our neighbors across the landing. They’ve had it in for us ever since that first week when my husband pounded one little nail into a piece of Ikea furniture at midnight. Look, we’re sorry we woke up your daughter, OK? No need to try to slowly roast us into moving. Besides, it won’t work; I LIKE the heat. I think it’s exotic living in a subtropical microclimate while freezing rain pelts the windows. Seriously, we could grow palm trees in here.

Heatwave! This is our island in the sun...

Which is why I was surprised when our pet cactus up and died on us. One would think the constant dry heat would be ideal for desert plants. Alas, no. We felt bad disposing of it, as it was our first living purchase since moving into our new home and all. But much like a Christmas tree in February, its time had come. And much like a Christmas tree in February, getting rid of it was no easy task. You can’t just throw out a giant cactus, at least not around this town. We have a neighbor who actually refers to herself, with pride, as La Responsable Poubelles (“Trashcan Manager”). She rang our doorbell at 9:00 am two days after our arrival, just to point out that we newcomers obviously didn’t know how to handle our trash properly (our empty cardboard boxes were soi-disant taking up too much room in the recycling bin). Our own real-life Oscar the Grouch. Neat.

What did you expect, a fruit basket?

Anyway, so not wanting to elicit the wrath of Madame Trashcan, we didn’t dare just chuck the cactus into the communal bin. Luckily, we didn’t have to: in a flash of insight, I recalled an incident from days long ago, when I had had to resort to hacking the limbs off a long-dead Christmas tree using a pair of desk scissors in order to fit it down the trash chute. I thus decided that pocket-sawing the cactus into smaller pieces and then bagging them Dexter-style could be a possibility. It was a gruesome task, what with the dull saw, frothy cactus juice spatters and my conscience, but it’s been a week and no knock on the door, so I dare say we got away with it. Besides, does she really want to go head to head with a scantily-clad American chick who has no fingerprints (read: who could be a professional assassin if she were more discreet)? I didn’t think so.

Won't you be my neighbor? Part II

As some of you may recall, I have already discussed my beloved neighbors and their eccentricities, but such is the magnitude reached by said eccentricities over the past several years—nay, over the past several weeks—that I feel the subject warrants revisiting.

Like I mentioned in January, I am now officially self-employed, working from home, a free agent, etc., and am (mostly) loving it. The new boss in particular is one cool chick. The office, on the other hand, could use some work. Let me explain:

Prior to being self-employed, I worked long days far from home, meaning I missed out on exactly what goes on in my apartment building between the hours of 8:30 am–8:00 pm. In my blissful naïveté, I always assumed that nothing much went on at all, aside from the occasional delivery (mainly for me). But since merging home and office, I have realized that no such peace reigns in my apartment building. Quite the contrary, actually.

First off, nobody works. I don’t know what my neighbors are all up to, but they are definitely up to it at home. Victims of France’s 11% unemployment rate? Fellow freelancers? Rentiers? Whatever the case, they’re all here, all the time. I am thus treated to a smörgåsbord of weirdness all day long.

Undoubtedly lives in my building.

Let’s begin with my certifiably insane next-door neighbors and the 1-inch partition separating them from me. Crazy Neighbor #1 is an elderly Japanese gentleman, who judging by the noises coming through the wall is a true connoisseur of gay pornography. He is also the victim of some form of extortion by an old lady to whom he refers as “ma pauvre dame,” and who regularly calls him demanding money. Their conversations go something like this: “WHAT? No, ma pauvre dame, I will NOT send you any more! Pardon? Forty euros? OK, but this is the LAST TIME!”

As if that weren’t entertaining enough, last week Crazy Neighbor #2, a.k.a. Crazy Neighbor #1’s 20-something Brazilian alcoholic boy toy, returned from wherever he had been for the last few months (not rehab in any case), and the pornography fest ceased..., only to be replaced by drunken shouting matches, slamming doors and gangsta rap. The novelty wore off within the first 24 hours since, let us not forget, the aim of my being home all day is actually to work. And I don’t know about you, but I need some modicum of calm in order to succeed.

At one point, I actually resorted to an online white noise generator in a vain attempt to block out the insane loudness of all that vodka-soaked screaming. Sad, I know. And ineffectual. So I took it up a notch. As I was working on a project involving the Middle Ages, the idea came to me to crank up some nice loud medieval music. And as it turns out, nothing combats the sound of two drunken, shouting men like a bunch of chanting monks. So that is my new secret weapon. When things get out of hand next door, I release the holy brethren.

You want a piece of me?

So that was last week. THIS week has been a whole new adventure. Monday I came home from having tea with a friend only to find a baby carriage, baby included, sitting in the apartment entryway unattended. I wouldn’t dare leave a piece of luggage unattended in the entryway, let alone a baby, but then I’m not insane. My conscience told me to stick around, so I kept the forsaken child company until, some 15 minutes later, his (clearly incompetent) mother, a.k.a. Crazy Neighbor #3, came strolling nonchalantly down from the 6th floor singing to herself.

Me: It seems you have forgotten someone here.
Crazy Neighbor #3: Oh! I was just upstairs getting some diapers!
Me (seeing no such diapers): Mmm hmm.

On Tuesday, a plumber showed up at 10 am to break apart our shower tiles. I’ve oft mentioned the disastrous state of our ceiling, so one would naturally assume that any work done on our place would involve first and foremost the ceiling. Not so (our landlord is evidently also crazy). Monsieur le plombier was nice enough, although I can definitely confirm that “plumber’s crack” is an international phenomenon. Is there a specialty clothing store for plumbers, where all the pants have ridiculously large waistlines and no belt loops? Anyway, so we now have some new, entirely unasked-for tiling (in the wrong shade of white, but who’s keeping track?). Meanwhile, our ceiling is getting to the point where the sound of pieces of it breaking off and exploding on the floor no longer makes me jump. It’s become a sort of familiar background noise, not unlike the cheerful humming of the refrigerator.

Wednesday was pretty uneventful, aside from our upstairs Crazy Neighbors #4 and #5 spending a good part of the night dragging heavy objects across their 19th century wooden floors. Judging from the sound, and the guests, I can only assume they were having a nocturnal furniture-rearrangement free-for-all. They do that sometimes.

We’re not crazy, we just enjoy doing this at midnight.

And then on Thursday came the crescendo. I arrived home with my husband, laden with sacs of groceries, only to find that our entire block had been sealed off with yellow crime scene tape, flashing lights, stationed police agents, the whole thing. They let us pass, but upon reaching our building, we saw the reason for all the hubbub: a body. As in, a dead body. There it was, just lying on the sidewalk, hidden under the gold foil that the French use to cover dead bodies, shock victims, and the homeless during winter. No explanation, nothing on the news, zip. I called my mom:

Me: So there’s a dead body outside our front door covered in gold foil.
Mom: Gold foil? The French gift wrap their dead?
Me: I told you it’s an elegant culture.
Mom: Did they put a bow on it?

I figure that the day one’s own mother no longer seems surprised by the theater of the absurd that has become one’s life, one needs to perhaps consider making a change. So as fun as this all has been, I think it’s about time we looked to greener, saner pastures. I was reluctant to leave our “nice” neighborhood, but you know what? I think I can handle it after all.

The sky is falling

This morning while getting ready to leave, a chunk of our bathroom ceiling fell off, landed on my head and burst into a million little pieces of plaster, which I then had to sweep up with a whisk broom as fast as possible in order to avoid arriving hideously late to work. So now there’s a big hole in the ceiling, which kind of takes the polish off the classy Parisian apartment look we had going. Sadly, the bathroom head trauma failed to spark any visions of flux capacitor-like inventions; only a very clear vision of moving.

I have previously discussed the phenomenon of thin walls in Paris. As it turns out, Parisian apartments have another thing in common: humidity. But whereas thin walls are really no big deal—they’re kind of endearing, actually; an inoffensive little fault—humidity is not endearing at all. For whatever historical reason, a huge number of homes in Paris suffer from serious ventilation issues, especially in the room where bathing goes on. This latent dampness always, always draws mildew, mold and all kinds of other nasties that should by all rights figure as illegal and intolerable in every standard rental contract. My first place in Paris, located in a fairly low-rent district (hey, we all have to get our start somewhere), was a formidable introduction to the wide world of Parisian bathroom moisture. Try as I might, it was a losing battle, which reached its climax the day I found a mushroom—a MUSHROOM—poking out between two loose shower tiles.

And as this morning’s Chicken Little episode demonstrates, evil bathroom dew is not limited to shabby pads. Upon moving into our current apartment, G. and I were told by the rental agency representing our landlord that an anti-humidity fan would be installed in our bathroom window. Ha ha—a little realtor humor! Turns out the fan was rendered impossible by our “non-standard window size.” What does that even mean? It’s a rectangle, and a pretty standard-looking one at that. I ask you: what is it with Parisians and fans?! The ensuing surplus of humidity and its fungal consequences came as a surprise to no one, especially not to me, a Mold War veteran. Stated another way, it kind of looks like a biological experiment is taking place, right there, on our ceiling. Either that or a bizarre tribute to Jackson Pollock.

Frighteningly accurate.

The effect is quite surprising, especially since one doesn’t expect to see such a thing inside an apartment as otherwise sano as ours. If I may venture a metaphor, it’s kind of like what my brother calls the “butter face” syndrome, a curious term designating a woman with a body to die for ... but-her-face. Clever, I know. So basically, our home sweet home has been reduced to the architectural equivalent of a butter face. Well, I think it’s high time “she” had a bit of cosmetic surgery.

To be continued....

Won't you be my neighbor? Part I

Parisian apartments have thin walls. In the case of older dwellings, this often stems from the division at some point over the last century of what were once large bourgeois family apartments into multiple smaller, separate ones, which Parisian landlords today rent out for a small fortune each. Sound insulation between the now separate residences was—and has remained—virtually nonexistent. Thus, what goes on in the apartments on either side of one’s own is generally perfectly audible, and more or less easy to live with depending on who the neighbors are, what kinds of noises they tend to make and what time they tend to make them.

But the walls aren’t all; Parisian apartments also have thin ceilings. Coupled with the frequent presence of hardwood floors, what goes on above one’s apartment is almost as difficult to ignore as what goes on on either side of it. This all adds up to the average apartment dweller being exceedingly well aware of the most intimate details of the personal lives and habits of those who live all around him, while not actually knowing any of them. A kind of box, if you will, of uninvited intimacy with people who are just this side of strangers.

In Paris, apartment neighbors tend to not know each other from Adam, which is perfectly fine by them. I mean, why bother? You will NEVER see a Parisian knocking on a neighbor’s door to request a spare egg or a cup of sugar, or to pop in for a spontaneous chat. Instead, it’s the opposite: they pretty much avoid each other like the plague. Stairwell encounters are particularly undesirable. Thus, if you are getting ready to go out, and you hear a neighbor’s door opening, you wait. Once the coast is clear, and the risk of having to make pesky, time-consuming small talk is gone, then you can venture out. Not before. 

G. and I live in just such an apartment. We don’t know many of the other people in the building, despite its relatively small size, but this is obviously normal. Besides, the lack of intimacy between ourselves and 85% of our neighbors is more than accounted for by the extreme intimacy we cannot help but share with the remaining 15%. Take the couple living above us, for example: their lives are an open book of sound that never fails to draw our attention because really, what choice is there?

At 7:00 am, they(?) are in the bathtub splashing water about and brushing their teeth. We can actually hear the brushing. At around 9:00 am, clomp clomp clomp! The perpetually high-heel-shod girlfriend comes tramping down the wooden stairwell. At 7:00 pm, she comes tramping home, jangles her keys into the door, opens and slams it shut behind her, tromps over to what I assume is the bed, removes her heels, which she lets drop—BAM! BAM!—to the floor, and then, all is relatively silent. Until after dinner, that is, when either she puts the latest Mika single on perpetual repeat, or she and her boyfriend get into a shouting match. They tend to intersperse their shouting with what sounds like rearranging their living room furniture.

Then there’s our next-door neighbor, whose noises are almost as bizarre. He is an elegant Japanese man in his late 40s, very well-dressed and polite. But once inside his apartment, things get very weird. He has this answering machine whose volume must be set on “hearing impaired” because when the thing picks up, we hear the entire message as though it were being screamed through our wall. Then, the machine starts beeping at 5-second intervals to notify our neighbor that he has a message. In the beginning, when we had just moved in and hadn’t grasped that beep = answering machine, he left on vacation for an entire week. Lots of people called him during that time: BEEP BEEP BEEP, all week long. I thought he had installed some kind of heavy-duty medical equipment or an industrial security alarm. This neighbor is also in a “complicated” relationship ... with a 20-something Brazilian male fashion model, who spends his days drinking and slamming the front door. Sometimes I run into him in the stairwell as he staggers down, hiccuping. I really need to work on my neighbor avoidance skills.

Anyway, not to JUDGE or anything, but this is the reality of Parisian apartment life. And yeah, we certainly contribute our share of noise as well. I’d even be willing to bet that we’ve irritated the hell out of our neighbors on countless occasions with our tromping around, vacuuming, vibrating laundry machine, long phone calls in English and noisy dinner parties. Plus I’m a bit clumsy and have been known to drop heavy objects on the floor, sometimes in the middle of the night. This is why there is never any open conflict in the building: we all accept that being auditory witnesses to each other’s daily goings-on is normal. And in the face of the cold anonymity of city life, maybe it does us all some good to be somewhat in touch with other people, however bizarrely.