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*

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.

Eye of the tiger

I have become a Parisian runner. As some of you may recall, sports aren’t really my thing—and by sports I mean competitive, sweaty, potentially violent activities; I’m not counting any namby-pamby New Age ones (those I obviously engage in, like any self-respecting Californian). The very word “sports” for me conjures up images of junior high gym class: donning a pair of ridiculous knee-length fleece shorts and being forced to engage in competitive group activities, demonstrating—regrettably—that the age-old stereotype of “girls suck at sports” is actually kind of true (I mean as it pertains to me, so save your righteous indignation). Messing up my painstakingly sculpted teenage hair by pulling that stupid gym shirt over it was enough alone to leave psychological scars, but repeatedly ending up last to be chosen for the softball team, dog-paddling my way through aquatic relay races and never managing to execute even one sorry chin-up ultimately created a profound distaste in me for “real” sports.

This is why I put off learning to run for years; I figured I’d be bad at it. I was tempted to seize the proverbial bull by his proverbial horns and release my inner Olympian when I began college—as a stress reducer if nothing else—except that at the time, I wanted something more original, more impressive (I was 18; give me a break). So I joined a Kung-Fu class in North Dallas, run by a guy who, fitfully enough, looked like a younger, greasier version of David Carradine. He made us call him “Master,” loved to spout random bits of wisdom from the Tao Te Ching and taught us animal-inspired stances so bizarre that if ever we had found ourselves actually needing to use any of them for self-defense, the attacker probably would have fallen over laughing—which would technically get the job done, so I’m not knocking it.

Don't make me use this.

In the grand tradition of B-grade martial arts movies, our “Master” firmly believed in the “no pain, no gain” approach to apprenticeship; he imposed bare knuckle push-ups on any misbehavers and took obvious pleasure in humiliating his advanced students by flat-out kicking their asses at the end of every class. I hung in there until the day he claimed to have cured his mother of cancer over the phone, at which point I realized with fortune cookie clarity that a mad teacher teaches only madness. And since I’ve never been lacking in that department, I decided to move on.

When I first arrived in France, I spent a lot of time in parks. I like parks; they’re green, peaceful, bucolic. They make for fantastic lunch spots if you can manage to snag one of the perpetually-occupied benches. While hanging out in such parks, I often noted a fair number of presumably French joggers. Nothing strange about that per se, except their clothing, which looked as though they’d initially come to the park just to relax, but were suddenly seized with an irrepressible urge to break into a jog: khaki shorts, polo shirts, canvas shoes.... Odd. Where, pray tell, was their sports gear? Now, G. has mentioned on multiple occasions that we Americans are totally hung up on sports equipment; even the average American housewife who wants to go out for a stroll around the neighborhood somehow feels she must put on a visor, headset, spandex shorts, sports bra and cross-trainers beforehand (with or without ski poles). OK, he has a point; it is a well-known fact that my fellow countrymen and I appreciate le stuff. But hey, at least we don’t go and try to exercise dressed like we just stepped out of a Lacoste casting call.

French jogger, ca. 1999.

In any case, it’s a moot point because over the past decade I have noticed a clear evolution in French sports apparel and now, when I go running (I’ll get to that in a minute), I see the same kind of Nike-clad, iPod-adorned, aspiring marathoners that I had expected to see all along.

So, after reading the hundredth women’s magazine article about how anybody can learn to run, I figured I’d Just Do It already. And in the end, it wasn’t so hard. Unsurprisingly, the first step was buying the appropriate gear, which actually played a major motivational role and clearly demonstrates the advantages of dressing like you mean it. I got through the requisite side stitches, the huffing and puffing, a brief episode of runner’s knee (also a question of proper outfitting), and today am a confirmed runner! My live-in “coach” and I run every week, come rain, snow or shine (mainly because he will not tolerate any whining what-so-ever).

Our territory of predilection is the Champs de Mars, a big green semi-park encircling the Eiffel Tower—I know, poor us. Running there is always an adventure, mainly because of the constantly changing obstacles. On any given day, we may have to outmaneuver masses of gaping tourists, unsupervised children, pétanque competitions, copulating dogs, marauding gypsy families, bridal photography sessions, homeless wanderers, rallying Copts, Segway enthusiasts, African immigrants hawking cheap Eiffel Tower replicas, and much, much more. Sometimes we’re treated to live music; other times we leave with free lettuce. Not wanting to trip over/crash into any of the afore-mentioned, we’ve learned to practice preternaturally aware running.

Today, thanks to my new-found recreation, I no longer fear sports. I’m not exactly what one could call a sports fan, mind you, but when I go in for my annual check-up and my doctor asks me whether or not I engage in any regular physical activity, I am proud to say that I can now reply with a triumphant “HELL YES!”

An ode to acrylics

Ten days before my wedding, which is to say toward the end of April, I marched into an empty nail salon in Southern California and requested a full set of acrylic “French tip” nails. I’d been toying with the idea for months, as “What am I going to do about my NAILS?” is a question that every self-respecting bride-to-be asks herself at some point. I’d begun early: interrogating my loved ones, scouring the web, consulting my inner child.... Most opinions were negative, acrylic nails being notoriously rough on one’s natural nails (really? You mean cementing prosthetics to one’s hands and then covering them with three layers of foul-smelling resin is harmful?). But there is no such thing as natural beauty—at least not in the world of nail art—so I paid no heed to the naysayers. Besides, I wanted gorgeous hands for those wedding photos and no way was I going to settle for a basic manicure. I wanted to go whole hog. I wanted my Steel Magnolias moment.

Thus, on a sunny Wednesday, in I strolled into my chosen nail salon and within minutes was seated comfortably facing my nail technician, a portly Vietnamese lady wearing a gaping, washed-out tank top that left little to the imagination and kind of made me feel overdressed. One other client was there —a 40-something character named Linda, the kind of woman who just hangs out in nail salons: big hair, loud makeup, ocher skin and a smoker’s voice. She wasted no time in announcing that she had a blind date in an hour, and had come over to get ready. She also fully intended to choose an outfit while at the salon, and thus had brought along several possibilities to model for us. This initially struck me as surreal, but a few blinks of incomprehension and I was over it. Besides, the surreal seems to follow me wherever I go—so why not here? Otherwise, the salon was fairly classic: rows of reclining pedicure chairs, little tables adorned with manicure lamps, displays of brightly-colored nail polish and a big flat-screen TV. In this case, the channel was set on Disney. I figured there must be a small child hiding in the room somewhere—a daughter perhaps?—but no, my nail technician just had a thing for Hannah Montana. Who doesn’t?

That and gambling. As it turned out, acrylic nails are actually quite labor-intensive, which left us plenty of time for light-hearted banter. So as she proceeded to glue 8-inch-long appendages to my nail bed (step #1), I lent a polite ear to sordid tales of gambling away her livelihood at the big casino over on the nearby Indian reservation. Not that I had any choice in the matter—I couldn’t very well get up and walk out looking like Edward Scissorhands, plus I really needed her to do a good job. So I shut up and listened.

Apparently, she had begun hitting the game tables ages ago, not long after arriving in the US as a Vietnamese refugee(?!).

“I used to play all the time. Sometimes I lose. Sometimes I lose a lot. My husband, he no like it when I lose. You know, hundreds I lose, sometimes thousands (laughs). He get real angry when I do that.”

“You don’t say,” I answered.

“It used to be real bad but now is better. Now I play, but not all the time. Sometimes I win. But also I lose (laughs).”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Do these pants make me look fat?” interrupted Linda.

Three and a half hours later, I felt as though a certain level of intimacy had been established between us. Upon leaving, I almost wanted to give her a hug and encourage her to stay away from the casino. But instead I gave her a nice tip, hoping it wouldn’t end up where I was imagining it would.

And in the end, I didn’t regret my choice. My nails were impeccable for the wedding and remained so for the honeymoon. In fact, I grew so fond of them that I had them “refilled” upon my return to Paris, which was almost as amusing as the initial operation. Nail salons here tend to double as erotic message parlors, which kind of makes sense. I mean, men have to do something while the ladies have their nails done—thumbing through magazines is just so prosaic. Incidentally, women can also get massages at these fine establishments, but the cost for men is always significantly higher. Now why would THAT be...?

But dubious salons aside, I’m still loving the fake nails. Why? Because they’re flawless! I mean sure, they do make a hell of a lot of noise when I type, but otherwise it’s pure pleasure wearing them. They’re unbreakable, unsplittable, unsulliable; I haven’t so much as caused one tiny run in my stockings since I had the nails put on and that alone is well worth the cost. Plus they’re still relatively rare in France, which is a nice boost for my ego.

The ONE downside is that they’re ... um ... flammable. I found that out the hard way while lighting a candle the other evening. Suddenly it was my thumbnail that was twinkling away and not the wick. “What’s that smell?” G. asked. “Nothing!” I said, trying to hide my singed nail. Oh, it was fine. I filed it down a bit and it was good as new. Mostly.

So in conclusion, I give two singed thumbs up to acrylic nails. Sure they’re somewhat dangerous. But in the end ... aren’t we all (philosophical pause)?

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.

War and Paris

I’m on a book kick right now. This is odd, really, since for ages I’ve merely accumulated books without ever bothering to actually sit down and read them (cookbooks and dictionaries aside). Be that as it may, I recently decided to stop looking at my book collection and instead start reading it. Maybe it’s my new job, whose distance with respect to my apartment provides me with a whopping 90 minutes of quality reading time every day, or maybe I’ve just awoken the sleeping book lover in me, but I’m racing through those pages so fast that if Hussein Bolt himself were to see me in action he would probably say, “Wow, now that’s fast.”

Having recently finished “Autobiography of a Yogi,” “Eat, Pray, Love,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “Les Yeux Jaunes des Crocodiles” and “Les Etoiles de Compostelle,” I’m currently about a third of the way through “Suite Française,” a World War II tale written by Irène Némirovsky, a Jewish woman who lived in German-occupied France until 1942, when she was arrested and ultimately sent to her death at Auschwitz. I’ve never been a huge fan of war history; that’s more my dad’s area of predilection. But this book is excellent, even if the subject matter is perfectly heart-wrenching (hence my dislike of war history).

While I’m on the topic of war, yesterday was the first Wednesday of the month, and like every first Wednesday of the month, air raid sirens all across France began wailing at 12 o’clock noon and lasted roughly 60 seconds (this is a monthly test of the alert system that ensures its proper functioning in case of real disaster). So, as I often do on first Wednesdays, I made the same oh-so-clever remark: “Ahhh! The Germans are back! The Germans are back!” which actually drew some laughter, since my new colleagues hadn’t heard that one yet.

All jokes aside, the sirens naturally made me think of the book I’m reading, which in turn made me think that not all that long ago the concept of air raids wasn’t funny at all. I actually wonder why on earth they waited until 1987 to start using them. Isn’t that closing the proverbial barn door some 50 years after the proverbial horse has gotten away? For argument’s sake, let’s imagine that another country (not necessarily Germany, which is enjoying quite close ties with France these days. More on that later) decided to bomb Paris. Would anyone react to hearing those sirens go off? I for one would not. I’d think to myself, “Hmmm, that’s odd. It’s not the first Wednesday of the mo…” BOOM! The end. So why bother? Even my French boyfriend, who knows everything about everything, has no answer to this one.

As for current Franco-German relations, the media on this side of the pond are constantly going on about how much respect and admiration Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have for one another. This relatively newfound friendship between the two countries is unquestionably a great thing, but I must admit that it is truly amazing to me that France and Germany have come so far in what has actually been a very small amount of time. Only last week I was strolling near the Ecole Militaire, and for the first time in what must be hundreds of strolls along this same street, I noticed an entire length of it riddled with bullet holes. “From the war,” my boyfriend informed me. And these aren’t the only signs of unhappier times in Paris. In addition to multiple, albeit discreet, architectural wounds scattered about the city, the alert flâneur will notice all manner of withered bouquets, faded tricolor ribbons and marble plaques dedicated to patriots who were killed on the spot.

These are all subtle yet chilling reminders that not so long ago France and Germany were locked in a horrendous war that cost 600,000 French lives and over 6 million German ones. And yet, despite two world wars and over three centuries of open hostility, these same two countries seem to bear no ill will; today, Sarkozy and Merkel are the power couple driving the progress of the European Union. And if I may venture to say so, the strength of their alliance is not so much a tribute to diplomacy as it is a tribute to collective forgiveness.