get lost

writing late night from my little guesthouse in Norway.

EN FIN!

the journal entry you have all been patiently waiting for.

ironic that it comes two months into my trip and only after leaving paris.

and it's not that i was so occupied with having fun in paris that i could not find the time to write. the reasoning fits much more in the vein of something tyler came up with upon leaving paris.... "words cannot express".

when tyler left paris she told me she had decided to use this phrase as a retort to all those questions she would face upon returning.... 'did you go to the louvre? did you climb the eiffel tower?... all of which we either failed, or chose not to do. 'words cannot express' was her way of circumventing the scowls and looks of disappointment from those who have not been to paris and could only come up with the most obvious landmarks to enquire about. i think my failure to write one measly journal entry during my entire two months in paris falls into this pocket of discomforted avoidance. i may of course be putting my own slant to what was initially a playful string of words craftily laced together by the talented miss greentree. but i digress. in my case, discomfort may have been the root of my failure to write. a possible underlying feeling of failure being the root of this failure. what the hell was i doing in paris anyway??????

ok. so i arrived. and everything just sort of slid into place. i did very little seeking really. my one attempt at finding a roommate (done from vancouver through craigslist) turned out to be a damn gem. a true find. a lovely, fun and terribly pleasant girl (sarah) from new york. so there we are, two foreigners who like to have a good time and take photos. the second effort on my part of reaching out (also done from the banks of vancouver... through friendster) is a connection with a lovely french/finnish guy, cyrille... who ends up strangely enough... living 4 doors down from the apartment i found. so there i am, two friendly lovely people already in one block.

next... more friends, some who have even contacted me (through friendster) who just happen to work in my field (film and animation) all who live, work and party within a 10 block radius of my apartment. ahhh, life in le marais. really, i think i must be spoilt by the gods. my life sometimes is too much. a literal onslaught of strange coincidences and bizarre happenings. surreal is a word that came up often. especially in lieu of this next story...

so, now i'm somewhat settled and feel like i'm actually living in paris. i've even bought myself an old holland bike. a primary essential to living anywhere for me. and so now i'm beginning to loosen all my mental ties with vancouver and past memories therein knotted. it's literally this exact moment of reflection that i get an unexpected call from a certain ex boyfriend of mine visiting paris. craig and his lovely girlfriend ja are in town for a rather unfortunate reason. but not to digress, they are visiting jean benoit... the last surviving surrealist. so, not only is it surreal to be with craig in paris, extinguishing any lingering emotions while rebuilding a friendship, but we're hanging out with a perverted and thoroughly enjoyable 85 year old man who happens to be closing out the surrealist period with gusto. please see my photo album 'the surrealist and the surreal' for more details.

so what the hell else did i do in paris?? besides going out a fair bit, making a veritable concoction of new friends, seeing a ton of music (jimi tenor, tegan & sarah, the fall, the killers, motorhead, and slayer, to name a few), eating a lot of great meals and drinking a lot of great wine and visiting with old friends in new environments... the answer is (or feels like) diddly squat.

i woke up late every morning. i justified this by saying to myself 'you're on vacation'.
i suffered through a horrible cacophony of drilling and pounding, sanding and yelling coming from the drunk moroccan construction workers planted two feet from my head on the scaffolding outside my window.
i took lots of photographs and wrote very little.
i learnt how to compress video and worked on my html skills.
i spent too much time on the internet.
i cried sometimes.
and sometimes i laughed so hard i thought i might crack a rib.
i watched the sun come up some mornings.
i rode my bike all over town.
i went to some art galleries but certainly not enough to feel proud of.
i went to one movie - obviously not enough considering i lived in a place many refer to as the heart of cinema.
i kissed a few boys and even had my first fight with a french boy on the street.
but i did not fall in love.
i bought too many shoes.
i smoked hash.
i smoked cigarettes.
i drank rose.
i tried my best to speak in french. but always people spoke back to me in english. so basically my french improved very little and my english deteriorated substantially.
i met cute french boys my age who were philosophers and university profs. but none of them fell in love with me.
i sent text messages.
i chatted on msn.
i skyped people back home.
i tried to read french magazines.
i took note of how lovely and nice almost every single parisian was, of my generation anyway, they got crabbier as they got older.
i found one or two cafes that i loved and i would go and sit there for hours and people watch. not write, mind you, just reflect on my surroundings and wrestle a strange sadness inside with cafes and wine.
i tried (and so did danielle) pig's feet. and ear. and ass. and snout.
i can report that they were all equally disgusting and should never be tried again by anyone.
i was amazed at how many people my age busted out with music in a public space, guitars and singing in apartments, pianos and horns in the caves of old bars. (jenn robinns you will be proud to know that 'not bad' had its official paris debut in one such apartment).
i was very hot some days. too hot to move.
and other days i was sad and stayed home because it was raining and gray. on a daily basis i played the game "faggot or french" because, really, the line is a very very fine one. it is really hard to tell.
i spent a good portion of time trying to decipher if some french people were really really nice or just secretly having a big old joke on me.
some nights i got so drunk i could actually talk french politics with people, cabbies for instance.
but again. most of that was probably just a big joke on me.
other nights i struggled to get 4 words of french into one sentence.
i avoided tourist traps like the plague. until d came and even then we did our best to see the louvre only as it was closing, had almost no people in it and we literally ran through the fucker in 45 minutes flat. seeing probably only one 10th of what that monstrosity has to offer.
i ate a lot of baguettes and camembert and salami. really a lot.
and i, unlike all the french women who eat the same and manage to stay incredibly thin, gained weight and felt like a dying walrus beached like an illiterate tourist on the fake sand of the paris plage. (a political effort made by the mayor of paris, a topic i discussed in length with a cabbie).
i met boys named christophe, antoine, julien, mikael, ishmael, sebastian, mathieu, olivier, vincent......
i discovered that in paris you cannot ever ever order mixed drinks or martinis. they don't know how to make them or they don't know what you're talking about when you say 'soda' or 'tonic'. you drink beer and you drink wine. c'est tout.
pasta is hard to find. you eat salads (always with the same dressing - vinaigrette) or croque monsieurs (with mustard) or steak frittes (with mustard) (and the steak is often apparently horse. great.)
unless you are going to a rock concert (which during the summer there are many) the techno music is really really bad. including the last night laurent garnier played the rex.
i found the french men almost unbearably forward (10 words between you and there's a tongue halfway down your throat... a method of kissing that, even when called out, doesn't seem unbearably 9th grade to any of them).
(and then when you do find a gem with a certain amount of restraint it is almost too much restraint.)
i drank a lot of coffee in the mornings and ate cereal.
i read the first 13 pages of 'jours tranquilles a clichy' henry miller, in french. i made a lot of tiny pencil scribbles of words i had to look up.
i had crazy dreams every night. one night i dreamt that i was in paris in the 1500's and i was part of this crazy brothel, we wore these outfits with some sort of bunny insignia on them, predeceasing of course something too obvious to mention.
that wasn't really a crazy dream. i had some real doozies.
i tried to write emails to my parisian friends in french. even a short one often took hours.
i had my period twice in the two months and was grumpy and couldn't move much for the 3 days surrounding.
i ate sushi twice. it was decent but expensive.
i spent way too much money and tried my best to forget about the exchange rate and live my life as i wanted to regardless of my lack of income.
i felt very guilty about my spending all this money and lazing around and doing diddly squat for 2 months.
feeling guilty did not deter me from going out and spending more money and doing a didlier amount of squat than the diddly squat i did the day before.
i spent one whole day going from store to store in search of nail polish remover. something obviously quite foreign to the women of paris. when i did find it it was in a tiny bottle the size of my thumb.
i spent a quarter of one day pondering why they keep their eggs unrefrigerated in grocery stores. eggs, milk and sausage all unrefrigerated. still beats me.
i pondered often what parisiens did all day, because it really seemed to me that they sat around and drank either coffees and/or wine for a great majority of the day. this is interspersed of course with racing around on their motor-scooter like maniacs. so i suppose they race their scooters from cafe to bistro to cafe to bistro in search of... what? still beats me.
i came to the bottom of the stereotype of the rude french waiter. of course he's rude. he works all day. every day. sans break. for no tips and a terrible wage. having lived off tips, rather well i might add, in new york... i initially thought that waitressing in paris would be a good fall back plan. au contraire mon frere. it's a terrible plan. a really terrible plan. my life would be going nowhere faster than it would be with me planting my ass at such a restaurant and drinking wine all day everyday.
i pondered often the strangeness of paris. reflecting on what many parisiens in their 20s and 30s have said to me... that paris is dead. a dead city. not much going on. and i couldn't help but agree in a sort of noncommittal denial type of agreement.
metros close down at 11:30
bars 1:30 (except the rare sweaty all-nighter you have to hike across town for).
you can't find a cab. ever. and when you do, they are too expensive to take everytime you miss the last metro.
the art galleries are as snobby and hard for artists to get into as anywhere. (save for the few interesting things going on with young artists like the surface to air guys who i met, and the kind of shows going up at palais du tokyo... though similar stuff is being shown at the vancouver art gallery from time to time, and if i remember correctly vancouver's own pigeon hosted a surface to air show a while back. plus we have, well, had, misanthropy and all these other great upstart venues for art.)
the fashion world is similarly closed-door to anything not already completely substantial. (vancouver has more to offer in the vein of young local designers that don't cost an arm and a leg).
the few cool things going in the world of night-life, be it a marble-arch type affair or a live gig, seem to have the same handful of cool people attending them. 2 months into my life in paris and already my circle was at a size that i could touch both edges. what separates this from vancouver i must point out is how lovely the people are, so outgoing, so interested in what you are up to as a human being on this earth, so not-at-all completely caught up with themselves that they can't take the time to look you in the eyes, and so genuine and grown-up i was honestly floored. not too much like vancouver despite the sense that vancouver seems to have a lot more happening for our generation of misfit artists and socialites alike.
and lastly and most importantly on my list... making films seems awfully impossible
the films that are made in france (save the handful of amazing ones of course) follow this strangely ridiculous misogynistic slapstick formula i can't begin to describe.
and paris has the same sort of nerdy meet-up groups and 24hr filmmaking contests happening to make themselves feel like there is a thriving underground film movement going on. just like vancouver does.
except in vancouver there are more industry jobs to be had.
and even though getting grants for films in canada is hard and private funding is virtually impossible, it proves that much harder in france from what i could gather.
end point... making films anywhere is hard.
final end point. whatever you want, wherever you are, you just got to go out and make it happen for yourself and stop griping about it.

wow. i just reread this. am i coming down hard on paris? i'm not sure. i am sure that i want to return for round two. this time i won't let paris do all the punching however. as in retrospect it really did. i was a wet fish in the ring. i spent so much of the time coming down on myself. wondering daily what the hell i was doing there. it took very little time to rediscover in retrospect what vancouver has to offer. vision is always 20/20 in hindsight. but really. vancouver has the youth and the market to pick up like a fucking jet engine on a crash course with a huge mountain of success. everyone just has to stop acting sooo fucking cool all the time. get off the pot. get off your high horses. and... well, get lost.

it's almost i like i could have told this whole story to you without ever leaving vancouver. my trip started with this statement and it seems to be the undisputed theme. a theme so strong i felt so totally and completely lost as i carried through with its intention.

a couple weeks into living in paris, my roommate went to amsterdam for the weekend. leaving me alone with my strange thoughts and remiss dourness. i promptly got quite naked and semi drunk. i holed up in the apartment for nearly two days in this state of depressed bliss and nakedness. it was the feeling of being naked and alone in an apartment in paris that really kicked it in for me. my trip, my intentions, everything i was gunning for in its entirety. and the conclusion i came to is such a laughably simple one: it's a frame of mind. you could think this thought any time of day or night for the same results. "right now, i'm naked and alone in my paris apartment." and what happens is, you automatically feel better. you look around you and you feel amazing. on top of the world. a million dollars wrapped up in shiny ribbons. how did this happen to you?! you lucky duck you. naked and alone in your paris apartment. you look around you again and reflect, geee, it's amazing really. i could have found myself in a 10ft squared, ikea closet replica in any unenthused polluted death-trap of a city. it need not have been paris, per say. why is this particular temporarily-romantic dustpile so special? when in fact, i could feel this exceptionally vibrant and on-fire about myself anywhere. it's a damn work of art, it is. people, you should be enthused. life, as it turns out, is a mirror replica of itself in just about any corner you want to plant yourself in. anywhere you or i want to go. granted, a city a beach and a forrest have their dissimilarities. but it's a safe bet to say that wherever western civilization ventures and congregates you're going to come across the same issues. people issues will always arise and they will usually be of the same variety as you are used to dealing with. customs may vary. but social settings will continue to make you feel slightly uncomfortable. drugs and alcohol are always used in the same manner. people still laugh. people still cry. feelings are still at risk of being hurt wherever you take them. and even if you get yourself as far away from these other people as you can you come across the best and worst part about any voyage of discovery.... you can never get away from yourself. 'wherever you go, there you are'. this exact phrase spoken by my father exactly 10 years ago as i departed for my first big european voyage of discovery. and it's not so much as i forgot, as i knew i just needed to discover this again.

and on that note, i wrap up my only paris journal entry. i have left paris and write all this from a quaint spot in norway in the embrace of relatives i barely know yet feel completely at home with. family is something we are forgetting more and more about in our modern western world. perhaps when we feel something is missing in our lives we, as a grand generalization about our generation, should ponder the possibility of this absence? and for anyone in vancouver reading this, thinking right now about how small our little vancouver can seem, daydreaming about the big cities, london, new york, paris.... perhaps its up to us to grow our city. everyone else in the world (those i've encountered anyway) seem to have this amazingly idealized and sculpted sense about vancouver that i could barely fathom having fled from there... the consensus is that vancouver is this really amazingly great place rife with potential and possibilities. lets make it so? lets (and of course speaking directly at myself as well) open our doors to each other first, get more collective, and then open ourselves up to an outside world that, whether we like it or not, is going to be banging down our doorstep very very shortly. if paris, a city known for its pretentiousness and snobbery, opened itself up so readily to a sorry little walrus of a foreigner, imagine what the warmth of vancouverites (i know we're warm underneath all those fancy haircuts) can do for a world that's desperately looking for the next big thing.

(ok, i kind of want to gag myself right now for writing all that pep talk nonsense. ah here i go again, being all canadian and qualifying myself in a defeatist self-deprecating attempt at a half-mast apology. ah shit. i'm just gonna shut up now and go sit in a corner and write. or well, stop writing. something anyway. hopefully its creative. even if its as simple a good dream.)

night.

la banane.