speaking in tongues

For about a week, I thought that Paris was one of the most wholesome major metropolitan centers I’d ever seen. Despite being a large city, I’d had yet to feel remotely unsafe regardless of where I was in the city or what time it was. This past weekend, I stumbled onto Pigalle, and my theory has changed. It’s not that Paris has reduced the number of “undesirable” elements; rather, the city has managed to push the bulk of those elements to the outskirts, and of those that have remained, the vast majority have bonded by cohesion into one area. In the north of the 9th district, Pigalle is described as being the location of the city’s “fading red light district.” I’d love to have seen what the place was like before it got cleaned up. As soon as I exited the metro (on a side note, I’m praying I don’t do that annoying thing where I come back to The City [SIDE side note: THERE IS STILL ONLY ONE “The City”] and start calling the subway anything other than the subway), I was surrounded by strip clubs, ranging from the well known “Moulin Rouge” to “Dirty Dicks,” which foregoes both the expected apostrophe and any subtlety whatsoever. I wonder if that one pops up in any guidebooks…you know, in case the Moulin Rouge is full or something. When the least sketchy establishment in the area is the “Long Island Club” (and that really is the only way to go worse than “Dirty Dicks”), I’d say the state of your red light district is strong. This was all made only more awkward by the fact that I was there to find a candy store that is apparently famous for its chocolates, a search for which I didn’t think it would be smart to ask the locals for help (if I’d told the “nice lady” standing outside of Dirty Dicks I was looking for candy, I somehow doubt she’d have understood…).

Anyway, this brings us to the titular turn of phrase (and if that seems like a stretch for a “cliché” as this blog uses the term, just be happy…other options included “Change your language and you change your thoughts,” “Language is the armory of the human mind,” and “If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”). I wound up in an Australian bar around Place Pigalle, and because alcohol is like the sun of the twenty-something universe, I was drawn into a group of Scottish expats there to watch some of the EuroCup tournament (I’m sure I’ve misspelled the tourney name, and that someone is going to do that thing where they equate not liking soccer with the new manifest destiny, but I’m just too rushed to care right now; suffice to say I like the game). The one thing that stood out to me was that in this whole group of individuals who had been living in France for almost nine months, I spoke the best French in the group, and therefore became the point man for communicating with the local population. I touched on this earlier, but that is not a good look for a group of people trying to get by in France; me being in charge of speaking French for a group is like letting your fourteen year old kid defend you in court because he watched a John Grisham novel-turned-movie. Still, we survived, the night went smoothly, and to the best of my knowledge everyone got home ok.

I suppose the only reason any of this otherwise unremarkable evening stood out to me was because there was something jarring about the idea of living in a place for the better part of a year and not even bothering to learn the local language. Maybe this is part of the chip on my shoulder that I carry around being an American who is trying to assimilate into the culture when there is still an ugly stereotype of the gunslinging American imposing his will/culture/general slapdickery everywhere. Still, there’s something that strikes me as either lazy or arrogant about simply not caring whether or not you can communicate with the world in which you’ve chosen to insert yourself. Rest assured, I speak poor, poor French (in fact, now that I think about it, it may be MORE offensive to locals when I bludgeon the language to death), but I cling to my kiddie pool level of understanding like it’s a life preserver; without it, the isolation would be too intense to handle. It’s not even like people here don’t speak English; on the contrary, EVERYONE does, and they generally do so whenever they suspect they’re dealing with an outsider (an annoying capitulation that I’m pretty sure is the end result of a history full of surrendering to any and everyone…and yes, that’s the only time I’m making a France/Surrender joke). My point is that I don’t WANT to be left on the outside of a place that I’m trying to make into a home, and I’m only here for a summer. If setting myself up here, poor language and all, has helped me to understand the role of language as a sort of cultural key, without which there can be no real contact (the image of plastic covered couches comes to mind), then this group in the Australian bar, as nice as they were, represented the opposite of what I’m hoping to become by the time I leave here, which is depressing, because they’ve been here so much longer than I’m going to be. That kind of isolation is easy, but it ultimately does nothing to resolve the need for contact that I think drives people out of their places of origin in the first place.

Fin / End / No más

it is not the metal in a piece of money that fixes its value

I’ve decided to try and breathe some new life into this little project for two reasons. First, I need some quality time away from the old ball and chain. I figure if I don’t find an outlet for my non-football thoughts that I want to turn into words, I’ll turn into a one trick pony, and while turning a combination of football, out of context literary/philosophic nodal points, and the word “dickbag” into online gold is a nice trick, I think I’d like to expand.

But more importantly, I’m in Paris for the summer, and I’ve got a lot of time on my hands that I’d like to use to hone my writing, which was one of the reasons I started this project in the first place.

I’m going to try to get beyond the obvious clichés about how the city is beautiful, and how it makes me want to write, and blah blah blah, because it’s been discussed by better writers than me. So, in an effort to make the necessary comment on the way this place has taken its hold on my creative outlets, all I’ll say is that as someone who wrote his senior thesis on Wordsworth (and THAT is a 40-plus page white-knuckle thrill ride…try not to get blown back by how fast the pages turn…), I get the part of his story where he wanders off to Paris and isn’t the same from that point on. It’s a Moses on Mount Sinai kind of thing; as such, I suppose you have to experience the glow to understand the effect it’s having.

Moving to more practical differences, the obvious one is the language, on which front I am desperately trying to get to the point where people at least have to wait until sounds escape my open mouth to tell that I’m not from here. It’s not even that I’m speaking it poorly, but it’s arguably worse when people understand exactly what you’re saying, but are giving you the same look they give a two year old who walks around banging pots and saying “DaDa.” This is, of course, exactly what one hopes for upon starting as a young professional in a major metropolitan area. I kind of want to learn every language just to try and keep non-native English speakers from feeling this way back home. It’s less about being magnanimous than about wanting to avoid the awkwardness that I now am going to know is there when they’re in a room full of people they can’t fully understand.

The second, and less touchy-feely difference I noticed is where I got the idea for the title of this post. In America, every single significant denomination higher than the quarter is signified by paper money. Bills are the currency of note. In Europe, on the other hand, the Euro has at least two (and given the exchange rate, probably three) different significant currency amounts signified by counts. These coins are either a little bigger or a little smaller than a quarter. As such, one of the first things you have to train yourself to stop doing if you’re an American is letting dropped coins slip away. It was one of the first things I noticed about the people here, actually; in America, if a coin drops, it just slides, but here, and maybe this is a soccer thing (the stereotypical, easy way to write off most differences in European culture), it’s a flurry of feet to stop the the coin from rolling somewhere it can’t be found. I don’t know why, but there’s something funny to me about how the way the makeup of a creation (component parts, material, etc.) can go only so far to determine its value. The same basic materials, the same situation, and two completely different reactions based solely on the value placed upon the completed whole, in this case the coin.

What makes this more interesting (a relative term) is that I was recently at L’Institut du Monde Arabe. I went on a friend’s advice with the warning “the building is trippy.” This is an understatement. Walls of glass surrounding a courtyard, transparent elevators shooting up and down transparent tunnels, the whole experience can do a number on your perspective (particularly if, as I imagine my friend was, you are stoned out of your damn mind). In any case, if you wander through the museum, you eventually reach a section devoted to the art of calligraphy. In the Arab world, heavily influenced by Islam, artists tended to shy away from depictions of humans and animals (something I thought was expressly forbidden, but which is apparently just discouraged). The resulting impact on art is astounding for the focus placed on finding beauty in signifiers that are themselves in search of signifieds, and the calligraphy is perhaps the most beautiful example of this. The letters, words, and sentences all come together to form a greater work, one that has its own artistic merit as a whole, but each component part is painstakingly crafted as a unique artistic endeavor. As an observer, knowing this, it’s easy to shift between looking at one work of art and looking at the hundreds, sometimes thousands of unique works that exist within it. It contradicts the idea of the material not mattering; indeed, here, the material mattering is what matters. For some reason, that concept resonated, and not in some “the journey matters as much as the destination” way. The idea that there is value in perfecting the means of creation, independent of what they are creating, is worth weighing against the equally valid notion that it is the outside value placed on something that often creates its value for us.

If all that seems like a lot of thought without any clear end point, well, I suppose I’m still perfecting means myself.

"that time of the month"

I am a great period boyfriend. It’s an underrated skill. We live in a world where, for some reason, men have decided that there is nothing significant happening when their girlfriends and wives enter that time of the month when everything you learned about what the human body is and isn’t supposed to do goes haywire for them. And it all happens in a fairly significant region below the waistline, which makes the callousness of the male sex to the predicament all the more bizarre. As a man, I walk around with an almost Zen-like relationship with my genitalia. Like with all my truly great friends, if something is wrong with my pal downstairs, I know about it before he even has to tell me (not that he can talk, though if he did, I’d imagine he’d sound like Andy Griffith in “Matlock,” old and wise, with the pedigree of a law degree and a drawl that betrayed a history of good old fashioned hoedowns). In any case, it’s shocking that we, as a gender, don’t expect women to be a bit perturbed when their own privates (I realize I sound like a southern preacher circa 1880, but I was raised in the church my whole life) decide to go AWOL. If “Jake Steel and the gang” ever did anything remotely close to that on my watch, it would be betrayal of the highest order, like Judas planting a kiss on my cheek.

As such, I’ve made it a point to try and sympathize with any significant other I’ve ever had during their period. It’s harder than it sounds, mostly because, as I’ve tried to explain, men can’t possibly understand it. I like to think I’ve made strides though. I have Cosmopolitan to thank for a lot of my progress. Not because it actually gives any sort of significant advice on the subject; that’s far too crass a topic for any magazine that aims to satisfy a readership of progressive, glamorous women (I can only assume that Hilary Duff doesn’t get periods, ever). In fact, the opposite is true. Once, when I read a “Cosmo For Guys” feature on the topic (perhaps the single least read magazine section outside of “for those who don’t like ‘watersports’” in Urine Fetishists Monthly), the magazine told me that all woman really wanted when she entered that hellish time of the month was a big hug, and that sensitive men should see it as their responsibility to be there with open arms when the chaos began. Rest assured that this kind of physical intimacy is the opposite of what any woman wants during her period. I’ve had more than one girlfriend respond to the aforementioned “big hug” the way that beaten pets respond to approaching humans, complete with the snarling. In any case, they don’t find it adorable; at best it results in temporary violence and at worst it becomes hilarious grounds for a future breakup.

But what Cosmo did teach me is that every woman likes to at least feel glamorous, and there is nothing that feels less glamorous than a period. Just realizing this insignificant fact, I have become something of a standard bearer for significant others that women don’t mind being with during their periods. My secret? Compassionate understanding? Try again: It's Fear. That’s right; I’m talking about abject terror and awe. And I don’t mean the goofy, sitcom kind of fear for periods that has been portrayed as the standard for men; that kind of nonchalance will get you torn to pieces, in some cases literally. I’m talking about the kind of fear that is tempered by respect for that which you can’t possibly fathom, the kind of fear that kept the Israelites out of the Holy of Holies. When “that time of the month” rolls around, I hide; I cower. I stay as out of the way as I can. I speak when spoken to, and I answer any questions with as few syllables as possible.

Of course, this is no way to live your life for extended periods (ba-dum-TSSSSHHH!!!), but I’m a firm believer that if you want to be a good boyfriend, you should try to be a great period boyfriend. It can’t hurt to have your own needs completely smothered by the overwhelming needs of someone else, at least for a little while. The secret to surviving “that time of the month” is compromise, which isn’t such a bad trait to develop in the long run. And when you have someone reacting to you and everything around them with emotions tempered by bodily functions the likes of which you can’t understand (seriously, don’t even try, it’s way too much to handle; it’s like “the sublime” except with cramps), and you can be patient (or, perhaps better, hidden), maybe you grow a little. Just no big hugs. Cosmo has no idea how hard these girls can hit.

a good beginning makes a good ending

My body physically rejects introduction settings. The strange thing is that I’m not an awkward person in most situations. But if you drop me in a crowded room with a lot of people I don’t know, all hell breaks loose. I imagine it’s like watching a lab rat do stress exercises in mazes, only the rat is sweating. A lot. In fact, I don’t know which is the problem and which is the symptom; do introductions make me sweat or are introductions difficult because I sweat? Either way, it makes for difficult social situations. Life is rough when every photograph of you at a crowded party looks like you just got out of a pool. “Hi, I’m Zac.” “Oh, hi. Did you just get out of a shower?” Yes, and now I’m going to crawl back into my hole and die of awkward. I bet it will be at least twenty degrees cooler there, too.

I’m looking back at that and realizing that’s probably not the way to win readers from the get go. See what I mean? Terrible at introductions. I promise this will get less strange as we go on.

I wish we could all jump into the middle of conversations. Introducing yourself is the worst, but introducing something about yourself is easy. Like when you see someone reading a book on the human anatomy and taking notes, and you can start off with a softball like “Med school student?” They say yes or no, you say what you do, and just like that, you’re in the middle of the conversation. Unless they hit you back with “No, cannibal,” you’re safe. You jump right over who you are and into what you do, and that’s so much easier. Maybe that’s because it’s a nice and shallow entry, the kiddie pool of meeting people. Maybe it’s because the question of “Who am I?” leads to all sorts of marked terms and codes and all the things that get philosophers and douchebag writers with too much free time all hot and bothered (just writing it out put me at half mast). In any case, discussing what I do is greatly preferable to discussing who I am, a question which, as we’ve discussed, there isn’t enough antipersperant in the world for me to tackle.

Dammit, I’m back on the sweat. Really, this isn’t a blog about sweating in social situations. Although that does sound like a good idea. We could call it “a drip off the old block” or “‘Yes, I did just sprint here, for your information.’” I’ll start that one next.

What this is, to use the easiest possible definition, is a blog about clichés. As someone who likes to believe he’s an artist (seriously, I’ve got a five o’clock shadow going and everything!), I like to imagine that the systems of art and society are made to be broken. As someone whose actually written and studied philosophy and law (as opposed to the vast majority of “artists” who sing about them on acoustic guitar), I know that those systems exist to inspire creation and production as often as they limit them. Basically, the goal here is to take clichés that we hear frequently or infrequently and use them to try and tackle that question for which there is no easy, cliché answer: Who am I?

Wow, that’s probably as good a beginning as we can hope for. Better take the title’s advice and quit while I’m slightly above sea level…DAMMIT, more salt water references…