Created for a final presentation in my Cultural Translation Workshop, this is a video translation of the last academic year of my life between Paris and Minneapolis. With over an hour of footage to narrow down, I chose clips depicting the constant movement and restlessness of living in two places, which can result simultaneously in both excitement and loneliness. No matter where I live, in Paris or in Minneapolis, my heart is always missing the other.
April
My regular monthly video for April, including visiting Fontainebleau, running the The Color Run 5K, visiting Annecy and Geneva with my sister, hiking on my birthday in the Alps and, of course, regular life in Paris.
A woman stands at baggage claim ripping into a new Marlboro carton, waiting for her suitcase. A couple stands kissing on the moving sidewalk, oblivious to the rest of the travelers and, to be perfectly honest, lucky they didn't get an elbowing from me as I scraped by them. I'm back in Paris, if it weren't obvious enough.
I spent just under a month back at home in Minnesota and it was as glorious as I predicted. After arriving home sans luggage (Lost at Schiphol Airport) and sans 40-euro bottle of duty-free wine I specially bought for our Christmas dinner (Confiscated at Schiphol Airport), I spent my days: sleeping till the afternoon, nourishing myself with Nordeast, frosting, root beer, oreos, bagels and peanut butter, driving cars, researching my family ancestry, watching Netflix until 3 AM every night (New Girl, Blackfish, The Shining and a feeble attempt at The Hunger Games before I lost interest), reading non-school material (On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield), going to concerts, playing the piano, shopping, gambling, trying out new restaurants, getting a new phone to replace my stolen iPhone, skiing for the first time in ten years with my sister and realizing my lessons served me well from back in the day and spending lots of time with my favorite Minnesotans. But, alas, there are only so many days a person can go without putting on real clothes and not feel like they're at the Overlook Hotel. I walked around the house shouting "REDRUM!" whenever my mom had her back turned.
Goodbyes are hard, especially because I won't be home again until at least September. But it was time to finish up this master's degree and continue living my Paris dreams or whatever, so I left. I have a long road ahead of me.
Part One of my January video
For someone who loves traveling, I sort of hate it. I mean, the act of traveling...well, it sucks. No matter what, I can guarantee at least several of these will happen: I won't sleep more than twenty minutes on any flight, I'll get stuck next to the baby that cries louder than it normally would just to punish the rest of us for not having kids, I'll have no room overhead for my carry-on, so under my legs it goes, my flight will be delayed, airport security will dig through my meticulously-packed bags despite complying with all the rules (Especially at Shithole Schiphol Airport) or my ears won't pop and I'll start whimpering in agony to myself for the last fifteen minutes. Or if none of the above happen, I'll have a unique situation like on Sunday when I got to my apartment and my landlady locked me out (long story) and I was so jetlagged that I tried sleeping in my hallway against my door until she got home three hours later.
But I made it. I'm in Paris. Everything is fine and I'm not flying again for over a month.
To backtrack quite a bit, December was a blur. My friend Ashley from high school managed to fly out from Boston to visit for a weekend and I had a great time introducing her to Paris and to Europe in-between my classes that I couldn't skip and conference calls she had to make because she technically didn't take any time off from work. I made her walk till her feet were borderline sprained and barked at her to get off my futon, stop being jetlagged and go out, because you don't waste your three days in Paris being tired. (You just don't, Ashley.) Being cold-weather natives at heart, we sat outside with a blanket for dinner in the Place du Tertre and drank wine on the Quai des Grands Augustins, as well as hitting the obvious spots like the Louvre, the top of Notre-Dame, the Champs-Elysées and the Eiffel Tower (though she wouldn't climb it). It's a great thing to have an old friend in this big city.
Ashley & I in the Place des Vosges
The rest of the month was devoted to school. I had an awful cold for a week or two that had me going through a box of tissues a day and coughing so badly my ribs hurt. Basically I kissed any and every social invitation goodbye and hunkered down in my chambre de bonne until everything that I had procrastinated on got unprocrastinated. In the process of writing close to forty pages in a week, I was missing the simpler days of the low-stress classes of my study abroad semester and the driving passion I had for my French degree that I don't have for translation. If any college students are reading this, you need to realize your finals could be a lot worse. You could be a graduate student.
Today, the official start of my last semester of school ever (I will not be doing a Ph.D. Do not let me think that's a good idea. It's not.) and I woke up early as I always do at the beginning. I felt daunted by the work ahead of me listed on my syllabi and doubted whether I can do this as I always do at the beginning. The RER B was bursting at the seams during the morning rush hour. I drank copious amounts of coffee and admired the beautifully overcast sky sheathing the Eiffel Tower in fog. I bought a book for class, Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau, from Brian at The Abbey Bookshop, my favorite bookstore in Paris because he always gives me free coffee, sometimes with maple syrup (He's Canadian), and genuinely loves helping me find what I need. I imagine The Abbey is what Shakespeare & Co. once was before the tourists found it.
I took a long way home to avoid the RER B, taking the boulevard Saint-Michel to rue Monsieur le Prince and the Place de l'Odéon and winding through the nearly-empty Jardin du Luxembourg. The green metal chairs were all empty, a rare sight in the warmer months. January is a wonderful time in Paris because you feel like it's yours. It's not even very cold, despite all the complaining Californians and Parisians with very limited cold tolerances.
My last first day of school picture ever.
Foggy day in the Luxembourg Gardens
The pruned trees in winter always remind me of the vines in Sleeping Beauty.
rue Herschel
rue Michelet
So as I start the new year, what did 2013 mean for me? It was probably my biggest year yet. I worked my ass off applying for graduate school, got in and spent months working on paperwork which included a visit to Chicago, somehow graduated from college with Latin honors, said goodbye to my little companion Ribby, and moved back to the city that makes me so, so happy. Moving here is the hardest thing I've ever done (so much more so than my semester in college) but I've somehow gotten this far. I try to view it like this: if you're going to do something hard, you might as well do it where you want to. I don't want to have regrets of what could have been.
What Grad School in France Has Taught Me
1. You can't get everywhere in thirty minutes or less. In fact, you can't get most places in thirty minutes or less, even though Mary-Kate and Ashley taught me I could travel 9,000 miles to Transylvania in "about twenty minutes."
2. You can't procrastinate like you did back in college. I'm finally learning that starting a research paper two days before it's due is really, really stupid.
3. The Eiffel Tower is really distracting. So is people-watching from my window, Deezer, Pinterest and old Britney Spears videos on YouTube circa 2001.
4. When a professor assigns you five books to read for the semester, you read them ASAP. You shouldn't read other books for fun.
5. You absolutely cannot skip class. Period. I think back on the days when I could Ferris Bueller-it in Montmartre during my study abroad semester and no one cared. That was such sweet freedom.
5. Google Calendar is sometimes the only thing keeping my life intact. I'm holding on for dear life.
6. Sleep can be the most fun part of the day.
7. Saturdays, and even Fridays, are legitimate study days. For the first time in my life, any weekend day is now fair game to get things done.
8. Chocolate and wine is sometimes a meal. After spending most of my life with a certain nonchalance toward chocolate, I've recently realized that everyone's right. It's pretty good. And it sometimes replaces meals when I don't want to go get real groceries.
9. Doing your master's in France before you're 26 is really smart. In a word, discounts. I can get into any national museum for free and get reduced prices on a lot of things.
10. Doing your master's in France before you're 26 makes you the youngest. Everyone else has time to figure out their lives for a bit longer than me. When people ask what I was doing before this career-wise, I have nothing to say. I'm the eternal underdog.
11. Wine and croissants will never let you down, but the RER will. My frown has been turned upside down so many times thanks to them.
12. Coffee is everything.
13. Grad school in one year instead of two means everything is overly intense. Good luck trying to hold down a job on top of it.
14. Grad school in one year instead of two is a relief. I probably wouldn't be doing this at all if it were two.
15. Be really passionate about what you choose to study. It's so much harder if you're not.
But the main thing I've learned from Paris is that you don't have to do what everyone else is doing. Let everyone else live up to those underlying expectations for what your twenties are supposed to be. I'm having a great time doing what I truly want to do.
The long-standing joke in my family is that I'm a cat lady, which is rooted back in my second or third year of life. The farm where my dad grew up was the place where I was first around animals and cats in particular. My sister and I rather creatively named several of the cats Lovey, Maddy and Scared-y, based on their temperaments. At that age, I was scared of dogs, but I ended up loving cats. In preschool, I came home with drawings I'd done of yellow cats with purple collars.
At the farm with Lovey, Emily and Maddy in 1993
One day when I was five, my mom and I somehow ended up at the Animal Humane Society looking at cats. I was smitten with a tiny kitten, but Mom had her eyes on an almost full-grown cat with a "raccoon tail" who was said to be good with children. We went home that night to discuss getting this cat and by the next day, my infamously good convincing skills worked- we were getting a cat! Finally!
The four of us brought her home the next night in a cardboard box. In the car, Emily and I dangled our hair in the air holes and giggled as the cat batted it around. Name suggestions ranged from Sassy (My suggestion since the only cat I could think of was Sassy from Homeward Bound.) to Tiger (Emily's suggestion). My dad quietly suggested 'Ribbons' since she had stripes like ribbons. We got our name.
The story of bringing her home "rittin" in probably 1997
Her first full day at home after a bath.
Easter 2013
Over the years, Ribby and I grew up together and I let her occupy a bigger piece of my heart than anyone else in the family did. She became my little shadow in the house, following me everywhere and waiting outside my bedroom door in the morning. Whenever I was sad, I think she understood because she always came to me, looked me in the eyes and stayed.
I always felt that people who say they hate cats would have had a hard time hating Ribby. She was an anomaly to the hissing, attacking, reclusive archetype that gives them a bad reputation. She only hissed once in front of me and it was pretty pathetic (When getting her temperature taken at the vet). She was also a lap addict. Her favorite thing to do was to fall asleep on one of us. All she ever wanted to do was eat, purr and snuggle. She was my living, breathing stuffed animal.
Unfortunately chronic kidney disease in cats isn't really something a cat can just live with forever; it will eventually kill them. She was diagnosed in June 2012 while I was in Italy and the vet told my dad that she had about two years left in her. Life went on and she was fine. On July 24, 2013, I found her with severe dehydration and diarrhea in the basement and we rushed her to the hospital. We opted to not euthanize her and instead get her treated and back home the next day. We weren't ready for goodbye and also, what about that two-year estimate? It had only been about a year. On August 9th, I realized that we'd been in denial about her health. I noticed she was walking funny and she eventually stopped walking altogether. She stopped eating. She stopped purring. She stopped looking at me in the eyes when I was sad. So I made the decision to let her go. On the night of August 13th, I tucked her in and told her the story of when we got her all those years ago. The next day, we wrapped my little girl in a towel and took her out of our house for the last time. I held her paw and her fur looked so soft and we kept saying through tears how cute she still was. "You all are making me cry," said the vet. The end was peaceful and it broke my heart. The last thing I said to her was "I'll love you forever" and I tucked her tail around her.
Losing a pet is harder than a lot of people give you credit for because they probably haven't been lucky enough to have one of their own. They don't get it and that's fine. Though she wasn't conscious of it, Ribby taught me how to love and how to be responsible. She provided so much comfort from hard days in Kindergarten to the stresses of junior high to preparing this summer for graduate school in Paris. She was patient with me when my five-year-old self tried putting her in a dress. She stayed calm when Emily and I took her for joy rides in the car in high school. She constantly warmed our hearts and made us smile and laugh and forget about our problems.
It's sad that I know that specific details about her will start to go soft in my mind over time and I can't do Ribby justice in all the ways that she impacted my life for the last seventeen years. I know she was just one out of millions of cats, but she mattered to me.
The old sayings “dream big” and “shoot for the stars” never had much
meaning to me in my early years. In elementary school, my teachers usually had
well-stocked classrooms of generic posters preaching virtues like “integrity,”
“perseverance” and usually a few dedicated to dreams. Does anyone in fourth
grade really have a clue what they want for their future? For example, my nine-year-old self's profession of choice was to be the next Britney Spears (For a
Thanksgiving project that year, I first wrote that I was thankful for her, and
then for my family.). As a victim of Youngest Child Syndrome (Which I just
Googled and is very real), I strove to do everything my sister did- be in Gifted and
Talented (I wasn’t chosen), have a super-high ACT score (My score was significantly lower), be in National Honor
Society (What was the point of that, anyway?). Name something she did, and I
tried my best to do it, too, often with lower results.
I really didn't dream much past what Emily
had done for herself, so I never quite had any “big dreams” of my own, other than to finish college and then fall off the cliff of Life After
College. That sounded about right, considering I had been probably the shyest
kindergartner in my class and had cried in fear the first day when my sister wasn't on
the bus to go home at noon (“Second graders go to school for the whole day,” My teacher
told me.). I even won the prestigious award of “Most Cautious Player” on my
fifth grade basketball team, Sharpied onto a basketball and really just code
for “the player who is most afraid of upsetting other players.” Lacking any
real talent, I still continued until eighth grade. I think I played for so many years because I was tall, liked to
run back and forth on the court and, of course, because Emily had done it. Years later, when it came down to mark off a language to study my first year of high school, I put down French. Because Emily did. And that lit the fire of my Paris dreams.
Me in Kindergarten, scared for my life.
A few weeks ago, I overslept and was in the
process of emailing my professor when my phone vibrated. It was an email. I
am pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to the MA in Cultural
Translation at the AmericanUniversity of Paris for the fall 2013 semester. Congratulations! I wanted to shout it from on top of a mountain,
but I didn’t have a mountain, so I called my mom instead. Everyone was extremely congratulatory and now after some time has passed, I’ve really started to think about how far I’ve come since childhood. I
don’t think anyone would’ve predicted that little five-year-old Rachel would be
living in Paris for five months, let alone another twelve—and voluntarily. I
myself can hardly believe it because, after all, Emily didn't go to grad
school—though she probably will someday and find a cure for cancer—but after
the last several months, it’s to be expected that I would follow this road once
again.
When I left Paris last May, the taxi took me away from the
neighborhood I’d just begun to feel comfortable in and I knew it wasn't the right
way to go. I sat with my head resting against the window as my eyes dragged
over shops I’d browsed through and cafés I’d wanted to try, and for which I'd never quite found the
time. We passed memories like jogging and wine-picnicking in the Luxembourg
Gardens, impatiently foot-tapping over the copy machines at the shop on the boulevard
Saint-Michel, the vélib’ bicycle racks that had saved me from stumbling
home in stilettos. My life in Paris was being reduced to the likes of a bus tour
and I wanted to shake the driver’s seat and yell “But wait- stop! That’s where
I found my copy of Les fleurs du mal! And that’s where I get my cheap
pizza! Oh, and we really must stop for the quai!” But instead I just
swallowed over the lump growing in my throat as we crossed Le Petit Pont
towards Notre-Dame and over the quai where I’d spent so many nights
dangling my feet over the glittering water and laughing over bottles of Côtes
du Rhône. I closed my mouth and settled into my seat as Louis Armstrong began
to sing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” over the radio. I literally
mouthed “Seriously?” to my mom in the front seat.
At home in Minnesota, I turned into a true Miss Havisham. I’ve
spent the last several months hoarding old receipts that keep coming out of the
woodwork from places like Franprix and avoiding the pictures I took because
they make me too sad. I’ve been able to successfully watch Midnight in Paris
once. My laptop clock is still on Paris time. I’m physically in Minneapolis, but clearly in Paris mentally. I’ve been a real
mess.
I have many fears and doubts about
going back, but I can’t really come up with a good enough reason to not go
back to Paris. I’ve heard so many people over the years talk
about their life regrets and I know I don’t want to wake up in ten years at 32 and think, “Why the hell did I not go?” I want to make the most
of this fleeting freedom that I have right now because what scares me
much more than moving to a foreign country is living an ordinary life without adventure. I know this is my next
chapter and I’m sure the kindergartner in me would be interested in hearing it.
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