I sound like a Martian in both English and French

There are certain things you become painfully aware of when you're living in a country that's not your own. I know it's an obvious observation, but it's true in ways you can't even imagine, even something as ignored but as intimate as your voice. I've never been so conscious of the way I speak, and I don't mean just in French.

Before continuing I must fully confess an important but embarrassing detail for those reading this who have never heard me speak French: My accent in French is thick. It's not so thick that people can't normally understand me, but it is quite obvious from the look in strangers' eyes that it hits them in the face with all the force of an elderly lady's generous application of perfume. However, seeing just the uneasy look in a stranger's eyes is the kindest of reactions. Among the worst is when they respond in English, which in US culture amounts to a (mild or not so mild) form of bigotry. If you're not sure what I mean, imagine the reaction of someone responding to a Hispanic person in broken Spanish (HHHOLAH) and repeatedly calling them their "amigo." It makes you cringe, doesn't it? I live a similar situation here in France. This happens regardless of the persons skill in English. Such as the time when, midway through the transaction, the cashier decided to switch to English but only managed to repeat "She.... She.... She..." over and over again. Or the time when I was ordering in Subway, where the menu items are in English, and they couldn't understand my pronunciation of English words (but could understand the French words), decided my French was bad (the irony!) and then tried to switch to English, which failed as spectacularly as you are probably imagining. It's worth noting, without writing a blog entry of its own, that the problem lies not really in the person's skill in English but in the othering and lack of acceptance of someone who's clearly trying to integrate into your country, but I digress...

All of this up until now, you could probably expect, but it doesn't stop there. Even in my own native language, my speech and accent is the subject of unease. At work, I'm constantly told that, "The American accent is difficult," as if there's only one American accent in a country that is between 14 and 15 times the size of France.

"You don't speak English; you speak American," is another one I hear often, as if I speak some kind of English pidgin. I'm not sure if this is just a weird linguistic quirk since they do, after all, call Canadian French (roughly translated for the French-impaired) "Quebecian" (Quebecois). But when you consider that they often put down Quebec's accent and dialect, maybe it's not some weird linguistic thing where they have the habit of referring to dialects instead of language, and French people are just completely unfamiliar of the idea with language plurality. It's ironic to think that in the US, we laugh at people as uneducated when they say they speak "American," and here, when I tell people I speak "English, not American," I'm considered the incorrect one.

I know this sounds highly sensitive, like I should just get over it. Don't worry. Plenty people of told me this--most of them French--which is why I don't really discuss this with them anymore. At a certain point, it seems fruitless. When you've had the same conversation a thousand times with the same result, why bother? And truthfully, the first times that it happens, it wasn't so bothersome, but it's like being tickled. After first it's funny, but slowly but surely it stops and before you know it, it's unbearable. So I'm trying to develop a thicker skin. It helps that this most often happens at work, and I just have to grin and bear it in the name of being professional.

Now, a year later, it's old hat. Yes, it was fun for a moment to be "the American" at the party, but eventually after the 700th joke about hamburgers and how fat we are or the 345th tongue-in-cheek comment guns, or fucking Donald Trump, it gets old. It also doesn't help that all of these things are serious topics that I worry about at night because I care about my country (well, maybe hamburgers aren't so serious) but they're just jokes to them. Feeling like the visiting ambassador from the "New World" is fun, but eventually you want to be part of the group, not the invited guest.

Well, at least he didn't have a gun, right?

People always ask me what crime was like in New York and Colombia, if I felt safe, if there were a lot of pickpockets, and my answer is always the same, "If you pay attention, you'll probably be fine. Something can always happen, no matter where you are and no matter how many precautions you take. Sometimes you just have bad luck, but in general, it's not as big of a concern as you'd imagine." In New York, I often mention that for cities of its population size, it's one of the safest in the United States. The question used to most often come from concerned Hoosiers who viewed NYC as the "the big bad city," which made it ironic that the one time I was held at gunpoint in my life was while I had come back to Indianapolis for my Aunt Andrea's funeral.

In the ongoing bizzaro world situation of Le Mans basically being the French Indianapolis, people often ask me the same question here, and as of last night, just like in Indianapolis, I had another unnerving experience. Jeremy and I had gone out with friends that night, and we got home pretty late. We had stayed up, talking and discussing, when there was a knock at our door. Neither of us were all that shocked. I immediately assumed it was probably a friend who had accidentally left something behind at our apartment before going out to the bars.

Jeremy looked through the peep hole, assumed it was a neighbor and opened the door. The man, who was about our age and whose face was difficult to see with his hood up, started to try to walk into the apartment. Jeremy, reacting quickly, pushed him out and slammed the door shut. The man pushed on the door, and we quickly turned the deadbolt, which lead him to start grabbing and turning the knob. I was still a bit shocked and looked at the door, and distinctly remember feeling cornered and not really sure what I could do to get him to go away. So I slammed my hands on my side of the door, which made a rumbling sound through the building, and yelled "I'm calling the police!" which I'm sure was so very intimidating in my awkward American accent.

I turned to Jeremy and told him to call the police because right after I said I was going to call the police, I became aware of an embarrassing detail: I never really committed the emergency numbers in France to memory. He was on hold with them for what felt like some time, and when he finally speaks to a person, he was told "just don't open the door" and "everyone's getting broken into tonight." The police never showed.

Equally effective

Sometime during the police call, the man stopped messing with our doorknob and went up to another floor. Jeremy turned off the light, and I crouched down in front of our windows that open onto the street. I flashed back to the time I had been in the proximity of a shooting (also in Indianapolis), and while, stupidly, the majority ran to go watch, I moved away from the windows and to the back of the store I was in. I did the same here, and it was only until I had calmed down that I realized it was extremely unlikely he had a gun, unlike in the US. Meanwhile, Jeremy had opened a window to look out onto the street, and I pulled him back in by the shirt and shut the windows. 

We both continued to watch, and we saw the man eventually leave our building. A car pulled up and the hooded man talked with a woman (who we're pretty sure lives in our building). After their talk (which I couldn't understand), the hooded man got in the car with a bunch of others and the care drove away, and we breathed a sigh of relief. 

Afterward, we began to sort through the facts, and Jeremy decided that he was probably someone who lived in our building but had got confused about which apartment was his since he was probably extremely drunk. In the end, he probably meant us no real harm and was just so drunk he had no idea what he was doing or where he was, but the entire experience was unnerving to say the least, if for no other reason than it reminded me of past experiences. It's been a couple days since, and I still feel a bit paranoid. When I walk around at night, I'm nervous that I'll run into him, and when I wake up in the morning or come back home, I have the irrational fear that he or someone else will be there. Like I said, he probably had no intention to rob us; he was probably just some drunk guy who didn't know where he was or what he was doing, but these things stick with you for a while. When I had a gun held at my face while someone demanded my money, I was nervous for weeks to walk around on the street, even though it was a completely different city. I imagine I'll have a few more days of being nervous. Regardless of the circumstances or motivations, there's something about a home invasion that shakes a fundamental part of you because it challenges what we all believe deep down: that you're unquestionably safe in your home. But hey, at least that means I know now I have a home.

I made a mistake

So, it turns out that maybe I made a mistake. I shouldn't have quit writing this blog. It's been almost a year, and I have been feeling a hole in my life since my only outlet for writing was social media. Facebook as an outlet for creative impulses isn't very satisfying at all; it's just ephemeral snippets. It's like you're starving and all you eat is cotton candy. You get a taste of something sweet, but it dissolves in your mouth before you've even swallowed and you realize you're getting no nourishment at all. It's just empty calories. Creatively speaking.

This blog did so many things for me at once. Writing about what I think and what I observe in the world was a way to digest it and learn from it, to arrange the information and make sense from it. In this way, this blog was my alienist. I lied on a couch in a darkened room and let loose what was on my mind that week. I explained my problems, my joys, my frustrations, then I added some gifs and posted it in the faux-anonymity of the Internet. Emphasis on the faux because, as it turned out, people were listening, which made it a way to let you into my life and to continue to share moments with people who were important to me. A good deal of the people who read my blog were friends who I now live far away from because–spoiler alert–I'm still in France, and writing a weekly post was a way to bring you all along with me, which I wish I could do. I miss you all.

So, that being said, I'm bringing it back: Season Three, An Expatriate Without A Country (a bit in homage to the brilliant and unforgettable Kurt Vonnegut Jr.), the long-term season. I hope you all join me.

And like that, it's gone.

Well, that's all folks.

Yes, just like that. I realized that I need to start putting more energy into some other projects, and I decided to let this one go. I'm a bit sad since I know I had some people who read regularly and I've been told by different people, from friends to acquaintances to strangers, that they enjoyed what I had to say. Thank you, all. Maybe it'll be back one day. Who knows. No promises. Maybe I'll post a random thing or two here as time goes on. But the blog as a weekly thing I do is over. I felt the quality starting to take a drop, and my enjoyment was too. It kept getting put on the back burner until I was barely posting. My desire to make good art, good writing is starting to take over with the change of the year, and while I never thought anything I posted was horrible, the pressure to have something every week sometimes forced me to put up things I didn't love.

But I have a bit of a parting gift for you. A playlist I put together. I decided to center it around the theme that this blog stood on: the wonder of travel and exploration, whether that be another part of the world or your own. I hope you'll listen to it to help say good-bye to the blog, and maybe help my candle light the candle of wanderlust in you.

See you around, folks.

 

I swooned into a pile of love / Je me suis pâmé dans un tas d'amour

Last week I left Le Mans for the first time since I arrived here and went to a place called Center Parcs with my boyfriend and his family.

La dernière semaine, je suis parti du Mans pour la première fois depuis mon arrivée et je suis allé à un endroit qui s’appelle Center Parcs avec mon copain et sa famille.

Yeah, you heard right. I’m dating someone. File that under things I didn’t think would happen anytime soon. I originally met him in a gay bar. Really the only gay bar here in Le Mans. I was coming out of the bathroom, and I said in French something along the lines of, “it’s free.” Nothing of great importance, but enough for him to notice my accent. He asked where I was from, and I told him the United States, which prompted a barrage of English.

Oui, vous avez bien entendu. Je suis dans une relation. Vous pouvez le mettre dans l’archive marquée “Choses que je n’attendais pas.” Notre première rencontre était dans un bar gay. Franchement, c’était le seul bar gay au Mans. Je sortais des toilettes en lui disant, “C’est libre” ou quelque chose de normal, mais ça a suffi pour qu’il note mon accent. Il m’a demandé d’où je suis et je lui ai dit que c’était les États-Unis, ce qui a provoqué un déluge d’anglais.

If you don’t remember, I’ll take the opportunity to remind you that most multilingual Americans find that annoying as hell. Part of it is cultural. Imagine doing the same thing in the United States. You see someone who looks Hispanic, you ask them where they’re from, they say Mexico or Colombia, and then you launch into your bizarre high school Spanish, which probably isn’t that good, to someone who’s clearly doing just fine with English. If you did that in the US, you’d come off as cultural ignorant at best and racist at worst. It also just kind of makes you feel odd and foreign each time someone says a word, and we all like to feel like we fit in now and then.

Pour eux qui ne souviennent pas, je profite de l’occasion pour vous dire que la majorité des Américains multilingue trouve ça tout énervant. Un facteur est notre culture. Pour mes lecteurs américains, imaginez-vous faire le même aux États-Unis. Vous voyez quelqu’un d’hispanique, vous demandez d’où il est, il dit le Mexique et la Colombie et ensuite, tu te lances dans parler un espagnol bizarre que vous avez appris au lycée, ce qui n’est pas probablement très bon, à quelqu’un qui paraît ne pas avoir aucun problème en parlant anglais. Si vous le faites aux États-Unis, on dirait ignorant au mieux et raciste au pire. Ce fait que l’autre se sent étrange et embarrassé chaque fois que vous prononcez un mot, et tous aiment se sentir intégrés de temps en temps. 

So as you can image, I wasn’t pleased, but I could only be a little angry because I was absolutely smitten. He was utterly handsome and had managed to continue to be charming while he was pissing me off, which is impressive. But since I felt intimidated and weird and angry, I ran away to return to my friends and watch him from a distance, hoping for another opportunity to talk to him but also trying to figure out how to make that happen without the onslaught of random English phrases. That opportunity never really came.

Alors, comment vous pouvez imaginer, je n’étais pas content, mais j’étais presque incapable d’être fâché parce que j’étais épris. Il était tout beau et est arrivé à me charmer en m’emmerdant, ce qui est impressionnant. Mais à cause de sentir intimidé, gêné et emmerdé, je me suis échappé à mes amis et pour le regarder de loin, en espérant une autre opportunité de lui parler. Mais je devais découvrir comment le faire sans être présenté avec un assaut d’anglais. L’opportunité ne m’est jamais arrivée.

A few days later, I found him on a dating app and messaged him, referencing the other night, and when he replied, he accused me of being a fake profile. Cute. After a long debate, through which I kept trying to figure out why I was putting in so much effort, I convinced him to meet me for a drink. When the day came, he canceled because of rain. There ended up being no rain that day, just ominous looking clouds that came and went. I started to suspect that he was actually Colombian and was pretty much prepared to give up at this point, but we made another plan and finally got together. When I saw him approach the bar door at the same time as me, I remembered why I was trying so hard: Because they very sight of him makes me melt.

Quelques jours plus tard, je l’ai trouvé dans une application de rencontre et lui ai envoyé un message qui a mentionné l’autre nuit. Quand il m’a répondu, il m’a accusé d’être un faux profil. Très mignon. Après un débat long, pendant lequel j’essayais de comprendre pourquoi je faisais tant d’effort, je l’ai convaincu de prendre un verre. Quand ce jour est arrivé, il a annulé à cause de la pluie. En fait, il ne pleuvait pas ce jour. Il n’y avait que des nuages très menaçants qui sont arrivés et sortis. Je commençais à m’abandonner, mais on a organisé un autre jour et enfin, on s’est vus. Quand je l’ai vu approcher la porte du bar, je me suis souvenu la raison pour laquelle j’essayais autant : parce que la simple vue de lui me fait me pâmer. 

We hit it off immediately. The night went great, and it’s been going pretty great ever since. He’s my favorite person to be around, and thanks to him my experience here in France has been so much deeper. He shows me things I wouldn’t discover on my own and does it all while being his charming, funny, handsome self.

On s’est bien entendus dès le début. La nuit était magnifique et il reste comme ça depuis. Il est ma personne favorite pour voir et grâce à lui, mon expérience en France est plus profonde. Il me montre des trucs que je n’aurais pas découverts seul et il le fait en étant charmant, drôle, beau.

So, back to Center Parks. It’s basically this giant nature vacation resort with little cabins, outdoor activities, and a big giant pool area with a couple large water slides, a wave pool, a crazy river to ride down, and heated pools that go outside, which is pretty neat in December. His sister’s husband had paid for their family to go, but there was an extra room and they invited Jeremy and me. I was a bit nervous to meet his family, but more and more, I’m learning to respond to nervousness head-on instead of trying to hide from it. Go deeper into the moment than try to escape it, you know?

Alors, Center Parks. Il est essentiellement une grande belle station avec des cottages, des activités de plein air et une grande zone de natation avec des toboggans, une piscine à vagues, une rivière sauvage et des piscines chauffées extérieures, ce qui est merveilleux en décembre. Le mari de sa sœur a payé pour sa famille, mais il y avait une chambre qui restait et ils ont invité Jeremy et moi. Je craignais un peu pour rencontre sa famille, mais de plus en plus, j’apprends à faire face à la nervosité au lieu d’essayer de me cacher de l’opportunité, de me mettre plus profond dans le moment au lieu de l’éviter.  

It was an amazingly fun weekend. I rode down two water slides—one with a forty five degree drop—rode a bike for the first time in years, took a walk in some nature, got to know some of my boyfriend’s family, and had a romantic mini-vacation with the one I love. All in all, despite coming down with a cold on the first day, it was a pretty awesome weekend. There was also no cell or wifi signal, which is frightening for the first fifteen minutes but then liberating for the three days we were there. It was so good that I started to dread coming home and having to go to work on Monday. But then I realized I only had one week till Christmas vacation, so I put on my big boy pants and we went back to the city. Where we promptly ate pizza.

C’était un weekend super amusant. J’ai fait deux toboggans-l'un avec une pente de 45 degrés—monté un vélo pour la première fois en des années, baladé dans la nature, appris à connaitre la famille de mon copain, et eu des petites vacances romantiques avec qui j’aime. Somme toute, bien que j’aie été enrhumé le premier jour, c’était un weekend fantastique. Il n’y avait pas de signal WiFi ou de portable, ce qui est terrifiant pour les premières quinze minutes, mais ensuite, il devient libérateur pour les trois jours que nous y avons passés. Il était tellement bien que j’ai commencé à redouter le retour chez moi pour aller au travail lundi. Mais je me suis rendu compte que j’avais seulement une semaine jusqu’à les vacances de Noel et je me suis endurcit et on est revenus à la ville. Où, ensuite, on a mangé de la pizza.