A tourist in my own city

Hi friends.  I've decided to veer back to the original purpose of this blog - that is, reflecting on my expat experiences and NOT publishing rant after rant surrounding my general introverted discontentedness.  I'm truly not unhappy, but when I start to write, all of my inner frustrations come out in a kind of cathartic word vomit.  Good for my psyche, maybe not so enjoyable to my readers.

I will start with one complaint, however.  This little sourness prompted my day's activity, so I feel it bears a small amount of explanation: I'm job hunting.  No revelation here, but it really sucks.  I don't think going into too many details would be productive, but over the past few weeks, I've generally felt that my very existence is of absolutely no consequence.  I can't figure out what my passion is in life, can't figure out what I'm really good at, can't figure out where I could make the most fruitful contribution.  On top of that, there's a pesky black hole on the other end of my email server, as clearly none of the dozens of inquiry emails I've sent out have reached a single recipient.  The answers I do get back have been more often than not discouraging and sometimes downright snotty.  So I'm feeling kind of down on myself right now and frustrated that I don't see any progress.  On one specific note - I'm working on a TEFL certification so that I can apply to teaching jobs.  If anyone has any advice on how to get into teaching, I would greatly appreciate it.  I know it's a domain that requires more than just a quick certification, but I want to try teaching English while I'm here for various reasons.

In any case, I've been a less-than-pleasant bedfellow the past few weeks because of the job hunt stress, and I'm also bored up to my eyeballs while on vacation.  It's also worth mentioning that my master's program doesn't have classes this semester, just independent research.  I'm so starved for structure, it's ridiculous.  I'm taking two really great French courses, so at the very least I have that.

In the depths of my first-world despair, I decided to get out of the apartment today and go enjoy Lyon like a tourist.  I loved doing this when I lived in DC, since there's no end of touristy things to do and places to see in Washington.  (I would have lived on the Mall if I could.  I certainly ran around it while marathon training enough times.)  I was really looking for an excuse to get out and remind myself why I'm grateful to be here, living in France.  It can feel like an endless cycle of hardships and frustrations.  Sometimes, not very often, I think back to the life I left in DC.  I was independent with two jobs that paid enough-ish.  I had fun friends, an athletic hobby that kept me busy and put me in contact with wonderful people.  I lived in one of the coolest cities in the world, only a mile or two from Barack.  It's always so easy to look back only see the positive in a situation I know in my heart was never ideal.  Especially at a mentally and emotionally exhausting time like this.  And I don't just mean the job hunting.  Living the bohemian expat life is not glamorous - it comes with a unique set of hurdles and nary a real guidebook.  Then again, I live in France!  Who cares what I have to deal with?  I'm literally living the (a) dream!  For all the cigarette smoke and annoying, confusing bisous, this is such a beautiful country, and I'm kind of in an ideal situation.  I get to be in grad school, speak a foreign language, absorb a whole culture, and I live relatively comfortably.  I pay pennies for my education and healthcare.  I'm not in debt, I'm not starving, and I'm enriching my life in a way that never would have been possible had I stayed in DC.

With all that in mind, I set out today to one of my favorite parts of the city, Vieux Lyon.  Vieux Lyon is the old part of the city (vieux = old), and it looks the most storybook European.  It's pretty touristy on the weekends, so I felt a Wednesday afternoon would be an ideal time for a stroll through its cobblestone streets.  My mission was to get away from the cliché, wander the back streets, and snap pictures of anything that piqued my interest.

To set the scene, the charming, narrow streets of Vieux Lyon:

On the weekends, and in the summer, these streets are usually so packed it's almost impossible to move.  Even today, the main street was a little crowded.  As such, I kept to the most deserted passages.  I love how the old buildings lean in toward each other over the street, veiling the ground in musty antiquity.  You can smell the thousand year history mingling with that distinct scent of baking bread.  It feels ancient, as though this quartier is in suspension, completely at ease with the patina of its beautiful decay.  Everything rests in an organic color, each building appearing to have grown up from the earth abiding by the color palette of nature.  Nothing gaudy or garishly modern.  

Further in my tour, I encountered a little more color and character.

The color on this storefront was actually shocking to me.  The brilliance caught the corner of my eye as I walked by, and I had to cross the street to take in its full glory.  This picture really doesn't do justice to the deep midnight purple, glowing even in the daylight.  I want to find this paint color and paint myself an accent wall in the home of my dreams.

This is my very favorite apartment in all the city.  Every time I walk by, I admire the graceful glass front, the blush of the façade, the thoughtful arrangement of potted plants, up to the jaunty, cheerful turrets of the roof.  It looks out on the Saône river, so whatever lucky person lives here even has a nice view...

The Bad Boy Café ;)

After Vieux Lyon, I mounted the steep hill up to La Croix-Rousse, which overlooks the city.  I stumbled upon a Roman-Gallic ruin on my way that I'd had no idea existed... something that I surely could never had done in the US!

Finally, I made my way back into the city at Hôtel de Ville, where it was once again crowded.  I gave myself permission to wander over to my favorite sparkly display and gawk at a few of girl's best friends:

As I stood admiring each display, "Moon River" à la Breakfast at Tiffany's popped into my head, and I had to wistfully tear myself away, sans croissant ou robe de Givenchy, malheureusement.  I was rewarded with some premature, confused blossoming magnolia trees in front of the Palais du Commerce.

After my tour, I'm feeling refreshed from my internal stagnation.  It's always helpful to gain perspective and to proactively search out those little reasons why life really isn't so bad right here and right now.  I don't know how long I'll be living in France or what opportunities I may find to leave or stay.  The future doesn't really matter in the present, and neither will have the best chance of being rich and bountiful if all I focus on is disgruntled whining.  Life is what you make of it, and today I made a happy memory.

A love/hate relationship with technology

Lately I've been pondering the question of the need (or not), for friendships and relationships.  Living in a foreign country can sometimes feel like an incredibly isolating lifestyle, but for an introvert like me, it gives me a terrible excuse not to have to talk to people.  I know.  How do I learn a foreign language if I don't talk to anyone?  It's a tricky line I'm balancing; if having a long conversation in English is mentally tiring for me, you can imagine how I feel about the prospect of conversing in French.  It's like the mental Olympics, and there's no medal in sight.

I pinpointed my little internal itch on this joint subject by two separate, totally innocuous-seeming experiences.  Firstly, I've been podcasting obsessively for the last few weeks.  I'm a Radiolab junkie in particular, but after exhausting the episodes and "shorts," I began lurking the web for other nerdy-type voices to put in my ears while I commute to various places.  I stumbled on Note to Self, which is a techy podcast that focuses on how humans live and interact with all the technology that has besieged our daily lives.  I find the host to be hilarious, and I want to get a beer with her someday, but the content is also so interesting.  For example, the host loves going on about FOMO (fear of missing out), and how that concept has pervaded our digital presence and usage.  For most, it seems that we must all stay connected at all times to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, and whatever other apps kids are using these days that I'm blissfully ignorant of.  And there's the ever-present question of how to put down our techy gadgets and just be with other humans in reality.  They look into why we hate voicemail, why having a conversation over text is so much more preferred than face-to-face, how the glowing screens of our devices literally keep us up at night, etc, you get the picture.  As I listen to more of these podcasts, I find myself cringing in recognition of many of these anti-social behaviors.  I hate voicemail.  I hate the stupid icon at the top of my phone that won't go away unless I listen to the damn thing.  I HATE talking on the phone.  I will go so far out of my way just to have a face-to-face conversation if texting or email isn't an option.  Ben will tell you that I live on my iPad, phone, and computer.  I'm thinking of switching gyms because the cell service at my current gym is less than desirable, and the only way I can stand the bike or elliptical for 30 minutes at a time is with Netflix or a good podcast.  I even use YouTube to practice yoga (god forbid I shell out money and go to a class and be around other people).

I could ramble on forever about how much I like to be left to my own devices (pun intended), but I'll make my point.  What are the value of friendships and relationships in a physical capacity?  How do we conduct polite, genuine interactions with people, and then transfer those interactions to a digital platform?  After a year of physical and linguistic isolation, I've sensed that my already weak interacting capabilities are really suffering.  I used to love to raise my hand in class when I was the know-it-all in middle school.  Somewhere along the way, I stopped doing that, even though for the most part, I still got all the right answers.  I'm terrified to speak up in class.  That started in high school after I was bullied, and then got worse in college when I completely lost any sense of my own identity.  At age 26, I have a much better grasp on who I am, and no one is bullying me anymore.  But I still don't want to talk in class because a.) it might make me look like a know-it-all, and no one wants to talk to that kid, or b.) I might say the wrong thing, and no one wants to talk to the stupid kid in class either.  Catch 22 of introverts in class.  I'm so used to staying mute and relying on my technology to keep me company, that raising my hand in class produces an effect similar to singing onstage for most people.  It's paralyzing, and it's not ok.

Here's the thing.  I'm not looking to make bffs in my classes now.  I'm probably not going to be in Lyon or even France for that long a duration. Most of the students I meet are either also foreigners, or in life transitions themselves, thus probably not hanging around for too long in one place.  I just want to be able to strike up conversations in any language just for the sake of having a little human interaction and acquiring a friendly acquaintance.  The key is that I'm not looking for names to add to my Facebook or phone contacts.  I want friends that don't need anything from me, and I don't need anything from them outside the few hours a week I see them in class.  It would be awesome to meet a soul-mate type friend, but I fear I don't click with people very often, so I don't want to heighten my expectations too far and get disappointed regularly.  So now I'm doing something that scares me: I'm talking in class!  I'm saying hi to people and asking questions before class starts.  I'm trying to be social, locking myself out of my comfort zone for at least a few minutes.  After a few attempts at this, I realize that talking to people isn't so scary after all.  Most people are pretty nice, and it's awesome to be in a French class at one of the most prestigious universities in France with a lot of the smartest foreigners in France.  I guess I don't need to rely on my phone so often.

Part two of my relation/friend/human-ship ponderings was prompted by an episode of The Office.  I stopped watching The Office after Steve Carrell left because I thought it would suck and didn't want to waste the time.  I decided to give it another shot, and I'll give the post-Michael Scott seasons a solid B+.  In any case, today I watched a Jim and Pam moment in season 9 that seriously knocked the breath out of me.  If you were living under the same rock I inhabited, don't read further for spoilers, but it's not really all that spoiling.  Jim is working in Philadelphia on his start-up company, and Pam is stuck (by choice) in Scranton with the kids and her dead-end job.  They have a fight over the phone in this scene (it's easier to just watch than to have me describe the whole thing).  After watching this, I felt like all the uncomfortable, awful, desperately heart-breaking moments of my life in long-distance relationships had been laid bare before me.  I know this type of fight intimately, and I couldn't believe how well they captured it in TV's most revered couple.

If anyone doesn't know me that well, then I'll just say that the last 7 of that last 9 or so years of my life have been spent in long-distance relationships.  I promise I don't choose this kind of thing for myself, but the heart wants what (whom) the heart wants.  Long-distance relationships aren't for everyone, that's pretty obvious, but when you find yourself in one, agree to try it, or want it badly enough because you're so head-over-heels for that person, here are my veteran words to bear in mind.  I won't call this advice or even a caveat, just my words from experience.  Being far away from the person you love creates a deep hole in your heart that fills with all sorts of wistful, pining, resentful, proud, resilient, angry, despondent, and yes, loving feelings that simmer and crack apart daily, sometimes hourly.  Long distance creates a never-ending game of phone tag and paranoia, questioning of trust and loyalty (that may be totally undeserved), and at least for me, an interminable sense of instability.  Looking back, I don't think this has anything to do with the other person or even me, but is simply a by-product of the distance itself.  It often begged the question: do I want to be in this kind of relationship?  Which for me immediately elicited the guilty response of, "yes, of course I do!".  But it's truly a lifestyle choice that relies on (aha!) technology.

My Jim/Pam example perfectly illustrates the frustration of conducting a relationship via technology.  You have a limited moment to air your grief and your daily hardship, and you're just not getting the reception you need and want on the other end.  Resentment has built up, passive-agressive tones are taken, and you wish you could take back every decisively hurtful sentence you just said because you know that this fight will be remembered over every other good conversation you've had.  Maintaining long distance is exhausting enough, but fighting with the person you rely on for emotional support is such stupid self-sabotage.  Resentment and regret are repeated ad nauseam until someone either has to go or can't handle it in the moment anymore and hangs up.  If you fight in person, you can run after your SO if they storm out, or if they need their space, you at least know that they're in the other room or will come home at the end of the day.  Couples fight, it's part of relationships, and there are healthy ways to deal with the aftermath.  Trans-Atlantic festering (or even trans-Pennsylvania festering) only deepens that hole in your heart.  In the scene I linked, when Jim has to hang up, the mechanical goodbyes between them tug at the painful memories I've pushed to a locked closet in my heart.  The link cuts out much of Pam's reaction, but I felt such an emotional kinship with her at that moment (serious kudos to Jenna Fischer for the acting).  You just stare at your phone, or the ended gchat video, face hot and reluctant angry tears brimming, half hoping you'll receive an apologetic call, or at least the chance to call back and apologize without sounding insincere.  You want to throw that phone against a wall, push the computer out a window, rail against the injustice of the distance that you, yourself put between you and your love.  But this technology is still a lifeline, and as much as it has the capacity to hinder a relationship, it can also feel like the only thing holding it together.

Tech isn't going anywhere.  It's a part of the fabric of our society at this point, and we're all still learning to harness it for its best features.  What is the importance of it, truly, in our meaningful relationships?  Does someone not count as a friend if they aren't added to Facebook/phone contacts/Instagram/etc.?  Does everything have to be "Facebook official"?  Is a long-distance relationship really a relationship if you only see each other in the flesh two or three times a year, and the rest of the time, you're glued to your phone in the hopes of text or email?  I'd love to hear other takes on these questions, though for myself in this moment, I'm leaning towards the side of more hindrance than help when it comes to technology.  Happy friending, everyone.

From years of too-short gchat sessions to nights at the bar with our new stuffed friend.