November 9, 2014
The draft of my second novel is done! I’m just waiting for my editor (my mom) to finish proofreading it while I patiently wait to have a title epiphany. It’s currently thundering outside, so no pool or beach, and the two dates I had lined up for the weekend cancelled on me. One got mugged outside of Whole Foods and the other is too embarrassed about how puffy his face is post-dentist to go outside. So I guess blogging will be this Sunday’s activity.
I’m going to Israel next month! I always knew about birthright trips—if you’re Jewish and between 18 and 26 years old you can go on a free ten day tour of the home land. I just figured I wouldn’t qualify because my mom is a goya, I never went to Hebrew school, and I openly mock all organized religions. But my cousin and other secular Jew-ish friends who went on birthright talked me into applying. After all, it’s a free trip.
Sure, it’s a propaganda tool and I’m probably going to be exposed to some political ideologies that I don’t necessarily agree with. But I feel like I’m pretty resistant to brain washing, and what the hell else am I going to do over winter break? Besides my job interview on December 30, which will be after I get back from Israel anyway. It’s for a one year legal fellowship with Heritage Health and Housing. I’m already nervous cause I suck at interviewing.
I’m still doing that thing where I buy the cheapest book I can find in the fiction section of Barnes and Nobles and read at least ten pages of it every night before I go to sleep whether I like it or not. Some of the books are cheap because the authors are long dead and no longer collecting royalties. Some of the books read like they were written by the same people who wrote the scripts for movies on Netflix that I gave up on before the opening credits were over.
But besides the fact that I’m cheap and do a lot of recreational reading at the pool (which is why I don’t just get library books or invest in an e-reader), I don’t have a good reason for why I’m reading books I don’t enjoy. It probably has something to do with the fact that unpleasant things I have to force myself to do are usually good/necessary for me, like waking up early to go running and taking vitamins. I don't actually take vitamins, but I did as a kid. Maybe flexing my self-discipline muscle is in itself beneficial to my psyche. Or maybe I’m hoping that I’ll be wrong one of these days and find myself really liking a book that I would never have picked up otherwise.
It’s one of the saddest truths I know: I’m almost always right when I don’t think I’m going to like someone/something. Which probably means that my life isn’t that sad.
Anyway: I have a twitter that I don’t know how to use and an Instagram now. Follow me: @rosepuanani
September 1, 2014
It’s my last year of school. Ever. Probably. It’s time to start thinking about moving out of this apartment, taking the bar exam, and finding an actual grown-up, no-end-date-in-sight job. I’m kind of terrified, but I’m also almost twenty six, so I’d say I’m ready to stop borrowing money and start earning some.
Realizing that getting my Polish passport was not going to be something I can do myself, my parents and I went to New York a few weeks ago to hire a lawyer. My grandfather in Polish. Therefore my mother is. Therefore I am. Except that apparently no one in my family had the foresight to write anything down and create any kind of record, official or otherwise, of who was born to whom, when, and where. Piecing together family hearsay, I figured out the name and approximate birthdate of my great grandmother, and my cousin in Krakow, bless her, checked church records and confirmed it. The lawyer told me this was good news; she’d file the paperwork and then we would wait. But then she told me on Friday that she had come across a statute from the time my grandfather was born, saying that Polish nationality could only be inherited from one’s father. Fine, my great grandfather was Polish too, but there’s absolutely no record of him in the town everyone seems to think he was born in. I have his American death certificate, but that might not cut it. So maybe I’ll have to accept one of my visa-marriage proposals after all. Just wish I had known that before I paid my lawyer the $2500 retainer.
I’ve decided to start getting scientific with my okcupid profile, and last Sunday I sent a message to every guy within a ten mile radius of me who was an 80% match or higher, unless I thought I might have already messaged him. (Probably my biggest complaint about the site is that it doesn’t tell you who you’ve already talked to. I could go back through my old messages, I guess, but that takes time and I’ve had to delete a lot to make space in my inbox.) Some older dudes were looking for women closer to their ages, so I didn’t bother with them. Occasionally I just couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, and one guy who was supposedly my soul mate cited the bible as his favorite book, so I obviously didn’t try and engage him. So I wound up sending eighteen guys messages. They were all short, three to five sentence, but proved that I had
read their profiles and was interested in talking further.
Here are the stats from my diligent record keeping: Eight of them ignored me completely. That’s 44%. I volleyed the conversation back and fourth with the other ten of them a few times, until I realized that there was nothing of substance for us to discuss, or, in one case, the guy said he was trying to join the air fore, and nothing is less sexy than a man in uniform. It’s one thing if he felt forced to join the military when he was eighteen, but quite another to be twenty six and aspiring to join such a violent organization. No numbers were exchanged. I haven’t met any of them in person.
I can’t say that I’ve never ignored a guy. In fact, while messaging on okcupid I think simply not replying is actually the politer was to indicate that you’re not interested, instead of stating so outright. I only do the latter because I don’t want to be labeled as someone who “replies rarely”. One time I had gone out with a guy who was also a writer and he asked me to read one of his stories. I told him that I overall enjoyed that story, but was he aware that the main character sounded liked a misogynistic asshole? Not a criticism of the author or his story, just an observation—the kind I find helpful when other people are evaluating my work. He proceeded to tell me why I was wrong, and in his rant about how women take offense to everything, he used the word “persay”. It took me a minute to realize that he probably meant “per se”, although from the context it was clear he had no idea what per se means. I just couldn’t anymore, and started ignoring him. It only took him a few weeks to take the hint.
But usually once you’ve exchanged numbers with someone and gone out with them a few times and talked concretely about plans to hang out again in the immediate future, I think I’m justified in wondering what the hell happened. Twice this weekend. They both happened to be French. Oh well. (See above. I got sick of fighting with the formatting on this site.)
August 3, 2014
I know it’s probably intended as a compliment, but I’m sick of being asked why I’m still single.
My first problem is the implication that singleness is a pitiable condition that no one chooses. Maybe it is for some people and maybe it was for me at one point, but right now being single is like going to the ice cream parlor and getting a free spoonful of every flavor, except I can of course skip the flavors I know I won’t like and go back for seconds and thirds of the particularly yummy ones. And then I get to go home with a belly full of ice cream, set the air conditioner to the temperature I want, and watch cute animal videos on youtube while painting my toenails in
peace.
My next problem with being asked why I’m still single is the same problem I have with being asked what ethnicity I am or why I wanted to go to law school or write a novel. Those are essay topics, and even if I feel like the person asking wants to sit tight and listen to my forty minute answer (sometimes they do, usually they don’t), I don’t necessarily feel up to giving an impromptu discourse.
But if you must know, there are two, maybe three, interrelated reasons why I’m still single. 1. I have my flaws, 2. All the guys in the dating pool have their flaws, and 3. I might be going about this whole dating thing the wrong way. Duh.
When a potential suitor asks me why I’m single, I suspect he’s really getting at reason number one. Like at job interviews, when you have to list your weaknesses. I think this is an unfair question, but since I usually really want the job I’m interviewing for, I say something about how I have trouble with multi tasking and sticking to word limits, but I self accommodate with my excellent time-management skills. I’ve never want to go on another date with any particular guy as badly as I’ve wanted a good resume padder, so if it’s not a job interview, I’ll usually just shrug. I could warn him that I walk around with a first trimester food baby most of the time and hate giving blow jobs, but I don’t.
When my friends, family, and anyone else who’s not contemplating getting into my pants asks me why I’m single, they’re probably getting at reason two and three. I’ll be the first to admit that I could be doing things that I’m not—allowing myself to get set up on blind dates and keeping an open mind about guys who are younger than me, for example. But like I said, I’m not really in a rush to leave the singles’ club, so I’m sticking to my comfort zone. Even without venturing outside of online dating, there might be some expert out there who would tell me that I’ve posted the wrong pictures of myself, said the wrong thing on my profile, or am taking the wrong approach to answering/sending messages. Maybe the free okcupid is not the best site.
Because I could write many more blog posts, and probably will, about what’s wrong with the men on okcupid. I know I’m not the first
(http://okcupidsniceguys.tumblr.com/) but there’s no shortage of things to complain about.
I sent out a big batch of messages (see previous posts) partly—okay, mostly—because I wanted to be able to say something like, “If you message 100 guys, you can expect to get a response from x percent of them, actually meet x percent of them, and go out with x percent of them more than once. Guys in their thirties tend to ___, whereas guys in their forties tend to ___. The difference between guys who grew up in Miami and those who moved here recently is ___.”
But the site doesn’t lend itself to data collecting, nor do my busy schedule or short attention span, so the information that I gathered from my experiment is this: There’s probably only about a fifty percent chance that any guy I message will answer at all, even though most of them are labeled as “replies often”. Of the guys who do answer, maybe about half of them will answer like this:
Either they’re so self absorbed they only want to talk about themselves, or it’s their way of saying “no thanks.”
Then there are the conversations that go on forever and he never asks for my number or suggests that we meet in person. Why don’t I just ask for his number? I might, if I didn’t initiate the conversation. But if I initiated the conversation, I don’t want to have to constantly be the only one nudging things along. Stalling in the messaging phase is to me a sign of apathy, deal-breaking shyness, or perhaps that he’s not who he says he is.
I could go on and on about what else is wrong with the guys of okcupid, but for now I think that adequately explains why I’m still single, no?
June 21, 2014
Okay, so I might have been unduly optimistic when I said online dating was going to give me lots of good stories to write about. It’s given me lots of fun times, but that’s not necessarily the same thing. Working at the clinic, on the other hand, is like being involved in a dozen different soap operas at once, some of which are darkly hilarious. But I’m pretty sure my legal career would be over before it started if I broke attorney-client privilege by sharing the details on the internet. And between work and meeting every left-leaning, college-educated, 30-something single guy in Miami Dade County, I haven’t had much time to write anyway. Here are the most exciting things that have happened to me in the past few weeks:
I witnessed a robbery in my neighborhood. I was walking back from the metro with a friend at 10:30 at night. Having developed a healthy paranoia on the Paris metro, I was wearing my giant purse, (you never know when you’ll find yourself in need of an umbrella, hand sanitizer, reading material…) the way I always do, diagonally across my torso with my hand over where it zipped closed. My friend was carrying a clutch with her phone, debit card, and ID around her wrist. While we were deep in discussion about hookah bars, some guy came up, ripped the clutch off her wrist, and ran away before we realized what had just happened. To top it off, one of the cops who showed up thought it was appropriate to tell me, “Two females, your size, walking in this neighborhood at night? You’re targets. You shouldn’t be surprised this happened to you.” At least the other cop had apparently attended how-not-to-be-an-asshole training and apologized for his partner. Maybe now I won’t deliver my rant about how people are so damn over dramatic to the next person who tells me how dangerous my neighborhood is. Probably not though.
In unrelated news, I’m finally accepting what I’ve long suspected. Drinking alcohol (except for beer, which according to my German teacher is a food group, not alcohol) is now officially added to the list of things I can’t do without getting sick.
There is a Vapiano in Miami (I had thought they were only in Germany) and I went there with my dad on Tuesday night for a late father’s day early half birthday dinner. It was pretty much like the one in Munich, but with free lemony tap water. I got spinach pizza and was pleased to see they cut it into slices for me, American style. The spinach, however, was raw and piled on top of the pizza, as opposed to baked in there like I was expecting. This was neither an improvement nor a step down taste-wise, but the raw spinach didn’t stick in my teeth the way the cooked stuff always manages to.
Oh, and I finally went to Trader Joe’s and got powder to make green-tea lattes at home. Which means Starbucks and I have no reason to see each other anymore, except maybe for emergency wifi purposes.
And that’s pretty much it. Riveting, right?
May 24, 2014
I’ve had an okcupid profile for going on two years now. (I used to be embarrassed about that, but the more I talk to people I realize so has everyone whose been single at any point in the last five years, so now I talk about it shamelessly.) I put up a dozen or so flattering pictures of myself, filled out my profile and answered the questions with what I think is the appropriate amount of honesty, then waited for the messages to roll in. And boy did they, at least a dozen every day. Soon I was texting three or four different guys from the site at any given time, and most weekends I had at least one date, all because I put up this profile and kept a reasonably open mind while answering as many messages as I could during the commercials of my breakfast viewings of the Daily Show. My goals—distract myself from thinking about my ex, make new friends, and gather ideas for future characters in future novels—were being achieved, without me ever initiating a conversation or even looking at the profile of a guy who hasn’t messaged me first.
But.
Recently I was starting to get frustrated. I made it a policy to politely answer any guy who 1) is in my specified age range 2) lives within a sixty mile radius of me or comes to Miami regularly, and 3) gives me some indication that he actually read my profile and isn’t just copying and pasting the same message to anyone with two x chromosomes. However, that message would increasingly often be “Thanks for your message but I don’t think we’d be compatible romantically. Good luck out there!” And to guys who clearly were copying and pasting or didn’t self-filter by age or location I answered less politely, usually asking them if they could read and then blocking them. (Side rant: What is going on in their heads? “She says she doesn’t like younger guys, but I really am such an amazing 23-year-old that she’ll have to make an exception”? Umm, no.)
Only about 5-10% of the messages I actually answered in a way that indicated that I wanted to continue the conversation. Like I said, that still left me with plenty of dudes to keep me busy, but potential relationships got aborted at every stage—after texting, talking on the phone, meeting once, or meeting a few times, he, or I, or both of just gave up trying to like each other. With the definite exception of one guy and the possible partial exceptions of two or three more, it was abundantly clear why these men were resorting to the internet to meet women.
Then one day a few weeks ago, the site gave me the option of automatically filtering out messages from guys outside my desired age range and who lived too far away. Which is brilliant, and meant that I could go through the messages that made it into my inbox in one commercial break instead of three or four. But for whatever reason I only was only getting messages that I had to say ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to—from guys who were religious or Republicans, or didn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” or talked too much about football. It was the longest I had ever gone without getting to the point of exchanging numbers or meeting someone new in person.
My old excuses for never initiating a conversation were gone. I no longer had to send snide responses to the youngsters and out of towners, plus the summer semester had started, leaving my nights and weekends free, so I could no longer claim I didn’t have time. My other arguments—“If he were really so interested he would have taken the initiative already,” and “If I find myself on a bad date, I want to be able to
say, ‘this whole thing was your idea!’” were stupid and refutable after I thought about them for half a second.
So last Sunday I did a search for guys 25-50 years old who lived within a 50 mile radius of me, and put the results in order of match percentage—a little algorithm the site does based on a bunch of semi-ridiculous multiple choice questions to tell you how compatible you are with someone. I opened up the profile of everyone who was 90% or more compatible with me—about 25 guys. And holy crap! There are men in Miami who read and plant gardens and spell out ‘you’. The algorithm isn’t perfect. A few of them I couldn’t even come up with anything to write to them, which I took as a sign that I shouldn’t bother. A few other ones, well, I didn’t find physically attractive at all. But to the rest of them, I sent twenty of the kind of messages I would be happy to receive: two or three sentences, introducing myself and mentioning something about their profile besides their physical appearance that I liked.
Here’s the data: five messages went completely ignored, at least as of now. Two were answered, but in a way that made it seem like they weren’t overly excited to be talking to me so I never answered back. A third conversation faded out not much longer after that. Seven guys I’m still messaging with but phone numbers have not yet been exchanged. I spoke on the phone with one last night before falling asleep, I have plans to go meet one for drinks tomorrow night, and went out with yet another one last night. It wasn’t the best date I’d ever been on in my life,
but it wasn’t bad either. If I’m being honest, and I almost always am, my heart sunk a little bit when I walked into the restaurant and saw that, no, that wasn’t just a bad picture of a good looking guy, that’s what he looks like, plus he had grown a mustache. He was sweaty and nervous through dinner, but then we went for drinks and talked about the joys and evils of gentrification and our mutual love of Tina Fey and he calmed down. When he dropped me off he said rather desperately, “Will I see you again?” I said yes, because I felt put on the spot and he had just bough me dinner and an expensive cocktail and driven me home. But if and when he texts me again I’ll say I’d love to hang out again as friends. Because I would.
So my point is that I’m glad I started being a little more proactive about my love life. It didn’t work miracles, but the guys I’m talking to now are definitely an improvement over the rift raft I passively attracted before. And I think I’ll have lots to write about.
May 11, 2014
I was going to write about what I did this week in Munich, but it’s honestly not that interesting (a little bit of visiting with friends and a lot of writing and eating like a Schweinchen.) So instead I just made a list, because I was in that kind of a mood.
What I like about Germany:
· Everything is clean and organized. Unlike Paris where there are puddles of urine on the sidewalk or Miami where road kill and broken glass in the street are not uncommon, Munich is pretty spotless.
· Pedestrians, bikes, cars, and the tram each have their own lane. There’s no confusion about who has the right of way what a red light means. There’s very minimal honking.
· Shopping! Euros are coins up to 2€, and buying something with coins doesn’t feel like spending money. I’ve bought post cards, shoes, shower gel and jewelry for what feels like nothing.
· I know that some Americans who live here would disagree with me, but my experience is that making friends here is easier than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Lots of people have told me that I’m the first Jew and the first American who speaks German that they’ve ever met, and that means they find me fascinating. Which is weird, but kind of nice.
· Germans generally dress to be comfortable and warm. I’m not one to adjust my sense of style too much to my surroundings (if I can even say that I have a sense of style), so in Paris and parts of Miami I sometimes feel like a schlub in flats and minimal makes up, but not here.
· Men here aren’t creepy. Unlike in Paris, I can walk around without being stared at, asked out, or told how charmante I am. (I know, poor me, but it gets annoying quickly.) Furthermore, it’s totally possible here to have purely plutonic straight male friends.
· Munich, at least, is a small enough city that it never feels claustrophobic. Unless it’s Oktoberfest or rush hour in the middle of the city, I always have been able to find a seat on public transportation/at the library/on a park bench, it’s rare that a line is unbearably long, and I’ve never left a store out of fear of being trampled.
· The foooood. Despite the majority of the population being so carnivorous, it’s totally possible for a vegetarian like me to be fat and happy in Munich. (Vegans not so much.) The absolute best thing to eat here is the rahmjoghurt (cream yogurt), but there’s also lots of good falafels, and Indian food adapted to German taste buds is for some reason especially delicious. McDonalds here sell veggie burgers, and of course there’s the pretzels—plain, cut in half and slathered with butter or with cream cheese and then sprinkled with chives, or covered with melted cheese. And let’s not forget Apfelschnecken (apple snails)—a deep friend coil of dough and chunks of apple covered in cinnamon and sugar. This trip I discovered chocolate chai tea and gelatin-free gummies at the grocery store.
What I don’t like about Germany:
· It’s winter here for like, eleven months of the year.
· Restaurants make you pay for water unless you specifically ask for tap water. And even then, be prepared for a weird look before they begrudgingly bring you a shot glass of water, half full. The tap water here is perfectly safe to drink, trust me, but Germans insist on only drinking the bottled stuff. They recycle like champs, but still, wouldn’t it be more ökologisch to not use all those bottle in the first place?
· Everything besides restaurants, movie theatres, and museums are closed on Sunday. I think it’s great that everyone’s obligated to chill out at least one day per week, but if I were up to me, businesses would be able to choose which day they closed. Cause, you know, not everyone needs to go to church on Sunday.
· Public library cards are not free. Sure, the cost is minimal. As an au pair I got a discount and paid, I think, 10€ for a whole year, and I got to borrow DVDs and everything, but still.
· Likewise, most public bathrooms aren’t free. They’re super clean, so I’m not complaining too much. In fact, if charging me fifty cents every time I have to pee is what it takes to pay the people who clean the bathrooms a living wage, I guess I’m okay with that. But if you’re like me, with a small budget and a small bladder, it’s an inconvenience.
· Most music videos are blocked on youtube. So I just lived without music for a year of my life.
· It’s too easy to schwarzfahren. Anyone can just get on or off any public transportation without having to go through a turnstile or show a ticket to anyone, so if you accidently bought the wrong ticket for the zone you’re traveling in, or honestly forgot that you needed to buy a new ticket because it’s a new week/month and the controllers come, too bad, you still have to pay the 40€ fine.
· Why is it impossible to find black beans here?
January 5, 2014
I’m settling in for a long night at the Oslo airport. One day I’ll have a real grown up job and will be able to afford either a direct flight or a night in an airport hotel, but that day is not today.
I spent New Year’s at a friend of a friend’s apartment (also much nicer than mine), where I learned that 1, I am 155 cm tall, not 152 cm like my German visa and every convertor I’ve ever used say, and that 2, my tolerance for alcohol, I guess like my tolerance for airplane food, has gone way down. Not that I’ve ever been a huge drinker, but there was a time that a drink and a half left me feeling tingly and sleepy in a way that was not unpleasant. Now, after a glass of wine with dinner and then half a glass of Sekt, I’m nauseous with a pounding headache. I guess that’s what you call getting older.
After counting down to midnight in front of the Nymphenburg castle and in front of some fireworks (and I mean right next to, which seemed kind of dangerous to me but apparently only me), I had to head back to grab my suitcase and catch my train to Paris. I had it planned so that I would catch the tram and then the bus back to get my suitcase and then another tram to the trains station with minimum time waiting in the cold, but I guess I took about ten seconds too long to say tschüss to everyone because that’s how much time I missed the first tram by. My whole plan was thrown off, and I spent a good part of the morning of 2014 doing a let’s-not-get-hypothermia dance at tram and bus stops.
Then, when I was bringing my suitcase (which already had a busted wheel) downstairs from my friend’s apartment, the handle snapped, probably because my suitcase had gained about ten pounds in the last week of December. But I didn’t have time to regret hitting the sale racks at H&M and stocking up on lentil and pea Eintopfs from dm, so I grabbed the one handle that was still in tact and miraculously made it to the train station on time.
I told myself I just had to make my suitcase last until the end of the week and then I’d get a new one in New Jersey with my Hanukah money. Of course as soon as I got out at Gare de l’Est, the last handle broke on my suitcase and I accepted that I could no longer put off buying a new one, even if it meant dipping into a bank account that I didn’t especially want to dip into. But of course, I forgot that nothing besides a few cafes and restaurants are open in Paris on January first, so I had to crouch down and awkwardly shove my suitcase around for a day. January second
was better. I got a new suitcase and discovered that Auchan still sells yellow baby bells. So that’s how 2014 started for me.
December 28, 2013
I’m in Munich now, apartment sitting for a friend in Neuhausen. She’s been to my apartment in Miami, and now that I’m comparing our abodes, I can’t help but feel kind of inferior. Of course it’s not really fair to compare, because she has a real, grown up job (as an interior designer, no less) and I’m still a student. So I shouldn’t be embarrassed that the nicest things in my apartment are the collages I made myself and hung with dental floss, but I kind of am.
Anyway, before I left Paris I got to see three of my friends (and got promises from the rest of them to meet up in January) and my cousin from Chicago who is in Paris for two weeks, and I spent a day in Versailles with Johann and Delphine. Here were the highlights, mostly food related:
· Burger King has come back to France (no, I didn’t go, but apparently this is big news that multiple people had to share with me.)
· Potatoes as a pizza topping. I ate this and could not finish it because it's super filling, but it was oddly yummy.
· A French garden does not have flowers in it. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are lying and should talk to Johann about it because that’s a touchy topic for him.
· I made a box of American mac and cheese for one of my French friends and he called it délicieux. Damn straight. It was the good stuff, Annie’s white cheddar shells.
· We got falafels from L’As du Fallafel, an Israeli restaurant in the Marais, where you usually have to wait minimum fifteen minutes for take away and forty five minutes if you want to sit down, but we waited zero minutes.
On the twenty fourth I took the train to Munich. After Strasburg I had a row to myself to stretch out and start enjoying my birthday presents to myself: DVDs of Girls and Weeds and a book of Lorie Moore’s short stories in French. And that is also how I spent my twenty fifth birthday, because everything in Munich was closed (except for a few places in Hauptbahnhof) including Tollwood, despite what I and apparently quite a few other disappointed Germans were told.
And that pretty much catches you up on my adventure. Tomorrow I’m spending the day in Ingolstadt and then I have to figure out what I’m doing for Silvester.
December 20, 2013
It’s finally my winter break I was so excited for, and night two in Paris. This year I decided to go to New Jersey for six days before crossing the Atlantic, which I’m glad I did. It gave me a chance to be there for Hanukah (by which I mean the one night my family gets together at our convenience, eats a lot of raviolis, lights a whole Menorah at once, opens an obscene amount of presents from my Grandma, and then eats ice cream cake and cookies that turn your mouth blue), to finally try the recipe for green mac and cheese I found during my summer of reading food blogs/interning, and generally decompress after the hazing ritual that is law school finals.
My parents drove me up to Newark airport on Wednesday afternoon. I couldn’t figure out how to check in early and get a good seat, which I didn’t sweat because I was changing planes in Oslo, and who wants to go to Oslo less than a week before the winter solstice? A lot of people, it turns out. I got a window seat on the absolute last row of the plane, next to a giant Norwegian man. I was also wrong in my assumption that a Scandinavian airline would have more leg space, so I felt bad for this guy. But I also felt bad for myself because I threw up twice during the flight. Either XL and SAS both serve their passengers tainted food, or I’ve just turned into a person who can’t stomach airline food and I owe XL and apology.
The plus side here is that I haven’t had an appetite since, which saves money on food. Last night I checked in Friends Hostel in the somewhat sketchy Barbès – Rochechouart neighborhood. For 18€ I got one night in a six person dorm with almost no heating or lighting and no lockers of functioning outlets in the room. I’m fairly certain I heard mice scampering around under my bed. This is not the worst hostel I have experienced in Paris, but I would add it to my à éviter list. The plus side here (I’m trying to make that a theme) is that I was driven to find Perfect Hostel, just one metro stop over at Anvers. For 22€/night, it lives up to its name. I got my own key with a sufficiently large personal locker in a clean, heated room with wifi which was reachable with an elevator (a rare treat in these old Parisian buildings.)
So there’s the beginning of my current adventure. Tomorrow I have plans to do more interesting things, which I will write about soon.
December 13, 2013
So apparently twenty five is kind of an important birthday? That’s what the internet seems to be telling me, because I keep coming across
lists like this one: http://thoughtcatalog.com/cehudspeth/2013/11/24-things-i-learned-by-age-24/. While I think it’s great that so many of my fellow 1988 babies fancy themselves qualified to give advice, I look at my GPA, my love life, and that glob of burnt cranberry sauce under the burner on my stove, and I have to admit there’s still a lot I have left to figure out. I’ve concluded that the only person in the world who could benefit from my almost quarter century of experience is my younger self. In fact, a lot of what I would tell my younger self—like, don’t be so nice or try so hard--I would absolutely not tell anyone else. But I’m putting out there for everyone anyway ‘cause, well, I can.
To my one year old self: Expose yourself to different languages as much as possible. This is the only time in your life where you can learn by osmosis and you’ll have plenty of time to learn English later. Take advantage, it just gets progressively harder from now on. You don’t want to find yourself in Miami one day as the only person who can’t speak Spanish.
To my two year old self: Now that you have teeth, start eating as many tree nuts as you can. One day you’ll develop a nasty allergy, and it
will be easier to watch your friends scarf nutella-filled crepes and almond milk yogurt knowing you already got your fix.
To my three year old self: Baby brother is here to stay, just embrace it. I know you were hoping for a sister, but he’ll let you paint his
toenails until he’s five and then down the road there will be a few years where he’s old enough to drive but not old enough to drink, and trust me, that will come in handy.
To my four year old self: Now might be a good time to start saving up for law school. I’m only kind of kidding.
To my five year old self: Be grateful for how much energy you have, how flexible you are, and for how perfect your vision is. Doesn’t last forever, sweetheart.
To my six year old self: Painting your nails won’t keep you from biting them. Neither will sheer will power. What you have to do is give in to
the urge to put your nails between your teeth, but don’t actually bite. This gives all the satisfaction of making sure all the germs from everything you’ve touched get into your mouth without giving your hands the gnawed on look.
To my seven year old self: It’s great that you’re so eager to try every extra-curricular activity that exists, really it is. So I won’t discourage that too much. However let me save you and your parents a little time, money, and aggravation. You suck at and derive no pleasure from playing the piano or pretty much any sport where being short gives you a distinct disadvantage, like basketball or volleyball. Instead, may I suggest getting a jump start or learning to cook or polishing those language skills I told you start acquiring when you were a baby.
To my eight year old self: Don’t worry that you never really get good at long division. That’s what they make calculators for.
To my nine year old self: There’s this magazine called Jane starting up this year. It’s not really aimed at nine year olds, but it’s brilliant and timeless and won’t be around forever. Without this heads up you won’t discover it for about another five years and by then its life will be half over. One day all the good magazines will be extinct, so start hoarding now or you can look forward to reading about how to please your man and cut calories. (Don’t be too distraught; just because magazines of the future suck that doesn’t mean there won’t always be plenty of good reading material in book form or on the internet. But it’s not the same as a glossy new perfume-scented magazine that comes in the mail every month.)
To my ten year old self: I know it’s mortifying that your dad went to back to school night and made a scene because they’re not teaching you
evolution in your science class. And that your mom insists on composting so you have to explain to your friends when they come over why your kitchen smells like rotting banana peels. But believe it or not you’ve actually hit the lottery when it comes to your parents, and you’re going to grow up to be a lot like them, so try not to be so embarrassed.
To my eleven year old self: Start watching the Daily Show now instead of waiting another year or so to discover it. The only upside to Bush
being elected-or in any event becoming president- this year is that Jon Stewart has more material than her probably ever will under any other administration. (The technology will soon exist so that you can watch any episode of any TV show on your computer for free, and that’s why I’m not recommending that you discover any other shows, but you’re not really going to have time for all of those Daily Show episodes later, and
once the Bush years are over you won’t really want to relive them.)
To my twelve year old self: You weigh over a hundred pounds now. Get over it. I know that seems terrifying, because 100 is a three digit number and you’re done getting taller. But notice how your doctor doesn’t seem concerned at all? Think of your weight as you would if you grew up in any other country, in kilograms, and you’ll realize just how arbitrary being above or below 100 pounds is. Also, your boobs are just going to get a little bigger and then your weight will stabilize at a perfectly acceptable number, I promise.
To my thirteen year old self: Not sure what if anything you should do with this information, but one day you’ll wish you had realized at the
time that nothing that you’re doing now really counts. No college, law school, or potential employer will ask to see your middle school report cards. The people you’re friends with now won’t necessarily be your friends later. No one will care how many goals you score or don’t score in your soccer games or if you can do a split with your left leg in front. Liberating, isn’t it?
To my fourteen year old self: Now that you’re in high school it’s great that you’re finally getting serious and realizing that just filling
your homework worksheets in with the lyrics of whatever song you have stuck in your head just so it will look done isn’t going to cut it anymore. Most of that hard work will pay off, but you could probably care about 10% less about getting into a good college without any adverse effect on your future. Try as you might, you’re just not Ivy League material. The sooner you realize that (and that that’s kind of a compliment) the happier you’ll be.
To my fifteen year old self: If you don’t want to keep taking Latin don’t feel like you have to. Any part of a dead language that could possibly be useful in the future you already learned in the first year.
To my sixteen year old self: Go ahead and go to Poland for the summer. It will give you perspective about being a (kind of) foreigner and stories to tell for years to come. But have realistic expectations. Just because Poland is on the same continent as the world’s most progressive and cosmopolitan countries doesn’t mean that your Polish relatives in Chicago are an anomaly or an example of how immigrating can change a person; that’s what Polish people are generally like. Pack some plant based protein bars for the meat-only meals and reading material for when everyone else is at church.
To my seventeen year old self: This will seem counterintuitive, but don’t have such an open mind about people. I understand your logic: If I’m super sweet to everyone, they’ll be inclined to be nice to me back. Two problems with this. One, it’s not doable. Even the most saintly, good-natured people (and you are not in this category) can’t be nice to everyone all the time. And two, this isn’t true for everyone. Some people are just unwilling or incapable of being nice back, so don’t bother trying to win them over. A better general rule: Care about other people’s feelings to the same extent that they care about yours.
To my eighteen year old self: While packing for your dorm room, it is impossible to bring too many blankets or layers of clothing. Also, bring movies. You’re not going to enjoy going out on the weekend in sub-arctic temperatures (go ahead and give it a try, but you know I’m right.) To your pleasant surprise, you’ll find a few other non-partiers at your party school, and having a copy of Garden State and y tu mamá también will save everyone a snowy walk to the video store and score you major points.
To my nineteen year old self: This is pretty much what I told you when you started high school, but it bears repeating now that you’re in college. Nothing you can do will get you into a fancy law school, and trust me the mediocre one you wind up going to will be hard enough. You will never have a job interview where you hear, “You seem great, but…a B+ in French 307? We really need someone who can analyze images of the sun in the modern Senegalese novel at an A level.” So chillax. Instead of proofreading that paper for the 800th time, just go to bed.
To my twenty year old self: Studying abroad in Paris is arguably going to be the best year of your life, not least of all because for the first time ever you have a room that is neither in your parents’ house nor shared with someone else. Two and a half years of monogamy are coming soon, followed by a dry spell, so go ahead and bring as many new gentlemen friends home with you as you want. Let your crotchety old neighbor raise their eyebrows as high as they want. If anything you’ll regret not having been even sluttier.
To my twenty one year old self: Don’t bother with the stress fest that is applying for a Fulbright Scholarship. Spoiler alert: you’re not going to get it. Plus you’ll need letters of recommendation for your law school applications, and you’ll feel like you’re being annoying asking your professors twice in one year.
To my twenty two year old self: Buy a dirndl as soon as you get to Munich. Yes, they’re expensive, but get one now and you’ll have several occasions to wear it; they’re not just for Oktoberfest. You look super cute in traditional Bavarian garb, plus it can double as a Halloween costume when your au pair year is over. But drag your feet and spending 100€ or more on one piece of clothing that makes you look like you work in a beer garden will seem less and less justifiable.
To my twenty three year old self: There’s no way around it (or if there is I don’t know what it is): this is going to be a tough year. A
devastating break up, the worst grades you’ve ever gotten in your life, and much less support from (most of) your “friends” than you hoped for. There’s not much that can be said to make you feel better, but comfort can be derived from relativizing your misery. Just look in your torts book. Your life sucks right now, but you’re better off than any of those medical malpractice plaintiffs. Actually, on second thought, just skip that chapter. It will haunt your dreams and isn’t even going to be on the final.
To my twenty four year old self: You’re right that most men in Miami suck. But. Recognize when you meet one who doesn’t instead of nitpicking. True, he’s American and he does some pretty unbearable things like texting “ya” instead of “you”. And yes, he has an established life in Florida and you plan on hightailing it back to Paris the first second possible. And you’re right that starting a relationship with a predetermined expiration date is setting yourself up to get hurt. But you know what else is setting yourself up to get hurt? Existing. It’s a much better strategy to just enjoy the enjoyable parts between the heartbreaks as much as possible rather than trying to avoid the heartbreaks all together.
August 8, 2013
I’m in Munich, and this is probably going to be my last blog entry for a while. This time next week I’ll be back in the law library in Miami, reading for the first day of class and day dreaming about coming back to Europe in December. I didn’t time this trip excellently; about half of my friends who I wanted to see are also on vacation and therefore not in Munich. But half of them are here, so the glass is half full.
I took the night train here. The regular seats were sold out, so I paid 10€ more for a couchette. Not exactly a bed, and I could only lay down, not sit up. Still, I actually slept and didn’t arrive in Munich needing a caffeine IV. Johann and Delphine, the friends I’m staying with, moved to a bigger apartment in the same neighborhood with lots of extra room and a giant balcony. “It’s at least better than staying in a hostel,” Johann said, giving me the tour, and I’d have to agree.
And, what do you know, there is such a thing as summer in Munich! Last July, the night before I left to fly back and go to law school, I organized a little Abschiedsparty at a café with outdoor seating. Everyone came in jackets and scarves. But it’s pleasantly warm here now, like Miami in winter. I’m wearing summer dresses and sandals and carrying a bottle of water with me everywhere. Yesterday I went to the "beach" between Rosenheimer Platz and Isartor to look for typos in my old novel and write notes for my new one. Before leaving I put my feet in the water and discovered that the people swimming actually weren’t crazy polar bears. If I had thought to bring my bathing suit I would have joined them.
Mostly I’ve been speaking French and writing in English, but those few times that I’ve found myself with a German who wanted to speak German I managed, more or less. Every meal so far here has been outsides and always the same thing: semmeln, cheese, and fruit. (Except yesterday, I had beer for lunch and gelato for dinner.) Unlike the French, the Germans still sell yellow babybells in the supermarkets, so I’ve had to take advantage while I can. They come with a toy labeled suitable for children ages 3-6, but I refuse to take the hint. Just as I refuse to think about the fact that I’ll be on a train leaving Munich in fewer than three days.
August 1, 2013
I’m back in Paris! I’m sitting in the bibliotheque du cinema, which is—why not?—in the middle of a mall, and trying to decide if I want to go to Munich tomorrow evening or take the overnight train on Monday and get there early Tuesday. It’s a long, embarrassing story why I have two tickets on two different days to Munich, the moral of which is that I can’t rely on anyone. It’s embarrassing because at my age I should have known the limits of what I could realistically expect to happen. Like I forgot this was my life and not some Audrey Tautou movie. I don’t want to talk about it.
On the way here, I got my ponytail patted down in the Miami airport, probably a sign that I have too much hair. I couldn’t sleep for any of the nine hours, and I didn’t want to turn on my reading light and disturb the people around me who could, so I plugged in my headphones and watched Bob l’Eponge for as long as I could stand to and then ate the meal they gave us. It didn’t look or smell appetizing at all, but I was hungry and bored and had ordered a vegetarian meal special, so despite my better instincts I ate the chunks of vegetables that had been frozen and reheated, I estimate about fifteen times, and covered in what I think was supposed to be cheese. I threw it up about a half hour later and –blessing in disguise!—my appetite hasn’t fully returned yet. I’ve almost been fasting for Ramadan along with most of my friends here (except that I’ve been drinking water, seeing as I’m going to hell anyway). And not having to stop and eat saves time and money! Maybe I will finally buy that dirndl in Munich after all!
I haven’t quite adjusted to the time change yet. I optimistically set my alarm for 8am yesterday and today, but Anouar and I stay up too late watching téléréalité and then I wake up and see him sleeping so soundly that I justify my laziness with not wanting to disturb him. Yesterday I didn’t make it in the shower until noon. Today I pushed myself and got up at eleven. I’m on vacation, okay?
Then it takes about an hour and a half on the RER D to get into Paris, which I’m not complaining about; it’s actually nice to sit and do nothing for that long, but it helps explain why my time here just dissolves away, despite my best efforts to savor it.
July 24, 2013
I’m going to Europe in six days! I can’t think about anything else, so I’m going to describe every part of this trip I’m excited about, even though I’ve been to Paris about a gazillion times already, and Munich half a gazillion. And this trip means that summer is essentially over. And talking about what you’re looking forward to is a sure-fire way to jinx it. But whatever.
On these bi-annual trips, the cities and the people in them have changed, but the changes are just big enough to be noticeable. Paris finally opened their new tram line; the construction in the Pasing Bahnhof has advanced nicely. My friends, while essentially the same people, have adjusted their ambitions, gotten new jobs, found new significant others, gotten engaged, grown or cut their hair, acquired a new tattoo…It’s like turning one page in a cartoon flip book, and it’s both sad and happy. It’s a reminder that I don’t live there anymore and am missing so much, but also reassurance that I can leave and still come back whenever. I can have as many “homes” as I want. I also like it when people clue me into how I’m evolving. As long as they’re nice about it.
The food is good. I almost said better, but I have to admit there are American food items that I miss when I can’t have them (I’m thinking cinnamon coconut butter and black beans). I don’t miss American food too much though because I’m busy stuffing my face with coffee éclairs and—forgive the cliché—real baguettes in Paris and mango-vanilla rahmjoghurt and the German interpretation of Indian food in Munich. Coffee éclairs, for those who don’t know, are the most caloric and delicious way of getting caffeine into your bloodstream. I buy them from the Simply in Châtillon because that’s where they’re the cheapest and I can pay for them at a machine that accepts pennies. Plus they come with an ingredient list to assure me that they haven’t snuck in any hazelnuts or gelatin, which is unfortunately always a souci of mine in French bakeries. Cause I apparently invented food allergies and the desire to not eat pigs. Anyway, the “problem” with getting éclairs at Simply is that they’re packaged in pairs, so I have to eat two. It’s really okay though. Walking everywhere, including up many a stair=permission to eat whatever I want.
A few more things I am looking forward to: tips and sales tax are always included. The price that something is labeled is the price that it is. Public transportation is much more safe and efficient than it is in any American city, unless maybe you stay out until the wee hours of the morning, and god knows I never do that anymore. Really, the only part I’m not looking forward to is leaving.
July 17, 2013
My internship is almost over. Back in March when I went in for an interview, they told me they ask interns to stay at least eight weeks. Wanting to suck up (and realizing that flights from Paris are for some reason cheaper later in July) I said I would stay for nine weeks. As other interns announced their departures, I regretted saying that I could stay so long. I foresaw myself sitting alone in the conference room, waiting for an attorney to come give me an assignment while passing hour upon hour browsing food blogs and watching my tan fade. But, my supervisor asked me to stay, and I suck at saying no.
And much to everyone’s surprise, the last few days the assignments have actually been coming in pretty steadily. Instead of doing work 40% of the time and nothing 60% of the time, I’d estimate that those percentages have flipped and I’m now doing something useful 60% of the time. However, I’m giving myself permission to come in at ten and leave at four, because the first and last hour of my day are when I’m least likely to h
The draft of my second novel is done! I’m just waiting for my editor (my mom) to finish proofreading it while I patiently wait to have a title epiphany. It’s currently thundering outside, so no pool or beach, and the two dates I had lined up for the weekend cancelled on me. One got mugged outside of Whole Foods and the other is too embarrassed about how puffy his face is post-dentist to go outside. So I guess blogging will be this Sunday’s activity.
I’m going to Israel next month! I always knew about birthright trips—if you’re Jewish and between 18 and 26 years old you can go on a free ten day tour of the home land. I just figured I wouldn’t qualify because my mom is a goya, I never went to Hebrew school, and I openly mock all organized religions. But my cousin and other secular Jew-ish friends who went on birthright talked me into applying. After all, it’s a free trip.
Sure, it’s a propaganda tool and I’m probably going to be exposed to some political ideologies that I don’t necessarily agree with. But I feel like I’m pretty resistant to brain washing, and what the hell else am I going to do over winter break? Besides my job interview on December 30, which will be after I get back from Israel anyway. It’s for a one year legal fellowship with Heritage Health and Housing. I’m already nervous cause I suck at interviewing.
I’m still doing that thing where I buy the cheapest book I can find in the fiction section of Barnes and Nobles and read at least ten pages of it every night before I go to sleep whether I like it or not. Some of the books are cheap because the authors are long dead and no longer collecting royalties. Some of the books read like they were written by the same people who wrote the scripts for movies on Netflix that I gave up on before the opening credits were over.
But besides the fact that I’m cheap and do a lot of recreational reading at the pool (which is why I don’t just get library books or invest in an e-reader), I don’t have a good reason for why I’m reading books I don’t enjoy. It probably has something to do with the fact that unpleasant things I have to force myself to do are usually good/necessary for me, like waking up early to go running and taking vitamins. I don't actually take vitamins, but I did as a kid. Maybe flexing my self-discipline muscle is in itself beneficial to my psyche. Or maybe I’m hoping that I’ll be wrong one of these days and find myself really liking a book that I would never have picked up otherwise.
It’s one of the saddest truths I know: I’m almost always right when I don’t think I’m going to like someone/something. Which probably means that my life isn’t that sad.
Anyway: I have a twitter that I don’t know how to use and an Instagram now. Follow me: @rosepuanani
September 1, 2014
It’s my last year of school. Ever. Probably. It’s time to start thinking about moving out of this apartment, taking the bar exam, and finding an actual grown-up, no-end-date-in-sight job. I’m kind of terrified, but I’m also almost twenty six, so I’d say I’m ready to stop borrowing money and start earning some.
Realizing that getting my Polish passport was not going to be something I can do myself, my parents and I went to New York a few weeks ago to hire a lawyer. My grandfather in Polish. Therefore my mother is. Therefore I am. Except that apparently no one in my family had the foresight to write anything down and create any kind of record, official or otherwise, of who was born to whom, when, and where. Piecing together family hearsay, I figured out the name and approximate birthdate of my great grandmother, and my cousin in Krakow, bless her, checked church records and confirmed it. The lawyer told me this was good news; she’d file the paperwork and then we would wait. But then she told me on Friday that she had come across a statute from the time my grandfather was born, saying that Polish nationality could only be inherited from one’s father. Fine, my great grandfather was Polish too, but there’s absolutely no record of him in the town everyone seems to think he was born in. I have his American death certificate, but that might not cut it. So maybe I’ll have to accept one of my visa-marriage proposals after all. Just wish I had known that before I paid my lawyer the $2500 retainer.
I’ve decided to start getting scientific with my okcupid profile, and last Sunday I sent a message to every guy within a ten mile radius of me who was an 80% match or higher, unless I thought I might have already messaged him. (Probably my biggest complaint about the site is that it doesn’t tell you who you’ve already talked to. I could go back through my old messages, I guess, but that takes time and I’ve had to delete a lot to make space in my inbox.) Some older dudes were looking for women closer to their ages, so I didn’t bother with them. Occasionally I just couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, and one guy who was supposedly my soul mate cited the bible as his favorite book, so I obviously didn’t try and engage him. So I wound up sending eighteen guys messages. They were all short, three to five sentence, but proved that I had
read their profiles and was interested in talking further.
Here are the stats from my diligent record keeping: Eight of them ignored me completely. That’s 44%. I volleyed the conversation back and fourth with the other ten of them a few times, until I realized that there was nothing of substance for us to discuss, or, in one case, the guy said he was trying to join the air fore, and nothing is less sexy than a man in uniform. It’s one thing if he felt forced to join the military when he was eighteen, but quite another to be twenty six and aspiring to join such a violent organization. No numbers were exchanged. I haven’t met any of them in person.
I can’t say that I’ve never ignored a guy. In fact, while messaging on okcupid I think simply not replying is actually the politer was to indicate that you’re not interested, instead of stating so outright. I only do the latter because I don’t want to be labeled as someone who “replies rarely”. One time I had gone out with a guy who was also a writer and he asked me to read one of his stories. I told him that I overall enjoyed that story, but was he aware that the main character sounded liked a misogynistic asshole? Not a criticism of the author or his story, just an observation—the kind I find helpful when other people are evaluating my work. He proceeded to tell me why I was wrong, and in his rant about how women take offense to everything, he used the word “persay”. It took me a minute to realize that he probably meant “per se”, although from the context it was clear he had no idea what per se means. I just couldn’t anymore, and started ignoring him. It only took him a few weeks to take the hint.
But usually once you’ve exchanged numbers with someone and gone out with them a few times and talked concretely about plans to hang out again in the immediate future, I think I’m justified in wondering what the hell happened. Twice this weekend. They both happened to be French. Oh well. (See above. I got sick of fighting with the formatting on this site.)
August 3, 2014
I know it’s probably intended as a compliment, but I’m sick of being asked why I’m still single.
My first problem is the implication that singleness is a pitiable condition that no one chooses. Maybe it is for some people and maybe it was for me at one point, but right now being single is like going to the ice cream parlor and getting a free spoonful of every flavor, except I can of course skip the flavors I know I won’t like and go back for seconds and thirds of the particularly yummy ones. And then I get to go home with a belly full of ice cream, set the air conditioner to the temperature I want, and watch cute animal videos on youtube while painting my toenails in
peace.
My next problem with being asked why I’m still single is the same problem I have with being asked what ethnicity I am or why I wanted to go to law school or write a novel. Those are essay topics, and even if I feel like the person asking wants to sit tight and listen to my forty minute answer (sometimes they do, usually they don’t), I don’t necessarily feel up to giving an impromptu discourse.
But if you must know, there are two, maybe three, interrelated reasons why I’m still single. 1. I have my flaws, 2. All the guys in the dating pool have their flaws, and 3. I might be going about this whole dating thing the wrong way. Duh.
When a potential suitor asks me why I’m single, I suspect he’s really getting at reason number one. Like at job interviews, when you have to list your weaknesses. I think this is an unfair question, but since I usually really want the job I’m interviewing for, I say something about how I have trouble with multi tasking and sticking to word limits, but I self accommodate with my excellent time-management skills. I’ve never want to go on another date with any particular guy as badly as I’ve wanted a good resume padder, so if it’s not a job interview, I’ll usually just shrug. I could warn him that I walk around with a first trimester food baby most of the time and hate giving blow jobs, but I don’t.
When my friends, family, and anyone else who’s not contemplating getting into my pants asks me why I’m single, they’re probably getting at reason two and three. I’ll be the first to admit that I could be doing things that I’m not—allowing myself to get set up on blind dates and keeping an open mind about guys who are younger than me, for example. But like I said, I’m not really in a rush to leave the singles’ club, so I’m sticking to my comfort zone. Even without venturing outside of online dating, there might be some expert out there who would tell me that I’ve posted the wrong pictures of myself, said the wrong thing on my profile, or am taking the wrong approach to answering/sending messages. Maybe the free okcupid is not the best site.
Because I could write many more blog posts, and probably will, about what’s wrong with the men on okcupid. I know I’m not the first
(http://okcupidsniceguys.tumblr.com/) but there’s no shortage of things to complain about.
I sent out a big batch of messages (see previous posts) partly—okay, mostly—because I wanted to be able to say something like, “If you message 100 guys, you can expect to get a response from x percent of them, actually meet x percent of them, and go out with x percent of them more than once. Guys in their thirties tend to ___, whereas guys in their forties tend to ___. The difference between guys who grew up in Miami and those who moved here recently is ___.”
But the site doesn’t lend itself to data collecting, nor do my busy schedule or short attention span, so the information that I gathered from my experiment is this: There’s probably only about a fifty percent chance that any guy I message will answer at all, even though most of them are labeled as “replies often”. Of the guys who do answer, maybe about half of them will answer like this:
Either they’re so self absorbed they only want to talk about themselves, or it’s their way of saying “no thanks.”
Then there are the conversations that go on forever and he never asks for my number or suggests that we meet in person. Why don’t I just ask for his number? I might, if I didn’t initiate the conversation. But if I initiated the conversation, I don’t want to have to constantly be the only one nudging things along. Stalling in the messaging phase is to me a sign of apathy, deal-breaking shyness, or perhaps that he’s not who he says he is.
I could go on and on about what else is wrong with the guys of okcupid, but for now I think that adequately explains why I’m still single, no?
June 21, 2014
Okay, so I might have been unduly optimistic when I said online dating was going to give me lots of good stories to write about. It’s given me lots of fun times, but that’s not necessarily the same thing. Working at the clinic, on the other hand, is like being involved in a dozen different soap operas at once, some of which are darkly hilarious. But I’m pretty sure my legal career would be over before it started if I broke attorney-client privilege by sharing the details on the internet. And between work and meeting every left-leaning, college-educated, 30-something single guy in Miami Dade County, I haven’t had much time to write anyway. Here are the most exciting things that have happened to me in the past few weeks:
I witnessed a robbery in my neighborhood. I was walking back from the metro with a friend at 10:30 at night. Having developed a healthy paranoia on the Paris metro, I was wearing my giant purse, (you never know when you’ll find yourself in need of an umbrella, hand sanitizer, reading material…) the way I always do, diagonally across my torso with my hand over where it zipped closed. My friend was carrying a clutch with her phone, debit card, and ID around her wrist. While we were deep in discussion about hookah bars, some guy came up, ripped the clutch off her wrist, and ran away before we realized what had just happened. To top it off, one of the cops who showed up thought it was appropriate to tell me, “Two females, your size, walking in this neighborhood at night? You’re targets. You shouldn’t be surprised this happened to you.” At least the other cop had apparently attended how-not-to-be-an-asshole training and apologized for his partner. Maybe now I won’t deliver my rant about how people are so damn over dramatic to the next person who tells me how dangerous my neighborhood is. Probably not though.
In unrelated news, I’m finally accepting what I’ve long suspected. Drinking alcohol (except for beer, which according to my German teacher is a food group, not alcohol) is now officially added to the list of things I can’t do without getting sick.
There is a Vapiano in Miami (I had thought they were only in Germany) and I went there with my dad on Tuesday night for a late father’s day early half birthday dinner. It was pretty much like the one in Munich, but with free lemony tap water. I got spinach pizza and was pleased to see they cut it into slices for me, American style. The spinach, however, was raw and piled on top of the pizza, as opposed to baked in there like I was expecting. This was neither an improvement nor a step down taste-wise, but the raw spinach didn’t stick in my teeth the way the cooked stuff always manages to.
Oh, and I finally went to Trader Joe’s and got powder to make green-tea lattes at home. Which means Starbucks and I have no reason to see each other anymore, except maybe for emergency wifi purposes.
And that’s pretty much it. Riveting, right?
May 24, 2014
I’ve had an okcupid profile for going on two years now. (I used to be embarrassed about that, but the more I talk to people I realize so has everyone whose been single at any point in the last five years, so now I talk about it shamelessly.) I put up a dozen or so flattering pictures of myself, filled out my profile and answered the questions with what I think is the appropriate amount of honesty, then waited for the messages to roll in. And boy did they, at least a dozen every day. Soon I was texting three or four different guys from the site at any given time, and most weekends I had at least one date, all because I put up this profile and kept a reasonably open mind while answering as many messages as I could during the commercials of my breakfast viewings of the Daily Show. My goals—distract myself from thinking about my ex, make new friends, and gather ideas for future characters in future novels—were being achieved, without me ever initiating a conversation or even looking at the profile of a guy who hasn’t messaged me first.
But.
Recently I was starting to get frustrated. I made it a policy to politely answer any guy who 1) is in my specified age range 2) lives within a sixty mile radius of me or comes to Miami regularly, and 3) gives me some indication that he actually read my profile and isn’t just copying and pasting the same message to anyone with two x chromosomes. However, that message would increasingly often be “Thanks for your message but I don’t think we’d be compatible romantically. Good luck out there!” And to guys who clearly were copying and pasting or didn’t self-filter by age or location I answered less politely, usually asking them if they could read and then blocking them. (Side rant: What is going on in their heads? “She says she doesn’t like younger guys, but I really am such an amazing 23-year-old that she’ll have to make an exception”? Umm, no.)
Only about 5-10% of the messages I actually answered in a way that indicated that I wanted to continue the conversation. Like I said, that still left me with plenty of dudes to keep me busy, but potential relationships got aborted at every stage—after texting, talking on the phone, meeting once, or meeting a few times, he, or I, or both of just gave up trying to like each other. With the definite exception of one guy and the possible partial exceptions of two or three more, it was abundantly clear why these men were resorting to the internet to meet women.
Then one day a few weeks ago, the site gave me the option of automatically filtering out messages from guys outside my desired age range and who lived too far away. Which is brilliant, and meant that I could go through the messages that made it into my inbox in one commercial break instead of three or four. But for whatever reason I only was only getting messages that I had to say ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to—from guys who were religious or Republicans, or didn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” or talked too much about football. It was the longest I had ever gone without getting to the point of exchanging numbers or meeting someone new in person.
My old excuses for never initiating a conversation were gone. I no longer had to send snide responses to the youngsters and out of towners, plus the summer semester had started, leaving my nights and weekends free, so I could no longer claim I didn’t have time. My other arguments—“If he were really so interested he would have taken the initiative already,” and “If I find myself on a bad date, I want to be able to
say, ‘this whole thing was your idea!’” were stupid and refutable after I thought about them for half a second.
So last Sunday I did a search for guys 25-50 years old who lived within a 50 mile radius of me, and put the results in order of match percentage—a little algorithm the site does based on a bunch of semi-ridiculous multiple choice questions to tell you how compatible you are with someone. I opened up the profile of everyone who was 90% or more compatible with me—about 25 guys. And holy crap! There are men in Miami who read and plant gardens and spell out ‘you’. The algorithm isn’t perfect. A few of them I couldn’t even come up with anything to write to them, which I took as a sign that I shouldn’t bother. A few other ones, well, I didn’t find physically attractive at all. But to the rest of them, I sent twenty of the kind of messages I would be happy to receive: two or three sentences, introducing myself and mentioning something about their profile besides their physical appearance that I liked.
Here’s the data: five messages went completely ignored, at least as of now. Two were answered, but in a way that made it seem like they weren’t overly excited to be talking to me so I never answered back. A third conversation faded out not much longer after that. Seven guys I’m still messaging with but phone numbers have not yet been exchanged. I spoke on the phone with one last night before falling asleep, I have plans to go meet one for drinks tomorrow night, and went out with yet another one last night. It wasn’t the best date I’d ever been on in my life,
but it wasn’t bad either. If I’m being honest, and I almost always am, my heart sunk a little bit when I walked into the restaurant and saw that, no, that wasn’t just a bad picture of a good looking guy, that’s what he looks like, plus he had grown a mustache. He was sweaty and nervous through dinner, but then we went for drinks and talked about the joys and evils of gentrification and our mutual love of Tina Fey and he calmed down. When he dropped me off he said rather desperately, “Will I see you again?” I said yes, because I felt put on the spot and he had just bough me dinner and an expensive cocktail and driven me home. But if and when he texts me again I’ll say I’d love to hang out again as friends. Because I would.
So my point is that I’m glad I started being a little more proactive about my love life. It didn’t work miracles, but the guys I’m talking to now are definitely an improvement over the rift raft I passively attracted before. And I think I’ll have lots to write about.
May 11, 2014
I was going to write about what I did this week in Munich, but it’s honestly not that interesting (a little bit of visiting with friends and a lot of writing and eating like a Schweinchen.) So instead I just made a list, because I was in that kind of a mood.
What I like about Germany:
· Everything is clean and organized. Unlike Paris where there are puddles of urine on the sidewalk or Miami where road kill and broken glass in the street are not uncommon, Munich is pretty spotless.
· Pedestrians, bikes, cars, and the tram each have their own lane. There’s no confusion about who has the right of way what a red light means. There’s very minimal honking.
· Shopping! Euros are coins up to 2€, and buying something with coins doesn’t feel like spending money. I’ve bought post cards, shoes, shower gel and jewelry for what feels like nothing.
· I know that some Americans who live here would disagree with me, but my experience is that making friends here is easier than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Lots of people have told me that I’m the first Jew and the first American who speaks German that they’ve ever met, and that means they find me fascinating. Which is weird, but kind of nice.
· Germans generally dress to be comfortable and warm. I’m not one to adjust my sense of style too much to my surroundings (if I can even say that I have a sense of style), so in Paris and parts of Miami I sometimes feel like a schlub in flats and minimal makes up, but not here.
· Men here aren’t creepy. Unlike in Paris, I can walk around without being stared at, asked out, or told how charmante I am. (I know, poor me, but it gets annoying quickly.) Furthermore, it’s totally possible here to have purely plutonic straight male friends.
· Munich, at least, is a small enough city that it never feels claustrophobic. Unless it’s Oktoberfest or rush hour in the middle of the city, I always have been able to find a seat on public transportation/at the library/on a park bench, it’s rare that a line is unbearably long, and I’ve never left a store out of fear of being trampled.
· The foooood. Despite the majority of the population being so carnivorous, it’s totally possible for a vegetarian like me to be fat and happy in Munich. (Vegans not so much.) The absolute best thing to eat here is the rahmjoghurt (cream yogurt), but there’s also lots of good falafels, and Indian food adapted to German taste buds is for some reason especially delicious. McDonalds here sell veggie burgers, and of course there’s the pretzels—plain, cut in half and slathered with butter or with cream cheese and then sprinkled with chives, or covered with melted cheese. And let’s not forget Apfelschnecken (apple snails)—a deep friend coil of dough and chunks of apple covered in cinnamon and sugar. This trip I discovered chocolate chai tea and gelatin-free gummies at the grocery store.
What I don’t like about Germany:
· It’s winter here for like, eleven months of the year.
· Restaurants make you pay for water unless you specifically ask for tap water. And even then, be prepared for a weird look before they begrudgingly bring you a shot glass of water, half full. The tap water here is perfectly safe to drink, trust me, but Germans insist on only drinking the bottled stuff. They recycle like champs, but still, wouldn’t it be more ökologisch to not use all those bottle in the first place?
· Everything besides restaurants, movie theatres, and museums are closed on Sunday. I think it’s great that everyone’s obligated to chill out at least one day per week, but if I were up to me, businesses would be able to choose which day they closed. Cause, you know, not everyone needs to go to church on Sunday.
· Public library cards are not free. Sure, the cost is minimal. As an au pair I got a discount and paid, I think, 10€ for a whole year, and I got to borrow DVDs and everything, but still.
· Likewise, most public bathrooms aren’t free. They’re super clean, so I’m not complaining too much. In fact, if charging me fifty cents every time I have to pee is what it takes to pay the people who clean the bathrooms a living wage, I guess I’m okay with that. But if you’re like me, with a small budget and a small bladder, it’s an inconvenience.
· Most music videos are blocked on youtube. So I just lived without music for a year of my life.
· It’s too easy to schwarzfahren. Anyone can just get on or off any public transportation without having to go through a turnstile or show a ticket to anyone, so if you accidently bought the wrong ticket for the zone you’re traveling in, or honestly forgot that you needed to buy a new ticket because it’s a new week/month and the controllers come, too bad, you still have to pay the 40€ fine.
· Why is it impossible to find black beans here?
January 5, 2014
I’m settling in for a long night at the Oslo airport. One day I’ll have a real grown up job and will be able to afford either a direct flight or a night in an airport hotel, but that day is not today.
I spent New Year’s at a friend of a friend’s apartment (also much nicer than mine), where I learned that 1, I am 155 cm tall, not 152 cm like my German visa and every convertor I’ve ever used say, and that 2, my tolerance for alcohol, I guess like my tolerance for airplane food, has gone way down. Not that I’ve ever been a huge drinker, but there was a time that a drink and a half left me feeling tingly and sleepy in a way that was not unpleasant. Now, after a glass of wine with dinner and then half a glass of Sekt, I’m nauseous with a pounding headache. I guess that’s what you call getting older.
After counting down to midnight in front of the Nymphenburg castle and in front of some fireworks (and I mean right next to, which seemed kind of dangerous to me but apparently only me), I had to head back to grab my suitcase and catch my train to Paris. I had it planned so that I would catch the tram and then the bus back to get my suitcase and then another tram to the trains station with minimum time waiting in the cold, but I guess I took about ten seconds too long to say tschüss to everyone because that’s how much time I missed the first tram by. My whole plan was thrown off, and I spent a good part of the morning of 2014 doing a let’s-not-get-hypothermia dance at tram and bus stops.
Then, when I was bringing my suitcase (which already had a busted wheel) downstairs from my friend’s apartment, the handle snapped, probably because my suitcase had gained about ten pounds in the last week of December. But I didn’t have time to regret hitting the sale racks at H&M and stocking up on lentil and pea Eintopfs from dm, so I grabbed the one handle that was still in tact and miraculously made it to the train station on time.
I told myself I just had to make my suitcase last until the end of the week and then I’d get a new one in New Jersey with my Hanukah money. Of course as soon as I got out at Gare de l’Est, the last handle broke on my suitcase and I accepted that I could no longer put off buying a new one, even if it meant dipping into a bank account that I didn’t especially want to dip into. But of course, I forgot that nothing besides a few cafes and restaurants are open in Paris on January first, so I had to crouch down and awkwardly shove my suitcase around for a day. January second
was better. I got a new suitcase and discovered that Auchan still sells yellow baby bells. So that’s how 2014 started for me.
December 28, 2013
I’m in Munich now, apartment sitting for a friend in Neuhausen. She’s been to my apartment in Miami, and now that I’m comparing our abodes, I can’t help but feel kind of inferior. Of course it’s not really fair to compare, because she has a real, grown up job (as an interior designer, no less) and I’m still a student. So I shouldn’t be embarrassed that the nicest things in my apartment are the collages I made myself and hung with dental floss, but I kind of am.
Anyway, before I left Paris I got to see three of my friends (and got promises from the rest of them to meet up in January) and my cousin from Chicago who is in Paris for two weeks, and I spent a day in Versailles with Johann and Delphine. Here were the highlights, mostly food related:
· Burger King has come back to France (no, I didn’t go, but apparently this is big news that multiple people had to share with me.)
· Potatoes as a pizza topping. I ate this and could not finish it because it's super filling, but it was oddly yummy.
· A French garden does not have flowers in it. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are lying and should talk to Johann about it because that’s a touchy topic for him.
· I made a box of American mac and cheese for one of my French friends and he called it délicieux. Damn straight. It was the good stuff, Annie’s white cheddar shells.
· We got falafels from L’As du Fallafel, an Israeli restaurant in the Marais, where you usually have to wait minimum fifteen minutes for take away and forty five minutes if you want to sit down, but we waited zero minutes.
On the twenty fourth I took the train to Munich. After Strasburg I had a row to myself to stretch out and start enjoying my birthday presents to myself: DVDs of Girls and Weeds and a book of Lorie Moore’s short stories in French. And that is also how I spent my twenty fifth birthday, because everything in Munich was closed (except for a few places in Hauptbahnhof) including Tollwood, despite what I and apparently quite a few other disappointed Germans were told.
And that pretty much catches you up on my adventure. Tomorrow I’m spending the day in Ingolstadt and then I have to figure out what I’m doing for Silvester.
December 20, 2013
It’s finally my winter break I was so excited for, and night two in Paris. This year I decided to go to New Jersey for six days before crossing the Atlantic, which I’m glad I did. It gave me a chance to be there for Hanukah (by which I mean the one night my family gets together at our convenience, eats a lot of raviolis, lights a whole Menorah at once, opens an obscene amount of presents from my Grandma, and then eats ice cream cake and cookies that turn your mouth blue), to finally try the recipe for green mac and cheese I found during my summer of reading food blogs/interning, and generally decompress after the hazing ritual that is law school finals.
My parents drove me up to Newark airport on Wednesday afternoon. I couldn’t figure out how to check in early and get a good seat, which I didn’t sweat because I was changing planes in Oslo, and who wants to go to Oslo less than a week before the winter solstice? A lot of people, it turns out. I got a window seat on the absolute last row of the plane, next to a giant Norwegian man. I was also wrong in my assumption that a Scandinavian airline would have more leg space, so I felt bad for this guy. But I also felt bad for myself because I threw up twice during the flight. Either XL and SAS both serve their passengers tainted food, or I’ve just turned into a person who can’t stomach airline food and I owe XL and apology.
The plus side here is that I haven’t had an appetite since, which saves money on food. Last night I checked in Friends Hostel in the somewhat sketchy Barbès – Rochechouart neighborhood. For 18€ I got one night in a six person dorm with almost no heating or lighting and no lockers of functioning outlets in the room. I’m fairly certain I heard mice scampering around under my bed. This is not the worst hostel I have experienced in Paris, but I would add it to my à éviter list. The plus side here (I’m trying to make that a theme) is that I was driven to find Perfect Hostel, just one metro stop over at Anvers. For 22€/night, it lives up to its name. I got my own key with a sufficiently large personal locker in a clean, heated room with wifi which was reachable with an elevator (a rare treat in these old Parisian buildings.)
So there’s the beginning of my current adventure. Tomorrow I have plans to do more interesting things, which I will write about soon.
December 13, 2013
So apparently twenty five is kind of an important birthday? That’s what the internet seems to be telling me, because I keep coming across
lists like this one: http://thoughtcatalog.com/cehudspeth/2013/11/24-things-i-learned-by-age-24/. While I think it’s great that so many of my fellow 1988 babies fancy themselves qualified to give advice, I look at my GPA, my love life, and that glob of burnt cranberry sauce under the burner on my stove, and I have to admit there’s still a lot I have left to figure out. I’ve concluded that the only person in the world who could benefit from my almost quarter century of experience is my younger self. In fact, a lot of what I would tell my younger self—like, don’t be so nice or try so hard--I would absolutely not tell anyone else. But I’m putting out there for everyone anyway ‘cause, well, I can.
To my one year old self: Expose yourself to different languages as much as possible. This is the only time in your life where you can learn by osmosis and you’ll have plenty of time to learn English later. Take advantage, it just gets progressively harder from now on. You don’t want to find yourself in Miami one day as the only person who can’t speak Spanish.
To my two year old self: Now that you have teeth, start eating as many tree nuts as you can. One day you’ll develop a nasty allergy, and it
will be easier to watch your friends scarf nutella-filled crepes and almond milk yogurt knowing you already got your fix.
To my three year old self: Baby brother is here to stay, just embrace it. I know you were hoping for a sister, but he’ll let you paint his
toenails until he’s five and then down the road there will be a few years where he’s old enough to drive but not old enough to drink, and trust me, that will come in handy.
To my four year old self: Now might be a good time to start saving up for law school. I’m only kind of kidding.
To my five year old self: Be grateful for how much energy you have, how flexible you are, and for how perfect your vision is. Doesn’t last forever, sweetheart.
To my six year old self: Painting your nails won’t keep you from biting them. Neither will sheer will power. What you have to do is give in to
the urge to put your nails between your teeth, but don’t actually bite. This gives all the satisfaction of making sure all the germs from everything you’ve touched get into your mouth without giving your hands the gnawed on look.
To my seven year old self: It’s great that you’re so eager to try every extra-curricular activity that exists, really it is. So I won’t discourage that too much. However let me save you and your parents a little time, money, and aggravation. You suck at and derive no pleasure from playing the piano or pretty much any sport where being short gives you a distinct disadvantage, like basketball or volleyball. Instead, may I suggest getting a jump start or learning to cook or polishing those language skills I told you start acquiring when you were a baby.
To my eight year old self: Don’t worry that you never really get good at long division. That’s what they make calculators for.
To my nine year old self: There’s this magazine called Jane starting up this year. It’s not really aimed at nine year olds, but it’s brilliant and timeless and won’t be around forever. Without this heads up you won’t discover it for about another five years and by then its life will be half over. One day all the good magazines will be extinct, so start hoarding now or you can look forward to reading about how to please your man and cut calories. (Don’t be too distraught; just because magazines of the future suck that doesn’t mean there won’t always be plenty of good reading material in book form or on the internet. But it’s not the same as a glossy new perfume-scented magazine that comes in the mail every month.)
To my ten year old self: I know it’s mortifying that your dad went to back to school night and made a scene because they’re not teaching you
evolution in your science class. And that your mom insists on composting so you have to explain to your friends when they come over why your kitchen smells like rotting banana peels. But believe it or not you’ve actually hit the lottery when it comes to your parents, and you’re going to grow up to be a lot like them, so try not to be so embarrassed.
To my eleven year old self: Start watching the Daily Show now instead of waiting another year or so to discover it. The only upside to Bush
being elected-or in any event becoming president- this year is that Jon Stewart has more material than her probably ever will under any other administration. (The technology will soon exist so that you can watch any episode of any TV show on your computer for free, and that’s why I’m not recommending that you discover any other shows, but you’re not really going to have time for all of those Daily Show episodes later, and
once the Bush years are over you won’t really want to relive them.)
To my twelve year old self: You weigh over a hundred pounds now. Get over it. I know that seems terrifying, because 100 is a three digit number and you’re done getting taller. But notice how your doctor doesn’t seem concerned at all? Think of your weight as you would if you grew up in any other country, in kilograms, and you’ll realize just how arbitrary being above or below 100 pounds is. Also, your boobs are just going to get a little bigger and then your weight will stabilize at a perfectly acceptable number, I promise.
To my thirteen year old self: Not sure what if anything you should do with this information, but one day you’ll wish you had realized at the
time that nothing that you’re doing now really counts. No college, law school, or potential employer will ask to see your middle school report cards. The people you’re friends with now won’t necessarily be your friends later. No one will care how many goals you score or don’t score in your soccer games or if you can do a split with your left leg in front. Liberating, isn’t it?
To my fourteen year old self: Now that you’re in high school it’s great that you’re finally getting serious and realizing that just filling
your homework worksheets in with the lyrics of whatever song you have stuck in your head just so it will look done isn’t going to cut it anymore. Most of that hard work will pay off, but you could probably care about 10% less about getting into a good college without any adverse effect on your future. Try as you might, you’re just not Ivy League material. The sooner you realize that (and that that’s kind of a compliment) the happier you’ll be.
To my fifteen year old self: If you don’t want to keep taking Latin don’t feel like you have to. Any part of a dead language that could possibly be useful in the future you already learned in the first year.
To my sixteen year old self: Go ahead and go to Poland for the summer. It will give you perspective about being a (kind of) foreigner and stories to tell for years to come. But have realistic expectations. Just because Poland is on the same continent as the world’s most progressive and cosmopolitan countries doesn’t mean that your Polish relatives in Chicago are an anomaly or an example of how immigrating can change a person; that’s what Polish people are generally like. Pack some plant based protein bars for the meat-only meals and reading material for when everyone else is at church.
To my seventeen year old self: This will seem counterintuitive, but don’t have such an open mind about people. I understand your logic: If I’m super sweet to everyone, they’ll be inclined to be nice to me back. Two problems with this. One, it’s not doable. Even the most saintly, good-natured people (and you are not in this category) can’t be nice to everyone all the time. And two, this isn’t true for everyone. Some people are just unwilling or incapable of being nice back, so don’t bother trying to win them over. A better general rule: Care about other people’s feelings to the same extent that they care about yours.
To my eighteen year old self: While packing for your dorm room, it is impossible to bring too many blankets or layers of clothing. Also, bring movies. You’re not going to enjoy going out on the weekend in sub-arctic temperatures (go ahead and give it a try, but you know I’m right.) To your pleasant surprise, you’ll find a few other non-partiers at your party school, and having a copy of Garden State and y tu mamá también will save everyone a snowy walk to the video store and score you major points.
To my nineteen year old self: This is pretty much what I told you when you started high school, but it bears repeating now that you’re in college. Nothing you can do will get you into a fancy law school, and trust me the mediocre one you wind up going to will be hard enough. You will never have a job interview where you hear, “You seem great, but…a B+ in French 307? We really need someone who can analyze images of the sun in the modern Senegalese novel at an A level.” So chillax. Instead of proofreading that paper for the 800th time, just go to bed.
To my twenty year old self: Studying abroad in Paris is arguably going to be the best year of your life, not least of all because for the first time ever you have a room that is neither in your parents’ house nor shared with someone else. Two and a half years of monogamy are coming soon, followed by a dry spell, so go ahead and bring as many new gentlemen friends home with you as you want. Let your crotchety old neighbor raise their eyebrows as high as they want. If anything you’ll regret not having been even sluttier.
To my twenty one year old self: Don’t bother with the stress fest that is applying for a Fulbright Scholarship. Spoiler alert: you’re not going to get it. Plus you’ll need letters of recommendation for your law school applications, and you’ll feel like you’re being annoying asking your professors twice in one year.
To my twenty two year old self: Buy a dirndl as soon as you get to Munich. Yes, they’re expensive, but get one now and you’ll have several occasions to wear it; they’re not just for Oktoberfest. You look super cute in traditional Bavarian garb, plus it can double as a Halloween costume when your au pair year is over. But drag your feet and spending 100€ or more on one piece of clothing that makes you look like you work in a beer garden will seem less and less justifiable.
To my twenty three year old self: There’s no way around it (or if there is I don’t know what it is): this is going to be a tough year. A
devastating break up, the worst grades you’ve ever gotten in your life, and much less support from (most of) your “friends” than you hoped for. There’s not much that can be said to make you feel better, but comfort can be derived from relativizing your misery. Just look in your torts book. Your life sucks right now, but you’re better off than any of those medical malpractice plaintiffs. Actually, on second thought, just skip that chapter. It will haunt your dreams and isn’t even going to be on the final.
To my twenty four year old self: You’re right that most men in Miami suck. But. Recognize when you meet one who doesn’t instead of nitpicking. True, he’s American and he does some pretty unbearable things like texting “ya” instead of “you”. And yes, he has an established life in Florida and you plan on hightailing it back to Paris the first second possible. And you’re right that starting a relationship with a predetermined expiration date is setting yourself up to get hurt. But you know what else is setting yourself up to get hurt? Existing. It’s a much better strategy to just enjoy the enjoyable parts between the heartbreaks as much as possible rather than trying to avoid the heartbreaks all together.
August 8, 2013
I’m in Munich, and this is probably going to be my last blog entry for a while. This time next week I’ll be back in the law library in Miami, reading for the first day of class and day dreaming about coming back to Europe in December. I didn’t time this trip excellently; about half of my friends who I wanted to see are also on vacation and therefore not in Munich. But half of them are here, so the glass is half full.
I took the night train here. The regular seats were sold out, so I paid 10€ more for a couchette. Not exactly a bed, and I could only lay down, not sit up. Still, I actually slept and didn’t arrive in Munich needing a caffeine IV. Johann and Delphine, the friends I’m staying with, moved to a bigger apartment in the same neighborhood with lots of extra room and a giant balcony. “It’s at least better than staying in a hostel,” Johann said, giving me the tour, and I’d have to agree.
And, what do you know, there is such a thing as summer in Munich! Last July, the night before I left to fly back and go to law school, I organized a little Abschiedsparty at a café with outdoor seating. Everyone came in jackets and scarves. But it’s pleasantly warm here now, like Miami in winter. I’m wearing summer dresses and sandals and carrying a bottle of water with me everywhere. Yesterday I went to the "beach" between Rosenheimer Platz and Isartor to look for typos in my old novel and write notes for my new one. Before leaving I put my feet in the water and discovered that the people swimming actually weren’t crazy polar bears. If I had thought to bring my bathing suit I would have joined them.
Mostly I’ve been speaking French and writing in English, but those few times that I’ve found myself with a German who wanted to speak German I managed, more or less. Every meal so far here has been outsides and always the same thing: semmeln, cheese, and fruit. (Except yesterday, I had beer for lunch and gelato for dinner.) Unlike the French, the Germans still sell yellow babybells in the supermarkets, so I’ve had to take advantage while I can. They come with a toy labeled suitable for children ages 3-6, but I refuse to take the hint. Just as I refuse to think about the fact that I’ll be on a train leaving Munich in fewer than three days.
August 1, 2013
I’m back in Paris! I’m sitting in the bibliotheque du cinema, which is—why not?—in the middle of a mall, and trying to decide if I want to go to Munich tomorrow evening or take the overnight train on Monday and get there early Tuesday. It’s a long, embarrassing story why I have two tickets on two different days to Munich, the moral of which is that I can’t rely on anyone. It’s embarrassing because at my age I should have known the limits of what I could realistically expect to happen. Like I forgot this was my life and not some Audrey Tautou movie. I don’t want to talk about it.
On the way here, I got my ponytail patted down in the Miami airport, probably a sign that I have too much hair. I couldn’t sleep for any of the nine hours, and I didn’t want to turn on my reading light and disturb the people around me who could, so I plugged in my headphones and watched Bob l’Eponge for as long as I could stand to and then ate the meal they gave us. It didn’t look or smell appetizing at all, but I was hungry and bored and had ordered a vegetarian meal special, so despite my better instincts I ate the chunks of vegetables that had been frozen and reheated, I estimate about fifteen times, and covered in what I think was supposed to be cheese. I threw it up about a half hour later and –blessing in disguise!—my appetite hasn’t fully returned yet. I’ve almost been fasting for Ramadan along with most of my friends here (except that I’ve been drinking water, seeing as I’m going to hell anyway). And not having to stop and eat saves time and money! Maybe I will finally buy that dirndl in Munich after all!
I haven’t quite adjusted to the time change yet. I optimistically set my alarm for 8am yesterday and today, but Anouar and I stay up too late watching téléréalité and then I wake up and see him sleeping so soundly that I justify my laziness with not wanting to disturb him. Yesterday I didn’t make it in the shower until noon. Today I pushed myself and got up at eleven. I’m on vacation, okay?
Then it takes about an hour and a half on the RER D to get into Paris, which I’m not complaining about; it’s actually nice to sit and do nothing for that long, but it helps explain why my time here just dissolves away, despite my best efforts to savor it.
July 24, 2013
I’m going to Europe in six days! I can’t think about anything else, so I’m going to describe every part of this trip I’m excited about, even though I’ve been to Paris about a gazillion times already, and Munich half a gazillion. And this trip means that summer is essentially over. And talking about what you’re looking forward to is a sure-fire way to jinx it. But whatever.
On these bi-annual trips, the cities and the people in them have changed, but the changes are just big enough to be noticeable. Paris finally opened their new tram line; the construction in the Pasing Bahnhof has advanced nicely. My friends, while essentially the same people, have adjusted their ambitions, gotten new jobs, found new significant others, gotten engaged, grown or cut their hair, acquired a new tattoo…It’s like turning one page in a cartoon flip book, and it’s both sad and happy. It’s a reminder that I don’t live there anymore and am missing so much, but also reassurance that I can leave and still come back whenever. I can have as many “homes” as I want. I also like it when people clue me into how I’m evolving. As long as they’re nice about it.
The food is good. I almost said better, but I have to admit there are American food items that I miss when I can’t have them (I’m thinking cinnamon coconut butter and black beans). I don’t miss American food too much though because I’m busy stuffing my face with coffee éclairs and—forgive the cliché—real baguettes in Paris and mango-vanilla rahmjoghurt and the German interpretation of Indian food in Munich. Coffee éclairs, for those who don’t know, are the most caloric and delicious way of getting caffeine into your bloodstream. I buy them from the Simply in Châtillon because that’s where they’re the cheapest and I can pay for them at a machine that accepts pennies. Plus they come with an ingredient list to assure me that they haven’t snuck in any hazelnuts or gelatin, which is unfortunately always a souci of mine in French bakeries. Cause I apparently invented food allergies and the desire to not eat pigs. Anyway, the “problem” with getting éclairs at Simply is that they’re packaged in pairs, so I have to eat two. It’s really okay though. Walking everywhere, including up many a stair=permission to eat whatever I want.
A few more things I am looking forward to: tips and sales tax are always included. The price that something is labeled is the price that it is. Public transportation is much more safe and efficient than it is in any American city, unless maybe you stay out until the wee hours of the morning, and god knows I never do that anymore. Really, the only part I’m not looking forward to is leaving.
July 17, 2013
My internship is almost over. Back in March when I went in for an interview, they told me they ask interns to stay at least eight weeks. Wanting to suck up (and realizing that flights from Paris are for some reason cheaper later in July) I said I would stay for nine weeks. As other interns announced their departures, I regretted saying that I could stay so long. I foresaw myself sitting alone in the conference room, waiting for an attorney to come give me an assignment while passing hour upon hour browsing food blogs and watching my tan fade. But, my supervisor asked me to stay, and I suck at saying no.
And much to everyone’s surprise, the last few days the assignments have actually been coming in pretty steadily. Instead of doing work 40% of the time and nothing 60% of the time, I’d estimate that those percentages have flipped and I’m now doing something useful 60% of the time. However, I’m giving myself permission to come in at ten and leave at four, because the first and last hour of my day are when I’m least likely to h