I'm dreaming of what?

Due to uncertainty in my work schedule and lack of planning ahead on plane ticket prices, I'm not going back east for Christmas this year. It's not a big deal, I guess. I was in France last year and I was in the South on tour the year before that. To be honest, I'm really not that big on Christmas to begin with; I think Thanksgiving is the best American holiday and Halloween is a distant second. But I have to say that I was looking forward to the snow. It's almost like the cold and the snow are a part of me, as much an aspect of my culture as local art or music. I feel like My People are, by default, dressed in layers ranging from hoodies to parkas, all the way from October to April. My People spend three months out of the year subsisting on hot chocolate and maybe warm apple cider. My People know how to drive in slippery conditions and know how to properly use the windshield defogger. Though My People are not necessarily MountainDewXtreme enough to go snowboarding, they all know at least three good spots to go sledding. My People love snow days. So I feel a little lost without any snow in the foreseeable future.

Come to think of it, I got just a taste of it in August, actually, up in Lake Tahoe.
...though maybe mountain snow is cheating.

Anyway, it's definitely the time of year when you know, beyond all possible doubt, that every reasonable person working in a retail store somewhere is already sick of Christmas music. Candy Canes abound. But it's still... Los Angeles. Do you have any idea how silly Christmas lights look on palm trees?

This time last year I was in Brittany, where it pours incredibly cold rain in the winter, but rarely snows. The science there escapes me, to be honest. In early December, when Emily and Jerome were still around, we went up to the coast near Plouha, stood huddled up on the rocky cliffs and peered over the sides at the thrashing water below while the winter wind combed through the long tufts of grass that grow there.

Later Emily went back to the States and winter vacation started and I was the only one left on the school campus. From the refectory to the dorms, all the classroom buildings and offices, everyone was gone for the break. And I was the only one without anywhere to go, the only one passing through that big metal gate at night, around the dark corners in the half-light. So they turned off the institutional oil heat and supplied me with a small electric heater, which worked out alright. I turned it off when I went out during the day, to the market or the library, so my room was always frigid when I returned. (Why is Inside-Cold so much colder than Outside-Cold?) Those twenty minutes waiting for the heater to warm up the room were always 'fun' in that at-least-it's-never-dull kind of way.
I spent a lot of time under blankets that winter. Under blankets, watching VHS movies (WTF, PAL speed-up?) from the local library with the amazing AV section, taking days to binge on one director at a time, Hitchcock (subtitled), Truffaut, Woody Allen (subtitled, poorly), Polanksi (st), Besson, Godard, Jarmusch (st, p), Tarkovsky(st), blah blah.
The school has these energy-saving light switches in the hallways that all run on a timer. There is a round button, illuminated by a thin orange circle, and when you push it, a soft grinding sound starts, and you get about two minutes to get where you're going, and then it turns off again, to prevent it being left on unnecessarily. A good idea for an institution. Hell, a good idea in general. But it does mean that at night, the hallway is always really dark in the time it takes to get from your room (or the kitchen, or wherever) to that little orange circle. That, combined with the fact that I was all alone in this big building, combined with the creaky, smooth hardwood floors, and the five-hundred-year-old stone stairs, so well-used that there is a scoop worn out of the center of them, made it pretty eerie to watch Hitchcock up in the living room and then creep back to my bedroom, dashing around corners to the next little button to illuminate the next (creaky) segment of the walk.

Actually, now that I think of it, one of the lights in the bathroom was on the same setup, so a couple of times I was surprised, two minutes into a shower (after manually turning on the electric water heater, also turned off during break) when I was left in darkness. Showering in the dark is actually kind of nice, it turns out.

Maybe it's just that I'm never satisfied. Always longing after whatever season it isn't. After winter break, in the middle of that winter that was heavy and dark, without giving the satisfaction of snow, I drove a borrowed car on the weekends to other places on the coast, mostly the beaches, bundled up against the wind and the rain, looking longingly at the sand and the waves crashing against rocks and even the German bunkers from the war. I remember picturing those same beaches in the summer, and picturing myself returning there, thinking, "Five months and forty degrees from now." I wanted to go and sit by myself on the beach and get sand in between the pages of all my favorite drunk authors, maybe make some new friendships that would only last twenty minutes, absorb a little sun, lie there and think about things. I remember thinking how much I wanted to eat summer food, bread and fruit, let the juice get all over my fingers and leave me sticky and preoccupied about it until I rinsed them off in the sea. Maybe that would leave them all salty, but that's probably better, anyway.

So maybe I always displace myself a few months or a few thousand miles ahead. In the meantime, there's good news: I just found out where to ice skate in Los Angeles. And I can drink warm apple cider even if it's not that cold out.

Gallic Scrapbook

I've been thinking a lot about France lately. Not just this past year and teaching English and all, but the bicycle tour I did the spring before, and the summer in school in Lyon. And I realized that I never really told people all the stories, and especially all the things that aren't exactly stories but were so much more important at the time. I think that I sort of wanted to keep them private, keep those memories for myself, only allowing bits and pieces out to anyone else, but recently I am kind of scared that I will start to lose the things that mattered most to me while I was there. I also feel like I owe it to friends in the Eastern Standard time zone, since I didn't really stay and hang out at all in between Brittany and LA, and only gave short, predictable answers to the question "How was France?"

I feel like I have forgotten a lot, not in a permanent loss kind of way, but in a temporary, just-need-to-jog-it-loose kind of way. Hopefully this will help.


I remember springtime in Brittany, unfolding on schedule the second week in March, but still taking everyone by surprise and lifting our spirits in spite of ourselves. I remember the first few days of sunshine, when we didn't dare hope it would continue because we didn't want to jinx it, so Silvia couldn't help but spill out a running commentary of the unexpected beauty of every small glinting thing we crossed, basking in the same sunlight but all seeming fresh and new and different, like the deep glowing green of ducks' necks on a pond or glimmering jewelry in a shop window. I remember the warmth, at long last, that let us take off our jackets, only to remember that we had to cover ourselves (due to Catholicism) before entering the basilica in Quintin, which was just as well because the dark inside of the chapel didn't yet know that winter was over and was thus still cold enough that we could see our breath, an extra treat in the few daring rays of colorful light trickling down from the handful of stained-glass windows depicting Our Lord and Saviour or Whatever. I remember whistling as quietly as possible to hear the sound reflected and carried up throughout the Gothic arches in the ceiling, out of my control after passing through my lips, but still my responsibility in case any sour-faced church personnel appeared. Fortunately they did not, and I was able to experiment some with different acoustic decay times from different locations in the chapel, as well as different intervals and pitch registers, even using the reverberation to harmonize a little. Silvia definitely frowned at me in that particularly Italian way and I felt compelled to explain that she shouldn't bother, that whistling in churches was one of my favorite things, so no amount of frowning would make me stop.

I recall how a few weeks later, it turned out that our apprehension was either well-founded or coincidentally accurate; this brief respite didn't last forever. I awoke one morning shivering and saw through the window that the whole world (or Brittany, at least) was bathed in white. There was a fog so thick that I couldn't see three rows deep into the cemetery across the way, but it wasn't grey. The light permeating through the fog was strange, almost eerie; it was as if there were no clouds actually blocking the sun and it would have been a bright, cheery day, if only I had been elevated sixty feet in the air. As it was, it made everything quite beautiful, since there was plenty of light, but the limited range of visibility forced everyone to focus on the nearby, perceptible objects more closely, isolating them for analysis. This was my impression, anyway.

And along with the fog came the Dutch, two boxy European vans' worth of exchange students, all buzzing in that Germanic, loud, fashion-forward way, prone to some combination of bangly bracelets, blond layered hair and tiny, round eyeglasses. Recognizable from at least sixty yards. Their French was awful. Negligible, even, so everyone spoke in English. I am proud to mention that my French kids' English was at least as good as theirs, even though I had always had the impression that Dutch people are born speaking seven languages fluently, with English chief among them. I ended up traveling with the group as a chaperone, and this somehow felt more adult, even, than teaching. I remember that the bus ride was the first time I truly cursed the existence of portable music and loudspeakers (read: modern cell phones), and in particular their popularity with youths in every industrialized country in the world.

People of Earth: Hip-hop sounds terrible through tiny speakers. Make a note of it.

Damn, did I feel old.


Much more to come! Old bars, the chapel at the school, weird american hangups! Poorly designed parking garages! Immigration issues!