Season’s Greetings!

Métro Jourdain (L11), sortie rue de Belleville (20th arr), 20 December 2010

A very Métro — I mean, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to all you readers out there!

I hope that everyone is having a spectacular Solstice, I hope that that Hanukkah was happenin’, that your Festivus will be fantastic, and that Kwanzaa is completely creative, cooperative, and community-driven (q.v. Kwanzaa principles).

Okay, that right there is the “short version” of this blog. The long version is coming right up. Get your coffee, or should I say café, or vin chaud, a tisane or heck, a Diet Coke, eh? Come back, and sit down, and read. I have a lot on my mind, and was stalling on writing a post because I just could not choose what I was going to focus on, so you are going to get the smörgåsbord of blog posts. You know, the kind of one where I break all the blogging “rules” and am all over the place for around (over???) 3,000 words. One of those. (A warning: I am committing a HUGE blog no-no, and pretty much blogging the entire month here. Just giving you fair warning. I’ve tried to divide it up so you can take it in chunks, haha.)

If you are not much of a reader, please press on to at least peruse the pretty pictures. There are some good ones of holiday scenes at the end. 🙂

Ghetto Living in Paris — Part Three

A view of the Eiffel Tower from the Avenue du Président Wilson exactly here. August 2010.

I am mostly putting this photo here so you know what this post is not going to be about.

The past month I spent more time than I really want to think about researching and constructing 100 word descriptions about the top sites and points of interest in Paris, France. One hundred of these 100 word descriptions later, I am a little sick of Paris, to be truthful. 

The End of May, Part Two

The Tour Eiffel – June 7, 2010

With the best of intentions, I hoped to post this at the beginning of last week, but it turns out that it is happening now, just as we are about a week and a half from the end of  June. On the good side of that, I have been busy this past week, and have even more about which to write, and that means this blog is working to the ends for which I started it: to find a deeper, broader life for myself here in Paris. What it also means is that I have less and less time to write and post. Thus is the never-ending blogger’s dilemma: when you have time to write, there is not much to write about, but when you have a lot about which to write, there is less time to do so. It’s a pickle, ain’t it. 🙂

At any rate, without further ado, here is Part Two of The End of May.

I realized, of course, as I was writing this post that it should really be called The Beginning of June (and is now, with situational irony, being posted at the end of June). Ah well, May ended on a Monday and then the rest of the week was June. It all blends and blurs, doesn’t it. To catch you up, if you don’t have time to read the previous post, I wrote about the various adventures I’d had with some of my friends here in Paris. I wrote about my friends with much gratitude. I am sincerely grateful for the friends I have made here so far. I realized as I was writing about the things I had done in those final days of May (and the beginning of June, too) that friendship has really been the best thing about living in a city like Paris. I realize this is pretty much true of all cities and places where we live and breathe and have our being. It is often (and so it should be) the people who are with us and share our lives that have more meaning than any famous museum, pastry, or monument.

Did any of you ever see the movie or read the book Into the Wild? I saw and loved the movie. I remember the ending of the film, for which I will just give the barest details here in case you have not seen it and don’t want the ending spoiled. The protagonist, “Alexander Supertramp” aka Christopher McCandless, writes in a journal of sorts (in the margins of Dr. Zhivago, a little research turns out), “Happiness only real when shared.”

Photo found at mykdh’s tmblr page: Things I Love – January 15, 2010

It is the grand lesson he learns in the story — the moral, if you will.  I find that in my life this is absolutely true. I think one of the reasons I had so much trouble the first year I lived here in Paris was that I really did not have many people with whom I could experience Paris. It’s really not as much fun for me to visit museums and cafés and monuments by myself. It’s just a lot more fun when you have someone to hold your hand, really or metaphorically, while you see and do things. Sure, I have had to “man up” and find my own Paris cojones and get out there to see and do things on my own. I just like it a lot better when there is someone else to do things with.