May 2009

Breaking my own rule*.

May 30, 2009

I dated a lot last summer.
Date is not quite the right word, but that’s what I’ll call it. It was’t Peter Pan–collar-and-poodle-skirt, two-straws-at-the-soda-shop dating. It was not-many-clothes-at-all, happy-hour-and-stumbling-into-the-night dating.
There were quite a few men in and out of my life (five, at one point), and I called it dating because there was no boyfriend.

Dating was exhausting.
Because when you’re seeing five people at once, there are bound to be complications — scheduling conflicts, at least. And white lies told to avoid hurt feelings. And too much information floating around.
As much as I like attention, especially from men — the more, the better, usually — I started to feel cheap, spreading myself so thin. Dating became emotionally debilitating. Which was as much thanks to the men in question as it was the overscheduled, oversexed madness and my psychological state at the time.

And so, after the chaos and folly of last year — culminating in the flaming destruction of not one but two disastrous relationships in the frame of about four months — this summer was to be a time where I simply did not date.
I had grand designs of rediscovering my sanity and enjoying a bout of self-induced celibacy, beginning with my solo transatlantic journey.
But then I met someone.
A couple of weeks before Paris, I met someone.
Who started as this faraway figure I admired for reasons I only sort of understood. Who became a friend. Who kissed me unexpectedly. And I’m now…dating him.
Fluid and natural and unnervingly…simple.

Gradually, I am learning a new, better definition of the word “date.”
(Related: The word “men” is taking on a more positive connotation as well.)

Date \ˈdāt\ noun
1 a: the time at which an event occurs < the date of his birth> b: a statement of the time of execution or making < the date on the letter>
2: duration
3: the period of time to which something belongs
4 a: an appointment to meet at a specified time; especially: a social engagement between two persons that often has a romantic character b: a person with whom one has a usually romantic date
5: see also: Friday, May 29, 2009

At 7:15, my doorbell rang. After having changed my outfit four times, I gave myself one last glance in the mirror, nodded firmly and trotted down the stairs to meet him.
Through the dirty glass of my building’s front door, he stood waiting for me, shirt tucked in, cellophane-wrapped flowers in hand.
Flowers.
No one brings flowers.
He brought flowers.
I put them in water while he waited, then we walked to the Brown Line and rode downtown with our Trader Joe’s bag filled with picnic food.
At Millennium Park, night was beginning to fall, and Pritzker Pavilion was filling with Polish Chicagoans celebrating the fall of communism in their home country with music and dance. (We had no idea the concert was even happening.)
We spread out our blanket — OK, a beach towel that was really too small for both of us — and made barbecue-pork sandwiches with cole slaw and carrot sticks and sparkling water. And chocolate-covered cookies (to die for) called Joe-Joes.
We endured the music as long as we could then walked east to the lakefront and through the harbors. In and out of orange pools of streetlight, we kissed and talked about our families. Yachts (mine) and house painting (his) and grandparental quirks (both of us). We found ourselves looking across the Chicago River at Navy Pier, and I stared at the flashing lights on the Ferris wheel while we had a Very Serious Conversation about love and trust, and the past and moving on from it. I hope.
Strolling along the river, I watched workers scrub down the decks and chairs of the tour boats from a long, sunny day full of tourists. Up the stairs and back to Michigan Avenue, we waded through a crowd of pedestrians and made our way toward the El again — it had felt like we owned the city, walking alone by the water. Maybe we still did, even with other people around.
I nodded off on his shoulder and he brushed the hair from my forehead to kiss me as the train rumbled homeward.
Fluid and natural and simple.

This is dating.
Worth the wait to redefine.

“I’m scared to call you my girlfriend,” he said.
“Then don’t,” I said. “Wait until it doesn’t scare you anymore.”

* of no loveblogging.

8 comments

Paris: Seeing the world through rosé-colored glasses.

May 27, 2009

Here’s a great travel tip: Don’t bike in a foreign city when under the influence of alcohol. Especially pink wine.

I nearly joined the ranks of Père Lachaise’s dearly departed shortly after polishing off a “farewell, Paris” bottle of rosé at Lavinia, a great wine cellar and restaurant near my hotel where you can pick out a bottle from the shop downstairs and drink it in the upstairs bar — at the shop cost, with no corkage fee. And Riedel stemware. And far be it from me to waste perfectly good wine; of course I was going to drink the entire bottle.

It’s possible I will never fully know what it is I ate along with that bottle of wine. But it involved four pieces of toasted baguette with four different toppings. One of them was smoked salmon; another was some kind of cheese. The other two shall remain a mystery, though one may have been foie gras. Which I will never eat again. Delicacy, my eye. Yuck.
But without those mystery snacks, I’d have taken a fatal spill down the stairs or hit my head on the park bench unlocking my bike, and never have made it to the point in my evening where I, uh, hit a car.

Yeah.

Everything was going swimmingly with my ride back to the Marais, where I would return my bicycle and then walk (stumble?) to dinner. Until the gendarme at the gates to the Tuileries told me the park was about to close. So I took to the mean streets of Paris. During rush hour. Hammskied.
But it was all right. Because Paris has dedicated bike lanes. Unless they’re bike lanes shared with buses. Which are much bigger than me. So I’m riding along, something startles me (probably a bus, but in my state, it could have been anything), and suddenly I am intimately aware that whatever separates the buses and bikes from the other cars is much more than a solid white line. Designed, presumably, to keep them from doing what I was about to do. I hit the mini-median in an attempt to drift out of harm’s way, lost my balance and keeled over, right into the door of a Peugeot.
I am not a small person. That tiny Peugeot, which could have passed for a wind-up car, didn’t stand a chance.
Obviously, when the woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window and started ranting in French, I yelled as loudly and rapidly as I could, “Non, non, d’accord! Je m’excuse! Désolé! Je me suis trompée! C’est d’accord!” Loosely translated? “I’ve never ridden a bike here before! And I’m wasted! I’m going to pedal away now and be long gone before you realize there’s a huge dent in your back door! Bye!”

The other people in the bike lane — in their damn rented Vélibs! — law-abiding citizens wearing helmets and definitely without a metric ton of fermented grapes in their systems, asked if I was all right. I wasn’t even fazed by all this, still knowing full well that it could have gone much worse. I explained (again, loosely) that Parisian drivers are nuts and that biking in Chicago is much less treacherous.
They nodded understandingly, and I pedaled away as fast as my wobbly, inebriated legs could muster. After a few more minutes, I made it back to the bike return without a map — wine gives me super powers, apparently — then proved I am equally disastrous on foot as I am on two wheels: I promptly tripped on my feet and faceplanted as soon as I made it to the sidewalk.

And please believe I was back at a brasserie not three hours later, at it again. When in Rome…

2 comments

Paris: Père Lachaise.

May 27, 2009

This is a continuation of the previous post, which got way too long while I was writing during my 4,256 hours of delay between Charlotte and Chicago last night.

I paid the extra 10 € to keep my bike for the rest of the day and took the opportunity to make my way up to Père Lachaise cemetery in the 20th arrondissement. But not before I took a wrong street off the Bastille’s traffic circle and wound up in the middle of a pretty unsavory area. Quick travel tip: If you’re in Paris and see a KFC or Pizza Hut? Run.
Of all the places I could have gone, why a cemetery? Quiet, for one thing. Absolutely no one around, except for the few people sitting among the tombstones — hey, morbid — and the paparazzi-caliber group of revelers hovering around Jim Morrison’s grave. That, of course, is the other reason I’d gone: After seeing where Jim Morrison died on the morning’s tour, I thought, “Why not see where he’s buried, too?” I wandered among the graves for about an hour and a half before I found it snapped the picture I’d promised my rock-star friend.
Looking at the names and epitaphs, written in every language, it was hard not to sit for hours and imagine the life stories. It’s what I do. There were crumbling headstones covered in moss, dating back to hundreds of years ago, mixed in with polished marble tombs erected in the past ten. One woman had laid fresh flowers on a grave and was brushing off the leaves and dust that had gathered since her last visit with a small broom; I saw another man walking up a path toward a gravesite with two watering cans to tend.
Some of the newer graves had enameled photos above the name of the person who had died, and some of the oldest were so desecrated with etchings and obscene graffiti that they should just be knocked down and the memory of whomever it belonged to preserved in another way. How sad.
I want to be cremated.

1 comment

Paris: Pedal pusher.

May 27, 2009

Don’t get me wrong: I love walking. I do.
But any self-respecting pedometer would have given up after my first couple of days in Paris; my calves were so tired that the rest of my body would twitch with sympathy at the end of the day. I needed another way to get around, and you miss the whole city when you’re underground on the Métro.

So I spent an hour and a half a few days ago, standing in the hot sun with a line of impatient Europeans behind me, feebly attempting to rent a bike from one of the Vélib kiosks around the city. My Visa card, with its quaint little magnetic stripe, lacked the magical chip that would allow me access to the more desirable features of European banking — and one of Paris’ most desirable city services, this nearly free program that allows anyone to rent a bike from anywhere in the city, ride it around then leave it anywhere else there’s a kiosk.
Fat American tail between my legs, I returned to my hotel and Googled “Paris bike rental,” knowing full well that all those smug Europeans were laughing at my misery as they pedaled away on their matching bicycles. Grr. The city’s biggest rental and touring company, Fat Tire, had sold out every tour until after I left; even begging on the phone and choking back tears that I was SO ALONE AND REALLY JUST WANTED TO GO RIDE AROUND WITH SOME NICE PEOPLE was useless. The search continued. I happened on one company with a fantastic website, Bike About Tours. And within 10 minutes, before I knew what was happening, my blind rage had booked me a guided tour of the city for Monday morning. Well, all right.

Monday morning arrived, and like every other day since I’d arrived, it was sunny, warm and breezy. I headed to meet my group near the Charlemagne statue outside the Notre Dame cathedral, but my keen sense of direction and total inability to read a map led me to the far opposite end of the Ile de la Cité, behind the Palais de Justice. So I arrived just a few minutes before we were scheduled to leave, cramming the last bite of a pain au chocolate into my face (fat American).
Naturally, as I was the only person in Paris not vacationing with the love of my life, I also was the only party of one on the day’s tour. Except for an obnoxious older man whose fiancée had elected to stay behind and do something else in Paris that day. So, in his codependent boredom, he asked inane architectural questions. Like what those round rooms on the corner of that building were called. Or why there were so few buildings made with red brick, like the façade of the Place des Vosges. Wish you’d come along, Dear Fiancée, and kept your husband-to-be’s mouth erstwhile occupied!

Now, our guide. Oh goodness. Let’s ignore, for a moment, the very obvious wedding ring and constant mentions of his wife. Our tour guide, Paul, an ex-pat Aussie who moved to Paris nine years ago to be with the woman he loved — all right, so I can’t ignore it — well, he was hot. And hilarious. And offbeat. And totally rocked the rugged cyclist look. With his shaggy hair and perfect calf muscles and logo T-shirt for this company he and his friend had started three years ago, the one his dad still refuses to acknowledge as a real business. And his mind-boggling combination of perfect French skills and this endlessly endearing Australian accent, and the way he uses the word “discover” to talk about showing us places. And his sick sense of humor, like showing us a sculpture along the Seine that he calls “the Masturbator” and a mermaid fountain near the Centre Pompidou that shoots water from its breasts.
Also, he wasn’t French. (I may get to that in another post. Really.)

So we hopped on our fabulous folding bikes — how very European — and began our tour. Which started in the Marais at the Holocaust museum then wound its way through back streets of the fourth arrondissement, including a stop to stare at the Republican Guard’s thoroughbreds in training, at the apartment building where Jim Morrison died in his bathtub (No. 17) and a look at a few “works” by Paris’ most famous graffiti artist, Space Invader. The most subversive mosaics I’ve ever seen, if that’s even possible. He invades spaces…with little tile pictures of ‘80s video game characters. Space Invader: get it?! Yeah. I didn’t either.
From the fourth, we headed to the Bastille and biked across the canal, gazed into the distance at the four glass buildings of the national library, designed to look like open books, then past the Jardin des Plantes and Paris’ largest mosque (which has a . Then we crossed the Seine and were in the fifth arrondissement, the Quartier Latin, where were darted through more back streets, peered into “secret courtyards” and saw the city’s oldest restaurant, which I’d never have been able to find on my own.
We stopped for lunch at a beautiful boulangerie and patisserie, Paul, which turned out to be like a French Panera. (Gross.) Tour guide Paul stood at the counter and helped everyone order, then I stepped up like a BADASS and was all, demander-ing mon déjeuner comme une vraie française. Don’t act like you’re not impressed, hot tour guide. There’s still time: Move. Be with me. We need bike tours in Chicago, too. I practically huffed my sandwich — my ham sandwich, my ham and BUTTER sandwich — and snarfed down half a chocolate éclair before we got back on our bikes to finish out the tour.

My favorite part of the tour had to be breaking the law — probably because we were breaking the law — riding our bikes through the entry and all around the pyramids and fountains of the Louvre’s courtyards. During this time, a guy in our group broke the seat off his bike (I don’t even know how you do that) and someone spotted Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek fame walking with his girlfriend. Excitement, ahoy: Celebrities, they’re just like us!

By the end of our four hours together, I was kicking myself for not booking this tour immediately upon my arrival. Though there are a lot of things I’d have done differently on this trip, like researching restaurants more in advance (every meal was a anxiety attack waiting to happen), but Paul was an amazing resource for the sorts of off-the-beaten-path things I would have loved to spend more time seeing. Next time.

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Paris: Back in the USA.

May 26, 2009

I still have a few more posts to write about my abbreviated week in Paris (I left Tuesday and returned Tuesday but really had only five days on the ground in France), but I’m sitting at the airport in Charlotte just happy to be home. And I’m not even…home, really.
But in less than four hours, I will be.
My “knight in shining Camry,” as one of my friends calls him, is coming to O’Hare to collect me, and I am so excited to see my apartment that it’s really…sort of ridiculous. Being homesick after just a week in one of the most beautiful cities in the world means one of two things: that I really love Chicago and have amazing, totally missable friends, or that I’m totally pathetic.
Maybe a little of column A and a little of column B.
Either way.

I found out yesterday morning, when attempting to read a French newspaper (horoscopes, en français!) that rail workers on some lines, including the one that goes to the airport, were going on strike today. (They do that a lot; I think they get bored because they all have such great lives, so they have to invent problems and stage protests or strikes.) So I had to improvise a new route. Which meant: THE BUS.
The trip out of the city wound through more places I hadn’t seen. But near the end, we climbed a hill that felt familiar: It was an area of Montmartre I’d explored on foot the first morning I was in town, totally delirious after a long flight and stinging a bit from the culture shock.
Full circle.

My God, what a wonderful trip this has been. Rejuvenating and exhausting all at once.
Yesterday was the best day of my entire visit. I will write about it later — in great detail, or as much as I can remember from everything I saw and did — but for now I’m just going to soak it up. After four hours of sleep last night (I’ll write about that, too, oof), I wound up sleeping for almost my entire flight, waking up only to eat some surprisingly delicious chicken and watch Bride Wars, which made me cry and filled me with shame.

What a rude awakening, though: This morning, even the prerecorded announcement on the bus to the airport seemed beautiful and romantic; here in North Carolina, some people could read Shakespeare in their twangy, Dirty Southern accents and still sound common.
Still? Elated to be back on American soil.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s an iced chai somewhere in here with my name on it.

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