Last week, I attended a wedding. The bride’s family and mine have been close for a long time; needless to say, my sisters and I were invited. Over the years, at Shabbat meals and semahot, I’ve gotten to know — or at least recognize — many of this family’s relatives.

In the inter-’od-yishama,’ food-getting period, when I and a certain young man were passing each other, we both stopped for what to me was an obligatory hello. He is married to the first cousin of the bride, and he was dressed in a black hat and a long beard; the smile on his face was genuine. I can’t remember if he asked me what I did or if I was in school. I know he asked my age, and I told him. Twenty-two. Then, perhaps inevitably…

“Are you looking for a shidduch?”

My response came immediately: “Nooooooo.” (If I were writing in pinyin, I’d write “Nó”; I didn’t say the word very loudly, but I said it with a distinctly rising tone, beginning with my head down and lifting my chin on the follow-through. Ok, I think I’ve about overdone this image.)

A few moments pass, as the unexpected, irreverent, obnoxious response registers. I then said, (something like) “I know I’m supposed to say something like ‘thank you,’ but… [trail off]” And it was over.

Immediately afterward — hell, even now, as I write this almost a week later — I was glad, maybe even proud. It’s hard to explain the emotion, because it was mostly a hop-up-and-down, yesssssssssss feeling, as if I’d done something so awkwardly magical, so brave, so clever. What a great story this will make! Let me text everyone!

But… alas.

Background time. It’s not so much for having grown up in Flatbush that I so hate Flatbush; it’s much more for having spent my young adulthood here. So the topic of dating and shidduchim and marriage is one I’ve long since thought, emoted, upchucked, and spoken (debated?) about. Still, was I making a point? NO! I would be lying to myself (and whoever my audience happens to be) if I claim to have taken some sort of principled stand for all that is moderate and normal and righteous. I wasn’t. I lashed out from an insecure place, an aggressive place, a disingenuous place, and mocked this (I’m assuming) well-meaning dude.

Some more background. In the last year.5+, I’ve lost my religion, so to speak. Or not so to speak… I don’t observe Jewish law, and I certainly don’t affirm any of the various faith declarations I was educated to affirm. I am an apostate, I suppose. (A nice-sounding word, that. Uh-pah-steyt.) This leaves me in a particularly uncomfortable position in the Orthodox world. The trouble is, this dude had no way of knowing this. I mean, granted, I wore a kippah serugah; so, nu, he’s modern, ach veis nisht, i know a mizrachi girl! So here I was, in my Ortho get-up at an Ortho wedding, being asked by an unknowing Ortho guy, effectively, if I’m doing what Ortho guys my age do… but I messed it up. I mocked the idea, the institution; and I mocked this man. Now, I have plenty to say on the idea and the institution, mostly bad. (Sorry.) But that’s not where I was coming from.

In turns I’ve felt like a jerk, a hero, and a harmless nobody — come on, as if this guy went home and cried about our exchange — about how I dealt with it. And I ask myself, would it be better — for me, for the questioner, for the oylam — if I play the part of the religious-but-not-ready guy? “Thanks so much, but I’m really not looking right now. B’ezrat Hashem, when the time comes…” I’d feel like an ass. Am I, then, honest (and justified) if I mock the question and the institution, etc.?

Other things to say. No more for now. Thoughts?

Pax.

Last day in Paris can be summarized thusly:

There was some stuff I thought I might mail home, but I was too lazy to do that, so I stuffed everything into the bags:

The trash bags, obviously, are trash; the Ikea bag is stuff I took to the MICEFA office for their magic basement full of things for studentses to use.

The final incarnation of the showerhead:

Which was, of course, properly removed and cleaned up. Not a trace of adhesive left on the wall:

Aren’t I conscientious?

Well, the person doing the outgoing state-of-the-room assessment didn’t think so. I spent about 1.5 hours, all told, scrubbing away with a sponge and the Mister Propre wipes. No-go. I’m being billed €44 for cleaning, taken out of my room deposit. No, I didn’t get it spotless, but come on, people! What do you expect, I should go buy an industrial-strength mop and cleanser just to clean my floor this one time? Not that that would have satisfied them; the lovely lady filling out the form shook her head and muttered “Sale!” at the stains on my bathroom floor that have been there all semester and resisted several concerted efforts at their removal.

The plane rides from Charles de Gaulle to Heathrow and Heathrow to JFK were uneventful. I learned that it is much easier to go through airport security in the winter, when one has a coat and pockets to put stuff it. I also watched the movie of Watchmen, which was rather simplified from the book (which I’d read, way back, on my way to Paris), but pretty good. Though it did switch around one of my favorite lines, near the end, giving it a somewhat different meaning. Probably because they wanted the movie to have something sort of resembling a hopeful ending. Also watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, mostly to counteract the effects of the absolutely abysmal Robert Ludlum novel, The Prometheus Deception, that I’d picked up at CDG; I just wanted to remind myself that spy thrillers need not be absolutely idiotic, since Ludlum’s prose in The Prometheus Deception makes a compelling argument for scrapping the entire genre.

Anyway…

My room upon arriving and unloading all my bags:

It had been all nicely tidied up for me before arriving, too. Yeah. 5 months’ worth of stuff can rapidly un-tidy a place.

Unpacking garment bag. I didn’t have to wear anything in this bag (dress shirts, suit, ties) for the whole duration of my stay, but it was good to know the stuff was there, just in case, getting spectacularly wrinkled in the back of my closet.

So now I’m back. I’ve had fun riding the MTA subways again (I hadn’t noticed, while in Paris, that many French subways aren’t air-conditioned), walking around without danger of getting lost, and eating non-French food, and all those things that are hard to do in Paris. I haven’t taken any pictures of that. I have, however, taken a picture of my computer gloriously plugged in, directly, no funky adapter-thingy:

Innit grand?

That’s all, folks. Nothing exciting going on anymore.

Last week, I took a trip into La France Profonde — The Deepest Darkest Depths of France. A full 2 hours from Paris by train.

Here’s a train station on the way there:

This is only notable because it is the town of Vierzon, which I kept thinking was Verizon.

I took the train to Bourges:


Which is a perfectly charming little town.

I proceeded thence on to La Borne, an incredibly charming little village full of potters. There’s a pottery museum there and all, though I didn’t get a chance to see it.

Me. In La Borne.

A building. Also in La Borne.

Totem pole. This is what you get when you cross a sock monkey, an Easter egg, and Godzilla.

Another building, all castle-y like.

Building that in the middle ages had pigeons and stuff. Still does, kinda. Also, people. With whom I was staying.

Snail!

Approach to the Feu de St Jean in a nearby town. This translates literally as “St John’s Fire,” no relation to St Elmo’s Fire. St John’s Fire has to do with the day of Saint John the Baptist, and involves that timeless expression of rural celebration and latent pyromania, the bonfire.

This celebration, on Friday night, was rather subdued compared to what was to come; there was a great big stack hay and whatnot, but that wouldn’t be lit till Saturday night. There were musicians, first a duo of an accordion and an electric hurdy-gurdy. I took video of them playing, and the locals engaging in some sort of traditional dance or other, but the files have somehow vanished in between the taking and the uploading to my computer.

About half an hour into this, I noticed a flickering red glow in my peripheral vision, and turned to see flames licking up from behind a rise on the other side of the stage. My thought process was as follows:
1: Hey, there’s the bonfire!
2: Wait, the bonfire’s in another place, and it’s not supposed to happen till tomorrow.
3: So maybe that fire’s not supposed to be happening– but if it was an accident, someone would have noticed, right?
4: Okay, I should be prepared in case it is an emergency. How do you say, “I assumed the fire was intentional?” in French?

Of course, the fire turned out to be just a smaller bonfire they were lighting on Friday. Perfectly contained and so on. The musical duo was replaced by a French Cajun band, which was nice.

And that was the Deepest Depths of France. Perfectly thrilling, no?

In the meantime, pictures.

From my last visit to the St Denis campus:

Mural thingy:

The stairs and escalators, without barricades!

This still was all blocked, though:

Hey, guess what happened to the showerhead?

A while ago, the fluorescent lamp in the kitchenette stopped working. So to thaw the meat to make fajitas, I had to use the bathroom one:

Speaking of those fajitas:

A bit blurry to see, but Francophones are instructed to pronounce fajitas as “fa-ri-tas.” This, I suppose, because French doesn’t have much of an [h] sound, so the more r-type sound in the Spanish j (which, incidentally, is represented as [x] in Spanish IPA) stands out more to French-speaking ears. Why, yes, I find this fascinating. Don’t you think about these things when you read the back of fajita-kit boxes? …you do read the back of the boxes, right?

Oh, and from the Porte de Clignancourt metro station:

See the little design just under the right end of the flag design? (by the by, in vexillological technical-speak, that’s the fly end, as opposed to the hoist end) That was originally penned over the face of Marianne Faithfull on a poster advertising some concert that she did a month or two back. It’s been entertaining to watch how the graffiti ends up placed over new posters. I think it works nicely on this one, with both the stark primary colors of the flag and the dynamic yet muted photographic background.

Why yes, I did write the above paragraph just to see how over-analytical I could get.

Next post will probably have stuff about the wonders of Deep Southern France (a full 2 hours from Paris!), complete with a quaint traditional celebration that combined electric hurdy-gurdy music and pyromania.

The taller cup is all the 1- , 2- , and 5-centimes pieces I’ve amassed over my months here. They’re just really not worth carrying around, you know? The smaller cup is the 10- and 20-centimes pieces, which I use to pay the laundry machine. I suppose I’ll pay for the last load or two with the smaller-denomination coins, just to use them up. That’ll be fun if there’s anybody in line behind me (it also reminds me of a lesson I learned when preparing to leave for France: when withdrawing money to buy a few thousand euros is travelers’ checks, don’t just automatically ask for it in twenties. Firstly, the poor guy at American Express will have to count it all; secondly, the nice lady at the bank will probably assume that you’re buying drugs or paying off a hitman or whatever else people do with large wads of unmarked lower-denomination bills).

Some pretty pics of the dorms — this is a nice walkway that is quite picturesque now that there’s actual green stuff on the trees and whatnot (pictures taken around dusk, so, you know, dark):

Some building in this dorm-y school-y complex:

Dorms, from walkway:

On that same stroll, I saw all three of the cats that hang around here sort of hanging around together. Well, not together, because they’re cats and they like to be semiantisocial, but on the same patch of lawn, eyeing one another warily. I took two pictures, one without night-shot and one with, neither particularly clear:

Finally, a movie poster that has been amusing me:

The title and the little subtitle are both in English. Which is puzzling. If it was originally titled The Hangover, why re-title it but still keep it in English? If it was originally titled Very Bad Trip, why subtitle it in English? Which one of these is supposed to be more intelligible to a non-anglophone audience? Is this, in fact, an imported anglophone movie, or do the French have nobody to blame for this but themselves? These are mysterious things.

And now a fun half-translated sign in Montmartre:

It’s air conditioné! But is it also climatized?

Posted by the elevator:

Apparently their English-language spell-check is brocken.

And from Montmarte again, some artsy stuff:

This one from somewhere in the 18th:

I’m not sure if this sign has been modified officially, or whether it’s the work of some rogue vigilante duct-tapers:

And another pretty shot of Montmarte looking all summery:

In other news, I discovered earlier this week that apparently Leonard Bernstein wrote an operetta based on Voltaire’s Candide, which was the first book I read in Survey of French Lit II at Hunter. The operetta is all sorts of fun, with amusing songs about the syphilis and the Spanish Inquisition (sometimes, depending on the version, these songs are charmingly combined).

Also, I read an interesting little article in the Times about innovative cost-cutting measures at American universities. My reaction was something like this:

New York Times: “Colleges are cutting back on little things: eliminating free laundry for students–”
Me: “Wait, did you say free?”
New York Times: “–limiting students to $60 worth of free printing per semester–”
Me: “That’s 600 pages at Hunter prices!”
New York Times: “–and discontinuing free ESPN and HBO service in dorm rooms.”
Me: “Free cable in your room? You people are kidding, right?”

All of this makes me worry that Hunter might try cutting back on services at Brookdale. They’d probably have to start by eliminating luxuries like electricity, running water, and walls. Really, if you take away the walls, the place becomes much easier to manage. All the floors just kind of collapse into one, and then you only need a couple RAs, though floor meetings would be a bit hectic. This could be solved by eliminating floors as well, and turning the dorm into a large hole that goes straight through the Earth. Students could jump in, and fall all the way through to Australia, and you could count it as Study Abroad. Except, of course, they wouldn’t actually come out in Australia, but somewhere to the southwest of it:

(Incidentally, the Earth Sandwich tool thingy used to make the above graphic is quite an amusing way to pass the time, and to dash small children’s hopes of digging to China. Well, I suppose they could dig to China, but they’d need to brush up on their geometry first).

And I think I’ll stop before I go even more thoroughly off-topic.

In case you’ve ever wondered what a slowly thawing block of spaghetti looks like, here you go.

I’ve discovered some interesting thing about the way my stove works. For instance, when one leaves a Nutella-and-marzipan sandwich in a frying pan, then goes to browse YouTube and forgets about the sandwich, the stove does not likewise forget about the sandwich, but instead neatly blackens one side:

(Incidentally, I highly recommend the Nutella-and-marzipan sandwich, a true culinary marvel. Properly prepared as illustrated below:


…And yes, it does work best with pink marzipan. Or green. Anything but the generic off-white color, which is far too austere and will give the sandwich crippling self-esteem issues as it fries)

I’ve also learned some fun things about plastic and heat. It seemed like a smart idea at the beginning of the semester to invest in only disposable cups and flatware, since I could just throw it out instead of cramming it into my luggage to go back. And everything went smoothly, at least after I learned not to stir boiling soup with a plastic spoon. And then yesterday I learned that it’s probably a good idea to keep track of where the plastic cups are when one is handling hot frying pans. I poured myself a nice cup of tea, and then stared at it wondering why brown liquid was spontaneously appearing on the countertop, and fridge, and floor. Then I noticed the neat little gash burnt halfway up the cup:

In other news, the front gate to the dorms has been malfunctioning, and 50% of the time doesn’t recognize the RFID badges. The high-tech, high-security solution was to prop the gate open with a bit of wood:

At least for a day. Now they just have us buzz the front desk if the gate won’t open. Which works great when the front-desk person is actually there (in fairness, they almost always are. It’s just that, you know, there’s only one of them at any given time, so there’s still the possibility that you’ll have to stand there buzzing for a while till they come back from the bathroom or whatever).

Next up, I think we have some odd Franglais and such.

Starting at the west end of it:

And then I got distracted by the little train…

…anyway…

“Rap is worthless.”

And here’s some pictures of the train tracks, which are pretty. Well, maybe not pretty. But kinda cool-looking.

Thataways lies the hinterlands of non-Parisian France, including (more or less in this direction) Paris VIII.

Buildings!!!

Bridge over tracks.

……….

So, I started this post before at 8:30 PM China time, and I saw fireworks outside my window and grabbed my camera, my wallet, and my watch and ran out of the room before I could finish this post.  It wasn’t until I made it to the West Lake across from the hotel until I realized that I had taken the batteries out of my camera earlier in the day to charge.  So no pictures or videos =[.  After that, my roommate, got back from dinner and I, along with several other people in the program, went arcading on the Restaurant Street.  32RMB down the drain.  And this is in addition to the 300RMB I spent earlier today at Walmart.  AT WALMART!!  On my way there, I did something American.  I put my headphones on and listened to music during the train ride.  Ah, reminders of NY.

Either it’s just me or this trip is getting expensive.  You really need to be able to control your spending or you won’t last in China.  I’ve already been flushed down the toilet and have hit my head on every bend of the pipe down to the sewer.  I would have to say that the highlight for today was seeing the fireworks.  It was rather odd because everyone else knew when it was over; two minutes after the last firework, the hundred-ish people standing near the gate to the West Lake, all jumped up in unison, clapped once, and disbanded.  It was rather odd.  I wonder if there is some sort of event going on today?  Afterwards, I walked around the lake and watched some carnival games the locals were playing, like archery and throw a sack at some stuffed dogs.  The prizes weren’t that great though, but the people all seemed like they were enjoying themselves.  Especially the kids.

Side noted advice that I learned: Don’t pack your clothes away when they are still wet.  It doesn’t smell as nice as it should afterwards. =\  Who knew!?