... in a Starbucks restroom in Edinburgh, about 1 p.m. From inside one of the two stalls, a cellphone rings.
Yeah. What? I'm stuck on the toilet ... I dunno ... yeah... I need a drink first ... yeah, but I can't sit for seven hours on the fuckin train without a drink...no, I can't get off the toilet... I need a drink...
Have I mentioned here that I've lived in Paris for more than three years, that I hate it, that it's been the loneliest three years of my life, that it's a lovely Mecca of intellectual pretensiousness and I can't stand most of the English-speaking people I meet, that I feel a constant John Belushi-in-the-French-restaurant moment coming on every time I go out in public, that every day I'm more firmly convinced that I'm courting either insanity or the permanent loss of whatever soul I have left in pretending to be a college-educated middle-class professional and I should go back to Knoxville where I understand the rules and get the jokes except that I make too much money to ever be happy making minimum wage, and I have no idea how it is that I seem to have done everything I ever dreamed of as a kid except I hate myself and I'm numb most of the time if I'm lucky but my family thinks I'm mostly happy and one of the only redeeming qualities of my life is that I can give them that illusion and all I really want is to have enough money not to think about money all the time, to not hate my job so much I feel like throwing up in the morning, and to have a few people I don't have to explain this shit to, and maybe I'm stupid but I can't seem to hit the trifecta there, I either hate my job, or I'm poor as shit, or I can't find anyone who both speaks English and doesn't make me want to set them on fire? And yes I AM drunk AND I cut back on my meds recently, which is ill-advised since now I can actually feel something and it's not pleasant, except for the wet dreams, and I will no doubt go running back to the rhino-size dosage before long but until then I'm enjoying being my normal vile, vitriolic, unprofessional, perpetually horny self.
katie [email] said at 8:24 PM 08-30-2007: Hi Dianne. I miss you!
For what it's worth, I went off my rhinoceros medicine, too, and I hear you loud and clear. Paris is pretentious. I think you'd have a nicer time there if you enjoyed cheese. Or snails.
Sorry the IHT doesn't have a Knoxville bureau. Surely there's a happy medium somewhere, though? The UK? California? Canada?
Or good ol' DC? I'd love to have you back. It would be nice to know, like, one other person here.
shauna [email] said at 8:07 AM 08-31-2007: it might help to keep reminding yourself that your body/mood is really adjusting to not having those meds, and things will let up (relatively) in that regard in a week or two. if you can wait it out and know that you aren't crazy, the horrors will pass. like when ewan macgregor sees that dead baby on the ceiling. desperately awful will fade to merely hugely uncomfortable.
brandon [email] said at 8:56 PM 08-30-2007: "and I have no idea how it is that I seem to have done everything I ever dreamed of as a kid except I hate myself"
One of the things that helped me get over being generally pissed off all the time at everything and everyone, was learning to dream like an adult.
Fuckabuncha kid dreams, kids are stupid and annoying AND their dreams are generally retarded. Actually, the truth is that retards don't even like to have kid dreams. I want to be a pony? I want to eat cheese in Paris? I want to smoke clove cigarettes and read Camus? These are stupid dreams. Because stupid kid brains came up with them.
You're a smart, intelligent, witty little lady. Don't self-loathe. Dream grown-up dreams. Pepper your thoughts with grown-up dreams. You are a badass. You can be happy. You just have to stomp on that child inside. Treat it like prom night birth, push it out, wrap it up, stick it in the cabinet, and start dancing, you're fabulous, honey. Don't worry about the blood, somebody else will clean it up.
brandon [email] said at 9:56 AM 08-31-2007: Invest your money in a well-diversified portfolio of individual high-performing stocks, international index funds, and growth mutual funds, and perhaps even an REIT. Bonds are good to staunch risk. But remember that not all risk is bad. Management of your investments should include a healthy amount of risk with an eye toward sustained growth. Though balance is important, while you still have time to make up for market corrections, integrated risk will not harm your principle. Avoid money market accounts and CDs, which present substantial penalties both in potential earnings and in liquidity. Also, you should invest in platinum, gold, and other precious metals. When the apocalypse is upon us, these - or the gun - are you only methods of staving off the raping pillaging hordes of bestial minorities and homosexuals who will scrap us from the face of the earth like God's own wrath. These precious ingots certainly can't buy your safety, or preserve your daughter's precious sanctity, but maybe it can buy you a merciful bullet in the head, and hers, too. before the long knives come out. And the inevitable sodomy.
kiche [email] said at 10:10 AM 08-31-2007: i'm sorry dianne.
have you tried meeting people over the internet?
that may work.
i've never been to paris; but it took me years to settle into nyc (i realize paris is different).
it can be very hard being working class and moving up because most americans wh do things like live in paris are not working class and have no understanding of what it's like. america has the lowest class mobility rate of the industrialized world.
cory said at 11:14 AM 08-31-2007: Hey, Di! I think it's time to come back. We miss you, and you wouldn't be lonely in DC. Other than that, I don't have anything useful to say, except that maybe think about branching out away from newspapers. Because there's life outside of newspapers, I swear.
anthony [email] said at 2:19 AM 09-01-2007: Why do you stay in Paris? I had a great time visiting, but I hear Parisians are the very very private individuals and total snobs. Maybe the countryside would be better?
dianne [email] said at 11:00 PM 09-02-2007: Wow, you guys are really nice, especially since that was a total drunk self-pitying rant. I would like to come back to DC -- there's a life outside newspapers? Tell me more.
So many things are like the baby on the ceiling. They freak you out, then they fall on you and ... they still freak you out, but you deal with it, in between the shakes and the vomiting.
I dunno about the meds. I figure they're a devil's bargain, but it's just me paying, I got no kids to fuck up so what the hell.
I can't believe Brandon advised me to invest in an REIT. That's weirder than the baby on the ceiling. For the record -- I never dreamed about Paris as a kid, or at any other time. I dreamed about Central Asia, but then I grew up and realized how attached I am to sissy amenities like laws.
I took the job in Paris cause they wouldn't hire me full time at my job in DC. And here I stay cause of stupid pride, and greed, I guess, and cause I can't deal with the thought of editing stories about school board meetings again.
Parisians can be obnoxious, or very kind, or both, but they do tend to have an us-them outlook, and even the kindest usually freeze if they're approached by a stranger. And being alone is NOT an option here. I think of the French mindset as summed up in a recent movie title: "Ensemble, c'est tout." Being together is everything. (Unless of course I've totally missed the point of that phrase.)
OK, being together is great, as long as you're happy with whoever you're together with, but the kind of French people I think I'd be happy with are probably not the kind who speak English well and seek out the company of Americans. And, much as I enjoy learning languages, I have come to understand that I could study French for the next 20 years and half the population would still regard me as subhuman the moment they hear a trace of an accent. So fuck trying to assimilate.
