I'll admit it, today was rough.
Sunday can be a risk. Taking a day off can be an unexpectedly abrasive experience; dropping the concerns and frenetic pace of the weekdays leaves us totally bare. We take it for granted but work protects us from the dangers of self-reflection, and without that shield we are prone to sudden bouts of melancholy. Or some bullshit like that.
Alternatively, it could have just been one of those days where nothing seems to go right. I'd slated myself for a lazy Sunday, hoping to engage in some exploration peppered with one or two errands. Getting off the metro at Nation, my first stop was at the mecca of electronics part suppliers in Paris: Selectronic. Before you give me a hard time for giving a glorified Radio Shack religious significance, let me first encourage you to shut up, and secondly point out that a good electronics store can be very, very hard to find. Actually this very second I think there might be a secret similarity between boutique electronics stores and video stores. In fact, try to imagine your local video store, you know, the one staffed by two balds guys with beards like old brooms, guy who understand that a Wednesday well lived is a Wednesday spent watching all the Muppet movies back to back while tipsy on Narragansett Lager? Well a lot of electronics stores are kind of the same. You won't make any money selling op-amp kits and DIY burglar alarms, so if you're going to run an electronic store you're going to have to love it. You're going to have to live it, literally live inside the store, arguing with socially confused customers and taking inventory of millions of pieces of minute, hyper-expensive merchandise. Unless you live it so hard it starts to rub off on your personality, it's not likely that you're going to stay open long. Maybe now you'll understand why I was so excited to visit to this place: going to a real electronics store is like stepping inside another person, someone interesting and knowledgeable and generous and weirdly enthusiastic, but in a completely charming way. It's a chance to recharge your batteries, specifically those batteries that help you step outside, look at an interesting leaf or hear a funny sound, and think, "Man, there's some really interesting shit out here in the world."
Anyways Selectronic was closed. Bummer. Turns out I'd forgotten Sam's tenet of Paris #1:
No matter, there was plenty left on the agenda. Next up was a visit to Mains d'OEuvres, an interesting spot that I'd located in northern Paris, near the Marché aux Puces that I blogged about last Sunday. From what I could gather I was headed to an interesting, open artists collective, basically a maker space with a strong aesthetic sense. You can see if you visit the website that they have this super cool installation called Centre Art Sensitif, a giant collection of various sensors as a way to help people understand how they can play with data. Anyway I was excited to see it and I was excited to get some work done on this haptics project I needed finished by Tuesday. Ah, but how soon we forget:
Granted the space wasn't completely closed, but it turned out to be different than I expected. To be honest I was hoping for something a bit more like a Noisebridge or a NYC Resistor, a place where I could chill with other people feverishly involved in almost self-effacingly useless projects. Instead I found a pretty great music venue with some by-the-hour studios,a closed cafe and a big empty installation space.
So I trekked onward. Last on my list of places to visit was the Pont des Arts, which I'd been told was not only beautiful but also the perfect spot for boozy picnics. With hopes of finding my Dolores Park I checked the address I'd written down: 43 Rue Marx Dormoy. I hop on the train at Port de Clignancourt and head south. When I get off I feel somewhat confused: I recognize this place. This is the same neighborhood I was at yesterday, near where I found the hipsters. There weren't any parks here, as far as I could remember. Maybe I had the wrong address, except no, that's definitely the right address. Number 45 was a halal lunch deli, 43 was a garage door with no name attached. At this point, I hate to say, I was starting to feel a little bitchy.
I started walking. At this point I just wanted to go home and get something, anything done, do I decided to head west across the train tracks up to Marcadet-Poissonniers. This walk started out the low point of my trip so far. Vistas like this one didn't help much.
Somewhere near the top of the list of things I like to complain about is not having anything really to complain about. Walking through Paris on a bright Sunday afternoon, with a full stomach and a day job that lets me travel wherever I want, I felt like complaining was the last thing I could feel justified in doing. And yet at that moment I was most definitely not having fun. I started to think about how the total and complete freedom I enjoyed every day was actually sort of terrifying. Liberty comes with its own pressures: every day lived to anything less that its fullest feels like a sin, but keeping every day full can be rough. If I was walking through a shitty part of Paris on a hot day with a full backpack it wasn't because I was impoverished or oppressed or wanting but because I fucked up. Sunday challenged me to make the most of it and I failed.
This was the sort of crap I was thinking when I started walking through the projects. This is the sort of crap I was thinking when I started seeing some pretty astonishing street art.
This is the sort of crap I was thinking when I walked into some random store to refill my prepaid phone and found a business I didn't know existed: country calling cocoons. You have to imagine walking into what from the inside looks like a barn for people--an empty, unadorned commercial space divided into two-foot-squared booths by pieces of scrap wood. Inside each of these is a single phone and a piece of paper with a country and a price written on it in permanent marker. Kenya, 26 centimes. Algeria, 28 centimes. This was a place where people who have nothing come to call home. Like me, these were people whose families were completely unreachable, but unlike me paying to talk to their families was a big deal. It was worth giving up a substantial chunk of ones income to sit inside a cramped, smelly box and talk in the pseudo-privacy of a shoulder-high wall.
I don't want to diminish it by overselling it but I definitely had a moment of self awareness. I decided to walk out of that place and pull myself together. Yes, living alone in a foreign city is hard. Yes, having complete control over ones own life is demanding. Yes, complaining about either of those things is ridiculous. Sure, rising to a challenge requires effort but summoning that effort is exactly what makes shit worth doing. It's something like when you see a dog running around outside. You see that sun-crazed mutt sprinting back and forth, panting and nearly falling over from exhaustion and yet you can tell he's never been happier in his entire life. My theory: exertion is actually fun. Exertion is actually one of the best things a living being can experience, but we've gotten so good at avoiding exertion that we forget how great it can be.
Well I may not be done bitching about how hard it is to have things easy, but I'm going to try to have a little more perspective. And wouldn't you know it, on the ride home I took a nice, deep listen and it was like I was hearing the metro for the first time. Wheels screeching, steam, echos, underground borborygmous, all of it rippling down the tunnels and out into the darkness.
Sunday can be a risk. Taking a day off can be an unexpectedly abrasive experience; dropping the concerns and frenetic pace of the weekdays leaves us totally bare. We take it for granted but work protects us from the dangers of self-reflection, and without that shield we are prone to sudden bouts of melancholy. Or some bullshit like that.
Alternatively, it could have just been one of those days where nothing seems to go right. I'd slated myself for a lazy Sunday, hoping to engage in some exploration peppered with one or two errands. Getting off the metro at Nation, my first stop was at the mecca of electronics part suppliers in Paris: Selectronic. Before you give me a hard time for giving a glorified Radio Shack religious significance, let me first encourage you to shut up, and secondly point out that a good electronics store can be very, very hard to find. Actually this very second I think there might be a secret similarity between boutique electronics stores and video stores. In fact, try to imagine your local video store, you know, the one staffed by two balds guys with beards like old brooms, guy who understand that a Wednesday well lived is a Wednesday spent watching all the Muppet movies back to back while tipsy on Narragansett Lager? Well a lot of electronics stores are kind of the same. You won't make any money selling op-amp kits and DIY burglar alarms, so if you're going to run an electronic store you're going to have to love it. You're going to have to live it, literally live inside the store, arguing with socially confused customers and taking inventory of millions of pieces of minute, hyper-expensive merchandise. Unless you live it so hard it starts to rub off on your personality, it's not likely that you're going to stay open long. Maybe now you'll understand why I was so excited to visit to this place: going to a real electronics store is like stepping inside another person, someone interesting and knowledgeable and generous and weirdly enthusiastic, but in a completely charming way. It's a chance to recharge your batteries, specifically those batteries that help you step outside, look at an interesting leaf or hear a funny sound, and think, "Man, there's some really interesting shit out here in the world."
Anyways Selectronic was closed. Bummer. Turns out I'd forgotten Sam's tenet of Paris #1:
1. Paris: Shit closes.
No matter, there was plenty left on the agenda. Next up was a visit to Mains d'OEuvres, an interesting spot that I'd located in northern Paris, near the Marché aux Puces that I blogged about last Sunday. From what I could gather I was headed to an interesting, open artists collective, basically a maker space with a strong aesthetic sense. You can see if you visit the website that they have this super cool installation called Centre Art Sensitif, a giant collection of various sensors as a way to help people understand how they can play with data. Anyway I was excited to see it and I was excited to get some work done on this haptics project I needed finished by Tuesday. Ah, but how soon we forget:
1. Paris: Shit closes.
Granted the space wasn't completely closed, but it turned out to be different than I expected. To be honest I was hoping for something a bit more like a Noisebridge or a NYC Resistor, a place where I could chill with other people feverishly involved in almost self-effacingly useless projects. Instead I found a pretty great music venue with some by-the-hour studios,a closed cafe and a big empty installation space.
So I trekked onward. Last on my list of places to visit was the Pont des Arts, which I'd been told was not only beautiful but also the perfect spot for boozy picnics. With hopes of finding my Dolores Park I checked the address I'd written down: 43 Rue Marx Dormoy. I hop on the train at Port de Clignancourt and head south. When I get off I feel somewhat confused: I recognize this place. This is the same neighborhood I was at yesterday, near where I found the hipsters. There weren't any parks here, as far as I could remember. Maybe I had the wrong address, except no, that's definitely the right address. Number 45 was a halal lunch deli, 43 was a garage door with no name attached. At this point, I hate to say, I was starting to feel a little bitchy.
I started walking. At this point I just wanted to go home and get something, anything done, do I decided to head west across the train tracks up to Marcadet-Poissonniers. This walk started out the low point of my trip so far. Vistas like this one didn't help much.
Somewhere near the top of the list of things I like to complain about is not having anything really to complain about. Walking through Paris on a bright Sunday afternoon, with a full stomach and a day job that lets me travel wherever I want, I felt like complaining was the last thing I could feel justified in doing. And yet at that moment I was most definitely not having fun. I started to think about how the total and complete freedom I enjoyed every day was actually sort of terrifying. Liberty comes with its own pressures: every day lived to anything less that its fullest feels like a sin, but keeping every day full can be rough. If I was walking through a shitty part of Paris on a hot day with a full backpack it wasn't because I was impoverished or oppressed or wanting but because I fucked up. Sunday challenged me to make the most of it and I failed.
This was the sort of crap I was thinking when I started walking through the projects. This is the sort of crap I was thinking when I started seeing some pretty astonishing street art.
This is the sort of crap I was thinking when I walked into some random store to refill my prepaid phone and found a business I didn't know existed: country calling cocoons. You have to imagine walking into what from the inside looks like a barn for people--an empty, unadorned commercial space divided into two-foot-squared booths by pieces of scrap wood. Inside each of these is a single phone and a piece of paper with a country and a price written on it in permanent marker. Kenya, 26 centimes. Algeria, 28 centimes. This was a place where people who have nothing come to call home. Like me, these were people whose families were completely unreachable, but unlike me paying to talk to their families was a big deal. It was worth giving up a substantial chunk of ones income to sit inside a cramped, smelly box and talk in the pseudo-privacy of a shoulder-high wall.
I don't want to diminish it by overselling it but I definitely had a moment of self awareness. I decided to walk out of that place and pull myself together. Yes, living alone in a foreign city is hard. Yes, having complete control over ones own life is demanding. Yes, complaining about either of those things is ridiculous. Sure, rising to a challenge requires effort but summoning that effort is exactly what makes shit worth doing. It's something like when you see a dog running around outside. You see that sun-crazed mutt sprinting back and forth, panting and nearly falling over from exhaustion and yet you can tell he's never been happier in his entire life. My theory: exertion is actually fun. Exertion is actually one of the best things a living being can experience, but we've gotten so good at avoiding exertion that we forget how great it can be.
Well I may not be done bitching about how hard it is to have things easy, but I'm going to try to have a little more perspective. And wouldn't you know it, on the ride home I took a nice, deep listen and it was like I was hearing the metro for the first time. Wheels screeching, steam, echos, underground borborygmous, all of it rippling down the tunnels and out into the darkness.
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