hard truths.

life in paris is going incredibly well. it's hard to believe i only have seven weeks left here, then it's on to another chapter in my life. we're still in the basic process of planning, so im going to keep it under wraps until decisions have been made. but here's a little hint of what might possibly be in my future: 

well, ive been inspired by a recent blogging trend. blogs are edited, secrets i am reluctant to share are omitted, and things i am ashamed of in real life are hidden and kept quiet.

i am not ashamed of that. my blog isnt fake, nor is it overly happy. there are just a few things im not ready to share with the entire world. since this post is about honesty, there are even a couple of things i'd share with the world, but not with the family who reads this blog. something about anonymity makes it easier to confess that which plagues you. a bunch of strangers worried about me is nothing like my family worrying.

but in the spirit of honesty, im going to open up a little part of me i had kept closed.

my mother has/had cancer. im not really sure what the technical terms mean, 'remission' and 'markers'. im too far away, not in constant contact, for my parents to explain properly. [this is the only picture of her i have on my computer. she doesnt pose for pictures, she didnt know i was taking this. its blurry and the background is horrible, but i like how its soft, just like her.]

we realized something was wrong the wednesday before i left for england. my mother and i had a dual doctors appointment [my mother and i are really close. i havent been to the doctor once without her. emergenices excepted.] we finished up the half of my appointment, and the doctor then asked my mother to strip so of course i hightailed it out of there. after a few minutes, the waiting room became too tedious and i went back inside. the doctor, assuming i knew everything, didnt mince her words as they were discussing the symptoms. i had never seen my mother so shaken, so quiet. i knew something was up, but other tests were ordered so i wasnt too apprehensive.

i had a week before i left for england. my mother had promised to sew some skirts up for me, and i selfishly pushed her, even though it hurt her stomach. for you to understand why i do that, you must understand that because of my gastroparesis, i live with literally constant stomach pain. not a single day goes by where my stomach doesnt hurt. ive gotten to the point where i can ignore it, control my nausea, and maintain a healthy weight. its horrible, but i am thus not compassionate to stomach pain. i really try to be, but i just dont understand how for ordinary people, the stomachache is completely debilitating. if i were to give into that urge, i would accomplish nothing. even typing this, my stomach is killing me. if i caved, i would throw up and lay in bed all day, wasting this beautiful day in paris.

anyway, the day before i left, we were panicking. the minutes were numbered, even seconds counted. my mother took a couple of hours to lay down, her stomach hurt so badly. i simply couldnt understand this. although i was smart enough to recognize that things were getting worse.

the next day, i left bright and early to go to the airport. after a few hours of chitchat, i was ready to go through security and board the plane. the second i stepped up to give my mother a hug, she started bawling. the most tears i have ever seen from her, came out on that morning. it was then that i realized something was terribly terribly wrong. these werent the normal 'oh, i wont see you for a year' tears. these were tears of 'i dont want to die while youre in another country'. i managed to tear myself away, and walk through security. my mother followed me on the sidelines, still crying. security tried to remove her, but upon seeing her tears and me standing in the security line, they actually let her stay until i was out of sight.

her deterioration was something i didnt understand as i wasnt able/allowed to see. it was shown to me in small selfish markers: skype calls and emails were only answered by my dad, text messages went ignored, my credit bill responsibilities, after her missing a couple of payments, were passed to me, and most painfully, advice was sought but not given. i had always been used to asking my mom advice, she has a way of saying what i dont want to hear in a way that makes me want to hear it.

then, in december, my family finally allowed me to see all of what had happened to my mom. she was hospitalized, and i left london a week early and returned home. i missed my exams, and my grades have suffered, but i dont regret it.  she was let out of the hospital the night i returned. the skeleton that laid on the sofa was a terrifying sight. my mother has always been overweight. always. i cant remember a time when she didnt wrap me up in tight, enveloping, and comforting bear hugs. except this time. she looked like she had lost hundreds of pounds and her hair was falling out. it was terrifying. i laid with her in her bed, where i would for the rest of the month. it was in that first night, drugged out of her mind from the hospital, that my mother asked me not to go to france. now, that is a selfish statement. if i stayed it would have been only for her. my mother doesnt make selfish statements. ever. she is the most giving, mst self-compromising, most suffering -in-silence woman i have ever met. she has never once asked me for anything, even though sometimes my choices hurt her. until then.

i think telling her i had to leave was the hardest thing ive ever done. explaining to your possibly-dying mother how you are going to leave her alone for seven months is a nearly impossible task. especially because i didnt want to go, i wanted to stay and feed her food until she fattened up again. i spent the rest of the month shoving food at her and refusing to leave her alone for even a few minutes. my mother was too out of it to remember that request, and said nothing when i left for the airport. she was too sick to come with us. which, horrible as it is, made it easier to leave. i could have never boarded that plane if my weepy mother stood at security again.

[this is my father. he is sleeping with his first grandchild.] my whole life, i have been closer to my mother. that is not to say i dont love my father. i adore both of my parents, they have given me so much more than they were able to. as parent roles go my mother is the one i confide in, my father is the one who i want to be like. but, in the past year, i have had to rely much more heavily on my father. our entire family has. my mother was the breadwinner, my dad was the artist. unfortunately, an artist salary does not support a daughter in another country and a wife on chemo. so my dad has stepped up in ways i never thought possible, ways im not so sure i could have. when i get back, i am going to step up too. i have put my parents in a horrible situation which i will endeavor to fix whenever i return home, be it in july or january.

i am lucky, we are lucky. my mom is doing loads better; in remission, markers are down, returned to work, etc. there was even a celebration dinner and she's taken to sewing again.

well, i think thats all the truth one post can handle. im sure many of you have been touched by something similar, cancer is something that unfortunately affects us all.

heart like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.


-marty mcconnel


i apologize for my absence. blogging has been pushed to the back burner. my weeks are beautiful, busy, but uninteresting: weekly posts seem redundant as i have settled into an immensely enjoyable routine that is fun to live but not so fun to read. my life is surrounded by beauty, i am shocked by how much beauty i see every day. my french is not progressing, while my english is regressing. i am having trouble remembering whether i am thinking in french or in english, i switch back and forth between french and english without realizing it. short phrases are now second nature, whereas long phrases are impossible to form correctly.i am enjoying my life completely, looking forward to the promises of spring and a few upcoming trips and visits. i am still trying to find my yellow bird, although the 101 in 1001 is seeming less and less important as the days go on. my father has lost his job, my mother has stopped her chemo, my sister is raising a child about to start crawling and walking, life in america goes on as it always has but i feel more and more distant and disconnected with each passing day. now i have an added necessity, beyond the need to find something to live for: to come to terms with new feelings and emotions that have arisen in the past six months. it has been six months since i left america, boarded that plane, and took my first steps onto non-american soil. there are times when i barely recognize myself, it is almost impossible to equate the anna i was with the anna i have become. even my name has changed, taken on a new pronunciation. the french have no idea where to put the emphasis on my name. what was ANna in the states, is anNA in france.


the problem with being in a different country, immersed in another culture, is how easy it is to generalize, compare, and despise. i noticed this trend in london. of the large group of americans living in nido, a few of them compared england to everything they had back in america and found england completely lacking. they would allow chance encounters and personal fear to taint their view of an entire country and culture they knew very little about.


i'm finding that in france, with the language barrier, the pull of that tendency is much stronger and harder to resist because it is easier to just give in to the hate than accept the differences. acceptance takes work, and thought, while requiring you to give up a little part of yourself in compromise. in london, it was only a few people who gave in to the generalizations. but, in france, the number has tripled. my roommate in london hated london, but loved the cities she visited. it is much easier to fall in love with a place when you see it through a tourist's eyes. it is very hard to love a place you live, where you don't understand the culture and are assaulted with it every day. but my roommate was the only one in my london group of friends who didnt like london. france is different.


as i type this, i am sat in a room with my two closest friends here and a guest. i am the only one of us who loves, or even likes, paris. my roommate despises it, loathes it entirely. she has a few days where she enjoys being in paris, but for the most part, she cant stand it. like my roommate before, she loves where she travels but not where she lives. lauren, our other closest friend, seems to have a love-hate relationship with it, which has recently been leaning towards hate. dallas, our guest, seems to have accepted the general opinion.


not all of it is culture shock, however. opinions are based on what happens to you, and i feel i have experienced a very different paris from them. the majority of my time is spent being in love, which tends to have a rose-colored glasses effect. even beyond that, removing romain from the equation, we have still had different experiences. for example, last night, we branched off from each other. katy, dallas, and lauren went home. lauren was accosted on the metro by a gang of literal boys, she has bruises in the shapes of hands on her body from the boys trying to harm her and from katy trying to save her. afterward, they spent the rest of the ride home screaming they hated paris and parisians. i had a different experience. aoife and i went to social club, danced to techno, and met two very respectful parisians who bought us drinks and walked us home but didnt even attempt to 'come home' with us.


this is not to say i have not been fighting those same tendencies i am complaining about in others. in fact, i am wondering if i am fighting them too much. it hurts me, and the open mind my parents instilled in me, to base my opinion on an entire city and culture on such limited experiences. i am not a typical american, and i would not want people to base their opinion of america on me. so i am fighting really hard not to do that with the french. i am trying to recognize that there is diversity and subcultures here just as in the states.


but am i excusing too much? am i harming myself by refusing to be anything but completely open? is there such a thing as too open-minded? i feel like i should be able to admit when i dont like something, but instead i simply call it a culture difference and write it off. is that the right way? i am starting to feel that since i am the only one going about things this way that i am the one in the wrong, not the others. but, here just as in london, it angers me to hear how much people hate this city. i end up irritated and annoyed, wanting to shake them and open their eyes to the beauty that is all around. but am i the one with my eyes closed? by refusing to see the ugly, am i being just as close-minded as those who refuse to see the beauty?


i have talked about this with lauren before, and we discovered that by allowing yourself to love a new place, you lose a little bit of yourself. in my attempt to be open, i have lost my self and created a new one, forged by my experiences both here and london. in the beginning, i found paris lacking to london. but i had to give up that part of myself that adored london in order to enjoy paris. i have never had any problem changing, losing, and gaining parts of myself, because one constant has always remained. i am a traveler, through and through. knitting is pretty much universal, and the small changes from country to country only make being a traveling knitter that much more interesting.


but have i been traveling wrong? shouldnt i accept the bad as well as the good, rather than ignoring it? i know these things, but i just cannot bring myself to act that way. every time someone makes a negative generalization, all i can think of is someone i met a long time ago, who was raped by a black male. unable to separate the feelings induced by that one black male and all the unrelated black males, she became racist and bitter. i refuse to be that woman, i refuse to base my opinion of the masses on the actions of one individual. i just cant see a way to let the bad in, without it consuming me.


intercultural dating has the same problems. every time romain and i fight seriously, which happens more than i care to admit, he insists that we dont have problems, our cultures do. each misunderstanding, each odd action the other doesnt understand, each difference between us is chalked up to him being french and me being american. but is that the right way? could the personal differences between us be simply that, just personal differences? but i do the same thing in america. my ex was from oregon and every weird thing he did was 'because he was from oregon'. before my trip here, i never realized how much geography shapes and affects us. its really beautiful to see how changed we are by the places we live and the people we surround ourselves with.


the days here are numbered, each one marks a day lost in the countdown, and i have reached the halfway mark. i am having to decide what to do with myself, where to go at the end of this. it is becoming clearer and clearer that a return to the states, a return to arizona, is almost impossible for me. i am trying not to think about that now, not to make any plans until absolutely necessary, but the end is approaching, and i cannot bring myself to face it. i am having difficulty facing many things lately, and instead am hiding in the bright light of the good. but the dark is always there, waiting on the periphery, be it the bad in people or the end of the chapter. i think it is time for me to come out and face it head on. 

but its hard to stay mad, when theres so much beauty in the world. sometimes i feel like im seeing it all once, and its too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that about to burst. and then i remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and i cant feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.


you have no idea what im talking about, im sure. but dont wory, you will someday. [american beauty.]

reflections on two months spent in paris.

i have recently become quite active on facebook. i am realizing it is an intergral part of the global society, not just the americans, the british, or the french. we all rely on it to communicate. texting has become obsolete, chat has replaced it. words are no longer even exchanged. a simple click of the thumbs-up button portrays all that your words of praise could hope to, and more. the vagueness can be interpreted in so many ways, as a friend simply liking a photo, or as a potential boyfriend saying to all the world that he likes your face. it is very foreign to me, and though i am not quite sure i understand it, i am enjoying it. 


it was through this recent return to the world of the internet, that i came into contact with a very old friend. and though our worlds have taken very different turns, she is getting married in the fall and i am traveling with no end in sight, we are still connected. we have been sporadically messaging for a few days now, and she recently said to me that she hated paris. she loved france, but hated paris.

it was then that it hit me: a few weeks ago, i would have said the same thing. "no offense to the french, but paris is just not for me." in fact, i think i have said that very thing. now, that is no longer true.sometime, between awkward moments ordering a coffee and fumbling leaps to avoid a pile of dog shit, i have fallen in love. i have fallen in love with the smells i so detested upon arrival, with the night so sparse with stars but heavy with emotion, and with the language i fail so often to understand.

i think paris takes getting used to. the beauty must be searched for, coerced out, and courted before it will allow you to love it. london was the opposite, the beauty was there for all to see. as soon as i stepped off the plane in heathrow, i felt it. the smiling people, the general mood of laid-back alcoholism, the pompous architecture, and the overwhelming love for the queen all combined to make one incredibly enjoyable place, one where i wouldnt mind spending the rest of my life. but upon further, deeper searches, the flaws began to peek through. one begins to take everything with a grain of salt, knowing there might be a hidden underbelly you will not like.

paris is nothing like that. the people are cold, and standoffish. the streets are littered with cigarette butts, spit, dog shit, and trash. the language is hard to figure out, and people are constantly correcting you. pronunciation is labored over, and grammar almost completely ignored. everything seems backwards, even the doors open the wrong way. but if you accept it, accept the bad and just let it flow through you, you will quickly begin to see the good. paris is just like a french woman. there is a hard, self-constructed veil across herself, almost impossible to pass through. but once you do, you find underneath there is all woman, soft and loving, and above all gorgeous. now these are all gross generalizations, of course, based on my limited experience and limited comprehension. as much as i love paris, and french culture, i really do despise their university system. i am having a very hard time with it.

there seems to be so many cultural differences between the french and us americans. but, ive found, if i try to understand their culture first, i can understand them. so many fights have arisen between me and romain, simply because i was stubborn and refused to see anything besides my american ways. and ive found that is the way with the french. if you greet them with arrogance and self-defence, they will respond in kind. only the french have perfected arrogance, have protected self-defence, more so than any other culture. you will lose that encounter, undoubtedly, and be left hating everything even more. however, if you are open when you meet them, if you dont take offence to their honesty, and give it back in return, you will be greeted with respect and you will see a side of them they keep hidden.

for example, pronunciation. at first, it seems like the french are making fun of you when they correct it. there couldnt possibly be that much of a difference between what i am saying and what they are forcibly repeating  into my face. it seems unimaginably rude that a stranger at the bakery would correct my pronunciation. but they do: the postman, the newspaper man, the woman working the box office, and even the mcdonalds attendant all correct pronunciation. but not as badly as friends, people you meet at parties, people who are your own age. but ive found that its not rude, its not malicious, they want to help you learn, they want to help you be better understood. they expect you to do the same for them when they speak english. even further, they get mad when you dont. in their minds, if mistakes go uncorrected, nothing is learned. if you dont correct someone, not only are you hurting them, but you are showing them you dont care at all. it took me months to comprehend this. but that moment when the baker saw me coming in, instantly grabbed two baguettes a l'ancienne and stated, matter of factly, that my french was getting better, made all the embarrassment worth it.

i have always had an odd infatuation with english culture, it has been in me for years, ever since my english cousin first visited an eight year old me. but i must say, i am slowly falling in love with french culture the more i am exposed to it. i cannot wait for the day when i am speaking to an english speaker and become at a loss for words, unable to remember the english term for a french word so commonly used. i have been changed by the introduction to romains friends, and the introduction of me to romains family promises to change me even more.