I wanted to take a quick minute to write something because I started this blog to be an “open diary” of sorts, but I haven’t had a chance to say anything for the last couple of days.
It feels like March is getting intense, even though maybe from the outside everything still appears calm in my life. Internally I’m screaming, over the news, over the changes in my life, over the work I need to get done.
Even with all that, compared to my friends it seems like my life is much less chaotic.
To cope I’ve been taking in as much sun as I can while we have it, because in Paris the sun is never promised. Looking at the weather for next week we will probably get only rain and fall back into the normal Parisian depression.
I’m trying SO HARD to not get upset over the American news and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to not catastrophize the future when it seems so clear to me that the United States is rapidly descending into full on fascism. I don’t even know if we can say it’s descending still it’s fucking HERE.
But for the time being at least my life in Paris is still extremely sweet. One of my bffs calls me every morning. The others are regularly in contact. I talk to my mom every day. I still have plenty to eat and I’m warm and dry every night.
I started a substack to share some stories. I think it will be a different vibe than the one I want to have here. But who knows? I feel strangely inspired in the face of all the calamity. Maybe this is my coping mechanism? What is that saying… “When the going gets tough, the tough get going?”
Maybe the going wasn’t tough enough for me before ahaha. So annoying for me to only be motivated in the face of hardship and not when I have plenty of time and space to be creative.
So that’s it. My petit update. If you’ve liked all my posts so far, please consider subscribing! I will take all of the encouragement I can get.
Finding an apartment in Paris is notoriously difficult.
The first two apartments I lived in I found through my university, who helped me a great deal. I did not need a guarantor for these places because they knew I was an American student with student loans to help me pay the rent.
Much like how the USA charges foreign students three times the tuition they charge citizens. If you have enough to go abroad for your education, you’re probably good for it.
My third apartment, the one where I currently live, I found on my own. When I was looking for a new place to live in the summer of 2020, the only help I had was from a friend who spoke better French than me, who helped me with phone calls and visits.
But she was not French, she was Moroccan, and while she actually helped me get an offer on one apartment, I ended up turning that apartment down because I felt like there was something better out there for me.
A few weeks later I found the apartment I am about to leave.
Why is it so difficult to find an apartment in Paris? Well, I can only guess that it’s because living in Paris is in high demand. There’s also the process of putting together a file, or dossier, that the landlord will accept. That usually requires one to have a permanent work contract (CDI) making more than 3x the rent which is actually damn near impossible for most people with average jobs.
There’s also the matter of having a guarantor. If you’re a foreigner with no friends or family in France making three times your rent, you need to pay out of pocket to some shady third party, or have a years worth of rent blocked up in your bank account (and if you’re new here you may not even be able to open a bank account without a place to live…catch 22).
The difficulty of proving you make enough to rent even if you do leads many people to fake their documents. It’s almost standard.
Once you have a nice dossier ready to go there’s the matter of sorting through the endless scams cluttering the apartment postings that can fool even the most savvy of searchers, although most people aren’t really that savvy.
There’s a particularly nasty scam that uses Air b&b to show the apartment to prospective renters, sign a fake contract and take their deposit and first month rent only to have the real owners come back just before or after moving day.
The real best way to find a new apartment is just…to know someone who’s moving out and can put in a good word for you with the landlord.
And this is how I found my new apartment.
At the end of March I’ll be moving into a new apartment in the same building where I currently live. I realized a while ago that my current landlord has been wildly overcharging me for the place where I live, while also maintaining that she was following the Paris rent law.
In the fall, she attempted to raise my rent even further, while pretending like she had been doing me a favor by not raising it until now. She met with me in person, and showed me – on her phone – some random numbers PROVING how much she had “saved” me, like some kind of used car salesman.
I was offended that she thought I was so dumb.
You see, in Paris there is a strict law about how much one can charge for an apartment and also how much one can raise the rent in any given year. If you don’t raise it for one year, you forfeit that raise. It’s not automatic, as she was trying to convince me it was.
Thankfully, I felt this coming, and I had thought to ask someone in my building if he knew of anyone moving out.
Unfortunately, I still had to go through a bit of a battle with my landlord over the rent increase that I eventually lost, because when I moved into this apartment I had to shell out for the shady third party guarantor service that eventually strong armed me into paying the full rent increase in total disregard of the law.
But that’s okay. In January I heard back from the man who told me that someone was indeed moving out in mid-february. What a stroke of luck! An apartment that is almost the same price of what my rent has been raised to, but bigger and actually respecting the rent control laws of Paris.
First, I went to go see the apartment and discovered I actually hated the layout.
Right now my apartment is a studio, and everything is close together and easily accessible. In this new, bigger apartment, Everything is in a separate room, including the toilet being separate from the bathroom, and far away from the bedroom.
This is standard for a Parisian apartment, but is devastating for someone like me, who pees about 50 bajillion times a night.
It’s also, according to my friends, not a good enough reason to turn down an apartment that’s in the same building for a decent price in a neighborhood that I love where I know everyone.
I knew I did NOT want this apartment, but I also knew that an opportunity like this does not come every day. If I didn’t even try, who knows when another apartment in the building might become available? (Also, I had missed an opportunity the year before when I neglected to ask in advance, and I’ve been kicking myself for that ever since.)
The whole process began with finding out the apartment was available in the second week of January. I was not expecting this to happen at all, I was still recovering from the holidays and trying to motivate myself to look for new clients. I was caught totally off guard.
Thus began the nerve wracking process of collecting all of the documents needed to apply for this apartment. In addition, asking someone I know to be my guarantor which is no small thing. I wasn’t sure if I even had any friends willing to take on that kind of responsibility for me.
I almost didn’t even bother to apply for it honestly. It was only thanks to the encouragement of my extremely reasonable friends that I made the effort at all. I knew that if I applied I would get it.
And of course I did. After speaking on the phone a couple weeks later, the landlord was happy to give me the apartment. Turns out I DO have a friend good enough to offer to be my guarantor. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the current resident to move out.
She ended up extending her stay from the end of February until the end of March which was just fine for me. I wasn’t really ready to move and ended up spending the last two and a half months agonizing over leaving a place that I’ve called home for almost five years.
This is the longest time I’ve stayed in one place since I left my parents’ home in 2008. I’m really very sad about it. It might be the only time I wasn’t truly ready to move.
Which is so ironic because I’ve actually been wanting to move out of this place since maybe the first year. It’s only NOW that I finally feel comfortable there and I don’t want to move.
But it is happening. And fast now. I have the contract, I’ve updated my housing insurance, I’ve made plans with friends to come and help me move.
And for my birthday this year I will be moving into my first “big girl” apartment since I moved to Paris. It only took nine years hahaha.
I hope you enjoyed this story, and I’d love it if you could leave your reactions or comments. Please consider subscribing to this blog if you’d like to read more stories like this.
Last week I met up with a friend from University who I haven’t seen since 2017.
She booked a trip to Paris from NYC on a whim, and it just so happened that we had a chance to meet up on a Thursday afternoon.
When we were at school together, I used to regale her with tales of my encounters with men, and since she’s 10 years my junior she’d always listen with rapt attention and curiosity.
We’ve kept up on social media here and there, but a lot has happened in the last eight years since we’ve seen each other. So when she asked me what’s happened, I asked her,
“Did I tell you about the young man I had during Covid??”
And this is what I told her:
I met him when I first moved into the (neighborhood where I now live). It was the beginning of September 2020, maybe a week since I’d moved in, and I went for a walk to clear my mind, because I’d loaned money to a friend and I needed it back, but she was avoiding me. I’d just fired off a bunch of angry text messages to her, and was returning home fuming over the whole situation.
He was putting his bike back into the Velib station, and as I passed by him he looked up at me with big eyes as I gave him a curt, “Bonsoir”. He replied with, “You’re so beautiful”, and caught off guard I gave him a softer, “Merci” and kept walking without slowing down to chat further.
He ran after me and caught up as I was approaching the door to my building. In French he said something along the lines of, “I don’t do this often, as you can tell because I’m a little out of breath. But you’re so beautiful and I had to take a chance that you would let me take you out sometime?”
I looked him up and down before responding. I wasn’t immediately attracted to him, but he had big, soft eyes that exuded sincerity. It was his eyes that made me agree to give him my number.
I asked him how old he was, and he told me he was 24. At the time I was 33, so he was a bit young for me, but by this time I was kind of used to younger men approaching me so I figured why not.
We went out once, to a lackluster dinner while the weather was still nice. I found him a little boring, the conversation wasn’t really flowing. We texted a few times after that but then he just disappeared. Typical.
I didn’t hear from him again until months later, towards the end of January 2021, after another couple months of curfew in Paris. For those of you not in Paris, we had a 6pm curfew from November 2020 to June 2021.
When he reached out, I was not inclined to give him a second chance, but he promised not to ghost me a second time (lol) and honestly I was craving some affection. After a week of persistently texting me every day, his opening came.
I was at the office that day, and didn’t have any of my preferred coping mechanism left to smoke. I told him that if he could obtain some and bring it to mine around 7pm, he could come over. He accepted the challenge.
He showed up that night as my knight in shining armour, with the requested materials for us to smoke together. From the moment he stepped into my apartment, everything was great. He came with great humor and kept me entertained.
And he was polite. The first time I invited him to lay on the bed with me he asked if he could take his pants off. That became our joke together in the future.
He started coming over to Netflix and chill with me five nights a week, heavy on the Netflix…we conversed and cuddled more than sex. He became like a real confidant to me. Since he lived down the block, our relationship was convenient for both of us and we would smoke and bake cookies and be silly together between 7pm and 1am when he would leave to sleep in his own bed.
I nicknamed him Squish, and I told him it was because he was squishy like a teddy bear, but really it’s because I had a joke with a friend of mine how anyone under 25 has a squishy brain since their frontal lobe is not fully developed.
At the end of February 2021 I took a trip back to the US to visit my mom and brother, and all the friends I’d left behind five years before in California. During this time I visited my ex, the guy I’d dated immediately before leaving the country. We were still attracted to each other, and I planned to sleep with him on the trip. It’s important for me to note that we were the same age, both 33 years old.
Except, after hanging out and catching up for a couple hours at his house, I walked into his bedroom ready for some foreplay only to find…no sheets on his bed.
No. Sheets. On. His. Bed.
I was immediately turned off never to be turned back on again.
Something about his lack of preparedness and effort, because he KNEW I was coming, my being there was not a surprise. I just expected better treatment than that. Some respect from a grown man to a grown woman.
So I let him put sheets on the bed and I went to sleep. I thought about leaving right then and there, but I had planned on getting my favorite breakfast burrito near his place in the morning and I couldn’t let his lack of effort ruin that for me.
Would you believe, this man had the NERVE to be upset with me for not having sex with him.
I told him, “There’s a young French man in Paris who knows how to treat me better than this. You should be embarrassed”.
When I got back to Paris after nearly two weeks in the US, I couldn’t wait to see Squish. I texted him in the car on the way home, and he came over immediately. I think he missed me during that time too.
We happily continued our routine, and on my 34th birthday at the beginning of April he came over to celebrate with me so that I wouldn’t be alone. That day he’d had a job interview, so when he arrived I asked him how it went. He started to recount the interview, and then he got to a part where he was quoting himself responding to the interviewers perceived lack of interest in hiring him.
He said, “I know I’m only 20, but I am a fast learner and I work hard”.
I stopped him and asked, “Wait. You’re HOW old?!”
He looked at me with those big, sincere eyes that had attracted me to him in the first place frozen, unsure of how to proceed, knowing he’d let his secret slip.
I asked him again, mildly amused at this point, “You’re 20 or 24?!”
“I was going to tell you…”
At this I lost it and dissolved into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I wasn’t mad. How could I be? As a teenager I used to lie about my age to men all the time. It felt like a hilarious turn of karma and I was relieved that at the very least he was not underage, because that would have been truly horrifying.
In that moment, while I was doubled over dying of laughter, the friend I had been upset with when we met called me to apologize for never paying me back. It was a very strange moment.
Relieved that I hadn’t immediately kicked him out, he waited patiently while I finished my call with her, (smart man) and after explaining himself and agreeing to bring over two forms of ID next time he came over, we had the best sex we’d had so far while listening to FKJ.
After the curfew ended, we didn’t see each other as much. But he came back every winter for the next couple of years until he eventually got into a relationship during the summer.
I think he’s 24 now…
I hope you enjoyed this story, and I’d love it if you could leave any reactions or comments. Consider subscribing to this blog if you’d like to read more stories like this.
It’s another beautiful sunny Sunday in Paris and it seems that spring is on its way to us.
If this were another time without social media and 24 hour news, one could almost be fooled into thinking that all is right with the world.
I’m in my favorite place, having my classic cappuccino, which is funny because I only started drinking them recently and I’m not entirely sure what inspired the change from my previously classic “allonge”.
But all is NOT right with the world. I woke up this morning full of anxiety about what’s coming next.
Thursday night I felt a tickle in the back of my throat, so Friday I stayed indoors with the exception of an academic talk in the evening that I’d been looking forward to for all of February.
When I returned home after midnight I made the mistake of checking the news and saw what had just occurred in the White House between the current administration and the president of Ukraine. Needless to say but I will say it anyways, I was horrified. And I have remained horrified for all of Saturday into this morning.
Like many others I am wondering, “What now?!” Will we look back on this moment as the beginning of WWIII?
Before leaving the house I spoke to a dear (French) friend who tried to reassure me that everything would be fine. But really just living in Paris doesn’t protect us from anything.
I’m scared about so many things right now, and living alone doesn’t help.
I’m scared for my family who lives in the US, I’m scared for the whole of the United States and that so many people still seem ignorant to the fact that they elected a fascist leader despite all of the evidence.
I’m scared for myself because I am not yet a citizen of the country I’ve called home for the last nine years. I’m scared for the whole world really because it doesn’t seem like anywhere is safe and if you’ve been paying attention even a little bit it seems like we are falling into some very well documented patterns.
It’s a rainy day today. Yesterday too, and probably tomorrow again.
Before I moved to Paris I had the same dumb ideas that most Americans do, that Paris is a romantic city (lie) and I would have no problem finding a boyfriend, that it probably wasn’t much different from what I was used to (ahahahaha), that I would love every moment of living here (I do not).
I never once thought about what the weather might be like, nor did I take the time to do any research.
What an unpleasant surprise it was for me to move here and realize that it rains almost as much if not more than in the UK, a place FAMOUS for it’s grey rainy days. How did Paris escape this stereotype??
This is why previously I wrote about the sun being out. It’s a really big deal to have a full on sunny day, let alone multiple in a row.
But now it’s raining again. Hard. All day long.
To be honest I’m kind of used to it now, and it’s not so bad when you don’t have anywhere to be. I went to my friend’s cafe to commiserate with her over how “hard” our lives are. Then I moved on to my favorite restaurant for some French onion soup and some jokes with the boys who work here.
Do I have other things to do? Sure. But I think I need to take a nap first.
Ten years ago when I was living in California, every weekend I had a “Sunday funday”.
My fun usually consisted of some kind of overpriced brunch with bottomless mimosas and some time spent on the beach.
Since moving to Paris, Sundays have taken on a different meaning. Time seems more regimented here, with most people following a general schedule. Sunday is a family day, and there are lots of things for parents to do with their children on Sundays.
I don’t have any children, and I’m no longer interested in brunches with bottomless mimosas (not that that’s a thing out here anyways). Not to say that I haven’t had any fun on any Sundays since I’ve been here, but the essence of a “Sunday funday” hasn’t happened for me in a while.
Yesterday, all that changed when the sun decided to grace us with it’s presence for the WHOLE DAY!
Not only did I wake up earlier than I have in months, but I also managed to get out of the house before the late afternoon. I sat in the sun on the terrasse of my favorite restaurant and pretended like I was on vacation somewhere near a beach.
One of my nearest and dearest friends took me out for a taco lunch where the tacos were not great but while sitting outside the restaurant I was recognized by THREE different people I haven’t seen in a while. It was actually quite hilarious. My friend was like, “Wow this really IS your neighborhood!”
They looked good but were very meh
After lunch we took a leisurely stroll in the sun and discussed all of our fears for the future regarding current events. Real fun topics lol.
To bring the mood up we came back to my favorite restaurant for a couple of pornstar martinis with oysters as a little snack and talked about all the fun things we want to do when the weather is warmer and the days are longer.
Oysters and porn star martinis what could be better
If you want to live like a local in Paris this is it. No sight seeing. Just walking, talking, drinking, and hanging out at cafes. Also taking in as much sun as you can whenever it decides to make an appearance because we are all severely deprived of vitamin D in the winter.
It’s a beautiful, sunny Sunday in Paris and for the first time in a long time I’ve managed to make it out of the house in the morning.
This is an incredible feat for me because despite being somewhat of a morning person, living in Paris has trained me into not wanting to leave the comfort and safety of my apartment until well into the afternoon.
This doesn’t do me well on the weekends, when the morning is the only quiet part of the day outside.
I miss taking advantage of the outdoors when most people are still at home sleeping, but since Covid I have struggled to make it out.
Sitting on my favorite terrasse in full sun is doing a lot to charge my batteries. Maybe if it was sunny more often I could make this into a routine. It won’t be though, Paris isn’t really known for its sunny days.
It almost makes me miss when the borders were closed and Paris was just for the people who lived here, no tourists.
Last night I heard some people speaking English in my building and I texted my neighbor to make sure it was only guests in her Airbnb and not new American neighbors.
She called me thinking something was wrong and I said, “No no don’t worry I just don’t want any loud Americans moving in”.
This is my 9th year in Paris. It’s almost hard to believe. I’m so thankful that I moved here before the world went completely nuts during and after Covid. It gave me a foundation here before things started rapidly changing.
But even still, I don’t feel like my place here is secured. Even after 9 years. I’m not yet a citizen, and even if I apply now, I may still need to renew my visa in a couple of years before citizenship is granted.
People would tell me to find someone to marry, but despite having some really great friends, I haven’t met anyone I wanted to be serious with romantically, and certainly no one I’d be willing to trust with my legal status in the country.
My visa isn’t close to expiring, but it’s something I worry about given the current state of affairs in the United States. I’ve been gone for so long, and I rarely visit, I don’t think I would fit in very well there now.
When I meet Americans who are new to living in Paris or just visiting, I feel annoyed and find it more difficult to connect than before. Living outside of my native country has afforded me a different perspective, because I’m no longer immersed in the American propaganda machine.
It seems abundantly clear to me that the majority of Americans run on fear, but are conditioned to believe that they just work harder than anyone else and that’s a virtue.
Imagine actually having vacation time and using it regularly throughout the year instead of subsisting on the occasional long weekend.
The first time my parents came to visit me I asked them to stay for two weeks and eventually we settled on 10 days because they could hardly conceive of a vacation lasting longer than a week.
Imagine being let go from your job and having a two month notice, long enough to make some sort of plan and try to find another job instead of just going into work one morning and coming home unemployed.
All that to say, I can’t leave, because I don’t want to give up “la vie belle”. Or should I say, une vie douce comme le miel.
My original plan for the day was to stay home and not talk to anyone, exhausted as I was from a week full of waiting for work, socializing, and having my time wasted by certain energy vampires. This initial plan was supported by a late morning rain shower, but was then nixed by the day transforming into the most beautiful weather we’ve had so far this year.
When I see blue sky from my one little window I feel COMPELLED to leave the house now, an after effect of Covid-19, and maybe of living on the ground floor. I knew there would be too many people out, the norm for a Saturday in Paris. Double the people if there is even the slightest hint of good weather.
Thankfully the nice weather meant there was at least one place I could go where I could count on it not being too busy on a Saturday afternoon. I’m here now, writing this from *there*.
And what exactly am I writing about today?
Not much really.
Just that I made it out of the house just enough to stretch my legs for 2,000 steps before sitting down in front of my computer again. My mom advised me to go try something new, but this feels like the most I can muster when I didn’t even want to leave the house in the first place.
Sitting and watching the hordes of people strolling around through floor to ceiling windows while safely ensconced in a mostly empty restaurant, this is the part of the movie where our heroine is struck by an incredible idea/inspiration and starts frantically working on it until it comes to fruition.
But this is not a movie, and I still feel just as unmotivated as ever while trying to maintain the illusion of someone who is a productive member of society. Do I sound depressed? I’m not, I swear. At least I don’t think I am. As I like to say, “Everything is fine on paper”.
That is to say, I’m healthy, housed, and not hungry. I’m also loved, and profoundly thankful for my beautiful life. So, everything is fine. The only problem I really have is that I know just enough of what’s happening around me to be terrified of the near and far future, and intelligent enough to know that things are about to get really difficult, more difficult, for basically everyone.
But I degrees, that’s not what I really wanted to talk about is it?
No, I wanted to stay focused on me and my small problems. Like wanting to stay inside and mope around doing nothing when I have plenty of things I could and should be doing to advance my life. Beating myself up for not feeling like doing anything so not doing anything because no one is making me, least of all myself.
I was scrolling instagram and saw a video about what this woman thinks in response to people who ask her how she is so consistent in her diet and fitness routine. It was brutal. The person who posted it said she immediately got in the shower after watching the video and honestly I did too.
I think all the time about how I used to be so motivated and hold myself to certain standards. How a different version of me would have never wasted a whole year of hot yoga membership and would be up early doing yoga at home and cooking for herself with all of the time and space she has.
So what happened? Is it really just the smoking holding me back? I feel like no, but I could be wrong.
All I know is that I haven’t been motivated to be like how I was in so long that it’s hard to even remember what it was that motivated me then. Was it good old fashioned American fear? I resist feeling anxious in any situation, but was that anxiety what fueled my success?
I don’t want to discount the achievements I HAVE made so far since I moved here. I’ve done quite a bit in the last eight years. So much has changed, isn’t it normal that I have also changed? At least a bit? Can I change again? What will it take to change for the better? I can’t go backwards, I can only go forwards.
This is something I feel like I have been marinating on for a while, why am I not taking advantage of all this time to do something productive that will make me money to secure my future or at least make me more healthy so that I have the energy to continue on when things do eventually get more difficult?
I justify it by telling myself I’ve worked hard already and I’ve earned the right to rest.
The Questions
How much rest do I need? Am I resting too much? Why am I giving my energy away to people who are not helping me at all?
What is the deal with me going to bed late and waking up even later? This morning I didn’t get out of bed until 11am. Is it the stars? Is it some sort of collective energy? Why does everyone around me seem to be working hard and I seem to be just chillin? Is that okay? Am I being protected? Is shit about to hit the fan for me?
Can I post this and remain anonymous? If I remain anonymous will anyone even read it? Would I feel better if I could just put my phone down and think for myself again?
I see so many people running with basic ideas and developing it into something cool just by staying consistent. For whatever reason I like things to be more complicated and trick myself into thinking that if it’s too much the same then it will get boring.
But then I turn around and go to the same places, order the same foods and fall into the same thought patterns constantly.
When I was a teenager I had a blog on opendiary.com. I wish I’d known then how that could have propelled me into the writing career I always wished to have and never gave that up.
But then I have always been afraid of being open and honest about what I think and feel online because of all the hate that comes the way of those who do. When I started my Covid blog, I would water things down and hide behind my words and never really divulged too much information.
Despite multiple people telling me they like my writing, I still felt “not good enough” to consistently put my thoughts out there in written form. It’s easier to just talk to people or write in my journal and leave it there.
But my voice can be just as valuable as anyone else’s right? Right??
Doux Comme Miel 