Lexicon: Banalogy

banalogy (n.): a figurative device employed to illustrate a point that requires no clarification; a dead metaphor used to compare one obvious phenomenon to another
DERIVATIVES: banalogist (n.), banalogical (adj.)

A recent email to my friend, Angela

Hey Ange,

Thanks for the Happy Birthday. I had a good one. Someone once told me that 22 sucked, but at 23 things started to make sense for them. The first part was definately true. As for the second, I definately have a better grasp on reality and where I want to take my life. I would even venture to say that I am happy. This is the first time I have been happy, not because of the people that I am around or the situation I am in, but because of the person that I am and what I want to do.

So that sort of answers your question about how I am doing, but only partially. I'm really happy because I left behind a lot of personal baggage in Europe and feel mentally and emotionally stable for the first time in a long time. I am also lonely. I think I achieved a good balance of alone time and not-alone time while away. Since I've been back, I've been happy to reunite with people, but not able to talk to anyone about my trip. It wouldn't be fair of me to say that nobody's asked about it; it's just that nobody's asked the right questions. It was really hard to see someone for the first time and have them say, "How was France?" We'd be standing there and all these images would come to my head and I would be thinking, "I've just walked into the room, we're standing here, and in two minutes we're going to be talking about something else." "Good" "Awesome." Sometimes I venture, "It sucked," with the right people. So for that reason I've kind of been alienating myself. Because I'm afraid I'm already forgetting about my trip and I'm not ready to. It's been a productive alienation. "I'm not fucking around this time" is my new motto.

In the bittersweet news department (extra-bittersweet, if you like your chocolate dark), I'm returning to my job at the chocolate store, but I'm not fucking around this time. It's not the step back that it might seem. At least, that is what I'm telling myself. The reason I came back was that my old boss made me an offer I couldn't refuse. So It's nice to feel like I'm a valuable asset to something. The raise will allow me to save money, which I really need to do. One of my closest friends at Moonstruck will be leaving just as I am returning. I think he's pretty pissed at me for returning and, though he hasn't talked to me about it, I can imagine why. I can imagine why because it is exactly the same reasoning I would have used before my trip. I tend to live my life in romanticized chapters. I closed the Moonstruck chapter with a lot of celebration and sincerely-written thank you cards and my friend and I solidified the fact that we were incredibly special people to eachother for an incredibly special period of time. My going back could be seen as invalidating that time because now I am turning it into just a job. From my end of things, I am secretly happy that it's going to be just a job and that I'm breaking my supersitious belief in romance for the moment. I
struggle with practicality and right now I need a strong dose of it to be able to accomplish what I want to accomplish. So yeah, I'm back to the chocolate for as little time as possible--no longer than the summer, but hopefully shorter. I want a real job and I'm not fucking around this time.

I am also lonely because I am not in love and there is a big part of me that will never lose sight of that romance. I function very differently when I am in love, which is part of the reason I have been avoiding it like the plague. But I'm also ready for something interesting to happen. I tell myself that I want a boyfriend, but really what I want is a captive listener. Is that wrong?

I did get your email about the dinner with comedy people a generation ahead of you. That is so awesome. If you meet Amy Sedaris, when you meet Amy Sedaris, tell her that my Party Log is growing. I am so happy that you have found that place in the world. You just have to keep immersing yourself in what you love. It sounds like it is really paying off and will continue to. (If I am not mistaken, that is the second time I have ended a sentence with a preposition.)

On Travel. An amazing thing happened while I was traveling. When I would stop and think about time (what time it was, how long until my next trip, how long I had been gone) I realized that I didn't want it to move any faster or any slower than it was. I wasn't homesick--I didn't want to speed up to get home. I felt like I had filled each amount of time that was given to me with the right amount of thinking, the right pace of walking. Time just moved at the speed time moves when you are not thinking about it. I wrote "Time=Time" in big letters in my journal (before I lost it). I wanted to write an essay about it and explain in some way (that was not too cliche, I hoped) that this must be what it means to actually live in the present--to be totally conscious of the moment that you are in and not any other moment. I still want to write that essay, but as I've lost track of the different thoughts to use as evidence, it's become a farther away dream. But I also realize that I don't need those thoughts, because the phenomenon I was trying to explain was so simple and not complicated at all: I was happy.

Do you mind if I post this on my blog? Because it is slowly approaching the most coherent thing I have written since my college entrance essay.

Oh, and in response to your last issue, which refers to the latter part of the subject line of this email: aren't we already?

Always,

Aud

P.S. Did I tell you that I read Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules? I loved a lot of the stories, but it was hard for me to get past how good Sedaris' introduction is and the line: "I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories can save you." Thanks for the recommendation.

Merry Christmas, Lame-o

When I checked the mail today, I found a Christmas card that I had sent to my friend Laura Herberg in Scotland. When I sent the card, I remember thinking that there was no way it was going to get to Glasgow before Christmas, but I did think that it would get there.

Instead, the card went to Scotland and back, just like me. It was stamped by the goodly clerks at the Royal Mail on December 12, 2006. So it did get there in time--and then it turned around. When I opened the card and read what I had written almost six months ago I was grateful for the international u-turn. Here is the interior of the card, verbatim:

Hey Laura,

Somehow I decided to send Christmas cards this year (something I haven’t done in hella long). I hope your Christmas is festive and fun and you have a good time with your Mom. I’m sure you’ll come up with something to top last New Years. I’m going to stay w/ my family in a beach house (which I’m stoked about) for the holidays. I love getting your emails so keep ‘em coming!

[heart] Aud

Thank God I don’t have semi-annual reunions with all of the greeting cards I have written or the intervals between my holiday correspondences would truly be “hella long.”

I’m not sure what troubles me the most about this composition, which at first seems so benign, but I think it’s the phrase “festive and fun.” This is the type of thing that I would normally say out loud in a mocking tone, probably marked by an affected Midwestern accent. Those around me would understand that this is purely a vehicle for the expression of my deeply rooted cynicism towards virtually everything. Equally troubling is the truncated “’em” that has here been employed to help conjure the desired dialect, but on paper characterizes the typical lameness that I recognize in most of what I do.

Up until today, I have avoided greeting cards with prewritten messages inside and opted for “blank inside” on the grounds that I didn’t want to send a card with something stupid written inside. I must forthwith renounce that judgment. And it’s not as though the absence of the Comic Sans “Merry Christmas” printed in the center of the white page robs me of space needed to communicate and elaborate upon important information, because none was (not) delivered in the greeting above. Perhaps the check in the box by the word “incomplete” on the sticker applied by the postal workers does not refer to the address, but the content of the piece of mail.

The truth is that I approach writing cards with the same dreadful question that I approach the work-day: how am I ever going to fill this void? I answer this question with whatever comes to my mind first. The “I’m sure you’ll come up with something fun to top last New Years” is the postal equivalent to facing all the bills the same way in the register. It gets me from the beginning to the end.

I don’t know how the return of the prodigal Christmas card will affect the choices I make about future Christmas cards, probably not at all. I suppose I have to think of it like the opening of a time capsule. No matter how much time has passed since a photo’s capture or a letter’s composition, people will always think that they look younger and sound dumber than they are today. How else would they get from the beginning to the end?

I wonder if this card was in Scotland at the same time as me. Somewhere in a pile of mail, this small white envelope covered in blue crayon scribble and Crops of America stamps sat containing the remains of someone I was half a year ago. And then it followed me home.

Six Degrees of Separation

While waiting in line to board my flight from Paris to Frankfurt, a mother explained to her child that, unlike their trip out to Europe, in their trip back to the States they would do the short flight first and the long flight second.

“Oh,” her daughter thought about it for a moment. “So it’s like the same thing, but backwards,” she concluded.

“Yes. The same thing, but backwards,” her mother affirmed.

|||

On my last day in Paris, my sister and I went to Sunday Brunch at the Charbon. We had been to the restaurant once before for dinner at the beginning of my trip and I had liked it. If the city of Berkeley was ever personified, it might travel to Paris and eat here.

At one point, my enjoyment of croissants and confiture was interrupted by my sister, who asked, “Dude, is that dude from Amelie?”

“Which dude? I asked. She pointed towards the sidewalk. I looked and recognized him immediately.

The dude in question was Dominique Pinon: the actor who plays the jealous ex-boyfriend of the waitress who works with Amelie at Le Deux Moulin. As soon as I caught sight of him, I realized how stupid I must have seemed to my sister for having to ask for clarification after she pointed him out to me. Because the thing about Dominique Pinon, is that he looks like only one person and that person is himself. That is to say, no one else looks like him and so the question “Is that the dude from Amelie” is actually rhetorical, for the answer is undeniably yes. Spotting him in a restaurant setting helped confirm his identity to us, as he looked exactly as he does seated at the café in the film.

My sister and I share a mutual appreciation for the actor Alan Rickman. Thus, our natural response to the celebrity sighting was to try to connect Pinon to Rickman. This task was particularly difficult because we were moving from a French actor to a British one.
We tried to venture forth from Pinon through Jean Reno, a famous French actor who has done some crossover films with American actors such as the recent Pink Panther remake. This path would open up the plethora of connections offered by Steve Martin and Kevin Kline.
“Kevin Kline was in Dave with Sigourney Weaver, who was in the fourth Alien movie with…!” exclaimed Emily, cutting herself off when she realized that the trail was leading back to Pinon.

The disappointment that followed was matched by our discouraging discovery that we could actually only name about four movies starring Steve Martin. Though Father of the Bride would figure prominently in our connection of Beyonce and Janeane Garofalo, it was not going to help us reach our current goal.

We made a few more circles back to Pinon before Audrey Tatou showed us a way out. Tatou was in The Da Vinci Code with Tom Hanks—finally, justification for the making of the movie. Tom Hanks was in Forrest Gump with Sally Fields, who was in Ms. Doubtfire with Robin Williams. Robin Williams was in Hook with Maggie Smith, who played Professor Mc Gonagal in Harry Potter with Alan Rickman. Mission accomplished—and in six degrees.

I have never been very good at playing six degrees of separation and found myself in a state of disbelief that we had actually done it. It was actually a very heightened emotional state as there had been several ups and downs on our way to victory. I was surprised by how easy it is to make a loop and wind up back at the same actor you started with. I thought of this the next day, when I overheard the little girl talking to her mother in line at the airport. You can always find your way back to the place that you started, but you may take a different way to get there.

Frisbee Shots: can you find the frisbee in front of these Paris monuments?

Tagh, l'explorateur

At a special hour of the day in Paris—in the late spring it comes when barefoot people in parks are enjoying sunlight that wasn’t there a month ago and the warm feeling against the arms of city walkers is still a surprise—those who have made it to the Place Contrascarpe for an evening glass of Voignier witness something special. This is the hour that Tagh, the explorer, arrives at the place on his camouflaged scooter to put on a show before them.

As his epithet suggests, Tagh is an urban explorer. Though the dried palm branches adorning his yellow scooter lend the vehicle a disguise more appropriate for a desert safari, Tagh continually returns to Place Contrascarpe to pursue his explorations. The steady flow of patrons in and out of the busy cafes provides Tagh with a constant influx of new species to discover. Tagh slowly approaches the seated guests, holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes with one hand and a notebook in the other—Tagh takes copious notes on his surroundings. Occasionally Tagh returns to his scooter, steps up onto the seat and peering off into the horizon through a telescope, surveys the terrain ahead.

Tagh, the explorer, is more than the average street performer. Unlike the accordion player in the metro performing next to an upturned hat that passively awaits loose change, Tagh holds a fake pistol to the backs of the café customers, demanding his payment. Those who comply toss their coins into a cigar box in Tagh’s outstretched hand.

Still, there is something other than the audacity to hold a crowded café at gunpoint that makes Tagh remarkable. Tagh’s service to the city of Paris extends beyond the careful gathering of foreign specimens; he instructs those who visit its sights in the art of observation.

Observation can be easily dismissed as the default activity following the opening of the eyes. Sitting by the fountain at Luxembourg Gardens, however, I realized that to refine the skills of observation actually takes a great deal of discipline and practice. I watched the children playing with their boats in the water and watched the parents that watched over them. (Or, to revise, I’ll say I looked at them, because for some reason the word “look,” to me, implies that the action begins at me and moves toward the subjects of my gaze, whereas “watch” begins with them and approaches me. I make this distinction because, from my seat in the garden with my journal propped open over my knee, I caught myself trying to project my interpretation of what was going on before me with the aim of pulling together some touchingly meaningful piece of writing like Adam Gopnick does so beautifully in Paris to the Moon.) The nascent journalist in me, concerned with writing the truth, quickly put an end to my temptation to jump to meaningful, yet false, conclusions.

Instead, I set out to describe the scenes as they were actually playing out in front of me. My journal from this read something like “little girl in a yellow dress prods at red and white boat with a stick” or “priest walks with a young girl wearing translucent black plants.” I tried to be as objective as possible, omitting that I thought the girl with the priest was quite attractive—it is a fact that one could see through her pants. As a constant seeker of the significance of things—one who interprets a cold as not just a lapse in the immune system, but also the shifting of fate and a haircut as a metaphor for personal evolution—it is hard for me to extract pure reality from my interpretation of it. After a few rounds of jotting down verbs and nouns accompanied by only the most necessary adjective, observations came more easily. And, at risk of making my experiment sound more important that it really was, other things came more easily as well.

The moment in which you dismiss yourself from the task of evaluating another culture and allow yourself to just look at it—no, watch it—is itself a special hour of the day. It results in a kind of openness that is at first as uncomfortable as having your mouth propped open at the dentist. You fight it at first but then submit, discovering that it requires almost no effort at all to stay open and allow the necessary improvements to transpire.

At no point in his show does Tagh present a hypothesis or draw a conclusion. He is forever operating in the data-gathering phase of the scientific method. And he does this so skillfully as to almost slip under the radar of the audience, who are lost in their own observations of him. “I didn’t realize until later,” my sister, Emily, said during a conversation we were having about our mutual appreciation for Tagh and his performance. “I’m not watching Tagh,” she announced. “Tagh is watching me.”