why is my reflection someone I don’t know?

I kept a journal when I was twelve, and I remember one day having an astounding (as it were to me at the time), epiphany about my dad was getting old, and that I should perhaps put a muzzle on my bratty, developing adolescent attitude, and in that moment of clarity, I put aside my own selfish feelings towards all the perceived injustices I had received, and saw him as a human being who was simply trying to do the best that he could, with what limited finances and resources he had. I saw that I did not show my understanding of what he did, telling myself that appreciation for his efforts were due, rather than the angry rebellion and uncomplimentary insults I had been paying him. Of course, this introspection lasted only as long as my scribbling did, and when the entry was complete, my magnanimous empathy had passed as well.

My mind is probably going to wander over the course of this…introspective session, as I have not yet gathered all my thoughts. But I wanted to write them out before I lose them.

This memory of what I wrote about my dad occurred suddenly to me as I was wiping down some mirrors. It’s a curious thing, cleaning mirrors. You are alone, and you aren’t. You are somehow forced to look at yourself doing a mundane, everyday chore, and not when you are seeking to boost or gratify your vanity. It can make you wonder, “Who Am I, Really?” “Is This How Others See Me?” “What Have I Become?” Maybe you will even spontaneously burst into “Reflections” like a Disney princess who does housecleaning. Maybe I am just asking myself these questions in light of recent situations and conflict that have shown me that I have not become what I wish to be. I am not who I was. I am not living the life I want right now.

I refer to a conflict that is perhaps a typical relationship woe – Person A has more free time than the other, and naturally desires to spend more time together. Person B is extremely busy and stressed and tries to give what s/he can, but ultimately begins to feel it an obligation and resentment grows, as s/he is continually asked for more time together than s/he can afford to give. Person A, with more free time begins to feel neglected and uncared for, believes perhaps, that if someone really wanted to spend time with them, they would make time to do so. S/he feels that her feelings are being invalidated, ignored, and that s/he doesn’t deserve what she is asking for in a relationship. There is also resentment and reproach, and s/he begins to complain and express disappointment and tell the much busier half that what they are trying to give is not enough. Eventually, things come to a head, Person B grows angry and thinks that to resolve the conflict would take more time that s/he doesn’t have or care to give, and that whatever time s/he has given has not even been appreciated, it is deemed “not enough,” and furthermore, wasted on arguments. Person B thinks perhaps the best solution is just to give up, but s/he expresses this in many hurtful statements. Person A is in tears, afraid of losing Person B, expressing uncontrollable emotions that aggravate Person B’s anger and validate Person B’s fears of time wasted. At some point, they make up, and agree to strive for a solution. Repeat ad nauseum.

I was just Person A in this vicious cycle, that I am hoping to break. After having spoken to some friends, while crying or while calm(er), I know that it is possible to take either side in this conflict. I do not think I am wrong to hope for, to ask for my needs to be fulfilled in a relationship. I think that perhaps a different Person B would be willing to sacrifice some time to comfort or reassure me, to not get angry with me because I cry. But I have also tried to look at the situation from the perspective of my other half. Not that I haven’t tried to before. The solution I arrived at each time before was that I would try to be content with what time we had together, and that eventually, that time would probably increase once the stress and busy-ness subsided a little. Maybe another solution would be if I found someone who is willing to give a little more. The thing is, I love my Person B very much, and when we aren’t upset about this issue, we are really very happy and loving around each other. When times are good, it is somewhat easier for me to accept that he cannot spend time with me. When he gets angry if I reproach him, it makes it even more difficult to keep my mouth shut because my unhappiness and dissatisfaction increase.

I do not want to lose him simply because I cannot learn to be a little more patient and to rethink the way I perceive the situation. When I am hurting and upset, it is really hard for me to listen with understanding to what he is saying. When he is angry and injects this wrath into every word, action, and blame he places upon me, I am not able to consider why he is acting in so harsh a manner. Sometimes I fear I am becoming like my mother, who used tears, hysterics, and “playing the victim,” to gain the comfort, apologies and reassurance she wanted. I am deeply afraid that constantly witnessing this behaviour as a child has somehow given me cause to believe that it will give me what I want. This is behavior I also want to get rid of, because my logical state of mind, when present, tells me that I am being childishly irrational. I loathed seeing my mother in a fit of sobbing, I grew to feel only indifference and disgust at her overly emotional episodes. I was fed up with her, as my other half was beginning to feel, with me.

This is the behaviour that I hate to see resurfacing in myself. I do not enjoy wasting my own time feeling so emotionally unbalanced and crazy. I can state other reasons for why I am so needy for his time – I feel lonely, homesick, friendless; I have stopped doing the activities I once enjoyed to make myself feel better; I am constantly too tired and sleep deprived from my two jobs that are not emotionally or spiritually fulfilling for me, to even make the effort to better myself. I know that if I were busier, and happier doing things that I enjoy, I would not feel that I need my boyfriend around to fulfill all these needs. So, I guess I asked my freshly cleaned reflection when it would me “show who I am inside” because I am not seeing myself as I was, as I want to be, in the mirror anymore. And I urgently need to restore that reflection. There is also another reason why it is so hard for me to accept having less time with him, which is the fact that half our relationship so far was long distance (about 8-9 months), and in half a year, I will be going home, and our relationship will continue indefinitely through long distance. That is the plan so far, at any rate, and so having knowledge of these great separations only makes me feel more desperate to cram in more time together before we are apart again. But I would rather be together still through long distance at a later date, than to push him away with my demands at present.

It’s possible for me to continue thinking I deserve more or better, and to use this belief to justify my demands for more time together. But, I know that I will not get what I want this way. When I am hurt, it’s difficult to not think, “Me, me, me.” That’s why resolving a conflict in an emotional state is a terrible idea. Now that I am calmer and feeling more rational, the introspection comes naturally and even the memory of what I thought about my father when I was twelve has come back to me, reminding me to look at Person B as a human being, not as my personal antagonist. Person B is a busy, stressed guy, who is doing the best he can, with limited time and resource, and rather than rejecting or downplaying his efforts, I know I should be appreciating what he does give, and supporting him in his various activities by not wasting time on disappointment and critique. Being with him also means that instead of looking at the things he does as things that take time away from us, I should consider how he is working towards a future that is potentially our future. Whether he is immersed in his studies at school, or working late at his lab, these are things that should be “common goals” – of course, I want him to pursue them. This time around, I hope that my contemplation/self-examination will outlast the ‘scribbling’ process.

 

 

please don’t take my sunshine away

my figurative plate is too full, yet at times i find myself barely eating the three minimum required meals a day. the effort i made to be more like my old productive self here in Montréal means that  i have somehow given myself too much to do again, with too little time. some days i am out the door at 6:20am, almost an hour before the sun now rises, and i do not come back until past 10 at night. even with two jobs, i tried to sign up for two choruses, and try to cook, clean, do laundry, do “adult” chores, and sleep. that last one wasn’t happening enough the week before last, and i felt like i was barely hanging on, almost falling apart from fatigue. my period was so late and irregular that i feared i might’ve gotten pregnant and that was a week of much un-needed stress on top of everything else.

i should count myself lucky at least, that i do not have jobs that i hate. as tiring as it is to start at 7 in the morning almost everyday, to run around on my feet for 8 hours serving customers, i still enjoy it. i am so grateful that i found a job that gives me enough hours a week even with my restrictive availability, and i really appreciate working at a café where the majority of customers are amiable, and the owners/bosses are fair and hardworking themselves. even when i am feeling sluggish, i feel motivated to work harder, because it always seems as though my coworkers and the owners are working harder still. i also enjoy having the opportunity to practice my french and feeling capable of working efficiently again.

and even though i go almost directly from an eight hour shift to picking up the kids i look after from school, i still look forward to doing it. while i felt under appreciated by the girls during the summer, i feel more like they genuinely like me now and perhaps even miss me when i am not around. it’s taken months, but i feel that they show me trust and affection; and even when i am so tired i feel as though i may fall asleep standing up while waiting outside of the school, i can’t help breaking out into a big grin and waving when i see the younger girl come out the front doors looking for me on the other side of the fence. and hearing the gladness in the older girl’s tone of voice when i say i will be staying for dinner or staying late to play with her after dinner makes me feel wanted, like i belong, like i matter. there is such a rewarding feeling too, in helping her with her school work everyday, in watching her progress from week to week, in noticing her improvements and feeling like my efforts are a crucial contribution to her grades, and in realizing that she trusts my knowledge of her coursework enough to listen to me when i am helping her study.

and joining an all women’s a capella choir has given me a chance to learn new music while practicing something i love in a warm, encouraging, and fun environment. even if it’s exaggerated, the praise i hear from other women who are great at singing is motivating. and whether it’s when we join hands at the end while standing in a circle and singing our theme song,  or when i am attempting to sing my part alone in a car with two other women who kindly offered to drive me home, or when i am asked to join an octet to sing songs in another language (Mandarin), i always feel such a great sense of belonging and welcome, that i am almost moved to grateful tears.

and so, little by little, i feel like i am carving out a tiny niche for myself in Montréal, which hopefully will be worth all the hours of lost sleep. i am too busy and tired to feel as homesick or lonely as i imagine i otherwise might, though i still feel it day to day, like a lingering bruise on my chest, that makes itself felt when gently pressed by a scent or a song that stirs up memories. i still miss France every week, and i can never seem to find time to chat with anyone back home anymore. sometimes it feels so surreal, to be back in Canada, working in Montréal, not having seen my family or friends for over a year, and knowing that this time last year, i was climbing a hot sand dune with views of the Atlantic in Arcachon, and shopping and drinking wine along the quayside in Bordeaux. in this way, i feel like an uprooted flower, struggling to find some stable soil, but every time i am replanted, some roots become lost and scattered and i feel like i’m wilting slowly when i wish i could be in bloom. the only time i feel calm and relief, even if it’s just for a few brief moments, is at the end of the day when i get to come ‘home’ to J and hold his hand in my sleep, and feel like i am bathing in sunshine despite the wintry weather and cold grey skies.

un dîner avec some of my students

 

“Everything ends this way in France – everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs, – everything is a pretext for a good dinner.” (Jean Anouilh)

it was not super fancy, but quite french, as in, some of us agreed to meet in front of the lycée at 7:45pm, and it was after 8pm by the time we had all arrived. then we went down to the restaurant(*) by car though it would’ve been only a 10 minute walk and kept waiting outside for other late-coming students until it was after 8:30pm, i’m sure. we were a group of all girls, and the one un/fortunate guy who was enrolled in their course. there were other BTS (brevet de technicien supérieur) teachers, who were all women, and everyone was speaking french so i felt a bit left out at first, but everyone was still nice. we didn’t really start ordering until 9pm, by the time everyone was finally seated, etc. and we started with getting apéros (i got another fénelon!! hahaha, i mean, i can get white wine in Canada, but fénelon? never!), and then we ordered food, and even after eating, some students got desserts and then we passed around a digestif (a strong, sweet apple liquor called Manzana, from Spain, poured over ice), and sat around talking some more until well after 11:30pm! thankfully, the spiritueux made everything feel light and cosy and loosened my tongue, giving it a greater degree of ease in rolling foreign syllables out through my lips.

i was quite hungry by 9:30pm and so i ate my entire plate, which was a gravied duck thigh (cuisse de canard confite), a mound of frites and a mound of haricots verts, but i didn’t get dessert. people don’t usually eat their entire meal in France, and they don’t take their leftovers to go either (which is why i try not to order too much, and i try to eat everything instead); everyone seated around me had plenty left on their plates. in fact, i would’ve still been hungry if i ate only what one prof ate (a few slices of cuttlefish and a few spoons of rice and beans!?) ! another teacher had ordered just a salad, and she didn’t even finish that! small wonder the waiter expressed some not-so-subtle surprise in his throat at my completely cleared plate, which slightly offended me into not ordering a dessert, a decision i regretted when i saw the plates of chocolate drizzled profiteroles with chantilly that some other girls had ordered. later, when i became hungry again, i guiltily ate a slice of french bread out of the full basket in front of me that no one had touched. my heart (stomach?) seemed to leap with dismay when the server came to collect these baskets. throughout the meal, at least half the group of girls would get up and go outside for a smoke every so often, and even though i was only present at these instances at the beginning and end of the evening, my hair felt like it was coated in a cloud of smoke when i came home after midnight and i was afraid my landlady would smell it as i crept up the stairs in the dark and think i had been smoking.

but it was génial to have been able to practice my french a little bit, and to have listened to their rapid fire french chatter about their futures and their love lives.  if i didn’t have to catch a 6am train to Lyon tomorrow morning, i would probably go to the boite de nuit with them tonight as they keep insisting, but going out at 1am is simply trop tard pour moi ce soir.

(*) Le Lamparo.

Cahors Cooking Chronicles: a tasty two month memoir

Between the last post I wrote in December, and now, I have done quite a bit of (lazy) travelling, during my two-week Christmas holidays, and during the more recent two-week “Winter Holiday” they have here in France that’s separate from the Christmas one. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much vacation or free time since I was in high school! Of course, I want to write about all the places I’ve visited, and show photos of all the interesting little things (rude graffiti included) that I’ve seen in the other French cities I’ve been to, but then I came back to Cahors, and jumped straight back into my job, and it should not be a neglected fact that travelling for two weeks straight is actually very tiring and can be stressful at times, and going back to work right away is going to ensure that you never seem to recover from feeling always under the weather, the threat of an illness enveloping you like fog, but never quite reaching your immune system.

Never mind that for now. In the effort to pursue what I’ve coined as “productive procrastination,” I recommenced work on my Humans of Cahors project instead, and continued to put off writing about said travels. I also struggled to make ends meet because I spent well beyond my means at Christmastime, the glamour of travelling tricking my brain into thinking that I could afford the glamour and prestige of expensive souvenirs, and this, coupled with the conscious thirst for a diet free of pasta-only dishes, and a new year’s resolution to continue to learn to cook, has resulted in my attempt at this moment to yet again, avoid writing about my travels. It’s a daunting task, to cover 3.5 weeks of photos, so instead, I thought I’d start with a show-and-tell of some of the ways I’ve carried out one of my new year’s resolutions thus far, i.e. cheap-at-home-eats. Maybe once I’ve done this, and found other ways to procrastinate “productively” (e.g. reading Jane Austen fanfiction like a fiend), I will finally begin posting about my travels ;)

The biweekly marché in Cahors is a wonderful, wonderful thing. This is an instance of one Saturday morning haul, fresh, local, seasonal, and colourful fruits and vegetables available only. Seriously, if anything comes from outside of the Lot department, where Cahors is located, it’s not considered “local.” That’s how local it gets. (It gets me loco. So does the absurd amount of dog poop piles in the cobblestoned environs of the marché. I may have just stumbled upon an explanation for the Lot river’s muddy waters.)

This was a moment worthy of a blurry iPhone snapshot: the first time I realized that everything on my plate was something I had prepared myself, from scratch : Roasted, herb seasoned Brussels sprouts and potatoes, a French Omelette with melted Emmental cheese, some shrimp sautéed with lemon and garlic.

I don’t know how I got through the first 24 years of my life without knowing how to make pancakes, but I did. And now, I no longer have to live out the rest of my days without. If only they had unlimited stores of (real) maple syrup in France! I tried the “maple syrup” they sell at the Casino supermarkets: just don’t. Unless you happen to enjoy sweetened soy sauce, which is what it tastes like to me. Luckily, I have some thoughtful friends, who, as true Canadians, rose to the occasion and brought or sent me maple syrup to help me out of the sticky situation. :P 
French omelettes can never get old, they are versatile, like the arepas I chanced to eat one humid summer day at a pocket-sized Venezuelan restaurant in Montréal, and at the Ottawa home of a Colombian girl I befriended when I was studying French briefly in Trois-Rivières, Québec. With the arepas, a ground maize flatbread, you can have a topping or a filling – at the Venezuelan restaurant, it was presented with a filling; at the Colombian home, it was a eaten with a simpler topping, like egg and ham, usually for breakfast. Well, guess what!? You can roll up something yummy in a French omelette like it’s an eggy little taco shell, or you can roll up the omelette and lay a topping on it with a sauce, too! Let’s call it the French arepas…oh wait. It is a French “repas.”

I tried to incorporate as many vegetables as I could into my meals without resorting to eating only salads. Roasts and soups are some of my favourite ways to commit vegetable genocide. I am not sure if that was the best written description, but it is too late, I have already thought it anyways. Let us take that description and purée it into one of my velouté soups, shall we? Because I do not rent my own apartment, and am living in a spacious bedroom on the third floor of an enchantingly ancient house of stone and wooden beam construction (complete with a dark, creaky, spiralling staircase, metal window radiators, and wooden window shutters covered in peeling rust red paint [AND NO WINDOW SCREENS, why, France!?] that bang incessantly against the jutting stones of the walls on stormy, windy nights) that dates back to the Middle Ages (13th century!), I do not have my own bathroom or kitchen. Fortunately, my landlady has a beautifully, wonderfully equipped kitchen, and if I am alone in it, I am free to do or make whatever I want. However, she also enjoys cooking, and I feel like I am encroaching on her culinary territory when I try to prepare meals in her presence. This means that when or if (rarely), she happens to be away for a weekend, visiting relatives in other small and charming French cities, I spend a lot of time baking 50x the amount of baked goods that one person could realistically eat in one weekend. Also, I can sing along to Taylor Swift as loudly as I want while I bake and cook and be free from her innocuous French judgment of my methods or recipes, which, if questioned, are usually concluded to be “Canadian,” tsk tsk. Well, these were Earl Grey scones after all, nothing French about that! In the upper portion of this photo, one can see that I terminated my quest for quinoa – something so ubiquitous in yogi-hipster-health-conscious Vancouver, but somewhat uncommon in Cahors. There is a special organic foods shop called La Vie Claire and everything is sold at special organic food prices (read, expensive). In the bottom half, one can bear witness to the fact that I have struggled to stick to Canadian dietary standard requirements of “dark green vegetables” by habitually eating a head of broccoli in as many different ways as I can without exerting too much extra effort. 

There is a tea and spices stand at the Cahors marché, a table laden with neat rows of small canvas sacks, and these are filled with many varieties of teas en vrac, dried herbs, and loose spices, topped with slightly cracked wooden cups or ladles for scooping said teas and spices into plastic baggies. When I first started learning to cook last November, the first dinner dish I learned besides quiche lorraine, was a simple curry. At her current home in La Teste de Buch (near Bordeaux), my friend Nathalie taught me the recipe she had been taught by her former Indian roommate, and every so often, when it is chilly outside (even for a Canadian, yes; also, I am from Vancouver, it doesn’t get very cold there!!), I have a craving for a bit of savoury spice. I’ll vary the vegetables in the recipe, or switch between rice and quinoa, but I always use the same Colombo spice mix, and I always get it at this particular spice stand at the marché.  

Because the days were colder, I had no craving for chilled lettuce leaf salads, but I did miss the quinoa salads I used to always make at home in Vancouver. So I started making a series of different layered quinoa salads, even experimenting with mixing my own vinaigrette (dijon mustard, honey, lemon juice, salt, pepper, olive oil/sesame oil/nut oil!). It’s an easy way to eat a greater variety of vegetables in one dish – provided you actually end up with the salad on a dish. Here’s a helpful hint: when shaking up salad in plastic or glass container, make sure the lid is secure, unless you enjoy licking quinoa off the counter. While in my quinoa salad phase, I came across this recipe for a Wild Rice Salad (of course, I switch out the rice for quinoa from time to time)! Most amazingly, it can be eaten hot or cold, and uses the same vinaigrette as my quinoa salads. Actually, no, the best part is how it always ends up being a huge batch that can last me 4-5 meals. It is also savoury, sweet, tangy, and slightly spicy all at once, and I have already made this recipe on three different occasions. (The “occasion” being that I was hungry and needed to be fed.)

I also went back to cooking some pasta dishes after a decent interval of time had passed after my days of crazed carbohydrate gorging in Cinque Terre. It’s not so much the pasta, but the sauces that I care about. What an easy way to boastfully pretend that one is capable of many different dishes! Thekitchn.com provided me with an easy, peasy Lemon Pepper Caper Pasta Sauce recipe, that I probably made three times in the first week I attempted it, loading it with more ingredients each time in the effort to beef up the dish (without actual beef). Salmon and avocado are always perfect together, they are like the health-conscious, culinarily sophisticated PB & J of the West Coast, whose love will literally fortify your heart with omega-3s.This is what I called my “I’m leaving town for 9 days (to go to Aix-en-Provence & Avignon) so I have to cook what I have left in the fridge,” kind of meal, or “Avocado & Mushroom Scrambled Eggs.”

And this! Well, this is a daily essential for me now, I’m apprehensive about how well I shall manage without it when I return to Canada. A fresh dose of espresso with a fine layer of crema swirling on top, in a little hand painted tasse that I picked up in Avignon, Provence! Not pictured: a too quickly consumed packet of Lotus Speculoos biscuits, so perfect for dipping in espresso that I do not envy Proust’s soggy little madeleine and cup of tea, though I worry about how I shall proceed with my recherche du temps perdu without these two cardinal goods in Vancouver…

At this point, I have become quite good at improvising a meal, I think: I had just returned from dreadfully rainy Avignon, and had barely any groceries nor money left. I did have some pesto rosso from Christmastime and capers left in the fridge, along with some creme fraiche two weeks past its expiry date, and spinach trofie pasta from Italy; and eggs are always relatively cheap, as are packets of jambon cru on special at the supermarket because they are about to go bad.

…which leads me to the, “I obviously just did a grocery run (because I took money out of my Canadian bank account) so I have more than just eggs and pasta” dish: The Return of the Evidently Economical Rice/Quinoa Salad with lardons, green beans, dried cranberries, red bell pepper, and honey mustard vinaigrette! I made this dish 4 nights ago. There is still some in the fridge. See what I mean?

And finally, the most recent dish of all, prepared for a Sunday night Skype date, 20 Minute Creamy Avocado Pasta, perfect for lazy cooks in a rush (induced by having been lazy all day long). I also have never had better luck with avocados than I have here, in France. They are always perfectly ripe and flavourful, and I even remade this sauce last night to coat two diced up chicken breasts (my first time cutting up and cooking meat in almost 8 years. Incidentally, it was the first time cutting up and cooking meat 8 years ago that had turned me towards the vegetarian way of life. What have you done to me, France!?).

It’s a dreary, rainy early evening at the end of February, usually always the dreariest of months no matter where you are living in the northern hemisphere. The Imitation Game (Version Originale) starts at the local cinema across the main street in 20 minutes. It’s a two minute cobblestoned walk from my front door. If I hurry, I can make it in time to gaze with unabashed absorption at Benedict Cumberbatch’s (sadly, now married) face for two hours. Bon (Ben??) appétit indeed!

Update: …Worth the walk in the rain. Especially since the rain can mask the tears on your face.