They make it so easy

I won't lie to you. Another reason La New Yorkaise and I are such good buddies is that we both understand what it's like to live in Paris. The difference is I was out of that place in about 3.1 years, departing definitively (the thesis defense, the odd visit aside) roughly three hours after my final exam - drunk off my tits and weeping with relief in Canada about ten hours later. And she - she got married to a local. Now I'm as I am - you can make up your mind about the degree of sanity I'm in possession of - and that poor girl, who's got another year to go on top of her 7.5, is both auto and medically medicating like crazy to keep it together. I think she's coming through it all quite well, considering I'd have gone on a killing spree by now if I was her. But she'll be fixing the damage for years to come.

Now obviously, la New Yorkaise is a city mouse, and though I grew up in the middle of nowhere I made the transition to London and then a bunch of other great big cities when I was eighteen. She is not a yokel, and as hard as I try, I'm not either. We understand big cities. We understand people are stressed there, there to work, maybe thinking transitory thoughts; things are rarely as clean or safe as they should be, once you cross the European Teutonic lines, and all in all there are some challenges. But Paris is special. Paris is a city full of locals who are unremittingly negative, and have been since they were children. Paris is a city where the people who save their tears for their pillows are the cheerful ones. Paris is a place where locals get their jollies from shitting all over everything else. It is the European post-colonial city; the population has been frozen into pride by the glories of its past, to the degree it has to frown on cultural innovations from its former rivals and from its former colonies, but also cornered by the cold economic realities of its present, which in many ways are the bleakest I've ever seen - you could make a good argument for Italian cities having bleaker economic realities, but at least people give each other compliments there. What little joy going through that repellent school system leaves an individual is ground out of your typical Parisian by their dysfunctional gender relations. It is an unpleasant place.

A mere five years on from my departure and the only people I'm still in touch with from that 3.1 years of my life are other foreigners who are living or who still live there, and a few French from other parts of the country, and I'm glad. There are a few Parisians I feel, sometimes, that I should like to see and talk to again, but any time I think I may be starting to miss them, my mind clicks forward and shows me how suffocating, negative and depressing the conversations will go. It's sad.

I understand these days better than I ever have that France isn't Paris - that people in and from the south, especially, are beautifully warm and enthusiastic, while still maintaining a strong edge of bluntness. The problem is that the French government is absolutely centralized in Paris, and French politicians tend to be educated in Paris, every time those fucking cockwanks make goddamn assholes of themselves, it's classic Parisian bullshit. Toady up to whoever's most powerful like a fucking whore, and minimize or forget the contribution of everybody else.

You know, best of luck to Obama with that international nuclear disarmament initiative. But this morning, I'm sort of glad to know that if we ever do have another world war, the capital of France will be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust long before the young men from my country are even thinking about being called upon to descend on the country's northern beaches and die in their thousands. Those fucking grande ecole-educated masturbators are so far up their own stinking shit-chutes that they'd try once more to forget it within a generation. The willful ignorance of people educated so intensively and expensively is truly vomit-worthy. Fuck'em.