I’m sitting outside in a sleeveless dress. I have a few goose bumps but my teeth aren’t chattering and it’s not raining, so I’m not complaining. The last week I would have worn my winter coat if I had it with me. I didn’t have it with me so I was just cold and cranky. Things I used to ignore started to seriously irritate me, like people who hold the door to the metro open and don’t let it leave on time. Like it’s the last metro ever. Like waiting three minutes for the next train is so torturous.

But today’s not so bad. Sure there’s still no sun, and I’m less than a week away from my next tearful airport goodbye. Still, I feel better because I’m not as materialistic as I had feared. I ran out of money about two weeks ago. Not completely, but I spent all the money I had allotted myself for the whole summer before July was half over. Because I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have been, and didn’t choose the right bank account to pay for my plane tickets and my hostel in Berlin.

Being broke is stressful, but I’m lucky enough that all of my necessities are already covered. I paid my metro card until the end of my time in Paris, and Ader doesn’t expect or even allow me to help with rent or groceries. So my only sacrifices are eating out and semi-recreational shopping. Not so bad when you compare my financial woes to other people’s, and when you consider things I’ve said in the past.

“Capitalism sucks.”

“I don’t care about money; I just want to be happy.”

“A shopping addiction is not a real thing. Why are they having an Intervention for this chick?”       

But secretly I was concerned for myself. Not that I really shop that much, and almost never for things that aren’t essential/super useful/gifts for my closest family and friends for worthy occasions. What concerned me was how much I enjoyed buying things, trying on clothes, smelling soaps, testing eyeliners on my hands…Shopping online was a double high, when I finalize my order and again when the package comes in the mail. Trips to Bath & Body Works were always the high light of my day in college. I could not wait to run out of shower gel.

So when I checked my balance and saw it was basically zero, my worry was not that I’d have to starve or sleep on the street or go back to New Jersey. But I was afraid that I was going to have to give up the only pleasure. And how terrible would it be to have to admit: Material items are the only thing that can make me happy?

Fortunately I know now that that’s not true at all. Going back to Montrouge and cooking lunch is not any more painful than waiting three minutes for the next metro. The same crêpe everyday was getting boring anyway. Instead of shopping I’m writing, I’m meeting my friends and hanging out in a park instead of a café, I’m making the most of the short time I have with my boyfriend. Sometimes I can’t keep myself from going into stores. But just looking, imagining buying things satisfies my cravings. Now I’m sure, I’m addicted to nothing.    

Where does my time go? How is it that it’s already 4:30 and I’ve accomplished nothing yet today? Every day is uniquely unproductive but today: I slept until 10:37 instead of ten because it took me so long to fall asleep last night. Now I know that, yes, coffee éclairs have caffeine in them. It took me an hour to get ready because I’m slow and then I went to the pharmacy to pick up something for Ader. That part was actually pretty speedy. I showed the pharmacist the receipt, she handed me the filled prescription, I said “merci, bonne journée” and left. Oh the horrors of socialized medicine! But that’s a discussion for another time.

I got back to our building and found the elevator broken so I had to walk up six flights of stairs. I’m out of shape my own standards so that took a few more minutes than it should have. Then I had to change clothes because my desire for a hot sunny day has little to no effect on reality and I was freezing. I had some emails to send in French (easy) and German (hard and time consuming). I checked my voice mail hoping someone had left a message with a job offer but all four messages were from Agathe. Agathe is a fifty-something French lady who contacted me through Conversation Exchange. It’s not that I’m opposed to hanging out with people a generation older than me, in fact just about all of my friends are older than me. But Agathe vouvoyers me and just seems really stuffy and old.

Back when I was a self-forcer I agreed to meet her, but then I admitted to myself that I didn’t really want to. I sent her an apologetic text to cancel and then spent the evening making guacamole and watching Secret Story with Ader, which was all I really felt like doing. Four times now Agathe has called me at nine a.m. asking if we could try and meet again. I never answer, I never call her back, and yet she just doesn’t get it. But people like this are also a discussion for another time.

So now I was dressed appropriately and my bag of books was packed and I headed off to the library in the Mairie of the seventh arrondissement. I took the metro all the way to Varenne and then it was still a bit of a walk. So I had plenty of time to remember that all the public libraries in Paris are closed on Mondays, a fact that I have lamented to anyone who will listen. But I didn’t before I got to the door and pulled on the handle a few times. Then I went to try and find the supposedly very nice Jardin Atlantique. I finally found it but it’s not that great after all plus it started raining. So now I’m home sitting on the floor using the coffee table as a desk. And that’s what happened to Monday, July eighteenth.    

I’m a pretty hardcore self-forcer. By which I mean I am constantly making myself do things I don’t want to do. The reason here is that if I only did what I felt like doing, some days I would just stay in bed and eat olives with my fingers. But it’s gotten to the point where I completely disregard my own volition and make myself unnecessarily miserable.

Examples: I made barbecue sauce for dinner the other night, even though I didn’t have molasses. It wasn’t the most disgusting thing I’ve ever made; we ate more than half of it with our fried tofu. But after a night in the fridge it was super bitter and literally made my eyes water and hurt my stomach a bit. Still, I finished it for lunch the next day on the principle that I don’t waste food as long as it doesn’t literally make me gag.

Yesterday I agreed to see a friend, more of an acquaintance really, a fellow Erasmuser for my Paris III days. I’m not a huge fan of this dude. He doesn’t make appropriate facial expressions while I’m talking and loves Terminator movies. I don’t have any real reasons to dislike him either though and I wasn’t busy so I accepted the invitation. We spent two hours talking about nothing in the Luxembourg gardens. The logic being, if I only socialized with people who have never ever annoyed me, I’d be all alone.

There are literally hundreds of other examples of this kind of situation from this past week alone, but I think you get the point. I think that I’d like to stop being a self-forcer or such a self-forcer anyway. There have been occasions, usually at the end of a semester when all of my willpower is used up, where I say fuck it and do only what I want to. This never lasts more than two days because I start to feel weak and moody from all the time spent in bed and the poor nutrition. My phone fills up with concerned text messages--What happened last night?!!!—and the worry that I’m wasting my life away becomes overwhelming.

So the next day I’m up early, running, eating protein, writing, and making plans with my friends, like it or not. So the idea now is to find a balance. I need to learn to make the most of my time without punishing myself. Right now I’m at Esplanade des Invalides for the second day in a row. Usually I force myself to find a different spot. I don’t like to go to the same place too often just because Paris is a big city with lots of neighborhoods each with its own personality. But here it’s clean and calm and unlike most other parks in this city, free of creepers. I just like this park better and for no other reason this is where I decided to go. That’s a start, I think.  

Time passes too quickly here in Paris! In college a month was a mini eternity, but here a good chunk of my time here is over. I’m not going to calculate the actual percentage of time that has already elapsed because that will only make me sad. I wake up at ten because if I wake up any earlier I’m throwing away an opportunity to sleep in. After the all nighters and days started at five am demanded by school and traveling on a tight budget, I appreciate a morning spent in bed. I wish I were one of those I’ll-sleep-when-I’m-dead kind of people but if I don’t set an alarm I can literally sleep for twelve consecutive hours. I’m not proud of this.

But then again there really isn’t much of a reason to wake up before ten. By the time I get my day started I’ve missed morning rush hour (perhaps the most miserable thing about city living), stores and libraries and cafés are just opening and the sun is out if it’s coming out at all. Don’t you hate it when you wake up early and it’s cold so then you bundle up and then by noon you’re dressed too warmly and have to carry some stupid jacket with you everywhere or just suck it up and be hot and tired too because you woke up too early? I do, but at least for the rest of this month that doesn’t have to happen.

Then I have to go grocery shopping pretty much every day-“marketing” as my grandmother calls it-because I refuse to schlep around twenty pounds of groceries once a week Albany style. Navigating the giant grocery store closest to our apartment is surprisingly time consuming, I think because I have a hard time accepting that such an enormous store doesn’t have, for example molasses, and I’ll do a thorough search of every single aisle before giving up, going home to put the groceries away and then searching some Asian market/health food store for the missing ingredients.

By this point it is usually mid afternoon, and if I don’t have a rendez-vous with friends I try and sit in a park or library and write. Except that my writer’s block in pretty bad. This stresses me out because if I can’t write now that I’m out of excuses: I’m well rested and warm a virtually free of all other responsibilities then when am I ever going to finish these novels? And then stresses make my writer’s block worse. Stress makes everything worse; it’s all stress’s fault! By the time I’ve calmed myself down it’s time to meet Ader at home and the days is basically over. Sigh.