au loin de ma maison (trop du Radiohead)
Today I’ve been feeling dangerously sentimental. Maybe it’s a bit silly, as I’ve been in Paris, oh, a week and a half. I wasn’t expecting to be homesick at all, in fact, reasoning that, having been more or less a transient for the last three years, this summer wouldn’t amount to much of a change. But just several days, not as a tourist but a resident in a strange land, have forced me to seek middle ground between the radical theories of where, exactly, home is. Graphically rendered:
Where the heart is |————H——————————| Where you hang your hat
I’d situate my current opinion around there.
It’s hard to be a foreigner.
My friend Connor Mendenhall, as he usually does, captures the sentiment better than I ever could in this excellent post. Of course, he’s been in Turkey for nearly a year, and has a much more legitimate claim on such feelings of isolation.
The language issue is only an aspect of my melancholy; after all, almost everyone here speaks English. But to my (probably oversensitive) ears, they wield it like a weapon. English is an accusation - instantly conveying several propositions: Your accent is terrible. Your grammar is execrable. Your constant, goofy half-smile could only have originated in one place.
They’re right, of course, on all counts. But it would be nice if they could at least wait for me to stutter out “je suis américain” before they assumed (again, correctly) that I understand almost none of their language.
But I digress. My parents’ house, Xanadu, Mike Tyler’s basement… all the places I’ve called home over the last 21 years, well, I miss them terribly. But I’m giving 21 rue Théodore de Banville a shot – if I manage to do things right this summer (knowing me, I’m sure you are all aware how tenuous of an “if” this is) maybe it will join the pantheon.
