Perhaps my schedule will permanently switch to weekends. I manage to postpone writing until then anyway. I did recently catch shade for having the most digressive schedule in the history of planning, so I’d like to acknowledge that I am aware of my faults (I originally wrote this on Friday, but I had some edits so we are back on track for Monday).
This week was pretty focused on people. I don’t mean that I fixated on a single person for a week (that would be kind of weird, wouldn’t it?), instead, I mean that I met, observed, and learned about some cool people.
Fionn is the son of our professor (and the fabulous Jenna Flood of my French education fables) and we’ve made good friends because he is hilarious. He and I went to play basketball at Champ-de-Mars, which is something I didn’t know I could dream of: the Eiffel Tower looms over you like Kevin Durant as you ball to your heart’s content. It is pretty sweet. We met a kid named Raimon while we were playing the other day. He was from Germany and knew English and no French, so it was a great conversational setup. We played with him for a while, won a few games, and then started talking. He told me that I looked like Belgian soccer player Kevin de Bruyne. That was better than Boris Johnson, so we remained friends. We decided we were hungry and that we’d go get something to eat. Raimon asked if he could call his brother and he could come meet up with us, so we played and waited for him. Rodas showed up a little while later.
We went to a place down the street and I got to talking with Rodas. He was from Germany (duh, they’re brothers) and had studied in DC. He also lived in Arizona for a while. Thus, he knew of the shenanigans that go down up in the Utah region. He was very respectful and asked some questions about what life was like as someone who was LDS. Fionn and I talked with them about what things were like and we didn’t shy away from how we felt because we didn’t have to. We talked about the positives, the negatives, and everything in between. Rodas knew a fair amount about our religion as a whole, but he was very surprised at the mentalities Fionn and I possessed towards the church we grew up in. He said that he had been kind of wary to meet his brother once he found out we were from Utah, but that we didn’t act anything like what he thought we would.
Later, Fionn had to leave, and the three of us wanted to keep hanging out. We tried crème brulee at a restaurant and kept talking. Rodas and Raimon are black, and Rodas joked that his brother acts white. I asked if I did, and he said, “you don’t act Mormon, that’s for sure”. I’m sure that many people would have found that offensive, but the way he said it didn’t feel off-putting. It felt far more like he was communicating that I had made him feel normal, and that I’d changed his attitude somehow. In the course of an hour conversation, I convinced someone that I was a normal person despite my church affiliation and felt like he cared.
He said he was surprised by the American way of caring. He said the people were very kind, but only to his face. He had no idea who he could count on if he needed something and that it was so isolating to have no close friendships and thousand surface level ones. I can relate to that pretty well, and I’m sure any number of people on this list can as well. He also mentioned that it was hard to feel cared about in a world like that. It kind of hurt me to hear that, cause he was such a cool guy who seemed ready for great things, and if people really got to know him they could see that. I feel saddest for the people in Arizona who didn’t get the pleasure of meeting him.
We also talked about the American political landscape, and how neither him nor his brother could fathom how people there don’t trust their government to help them. He said that in Germany, the people know that the government is there to help them and make their society better, and that everyone trusts their representatives to do just that. I wish it were the same in America. They described an environment where people weren’t afraid to talk of politics because there is a mutual understanding that collaboration is the only way forward. It was cool.
The next person I observed was some random guy at Notre Dame that I genuinely cannot explain in words. He was riding a bike with a speaker and had a backpack with cones attached to it and a bunch of other things. He wore fingerless gloves, had peach fuzz on his face, and was dressed in all black. The only reason I mention him at all is so that you can understand exactly how odd this scene was. Shortly after that, a bunch of skater kids showed up and tried to film a trick on their camcorders at Notre Dame. It was night, and we watched them fail over and over. Out of nowhere, the Green Berets (special forces) show up with their assault rifles and walk past us. They go up by Notre Dame — the skate kids had become very loud at this point — then come back. I thought the skaters would leave, but they didn’t. The Green Berets walked towards them and I was ready to watch the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. They walked between all the skater kids and didn’t say a word. The skaters just kept on skating and didn’t acknowledge that the special forces were literally walking through their skate video. The Green Berets didn’t bat an eyelash at the loud kids, they just sauntered on past. To conclude the act, an empty water bottle rolls on over to us, pauses, and stumbles down the stairs. “Now that’s a drunk bottle,” I said, which is probably the funniest double-level joke I’ve ever made and the comedic timing could not have been more perfect.
I encountered the same person twice, and was not delighted either time. Walking in between the mall and our classrooms, a guy yelled at me and said, “You have a funny face! Let me draw it for free!” I said, “no, sorry, I can’t today,” and kept walking, despite his wailing cried to let him draw my weird looking face. It was only slightly embarrassing. I thought nothing of it. 30 minutes later, we were walking by the same place and I realized I had to cover my face so this guy wouldn’t see me. My friend (rat) thought she saw the guy and said I was good to lower my notebook. I thought it was him too, so I naively lowered the book. I should have waited, because like something out of a movie, the people parted and the guy and I were facing directly at one another. “YOU AGAIN! Let me draw your funny face! You have such-a round cheeks! COME BACK HERE!” I walked faster. It was hilarious. The guy is there everyday and I avoid the corner just as often. So far so good.
I went to Disneyland. I rode the scary rollercoasters. I lost my voice. Enough said.
I saw my first rat. And second, third, fourth, and fifth. I was very scared.
We visited a castle called Chateau de Vincennes. It was very cool. We climbed up the bell tower and were admiring the view when one of my friends said, “Look! A clock!”. It was not in fact a clock, it was a bell, since we were in the bell tower. In French, bells are called les clochettes, which I suppose makes sense because they were like small clocks that only told a little bit of time every so often. After laughing about that blunder for a bit, I saw an actual clock in the distance. I said, “Look! A cl- “ and was interrupted by the second loudest DONG (Ryan Olvera knows the first one) I’ve ever heard in my life. The clochette behind me was not happy with my joke. It was so funny. I wasn’t permitted by the bell tower make fun of my friend.
My last thought is about showing up for these aforementioned people. This week I learned that putting what you want aside and going out of your way to help someone who needs it will always be worth it, even if they’re not your favorite person in the world. They’re still people, they still have emotions, and they still need help. I had a chance to be there for someone this week, and I’m glad I did. I can’t imagine how hard it is to feel like nobody has your back and nobody is looking out for you. I’m lucky; I don’t feel that way, but I think for a minute I got to see what that feels like. I got to watch and listen to someone go through that and it was terrible. Just being present had a huge effect in decreasing that kind of panic and stress. Show up.
I’ve been working very hard to change the gut reactions I have to situations. I have learned that the worst part of a stressful situation is the anticipation. The actual thing has never been that bad, but thinking about it has (cue my rocky relationship with the Tower of Terror). I had the thought to do something nice for someone I didn’t know on Sunday, so I did it before I could talk myself out of it. I didn’t even give myself a chance to think about it. I just did it, and I’m glad I did. I’d like to keep working on this skill so that when things go wrong, I’ll have trained myself to act normally and not in a panic. I’m sure it will take a while.
Anyway, things are really fun here and I dread the day I have to return to mathematics and hard work and character growth and all that. But for now, I am going to try to get my haircut. If you’re Christian, pray for me.
-willards
