The Chocolate Cake Conundrum

There is a famous scientific theory that I just made up called the Chocolate Cake Conundrum. It is when you see a chocolate cake and it looks so good and you just want to stuff it in your mouth in one bite. Then, when you get your hands around it, you bite down onto a frosting covered cinder block. All your teeth shatter, and when you stumble back trying to catch the fragments of your mouth bones, you fall off the edge of a cliff and die. Thus, the Chocolate Cake Conundrum.

Paris is my Chocolate Cake. Don't get me wrong, I've been having an amazing time, but some moments feel less like sponge cake and more like concrete. So I guess it's more like a layer cake. Like the cakes my dad would make me on my birthday; a brownie base, ice cream in the middle, brownie, ice cream, whipped cream, oreos, sometimes ketchup to keep us guessing. Now just replace the whipped cream with a frothy layer of asphalt and you have my experience here.

Now none of this is Paris' fault, I would never slander my baby in such a way. The city is spectacular. The cobblestones are embedded with history and stories that whisper through the evening heat waves. The Seine sings its calm and consistent lullaby each night. A tangle of languages tumbles through the crowded streets and ties us all up in beautiful and colorful knots. When I gaze around Paris, I feel at home. That is my chocolate cake, and all the lovely layers in between.

But that pesky cinder block is still hidden in there somewhere, like the hidden petulance that permeated the canals with filth and disease in Death in Venice. Luckily, cholera is not rampant in the streets of Paris like it was in Venice, actually that wasn't even a very good comparison at all but I was forced to read that book last semester so I might as well get some use out of it. For me, this hidden epidemic... is French class.

DUH DUH DUH. I know, it seems anticlimactic, and it is. I'm in France. I'm taking French classes at the Sorbonne. What right do I have to compare that to a literal disease like cholera? Well I really don't. But I'm a dramatic kid, and sometimes it truly feels like that. I have 3 hours of French class every day and if I don't cry in my grammar class, I cry in my phonetics class. I drown every day, and just as I allow myself to slip into the release of the cool water and accept my fate, someone yanks me from the river and resuscitates me, only to shove me under again. Wow. I really am laying it on thick. Well I haven't written in a few days, it's all just kind of coming out. When I'm not in French, I am doing French homework or I am in my other 3 hour class or doing that class' homework. I guess what really gets me down is that when my day is done, I have seen the inside of my classrooms and the urine-stained metro walls and that is it. To be in Paris but forbidden from seeing Paris is almost worse than not being here.

"Breakdown during class" 2019. Acrylic on Canvas

I don't want this to sound like a complaint. I have made memories here that I will never forget and I feel myself growing every day. I have learned how to cook things that I used to only pin on my pinterest board. I have made some wonderful friends. I have learned a plethora of new skills, some that are useful and some recreational. Don't worry about it.

It's just been a long week. And since I am updating on a Friday when I just stuttered my way through a phonetics test and stared blankly at my grammar homework, the post was bound to take a somewhat darker turn.

But all is not lost! Far from it! The weeks ahead are full of class, class, and more class, but somehow I will stay awake long enough every day to make sure I go out there and live while I can. A great man once said "You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true - anyone can cook... but only the fearless can be great."

Yes. That is Gusteau from Pixar's greatest creation, 2007's Ratatouille. But you can't deny that fat animated chef knew what he was talking about. After all, Remy had to leave the sewers to become a famous rat-chef.