a cheesy valentine’s day

Throughout highschool and on my college breaks, I worked at an upscale florist. We had a huge store front and I worked the sales floor, putting together bouquets and arrangements and placing delivery orders for walk-in customers. It was a great afterschool job and I loved it. But after living through year after year of the Valentine’s Day shitstorm, I left that job thoroughly turned off by the holiday.

The clientele during this seasonal rush was largely male, and customers broke down more or less into three categories: genuinely sweet and romantic men (who generally came in up to a week early to plan things out and knew all their lady friend’s favorite things), good-hearted but slightly irritated guys mad about the expectations placed on them by their girlfriend, her mom, society or god knows who else to get something showy and romantic and to shell out a ton of cash, and finally, sleaze bags trying to juggle multiple ladies or get into someone’s pants, buying the cheapest crap possible and all while hitting on little old oblivious high school me. By far, the middle group was the largest. And I honestly I sympathized for them, guys caught in the middle of a high-expectations commercial holiday and forced to prove their love with stuff. My 5-year run working their safely vaccinated me from ever demanding the drippy junk associated with this pink and red stained day of my partner.

Fast forward ten years – (wow, ten years already!?) – change the country (where the commercial intensity of this holiday is at least a bit less) and factor in that I actually have a sweetie now, I’m still pretty detached from the flowers, chocolate, and candlelit dinners at fancy restaurants. I will confess, albeit begrudgingly and against all the staunch beliefs of my 17-year-old self, that yes! I sort of do want to do something a little bit special or different each year.

So I’ll let you in on our little tradition. It’s no big thing, just a special meal cooked at home, no candles or fancy clothes, no aphrodisiacs either (I am so sick of hearing about that nonsense!) It’s a different meal each time but with one very important common theme: cheese. In the beginning, it was the modest indulgence in an entire Mont d’Or round for the two of us. Edd had talked it up as a Christmas staple at his parents’ house before I went home with him for the holidays and I had been seriously looking forward to the fabled gooey, spoonable cheese the whole trip. Imagine my disappointment when his mother decided to forego the Mont d’Or that year… Weeks later, not letting Edd live it down, we headed to the market and picked up a stout round box of cheese and consumed it lovingly on Valentine’s day.

There have been other melty cheeses in the years after, including even a cheddary Welsh Rarebit. And there has been one non-cheesy Valentine’s days too, and let me tell you it didn’t hold a candle to our cheese dates. Now, I’ve become quite fond of the tradition; perhaps the one off-year we had cemented that. But also its cold and I’m looking for any excuse to eat hot melty cheese! It didn’t even occur to me what an inadvertent play on words this ritual was until last week when I told Sarah nonchalantly that we always have a “cheesy Valentine’s day, no pun intended.” Ha!

This year we’re continuing our tradition with a fondue savoyarde that we’ll she with Sarah and her man Anthony. And please, don’t tell me that consuming a mountain of hot, melty cheese isn’t appropriate. First off, tell me that cheese isn’t sexy. Just look at that slowly oozing St. Nectaire up there and tell me that. Although I’m sure that anyone reading who has had a good fondue or raclette has also experienced the cheese equivalent of a hangover. But let’s just concentrate on the magic moment before all that comes. It’s drippy and warm and gooey. You use a fancy long-handled fork or other special utensils. You simply must imbibe wine with your cheese, otherwise you’re just asking for a belly ache. And if you drop your bread in the fondue you have to do a dare. Sounds just right for this cheesy holiday to me!

Happy Valentine’s day to you all, be you a romantic or not.

mrs. pacsman

As of about a month ago, Edd and I have been PACS’d for one year. Looking back through my archives, I realized that I didn’t even mark this event with a post here. I suppose that’s good evidence of the fact that it just wasn’t a grand affair for us, and how unlike getting married it was for us. Jeez!

For those of you not in France or just wondering what I’m even talking about, PACS stands for pacte civile de solidarité. The wikipedia page on it lays out things very well, but essentially, the PACS is a civil union. Many bi-national couples faced with the dilemma of staying in the same country get married to get a visa, but in France at least, the PACS is another option, and the option that suited us best. I’ll get to why later on in this post.

I missed our official anniversary to make a post about this, but to begin with, we’re not really big anniversary celebrants. With the great news announced in California this week concerning Prop 8, there has been lots of news and ideas brewing about marriage and all its changes. I think it’s a fascinating time, and the articles coming out of this are really interesting: engaging gender issues, the economy, changing generational attitudes, etc.  I found myself reading three articles the other day that I wanted to share with you all.

The bouquet I made for Laura's wedding.

First off, I stumbled upon (no pun intended) Nona Willis Aronowitz’s piece at GOOD magazine: I Wish I Wasn’t Married: In Defense of Domestic Partnerships for Straight Couples, and many things she says resonated with me. Then a little bit later, while skimming the headlines on the Atlantic, I saw this article: The Marriage Problem: Why Many Are Choosing Cohabitation Instead.  And then this one: The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America. So, click away and read those for a bit….

See? I love married people!

…OK! I want to get this out there. I’m not against anyone getting married. I do feel a part of this generation that is a bit more slow to do so. I never was the kind of girl to daydream about my wedding. When Edd and I started figuring out how the heck I was going to stay in France, just getting married for the papers was definitely something we discussed. But, I didn’t like that idea – deep down, I knew that marriage was a romantic thing for me, fraught with many ideas and stereotypes and intimidating ideas of foreverness. I still need time to figure out what that means for me. And luckily, he’s not in a rush to do that either.

So the PACS. It’s just right for us right now and I’m very happy that this option was available to us. I jokingly call it, marriage light. When we went to our rendez-vous, we just had to walk a few blocks up the street as it turns out that we live not far from the courthouse where such business is taken care of. We had an appointment, went into a pretty nondescript office meeting with your average nice civil servant lady, and signed our contract. The whole thing was a bit strange as its so new (only 11 years old in France) and so different from marriage, yet so close? – no one is sure about the ceremony and traditions tied to it. And for many couples, it is what you make it; some couples bring friends and cameras and flowers, others roll out of bed in their jeans and just sign with no fanfare whatsoever.

We were a little bemused ourselves, not really sure what it meant to us. It was pretty much for the administrative benefits, but we really do love one another and it still seemed to be a milestone in our relationship. Do we dress up? Will we want to take pictures? Should we kiss after signing the papers? Pop some champagne?

Not a lot of pomp here...

I put on a dress and he wore a dress shirt. (Only to feel pretty self-conscious in the waiting room with plenty of other folks there to accomplish other administrative affairs staring at us like “why are you all dressed up???“) We snapped a few photos to send to our parents. We definitely had some champagne – Who would miss an occasion to drink any? – and went to one of our favorite bistros for lunch (though it was in no way romantic as it was the business man 40-minute in-and-out special). Later that night we went out with a few friends for drinks and dinner. And that was that. PACS’d.

I sometimes forget all about it, I love that it’s not a thing, not a big deal. We’re now officially boyfriend and girlfriend. But I also love the idea of solidarity built into the name. We’re in this together! We’re a team!

And maybe one day, sure, we might get hitched. So the title of this post should probably read: Why I’m Not Married Yet – I’m a never say never girl, and one day my mind will probably change. Or maybe we’ll decide to move to the US and where our PACS wouldn’t be recognized. But for now, I like where we are and I really love that the idea of marriage and all the shades of gray in relationships are getting more attention and more legitimacy.

snow day

So the weekend has proven to be quite chilly and this morning we woke up to more snowfall, and this time it seems to be sticking around!

So this is perhaps no more than 2-3 inches, but that is ENORME for Toulouse. We bundled up and were some of the few to make it to the market this morning.

And of course I took this guy’s picture, along with a bunch of other people who were out photographing this rare snowday!

Planning to stay snuggled up inside and cooking up our semi-frozen merket finds.

slow, awaiting momentum

Waking up at 10am most mornings and just trying to soak up every bit of that luxury. And for the past two days or so, the wind is whooshing outside the black-out shutters, making it even sound cold out there. Which, it actually is, by Toulouse standards. When I finally roll out of bed to crank up the volet – definitely not missing the shutters from my flat in Lyon where you have to open the window to open and close the shutters — its pure grey outdoors and there is a tiny carpet of snow accumulated on the tiles of the balcony, with small snowflakes floating around lost on big gusts of wind. And here I think I realize that, yes, I do miss snowy midwestern winters. But as I was explaining it to Edd recently, I truly believe that those who sigh and love snowy days were marked early by fantastic snow-day experiences, no school, playing in the snow and sledding down great hills with a hundred other kids until you can’t feel your thighs anymore and your mittens are soaking wet. Gaspard was singing Christmas carols in his bathtub last night while forming snow-things from the bubbles. He doesn’t even know the half of it!

But really, the snowfall here is pretty pathetic. By 11am it’s all blown away and even before that any photo you take of the snow requires a macro setting on your camera. Like this photo of St. Aubin, it’s snowing hard and you can’t even see it! Pfff!!

Since I last wrote for you all here, things feel so slow. Slow but comfy and nice though. Slow like a cute sloth video on YouTube that gets you clicking on all the other baby sloth videos after it and then you’ve wasted an hour in no time. I do believe I jinxed myself with that last post though. After turning in my first dossier and getting the extension for my second, I just let go and slid into that new year “blah” feeling. Not depressed, but not inspired. And sort of overjoyed that I brought those sweatpants back from my stash of belongings in the US. Tried to start running again and only clocked about seven miles for 2012. Progress on the extended paper is slow going. Classes are fine, but I feel a bit underwhelmed by their content in general, and find myself wondering about how a museum studies or art education program would have been in the US or simply just listing ways this class could reform itself to be better.

The best things in life during the annual new year slump are so small but so lovely and edible most of the time. Snuggling on the big couch here with my chéri and cruising pinterest for much too long. Catching up with NPR and all my podcasts. Staying up until all hours reading a good book for the first time in eons. Consuming tons of delicious loose-leaf teas; turned on to the tea-pot usage again by my mom while we were in the US, I have gotten out our Bodum press pot and go through a pot a day. (Dreaming of a pretty new one like this one though not until something tragic happens to the Bodum, of course.) That new PJ Harvey album seems to be the perfect bookend to my anglophile period-piece TV series phase I went through in Lyon. The discovery of Pomponnettes at a bakery here in Toulouse also shook my slow-moving earth. A super airy light brioche that looks like a hamburger bun topped with giant sugar crystals and flew down from heaven on wings. Cooking up some delicious things in the little green pea podded kitchen: aligot, roasted every-vegetable with loads of cumin and lemon, an expensive but organic chicken roasted Zuni-style, and of course many a bowl of warm creamy porridge every morning topped with pecans and maple syrup (that giant bottle from Costco may run out sooner than planned…)

So funny how motivating the atmosphere of new year’s is in the first two weeks or so (resolutions, healthy things all around, two-week cleanses) and then it all just flops into the doldrums of winter and the return of reality. My return to the masters program reveals that it is not so inspiring as real work in my field is but I just need to finish. Beginning with this dossier whose open-ended extension I’m abusing a bit, maybe. It will get done, but just feeling sluggish. And then, I know that once I get into it, the to-do list will get longer and longer. Thesis research and writing will commence and life will slip quickly from February to June in no time. Hoping to squeeze a trip to Prague and Austria in there somewhere and have already gotten a new procrastination project lined-up for when thesis writing is just too much: researching a trip up and down the west-coast…

OK momentum, do your thang…