I got up early today and took the bus all the way across town to the office (EGIDE) that manages foreign fellowship holders for the French Foreign Ministry to get some forms filled for the deferment of my student loans. As I left our apartment, I dreamily circled down the 6 flights of our spiral staircase, not just because I was still half asleep, but also because I love taking the 38 bus from the 14th to the 10th arrondissement, and so was busy imagining what I would see and look for on my trip. It would be a lot quicker to take the metro, but by bus I can see the city, and the 38 goes right through the heart of the 14th, 6th, and 1st arrondissements before finally reaching the 10th, giving its riders glimpses of the Museum of Medieval History, the Pantheon, Luxembourg Gardens, the Hotel de Ville, and Notre Dame. Not to mention that once I get off the bus at the Gare de l’Est, I can take a slight detour on the path to the EGIDE in order to visit the pedestrian bridge that stretches in a whimsical arch across the emerald green waters of the Canal St. Martin.
Well, I must have been dreaming too deeply, since when I got on the bus I failed to notice that this particular 38 did not go all the way to the 10th, but stopped in the 1st. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was that I thought I could just walk the rest of the way. Long story short, wrong. Not unless I wanted to spend my whole morning on foot. Before realizing the extent of my error, I did walk by the Centre Georges Pompidou, where a Chinese musician was playing a traditional stringed instrument in the courtyard–which is actually a huge expanse of concrete, but strangely enough it has great acoustics. I should have known better, and taken this accidental rencontre as a sign from the gods that I was not meant to proceed on to petty bureaucratic matters. I ignored the gods, and the gods took their revenge.
Once I finally arrived at the EGIDE (a full hour after I left home and without seeing so much as a glimmer of the Canal St. Martin), I was promptly seen by the woman who is in charge of Chateaubriand fellows (and whose name, Gentilt, is ironically phonetically similar to the French word for “nice”). Mme Gentilt just as promptly told me that she could not sign my foreign forms for reasons that still remain obscure. No amount of pleading or explaining my case seemed to matter very much. It was not within her duty, so she wasn’t going to do it, period. I should translate the offical EGIDE certification of fellowship status form (which has her signature on it!!), she said, then go to the American Embassy (across town in the 8th) to get the translation notarized. Then I should send that translation along with the original and the unsigned American form to my lender. When I protested that my lender may not accept a form that wasn’t signed, in spite of the accompanying documentation, her completely rational reply was, “But, many American students have asked me for a similar thing, and I have always just sent them to the Embassy. And they never came back to see me, so I assume it all worked out.” End of conversation. I held my tongue and did not say that perhaps the reason they did not come back to see her might have something to do with that fact that they were now aware that when they had a problem that she could solve with a simple stroke of a pen, she would send them out cavorting all over Paris instead. True to her name, she was “nice” about the whole thing (she didn’t hit me, spit on me, or yell at me or anything), it’s just that “nice” people often tend to be so by virtue of their helpfulness to others. “Nice” must mean something different in French, at least in French bureaucratic parlance. It was “nice” of her to see me at all, I guess. My third mistake was that I expected something more.
Things did get better, though, and I thoroughly believe it is because 1) things always happen in 3’s, and I had made three grave mistakes, so I figured I was done for the day; 2) I lowered my expectations; and 3) I stopped ignoring signs from the universe. The universe told me to go drink coffee in a cafe, so that is where I spent the rest of the morning, reading Utopia and writing in my journal. Later in the afternoon, I met Chris at the Louvre, and he (unexpectedly) brought me lunch–what a thoughtful guy! Then we went in and saw the Mona Lisa. She smiled at us from behind a thick hedge of tourists, and I felt a lot better.