Daily stage fright
A couple weeks ago, This American Life re-ran an episode from the year 2000 called “Americans in Paris.” The whole thing is charming and feels like a warm and wonderful time capsule, but I want to talk about the first act, in which Ira Glass accompanies David Sedaris around Paris for a few days. They skip the Louvre and Notre Dame, neither of which Sedaris has been to in his two years of living in Paris. “I don’t see the point,” he says. Instead, they go to a hardware store, a puppet show for children, a medical supply shop, a frozen-food emporium, and a store that Sedaris calls “the Noah’s Arc of taxidermy.” Sedaris speaks French at this point, but not very well, and his entire mental map of the city is formed of places where people are nice to him despite him constantly and unwittingly making a fool of himself. And also children’s puppet shows, because he can understand what’s going on.
Sedaris’s life in beginner’s French is explicitly presented as “a series of humiliations and near-humiliations,” and it’s funny. Of course it’s funny! But it’s also so clear that he loves every minute of it. Not despite the humiliations and mishaps and unadulterated terror at the prospect of asking a stranger for a light, but because of them. Glass calls this sensation “daily stage fright,” and it turns out that experiencing it is the whole reason Sedaris has moved halfway around the world. It’s a feature, not a bug.
To say my entire soul thrilled in recognition would be an understatement. When I first came to Mexico City in 2007, I could barely put together a sentence in Spanish. I was studying abroad, but classes weren’t even the worst of it. The real challenge was that at all the stores in my neighborhood the products were behind the counter, immediately forcing me into what might be generously called “conversations” with the clerks. How do you say “floss” in Spanish? Ibuprofen? A power strip? I needed all of those things, and I had no idea. This was before Google Translate and smartphones; I didn’t even have internet in my house. If a word wasn’t in my Spanish-English dictionary—or if my dictionary was at home, and I wasn’t—well, I would just have to figure it out. It was so scary, and so, so, so embarrassing.
Reader, I loved it. I loved having to really think about mundane objects and what they did in order to describe them. I loved how completely trivial interactions became emotional roller-coasters. I could take nothing for granted, and so nothing was banal. Take the Great Power Strip Adventure of February 2007. I walked into a small office supply store near my apartment, after days of gathering my nerve. “Hello,” I said to the lady behind the counter. “I need to plug many things into one thing.” “Oh,” she said after a moment of confusion. “You need a power strip.” And she rustled around in the shelves until she found one and handed it to me. It remains one of the best moments of my life.
When people talk to me about learning another language, they often say that the white-hot fire of embarrassment and shame they feel when they speak it means they must be doing it wrong. That couldn’t be further from the truth. You’re stammering and freezing up and praying that a black hole will open beneath your feet and swallow you every time you open your mouth? That means you’re doing it right. It’s the only way. And not only that. It is, dare I say, the best part.
In the radio segment, Glass describes this state of being as when “the mystery has not ebbed from everyday life.” Sedaris says that when his French improves enough that he loses that feeling, he’ll leave. Nineteen years later, he has. Twelve years after my own total immersion plunge, I’ve long since left that feeling behind. I miss it. One day, I suspect I will go in search of it again. It was nice to realize that I’m not the only one.
Recommendations
Who? Weekly. The best podcast ever made, about the celebrities that make you go, who? (The world of celebrities, and of everything else it turns out, is divided into Whos and Thems. When you see a picture of the latter, you say, oh them.) The hosts have off-the-charts conversational chemistry, and it’s super sharp media criticism disguised as cotton candy about Instagram influencers and Eurovision contestants. There’s a little bit of a learning curve when getting into it, as the invented jargon would suggest, so if you’re curious but not sold I recommend their recent guide to the Whos of the Democratic Primary (the July 26 episode).
“What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?” There are certain debates in the public sphere that seem to be about science but are actually about everything but. GMOs are one, chronic Lyme disease is another. As a science writer, it can be hard, and exhausting, to figure out how to approach those issues. This is an extraordinary article that expertly threads the needle between skepticism and empathy.
“What America Gets Wrong About Tracy Flick.” This is the latest in a trickle of articles over the past few years in which critics re-watch Election and say, wtf??? Not about the movie, which is a masterpiece, but about how we collectively remember the movie and especially its hero-turned-cultural-villain, Tracy Flick. I had this experience myself, and it is dizzying and enraging. Highly recommend!