It started with a dream. I had a nightmare that woke me up Tuesday morning. I dreamt that when I got up and started to brush my teeth, three of them fell out.
It didn't hurt, it was more like when your baby teeth fall out as a child. Started with the top towards the left, then lower towards the left. My left. And then I think a lower right on when someone (not a dentist) tried to inspect.
I heard a little while ago, I think from Beckie, that when you dream about losing teeth it's actually about anxiety over money. Now as we all know, I'm always worried about money. It's a constant dull pinprick at the back of my head, I don't need special dreams to tell me that I'm broke. I think I've been all right this trip, splurging in enough places to enjoy myself without resigning myself to destitution. But whenever it just seems like I'm managing to save a little, something dumb happens - I lose £10 in the supermarket or buy a SIM card that doesn't work for my phone. I scrimp and save and unabashedly accept the name of cheapass so that when shit like that happens, it evens out to where it's only as though I'd spent like a normal person, instead of spending like a normal person and then losing more on top of it.
So, I treated the dream like a horoscope and didn't put too much stock into it, but made a mental note to keep it tucked away in my memory bank just in case something did happen to happen. Of course, I promptly forgot about this mental note almost as soon as I went to brush my teeth and they didn't fall away to the touch. I forgot about it basically before my day started.
And then, almost as soon as it did start, it seemed like it was shaping up to be a bad one.
The Contrôleurs were in the Metro station where I was making a transfer, and though I'd specifically bought a week long pass, I got fined €40 because I didn't have a particular ID thing that's supposed to go with it. (Travel tip: a carte orange is not the same thing as the metro ticket, even though it is printed with orange stuff on it. The carte is your ID thing. Even if you are bandied about between two different ticket vendors because you don't speak French, and each of them will be very sweet and helpful and make sure you understand that the ticket's validity period doesn't start until Monday, neither one of them may ever mention anything about this other ID thing. Ask for it.)
It's my own bloody fault for visiting a country without bothering to learn any of the language first. Be presumputous enough to assume that enough people speak your language (which most of them do) and resign yourself to helplessly talking at each other when you get in trouble, each party trying to get the other to understand. Actually I think we understood each other fine, but they had no obligation to do anything about it whereas I pretty much had to pay the €40 immediately or pay €108 later.
It wasn't fair. Trying to save money by buying a week pass should not cost you $60 American. And what burns is that I wasn't trying to cheat the system. Had I ever been caught any of the scads of times I'd ridden the rails without validating my ticket in Melbourne, well. That would have been unfortunate but not unjustified, I suppose. I knew I was taking a little risk. But here, to be "caught" for want of a little card that comes free if only I had known I needed it...I'll say one thing. If this had happened in San Francisco, I would have been let off.
But I am not in San Francisco. I chose to leave San Francisco to go other places, Paris being one of them, even though I don't even know enough French to be bad at French. So I might as well accept the consequences and move on.
Of course, though, I spent the rest of the day thinking about it. There were dozens of things I told myself. Could've been worse, €40 is not a small amount of money but it could have been more. You're saving well more than that thanks to the very generous friends who are letting you stay with them rather than at a hotel. You've probably saved that much in museum admissions by going when they were free. And don't pretend you're not vowing privately to use the ticket at least four times a day now that it's cost you a total of €56, anyway. You're having a fantastic time otherwise, again thanks to the generosity of your hosts, so don't start letting a bad attitude taint your holiday. And let's be honest, you might spend that much on dinner in two days. Be glad that the money you've lost was treat money and not desperately needed money, even if it was money that you didn't deserve to lose.
It still bothered me. It bothered me intermittently at the Dali museum, it bothered me on the way back to the flat for a cheap lunch; it bothered me while I looked for something else to do in another part of town so I would have an excuse to use the ticket again.
I decided to see a movie, No Country for Old Men, and went to the cheapest place I could find in Pariscope accesible with my ticket. I knew I was being petty as hell, but it helped that it was kind of far away and it helped that I was about to see a movie where I knew a lot of people were going to get killed. It helped also that I already knew it was supposed to be very good, because I was not going to be spending any more money that day on something that was not a sure thing.
The movie was excellent. Coen brothers, amazing. Javier Bardem, amazing. Tommy Lee Jones was so helpless and sad. One of the last things his character says in the movie made me cry. It's not the part that's meant to close the film, I'm sure it's not meant to be insignificant, but it is incidental and I'm sure it's not the part that's meant to linger in your thoughts and haunt you on the way home. But I wasn't expecting to be stunned so close to the end of the film and this reached right out from the "this is the end of our movie winding down" haze and slapped me in the face. John Rosenberg would've said it punched me in the heart.
Tommy Lee Jones is talking about two dreams he had in the night, one of them forgettable, the other the image that closes the film. Both dreams involved his dad, he says. In the first, forgettable one, they meet somewhere in town and his dad gives him some money. "I think I lost it," he says, and moves on to talk about the other dream.
Tommy Lee's character is older than his father ever lived to be at that point, so he says it's funny that he would dream about him because the father would now be, in a sense, the younger man. And the film, as can be gleaned from the title, is about a country outgrowing its elders, leaving the old men behind. And there's something so stunting about losing money. It's as though it takes a kind of irresponsibility to lose money of which we are capable only in youth. Not to spend money foolishly, but to simply lose it - there is nothing else that can make you feel as childish, no matter how old or mature you think you've gotten.
Would I have been crying if I hadn't had the day that I'd just had? As I've said, money's always an issue. And losing some never makes anyone happy. But is it just a sign that I'm really still just a spoiled kid when I lose some money and pout for a day, and then decide that the only thing to do is to forget about it? But what else should I do? It wasn't even that much and after all, it's only money.
That's either the most mature attitude one can have about it or so naive only the most foolish kind of youth could have come up with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment