Rentrée Sickness

Yesterday, the first of September, is known as la rentrée, or the return. It is a grand return indeed: everyone’s back from their lengthy August vacations, school is again in session, the city is coming back to life, office activity is picking up. And therefore, everyone is feeling down. Including me, except not for the same reasons most Parisians are.

It’s just that I’m sick of all the complaining. I’ve grinned and bared it and I’ve tried to be sympathetic in the face of it, but frankly, I’m over it.

Parisians complain all the time. It’s practically an academic exercise. The running philosophy goes that if a Frenchman finds something worth complaining about, he has analyzed the situation craftily enough to identify an obvious or, better yet, a hidden fault. If you don’t find any fault, you are mentally lazy. He is therefore smarter than you. To boil it down into simpler terms…Complacent = stupid. Happy = downright moronic. Maybe I’m looking at this from a limited point of view (or maybe I’m just dumb, since I’m often in a good mood), but what does it say about a culture that devotes all this mental energy to actively not being happy? It isn’t a shock, then, to discover that 20% of French adults are on antidepressants. French adults are also the world’s biggest consumers of tranquilizers. Holy smokes.

Combine an already pessimistic national character with a return to work after the summer and Paris starts to feel funereal. You can feel it on the Metro and watching the hordes of workers surge past in the business district. Every student I’ve seen since yesterday morning has complained about something or other. I asked one, whom I hadn’t seen in two months due to her sprawling summer holiday, how her trip went, smiling expectantly. She said it was fine and then immediately launched into a long and bitter diatribe about how shitty the public transportation system is. All this because she got to work 15 minutes late today. I think we’ve crossed over from glass half empty to can’t see anything in the glass at all.

I read a piece in the IHT yesterday that went beyond my small sample size. Apparently, this is a “particularly morose” return because people are hesitant about the slowing economy and decreased purchasing power. Well, these are legitimate causes for concern, but there are reasons the French economy is stagnant (beyond the ripple effect of the American market crisis) and part of it has to do with the lack of dynamism and resistance to change. It’s the French paradox of complaining about how bad things are but then complaining (translation: striking) when something is poised to change. In fact, there have been rumblings about a major strike coming to theaters near us this fall—which may succeed in slowing down the economy further if it causes a prolonged period of preventing people from getting to work.

Clearly, I’m a product of my own culture. Surely, no one likes coming back from vacation and financial woes are not trivial matters, but where I come from we pick ourselves up and get things done and don’t waste too much negative energy bitching about it. Because that’s just what we do. And if we don’t like the situation we’re in, we try our best to change it or something about ourselves in order to better deal with it. We don’t wait around for the other shoe to drop or for the state to come pick it up and put it back on the rack where we think it belongs. We’re certainly not perfect, and we’ve made plenty of mistakes, but we at least make an effort to control our own destinies. (Ooooooooooh, she took it there.) It’s strange how after a year of living outside America, I realize how much of an American I truly am.

Oh, but of course not all of the French are dark, dreary, and dour. And I adore France. Just not for the reasons outlined above.

Yes, this is my day to rant, people! And don’t think the irony is lost on me. I fully acknowledge that in my attempt to vent about the complaining that surrounds me, I am, in fact, complaining. Maybe this re-entry sickness is more powerful than I thought.