The Little Genie

Say what you will about Joan Rivers. She inspired me the other day. Click on that link with care -- her potty mouth remains as dirty as ever (or skip ahead to the 4:15 mark, when she gets into some real, pure thoughts of her own). It's been a while since something on TV has moved me. Several years ago I was jolted out of my melancholia while watching the film Veronica Guerin. If you missed it, Veronica Guerin was a fearless journalist who exposed a drug ring in Northern Ireland. Watching her story left me feeling like a coward.

At the time, I was sitting on my brother's blue velour couch in Beijing, enjoying lots of delicious homemade dumplings and steamed cakes. During my six weeks in China, I mastered one Chinese sentence, even learning to write it in calligraphy. To this day, I can still proudly say, ''I am American, not Chinese.'' In retrospect, I see I could have been more judicious about what I learned to say. To a Chinese person, I imagine that statement was rather self-evident. When I retell this story now, I own up to the silliness upfront (never divulging how long it took me to master the characters and sounds!), and somehow that makes it a little less silly. A few days after watching that film, I was back in New York working to (re)build a life.

Speaking of ''owning up'' to mistakes and shortcomings, I named my business here La Petite Génie. While certain French nouns can be changed to show gender (maître and maîtresse for male and female teachers, for example), génie is not one of them. When I tell certain French people the company name, they wriggle their eyebrows a minute and then say, ''you know, it should be Le Petit Génie. We don't really say la génie.'' I nod and smile, thanking them for the tip, wishing I hadn't already printed 200 business cards and bought a domain name.

In France, it's common to simply call your teacher ''maîtresse," which becomes a little problematic for me, since the same word also means ''mistress.'' One former student always made me smile when he started each text message to me like this, ''Hi Teacher, how are you?'' Other students have talked to me about their open-relationships or stagnant sex lives, and I sometimes wonder, are they, too, playing with the doo-bluh on-tahn-druh (double entendre) of my role as ''maîtresse?'' To be fair, that term is often reserved for elementary school teachers and women who disrobe; neither is true for me. In fact, my title here is really ''professeur,'' which adds more weight to my job than my credentials merit (in Anglo-Saxon terms, anyway).

So what did Joan Rivers say? She told a disheartened Louis CK that he can't give up, that you simply don't give up when it comes to work and your career (or anything else, I suppose). She warns that you should be prepared to falter and fail, but then you must get back up. Two good morsels of advice for someone who is feeling a bit disheartened about building a business here in Paris.

I recently emailed a friend and said that I was ''sur le champ de bataille contre les fourmis,'' (on the battlefield against ants). It has been a long week, but thankfully, that battle has come to an anti-climactic finish: I resorted to chemical weaponry, and those poor beasts walked right to their deaths. I was secretly amazed at how unfazed they appeared after the previous day's onslaught of boiling water, mint-scented glass cleaner, and a few lavender bubble baths. The more drastic my measures to eliminate them, the more determined they seemed to be, walking around the base of the stem, in lines and with purpose. Ironically, it's the very same work ethic observed in ant colonies that I now need to summon in myself.

Ant problem aside, I can now focus my energy on developing business brochures, targeting potential clients, and boosting myself up as I prepare to walk down a path that may not lead to success.