Check out this story I wrote for The Daily, about awesome San Francisco artist Brian Singer.
When I was 20 I left the crowded, incestuous gut of New York and headed due east, across the humbling ink blot of the Atlantic, to Paris, the City of Light.
I had been there once before during the summer following my high school graduation. Freshly separated from my boyfriend, struggling to emotionally adapt to my father’s remarriage and about to embark on my freshman year at NYU, I could not find it in me to muster the touristy spirit necessary for European travel. My attraction to Paris during that trip seemed both strangely visceral and as if I’d experienced it from afar, like I could see through both ends of the telescope. I was too ruined by introspection to appreciate my fondness for the city then, but I’d always known that some day I would study abroad in Paris.
The chance came during the fall of my junior year at NYU. I loved living abroad, but it was also one of the loneliest times in my life. It made me behave in extremely out of character ways. I was brash and brazen like I had never been in New York. I guess I became less shy while I was there, mostly because as an American abroad you are constantly embarrassing yourself and eventually it just stops bothering you. Every time you open your mouth, or make some minor cultural faux pas like bringing a coffee on the Metro, you are embarrassing yourself. After a while you just get used to it, and being shy starts to feel like a luxury.