When people are speaking in another language and laughing about something they seem to want everyone else around them to think is endlessly funny too, I imagine that it’s never actually anything funny at all. That it’s something totally prosaic (and/or stupid) instead. Mind-numbingly so. After all, only idiots laugh with such bombast—regardless of nationality.

And yet, because people—especially Americans—have been conditioned to believe that those speaking a foreign language (particularly if it’s French or Italian) are inherently more “glamorous” and “cultured” than themselves, they’re also made to feel decidedly more “inferior” when they can’t understand what’s being said. As though, if they could, it would make them as “urbane” and “sophisticated” as the people speaking. Little do the mere English speakers know, those communicating in a foreign tongue (foreign to the American, anyway, who sees everyone from a different country as “other”) are rarely saying anything all that noteworthy. Even though they certainly have a gift for making it seem that way.

Just as the people sitting near me in the terrasse of the café did. Side note: if you’re too “uncultured” to know what a terrasse is, it’s the “outdoor area” of a Parisian café. In the dead of winter, it was a bit more of a challenge to find one that was actually “set up for business,” but whenever I did, I always opted to sit in it. For it was the best way to avoid people. People who were too fucking pussy to sit outside in the cold. People, who I fucking hate as an entity/concept/race—whatever the fuck you want to call them/classify them as. And the longer I stayed abroad, away from my “native land,” the more I realized that there was no varietal of humanity that would change my mind about people as a whole. Regardless of whether I could understand them or not (even though, fundamentally, everyone spoke the same language now: Capitalism).

Of course, a part of me had believed, like the average naïve American, that I might be “endlessly enchanted” with the people of Europe. That they would provide, in some fashion, a restoring of my faith in the human species somehow. You know, with their supposed intellect and erudition in respect to the rest of the world (most markedly, as alluded to, the United States). But no, upon touching down in Paris approximately five years ago, I found that it didn’t take long to experience the same level of irritation that I did in the United States.

Oh sure, it was to a different extent, but the irritation was there nonetheless. I suppose, at the very least, I did have to admit that it seemed as though people read more in Paris (I won’t say that for the whole of France). Much more than they did in New York, which is filled, ultimately, with people pretending to read. Siphoning the highlights and regurgitating them when and where possible. All in some effort to, what, assure themselves of their “big city superiority”? I have no idea. All I knew was that I needed to get out, to find somewhere on this Earth that didn’t annoy the shit out of me.

When I told the few friends I had that I thought that place might be Paris, not only did they try to discourage me with phrases like, “Andie, what the fuck are you thinking, Parisians are even more grating than New Yorkers” or “How are you even going to sustain yourself there? You don’t speak the language,” they actively mocked the French with an over-the-top rendering of a “stereotypical” accent. At the sad little going-away “party” I foolishly tried to put together, the scant number of attendees ganged up on my life choice by showing up in berets and carrying baguettes while continuing to do impersonations of how French people supposedly sound to the American ear. Naturally, it made me wonder how I could have ever conceded to being friends with such cunts. But such is the “desperate times call for desperate measures” nature of living in New York. City of uncultured swine feigning otherwise.

In Paris, however, I found that the only thing worse than being faux cultured was actually being cultured and lording it over every “silly American” who wasn’t. Could never be, no matter how hard they tried—because they weren’t indoctrinated from the start with the necessary educational tools to become cultured. No, instead, the U.S. was increasingly solidifying itself as a confederacy of dunces. A place where costs were only cut where it mattered the most: arts and education. Gutted to the point, in fact, where there was nothing left except a decrepit bottle of Elmer’s glue and a half-empty canister of glitter. That, to me, was the image of “arts and culture” in America.

When I arrived in Paris, I’ll admit that, at first, like anyone would be, I was seduced. And of the belief that nothing as refined could possibly exist. But, like all honeymoon periods, this giddy feeling was not to last. The contempt crept on me, again, as it does in romantic relationships that were once so “white hot.” And I think that it did stem, at its core, from hearing languages I couldn’t understand. Not just French, of course, as Paris is an Alpha + city—hence, the presence of numerous foreign languages buzzing through the air at any given moment. But every time I heard someone speak in one, yukking it up with as much mindless gusto as any American idiot, it made me realize that nothing they were saying, whether I understood it or not, could possibly be that funny.

That was what the latest batch of laughter over something said that I couldn’t understand, auditorily assaulting me with its reverberating echo, reminded me of anew. And so, sitting in a chair of the garden-variety terrasse in the dead of winter, bitterly sipping my chocolat chaud (which had the same density as a pudding rather than what an “average” American would consider a “normal” hot chocolate), I was slapped with the unwanted epiphany—formerly just an adumbration (emphasis on the “dumb” in “adumbration,” I reckon)—that the world was filled with dullards no matter where you went, how far you tried to run from them. People just trying to experience some simulacrum of joy to ignore the overarching fact that this life, this world is fucked. Most markedly in its glaring embracement of stupidity. Tragically, no foreign language could mask that reality to me.