Paris has a quality about it that brings residents to their windows and deserts them there. It beckons you with the sounds, lights and laughter, but what you end up doing is hanging your head limply over the window sill, staring and trying to make sense of the lights and sounds.

It is the same quality that makes everyone here a lifelong observer.

It is that overwhelming quality — the kind that saps your energy — that makes a nice Friday night that would otherwise be ripe for partying and good times, seem too hard and too long. It makes the dense chorus seem too exhausting. Maybe it’s the language barrier or the sameness and politeness of the host family’s questions. Equally, it could be the forced camaraderie of rootless American students banding together on open Friday nights, knowing that back home we would have something more definite.

However, in Paris, there are not a great deal of these definites that make life and hapless energy sustainable — especially for the Parisian-in-training.

That must be the trick I was never warned about.

How do I sustain the energy?

By 8 p.m., I have drank more than my share of wine, had six hours of class, visited the Louvre for the seventh time since I came into Paris, eaten two full baguettes, shopped at the premier chocolate shop in Paris, and ran a few miles in one of the hundred beautiful parks that dot Paris like freckles. And dinner here doesn’t even start until 10 p.m.!

It only took two weeks of partying and blissful over-sensitization to turn this ecstatic traveler into a sniffling hermetic — at least for now — until the perpetual need for a Kleenex box and cough drops hopefully blows over.

Paris is not kind to the sick, considering its dirty metro trains and unwashed fruit stands, which are probably to blame. Not to mention my own excessive extra-curricular activities.

Truly, tonight, I would like to blame Paris. That’s the kind of mood I’m in.

Being sick makes the trains come earlier and your legs not willing to run for them. Being sick in Paris means you can’t drink a whole bottle of wine without losing your head, which is a bust. Being sick in Paris is being stranded in a trendy district not able to find a napkin or Kleenex for less than five Euros.

It is these feelings that, logically, must have been considered when the government decided to give the French worker four to six weeks of paid vacation a year.

Paris, especially, is an incubator of high tensions. And primarily, if it is not too much getting gawked at, it is gawking too much. There is simply so much to see and too many social subtleties to see it all.

In Paris, if you stare at anything but your shoes or gaze in a blind meditation, you are labeled a tourist or a mawkish gawker. Whichever is worse, I don’t know.

To keep myself in check like this — with these drastic rules, considering I do want to fit in for once — is exhausting. It keeps shoulders tense, and the slightly skewed iron-creased pleat of my pants an ongoing consideration for why every Parisian seems to be staring at me like I’m mad.

All told, it makes me want to get out, maybe for just a day. Get out in the country, because even in the heart of the parks, I can still hear the perpetual traffic. To go somewhere where I do not have to be so self-conscious, to fit in or learn a new language, to make a casual connection. That would be nice.

But if you think all this means I want to go back to the States just now, that is not it. This is what a bad day sounds like, that’s all.

More specifically, this is what being disappointed in oneself sounds like.

Being sick like this is a good physical indication that I might do well to slow down a little, that’s all, slow down.