Too Real

How can I write a portrait of someone I don't know? How can I write a portrait of someone I know so well?

I've been wanting to write “portraits” of people since reading The Diary of Anais Nin. She prepared characters for books by writing from experience and observations. I no longer feel comfortable inventing people. I am also nervous about chronicling them, especially after Edith asked for the name change. I should really change everyone's name, especially mine.

But that's a different story. I think I want to invent again. Diarist suits me either too well or not at all, and I'm worried about becoming too entrenched in this project that has no boundaries. I think that I will forget how to play by rules, and forget that some people have a distinction between good and bad. By forgetting these things my life will become more difficult, in a tiresome way.

What is it that keeps me from excelling? I used to feel so pleased with myself. I was so positively reinforced. Why? What was I doing then that I have lost now? I don't think I have shrunk, I don't even feel that I've changed my shape. Why is all so dis-satisfactory? Am I disillusioned? I don't feel any wiser, that's for sure.

I keep dreaming of huge projects. I keep dreaming of giving my life to something. It's really quite meta, when I'm daydreaming about how I could be at work and be totally inefficient because my mind is caught up in something. Does that situation translate into words? I dream that I'm dreaming something.

Am I capable? One of the things I dream is the Artists Collective. Another is a Book. Things I haven't started. I wonder if I could start them. I wonder if I want to start them.

Who are you? Come closer.

Mysterious Angst

I don't understand how depression makes some people creative.

I'm not even very depressed and I feel trapped by it. It invalidates my ideas and makes everything difficult. It makes things that can wait (or must wait) feel frighteningly pressing and everything that needs to happen right now is somehow delayed because I can't bear to be done with it.

It's not that I'm not doing anything. It's that everything I'm doing loses its value. I would be proud of the reading I've done, the writing I've done, the people I've met. But I just feel vaguely disappointed in how much I've learned and in The Beautiful and Damned (which may be a source of some of this ennui).

I must be happy. But seeking happiness to be happy feels like googling “how do I laugh?” I need something bigger to be happy.

I also need the sadness to stop manifesting itself physically. If I could just ignore it, if I didn't feel the pain in my stomach, or the heaviness in the bridge of my nose, the ringing in my ear. It's speaking to me, maybe it's yelling at me, telling me that it's there. I can only stand here helplessly. What is sadness? What do you want?

I haven't earned sadness, no more than my internship of interminable reading. That's why it doesn't sit well with me. I am so nearly cosmically obliged to be happy that I have no arsenal to battle sadness. The reasons for it are so small that I can't imagine how it bloomed in such arid soil.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre

If this was a song and not something Albert Camus said, it would be my theme song. It is too general to be my motto, and I'm not the kind to have a motto, but I think it can be my theme song anyways.

After three weeks alone, I spent more than thirty hours with another person. This abrupt change was very strange to me, and I have regained my seclusion for a few hours to shower, eat, read and write. I feel comfortable in these activities. At 7:30 we will see Hannah Arendt. Every date feels like my first date. Honestly, I don't put much stock in dates. Too premeditated. The only one that stuck was the 8th grade outing to see Borat, which is really a story that I should tell at parties. Have I been on other dates? I don't know. I remember thinking “Is this my first date?” many times, and yet have no recollection of the incidents themselves. I guess I need to go on better dates. Hannah Arendt will probably not be a spectacular date, but I want to see it in order to better understand my friends who think that she is a spiffy lady.

I'm reading The Beautiful and Damned, but the doomed romance is too much. In the face of this new thing I really shouldn't be adding fuel to the pilot light of cynicism that asks me why? Why? Why? Is there really a connection here? Am I capable of connection. I think that people see the best in me for 8 cumulative hours of their life.

No. I want someone who likes me deliriously and unconsciously. I think I could like them that way too, if they started it. No, I would be bored.

The language barrier is kind of a drag. French accents are cute, but French is cuter. Just not with my mouth, which insists on deforming words every so slightly and just enough that I wish they'd never been spoken. I wish I felt like I belonged here. No more of this bullshit, never again. No more things I didn't earn. Every time I have something I didn't merit, I forget my merits and that is terribly dangerous.

I feel safe by myself, naked, on my bed. Books, computers, spicy mustard and gooey cheese are all I need. Pens are nice too.

Boys are also good. It's just hard to feel comfortable. I keep waiting for him to smile as much for me as he does for... the time I saw his biggest smile. And it's the same every time I don't understand why they don't because I do. I'm not pretending, either. Not then.

Another Self Portrait

I am a walking sacrilege. My breath falls on God's brow like hurricane and His eyes fill with tears against the screaming wind. My eyes never weep. They are dry like cool lava, they are an amorphous solid, they have not welcome in any physical state. My lips part like the jaws of egoism and devour the unsuspecting fool who does not look beyond himself. I drink my own blood. My tongue whips like irony on a raw heart. The world is my Medusa and if I look too close I turn to stone, and it turns to snakes. Good thing we live in a land of mirrors. A cage without windows; there is nothing but bars. Calvin and Hobbes play ball with my brain and it gets lost near 23rd base, with the time-space continuum vortex. I'm flying faster than light, because I have no mass and my wave function is one everywhere but is still normalized.

Wait that's not me; it's Chuck Norris!

I know this isn't funny but I had fun and that's what counts #freebitch oh my god I need to stop with the hashtags.

BOOKS ARE LIKE CIGARETTES!

I used to think that people smoked cigarettes as a social affect. You're smoking, I'm smoking, can I bum one, got a light, etc. Then a group of people convinced me that the reason was more personal. They said that when you're smoking, it's just you and the cigarette. Life is calm, and you are alone and agentive.

Well, in that case, books are my anti-drug. When your mind is in a book, no matter how many people are around you, no one can touch you. That's why it bothers me when people interrupt me when I'm reading without acknowledging that I was preoccupied. Do they not realize what a sacred place I am in when I read? I am no longer human with my book; I enter another realm. I feel safe when I have one with me.

So yeah, just say no, kids. And read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book.

Elements of goddamn motherfucking style

I've started The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne is the front-man of King Comma, my second favorite progressive rock band. Sometimes my commas get out of control too, as I'm sure you've noticed. I have composite thoughts! There's nothing I can do! Except, of course, to adopt staccato exclamation marks as a coping mechanism. What I mean to say is I hope it doesn't rub off on me.

Madame Nin, on the other hand, was a master of balanced sentence structure. She very naturally wrote sentences of a reasonable length without any extra clauses. They read smoothly, too. I will have to read House of Incest and Winter of Artifice, but until I get my hands on them I have her erotica to guide me. Wink.

Hawthorne is also adept at the sarcastic ad hominid. I just read 15 pages of the most intricate character assassination ever attempted. His arrow struck true, as well. He may as well have described his coworkers as the most adept bike thieves, baby-pinchers, and skilled opera-house-exhibitionists he had could ever have imagined. I thought this book was supposed to be dramatic and historical, but so far it's uproariously funny. It is not entirely out of character for High School English classes to be highly misleading, and I guess this was no exception. I have good memories of Junior year English, however, for without it I would never have read The Things They Carried and my introduction to The Great Gatsby would have been at the very least delayed.

I am glad to pay a bit more attention to style. I felt that journaling was degrading it over the school year. My writing had little reflection, as a turbulent river of emotion leaves few eddies still enough to look into. Holla atcha flooid mekanix. #tolerancebreak2k13.

Well that escalated quickly...

Self Portrait

She was eating books. With total abandon, she consumed the pages. Like a greedy toddler, bits and pieces of them splattered on her face and clothes. They dripped onto her thighs and smeared up her hands. Unattainable fragments streaked down her chin. She stuffed phrases into her pockets for later. Chapters fell lightly into her stomach, leaving her hunger unabated. Sometimes she swallowed them whole, sharp teeth barely grazing the sentences. More more more, but she didn't care for nutritional value. It was the thrill of the act. Turning pages as if they were spoonfuls, marveling at the broth which gave way to meat, and then an empty bowl which smelled of all of the spices she'd ever tasted. When the dish was done she paused for a moment and took a breath. “I tasted,” she thought, and then inhaled and opened to another first page.

At work, she was an amateur painter who had never seen a nude body. Bits and pieces of the figure in front of her were familiar. Cheekily concealed by a shawl on the cover of a magazine, she'd seen a hint of the divergence of a vector field. A movie could still be rated PG-13 if it only had one instance of tensor calculus. When she had pirated Game of Thrones, a popup ad had offered her the chance to watch a couple engage in a closure problem, but she had closed the window. The show itself gave a few glimpses of the Laplacian, enough to make her blush. But in this room it is all laid out. A greyish-yellow voice says the unthinkable. A Dijon accent orders “describe to me this body.” She shivers and dips a clumsy brush.

A tulip bloomed in a desert. As she walks along the river people watch her and think “she will die soon.” They have an irresistible desire to pick her, to bring about that end, but why grasp at what is probably a mirage? They drool for her, with greedy eyes, and she wilts under the glare. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that she does not belong. Dew on petals falls into cracks in parched earth. While the sage grows sturdily and aloe gives the weary some relief, it's hard to remember why she was ever there.

Writing while my room cools down. Egoism 101

The enforced stone age keeps me prolific. I can't sleep until the sun sets, I can't cook creatively, I can't send words across continents in seconds; I'm in a different world. In this world, I read until I'm chased from my bed by the threat of a premature nap that will leave me thrashing in the heat of this room until midnight. I go outside and throw metal webs in the air until a wick comes loose and I undo my hair to fix it. In my bed again, the wind is soft on my back and cools the bruise on my elbow. One diary closes, and another opens.

All day I feel like prey. Only in moments of happiness, usually occurring halfway through a certain special incendiary tune, do I feel powerful. I feel agentive. But it fades because I'm following a path and everyone is watching where my feet land. What are they watching? Are they watching something they fear, something they admire, or something they have a vague distaste for? I feel like an international savage, like my very presence is an affront to as-it-should-be.

They want. They speak to me and I see desire and it angers me. If I don't see desire, I can't imagine what they mean and I invent desire to justify my disinterest.

I don't see faces that I want to see again or even stop and examine for an instant. Only one person (outside of the workplace), in a short interaction, did I want to learn from. He sat in a pile of books, and told me to come back at the beginning of the next month if I wanted to sell some of my library. I didn't feel like a savage. I felt like a spirit.

Today a man began slowly. He said my fans looked like a birds foot. Then he wanted to see me on Saturday, whenever I 'played.' I don't understand what they are grasping at. I love to let people I only barely touch back into the randomness of the world. I love to watch our understandings step away from each other and infect outwards. I imagine them later, at moments that don't announce themselves, and it is a rich feeling.

My desire doesn't come when it's called. She hates to hear her name before she introduces herself. When anyone demands her, she ceases to exist.

Toulouse Pride

Though a smaller affair than Madrid Pride, Toulouse Pride was excellent. It had a similar structure, though in addition to the rolling stages full of DJs and dancers there were a series of speeches to kick it off. One was by a sister of perpetual indulgence! The sound system was such that the deaf could understand better than the hearing unimpaired. I think that says something about their efforts for equality.

The parade started and the crowd was very confused. I tried to follow one float, but couldn’t keep up. Then I realized that a drum corps was coming up behind me, so I hung back. That ended up being the best possible decision and I stuck with them for the remainder of the 2 or 3 hour parade. I just danced and danced and danced and danced. A pair of girls who were hitting on a drummer, and a gaggle of very enthusiastic women who all knew each other followed the drummers with me. With the gaggle there too I didn’t feel like I was alone in the crowd. It really didn’t matter though, because nothing really does when a dozen drums are beating.

My shoulders are burnt, my head hurts from dehydration, and Stop Making Sense just ended on my music-device. But those are the worst things of today, so hey! This is great.

On the way back a dude in a tutu was asking for kisses so I kissed him. First kiss of Toulouse, weeee. Well, this time around at least.

This evening I tried to find a punk concert, but I got sketched out in the neighborhood as I approached the approximate location. There are actually a million things going on in Toulouse tonight, but I’m too tired from dancing in the heat without enough water. Also I just walked for an hour and a half trying to get to this show. Bleh.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I anticipate a slow day, but whatever. Maybe I’ll get to reflect on what my two decades mean to me.

Birthday present from the group: Ubuntu

I'm such a fucking nerd.
My parents got me a set of David Griffith's textbooks and two cordless screw drivers.
I'll have to buy some drugs to balance all of this ~useful~ stuff.

What is fun?

I read somewhere that fun is the American alternative to pleasure. In a facebook message yesterday, my mom asked if I was “having fun yet?” and I took offense. But I have two stories to tell today, because I had fun on Thursday and I had pleasure on Friday.

On Thursday a work-dude was kind enough to invite me to go to a movie with him and some of his friends. We saw “The Bling Ring” because it was in some way connected to Sophia Coppolla, but that did nothing to excuse it. The best part of it was “can I have a 5 mg Adderall mommy?” “of course honey.” I tried to explain how that was the most honest representation of America in the film, but I’m not sure that it got through. I’m actually pretty sure that the didn’t even translate the other Adderall joke, when the girls got up in the morning and all took a pill with breakfast.

After the movie el work-dude and el office-mate were hungry, so we went to MacDonalds. I was floored. They have electronic ordering systems on the wall, so you pay for everything and then just hand a ticket to the person at the front and they get you the food. It would not be that hard to replace everyone in MDs with a robot. It has begun.

They ate, then we went to a friend of their’s (ex-stagiare as well) apartment, and had some wine before going to a bar. It was my first subway ride in Toulouse, which was exciting.

The bar was awesome. It was somehow Spanish themed, and the point is to dance on the tables. We drank sangria (weird sangria…) and then yeah, we danced on the tables. The best songs were “I’m gonna getcha” and “Thrift Shop.” At one point I thought they were gonna play 212 but it ended up just being a remix. I got real excited though.

I met someone else who is involved with the IMFT somehow, and he asked me if I liked office-mate. I said yes, because what the hell. He said he though office-mate liked me too and I should talk to him because office-mate is really shy. I told him to calm down, which he thought was funny. He also immediately told the 2 other guys dancing on the tables, so I flipped him off which is apparently not the done thing in these parts but at least it changed the subject.

I did talk to office-mate a little, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to hook up with someone who shares an office with you. But he’s so adorable, so…

He left early though, and I danced a bit more and then left. Work-dude walked me home, kinda awkward.

Their end of classes party was on Friday, but I decided not to follow that up because it’s basically their Renn Fayre and that is sacred. Even if they obviously don’t have the same kinda blow-out as we do, it’s still sacred to me.

Instead, I had a pretty good day at work (we argued about wine, which was really fun) and then brought some books to the riverside. I lay in the evening sun and finished Disgrace, and continued with Mythologies, and only got asked out twice. Mythologies is gonna be a long term project, but Disgrace blew my mind. I think it has the most perfect ending of any book I’ve ever read. I can see why this guy won the Nobel prize for lit, maybe even more so than after I finished The Bluest Eye just two weeks ago.

After the sun was getting to be really setting, the grassy area by the side of the river was getting really packed. So I started walking home, but I got distracted by the sunset on the Garonne and the fact that “Take Me to the River” was about to come on. Talking Heads and Sunset is a combination I highly recommend. I guess Talking Heads and Sunrise is the more popular combo.

Home, journal and a cup of whole milk, a little bit of Bienvenue Chez les Chtis, and then sleep. I may have just slept for 12 hours. I don’t care, I love it.

Ahem Ahem

So, this is the first day that I haven't had anything pre-written when I take my internet break from work. I need to go back in soon, but for now I'll say that things are pretty comfortable here. I'm settling into the rhythm of book-walk-work-walk-book and am fitting in -food- here and there. Starting to talk to people, and thus have less anxiety about that.
And yet all of my dreams are still almost nightmares. I don't know what I am so unhappy about. I can feel it when I'm awake too, but it just doesn't make sense.
Today is cool and overcast, though it was hot and overcast this morning. My kinda weather.
I hope to have a weekend of Pride and Punk, I'll letcha know how it turns out.

my dreams have been so gruesome lately

I was standing in the driveway at my house in Corvallis, and a plane was flying above us. No, not just one plane, there was another plane attached to the back of it by some kind of cord. Behind that plane was a tree, as big as the second plane. Tied to that tree was another tree, slightly smaller. It was sad, for some reason. It was a sign of danger.

The planes are low, close to us now. It looks like they are going to crash in our yard, but instead they pull up at the last minute. The last tree gets tangled in the tree across the street and breaks off. The rest of the airborne train keeps flying.

We sigh and get to work, trying to remove the tree from our neighbor’s yard. There’s a mob of us now. I sit on the trunk many feet above the ground and saw a branch off. Below me, my neighbor Pat looks up from her wheelchair, a mix of fear and regret on her face. She’s not in a wheel chair in real life. The branch comes off and the tree wobbles, but I balance with my weight.

Suddenly I’m down on the ground with everyone else. There are a few Reedies, and a lot of unknown faces. We’re balancing bamboo poles, making some sort of woven net below the tree, a few feet off of the ground. I look up and the tree that crashed is full of bodies. Suddenly the bodies are in clear plastic bags.

I’m walking into my house with a young man who has been with me since I was in the driveway, on reflection. He wears baggy clothes and has a shaved head. He’s a little shorter than me. It’s getting dark.

 

That’s all. God, the bodies in the tree. I don’t’ even know.

Drunken Ramblings about Reed from a Long Time ago (Lutz Report)

There’s nowhere to go but down. The surface is empty and exhausted (épuisé). On top of that, your compatriots ask you nicely to leave. So you DIIIIIiiiiiiivvvvvvvvveee.

Boom. Welcome. Oh it’s sweet. You can taste the disgust in the back of your mouth, like an exboyfriend you see every day (welcome to reed guys) Look look look try to absorb your new, subterranean environment, Try to erase all that sick and burning smoothly rocking real time. Ooooh comfortable darkness-so nice that the quest makes the background AS DARK AS YOUR HEART. I see you. Everything is new and different and I want to give it all to you but it’s not mine to wrap and bow and gift tag and under a tree and find at midnight carefully peal the tape take a peak wrap back up back away dammit the floor creaks and the stairs are scurry friendly as you find your comforter and know no one can find you once they know you’re there.

Everyone is so ready to be present. I advise a healthy delay. No one knows who you are and I include you in that number. Pulpit preach, silly girl, making things simple. Remember how we were underground? Protected by layers of silicon? Removed and hidden. NO ONE CAN SEE US. Do what you want and the rest can go frolick in its fields of grass. Us, we trot on molten lava. And you don’t feel it at first because that’s what Ritalin does, friends. No, really, Tha’s an HPV. Don’t go there. I believe firmly in letting yourself sink into the heat and burn a new layer of scales into every part of your body. Because if you don’t emerge a reptile you’re doomed to extinction. The dinosaur thing was a fluke, really, you need skin that’s has a higher tolerance than this bullshit homo sapien sapien integumentary system.  Dude. Do away with that bid’ness.

Okay, back to our subterranean home. I meant for this to be a story but now I’m too drunk. I could either paraphrase the matrix or go on and on about how reed might totally isolate reality from this random ideal that why did anyone create?

 Andwhy do we all have the same dream.

God I love everyhitn.

Have you ever been in a cave? I went once. I said I needed to go to the bathroom, because there are no bathrooms in caves, and I thought that if I asked for one then We would leave. And we did leave and thank god because they were going to make me swim 60 feet underground. I’m uncomfortable with this concept. But that’s what we’re doing right, Swimming underground meters upon meters under this sturdy and unforgiving soil, the wreckage of adeventures past that burned in the renn fayre bonfire. Have you seen that fire. Have you seen the halo around their heads. Is it not worth crying for. Is it not worth living at 48.48 degrees north and 122.63 degrees west where the variable fulcrum works directly against any progresss you make?

Beautiful.

Manifestation Anti-Fasciste, Pro-Sexiste

Weekend #1 in Toulouse: It’s whatever. It started off with a plan to go to Carcassonne by train at 8 am on Saturday. At 7:30 I was meandering towards the station and saw posters for a protest happening at 2 pm that day. Underneath that poster was another that advertised an electronic music concert. I was tempted to do those things instead of go to Carcassonne, but decided to continue with my original plan.

Then I ran into an open-air market and decided to stay in town. I finally got some good cheese, good bread, fresh lettuce, fresh tomatoes, avocados… good things. I left laden with bags and happily nibbling on cherries all the way home. They weren’t as good as Madrid cherries, though. I need to find out what France’s specialty is and get a lot of those. I think it might be strawberries.

Then I read books and napped until 2, when I got dressed again and headed to the protest. I got a copy of their manifesto and looked it over while we stood in the drizzling rain. It said that they represented the immigrants and gays and everyone the fascists were being assholes to, and attacking, etc. Fair. But then it said: No more fascists in our neighborhood, no more neighborhoods for fascists, get out get out etc.

That is so IRONIC. The fascists tell you to get out get out and then you tell them to get out get out, well, um, that seems really effective on both sides. Why are you protesting fascists? The real problem is with fascism, and sometimes I feel like the only way to deal with fascists is to make them politically and culturally irrelevant and then wait for them to die. Fascism and fascists are different things. Anyways, I marched with the old people who had flags for human rights and peace movements instead of the young communists. I was wearing a red scarf and didn’t want to get confused for one.

Eventually I got bored of the cute, sweet old people, and walked up to the front of the march to see what was going on. That is when I discovered that they were explicitly protesting the murder of a young anti-fascist. There was a group at the front with a big banner making a ruckus and chanting and then the rest of the crowd was either quiet or talking amongst themselves. Lots of flags though, for a lot of different extreme leftist groups: communists, anarchists, peace activists, you know the type.

As I was walking up to the front of the parade, I noticed that the back of a sign made from a cardboard box said “fragile.” I thought to myself that “Fragile, this side up” might be a good political slogan with fragile referring to human rights or something and this side referring to a political group. I laughed a little and continued on my way. At the front of the march it was all very exciting and yell-y and police everywhere. They were chanting “Toulouse Anti-Fasciste” over and over.

Then this man, in his late 30s wearing a green military-reminiscent jacket, starts running across the road. He runs right up to me and says (in French of course) “Does the death of a young anti-fascist make you laugh?”

I’m totally shocked and I say, for lack of any other response: “no…”

“Well, I saw you laughing back there, and maybe you think that the murder of this man was funny.”

“No, no”

Then he ran back across the road, literally all the way across a 3-4 lane road back to where he started.

Let me digress a little bit about being a girl alone on a street in Toulouse.

I get yelled at more than 5 times a day: “Hey little girl,” “it suits you, having your backpack strap between your breasts,” “do you want to adopt me,” “~strange chicken noises?~” “Heee-lllllooo-ooooh….” (All translated of course). Any time of day, I swear. It’s worse coming home from work, of course, because there are more people around, but the strange chicken noises occurred at 8:30 this morning so misogyny clearly doesn’t sleep.

And this random asshole at a protests who decides that by smiling I’m a fascist?

Well I think he’s a sexist for deciding that because a girl is by herself he has the right to exploit her vulnerability. Yeah, I’m vulnerable when I’m by myself. Why? Because I don’t expect to be fucking insulted to my face at any second. On top of that, I don’t want to walk around with my defenses up. That’s not who I am.

I don’t know what to say when these people are mean to me, it doesn’t make any sense. Should I just flip them all off? Will that help? Should I walk up to them and say “Hi, my name is Julia and it really bothers me when people harass me on the street?” It’s way harder to do all of this in French of course, but maybe I should try to introduce myself. For now I mostly just ignore them but it ruins my fucking day, I swear.

And I actually wouldn’t care if they weren’t assholes about it. The last time I was here, a guy walking by just said “Oh my god you’re so beautiful” and carried on. That’s totally fine, I’m down to be complimented. The only nice thing a guy has said to me on the street was “I like your style.” And that made up for all the other shit I’d put up with that day. It really doesn’t take a whole lot, either way.

That man at the protest was just too much. I felt like an idiot for being so hurt by it, but it was really awful. What part of me was so offensive to him that he needed to come be a dick? Was it really me laughing to myself about a fucking protest sign and not taking the world as seriously as he does?

I’m done. Okay, so that’s day one. I didn’t go to the concert, I just stayed home and read and watched the director’s commentary on I’m not there and ate food.

Today I also tried to go to Carcassonne but my debit card didn’t work so I decided not to go since I should really sort that out before I go rolling off to distant lands. Instead I came back home and finished Songs of the Doomed and then went to a hydroelectric power museum that is just down the street from my dorm. I’ll go back for a guided tour, because that’s really what it’s meant for, but they had a photo exhibit that I know I’ll come back to also. I don’t remember the photographer, but there were a lot of pictures of Johnny Hallyday then the Beatles, McJagger and the Stones, and even a few of Bob Dylan too. They’re really lively and not too studied and I want to go back there and write in a journal for a while. I love arting around art, that’s really why I need to start an artist’s collective. It also made me want a nice camera again. I think I could get really into photography.

Well, now that I’ve written a small novel I guess I’ll be done here. Suggestions on how to deal with assholes in the street greatly appreciated. I’ve never been faced with this many of them before.

A letter I found in a notebook. I think “friend” is a few people… Formatting essentially preserved

DEAR FRIEND

I DON’T SAY EVERYTHING THAT’S ON MY MIND, BUT I AM SO LUCKY TO KNOW THAT IF YOU EVER ASKED, BY SUPERHUMAN INSTINCT OR DUMB LUCK, I WOULDN’T FEEL THE NEED TO LIE.

                AND IF I EVER FEEL MORE HAMLET THAN TEMPEST, IT’S QUICKLY CLEAR THAT IT’S A JOKE OF TIME.

                I WILL FORGET, I HAVE & I DO, THAT I’M FRIENDS WITH YOU OUT OF A DEEP AND NATURAL PARASITIC NATURE. I SEE SOMETHING MARVELOUS IN YOU THAT I WOULD LIKE TO ADOPT OR LEARN OR LIVE OR JUST BASK IN AS YOU GO ABOUT YOUR SANE & NORMAL BUSINESS. I CAN ONLY HOPE THAT YOU FIND SOMETHING NICE IN ME SO THAT MY DESPERATE ADMIRATION IS NOT EVIDENT OR CREEPY. IT IS PROBABLY MORE OFTEN CREEPY THAN EVIDENT & FOR THIS I APPOLOGIZE.

SOMETIMES EVEN WHEN I’M STARING YOU IN THE FACE & I HAVE SO MUCH TO SAY, I STAY SILENT AND JUST WONDER WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE SAID IN RESPONSE. IF I TOLD YOU EVEN HALF OF THE THINGS I THINK EVERY SINGLE TIME THAT YOU ENTER MY FIELD OF VISION. AND MAYBE THE WORST IS THAT I KNOW WE ARE BOTH JUST SITTING HERE BEING LONELY & SOME PART OF ME HAS THE STUPID IDEA THAT SITTING HERE TOGETHER AND NOT LONELY IS SOMEHOW NOT WORTH THE RISK OR EFFORT.

                MEH. IT’S PROBABLY RIGHT. EVERYTHING IS SO OUT OF BALANCE. MAYBE I’M SO AFRAID TO BE A PHYSICS MAJOR BECAUSE THEN I’LL KNOW EXACTLY HOW UNBALANCED THINGS ARE, DOWN TO SEVERAL DECIMAL PLACES. OR MAYBE I CAN’T BE A PHYSICS FRENCH MAJOR BECAUSE THEN I WOULD TRULY FEEL HOW UNBALANCED JUST BEING IS.

AND I’M DRAWN TO YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE BEYOND PROBLEMS LIKE THIS AND YOU HAVE RATHR MORE LIFE THAN THIS.

LOVE,

Julia.

Salut, la vie

Things are lookin’ up. I’m almost done with my annotated bibliography. I discovered that I was typing in font size 10, so when I scaled it up I’ve got way more than he asked for. Now I just need to make sure that I’m not doing quantity over quality. Next week, I begin to experiments! They’ve got most of a paper written, but need a little bit more data on flow velocity in this weird set up they have. It’s like a cylinder with an inverted cone on the bottom, and it’s full of tiny marbles. They’re looking at how water flows through it. Pretty sick, and I get to play with it.

I talked to some people at work! For entire minutes. We discussed where Oregon was. Also, one dude said that they’d take me out on my birthday. Not sure who he was talking about but mostly himself I think. How do you get to know people?!?! The only ones that talk to me are the ones who want to get into my pants. I guess you hook up with them and then they introduce you to their friends, who become your friends. Damnit. I have the worst strategies. The only other network I can think to exploit is the expat community, but I don’t just want to be friends with expats. Fuck.

After work, I took a detour on my way home. I was intending to go to an English bookstore (yeup, see above paragraph) but got distracted by everything else. I’m definitely going to continue to explore the area of town around the capitol. I wanna find where I was last time I was in Toulouse, because it was also very nice, but so far no luck. This area I was in today has a lot of tiny streets with all kinds of shop and restaurants. On sunny afternoons like today everyone is out with their friends at bars. I eventually meandered home and dropped off my computer. I went out again and crossed la Garonne, but the other side of the river wasn’t as nice as my side. 

Then I came home and ate salad and watched Asterix et Obelix aux Jeux Olympiques. The sound quality isn’t very good because it’s just a file and not a DVD, but if I watch it more than once I’ll pick up more of the rapid-fire French comedy. 

THE SUN IS COMPLETELY SET AND I AM NOT ASLEEP. FUCK YOU JETLAG.

Also apparently the water-people play soccer tomorrow afternoon. Down. But kinda too embarrassed to play. Oh but I want to. It’ll work out.