Today I booked my flight back for the 28th of May. I’d been avoiding it a long time. Florence told me a while ago that she plans on moving in May, so I told her when I was leaving, wondering if I’d be able to stay up until my flight, or if I’d have to stay with a friend. She told me that she’s moving as early as the 15th, but that I can stay. I will be completely alone, as Sebastion is leaving this Friday.

However, she’s taking the washing machine and more importantly the refrigerator with her. When she told me this, I didn’t really know what to say. She said she would leave a few plates and utensils around. She hasn’t thought it out very well, I can tell. As far as not having a refrigerator for potentially two weeks—well, I can put my things outside the window, she told me. I asked her, what if it’s nice out? She explained that it has been nice out but the weather is so unpredictable…winter one day…hot summer the next…essentially, my rather pertinent question became an occasion for her to complain about the weather. Then she invited me to a party at the theatre where her husband works. Then she asked if I can find someone to help move my bed out, which would mean that I wouldn’t have it to sleep on my last night.

I have exactly a month left in France. Today when I woke up Katrin seemed a little reticent and troubled. It was gray and rainy outside. We had a talk. From the balcony we could see the port and there was a big cruise ship standing in the water. I scoped it with the binoculars. In the rain we walked to a nearby patisserie and got breakfast. Back at the apartment we put on some music and started cleaning and packing our things. I started to feel overwhelmed. The act of organizing and packing gradually calmed me down, but I still feel it.

Right now I’m on the train back to Paris (though I won’t be actually posting until later tonight). Train and bus rides are often an occasion to reflect. Somehow, I feel that like the last vacation, this one too has been a kind of dividing post. The landscape to my right outside the window is flat and cultivated, with mountains in the distance. The sky is a light gray color, except just above the mountains, where it is a dark blue. In about five hours I’ll be back.

would your blog get an A?

The spam I get in my Hampshire webmail account is always getting more interesting. Yesterday I got this one with the subject line "would your blog get an A?" (keep in mind while reading that it's viagra spam, though the text makes no mention at all of viagra):

all the sudden im 30 i thought id be driving a mini van full of kids and happily decorating my own home but life has shown me again that i am not in control and as i wait for more children and a sense of being settled
grant and i listened and danced to his music on valentines day
i have been laying in bed sick since monday it seems to be getting worse by the day not better i am so irritated and antsy i miss my family and i want to clean my house
refined sugar will be your enemy till you die
but the pattern is still available
again happy things
do you have to be obsessed with yarn and needles and hooks like i am to think that is the most inviting little space youve ever seen
hey my little family
let me explain Buoy
cate what did you play on the computer then
from the spring/summer 09 toast catalog
say hi to gilbert and the kids with love km
and that made me think of all the insomniatic nights that she stayed up with me and mirrored my every move and snuggled me right out of my anxiety into dreamland long after grant and cate had drifted off
acre of land is my favorite song of his
i thought id live there forever one day when i was 12 my dad quit his job and we moved to lake tahoe it rocked my stable world
i really really need my bedroom to be simple and uncluttered and white for calming purposes you know what i mean
we gave the universe one out- if grant found a job he loved before springtime wed stay put even though we wanted to go to cali really bad and even though grant had been looking for a different job for a long time
the deal with pcos and carbs
like this one for instance my older brother uploaded it while reminiscing about the old buggie he rebuilt in the 80s
project 31 is rolling along i have donations for every single item i need for the 31 newborn kits and lots of fabric donations and i will sew until there are 31 baby quilts too thank you SO much i was overwhelmed by the awesome response packages are starting to arrive i will be sure to post some pictures when i get it all together and ready to take to the humanitarian center my heart is happy

Being away from Paris in Nice leaves me doing a lot of introspecting. I introspect about the same basic thing, with subtle variation. Today we walked around near where all the celebrities have vacation houses. Earlier we went to the Marc Chagall museum. I wanted to go swimming, but it was cold and rainy. Tonight on the way back the sea was the same dark blue color of the sky.

I’m thinking of how I can continue to cultivate my internet personality. Any suggestions? My friend Anna tells me to get a twitter, but Dave thinks they’re wack. The other day, Jackie, Amanda, and I were walking around near rue moufftard talking about the impossibility of me becoming a fashion photographer. True, I don’t know anything about fashion or photography, but this guy’s blog/website—he’s a fashion photographer/curator and Jackie’s interning for his publication this summer—makes me think that I ought to work on some new talents in order to increase my blogging cred. Maybe it’s not economics and Penn State that I should’ve done, but lots more drugs and art school. But you have to have rich parents for that.

Am I being presumptous?

still walking

“I’d love to be like me if I can feel like you.”—Gary Numan

Kore-Eda’s Still Walking was excellent. It really hit me where it counts. It’s the kind of movie that almost moves me to tears, not because it’s especially sad, but because it just gets to me. I have a real soft spot for meditative, slow paced cinema, preferably with little dialogue. If anyone cares, and they’re interested in the kind of aesthetic I’m talking about, they ought to see Maborosi by Kore-Eda.

I’m in Nice right now. I find the landscape very agreeable. It makes me wish that I knew how to make money, so I could afford to do shit like this all the time, and not incur lots of debt. Paris does that to me too. Whatever Hampshire has done for me, it hasn’t given me a sense of confidence about making money. Maybe I should’ve gone to Penn State and studied economics. Instead I went to a small liberal arts colleges so I could pursue my unique interests and deconstruct things like Chris Marker films and Seinfeld.

nice guy?

Even though I’m a nice guy, apparently, I went back on my word and turned down the housing offer I mentioned before. But am I really a nice guy, after all? The other day, I sent Jared a text message asking him where he’d been lately, and he replied saying that he was still a little pissed about something that I’d done…and that in addition, I probably didn’t know what it was, and that was part of it. My mind went over all the possibilities. I couldn’t really think of anything, but I still had a guilty conscience, as if there was a latent and mean spirited tendency in me that inadvertently was made manifest without me even noticing.

Come to think of it, this must be exactly what these girls I wrote about a few entries back are responding to. Well, as Céline points out, being hated is sometimes what happiness is all about. I know I enjoyed writing that entry, and I’m enjoying this one, too.

going to the movies

“I don’t like the film, I don’t like the film, play it all back, play it all back”—Gary Numan

Last night I saw Robert Aldrich’s classic noir Kiss Me Deadly. It was showing in some random theater in the 10e that smelled like a hardware store and generally wasn’t very cosmetically appealing. Also, the sound frequently made that buzzing noise that one hears when a cell phone receiving or making a call is placed near a stereo. The guy in the projection room was probably using his phone. The same guy was working the booth; he seemed out of sorts when we bought our tickets, in an endearing sort of way. At any rate, all of this was fitting, considering the sleazy quality of Aldrich’s film. The day before I saw In the Electric Mist with Tommy Lee Jones, a neo-noir that should be released in the states pretty soon. It was just I needed; a bad-ass, hard-boiled cop beating up motherfuckers and bending the law. Today I’m seeing Hirokazu Koreeda’s new movie Still Walking. It’s been a good week for the movies.

nice guy

The past few days I’ve been sending it seems countless e-mails to people who responded to an ad in the daily digest saying that I’m available to fill a space in an apartment. This has been frustrating because none of the offers stood out. I either got replies from second years, gamers, or the type of people that you see around all the time (maybe you are even very loosely connected) but for some reason, you just never talk to*. I decided to accept an offer in a nice apartment with a group of 4th years that fell into this last category, but it was too late. Then I received an offer from a second year girl, and I realized that one of her friends was in my orientation group last fall. I jumped on that, and it looks like I’m living with this guy I know from orientation, and four of his girlfriends. I’m not sure if I made a mistake. Today, I got an offer from one of the Frisbee guys, and it pained me to turn it down. I’m a nice guy, and I don’t want to fuck over the other group.

On that note: I’ve always considered myself a nice guy, and my mom holds the same opinion, but I’m never sure if others see what she so perceptibly notices. Well, it turns out, I really am a nice guy. ‘I've seen you around and you seem like a really nice person,’ pac07@hampshire.edu told me today in another housing offer. I don’t even know who he or she is, but I guess I made an impression.

*Interesting side note: for some reason, a lot of the people from all of these categories are named Audrey.

“I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.”—Sandor Krasna

Nearly every time I’m hungry here, I think of eating a Greek/Turq kebab sandwich. A good kebab sandwich goes a long way. I used to think that all of these sandwiches were created equally, so I was very pleased to find the other day a place that sells them for only 4E. To good to be true. Tonight I had one at place in the 11e. Instead of in a roll, they put the meat in a pita and grilled it. This shows potential, I thought. I was let down. Katrin, who was with me, agreed.

the life machine

“I know, I’ve had my time”—Gary Numan

I went to see Sunset Rubdown tonight with Katrin and Andrew, my friend from Middlebury. Often I find concerts like these to be an occasion for my mind to wonder around. I felt inspired. I’ve also felt inspired lately by the landscape around the bibliothèque nationale and Bercy Park. But inspired to do what? Certainly not to jump headlong into my paper on Sans Soleil.

Some interesting things occurred this week. Thursday night I made a salad for Tobias’ weekly dinner, and everyone loved it. The same night, walking to a bar by the Pompidou, we noticed a huge crowd outside of a neighborhood bar/tabac. There were many plastic glasses and skinny jeans. It seemed out of the ordinary. Turns out, Vice magazine was hosting a party there. On Friday night, Katrin and I saw a guy doing coke while waiting for the metro. Then when we got outside, we saw four young guys remove a manhole from the street and climb into the sewer.

Lately I feel very conscious of the shortness of my stay in Paris.

"Only police ever see night time for real." - Gary Numan

Monday night, I take line five to get to Gare du Nord to meet Katrin. A few seats away there is a man with many dreadlocks who seems to be looking at me. Céline says in Journey to the End of the Night that we should never trust strangers approaching us in the dark. I think the same goes for people with dreadlocks staring at you in the metro, especially if it looks like they would offer you a spliff in other circumstances.

Thoughts while running yesterday:

- Maybe after college I should disappear and move to a small town in the Midwest and become an amateur body builder. But I don’t have the right body type. And I probably wouldn’t be able to afford therapy.
- Next to the Seine, there’s a huge Cujo kind of dog being pet by a woman that doesn’t appear to be its owner. Why can’t people have huge cats for pets, like leopards or lions? Katherine Hepburn has a pet leopard in Bringing Up Baby, and it’s really damn cute. Besides, that dog could kill a motherfucker just as easily as a leopard could, if it wanted to.
- Are people that wear flannel more approachable than people who wear track jackets? What if it’s a pastel flannel? I was wearing a flannel the day before walking next to the Seine around the same spot and a man asks me: is my friend up there ugly? Is he ugly and black? I say I don’t have an opinion, and fortunately (I imagine) he doesn’t persist.
- Should I blog about defriending people on face book who have annoying status updates? Gary Numan was ahead of his time when he asked: are friends electric?

03w94kjfdsljf'a

“I must confess, I cried.” – Gary Numan

On Thursday night I had to go to a contemporary classical music concert at a venue near the Pompidou so we can theorize about it in one of my classes at the center. Like a lot of things that are considered experimental, contemporary classical music is good for theorizing, if nothing else. Before the concert started, a young French guy struck up a conversation with John and Jared, who were sitting next to me. After the concert we stuck around for a while to chat with him. Apparently, the girls in my program who were there felt left out. I don’t know how one is supposed to integrate six new people into a conversation.

When I was outside waiting for Jared, all of the girls gave John hugs to say goodbye. A few of them nodded in my direction. Apparently, I inadvertently offended them, and it wasn’t the first time. Or maybe they just don’t like me. Well, what are you going to do? Somehow, my reticent and reserved nature around them has gone from agreeable and inoffensive to judgmental and derisive, or something like that. I can’t win them all. Or perhaps what is more likely is that I’m simply overstating my significance in their lives (although I was implicitly mentioned in one of their blogs—that’s got to count for something).

this is my complex

"You're just a viewer, so cold and distant." - Gary Numan

I think I've lost the ability to pay attention in class. When I'm not struggling to stay awake, I'm wondering what the hell we're talking about, and pretty soon I'm back to struggling to stay awake. This makes me think I'm not cut out for academics.

On another note, I got some very interesting spam today:

Greetings,

to learn how those
Gervasio said.
hear if you would

Sincerely, Sebastian Hill

Greetings,

texts. If you've read a
as a requirement
grant us the sloe

Sincerely, Rod Bradford

me, i disconnect from you

"It's the only way to live, in cars." - Gary Numan

This past weekend I went to La Rochelle with the other students in the critical studies program. I started out with good intentions, I wanted to reconnect with people. I'm not sure if this happened.

I did, however, enjoy myself. I smoked a couple of times and I felt like I was vomiting poetry every time I opened my mouth. We had some great laughs. On Friday we all went out to dinner, then we separated and found different bars. I was with a large group of girls. Across the street from us was another small group sitting outside, and I joined them later on in the evening.

After joining Jared and Dan for a smoke, I went back to the table outside and asked myself if I should get another beer. James told me I should manifest my destiny, and I liked that, so I got myself a pint and then joined Jared and Dan again. Brittany was there, too, and they were giving her shit for one reason or another. I decided to go investigate the other group again. As I approached their table, I noticed a group of about four English-speaking tourists lined up, pretending they were sitting in a car. One of the said, ‘we need a driver.’ They look at me. ‘There’s our man!’ they said. I was feeling pretty fresh, I had my track coat on, so I figured I was up to the job.

I got in front of the line and told them that I was driving a six-speed, and that we would be doing some serious racing, and that they would have to give me good sound effects. I proceeded to narrate a drive, so to speak, which entailed me describing what gear I was in, how fast we were going, and any obstacles or sharp turns that came our way. They were really into it. After reaching about 150MPH and several hit and runs, I ended the joyride. We shook hands and said our goodbyes, and I spent the rest of the night recounting the tale. Finally, in the hotel room, I wrote poetry and Jared acted as my enthusiastic audience.

Other than that, we spent our times going to museums, touring the town, etc. I walked around a lot by myself and introspected. On Sunday we went to the aquarium. I wanted to see a giant squid kill a whale, or the piranhas rip up a motherfucker, but even without these things it was entertaining.

On the train ride back, I felt reflective and drowsy, and relieved that my paltry attempts to reconnect were finished.

every day i die

“You know I hate to ask, but are friends electric?”—Gary Numan

Last Wednesday, I decided to walk to the center because it was a pleasant spring day. I had my sunglasses on and my faux Adidas track jacket. I was listening to my ipod. A man approached me and asked if he could ask me a question. Initially, it was surprising that he would choose me, because after all I was listening to music and cutting a fast pace, too. I always cut a fast pace.

I don’t know how to reply to this kind of thing. Sometimes I ignore it, sometimes I’m indulgent. He didn’t look unsavory, so I told him sure. Do you have a soul? he said. Maybe, I said, but I’m in a rush. That was the end of it.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense why this guy approached me: I was looking really fresh, my perception of the world was mediated by various technologies (ipod, sunglasses), and in general I probably appeared alienated, etc. How could someone like that have a soul? This seems like a safe assumption.