Believe me, or really, it doesn't matter if you do, but secretly i want everyones approval and admiration, I love living in the States.

wood carving on a giant door 

 I love the access to nature. 

I love the wide open spaces. I love the trees. I love the people. 

I love the Wonder Woman Tables in the diners that dot the expansive highway system.

I love that you can drive 4 days, never have to show ID and communicate effectively with most everyone you meet on the way.

 I love that americans were on the Queen Mary 2 totally disregarding the dress code of formal nights because they paid THROUGH THE ASS to be on that stupid ship and if they want to wear CUT OFF JEAN SHORTS to dinner with flip flops than god damn it thats what they are going to wear. 

On top of this, I love living in Boston. I love the architecture. there are few places I think I would enjoy living in the States based on Architecture alone, and Boston is one of them. 

Tampa Florida is not one of them. Sorry Tampa.  Tampa gets the jean shorts and flip flops award though.

As I am going through Paris, it is exhausting to appreciate it all. I fear that I will loose something so I try to remain in the moment. constantly scanning the buildings, the doors, the people, the fashion, the cars. it's tiring, it really is! my brain is working over time, on top of the work that I am here doing, I am wearing myself out.

BHV department store 

I become anxious knowing that there is no way I can possibly remember all of this stuff.  

it bums me out that I can not take these memories home with me and build life size paper mache city blocks complete with working marches and boulangeries. 

so I try to capture it all with pictures. and at first i would just point and shoot at something with no concept of setting up the frame, and the pictures would be without composition. Everything lost in everything else. 

I went vintage clothes shopping for a spell this morning,  and I walked though the shops and I took off my headphones listened to the music they were playing in the shops. Immediately I became more interested in my surroundings, I think I isolate myself with headphones,  especially at home, I will try wearing them less.

I was looking at some used Mink Stoles that they had on sale for 10 Euro each, I thought of getting one for my friend Morgan who would not be happy about it, then I thought of getting one for myself, I still may.   

Anyway I was really enjoying the music and I tried to shazam what was playing, but I couldn't get a wifi connection, so I was faced with the fear of having to communicate in french to the Wicked hot guy with a beard and curly hair behind the register.

ahem. 

"pardon moi monsieur" smile.

"oui" smile back, good sign.

"parle vous anglais?" hopeful look in eye, still maintaining smile

"oui" still smiling back, that makes me feel comfortable.

"what is the music we are listening too?" 

"I think this is iggy pop, but there are others, it's a compilation"

"ah, ok, it's a mix, I like it, thank you very much"

I had to travel to paris to form an appreciation for Iggy Pop. 

I like that too.

Oh no, it's happening again! 

I am starting to resent my parents for having me in the United States Of America. I am starting to get all uppity on European culture, and all snarky about the States.
By the time you read this it will have happened,  I will have been transformed into another dimension, a surreal twilight zone experience where everything looks the same on the outside, but just a little different in many ways.

I am beginning to feel like a European again.

 FUCK.

This only ensures that I will feel displaced when i get back to the strip malls, superstores and chain restaurants of the states.

Ah America-
The land of  boring looking money. Every bill the same size.
 the way we snub dollar coins and totally ostrasize the two dollar denomination flabbergasts me.
whats with that?

Why do we settle for fruit veggies and meats that taste like plastic in the states? why do we settle for mass produced breads or mass produced foods, At all?

when I buy a peach, it's usually a gamble. I would say the odds are stacked against me and that my  peach is going to leave me feeling unsatisfied, and more than just a little duped.

[I will admit that the grapes, bananas, oranges and apples are all usually fairly reliable in the states]

it's almost better not to know really.

If you have never been to Europe, please, don't ever go.

I was talking to my grandfather last christmas, he was complaining that the french were very rude. I have heard this from many people.  I think it's a defense mechanism that folks create in themselves so that they don't feel loss, but instead feel relief when they leave.

I know this blog is choppy, but i am trying to get as much out as possible to my loved ones before the whirlpool of foreign languages, art, culture, amazing architecture and appropriately prepared breads lobotomize me into a socialist fervor.


I met an man yesterday, he was a visual artist living in a very crazy cut up apartment on the BD Sebastopol.  He referred to the room with the shower and sink as his Living room, because he could also fit a twin bed in there for guests when they came over. His bedroom was mostly his bed and his kitchen was across the hall. it was expensive to live there. He was considering a move to Berlin,, he had been in Paris for three years, he was Danish, and grew up in amsterdam. he speaks english, spanish, dutch, german and french.
He wants to go to Berlin because it's much cheaper to live and the art scene is more up an coming.  can you imagine?

can you imagine taking a train that travels over 100 mph,  for three hours and being in a completely different culture with an entirely different language?

I don't know what i am trying to say here. if anything. if only this, that i love what i see, I love what i experience, if only on the surface, it's outside is appealing.

i like it because it's different in so many ways. it's mind expanding.


more later

 

Free WIFI in France - sort of

Free WiFi

oh For some reason or another,  I have deeply and firmly rooted in my head that WiFi is our god given right as humans, just as healthcare, public transport, higher education and (insert your own witty god given right here)

 My views although empathized  by my fellows are not often supported by many
WiFi after all is a service, provided by computer servers and an infrastructure of little boxes and wires and wireless antennas etc. etc.  Someone has to pay for it.

The only wifi that is our god given right i suppose is our ability to speak, and interpretive dance. 
with The way some people use words today,  i would love to see more interpretive dancing used for conveying  information.


STill though. have you ever been in a cafe, or on a bus or maybe just out on the street, with your wireless device trying to quell that itch to get some information that is only a few key strokes away if ONLY you had a wifi connection?

Have you ever then turned on your devices wireless antenna with the faint glimmer of hope that someone around you may have an unlocked channel, or that the Fung Wah Wireless will actually work? (ps- they advertise wifi, but i think it's a farce). Then you see among the list of peoples pet names or there favourite sports teams or various warnings to stay off there channel, one or two possibly three connections with the name Free WIFI.

at first, my heart skipped a beat, could it be?  i try to connect, yes, it connects, the scalloped fan is displayed with ALL of it's bars. but then, as you go to load your webpage, fingers itching with anticipation, nothing.  a message display - you must be connected to the internet blah blah blah.... and your heart sinks, but it's an anticipated sinkage so it's not too bad and you sink back into the opression that is todays information age.

ha ha

Why do "they" tease us like this? how unfair. it's just another bludgeon of reality brought to you by a hopeful glimmer of what could possibly be.

Well here in the socialist cesspool of Paris - there is a way of WiFi sharing that seems appropriate to me. Here in Paris, those free wifi connections actually mean something.

Brace yourself.

so here in paris, if you purchase WiFi  through Orange or SFR,  you then have access to the wifi connection from other peoples homes.  If you are in the street somewhere and you want to get online, you turn on your antenna, scope our the Free WiFi, click, enter a code given to your by your provider and connect.  there even exists an app that plugs the code in for you every time you try to connect.

I am not sure exactly how it works, but my friend, who is allowing me to use his code while i am here explained it in simple terms like this. 90% of the bandwidth coming to your home is off limits to anyone not on your network. 10% is reserved for other provider subscribers who happen to be in the area to tap into.

how nice. it makes sense, no one seems to loose.

having internet access outside of my apartment here in paris has been extremely helpful to me.

I purchased an ATT Ipad knowing that I Was going to be staying in France and that I was going to need cellular service.  Turns out the cellular service is pretty spendy at 6 euro a day, which would have been around 200 euro which is about 260 dollars which isn't horrible but it's nice to get it for free :-0

its good to know people

beautiful men and woman hunched elbow to elbow
 knee to knee perched on caned plastic chairs circled over rounds under scarlet awnings ,naievely fixed in smokey stares, eyes alert with libation and lingering light lent by latitude

 smart automobiles squeeze down crowded scalloped streets dodging droning dirtbikes preemptively beeping at artfully dodging beautifully bicycling boys whom circle them all with
the graceful cadence of powerful pedals

Evaporation

As much of a hassel as it is, i enjoy hanging my clothes to dry by the natural process of evaporation

something about taking the time to touch each individual piece, shake out the wrinkles and hang them on the wrack

there is something spiritual about it for me

 i like taking the time to do the things that have been taken away from us by convenience, when so many things in our world are demanding of our time.

ironically enough it feels to me that people started using clothes dryers to save time because they felt  hanging up the clothes took too much time

time away from television watching probably

anyway, It's not that watching tv is not a worthwhile experience

 what i wanted to say originally was that doing things the "old fashioned" way usually means doing

things for myself usually means removing a piece of the equation usually a convenience, in order to

finish a task, to recieve a solution, to accomplish a goal

taking out the need for a clothes dryer.

I think of the money saved on the machine itself, the money saved on the

 resources to produce the heat to turn the drum. I like not taking electricity from the grid.

my clothes are going to dry, weather i use a machine or not because evaporation is inevitable.

(The apartment we are staying in in Paris does not even have a clothes dryer. there is a washing machine, but no dryer, and we are staying right in the heart of Paris, so it's not like we are staying in a rundown cheap place)

taking back that piece of the equation is a spiritual experience for me because

it gives me strength. it gives me comfort.

i feel rebellious making my own yogurt.

 Taking some time each week to make granola can almost feel like a crime

but when I sit at the table in the morning eating my granola and my yogurt i feel accomplished

in the beginning

I have wanted to blog. I never have gotten around to it laziness and habits play a big role but More likely though, fear has stood in my way.

different types of fears. it is my intention in this blog to circumvent these fears and just be me. A me that

I am able to express.

In this blog I will not worry about punctuation, most spelling errors, vocabulary levels. I will not be focused on grammar and all the intelligence that "proper grammer" can convey.

so, this is how i am going to be able to enter these blogs, I am just not going to worry, I don't want to edit myself in a way or rather manipulate the words in a way that will lead me from on the spot authenticity.

I hope to post the most unflattering of pictures as well as the most flattering.  I hope people read my blog and say that i am ignorant, uninformed, insane, short sighted.
I hope at times to come across as immature as making bad decisions.

there. I feel so much better having said all of this.