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I woke up Wednesday morning to creaky knees and sore shoulders, probably the aftermath of lugging 20 kg of luggage across Europe for the past two days. After going to bed at 4am watching Dexter with Brenda, I woke up at 8am to no alarm, sun shining in my face, and sleep nowhere in sight. Solution? A puzzle of Espana and a cup-o-coffee.
The great plane, train, and bus tour of 2009 began Tuesday morning as I dropped the keys to my apartment into the hands of Monsieur Cordeau and began running the 2 km to the train station only to be told that the trains had been cancelled for the day. Over 24 hours later, 2 trains, a plane, and two buses later and I find myself sleepily rolling into Salobrena to see Brenda beaming behind sunglasses and giving me the biggest hug of my life.
Sam came up for the day to hang out, and go up to the cliffs and exlore Nazi bunkers.
He also bought the creepiest doll I have possibly ever seen.
Standing placidly next to our coffees in broad daylight I feel like this should have maybe come to life and started reciting divine truths karate Kid style or rather possibly more in the vein of Chucky.
Maybe there’s a reason i dont post very often at 4am.
I always took having all my things in one place for granted, until I turned 18 and have experienced the annual habitation transfer- something that seems to come now with my semi nomadic existence. In one sense it’s been nice to be forced to look at all my accumulations and get rid of clutter that I don’t seem to really need. On the other, it gets really really old seeing the shipping up of everything on an annual basis.
My suitcase is semi-packed and it’s a wierd feeling to be living in limbo- neither here nor there and just eating up time until my plane leaves for Spain on Tuesday.
Sitting around my room staring at my now blank walls, and the blindingly white table in the living room, I feel like I’m in somebody else’s house, like I’m squatting and somebody’s going to come home at five and be like “who ARE you?”
Well Dieppe, it’s been a nice run, but I’m starting to feel like the last kid who stayed two hours too late at the party. Strolling on my now common 3 hour walks, I want to look around at everything and feel overwhelming sadness at everything I’ll miss. But without the people I met here, Dieppe seems more and more like a convenient background scene for me to piddle away time in front of. I want to feel preemptively nostalgic for the chateau or the English Channel, and I have no doubt that in a couple months, strolling down High Street, I’ll suddenly miss the picturesque surroundings. I want to feel sad, but secretly in my head I’m doing a happy dance and singing “I’m leeeaving on Tuesday…”
Photo taken by William Eggleston
Sometimes one of the limiting things about writing a blog from another country is that I sometimes feel obligated to keep my posts focused on France and reflections on being in France, as if by default that´s the only thing you´re allowed to think about in another country. False.
Still one of the great things about being a hop skip and a jump from Paris (and other such teeming metropolises) is that I get the chance to check out really great things that come to the forementioned cities.
One of my favorite photographers of all time, William Eggleston, has an exhibit up at the Fondation Cartier. I believe this project was funded by the fondation and the phtographs will focus entirely on Paris, which is different from what he´s done previously. AND it´s in town until the end of May.
The next chance I get, I´m hopping a train to check this out.
My Monday afternoon in a nutshell: guns, bitches, and bling.
Or rather. Books, beaches, and berries.
Fraser and I decided Saturday that if we were hanging around upper Normandie for a week, we might as well take some day trips. Enter Le Havre, the second largest city in the Academie of Rouen. Havre was pretty much what one would expect of an industrial port city, and the constant drizzle of rain only seemed to enhance the ambiance of cranes and crates and metal and concrete structures.Fraser and I walked along the pier, explored an old port building converted to an art museum, and ran around the skate park.
Perhaps this is what Pittsurgh might look like if it were locted in France and about 10 times smaller, and on the water. But then again, probably not. Actually scratch that. Why does my brain always have the need to analogize things?
The smoldering remains of my computer are laying on top of my desk, and considering this will be my second technology update in not even two weeks, Im starting to feel like maybe i pay a little too much attention to this stuff.
My family has for years doggedly refused to throw anything away before its haggered frame is sputtering and steaming little engine that could (or in this case finally counldn’t) style. We bought our Ford station wagon Torrito in 1992 and that car was one year shy of my finishing college by the time it was finally sent off to the scrap heap. In High School, I became unsettling used to noises such as clunks at stop lights which Dad calmly explained were the “loose engine mounts”- the clunking noise was the engine shifting in the hood. I learned to accelerate in stages so Torrito wouldnt start smoking and leave me stranded in the middle of the intersection. And Torrito was seven years used when we bought it in 1992.
Our washers and dryers are are replaced only when the old one has given way to its fifth massive leak, our stereos when the fuses have blown out and the songs coming from within sound more like crackling paper than teh Rolling Stones or John Pryne.
I like to think I’m not a materialistic person, even though my parents to this day embarassingly remind me of the time when I was six and sat out on the curb in the rain, with our rusted heap of a screen door that was finally being replaced, crying, no bawling because I felt like the screendoor would think it was being abandoned, that it had been a bad screen door, when really it had lasted since the house was built in the 60s.
Unfortunately our “use appliances to the bone and scrap” philosophy doesnt transalate to technolgy, because even if you do continue to fix your computer, programs will become obsolete, and the RAM memory will start to sound like cogs in a clock regardless of how many times you defrag it. When I got mine in 2003, it was like the mecca of “adult things” i could own. Before we only had family computers, and it was always “dont install this on the computer” or “dont use the computer after 11″. Getting my first computer was just as much of a rite of passage into adulthood for me as many other firsts and segways from childhood: first kiss, first time, first drink, first apartment, etc., etc,. It was the most expensive single thing I ever owned, and I was going to get my moneys worth. godamn.
So last week as I propped the little guy on a plastic box, airing out the burning fan, watching the screen slowly fade until looking at it was akin to staring at the bottom of the Hudson River, I realized this was the end of the one device that segwayed my baby bird leap from living at home to becoming independent.
It’s official everything technology related I brought to France has now bit the dust. I promise this is the LAST time I mention anything on this topic again. Partly because this is not a forum for throwing pity parties for ghosts of gadgets past, and partly becuase I have no more machines to report on.
I realize this is post mentions nothing about France. Or reflections about France. Sorry to those who started reading this with expections of the above mentioned topics.
Louise, Marie, Etienne, Lucie, and Lorinda.
Because sometimes Thursday afternoons just warm the crap out of my heart.
When I mentioned in my last post that the end of this job felt like a driveby, I meant that in a “this is how it feels in my head” way. In non Lara universe I’ve had plenty of time to get my shit together, and yet it’s the last Thursday of class, I haven’t packed, and instead of writing a letter to the proviseur asking if we can have a place to live until the 28th, I’m sitting here drinking my fifth cup of coffee for the day a taking pictures of the black hole that has become my desk.
I’m not really sure how things got this messy or even how i ended up with this much stuff. I remember going through my great-grandmother’s belonging at her tiny box house on Cranberry Rd. and me and my brother pulling out the “how DO you get this much stuff? If I ever end up with old sewing kits and 70 years old coupons in my closet, kill me.”
Well guess what. Rummaging through the piles of junk that seemed to have burrowed themselves in my carpet only to surface at the end of the year like five year old cicada nymphs, I found no less than 2 sewing kits and a whole array of shit I can only classify as thingamabobs and whats-a-whoseits.
Looking over the expanse of my desk that seems more like a teetering game of jenga than anything else I can only think. Empty bottle of travel shampoo? Giraff candle from Christmas? a broken keychain flashlight? Why room WHY?
I get it ok? People accumulate stuff, and I have two sewing kits, a million brochures, some sketches AND some old coupons stashed under my bed to prove it. Looking out over the expanse of all things cracked broken and torn that somehow now line and fill every space in my room, looking at my computer propped up on a pill box with the battery taken out so it doesn’t overheat, I’m tempted to throw everything i own out the window.
Moving from France seems less and less like packing and more like a coup d’etat inside my head.
