Yesterday Paris was blooming, and the weather was taken advantage of as the streets exploded with funk jam peace concerts and flea markets. Unfortunatley for me there was an excellent turn out of the inhabitants from the Valley of Creepy and Dejected Dolls at the little flea by Montparnasse.

I don’t usually ask for much, but these annual existential crises requests that keep getting dropped on my dorrstep are getting old.

Love,

Lara

Things I will NOT miss about Budapest:

- Not speaking Hungarian

- Getting on a train to go to the airport and misreading the stop, and ending up going to a small town in the middle of the countryside when my plane was scheduled to depart in less than an hour.

- Getting to the airport 10 minutes before my flight left

I never thought I’d feel like i was coming “home” to France.

Budapest is everything I thought it would be minus the touristy bullshit that seems to haunt every major city in Western Europe. I’d post a picture that encapsulates my startlingly poetic walks, the old fat gilded bulbs that bloom like tulips above the cityscape, the ubiquitous bikers, and the fruit markets that spill out onto the stone cobbled streets, except i lost my memory card reader somewhere along the line (my track record so far is stunning).

Like poland, Budapest at least, seems like the cool kid that everybody secretly wants to be like but who doesnt realize they’re cool. Well, maybe it’s just on the verge of self-awarneness- a 15 year old on the hip scene just starting to flex its muscles. But seriously. I often have these really romantic ideas of Europe, of walking old alleyways, and stumbling upon some ancient edifice, of finding an old cafe hidden in walls- and granted this does happen; although maybe I’m getting spoiled, but Budapest was the first place in a couple months where I felt like I could melt into the walls, or stopped lid stride to look up and go, wow.

I had thought that a week in Ipswich would make the hands on the clock move at a snails pace, but instead they tick consistantly and evenly winding down my my days here that seem to be going faster and faster and faster. Usually when Im in Europe, I try to visit my Great Aunt Rae who long ago became an ex-pat, married Uncle Ray and moved to Figi and Nigeria and a whole slew of places I cant remember at the moment.

Mostly my experiences with Aunt Rae have been at a distance, some witty e-mails here and there, some news on her novel about the tahitian women on Pitcairn Island.

Since arriving on Sunday, the time sometimes seems to drift by, slowly but pretty soon its the end of the day and Im wondering where the day went. You know. Spending time at Aunt Raes is like being zipped into an alternate universe where dusty books (literally though) with titles such as: The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and What Eats Wasps and Ancient Art of Timbuctoo line the bookshelves, and where most people would strew magazines such as The Economist or People upon their coffee tables, you find things like a 195os copy of The Hertz Guide to the Canary Islands.

It amazes me that despite filling her days with taking the yorkshire Harry on walks in Christchurch Park and volunteering at the Sutton Hoo Society, this is a woman who has lived in no less than 6 countries, volunteered with the Red Cross in Japan during the Korean War, escaped the Iranian coup in the 197os and had married a French man she met in Morocco by the time she was my age.

Talking to her over evening tea, deep burried family secrets are revealed, and I suddenly find out that she had invited one of rays colleagues to his funeral- the guy who worked on the atomic bomb and sold the secrets to the Russians. Who knew? I find out my Grandmother didnt marry my Grandfather because she loved him. Again…

Tomorrow its off to Budapest and it seems like the more I move around, the less I have to say. I wonder why that is.

I have some blogs backlogged, but I havent gotten around to posting them. Well, these are things I always mean to get around to but never do. Funny how not sitting around all day will push bloggings priority from about a 1 to about a 1oo. Bear with me.

On another note: Willem update. Not found. Dont think it ever will be.

On ANOTHER note. In my haze of despair, i forgot to mention that my last blog was my 1ooth!

If you read this far, Im sorry. Please go out and do something with your day now. I promise Ill post the worthwhile stuff soon.

]]> http://laraheintz.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/this-is-random-brain-defrag-you-probably-dont-want-to-read/feed/ 1 laraheintz http://laraheintz.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/manifestos-and-loss-in-the-digital-age/ http://laraheintz.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/manifestos-and-loss-in-the-digital-age/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 10:55:26 +0000 laraheintz http://laraheintz.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/manifestos-and-loss-in-the-digital-age/ ]]>

The things that get lost forever aren’t usually the ones you notice immediately. For me the most valuble and noteworthy things that have ever disappeared in my life are the ones whose absences usually slip to the peripheries of my often distracted consciousness until one day their lack of presence pokes its way into my day like a pencil slowly puncturing a piece cardboard.

And so yesterday I realized all of a sudden that my External Hardrive, Willem Dafoe, was missing, and thinking it was just hidden in my carry-on that had been repeatedly arranged since I left France, I wasn’t too worried about it. But I kept thinking of it all day, how I hadn’t registered that bright blue case in awhile, and upon looking for it, realized it wasn’t in fact in any of my luggage, it wasn’t hidden under clothes or medicine, or in my camera case, and in the absence of my own room to get lost in, these are really the only places it could be.

Earlier this year, in a gung-ho fit of “I’m going to be responsible for once”, I decided to upload all my files onto Willem as a concise backup insurence for the day my computer would die (it did finally, I’ll note). Therefore, as it turns out, WD ended up containing everything I’d done, all my photos, all my documents, every paper I ever wrote found a home on this little red hardrive, my justification to the world that I could be responsible and back up my files, that even when my laptop was reduced to a smoldering heap of hot metal, the valuble stuff would have already jumped ship. What I didn’t take into account was what would happen if I lost Willem. Which, cool
world, I guess I did.

What stikes me most about the whole situation is the incredible and overwhelming sense of loss I feel at losing all this. In reality they are just pictures and files and how often do you actually go back to read old papers? Before conveniently being able to store all this in little folder icons, people did store papers and photos in boxes in the attic, storing dust, and when computers did become relevant, scanning them. Sometime these physical files would get lost in files. Sometimes they’d get thrown out. I dunno.

And if you want to take it further, why as human beings do we have this intrinsic need to tie ourselves to things we’ve done in the past? Why do we have the need to make scrapbooks or keep physical reminders of things we’ve done? In my immediate sense anyways, the purpose of some of those documents take on a much more immediate necessity since many of those documents will have been useful in applying for grad school- a loss that even as I think about it now sends my stomach lurching through the roof.

After all, I still have my brain, which is what created those things in the first place. But physical reminders (or now i guess digital records) of our past and the things we’ve done and created are the ultimate sort of life insurance. They allow us to pull out things we’ve done, and say “LOOK. I did this. This is mine. This is what I created. I have PROOF”. The things we create are a delicate part of the identities we construct throughout our lives. What we surround oursleves with, the physical records of what we create become just as important as what we eat for breakfast, or how we react to situations, or the friends and relationships we cultivate.

They allow us, to be able to pull out and remember the best things we’ve done, the most noteworthy, the most logically thought out and planned and constructed because they were the things that were worth recording and documenting in the first place. They are the proof to our claims of accomplishment- that without which make our claims to ability seem sort of empty. What I have now to show for myself are claims to what I can do, and my personality (um shit.) to show for what I can do.

Losing a piece of hardrive shouldn’t be this big of a deal, or play this big of a role in my sense of being a whole. But it does represent at the end of the day, hundreds of hours of thought and contemplation- as the things we create are often the end result of thousands of hours of thought processes, and losing it (cough) seems like i lost a piece of myself (um sorry).

I know the pit in my stomach shouldn’t be this deep at the thought of losing all my files from the past five or six years. After all, they’re only pictures and papers. But fuck guys. They’re my pictures. And my papers. And now they’re gone.

I still have all the notes my Mom and Dad stuffed into my pink lunchbox in elementary school stored in a plastic pouch gathering dust in my closet. Everyday for years I would see Mom´s flurried rounded writing gracing paper bordered with herons stuck under my thermos of spaghetti-o’s. My Dad’s notes were usually shorter and written on post-it ’s-a quick “Hi linda have a nice day-Dad” the writing square and elongated and sure.

Admittedy it’s been quite a few years since I’ve gotten a note tucked inside my packed lunch but today waiting in the Granada bus station, this is what i found sticking out from between my two sandwiches. So dear Brenda if you read this (and let’s be honest here you will), I’ve officially lost track of the number of times you’ve spontaneously made me crack into an all out shit eating grin. I miss you already.

Life used to be presented as a journey a long and winding road (this is NOT meant to be a Beatles reference by the way)- a smorgasboard of opportunity if you will. But recently as I have to make the yearly decision of where my life (or next year at least) is headed I´m starting to see blaring flashing signs reading “BIG FORK IN THE ROAD AHEAD!) and more and more things seem to annoyingly resemble a choose your own adventure ending novel. “If you woud like option A, turn to page 31. If you woud like option B please turn to pae 56.”

Arg! Page 31 or 56??!!

Being ensconced in a bubble of solitude in Dieppe often meant being surrounded by my own thoughts, music, and in general, well. stuff. Being suddenly around someone else day to day and it’s like showing somebody my hometown. I discover songs on my own playlist that I haven’t listened to in ages, and all of a sudden you get somebody else going through your music and it’s like ooooh yeah! I like this! Books and topics you haven’t thought of in ages suddenly come up in conversation and suddenly seem shiny and fresh out of the box. It’s absolutely astonishing to me how much of a difference it makes having somebody around to bounce ideas off of.

New perspectives.

That’s all I’m saying.