If we had blogs in 1998, I’d be hunted by Scottish trolls

Edinburgh. Oh, and I get to be in Belfast for the Easter peace agreement and am unaware of its significance. The latest from my study abroad journal way back when.

As always, spelling, grammatical, factual, and emotional errors have been preserved from the original journal. Today’s comments are in red.

9 Avril 1998

Bus writing leads to shaky chicken scratch.

This week has not begun the way I thought things would go. I took the 6:08am from Differdange, took the 6:56am to Bruxelles, and the 11:01am Eurostar to London. LONDON. I still cannot believe I was there. I fell in love with the city, moreso than I ever thought I would. I will definitely return someday. And I have, multiple times, most recently in March 2011. I’m not in love with the city. And Heathrow is probably the worst airport on the planet. I basically just saw the sights. London. I was there. Wow. I met Steph & Ryan at Waterloo with a McCoy Palm sign. We got to Victoria, found the coach station, ate at Victoria, went back to the coach station, and took a horrible overnight bus to Edinburgh. Sleep was lacking, necks were hurting, and I spilled Coke on Steph’s shoes.

We arrived in Edinburgh without accommodation, big mistake, for it has changed our plans totally. We were turned away from the High Street Hostel but found beds at the Edinburgh Backpacker’s Hostel. (Beds ok, showers scalding) We had to wait until noon to get beds, so we set our stuff down and walked the Royal Mile. Being not yet 7am, we had plenty of time to kill while we froze in the cold air of Scotland, so we bought baps at one place, hot chocolate at another, saw Holyrood Palace, the Queen’s Scottish residence, then hiked back up to Edinburgh Castle, where we spent £6 but it was pretty cool. They still use it.

Well, anyway, at noon, we went back to the hostel and slept till 6:30. It was a much needed rest, & I could feel a difference. We went to a pub to eat dinner. (I’m now staring out at snow covered mountains sprinkled with sun. It’s really incredible…) I had fish & chips & a pint of the black stuff. Ryan had hagas. Steph had a baked potato. She’s so picky it’s annoying. Dinner was great. Then we went and saw live folk music. We walked into Dirty Old Town. I had another pint. It was better than the first. The two guys called themselves Skiltron and were part of a bigger band called the Prodigals. There was a guitarist who sang like Garth Brooks, and an awesome violinist. We watched them for a few hours and then went & crashed. Despite the nap, I felt it was a productive day. Steph felt otherwise, I’m sure. But this is a vacation. No need to kill ourselves. Today was stress overhaul day. To relax is nice. Today we woke up without a place to stay. Nowhere in Scotland. So we’re heading for the Emerald Isle. It’s been hectic. We’re staying in Belfast, at least, that’s the plan. The bus ride has been beautiful, but Scotland just feels like fake Ireland. I don’t like it so much. It’s lacking something, maybe spirit. It’s probably been killed by being labled British. Shh…don’t tell the Scots I ever said that! Or the Brits! Ha. Really dumb comment.

12 April 1998 EASTER

Arrived in Belfast about 1am, stayed in Queen’s University dorm rooms. Each of us had our own room, which was strange. The Stena line ferry took 3½ hours – we thought it was 1½. We got two pints of free Guinness. I felt kinda sick at one point. So did Ryan. He didn’t even finish the 2^nd pint. Fears were finally laid to rest when we found a place to sleep. With morning arrived Bizarro World. Belfast. We walked around the main shopping district for an hour, then left.

13 April 1998

Belfast was creepy, come to think of it. The people seemed Irish in appearance, but their manner was quite different. It was as if they were prepared for something evil lurking around the corner. They were cautious, tense, and reserved. Apparently it didn’t occur to me that a major peace agreement had been signed that day and that yeah, things were going to be a little weird. I did pick up a Belfast paper that had a copy of the peace agreement in it. I still have it. I should frame it, because it’s a beautiful thing they did in Ireland, finding peace and all.  It was an uneasiness, a place that told you to get out before dark set in. We saw a rally at the unionist headquarters. I heard on the radio that there were nationalist demonstrations yesterday. The whole thing is very bizarre. I can’t wait to read more about it.

I have neglected something very important here – that we went to a restaurant that was like an American sports bar to eat, and there was something on the menu which I ordered that was called the Cincinnati Reds, which was just spaghetti with some bad tomato sauce. Thank god I remember this very important detail of being in Belfast on the day of the peace treaty signing.

When we were leaving Belfast central, we saw the peace line, a wall built between Shankill & the Falls, the unionist & nationalist neighborhoods; I don’t know which is which. Barbed wire covered every wall, every fence, and graffitti was something to be taken seriously. Wonder how long the agreement will last.

We crossed the border without any passport checking. Dublin was alive and well. Cold, with snow on the mountain tops and hail from its skies, Dublin did not fail to charm. We arrived at Connelly Station & walked forever to the Avalon House. I was embarrassed as I took a wrong turn. Duh. I was so worried about getting it wrong that I did. Oh well. We set our stuff down and headed out to eat. First we stopped for groceries, assuming everything would be closed Easter Sunday. Wrong. Tropicana Pure Premium. Ok, this is about the millionth time I’ve mentioned this orange juice, so I’ll explain. Orange juice in Europe, at least at the time, was sour. I’m talking about northwestern Europe. I’m sure down in the Mediterranean area, especially in Spain, you can find freshly squeezed OJ everywhere. But Luxembourg is not Mediterranean Europe, so any time I found the Tropicana, I bought it. Bad Ass Café is too expensive. Bewley’s café sucks. Elephant Castle too long of a wait. Salmon at an Italian place. Salmon good, too much lemon juice. Dry potatoes & carrots & broccoli. Not worth £10. I left my camera; Ryan left his wallet. We were fortunate to retrieve both. Scary moment. Then we went to Gohgerty’s. Too full. So wee went to Fitzsimon’s, and the St. Paddy’s band was there, so we stayed. Crowded, but good. Not fun, really, but still good.

Slept not enough, caught the 9:10 to Galway (not Gal Way as Steph says). Found a hostel (The Galway Hostel). Nice people. Walked around the shops. Some open. Ate at the Cobblestone Café. Ham salad sandwich. Walked along the coast. Beautiful. Listened to Bad while looking out over the water.

I failed to grasp the significance of being in Belfast the day their lasting peace was brokered. We're really blinded by youth, aren't we?

 

What traveling taught me about breathing air and drinking water and riding trains

A couple of nights ago in my living room, otherwise known as Lou's, I met a guy who had lived in Munich for the last seven years and was now married to a German woman and father to a young boy. (I briefly mentioned this the other day.) He was a light-skinned black guy with a kind of afro whom I had never seen in the bar, and it being half-priced Wednesday with the usual crowd, I was naturally curious about the stranger.

Our conversation started because I had seen that his driver's license was from Germany when he had to show ID and continued when he discovered my interest in travel. He was originally from DC and returned on occasion to visit family, as was the case now, and he told me his dad, who lived in Florida, would drive twelve hours to see him in DC but wouldn't take a nine hour flight to Munich to visit him. We both agreed that is crazy. You don't even have to do anything on a flight except watch movies and drink beer or in my case red wine (much better for the nerves) and if those don't appeal to you, bring a book or another gadget. Most of the international flights have videogames, too, some of which are quite addicting. Sure, you have to be patted down like a criminal in the airport and if you're of the peasant class like I am your seats are cramped, and the turbulence is far scarier than hitting a pothole since you're like a billion miles in the sky, but if you can get over that, flying really is much easier than driving.

But I suspect it isn't the flying part that scares him or the rest of America who won't cross an ocean. I'd like to call it intellectual laziness but that would be judgmental, so I'll just call it fear of the unknown. All you do is buy a little book with your picture in it, go into this giant metal room with a lot of chairs, sit there for nine hours and do the abovementioned activities, and exit the room into a place where you might not understand what people are saying and the roadsigns are circular with odd-looking symbols on them. The people look like people although they may have more or less melanin in their skin than you and they may be wearing clothing you'd never find in your GAP back home, but you'll hear them laugh and cry and realize that you are of the same species of animal. As I talked about in that previous post, our nation really needs some exposure to lifestyles and cultures other than the stars and stripes so we can change the course of our foreign policy and international dealings and maybe get people to like us again.

I was curious how he felt being a black guy in Munich, especially one married to a white woman, and he said he felt far more comfortable in Munich than he did in Washington, the latter consisting of white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods that only mix at certain intersections. Remember, this is Munich we're talking about, you know, where all the Nazi stuff began and where neo-nazis are still well-established. Despite that rightwing nuttery in Bavaria, he said he's never really felt it, not like he does in the US. That neo-nazi stuff isn't all that different from the Tea Party mentality aside from the obvious historical and swastikal implications. (Ooh, new word!) In both cases you have a bunch of weak minds who feel threatened by what they perceive to be a loss in status and who don't believe they're getting a big enough slice of the proverbial pie for themselves. But the Tea Party mentality was only part of his problem here in the US. He also has a problem with the black population of Washington, who are themselves pretty racist on account of our own history of gross human rights abuses, a cousin to fascism called slavery. In Munich, he doesn't have to deal with any of that. He's just him.

He may have had a pretty rosy outlook on that particular issue in Munich (and he admitted as much when I said the Turks would probably strongly disagree with him), but that was just part of why he loved to live in Germany. I understood him completely when he said that after he studied in Munich seven years ago he didn't want to leave, because I had done the same thing. I had stayed an extra semester when my first one was over in Luxembourg, gone back the next summer for a graduate program, worked an internship in Ireland, took a three month sabbatical in Bulgaria, and am still trying to figure out how to get back to that piece of the planet we call Europe. For him, it wasn't just a love for bratwurst or a sense of adventure or the freedom of the autobahn. It was a love for the way of life, for the practical way of going through the quotidian deeds of human existence. His reasoning was expressed rather bluntly but I agreed in principle: Americans are stupid. We live in a stupid way. We politicize things that are just normal ways of life in most of the world, practicalities like public transportation, which is a way to move people from one place to the other in a practical manner. In Europe, you can get anywhere by train, even to remote villages, and it won't cost you a week's paycheck to do so. In the United States, if you support public transportation, you're labeled a "liberal" and even more extreme, a "socialist," for daring to want efficient modes of transportation. Not only that, many Americans are PROUD to sit in gridlock every day in their cars rather than build better transport systems. That is the definition of stupid!

In the sixties and seventies, when car companies started buying up public transportation systems and shutting them down so they could sell more cars, we stopped being smart about our cities and started the endless sprawl that has sucked the soul right out of this country. We flattened whatever was in the way and put up big box stores where landmarks or forests used to be, and we labeled it as progress as we watched our friends and family pack up their small businesses and join the corporate chain gang as just another number. In Europe, you can visit 500 year old churches that are part of a city's identity or buy a baguette at a corner bakery that has been there for 300 years. In America, we tear down $235 million baseball stadiums that are 17 years old to spend $672 million to build a new one (instead of spending $200 million to upgrade the existing one), and wealthy people like the Braves owners who get richer from it make us pay for a lot of it with our tax dollars! Then we complain about "government spending" while happily handing even more dollars to those same rich people! Meanwhile, the places that defined our childhood and became who we are no longer resemble the places we knew. Our identities, so important in connecting us to one another, simply vanish.

That is the definition of stupid.

If more Americans would get out and see the world, really see it - not just the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben or the Colosseum but the way people carry themselves, how they talk to each other, what they buy at the grocery - they'd realize how stupidly we do things in this country and they'd see that things like public transportation, clean air, and health insurance aren't political issues, but normal ways of living as civilized human beings. Why am I a "liberal" because I don't want factories pouring out cancer-causing pollutants into the air and water we breathe and drink? Does that make any sense at all? No! I don't want cancer-causing pollutants in my air and water because I don't want cancer! We need clean air and water to live, not because it's some agenda.

Yes, Europe has its struggles with stupid, too. It has the French blocking a diplomatic deal with Iran because it can't get over the fact that its power and prestige is a chapter in a history book. It has Hungarians creating draconian censorship laws for journalists as if it had never suffered a half century of Soviet oppression. It has Greeks skipping out on paying their taxes and then rioting when the government takes austerity measures because it can't pay its bills. It has Starbucks and McDonald's and all of that soulless processed bullshit that's meant to save time or whatever in our stupid processed lives, and that stuff is starting to encroach upon their slower, happier way of life.

But it's still a slower, happier way of life. They still buy fresh bread everyday at the bakery around the corner. They still have siestas and mealtimes and take time to enjoy their food. They still take their four to six weeks of vacation a year. We waste our lives away, hoarding what little scraps of wealth our corporate overlords drop from their golden tables and pointing to our "economic power," saying, ha ha ha, you stupid Europeans, spending all your days on vacation when you could be making money! Then one day we wake up and we're 75 and we say, what happened to life? Where'd it all go? And we don't even remember the insides of the various cubicles and offices that took it all from us.

As the saying goes, "Stupid is as stupid does." Choose smart. Choose life.


To prove my allegiance to at least some version of capitalism, I ask you to please consider clicking on the sponsor below. I am looking to fund a project involving words and airplanes that I will be describing in more detail once I have more details, and any help I can get is greatly appreciated.

How to eat

As a kid, I used to love the yogurt with the fruit on the bottom. I didn't know about all of the sugars and nastiness that companies add to these yogurts. And I certainly didn't know about carmine.

Carmine is a color additive to some of your favorite flavors like strawberry, raspberry, and cherry. It is found in your fruit-on-the-bottom varieties as well as so-called Greek yogurt and the probiotic types of the Jaime Lee Curtis persuasion. It's made from cochineal extracts.

This is what a cochineal is:

That's right, folks. That's a cochineal beetle, a parasitic scale insect native to South America and Mexico that feeds on cacti that creates carminic acid. It takes about 40,000 of the tiny bugs to produce one pound of cochineal extract. Picture millions of them waiting to become part of your yogurt.

Yogurt is not the only place you'll find carmine, either. It's in candies, sodas, ice creams, medicines, and cosmetics, among other things. Think about that next time you get out your compact - you're smearing bug guts all over your face!

I made myself a snack this evening with yogurt - plain yogurt with no additives aside from the ingredients I mixed in myself. You can do wondrous things with plain yogurt. I added some dill, freshly ground black pepper, and a pinch of curry powder and ate it with carrots. Sometimes I cut up cucumbers and add in some dill and garlic salt, which is a cool treat for hot days. Forget processed vegetable dips you can get at the grocery - make them yourself in five minutes!

For the sweeter tooth, make your own fruit yogurt using real fruit and honey. I like to smash up brown bananas into plain yogurt and sprinkle in some cinnamon. You can add other fruits, too - sometimes I'll use bananas, apples, and oranges with honey. Berries are also great. Honey is a natural sweetener so go for it!

What'll it be? All natural foods or foods containing bug guts? To me, that's an easy decision.

La dolce vita

Chris and I briefly discussed living abroad the other night until it degenerated into bickering. I asked him to give me his top three choices of places he'd like to live and I'd say my three and we could decide from there. It didn't get past Rome before his wine-soaked brain jekyllhyded (I believe that should be a word) and he accused me immediately of shooting down his first answer. To be fair, he was right, I did say I didn't want to live in Rome even though I would if that were the opportunity. But he could have at least listened to why.

I want to live in smaller town Italy, somewhere in the south along the coast, in a place where the people don't live with the excesses of their world city brethren and we can pay about $500 a month for a room and live among the town's denizens instead of the tourists. I was thinking about a place similar to Veliko Turnovo, where I stayed in Bulgaria for about two months at the end of 2007, only with proximity to the sea.

I explored the parts of Italy many people don't consider. A few of them:

Crotone

Crotone

This is a port city, with ferries to Greece, Albania, Croatia, and Malta, something that appeals to me, especially since I've never been to any of those countries. (Greece and Croatia are near the top of my list!)

The city was founded in 710BC, so there's plenty of history, a prerequisite for living anywhere. At 60,000 inhabitants, it compares to Veliko Turnovo in population, giving it a smaller town feel with the perks of a city.

Belvedere Marittimo

Belvedere Marittimo

Seems doable. Old stuff, sea, mountains, winter temperatures in the fifties - all the ingredients for happiness.


Taranto

Nixed because:

In 1991 Taranto was declared a high environmental risk area by the Ministry of Environment. As a consequence of the poisons discharged into the air by the factories in the area (most notably the ILVA steel plant, part of Gruppo Riva), Taranto is the most polluted city in Italy and western Europe. Only 7% of Taranto's pollution is inhabitants-related: 93% is factories-related. The European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER) showed that in 2004, estimated dioxin emissions from the ILVA plant were responsible for 83% of Italy's total reported emissions.^[7]

Every year Taranto's inhabitants inhale 2.7 tons of carbon monoxide and 57.7 tons of carbon dioxide. The latest data provided by the INES, the Italian national institute of emissions and their sources (Inventario nazionale delle emissioni e loro sorgenti), confirm that Taranto stands comparison with China's Linfen and Copşa Mică in Romania, the most polluted cities in the world due to factories' emissions.

In particular, Taranto has dioxin. 92% of Italy's dioxin is produced there and, in other terms, 8.8% of the dioxin in Europe. In ten years, leukaemias, myelomas and lymphomas increased by 30–40%. Furthermore, dioxin accumulates over the years: so far at least 9 kilos of dioxin have been discharged into Taranto's air by its factories, i.e. three times the quantity discharged in the Seveso disaster (the one in 1976 where the Italian city Seveso was contaminated by dioxin).

Grazing is banned within 20 kilometres (12 mi) of the Ilva plant.^[8]

Ugh. Also, it's where the name tarantula comes from. Icky.

Then I came to Bari, a port city of 300,000 people, a little bigger than I had been looking for, but something caught my eye: the Petruzzelli Theatre, which houses the opera. What better place for Chris to live and sing in than one in which the opera house bears his name (or at least a form of it?)

There is old stuff. There are ferries to Greece, Albany, Croatia, and Montenegro. There are beaches. There is seafood and fresh olives. Rome is only a four hour train ride away. The Amalfi Coast is on the other side of the boot. The city isn't overly touristy.

So, Bari might be the place. Now to figure out how to get there. And when. And what to live on. Meh, I'll figure out a way. Who knows what the spring will bring? Stay tuned...

Neue Kinder auf dem Block

If you want to know the truth, I don't remember the first time I left the country. I'm under the impression that I once ventured south of the border before my fifth birthday, and the second time involved lunch in Windsor, just across the northern border from Detroit, at a point in time when I could at least read. Neither of those count as foreign excursions in my book; you didn't even need a passport for them.

I'm not sure how I became interested in travel. I remember in high school wanting to go to UCLA to get as far away from Ohio as I could, but I don't recall harboring the notion that I could go to other countries. It just wasn't something people did in Southwest Ohio. Then the phone call came, the one that changed my outlook on the world. It came from a coach who wanted me to play in a softball tournament in Sydney, Australia.

I was only seventeen during that trip. The chaperones weren't exactly vigilant in their stewardship of a team of 17-18 year old girls, but they didn't exactly give us our freedom either. We participated in pre-planned activities, supposedly meant to experience the "culture" but in reality were designed to reinforce the stereotypes that tourists had of Australia. They took us to a zoo where we petted koalas, a farm where we watched sheep farmers throw boomerangs, and some caverns in the Blue Mountains. The mountains themselves were probably most interesting as a kid coming from the flat ennui of Ohio. I carried a camera that used 110 film; all of the pictures came out uncentered, most of them blurred. For whatever reason, I also decided to use up a whole roll of film taking pictures of the opera house while we were on a boat tour of the harbour. I was a terrible photographer.

I wish I could tell you how I felt being there and how I viewed my first "foreign" experience, but I just don't remember. They dropped us off at a mall twice, as if we couldn't get that experience back home. Malls were one thing Sydney and Southwest Ohio had in common, although racks of rugby shirts and soccer jerseys were something of an oddity. I believe the most exotic thing about the whole trip was that I was in a big city. I'd never been to a big city before - Cincinnati wasn't exactly a sprawling metropolis, and even those trips were just to the ballpark and home.

What I do know, however, is the mere act getting a passport, boarding a plane, and traveling to another country sparked a desire to see what else there was in the world. That's how I ended up going to Miami University. What had been a trip to Oxford merely to get out of a day of school turned into a life-altering experience. By a quirk of fate, the tour guide during my visit was doing the Luxembourg program the next year, and I knew instantly what I wanted to do.

And I did.

If I hadn't been a good athlete, I'm not sure I would have ever left the country. What if I had never received that phone call? Perhaps I would have gone to UCLA, or maybe I would have gone to Miami anyway, without that curiosity about those little yellow and green and orange spots on a map. But maybe that curiosity was always there. There was that presentation given by the school counselor in Mr. Rawers's fifth grade class. She had just returned from a vacation to Italy and Greece and showed us slides from her trip. I remember experiencing a profound sadness as I looked at the ruins of those once great civilizations. That was about the time I was reading Edith Hamilton's book on Greek mythology, which I found fascinating. And then there were Mr. Daugherty's eighth grade geography map drills, when I learned where on the map were every country, major city, river, body of water, mountain chain, etc. I excelled in those contests, when he'd call out a geographical place and students before two maps had to compete to point to it first. My mom even let me hang a map in the hallway so I could practice. So I guess there were clues.

Still, it was that opportunity to go to Australia that made me realize I could visit those places myself. I think that's a big problem in America - people just don't think they can go to those places. It doesn't occur to them to go to Paris instead of Disneyworld or to the Alps instead of the Rockies. I was talking to a guy last night who has lived in Germany for seven years who can't get his Floridian father to visit him unless he comes back to Washington, though for his father it's a nine hour flight to Munich and a twelve hour drive to Washington. It makes no sense to the well-traveled. That's why I'm reflecting upon my first venture beyond our nation's borders, trying to figure out a way to get more Americans out of their red, white, and blue cocoons. Only when you travel outside it can you see America for what it really is, and trust me, you undergo an awakening. Unless you choose not to (and there's plenty of that.)

The school counselor's slideshow was the only exposure to the world outside the US that I can remember in elementary school. I vaguely remember learning the countries of Western Europe, mostly because I was puzzled about why we stopped paying attention to the map at a line down the middle of the continent. We weren't really allowed to talk about those countries in Eastern Europe due to our mandatory hatred of the Soviet Union. I'm sure students these days have more exposure to the outside world than I did simply by virtue of technology. But with the state of our education system and the way we produce cultural zombies with our standardized tests and common core principles, I imagine that their exposure is far too limited. Worse, our vastly unequal school districts leave some schools without access to our grand new technological world. Heck, some of them can't even get updated textbooks, let alone new computers. My high school sophomore World History textbook was from 1960 - the Vietnam War hadn't even happened when it was published. That was twenty years ago, and the problem of outdated textbooks hasn't improved much.

One year during elementary school - I want to say it was in sixth grade - our class participated in a pen pal program with a school in Texas. What stands out in my memory the most are the repeated mentions of "New Kids on the Block" in their letters. NKOTB hadn't hit the radiowaves at that time in Southwest Ohio, so to us, these kids seemed exotic because they had something we didn't. (I realize that Texas acts like a foreign country, but since we still don't need a passport to travel there, we can still count it as part of USA.) Imagine kids being pen pals with students from other countries, how much they could learn from it. And just think - you could use Google Hangouts or some other video technology instead of pen and paper. Students could make videos of where they live and show each other. Can you imagine the look on a surburban USA kid's face when a kid in Ghana shows him what his town is like? What? You have McDonald's too?

This is my dream, of course. While so-called education experts are worsening US schools by implementing common core, they should be erasing archaic notions of schooling that see our students falling further and further behind others in the world. One horrifying example of our backwardness: some US schools don't even teach geography. Why why why why why why why? I know this country has a history of isolationism and xenophobia, but we can no longer afford to think that we don't need to know about anything beyond our nation's borders. Our flawed foreign policy and history of wars and 9/11 are a direct reflection of our collective ignorance.

The US State Department has many programs that bring US culture to students in other countries, such as the Sports Diplomacy program led by Cal Ripken, Jr. and other US athletes. I wonder if we can't work with embassies from other countries to implement programs that bring their cultures to US citizens in places like Southwest Ohio that don't get much exposure. Imagine South Africans teaching US students at Dayton Public Schools how to play rugby or Italians teaching opera basics at a rural school in Iowa or Egyptians teaching the history of ancient Egypt to kids in Mississippi or...I'm dreaming again...

Whether by fate or by accident, I've been fortunate enough to explore two regions of the world in depth. I want to see everything I've never seen and revisit every place I've already been. Everyone should have that chance, and they shouldn't be afraid to do it. An intellectual curiosity about the world and an understanding of global connectedness should be instilled in early childhood and continue even when we're wrinkled and gray. So go to Cheapoair.com and book a ticket!

*I don't speak German and I don't care if it's a bad translation. Google translate translates New Kids on the Block as New Kids on the Block.

The World's First Computer Programmer Was A Woman

via Women Rock Science

I can tell you the exact moment when I realized that history wasn't the story of the past, but millions of different understandings and manipulations of how things have happened since the world existed. I was a naive college student out of the suburbs/exburbs of Southwest Ohio who had never received anything less than an A in school. I got A's because that's what you were supposed to do. Things were what they were and your textbooks were true and that was that. What I had learned was right, and it covered everything important that had ever happened.

So one day over beers during my sophomore year in college, I was having one of those "serious" discussions with a fellow member of College Democrats at Miami University, a school where only 4% of the students were minorities at the time, and I said, "Maybe the reason we don't learn about significant black historical figures is that there weren't any.

Boy, was I schooled by just the look on the face of the person I was talking to. And then came the lecture. It was one of those seemingly insignificant moments at the time that turned out to be vastly influential in my life. (I've had many of those moments, trust me.)

In primary and secondary school we had learned about Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, and Rosa Parks and Dred Scott and Frederick Douglas and Washington Carver. They explained the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement to very young minds. In Englewood, Ohio in the 1980s, they explained black people.

Does it shock you that I put it this way? Why? Is it so tough to admit that we have race issues in this country? I see so many white people state that because we have a black president, racism is over. (Yeah, people really think that.) Here's the reality: in the United States of America, the color of your skin determines where you live, what you do for a living, how much you make, your education level, and how likely you are to be arrested, among other things. They didn't teach us that in Southwest Ohio. They taught us that everyone was like everyone else. I think that's where multiculturalism fails in education. Because everyone is NOT like everyone else - we all have very different backgrounds and experiences, and such things as the color of your skin vastly influence those backgrounds and experiences. This teacher gives a student an excellent lesson that I wish I had had at that age.

Just as I hadn't realized that our history books were written from a white perspective, I didn't realize they were written from a male perspective, either. Susan B. Anthony gave us voting rights and women's lib gave us the rest of them and that was that. I certainly never felt any gender discrimination when I was a kid. After all, I was first in the class and a star athlete and it's pretty tough to discriminate against a good student. I didn't know anything about the glass ceiling or the unequal pay or the higher levels of insurance premiums that women faced in the eighties and nineties. I certainly couldn't foresee the brewing war on women that the GOP has waged in the last decade, reviving controversy on previously settled issues like contraception and abortion.

And I never knew about people like Ada Lovelace (pictured) or Hedy Lamarr (inventor of wireless communication technology). We knew Betsy Ross because she sewed a flag (sewing being viewed as a women's occupation.) We knew Clara Barton because she founded the Red Cross (nurse being viewed as a women's occupation.) When it came to male-dominated positions, we never learned about women who did great things in those fields. Marie Curie was spoken about with her husband, never as an individual. And I think we knew her as "Madam" Curie.

But you know, you can excuse a twenty-year old for not knowing that the American history taught in our schools was written by white men. You can't excuse a forty-year old.

Just because you were taught something is one way doesn't mean it is. School textbooks are rife with information that is included because of some political decision. Parents often give their children misinformation simply because they don't know the answers. Far too many minds are poisoned with that vile form of Christianity that thinks a 1600 year old book gives them permission to hate others who don't live like them. Although there is a lot of evidence showing brain chemicals and genes shape a person's behavior, there's no denying that how and what you are taught in childhood influences your behavior as an adult.

If you don't look at multiple sources of information, if you don't read multiple newspapers, if you don't talk to people of multiple ethnicities and religions, if you don't travel outside your city, state, and country, you aren't going to know how things really are. Fortunately, it's a lesson I learned early enough, but far too many people never learn it. We're seeing the consequences of that today, with people believing conspiracy theories, denying climate change, opposing gun regulations, professing a hatred for gays and Muslims and blacks and liberals, and all of those other bizarre behaviors coming from the Fox News crowd. In the end, we all suffer from the warped views of these individuals. Ask the Filipinos. Ask Sandy Hook families. Ask your neighbor.

Slumlord Hundredaire (Nightmare on Kenyon Street)

I knew we were doomed when we heard the deep voice of Tombe, the massive chunk of African muscle who rents the room next to us, thundering from our shared kitchen. He was yelling at the property manager about the tiny vampire problem he was having which would soon plague us all. It was the beginning of the end of life on Kenyon Street.

Two years ago I moved to Kenyon Street after I had returned to Washington from another stint in Beirut. I was looking for two things - cheap and location - a combination rare in the revitalized capital, among the most expensive cities to live (in civility) in the country. Two rooms had been available when I went to see the place; I chose the larger one and gave a security deposit that very day. There was a property manager who lived in one of the rooms and took care of the property related issues for the landlord, a man I had never met in the first year I lived there, and two other rooms, only one of which was rented at the time.

It was a dumpy place and I knew it, but the cheap was important because I thought I'd be flying to Denver every month to visit the Cosmonaut, only he joined a cult and I flew out there just one more time. By then, however, I had gotten to love the neighborhood of Columbia Heights, an area you wouldn't walk through at night less than a decade ago. Gentrification had given it new life. I was in the center of it all, not even a block from the main square, and had found friends and bartenders near me who made me feel part of the community. So I stayed. I had no real problems with the place for about a year. That first winter was mild, so I didn't notice the problem with the heat - or lack of it.

I met Chris in February 2012. He was this obnoxious loud guy who seemed to be at Lou's City Bar every time I was there. He listened to my complaints about the cult and my crazy boss and how I was sick of it not being baseball season. We became friends on the night of the Oscars, when the spectacle that is the NBA All-Star Game was on at the same time and we had to read the closed-captioning for the Oscars. I took a poll of the bar to see which program should get the sound. The basketball won, so I invited Chris to come watch the Oscars at my place. It still took over a month before I actually liked him. It took baseball season to start dating.

In July 2012, realizing that renting two places was a waste of money, we crammed his stuff into my room. I made use of PVC pipes that were laying around the house and some glorified milk crates to create another closet for the room. And there he's been, for a year and a quarter, living, receiving mail, cleaning up the property manager's messes in the kitchen, etc. He once helped the landlord put up walls in the apartment upstairs. He was with me when we asked the landlord if we could plant a garden in the backyard.

The landlord is a gaunt man of questionable intelligence and reason. His gray hair reaches his shoulders almost unwillingly, and a slight mustache gives some substance to an otherwise featureless face. His bony frame moves silently as he conducts his bizarre behavior. During the spring, he crawls around on hands and knees in the backyard and picks mulberries from the ground, blows on them, and eats them. At first, I thought it was a stray dog roaming around the yard until I actually saw him doing it. I never once saw him pick the berries off the trees. Every now and then he'll have a big bag of Budweiser cans in the back that he dumps, stomping on each can individually. He employs a Latino guy named Jose to do various tasks around the property. Watering and mowing are the normal activities - sawing things at random hours is not so normal, nor is carrying large items like mattresses and broken furniture to the curb on the wrong trash days. (We don't know where these large items come from, as they aren't coming from the mounds of junk in the basement, because that never goes away.)

I can't figure out how this strange man came to own $3 million worth of property, but we speculate. To be honest, he seems more like a guy who'd live in a shack in Appalachia with broken cars and chickens in the yard. Perhaps he inherited it. Or he came into money through a lawsuit of some sort. Very little can be found about him on the internet. If he hadn't been adamant about his opposition to chemicals of any kind (in the garden, building walls upstairs, and apparently getting rid of pests), I'd think he were involved in selling meth or something, because he doesn't seem to have a steady job since he appears on the property at random times during the week. He has a real estate license, from what I can tell, but he doesn't sell real estate. I suspect he got this license to avoid having to get a business license to operate his rentals, which I believe would require further regulations. He is a certified lead abatement specialist. He lives on Clifton Street, not too far from here. He once represented himself in a lawsuit with a tenant, in which he sought nearly $25,000 in back rent, property damages, and punitive damages. I couldn't find out anything more about the suit except that punitive damages were denied. $25,000 is a lot of money for a renter - either there was some sort of fire or, well, how do you cause that much in damages? That's the extent of his online identity. Having a business and no online presence is suspicious to me.

Even that weirdness was bearable, until the property manager stopped managing the property. He still lives here, he just stopped caring about anything. Things started to break without being repaired. The kitchen sink started to drip. He started paying the DirecTV and internet bills so late that they kept getting cut off. Certain undesirable pests made their presence known in the kitchen.

Then came the tiny vampires, otherwise known as bedbugs. Oh yes, they are terrible creatures. As it turns out, Columbia Heights is infested with them. On the day when I went to Target to get cleaning supplies and bug killers, I saw others buying the same products. They have nothing to do with cleanliness except that they will make you scrub every inch of everything you own once you get them. No one, not even the rich, is immune. I spent $150 that day on mattress covers (they make them for bedbugs), rubbing alcohol (to put in a spray bottle and kill them), Pinesol, scrubbing brushes, caulking for the baseboards, a caulking gun, a new mop bucket, sponges, an eco-friendly bug spray, and plastic storage containers to replace the boxes under the bed. Then I tore the room apart.

I thought I had been suffering from mosquito bites, that maybe a couple of mosquitoes had gotten into the room and were content to wait until dark to feast on my blood, but when Tombe was shouting in the kitchen about how he was getting eaten up by bedbugs, I knew the real culprit. I couldn't bring myself to look under the mattress that night. It wasn't until the next night, a Friday, when the hell began. Tombe had thrown his mattresses out on the curb - I think that displaced enough of them that they scurried under the wall of our structurally insufficient place of residence into our bedroom. I was itching mightily that night and switched on the lamp to inspect our slumber area. What I saw was horrifying.

Dozens of the bloodsuckers were climbing up the wall and on the mattresses. We lifted the mattress; the image of them crawling has been branded into my memory and my nightmares. When I did the cleaning, I found dozens in picture frames on the walls. But I'm not even going to get into the details of what I found when I lifted the box spring. They were building a civilization.

I texted the absent property manager to get an exterminator over there. I got no response. I did it again two days later. No response. Finally the landlord himself came over to talk to me about it. He claimed that he was waiting for something in the mail to deal with them. After A WEEK he brought over some homemade things to put under the legs of our beds that would hold diatomaceous earth, a natural compound that kills them. By then I'd gone through two large bottles of rubbing alcohol. We were supposed to do it ourselves but Tombe and I were the only ones who used it. The property manager, an idiot (and also an INS violator, which is relevant later), didn't bother cleaning anything and even dared tell me to get my stuff out of the hallway after a week when I still was cleaning every day.

By law, a landlord is supposed to take care of bug infestation problems. Dropping off some chemicals and telling tenants to do it themselves is a violation of the law. I'm still seeing a few of the bugs a week even after a month, but they've mostly been dealt with. But I spent a lot of money on the problem, and possessions were ruined by the bugs. I believe I'm entitled to compensation.

Despite all of this, the landlord complained to the property manager that Chris was there too much, and the property manager conveyed this message, AS IF CHRIS HADN'T LIVED THERE FOR MORE THAN A YEAR. Then the property manager had the nerve to text me - TEXT me - and tell me he didn't want to see Chris for the rest of the week.

Naturally I was furious. I thought of all the violations that I knew of at the place. Rather than respond to him, I thought I'd take some time to research the laws that I knew the landlord was violating. Here are some:

• There is no heat in the winter. We use space heaters. Last year Chris dared mention that he would help bleed the radiators to get them functioning again, and the landlord said he would get a radiator key and then never did anything about it. Here is the law:
 

Whenever the heating facilities of any habitation or bathroom are not under control of an occupant of the habitation, it shall be the responsibility of the owner or licensee to supply sufficient heat to maintain the following minimum temperatures for every occupied habitation and bathroom:

(a)             A minimum temperature of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit (68° F.) between the hours of 6:30 a.m. and 11:00 p.m.; and

(b)             A minimum temperature of sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit (65° F.) between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.

I think that's pretty damn clear.

 
• The landlord raised the rent by 12% last year. In DC, a landlord is only allowed to raise rent by the Consumer Price Index unless he is exempt. That would be 5.6% in 2012, but the Office of the Tenant Advocate checked the records and it shows our landlord is exempt from the law. However, I think he's violating the law and lying to get the exemption. The law states that small landlords can be exempt if they have four or fewer rental units. We have four people paying rent downstairs and I can't tell how many people upstairs. (They are undocumented tenants - people are going in and out of there all the time.)


• The kitchen faucet has leaked since March. The landlord had been told several times but refuses to have it fixed. Meanwhile, the idiot property manager is paying the water bill and doesn't seem to understand that he's probably paid hundreds of dollars because he won't insist on getting the faucet fixed.


• The basement is so stuffed full of junk there's no doubt it's a fire hazard. There are other unrented parts of the property, and my suspicions are that those, too, are full of hoarded junk like mattresses and broken lamps and boards and pipes. I have a hard time getting to the circuit breaker controls when we trip a circuit, and this is not rare since the electricity in the place sucks.


• The trees are diseased. Many have blight. One has this pink oozy fungus on it. I haven't done any research yet, but I'd assume that tree management is a requirement of property owners, lest the diseases spread to the trees of neighbors.


• Last year the landlord's fire insurance lapsed, or that's what he said. A fire inspector was coming to inspect the upstairs apartment, and he frantically tore out walls and rebuilt them over the course of a few days before the inspection. We know this because Chris helped him put up the walls. I don't know if he passed the inspection. If he did, the inspector was probably incompetent. He never bothered to check the ground floor or the basement.


• One time we had fire shooting out of our ceiling because of faulty electrical wires. Or something like that. The electricity is bad. Some outlets don't work. Others blow a circuit if you use them. Once every outlet in my room blew and an electrician did come and replace them. But I have my suspicions that he was unlicensed.


• Mice. Yeah, a nightmare. We were getting them in our bedroom on occasion and buying a bunch of sticky traps which does nothing to solve the problem. Ironically, the bedbugs forced us to caulk around the floor and we filled in holes we hadn't realized were there and we haven't had any mice since then. But recently I've heard them in the walls. So I will complain. Again.


• Roaches in the kitchen. We live in a city. Sometimes it happens, even in nice places, and you call an exterminator and they go away. But this is recurring, and nothing is being done about it by anyone but me. I shouldn't have to buy the chemicals to kill them, and I shouldn't have to apply the chemicals. That's why there's an onsite property manager. But apparently Chris and I are the only ones who manage anything about the property.

I never documented the instances where I complained about things. I could probably get text messages from the phone company. (Can you do that?) God knows what else is wrong. I've only recently been paying close attention. The fact that the property manager had the nerve to tell me Chris couldn't be here prompted this research. He hasn't been working recently; we have our theories. Mine is that he had his visa revoked. An INS agent called me about him several months ago. I couldn't tell her much because I didn't know the answer to her questions. He hasn't been working so that's probably why he's noticed Chris is around during the day, since he doesn't start working until the afternoons. But it's like he completely forgot that Chris lives here. It's so weird.

I'm searching for a new job that will pay more so I can get the hell out of this dump. Hopefully we can stay in Columbia Heights, but with rent skyrocketing in this area and me not being one of the 50,000 lawyers in this city, I worry it will be difficult.

We’ve definitely been tricked

There’s a commercial that was aired frequently during the World Series by some mobile phone company where a family uses some app that shows where the best treats are. The family talks about avoiding a house that didn’t give treats they like, and their eyes light up when they learn what houses are giving whole candy bars.

Greed. Instead of marveling at the fact that we have this awesome tradition where we knock on strangers’ doors and they give out free candy, they bitch about what one house is giving out. Maybe those people are struggling financially and can’t afford to give out whole candy bars, or perhaps they just don’t feel the need to compete for most popular candy-giver. Whatever the case, to bitch about the gift that a stranger has given you is nothing short of greed.

Of course, a little disappointment in your some of your treats is to be expected. As a kid I remember hating those peanut butter toffee things and wondered who on earth would eat them. Then there was the house that passed out apples from the tree in their backyard that had wormholes in them. But generally you didn’t bitch about free candy given to you by strangers. Trick or treat was a community event; we knew a lot of the neighbors and we were generally grateful for all of these gifts (unless we ate too much and got a stomach ache.)

Lest you think this is about “kids these days,” it isn’t. It’s about parents. It’s about society. It’s a theme we see repeatedly in our day-to-day activities: gimme gimme gimme. And how can we not expect these results when for the last fifty years we’ve been bombarded with marketing, which is the systematic art of deception. First it was “buy because you need this” then it was “buy because this makes your life easier” then it was “buy because you want this” then it was “buy because others will judge you for not having this.” Now it’s “buy just to buy.” What I’m noticing is a complete disconnect from other human beings in far too many people, and it crosses cultures and borders. But it started here in America. Screw whoever is hurt in the process of me getting my products! My cell phone causes people to be murdered over conflict minerals in Africa? So what! Slaves made my clothes? So what! Hundreds of thousands of people die every year in wars for oil so I can drive to the mall to buy, buy, buy? So what! It doesn’t affect me Me ME!

Bitching about greedy trick-or-treaters may seem trivial, but it’s these little things that add up. It’s the YouTube videos of greedy children rejecting Christmas presents they don’t like. It’s the woman who rips the Elmo doll out of another woman’s hand on Black Friday. It’s the parents who spend thousands of dollars on their children’s birthday parties to outdo the other parents. It’s the people who vote no on school levies because they don’t have children in the school district that needs the funding. It’s bitching about taxes because god forbid you contribute anything to America.

Greed. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote his most famous work, The Republic, at a time when Greek democracy was in a freefall. His observations were that society had become greedy and individualistic and it was ripping apart Greek civilization. It led to constant wars and eventually the society collapsed. We’ve seen countless examples of this same theme throughout history, and we’re seeing it now in the United States.

We’re about to enter yet another Christmas season, the time when Greed is on full display and marketing whores drink from the cup of abominations. I’ve come to loathe this time of year and reject materialism outright. These days, if you give me an apple with a wormhole in it, I’ll cut it up, ask you if you want some, and thank you for the gift. To those who have been tricked into avarice, how about counting your blessings instead of bitching about not getting a whole candy bar?

The King is dead! But you may be able to find him in the Q’s. Or the L's. Who knows?

My laptop is dead.

You don’t know how much you depend on your laptop until it dies. I called a tech guy and he couldn’t get it to wake up from sleep mode even after I bought a new battery for it. Here comes the nighttime. Right now I’m borrowing one from Chris’s brother until I can get a new one, but you know, my stuff just isn’t there.

Case in point: Reflektor.

Reflektor is the new Arcade Fire album that came out today. Normally, I’d just download it from iTunes and be done with it, but I no longer have access to iTunes thanks to cheap parts from China, at least that’s what I’m going to blame it on since someone must be responsible for my woes! Still, I wanted the album. So I did what we did back in the nineties – I sought what we used to call a “compact disc.”

Back in the nineties you had these things called “record stores” where you went to buy round or square objects that held recorded music data on them. They used to be big, black, and plastic and you called them “vinyl.” Then they were little strips of magnetic material contained in square plastic containers. Next they were smaller discs; these are to what I referred earlier. I had a lot of these things called “compact discs” but over time found the convenience of MP3s too much to resist. Thus, I am part of the problem. I helped close the record stores.

The thing is, I loved record stores. I loved flipping through the discs looking for buried sonic treasures, loved to look at the covers and the funny names of bands and the displays of what we called “new releases,” which came out on Tuesdays in the United States and Mondays in the United Kingdom. I’d dig through the bargain bins to pick up older music for a few bucks, and I rarely left without a handful of new discs. Even when I was downloading music, I still visited the stores. It was a payday ritual – I’d reward myself for getting through another two weeks of work with some new music.

But the stores disappeared. Sure, people blame online music, but that’s only part of the explanation. The music stores started to disappear before MP3s existed, when big box stores started selling CDs for lower prices. Walmart began to hoard a larger share of the market until a quarter of all CD sales came from its stores. Like in so other many industries, Walmart succeeded in shutting down the independent guys. They weren’t the only ones – chains like Best Buy and Borders are also guilty.

Which is why I feel so dirty about what I did today. No record stores stand in my neighborhood. Melody Records in Dupont Circle, where I had purchased countless CDs, no longer exists. But I wanted that record. There are only a handful of bands these days that I make an effort to purchase on the day of release – U2, The National, and Arcade Fire are pretty much it. So I went to Target.

I hate the box stores, but what can you do when the indie stores have dried up? I go to Target because it’s a block from my house and there isn’t anything else – aside from CVS – where you can go to purchase toiletries and household goods. The minimarts in the neighborhood were all pushed out by “development.” There’s an indie pharmacy but you can’t just go there to pick up some contact solution; it’s predominantly for medicines. I support the small businesses if I can – I am a frequent customer at the indie coffee shop instead of the chains, and well, what can I say about Lou’s except it’s practically our living room – but Target is unavoidable.

The Columbia Heights Target is a frustrating experience. A certain demographic that shops there seems to have no respect for it as a place of business, as it’s often trashed. In addition, the shelves are frequently empty of the products you want and full of junk you don’t need. The prices are pretty ridiculous, too – Target advertises that you’re getting your products “for less,” but not at this place. Perhaps that would be tolerable if the prices of things weren’t missing so much and you get up to the register (after waiting forever) to find out what you’re buying is several dollars more than what you logically expected. What’s more, the employees don’t give a shit and let you know it. Try to get one of them to help you when they’re talking to each other – you wonder how they don’t get eye strain from rolling them so hard.

I went to the meager section where they sell products they call “music.” You aren’t going to find much that isn’t pop garbage. A whole shelf full of Katy Perry and Justin Bieber and that type of stuff was labeled “New Releases.” (They did have one copy of the Paul McCartney album, so apparently someone in the supply chain knows something about music.) I moved some of the Katy Perrys aside and tried to find Reflektor, but it wasn’t in the new release section, so I went to the “rock” section, which wasn’t even in alphabetical order. In fact, it was in no order at all. I tried to dig around to see if there were any copies of Reflektor there, but I didn’t see any. I went to the section labeled “pop” and briefly considered suicide since I don’t want to live in a world where people listen to the stuff I found there.

Target didn’t have Reflektor, the new album by the band who won “Album of the Year” at the Grammies for its last album despite being on an independent record label, a band so big that it got its own post-Saturday Night Live special, a rarity that only the biggest worldwide acts like U2 get. And I wondered, is the CD really so dead that Target doesn’t carry this record, or is it just that the employees in this particular store are so bad that they didn’t put it on the shelves?

That’s when I went to Best Buy. They had more CDs, but I found it strange to navigate the shelves looking for one. Several copies of Reflektor were on the new release shelf, so I grabbed one and came home to listen to it. I feel like I’ve violated my principles. Yet, what choice did I have if I want to support this indie band? Best Buy helped kill the record stores. Best Buy won.

If we had blogs in 1998, mine would have been poorly written

April in Paris. What more do I need to say?

As always, spelling, grammatical, factual, and emotional errors have been preserved from the original journal. Today’s comments are in red.

le 6 Avril 1998

Leaving Paris. I glance back for one last look at the city’s symbol, the Tour. The spirit has attacked my existence, challenging me to conquer it. Alas, I have no control, and have only to look toward the next venture to the city. Insanity was lost upon arrival; insanity returns upon departure. Good lord. I’m glad I’ve since learned how to write.

Friday, the debate about whether to go or not found the yes side a winner. Despite no guarenteed accommodation, we set out any way. Upon arrival, we sought a tourist office for booking, but found nothing. A stop in a hostel found us marching to another hotel, which proved to be successful. A venture to the Champs Elysées for Burger King, however, was not, as Burger King exists no longer. Yay! McDonald’s won. Boo! At least we got to see the Tour at night. We sat up till 2:30am. Yanni was on the telé, and we actually watched. We got a late start in the morning, about noon, & headed over to the Latin Quartier for eating, after I semi complained because we always go to the same places in Paris – the touristy ones. I don’t understand why, if Paris is Matt’s favorite city, why he won’t explore it. So we went to the Latin Quartier and passed by a Jean Louis David. Andrea got her haircut for $30 there. It looks awesome. After that little adventure, we found a café and ate good panini, croissants, et great chocolat chaud. Then we wandered. Through the rain. In April. In Paris. What more could you want from life?

I avoided using an umbrella, not just because Andrea kept hitting me in the head, but because the rain felt awesome. No words can describe April in Paris. No words I knew at the time, anyway. Apparently the only adjectives I knew then were incredible, awesome, and amazing. There I was, in this fabulous outdoor museum flavored with all of the spices of history, and I can’t find words to describe April in Paris? I mean, here is a city that smells of fresh bread every morning, that houses many of the greatest works of art ever conjured up from the souls of man, that has practically become synonymous with romance, and I can’t find any words. Geesh. We walked through Luxembourg Gardens, just wandered until we sat for awhile until wandering past the Arc down champs elysées, where we bought tickets for L’homme avec le mask de fer, version orignale. The Man with the Iron Mask. Was that Leonardo DeCaprio? While waiting, we ate at Haagen Daas, then saw the movie, which was good, except the end, which said Louis XIV was the greatest French king. It was quite embarrassing, really. French people in the theater actually laughed when that statement was made. Metro returned us to place de Republique, where Andrea prostituted herself before we went to McDonald’s. (A guy on the street offered her a credit card for some reason.) Oh, I forgot about Perry/Paris, the flour filled balloon. Enough said. No, not enough said, because I have no idea what this was. Anyway, we got back after 1:30am and crashed. [UGLY FRENCH GUY STARTING AT ME DESPITE BEING A METRE AWAY]

Got up late again this morning. Went back to the Latin Quartier against the wishes of Matt. Our café was closed but we found the Grand Bistrot with menus for 42 francs. Incredible food. Salade, turkey with Normandy sauce et frites, desert. A whole desert. Must have been dry. Fairly cheap. We hadn’t realized how close we were to Notre Dame and its scaffolded front. Every time I see it, it gets more incredible. Walked to Musée D’orsay. Line was too long. Listened to a violinist busking. It was awesome just sitting there, listening. It started pouring. I was wandering. We met back together after an hour and headed over to Gare de l’est but waited an hour to avoid the supplement on the earlier train. And here I sit. This was the best weekend of the entire semester.

There's something enchanting about Paris that you don't find in other places, but I can't put my finger on it. It's like you go in there with certain expectations, and you expect those expectations to be unattainable as expectations usually are, but it's as good as advertised every time. I've had similar feelings about New York. Sometimes you find yourself awed at the fact that you're there, as if it were a fantasyland that had come to life. I love Paris in a different way than I love most places, but I would say it is similar to how I feel about New York. I suppose you could say that there are certain places on this planet where there are things "happening," where people write books and paint masterpieces and somehow manage to capture what this thing is we call "soul." And I think the reason that Paris and New York are different from other places of the arts, such as Florence, is that they are the cultural and economic centers of their respective countries, whereas a country like Italy has its soul scattered over Florence, Milan, Rome, and others.

I feel like I've been sent back to 1998, because I'm struggling to find the words for what I want to say.