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A little update
Well, after last week’s setbacks I feel like I’m making some progress, in terms of making a social life and feeling more at home and at peace with myself. I got over my cold really quickly, minimal hacking and only needed half a giant roll of toilet paper to capture the mucus coming out of my face. It’s now entirely my responsibility to track down the keymaking guy and have him make my key…but his shop is never open…go figure. I’m still kind of freaked out by strangers on the street that look the least bit dangerous, and god help me if they try to talk to me on the street I get a mild heart attack when a man says “bonjour” in my head I scream “FUCK OFF I’LL KILL YOU IF YOU TRY ANYTHING.”—apparently that feeling subsides after some time and therapy. I’ve been watching too much True Blood… so I keep running over this image of the next time I’m going to be accosted in an alley and it goes something like this: ay yo gimme yer bag bitch---I’ll clutch whatever mystical looking piece of jewelry I’m wearing make my eyes roll back in my head and start speaking latin backwards and start dry heaving, if I actually had the power I would rip my face off and reveal the true nature of evil and muscular anatomy…go apeshit brujo…. and hopefully he will think he’s having a gypsy spell cast over him (hopefully the French are superstitious) and head for the hills! Or maybe I’ll just run really fast like a bitch.
Whatever. Um. Yes, making friends. Through friends of friends of friends the world gets smaller every day. I met up with Zhara, she’s the sister of an acquaintance of mine in Albuquerque, she’s been living in Paris for a year now. We apparently have something like 27 friends in common and just never met in Albuquerque, so we met in Paris, cool! She introduced me to this very cool circle of poets and artists and people who like those things. There’s an organization called Spoken Word and they put on open mic nights every week and various performances, I’ve met some cool people through it. I’ll go more often now. I’ve been going to some parties, but it’s like I’m constantly battling the old jewish lady in the back of my head….yew should go hoooome its getting late you gawt some nittin to do in the mawhnin. You shewdn’t drink unutha glass of menachvitz you might fall asleep on the metro….bettah wear a sweatah you might regret it….The old jewish lady in my head has been winning the battles lately. Maybe this weekend I will sequester her and party full throttle and miss the last metro and dance until morning…but I will bring a sweater. I have a (digital) pen pal from Greece moving here next week who will probably motivate me to go out more. It’s so strange how nowadays in PARIS, when it comes down to the choice of having an epically drunken foolish evening or having a lovely morning the next day I choose the lovely morning. That will probably change soon…it doesn’t sound like me. Or maybe I’m being grown up….bahahaha. Once there is a party epically enticing enough for me to hate tomorrow I will stay until the wee hours of the morning, but I’m hard to impress in terms of parties, so we’ll see what happens.
Yesterday I had a lovely day since I went home like an old lady the night before. I went to Pere Lachaise, armed with a red bull, camera, and sketchbook. If you don’t know, it’s the cemetery where Jim Morrison is buried…no I did not kiss his grave. I couldn’t find it not was I that motivated to. The whole pokemon style tourism thing [gotta catch em all! Locate, take a picture, came conquered, on to the next monument to not thoroughly appreciate] is a real turnoff to me. The cemetery is a seriously gargantuan testament to death and history. It’s really beautiful, not really spooky until the sun starts going down….then I get a little nervous as I said I’ve been watching too much vampire bullshit, I mean c’mon it’s still a cemetery. The most interesting things I saw were the huge differences in equality, even in death. Some people could only afford to have a modest cross above their grave while others constructed what look like mini churches or mansions to continue their legacy long after their deaths. And still those monuments are subject to time once they’re forgotten about and maintenance ceases. Iron rots and doors collapse. The tree roots knock over headstones, never to be repositioned. I felt more connected to the earth, and a better concept of our relation to our time on it.
I drew a few pictures; it was a more challenging exercise than drawing pictures of statues in the Louvre. For one I have to make up the composition with my little finger viewfinder, ooh how artsy fartsy I must look when I do that. And I have to find somewhere appropriate to sit, I gave up on finding benches near a good composition and caved into sitting on top of a gravestone…old Mr. Henri will not be rolling around in his grave under me if he knew I were sitting on top of him….hopefully. Then drawing a cemetery is a lot of perspective. It’s sort of mathematical in nature. The more ripped I am on caffine, like heart racing this is what drugs are like ripped on caffine that’s when it’s the most fun. And to drink that much coffee here would be so expensive…so I have to resort to redbull. Lame.
Then I met up with Elsa, she just got back from traveling. Wooh, she’s one of the first people I met when I came to Paris and I’ve only known her for a couple weeks but she’s my oldest friend now! So we got some wine and met up with some friends in a park and talked whilest drinking the wine and smoking cigarettes, in true Parisian fashion.

there's pictures of all these things on facebook, I'm too lazy to upload them on both.