installation

I wonder if hanging out with a girl for the sole purpose of hurrying up my menstrual cycle is immoral. Not that I have, just a possibility. I know I will be more excited and less tired and more focused once I finally get my period, but then again it's not even that late. I haven't actually been here very long--it only feels like three months. Christmas anyone?
No, don't think I don't love this city. I like this city more than I've liked any city, and I know I'll love it when the bodily pain of adjustment and femininity has abated. It's just that it's hard, and I forget things, and even the best city in the world (your choice) is only as good as the place you make for yourself in it.
Currently my space consists of free-floating mental debris playing 3D pong off the cream paint and very nice Moroccan furniture of my new cube. I like my room a lot. My things blend with Isabel's things very nicely, and I do say so. However you may say what you will--you see for yourself. (brief but satisfying highspeed...gets one a little high)
As for Isabel, my fine Madame of some upwards middling years, I have the impression we ourselves will blend nicely as well. The same goes for her kind and jumpy daughter, Mlle. Alex. With Isabel there is a slight and unidentifiable burr in our conversation, but if we were just the same there would be little to gain from our exchange, eh..n? Also, any unease is immediately eased when I find drawers and drawers in my bedroom filled with piles of small and interesting moreover useless items. With Alex there is the problem of her great friends, who seem great, and therefore to whom I of course cannot speak. They are over right now, drinking and listening to music that I like. I am downstairs in my Bedouin boudoir, writing an entry for my blog. However I am okay with this for three reasons: 1- I do not comprehend French as quickly as these young shucks speak it 2- I am dirty, tired, and grouchy and 3- I simply have to write in my blog or else nobody will ever check it and then they will forget I exist! That's how that happens.
So on to other things. Tristan and I have spent many free hours exploring or squashing awkwardly into overcrowded metrocars. Huffing a lot, but at least we have each other. I say things to him like, "You're often mean and very rarely nice" and he says things back like "Well there's very rarely reason for it," but I suppose I'd rather have an offensive friend than an empty city. Everything here is so pregnant with collective experience, and so devoid of personal significance.
All in good time, says the guy with his nose knocked to the other side of his face (or rather, this is what his nose says to me), but in these first too-hot-too-cold days it's hard to believe I'll ever digest a place like Paris in a single year. I need to bite off thousands of tiny morsels and squish each one with a pensive tongue. Instead it's a world-championship pie eating contest and I've just been shoving, shoveling Paris down. Snakelike, the towers of Notre Dame protrude from my abdomen, the stairs of Montmartre lodge uncomfortably in my throat.
The good news is I've started to habitually translate everything I say into French. Or at least the last bit. le derniere morceau. I'm taking the stupid kid intensive French class this semester but I'm okay with that because after talking into a little microphone for two hours every week and having to listen to myself butcher this grace of a language, maybe I'll reform. Also, I have no vocabulary, as my kind Isabel knows quite well, which is interesting since I can understand many people fairly well. Are all the words hidden deep down in my spleen after all--am I just waiting for the crossover point? Or will it be the long and heavy road en fait. Impossible to say.
All right, well I'd like to say that I've got to get back to reading L'Etranger, but in fact I gave that up as soon as I found Harry Potter Et l'Ordre du Phenix on a bookshelf. So in fact, I have to get back to Celui-Dont-On-Ne-Doit-Pas-Prononcer-Le-Nom. Wow, French sucks.

transient

So of course I am one day behind this bloggy thing already, but what's new?
My first day in Paris was about what I'd expected--fun but disorrienting, leaving a hint of that old metalic taste. That intruding spirit-hand that gropes around in my innards, first causing heartwrench, then seasickness, then a woozy bouyancy by turn. I find it just so interesting how physical our emotions are, and how emotional our physical conditions may be.
But for comprehensible details!
-Moreorless everyone in my group (11 of us altogether) seems sincerely nice, mostly sincere, and importantly, good-humored. It's a funny situation and it seems to have gone-over fun with most of us, so I feel good on that account.
-I still do not know the name of my Madame or where she (and I) live, but hopefully will within a couple hours here. Mme. Schnorzy (or whatever), my program director, says encouraging things, however--hints that she is 'easy going' and 'communicative.' As long as she's not disease-ridden, that seems to be ideal.
-I spent a lot of my first day exploring an abandoned railway track with Tristan and a couple of the other girls from our group. This was interesting on many levels, which I will now illustrate through illustations:

kitty houses

Prelude

Night before brought slight but sudden realization--the drawing back of denial's veil which draws the throat closed. Earlier I cried big wet tears over my old, purring cat, with the knowing that her soft perfection will rot and her lovely lucid eyes melt from her head. As will my own greens, surely, but not yet. That's all I could think--not yet.
Now I am in the airport. They took my lipgloss, the bastards. I don't mind travelling too much--I just don't think about it while I do it--but I have to say it was more fun with liquids. Yesterday I fairly fully conceptualized a short film which would be entitled, "Prelude to a Plane Crash"--but this is probably not the time to write about it. It could be brilliant, though, that's all I'm saying--a sympathetic but realist inspection of the mortal heart, as shown through one person's last day on Earth--his or her preparation for the departure without an arrival. Okay I seriously can't write about this while that sweet old Japanese woman munches her packed lunch and stares at me. No, not this time, we're going to make it through, lady.
Whatever, I don't think it's so irrational to think about death more before and during a plane ride than a car ride. After all, statistics do not come from the gut, and anyone without a background in physics knows well enough that nothing that heavy can fly.
Also there is the little issue of moving to a big foreign city and leaving behind an intensely loving and neurotic family, separating from both sets of fantastic friends, oh, ohohyes don't forget--bringing along luggage so heavy I could have packed myself in it. No, no but seriously, it's going to be great. What can I say? I love lamp.

Hey can someone tell me how to change my opperating language on this stu...pendous Dell computer?

I (sincerely) love that I can list this blog as my website on facebook one night, and have two comments by the next.

Also, I have to say that I am bringing too much to France. That is SO clear to me, yet I am (apparently) powerless to avoid this certain (and ohso female) disaster.

I'll peace out now before paretheses take over this post and move to colonize my brain.

departure

These last days in Dover are blossoming and dying fantastically, all in each day, after day after day and I am rematerializing as flesh and blood, standing suddenly in the center of the suburban street. With me my fears, some soul-clinging anxiety, and peace like eggwhites and shell, keeping me whole. I'm curious.
And is the season just as it should be? Where is the indian summer now, where is our collective doom shimmering in the mirage over hot asphalt? Driving my parent's SUV with the windows down, gathering necessities and niceties for the voyage ahead, worrying about relationships between myself and others, my hair clean...nothing could be more normal, which is unusual.
I'm blind, but I'm alive. Roll me on, but carefully. Balance me on the equinox, but not before.
Walking down the street I spot a dead S, belly open and peeled back, flat and shiny. Only my skin knows it from a candy wrapper, knows it by its death so I shiver. The air is perfect, warm close to the skin and cool brushing by. Everything is the same. Same as it was. Same as itself. The wrapper in my pocket and the snake on the cement and the half-dead flowers on the branch and the sun in the black abyss.
I'll miss you, Dover, impossible though it may be to miss something if everything is everything. I'll miss you like I miss Bard, less than I miss people, but more than I miss homework.