the amsterdam post
i have this strange sense of desperation right now. yuck. and haha. i'm sitting in an easyinternet cafe in amsterdam, right on the damrak (which i tried to say last night and kept saying darmac like it was some kind of...new skin product or a tarmac. whatever a tarmac is.) and yes, so my heart is beating like crazy in the funniest, most inconsequential of places, mi-chemin entre un bibliotheque universitaire et un bureau... teehee. no but really. it's about ten o' clock pm here, and i'm going to go meet my mom, brother, and cousin in paris tomorrow. before i let that all happen, though, i'm trying to work out housing situations: to live once more in the granite blocks we poetically call "the hi-rises"? or be a pioneer and move...just a few blocks NW, to a house which has beautiful patterned hardwood floors [dramatic gesture] but no DSL or furnishings or spectraguards. and also i have to deal with summer work situations, and class situations, and even if i were to be honest and say that i don't have big bad "situations" but just simple decisions to make, i would probably be as uneasy as i am now. faced with my 24 potential hours of internet access and the police officers who have mysteriously infiltrated the cafe.

why so uneasy and desperate? i'm definitely not at home, for one thing! hmm. just thought of something: i think, but am not 100% sure, that most of my friends are not at home right now. to do a quick mental roadmap, my friends who aren't at home are in places as diverse as pittsburgh, bucharest, munich, houston, northern california, chicago, new york...blah blah blah. what is with this? notably i guess it doesn't matter for people that today is boxing day, a day which is traditionally spent kicking about wrapping paper and peeking in the fridge at home with family and friends. but apparently not everyone is so lucky/jesus' birthday oriented. (do i tend to avoid making christians as friends? quiite possible.) and here's something else: i personally haven't spent more than a few weeks at 'home' for two and a half years. this is the life of the college student, i guess. but where have i been? this past semester i was in lyon, france. i did about three cumulative days of schoolwork there, as per the usual, and we'll see how well that paid off for me! and more recently i was in london and now i'm in amsterdam. for the past few days, therefore, i've been suddenly deprived of my 25-odd instant friends and plunked into a Let's Go solitude and have had to depend on perplexed look and smile to get me along. how am i doing?

to start with i have thoroughly enjoyed watching this is our youth, and habla con ella, and lord of the rings/the two towers (sorry again) with and without various people. and trotting merrily down the various hot shopping streets of those two cities. and tonight i saw this sign in dutch:
god is er.

probably the most damning blog. i am usually funny and obliging, right? but as i realized sadly a few hours ago that when i am stressed, i am neither funny nor obliging. yet these are the only character traits i have to recommend me. i will never be a good leader!

way too busy to write. the non-academic nature of most of my entries since in france is not misleading! i have not done any work since landing in france, but now i have to do some! i just took my regards croisés test, which meant me, looking at a still life of wine and gaufrettes and telling where the life in the painting came from. highly satisfying. now just some critiques of jacques lacan/the count of monte cristo and voltaire/stendhal! lately everything is about compare compare contrast. mmmph.

and i bought lots of tickets which will take me from lyon to paris CDG, paris CDG to paris nord, paris nord to london waterloo...[confused pause]...london victoria to london gatwick, london gatwick to amsterdam airport...[cough and look for fruit snacks] and amsterdam station to paris CDG! actually i haven't bought half of these tickets, but i get the idea. logement might be a problème. [blithe wave of hand]. ah, travel.

one huge problem with emails is that there's almost no chance of people gathering up my epistolary efforts into a 37 volume set entitled Correspondance after i die. just people's inboxes. and my sent mail box. of course. but i am a masterful emailer! maybe we can still make this happen. (clearly i am insane. what is worse than my emails? nothing.)

this weekend (lyon will have you know that this weekend started on thursday!) was la fete des lumières, and was full of light and trop de monde. every night, streets were just brimming with good natured, well bundled up people and plumes of smoke (various sources) and strings of lights everywhere! also i went to the municipal library, where there was a roundtable discussion of jules et jim, featuring like six extremely relevant people. including the sons of the real life jules and jim! wow. i was enjoying it, really i was, even though i've only seen the movie once and had mixed feelings about it. after about an hour, though, i thought i should leave, so as to recuperate my books from the magasin where they had been waiting for me for an hour and a half. but then realized i didn't want to be that girl. so instead i half-feigned a coughing fit (i'm getting sick again) and left even less discreetly! the disappointing part was when, right at the beginning, the mc was like "jeanne moreau was supposed to be here, but she had pressing business in rome"...why tell an audience that? it hurts on so many levels!

trying very very hard to remember the overarching lessons that i've learned so far in my five semesters of highish education. really! all my classes somehow congeal into one by the end, or at least i'm a pitiable academic-type (ohh not at all) who likes to make generalizations. but really, i think that it goes like this:

fall 00 - the thing with adam smith (the distribution of wealth? something.)
spring 01 - stickers and wordracer and kc3
fall 01 - the concept of the weighted average
spring 02 - border studies, i'm almost sure
fall 02 - the difference between baroque and classical philosophy

did you know that i didn't know when the french revolution was? a year which begins with 178...did you know about my perverse resistance to absorbing any french history?

i think that i am a very conservative person. and that this conservatism has gotten me into some trouble in the past. or, to be really precise and sad about it, it has kept me out of trouble that i now wish i had gotten way the hell further into. [wink wink, nudge nudge]. and there i was, reading the count of monte cristo and war and peace and catcher in the rye and trying to be all about unimpeached innocence and wonder. conservative! mm, yes, there i was. so that is sad. i decided that according to the Propp/Greimas schema ness, i am always the subject, never the object, of a romantic or platonic quest. there are three specific occasions where i was REALLY disasterously subject-y. and like catherine deneuve in au plus pres de paradis, i live in mortal excitement waiting for any of these three chancec to come 'round again. yeah right! but at least, that is why i'm never on the qui vive looking for some new boyish prospect. instead i very quietly stalk tall browneyed strangers from my barstool, or get draguéed. when does that work?

but i don't really let this shyness, conservatism, girlish etiquette, get me down. because i have this suspicion that the people in my future are the people in my past, just always looking older and more worldworn or wearing some new mittens (i love winter reunions), meeting up in new ways, new places (soit poughkeepsie, soit barcelona), saying different things and smiling in the same way. am i tromping on old great gatsby ground? i'm obsessed with old moments and how they flicker through the mind 90% of the time, these days in france which aren't long enough. clearly memories are an inexhaustible source of pleasure and mild internal debaucheries. clearly i walk around half the time, humming an idle hum and bumping into things...doh!

what i mean to say is that i lack initiative. i wait for them to call.