Update: week of August 11

It’s been a nearly 3 weeks since my last update, so I guess that just means my work is cut out for me. The bad news is that that usually means that all the color and light is drained out of my descriptions as they have become distant and therefore just a list of events.

Back in Paris after my adventures on the train, I did very little. Part of the problem is that there isn’t an extra key to the downstairs lock at Mido and JP’s Montreuil apartment, which means that every time I leave I have to wait outside until someone lets me in again. It has never taken more than 15 minutes, but this very lazy person uses that inconvenience as an excuse to never leave the apartment. If you think about it, there are 9 floors with probably an average of 3 apartments on each floor (a max of 4). So, let’s say that 4 individual people live on each floor (it’s probably much more); 4*9=36 people coming and going, and many of them are bound not to have standard schedules. Granted, it’s August in France, meaning that two thirds of them are on vacation in the country. So, 12 people, maybe 4 of who do not work 9-5, each making an average of 2 trips out and back per day (assumed based on nothing at all). That’s 16 door openings over 8 hours (9 to 5), indicating that either my calculations are wrong or I have been very lucky never to have waited more than 15 minutes.

Yes, it’s these sorts of calculations that are exactly why you read my blog. (Assuming anyone is out there at all. Hello?) But the good news is that, having realized that being busy keeps me happy, I was only there for 2 days that time around. My mother was just arriving back from Bali, where she caught a bad cold and broke 2 of her ribs, so I gave her 24 hours of sleep it off, and then went to the heartland for a short visit.

Monday, August 15 is bank holiday in France, which meant that I had an extra day to kill before starting French class again. How do you call that when your time is such a burden on you? There must be a word. There are so many things in life I want to do, and at the same time I am racking my brain to think of them, and doing the same things over and over, and not leaving apartments…. It’s a matter of organization. I need to look at the big picture and work from that in order to determine how to spend each morning. I want to create huge amazing works of art, but I don’t have a room of my own or any physical materials. I want to see Brittany and Poland and New Zealand and Laos, but I don’t like to travel alone and I don’t like to travel. (In the words of the great David Byrne “I am tired of traveling, I want to be somewhere.”)

You read over and over that the thing that makes life worth living is relationships. That’s what all the wise thoughtful people say on their deathbeds. (I have also heard eat more chocolate.) My mother said yesterday that someone famous (Aldus Huxley) said that kindness is the only think that matters in life. Anyway, I buy it, lock, stock and barrel. But (sorry, there is a but) how do you know which relationships to invest in? By the way they feel about you? By how you feel about them? By who they influence you to be? By who you can influence them to be? By what is easy? By social expectations? To make other people happy?

Sure, it’s easy enough to be kind to bank tellers and telemarketers and people you pass on the sidewalk. Of course, it is important to invest in your family; you are stuck with them after all, so you might as well make the most out of it. People are like gardens and the more you put in the more you get out… if the soil is any good that is. So, first you have to check the soil. I guess the reason I am off on this crazy mixed-up tangent is that I opened a file I have on this computer called “notes for the blog”, and it includes a list of ideas I wanted to talk about, and one of them is “choosing your partner for love”…. I have read entire books on the nature of love, and I have no idea what it is. Did I know something last January 30 when I typed up this list that I have now forgotten? Can I blame it on the season? Maybe, in the words of the great George Michael, I “just gotta have Faith, Faith, Faith.”

Where was I? Oh, at my parents’ place in the French heartland, where we did very little (my mother was sick, you know). We had kir by the river. I think I went for a long walk on Sunday. My datebook says that John and I went for a short bike ride on Monday before I left on the slow train. I’m allergic to their house (I think it may be the bedding) and I took an allergy pill on Sunday that almost killed me (drowsiness). It’s strange but I usually go thru life forgetting that I have allergies, until I visit my mother or someone with cats. I could barely put myself on the train back to Paris, slept most of the way, and woke up the next morning with a terrible hangover from it. It felt like there was a brick in my head.

Before that near-fatal error, we tried to go to this new restaurant in Saint Savin, but they were full (reservations on this fine bank holiday). So, instead we had a picnic of magnificent baked goods by the river (that town also has a wonderful bakery). With them, we drank one of the fine bottles of wine I bought in Italy with Adam and Liz, a light bubbly thing perfect for a lunchtime picnic.