The Strength

I have been under a spell of feeling not well this entire week, and I figured out today that I probably have hay fever thanks to Paris's seemingly nonexistent greenery and flowery. I'm pretty sure that I got sick simultaneously, though, so hopefully that part is gone. Well, I'm here and feeling decent at least, but very tired-like.

Damn, Paris is getting boring! It's probably because I didn't really hang out with anybody this weekend. Also, I haven't made spring break plans yet - should I visit Italy and London, or Japan? Shh... I think I might just travel alone to Amsterdam (bad idea???) to see Eurovision performers. Yes, specifically for that purpose. What, you act like I know much about Europe?

I guess I should browse the infinite internet or the really thick Lonely Planet guide for Europe in my room. But that's too much work.

I'm going to be home in exactly 2 months. It's 30/3, then it'll be 30/5, then 5/30, the (North) American way. Also kind of the Japanese way. Probably the Central African Republican way too? They have their embassy nearby my house.

This spring is going to be tough. It'll test my tolerance of myself, of other people, of new things, of old repeating things. I'm going to try going running tomorrow specifically because I want to know whether it'll help or hurt against the allergies. I was able to go through frisbee practice indoors on Friday, still sick, without much trouble. I didn't go Sunday because I wanted to get enough sleep to get over the sickness. Well, sleep doesn't kill allergies. A lack of sleep cheers them on, though.

I gained a little weight this weekend and I'm still really craving food. This is good for muscle building, but, um, weights are integral to that. Don't have those. Well, there's always the wooden exercise structures in the (now pollen-filled) Bois de Boulogne. And my Push-Up Pro grips. Fellas and femmes: don't buy these. They slide like nothing else; if you don't have a good surface, they will fail. Luckily, the carpet in the living room isn't too bad for them, but still... I need this shit for my wrists, man. I guess I'll have to buy Perfect Pushup when I get back.

In 2 months.

I stop a lot when I blog now. This isn't freewriting; it's more like stopwriting. At least the stops aren't that long. Keep in mind that when you are actually writing, with a pen, you can think as you're writing. I think it's a better process, actually. Lets your brain think things through before you get them down. Whereas typing, unfortunately...

I read a book about photography called La chambre claire by Roland Barthes. It was really good at first but I was left disappointed because all the author seemed capable of discussing was seeing the essence of his dead mother in a picture of her when she was 5 years old. It seriously went nowhere from there and was really weakly argued. He saw death in photography when you could easily just take a quick counterargument route and say, well, why can't you see life instead?

It's just that death is seen as a more serious topic and is more accepted as such in academia, I guess, despite the fact that the guy was trying to be as un-academic as possible. I guess when you're French and heavily embedded and submerged in all this academic shit there's not much you can do. This city is stuck in its history and seems to have too much of it to learn much from it. Those who have information overload are doomed to repeat it.

That's why I listen to Plies. It's my drank. "Just stand in front of me and pose. You touch mine, I touch yo's." Unfortunately, I'm losing my taste for the bad flavor. That's the difference between bad music and beer - somehow people can't tire of the latter's awful, look at me I'm a man I can have a bigger belly than you taste.

And alcohol sucks. All of it. At least when you have nobody to get frisky with in the meantime. But even then, it's really just unnecessary.

Peace.

I hate Sundays.

Sundays suck. Sunday is the day where nobody talks to me and I talk to no one else, and I'm isolated and all alone, stuck trying to do work or trying to get myself to do work that usually involves reading long sentences like this one except only in French, all day, and all night, up until 4-6 AM, which isn't any good for the 9:30 AM class I always have on Mondays or my sanity or my health; I usually end up going to class wanting to throw up or something.

Nobody is ever on Facebook. Maybe there are some messages left over from the night before, but after that there's nothing. I can't call home until it's rather late because nobody gets up in the morning on Sundays and there's a 5 hour time difference. Before that time I get nothing done.

In Paris, in 枚方, in Medford... there's no difference. It's all the same sad Sunday story.

There's a band called Taking Back Sunday; I think it's the best band name of this generation in music. I don't recall enjoying their songs very much, though.

I'd say this is a very selfish freewrite but I think it speaks for everyone. Sundays suck. Observe the Sabbath day or it will make it observe you.

I was gonna go to the Louvre today but I didn't go to bed early enough to do so and my feet and legs are still sore from not being stretched after frisbee practice, which rocked, Friday night. And that was a legit practice!

I guess I'm not gonna go back to Japan for spring break. But I haven't booked yet for the everyone's-gotta-do-it-travel-Europe vacation. Aaggh, where does the time go? I'm going to need this one so badly... another 3 weeks and I'm gone for 2 weeks and I'm back for 5 weeks and I'm gone. Goodbye, France. Never coming back.

At least I don't think so... Now, Japan, on the other hand... you might see me, look out. Wish they liked foreigners a little more so I could have a refuge in case we have another draft. Don't laugh; bad economies lead to bad wars. So stupid, why did I sign up for the selective service shit?

At least there's paisible Canada.

I hate Sundays.

Time to let go of something?

I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T
A-L-E-X-B-E-R-R-I-A-N
Two different words.

It is just about the time I came to Paris for; I expected it much earlier, which is why I've been so thrown off and nervous here, yet it didn't come. Finally I have the chance to make friends with French people. Well, hopefully! I called the treasurer of the team again 20 minutes ago, read, 2:08 PM, to remind him about me going, and I think I woke him up. Fuck! He seems to be a nice person, though, and he told me to call back in half an hour. 5 minutes left? Wow, I'm so nervous. Well, I hope that's not another bad start!

I'm running out of starting time to make. I've been extending the countdown from the start of the race for awhile, and I haven't allowed the gun to fire. When it does fire I fear it might shoot faster than 330 m/s ± .6ºC at STP. That wouldn't be good.

Seriously, I've done nothing here. I've worked to understand things without doing school work. That doesn't work. Needs more (line) integrity. Over dS.

I'm about to go to a French library and do work. My friends are mostly not around this weekend, so I am again alone. Alone in a time of testing.

This is difficult. -2 minutes left. And not the phone call. Just being here is.

I'll be back for the summer...

Where I'm @ → now

I guess I'll give you an update on what's happened to me since Saturday.

Since then I've been pretty damn jovial. I've run in the forest park known as the Bois-de-Boulogne 4 days out of 5, and since they've got all these neat wooden exercise structures all over the place, I've been able to work my upper body too. Speaking of, I know I have no upper body whatsoever. Lifting weights would be a good start; that, however, would require signing up for a gym, and since I have no experience thereof I don't think that would be a good idea.

I climbed (obviously part of the way up) the tower of the Bastille the other day and that was pretty cool, but my upper body strength was all gone by then and it didn't help that I was carrying my bookbag, so I needed this French guy's help to get me up to the first platform. And man that was hard. I had no pull left in the muscles up near my shoulders because I had used it all earlier that day and this week. The guy who pulled me up was young, probably my age, as were all the other kids up there, boys, girls, all high school or college age. Really cool. This climb was possible due to the strike, another one of those general Paris strikes that I don't comprehend at all. Why can't they just write letters to their representatives en masse? Well, I guess they could also lobby like normal people, but I hate lobbyists and don't think they're essential to the government at all, especially not ours, not at the federal level where all that shit's supposed to be irrelevant via Amendments 9 and 10. Whatever.

I am way behind in my work. I am way behind in finding what to do for the summer, too. Great.

You know what's interesting with the title: if you look at it from the mathematician's point of view, you'd see a function that requires everything to start from a set of where I'm at, and then create something in the field of "now." I wonder if I can draw any symbolic meaning from that. I don't really feel like it, but okay. I don't think the function is bijective--- specifically it's not surjective (onto).

Munch on that.

New

Well, I told him I'm not hanging out with him anymore.

That should work.

No more emotional outbreaks in Paris, I hope. I'm free and 8 more weeks, not 8 more weeks and I'm free.

Peace.

Sigh. Every day I

Sigh. Every day I walk through the streets of this city and I find no evidence that anyone has ever loved anyone else. I see people cold, faces bold and defiant, of what? I see art and I don't see what other people see in it. I see museums, treasure troves of the richness of days past, an old, free currency that they give to me and that I can't spend. Nobody's telling me any stories that have any point to me. No love behind them; histories of conquering, histories of Napoleon, always Napoleon, histories of socialism and radicalism. People homeless, begging because the government won't let them get any other job. I won't go on about how the French government spends half its country's GDP. That's irrelevant right now.

I see groups of French people. They kiss each other, left cheek, right cheek when they see each other. No hugging-- that's considered too intimate. What? All I want is to be hugged. Fuck kisses. They talk amongst each other. When I go to Dauphine I talk to myself in my head beside them. This is torture. Thinking about this is torture. I want to throw up.

Two months of reluctance, and nothing of it. I am tired of looking sad so I don't want to look like an idiot any further. Sad idiots are always the ugliest. And yet that's what I have to be... ugly. Well, it's gotten ugly. I guess I'll have to remain that until I can blossom again.

Spring is coming; no evidence so far. Paris is a bunch of buildings all the same height; they won't let them grow any taller but they're tall as it is, what's the point? All the buildings look the same. Then some older building that I'm supposed to call a classic. No nature.

When French people see nature they want to conquer it. French gardens are all about man's power over nature. Obviously it's not over man's creative power over nature because the gardens are the most unnatural, ugly, boring pieces of shit I've ever seen. I'm sorry. I'm not happy. But when you remove nature from the whole mess, what is left? A bunch of concrete. It might as well be a modern city because there's no evidence, no tick, of humanity in it.

Old classics, old museums have nothing for me. My heart is not there. Sucking it into the dark recesses of the past-- imagine how many people had to suffer while the government pumped money into these things -- cannot make me feel any better. Everything here is tired. I need to get out.

And so I will. Far, far away. Far, from this old room with no sunlight permitted to enter whatsoever, far from this chamber that, if you think about it, I am enslaving me and my sadness in, hiding me and my horrible state from the public, from my family, from my homestay family and fellow students who live here with me. I'm too embarrassed to tell them the full story about how I've fucked up in Paris. Too embarrassed.

And I'm not happy here. Nature buried under immense stacks of building material and fake, inadequate love. And my nature is stuck under Paris's foundation too. Fuck this place.

I guess now I have to beg for salvation. No.
I'm going for a run. If not outside, in my mind.
But...

I almost got what I so badly wanted when I was happy. This was a week after I got here. Now I still want it and I'm not happy. Just one little thing can get me so depressed. I don't want to have a romance to rescue me from unhappiness. Because I know I'll never get such a thing. I just know it. I can't believe otherwise.

And it hurts. It hurts so bad.

アイディア

There's nothing more fucking annoying than the sound of the train passing by underground when you're trying to get to sleep or when you're trying to relax. Right now I'm trying to do the latter after failing the former.

Slept for two hours tonight, 12-2. Felt like I was awake the whole time. Could not get back to sleep afterward. Actually feel like sleeping now but have no faith that my body would cooperate with the obvious best idea.

I hate this, this state that I'm in. Yes, I'm pretty sure it has to do with the country that I'm in, too. Why did I come here? Did I really think I would fit in? I fit in like a sore thumb. There's no problem for me with sticking out like a thumb but if you're gonna be sore it's not worth the trouble, thanks. No, seriously; I like sticking out, but this is too much, just too much.

I played piano today, or keyboard rather. A good keyboard but still a Yamaha thing. My host father has it in my host mom's room, and I just never got around to asking him to play on it, finally forced myself to do so today. Sang and played a little. Saw a piano performance the day before, wasn't completely pleased but it at least got better and gave me something to constructively think about. The Yamaha he played on and/or the acoustics was/were totally inadequate. I felt like I could've played better. Probably could've two years ago when my technique was still there. I still could've done the easier Chopin pieces better; he had no touch for lyricism, at least not at the beginning of the performance.

Ugh, too tired to blog no more. I can at least go back to sleep, not back to bed (I'm in that)... this new BEP song is helping me relax. They're so good, the Black Eyed Peas.

La noche es after mí / Magnets

Long story short, I had about 3 hours of exercise in Japan per day if you add up all the biking and the frisbee. You might say biking and frisbee ain't shit, but frisbee for 1.5 hours is pretty considerable and biking involved a 1-gear bike and hills all over the place, and, naturally, being who I am, biking hard and fast, always. That's what I wish shopping in the US were like-- go out, buy only what you can fit in your bike basket and bookbag, go back home, and have spent very little money but very many calories. I apparently came home from frisbee I mean Japan looking much healthier than before, at least according to my aunt. I'm afraid I'm going to come back home from France looking rather gaunt like I always do after Tufts semesters. That's no good. Fuck.

Well, absent the (perfect amount of) exercise I have been staying up to horribly late hours and not gotten much out of Paris. I tried to go to bed at midnight four hours ago but that didn't work. Zzz. I'm tired now but who knows whether I'll be able to fall asleep?

You know, there's something about magnets. Their attraction depends on their distance, no matter what you put between them, as long as that thing doesn't exert too much magnetic force itself. You can put a terribly dense brick between two powerful magnets and they'll stick to the brick.

I might need some distance.

Inadequate (en)light(en)ing

On the right side of my bottom taskbar, which, by the way, is a plain, Windows-98-looking taskbar, with its gray coloring and the regular-looking start-menu button on the left, there is something that says EN. This is my keyboard language setting. If I hit CTRL SHIFT 4 this gives me JP. The two respectively stand for English and Japanese, as you might expect.

This letter is about too much "en."

I have finally figured out what I wanted here the most: the language experience. One of the most fun things about Japan was being able to have Japanese friends (for whom I am very grateful) and speak in Japanese all the time, everywhere. Japanese is a language where there are many ways to shorten statements and make them grammatically correct. On the other hand, when you're nervous because you have to talk to someone of higher social status than you, like a teacher or a boss, Japanese forces you to use a lot more filler, making longer sentences with less content, which in turn I think makes it actually easier to speak to such people. In any case, the language has ways of being polite built in; and if you fail to be grammatically polite, there's always the escape trap that you're a foreigner. This is what I got used to over four months over there in the land of the falling moon.

Here, though, par contre I have failed to get this language experience. There was an obvious outlet: however, being nervous, I have so far failed to pursue it. That outlet is frisbee. I allowed the excuse in my head that I was just getting started and the embarrassment of not being allowed to join this club would hit me too hard, since I wasn't used to Paris yet. Well, guess what? I'm still not comfortable here. No, not "not completely," just not comfortable period. Oops. I even bought cleats more than a week ago and still haven't done anything with them. Yes, there are clubs at the two public Parisian universities I go to, but I'm either not interested in any of them or I have no clue what they stand for (ASSIDU? JAPAD?). The answer is frisbee, and I'm finally hopefully going to gather my balls and go.

I have not exactly gotten into Parisian culture. 50% of the time people figure out my accent and start speaking to me in English, which in turn is a consequence of me not speaking French enough daily. This is obviously discouraging and a pain in the ass. Meanwhile, Paris is a city of tourists, period, and a small one at that. I'm trying to find some small, more charming niches where I can go every now and then and just enjoy myself. The Louvre isn't one of them, sorry. I'm not that big of a fan of looking at art. I don't get anything out of it because I'm not an artist. Most of what I get out of music is from being a musician. I listen to songs and hear how I would play them on the piano (which I generally do when I go home). I imagine how I would dance to them if I weren't in the middle of a train. Hell, I picture how I would throw DDR steps on them (THROW SOME D'S ON THAT). I think about how I would sing them, or I sing them. For art, I have no clue how the creative process works.

Most of the music I listen to is stuff from back home. This is no different from when I was in Japan, but a couple nights ago I had a solitary Japanese music listening party. That was fun. Paris dance radio is good, though, and I should listen to it. There's a radio right next to me, too (although the quality is shoddy...).

As for niches, well, there's the Filipino stores on Rue Mesnil, station Victor Hugo, where I went for the second time today. I can't name any more. I've been a lousy explorer and this room sucks and yet I feel like I've spent too much time in it. The only reason it sucks is that the lighting is shit. The main light is weak, and the lamps I have aren't that great. The worst part, though, is that the sun does not shine for me: when I wake up, there is barely any sunlight shining through my window, because my window opens out onto... well, a very, very small courtyard if you can call it that surrounded by buildings that go as high as they're allowed to by the Paris bureaucrat zombies. Which means NO SUNLIGHT, even at the peak of the day. Fucking awful.

Well, it's only awful because I haven't gotten over it and out into the world of sun that exists here, somewhere. I'd say Bois de Boulogne, but that's basically a forest...

You know what's funny? The temperature dropped here. Huh? It was a steady 10 degrees Celsius or higher all throughout February during the day, and when I went out today it was only 5. It's already temperate in Osaka, 11 degree high during a rainstorm. I thought it was going to snow there for a while. I forgot...

Well, I've got my first test coming up and it's going to be an interesting one. A test of supposedly three proofs for my Discrete Probabilities class at Dauphine. On Monday at 8 fucking 30 in the morning. That's all right, though. I can handle it.

Two days ago, though, as my host mother was questioning what was wrong, when I was supposed to go to the Louvre at 9 AM in the morning, I almost threw up when I was talking to her. Oops, don't go running and do tons of sit-ups and push-ups if you're just recovering from a cold and going to sleep one hour. The order in that sentence should be rearranged but you get what I'm saying.

And I'm dépensé. Spent and, to make a pun, out of thought.

No, I'm not thoughtless right now. There are many things on my mind. Just...

Losing it

Just a short update to denote that I am kind of off the deep end.

I slept about an hour and then got up to go eat breakfast and proceed to the Louvre. It is 10:25. I am not at the Louvre.

Guess I'm not the fighting kind... wouldn't mind it if you were by my side.