Another Sunday in Paris. Nothing happened, so let's talk about another Monday in Paris.
The day is long. It's 9:34 PM and outside the window there's still a relatively pretty cloud formation with a nice gradient from gray, to sky blue, to gray, to the trees. Students, I think, run around in the stadium across the six-lane street, playing soccer on a hard surface. The feeling from having eaten a fourth baguette sandwich in four days, this time for dinner, is pleasant. Mango yogurt isn't as great as it sounds, but it probably helped get that feeling. With feelings you never know how they get there anyway.
Earlier today some students might have tried to start a bonfire on the campus of Nanterre in the spirit of the strike. Another train accident on line 9 delayed my host mother getting home, so my housemates and I went over to Carrefour, a supermarket that seems to be buried by the grassy park and baseball field above it, to find food to make our dinners. I got a baguette and some meat because I already had cheese and lettuce in the fridge, and mustard was available at home: €1.52 ($2.03). My host mother's sick and had a very long day at work that ended at about 8:15 PM. Geez. She's a soldier.
"No more lonely soldier." The phrase in my head has transformed itself from what it initially was when I was trying to sleep last night, "No more the silent soldier." I decided it would be better as "No longer the silent soldier" to make the meaning more clearly applied to me, but in any case I forgot to change my Facebook "self-introduction" thing where I'm counting down the days left in Paris with a small motivational phrase each day. Which means I've forgotten about one day. Actually, no, I'll use it tomorrow; I had something else prepared for today.
Sometimes people wonder what my motivations are and accuse me of things that I've never thought of doing. This is rare, though, and most frequently it's more actual that I imagine people accusing me of these things. So as to be able to rebut them if necessary. Maybe it's true, though, that those are my motivations. But if that's true then it's my heart, not my brain. And the heart is what I've learned I need to come to understand here.
The gradient of clouds has changed from diagonal to horizontal; at least that's how I see it. One horizontal line of gray, another of light sky blue, then trees. I haven't been this relaxed in awhile.
Another one of my uncles died today. This time he isn't one of my mother's brothers or sisters but he's a brother-in-law. So my Tita Ava lost her husband. He was 50 and just suddenly died of a heart attack. I don't want to be my cousins Yayan or Hannah right now (Yayan's slightly older than I am; Hannah is in high school or younger). That's awful. I don't want to know what that's like.
I have an offer to run tomorrow and get to the library. A dentist appointment on Thursday. Hopefully it'll stop the bacteria that are fucking up my teeth or giving me pain in my jaw or whatever they're doing now from running amok in my body. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have, but they're going up against one of the strongest versions of me I've ever known so they're in pretty big trouble.
Today I had a rare version of a nap, one that didn't end with a headache. And one that might even let me go back to sleep at a normal time again; that's pretty rare.
In Paris the time zooms by slowly.
