Skip to main content


I took today off from work as a way of continuing a celebration of my birthday.

It was a beautiful day of grey and light rain that as time passed on I felt compelled to wander out into the wet streets of Seattle. Book hunting was my unofficial reason for wandering out, but of course to feel the rain dripping down my face was the actual reason. The 4th of January and a lovely walk though the rain, oh Seattle how you send my heart ‘a flutter.’

I keep looking for a used copy of Down and Out in Paris and London, but for some odd reason I can’t seem to find it at any of the used book stores. I did end up finding some plays by Satre in French today for $3 today though. I thought that reading existential French dialogue would be fun and help with learning more of the language.

I was hoping to round out this wander with some Asian food, but the aesthetic of Café on the Ave pulled me in for a sandwich and a trial of the London Fog drink I heard talked down yesterday. I would have to agree with the verdict of it not tasting too spectacular. From my experience, milk stops the tea from steeping so the attempt to steep Earl Grey in steamed milk hardly makes sense. The number I was assigned for my food was the number 22. I found this amusing as yesterday was my 22nd birthday and the normal number of 4 which usually follows me about is both a product and a sum of the two digits.

While sitting at the café I read more of The Stranger. Finally made it to the 2nd part. I’m still not enjoying it as much as Nausea. Camus just feels too apathetic towards everything. I have met people like this and after a while they just seem to be too much of a bore, because it seems that they are not really too apathetic towards everything as much as they are just too involved with themselves. Can’t seem to think about what might be going through the minds of others because they are too self-involved. Sartre’s character in Nausea was, on the other hand, very involved with trying to figure out what other people are thinking, which from an outside perspective would probably lead one to think of him as being apathetic as well.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Windy Coffee. [part 1]

Fulya was looking at my sketchbook the other day and remarked that she liked the random sketch that I had made of some girl that I saw walking along with a little plastic cup of coffee during the wind storm a few weeks past. As I still have some small pieces of very good watercolor paper [that I had sized to be used for some small frames I had collected but did not have anything to put in them yet], I thought that perhaps I could transfer a little sketch to a little piece of paper to play with techniques. Namely the layering of water colors. Something that I know I have been working on a lot, but practice makes perfect. I also wanted to see how using my new mechanical pencil filled with blue graphite would work in hiding my lines as I initially worked. I forgot to take a picture of the transition between not having the girl inked at all to inking her and starting the background. I was having a hell of a time trying to figure out a setting in which to put her. At first I was th
French underworld tattoos at the turn of the century. The man sports a tattooed mustache intended to foil the prohibition of facial hair in the Foreign Legion. The World of Tattoo by Maarten Hesselt van Dinter. I can only dream of being anywhere near that combination of badass and crazy. Though at that point the Foreign Legion was probably still the best place for criminals to get their record cleaned so perhaps he is as well quite legitimately scary upon all of that. I find myself flipping back to this page time and time again to romanticize the French underground from around 1900. Give him an accordion, a beret, and some braces. Prostitutes who could easily kill you if you ever come up short and tattoo the names of their ‘actual’ lovers between their breasts, close to their heart. Tattoo ‘Je mother fucking t’aime’ in a tattoo cursive along my collar bones.

The adventure continues.

So, I haven't written much lately.. but from the doldrums of the end of semester I then entered a time period of a flânerie across France. A last hurrah. Jessye came to visit again and the tiny room was packed up all into a few suitcases, the largest being named Bertha, and Rennes was left behind, although not before having a picnic in Thabor for the last Saturday market... We got the essentials. Madeleines (where as I reached the front of the line the vendor greeted me with a question of, '6 madelines?') with a few more of that vendor's delicious delights, like those bite size rolls with jams and caramel and chocolate.. Then of course the impossible cow cheese that acted like goat cheese and was rolled in Provencal  herbs. And of course a baguette from the amazing bakery covered in tiles. A trip to Thabor with Jessye was never complete without a stop at the aviary. And some people watching. A mohawked punk rocker walks a little girl hand in hand through the park.