migratory times

Delicious graphemes has migrated to tumblr! This is mainly because more people I know use it than blogger. I personally find the comment structure slightly odd but let's try this for a while at least.

hey check out my lungs

Well, after three months of waiting - the French government isn't particularly punctual or informative, preferring to wait a few months and mail me a letter than to respond to my emails - I am at last an official resident! And I didn't even have to buy an expensive envelope or drive for several hours on multiple days, which is more than can be said for the visa process. In fact, it was relatively easy and only took something like an hour and a half. Plus I was afraid of metro issues making me late, so I left early and ended up going in before my appointment was even scheduled. No one yelled at me or told me to leave because I was unprepared. That is not to say, of course, that it wasn't a weird experience on several levels, but I've gotten used to the fact that everything that is going to happen to me for the next several months is going to be slightly incomprehensible.

The thing about being an English speaker in France is that everyone knows a little bit of English, and when they recognize your accent they default to whatever English words they know, even if there are about five of them. This is particularly difficult when you have been speaking almost exclusively in French for a long time and suddenly a doctor is giving you a really intense look and saying, "Your teeth. Are they good?" and "Do you have pregnancy?" The woman who gave me my vision test used a mixture of comprehensible French and disjointed, single-word English, switching back and forth between them so that every thing she said caught me off guard and I'm pretty sure I looked like I didn't actually speak any language.

"Pregnancy?"

"Uh, what?"

"Pregnancy! Do you have pregnancy?"

"Do... I..."

"Are. You! Pregnant!"

"Oh! Oh, no. Definitely not."

I then stood half-naked in a room for a while, pushed against a big plastic box so they could x-ray my lungs. I'm not sure why they're particularly preoccupied with the lungs of their immigrants, but this part was actually kind of interesting. I've never been x-rayed anywhere but my mouth, and that's just kind of, you know, "Yeah, those teeth pretty much look the way they do when I look at them in my face." Lungs are much more interesting!

"Do you have asthma?"

"Yes, how did you know that?"

"Your ribs are shaped weirdly, see, how they're horizontal like that. That tends to happen to people with asthma."

I have never even heard of this. How does that work, the lungs and the skeleton are two completely different systems. But they do look funny! I have horizontal ribs! Is that not the coolest thing that you have ever heard?

very professional correspondence

Mr. Jalabert,

I wanted to tell you it's possible that I can not come in tomorrow - like Simone, I gotta go get my residence card. I do not know how long it will take, but if it's very long I'm not going to come. Thank you for your understanding.

I also have questions about the writing assignment that you submitted for foreign students. I spoke to my manager and she said there is no need for me to do, but if I decide to do to have more opportunity to improve my score, do you explain some details of duty, as possible topics and how many pages you want to write?

Sometimes (often) when I write emails in French, I use Google Translate to make sure I'm actually saying what I intend to. While this generally reassures my confidence in my own language skills, it also frequently makes me question the skills of the people who are responsible for these translations.

useless questions for Philippe, translated

"Philippe, how do you say 'raccoon' in French?"

"What?"

"They're animals. I don't know if they only exist in the US or what. They have... Wait, how do you say 'tail'?"

"...What?"

[vague pantomime]

"Oh! Queue!"

"Right. They're animals with a long tail, shaped sort of like this, with lines on it."

"Les ratons-laveurs? They smell bad, and they wash their food before they eat it?"

"Uh, maybe. They have hands, like people. And they look like they're wearing masks."

"Yes! Ratons-laveurs. You know, because they're like rats, but they wash their food. We have them in Europe, mostly in Germany I think. Only in places where there's a lot of water."

"Oh. You see them everywhere in the US. They get into people's trash cans and stuff... Actually, I forget why I asked this question in the first place."

There you have it, America. In France, raccoons are called "little washer-rats."

I saw Harry Potter

Here are some thoughts about it. (spoilers, probably, but just a little)

1. Best part = short animated story sequence. You probably knew I was going to say that, because of how I am such a nerd for clever animation. But seriously:


2. I don't know how they let that suspenseful waiting-for-a-snake-to-leap-at-you scene go on for SO LONG and still somehow managed to scare everybody when it happened. I actually started to get really frustrated, like, come on, guys, I know that snake is going to jump out, this is starting to get ridiculous, any more and it's going to ruin the suspAAAUGHHH! I think I looked like I was having some kind of a seizure when that happened.

3. Sometime since the last movie Dobby went right into the uncanny valley. And this is me saying this, me with my robot fascination and tendency to stare blankly into space. My uncanny valley is very small, but apparently there is room for Dobby. I think they must have subtly adjusted his proportions. Compare:



It's always the mouth that turns it unsettling for me. Like those robotic heads that move around, but as soon as they start talking they just look like they're gnawing on something. The person who finally figures out how to do a CGI character whose mouth seals properly when they close it will either be my hero or take things to a whole new level of subtle creepiness.

it's a cornucopia of love

Well I hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving/food day/rare opportunity to use the word "pilgrims." This was my first EVER Thanksgiving not spent somewhere within a mile of my parents' house, so that was kind of weird, but we made up for it with a Smith-sponsored foodstravaganza.

I was originally going to make "Grandaddy Rolls," aka my grandfather's recipe which has appeared at every family gathering at for at least as long as I have been alive, but in an odd turn of events I ended up with a host family who doesn't have an oven. While I personally would argue that this is impossible, I have seen the evidence, and I guess that's one of the differences between French and American cooking - it is apparently possible here to go your whole life without ever needing to bake or roast anything. Huh.

This posed a bit of a problem for me, as my main area of food expertise is bread products, and the rest of my diet could essentially be made over a campfire in the wilderness or picked directly off of plants. But you can't come to a dinner and be like, "I have PLUMS!" No, I needed civilized food. With a recipe.

So, as anyone would do in such a time of need, I turned to The Internest.

My starting point was this: peppers, onions, chick peas, various spices, and... an oven. So not exactly a possible choice. But I am all for adaptation, so I set out to turn this into something I could work with.

First, I left out the chick peas, because there was definitely going to be enough protein in everyone's lives at this point (side note: just before the dinner started, three people were required to carry the turkey across the Boulevard Montparnasse). I decided it would be possible to just do it in a large pan on the stove. And I wanted there to be carrots in it, because, I don't know, it's Thanksgiving, and you need carrots. At this point I ran into problems because I have no idea how to convert from standard to metric measurements, so when I asked Lorraine for advice and was told to buy a kilo of carrots, this wasn't exactly as informative as she intended.

"That sounds like a lot of carrots," I said.

"Well, the carrots are the most important part of the recipe, aren't they?"

"Not really. The carrots aren't actually in the recipe. I just added them."

I get the idea she is the kind of person who follows the recipe religiously. I am not. I proceeded to measure all the spices with my fingers.

In the end it turned out fine. I ate the rest of it for lunch yesterday.

a confession

I have no idea what Benoit Mandelbrot looked like...


...but even if I go look up a picture of him, which I will probably do after posting this, I will never be able to imagine him as anything other than a rotund bald man with stubby arms and a smaller version of himself sitting on his head.

slightly morbid thoughts that I have on a regular basis:

"If a car hit me right now and they had to go through my stuff to figure out who I am, what would they find and what kind of mental image would they get of me while I was unconscious?"

Well, let's see.

Carrying: one painting, rolled, in acrylic on brown craft paper, depicting a person being splashed by a large wave.

In pockets: two brass buttons (fell off the coat unexpectedly today), keys with flash drive, receipt for bottle of turpentine, bank card, metro map, napkin, 3.71 euros, Schoko-Bons candy wrapper, folded paper reminding me to check to see if I'm dreaming (unsuccessful, I consistently forget about it and so I never have it while actually dreaming).

In purse: cell phone, hand sanitizer, two pink rubber bands, 20 centimes, green pen, Navigo metro pass, photocopy of passport and visa (at least I know I'd be identified quickly), half-written letter (english) in envelope addressed to my cousin, wallet.

In wallet: receipt for various paints, 1.79 euros, Sorbonne student ID, Reid Hall ID, Louvre card, coupon for 10% off at the Galeries Lafayette.

In backpack: inhaler, ipod (no headphones), candy (same as the wrapper), red pen, nail file, paper palette, large empty plastic bag, recycled paper cahier containing art history notes, plastic bag containing jelly jar containing turpentine, plastic bag containing paints brushes palette knife linseed oil pencil and eraser, plastic bag containing six clementines, black pen, black fine-point drawing pen, hairtie (oh hey I've been looking for that), bunny-shaped pencil case containing three pencils and an eraser, digital recorder containing lectures from various classes.

Okay, for this I think you could reasonably conclude that:

1. I have too many pens and need to stop carrying them all around; it's unnecessary
2. I am a huge art nerd (particularly on wednesdays)
3. I really like clementines (true, but I do have a good reason to be carrying those)
4. I am highly flammable and it's a wonder I didn't spontaneously combust when that hypothetical car hit me

Is this a reasonable impression of me? I have no idea.

a summary of my recent life...

...in the form of a list of

Things I Like:

1. clementines
2. kiwis
3. oil paints
4. seeing mice run around on the metro tracks sometimes
5. the picture of the pink bunny telling you not to shut your fingers in the metro doors
6. speculoos cookies
7. knitting mittens
8. walking around in the rain
9. this plaid shirt
10. fencing with the dude who has done it before and so just spends the whole time being clever and beating me terribly
11. my wool coat, which is pleasantly waterproof to a surprising degree
12. cooking
13. the end of World War II, which, among other positive aspects, gives me a day off this week
14. remembering that tests have been postponed for a week because the professor forgot about vacations

creation by elimination

Austin Kleon is a person who writes poems out of newspapers and makes me miss my high school creative writing class. We actually might have done this once. But things like this, or the magazine collage poems we did whenever we had spare time, were some of my favorite things I did in that class. I guess maybe it's easier to write when you can pretend it's not you doing it and you're really just finding it already there?


Either way, I think I should try doing some of these with those free newspapers floating around the metro. There's also a tumblr for submitting your own poems and a book which I kind of want to buy for myself and about half of the people I know. But it would be weird to get everybody the same thing for Christmas, probably.

Related, and found through the above: A Humument, which I also want, and which is also on the internest for you to look at.

knitten a mitten

To entertain myself over the break I started knitting some mittens! You know, for my freezing icicle hands that I have pretty much all year. This is the first one - notice the thumb hole, of which I am really proud (this is my first project with digits). The second one is going to reverse the colors, so the yellow will be the background and the red the more design-ish part. Too bad I'm not in Gryffindor.

The pattern I used is the Ruba'iyat Mittens, which is super awesome and can be found here if you use Ravelry, but I'm not sure how to find it otherwise.

the hypothetical party

omeday I'm going to have a party and the theme will be "Mount Olympus." It will be similar to a toga party, in that there will be togas, but it will also be held on the roof of the tallest available building, where we will look down over the edges and talk about the people we see walking around down there.

Everything will be served out of large ceramic pots (which I suspect I will have to make for the occasion, and will probably then send home with the guests because one can only use so many giant ceramic pots), and we will sit on sheepskins and tapestries, and some people, I'm not sure who, will be playing instruments and singing some epic tales. Also, I will be disappointed if at least one person doesn't grow a really serious beard for the occasion.

adventures in consumption: persimmon

ne thing that I don't exactly share with the French is their food philosophy. They treat it as if it were a science, which I guess is what happens when you've been accumulating food rules. And there are a lot of rules, both spoken and unspoken - a baguette must have a particular weight, you use butter to stick the cheese to your bread, beer and not wine is had with Chinese food. They are Serious about their food. Every meal is an elaborate ordeal.

I'm all for elaborate food alchemy, but as it turns out, when left to my own devices - such as being allowed to feed myself for a weekend - I default to the diet of some kind of wandering nomad peasant. That is to say that two or three of my meals per day tend to consist of some combination of bread, cheese, yogurt, and fruit. Every once in a while Philippe comes home, looks in the refrigerator, and says, "There's nothing gone from here, what did you eat for the past two days?" And, judging by his reaction, "Mainly apples and cheese" is not a satisfactory answer.

The truth is I just really like bread, cheese, yogurt and fruit, and as I've mentioned here before, the fruit selection in Paris is too good not to take advantage of. So today, despite it being a holiday and therefore all of the stores being closed, I went out on a mission: I was going to buy a persimmon.

I'd never had a persimmon, with the possible exception of some persimmon pudding someone brought me at school once, so I didn't actually know if I liked them or not. Actually, I had never actually seen a persimmon, even though they grow in the southern US so I could probably find one around Maryland if I looked hard enough. Also whenever I asked anyone if they had even had one, the only stories they had were unpleasant ones. But still! No one becomes a fruit-eating champion by avoiding things that sound bad, and I am determined to succeed in the area of fruit-eating.

So I put on my new boots and went out, confident that I would be able to find the one produce stand open on a mysterious religious holiday. And, lo and behold, there it was, and I purchased my persimmon, which is "kaki" in French, or whatever language they borrowed that from, and which was a lovely red-orange and bruised under the gentle force of me trying to pick it up, which I took as a good sign. And I took it home and cut the end off with my Swiss army knife, because I am kind of a boy scout. And I hesitated for a second and thought, "How am I supposed to do this? Whatever, I'm just going to eat this with my hands like a savage beast," and proceeded to do so.

Now here is the only way that I can describe this persimmon: Imagine that you have a peach or something, the kind of fruit that's slightly fibrous inside but gets softer and softer as it matures. And then imagine that you take this peach and just leave it out to ripen far beyond the recommended time, but instead of turning into brown mush it just keep getting riper and riper until it is softer and sweeter than any peach imaginable, and at some point it will reach the peach singularity and transcend into a freakish level of fruit...ness. And that is what a properly ripe persimmon is like.

It was soft and pulpy, like I could have eaten it even if I was a baby or a toothless old person, and ridiculously sweet. Eventually I became so covered in juice I abandoned my original plan and used a spoon to scoop the inside right out of the skin. (I have heard of people putting these in the freezer and then eating the frozen slush out of them, which sounds delicious.) I should have taken a picture of it, because it was a terribly pretty fruit, but by the time I thought of it I was covered in slippery yellow pulp and felt like I had just eaten several spoonfuls of sugar.

So that is the story of the first time I had a persimmon.

adventures in consumption: boots

On Saturday I took a Step in my Life and bought some new boots. My other black boots started to fall apart last year (though I kept on wearing them, and just avoided puddles or particularly sandy places) and now my green tennis shoes are headed in the same direction (though I continue to wear those too, and am determined to do so until the soles wear through or detach from the rest of them). In general I was in dire need of some really good walking shoes, so I found the Doc Marten's store in Paris and went to find some boots.


Actually, I went about a week ago, but they were out of my size so I had to come back later.

They are extremely comfortable, even though they rubbed holes in the backs of my feet the first time I wore them because they were laced funny and I wasn't wearing proper socks. Whenever I wear them I look at my reflection in shop windows - which I tend to do anyway - because I wonder if they make my feet look disproportionately large. But it seems fine to me.

echolilia

These are such lovely pictures.

(By Timothy Archibald, via Mind Hacks)

font font font (that's the sound fonts make)

Okay, apparently it is typography week on the internet or something, or possibly it's just one of those things where the interrelatedness of the universe pounds me in the face for a while. Either way, there are letters coming at me from all directions lately. I've just started a class called "history of books and publishing" and it has me doing things like memorizing font families and comparing axes and serifs, and also my host father words at a printing press. Add in the many churches of Paris with their gift shops full of calligraphy kits that I have to resist buying (Do you know how many calligraphy kits I was given as a child? It was a lot. I guess I was just a kid that seemed like I should be writing something.) and perhaps you will understand that at the moment my brain is saturated in words.

So here are some letter-related things that I like at the moment.

Daily Drop Cap is a blog that puts up a new big illuminated letter every day. There's a link to this on here somewhere already, because sometimes I use them in blog posts, until I get overcome with minimalism and take them all out. But anyway, a lot of them are really good. (This is the person responsible for the above image too, look at those birds!)

A video, via Design*Sponge:

Legacy of Letters from Luca Barcellona on Vimeo.

Aughh, where are all my calligraphy pens? (Short answer: in another country) Really though, those things got in my way for years but every time I wanted them they disappeared.

Also from Design*Sponge, typeface contest! I might enter this just to give myself something fun to work on during this break.

Poppytalk does Font Fridays, which are what they sound like. I keep adding these to my computer even though I know I'll never use them.

Font Generator - I haven't actually used this, because I don't have a scanner, but it's been living in my bookmarks for a million years because I feel like I should have the option at all times. You know, for the times when I might really need a font of my handwriting. It could happen.

ABC Button Font - I can't get this to work on my computer, but maybe you can. Pretty cool though.

related to rain:

Slightly related to my last post, in which I mention that I miss rain. This is maybe kind of weird, but I really do love rain. There are not a lot of climatic differences between France and the US, but the lack of proper rainstorms is one of them. And even when it does rain, the lack of grass and leaves for the rain to bounce off of, not to mention the fact that I'm four floors above the ground, leaves it a little unsatisfying.

With that in mind, here are internet noisemakers that sound like rain!

RainyMood.com (a half-hour loop, with some thunder)

Nature Sounds, which is what it sounds like - not just rain but other things ranging from the pleasant (ocean) to the slightly suspicious (children laughing) to the inexplicable (Darth Vader??), so you can combine them however you want. I recommend adding a loon, because loon sounds are just fantastic.

I've never actually seen a loon. Where do they live? I'd like to live somewhere with a loon. I hear that some people find that sound creepy, but I'm quite fond of it.

regarding the trees

Here is a thing that I have discovered: I miss trees.

I am mainly not used to missing things, places in particular. Throughout my life my family has lived in no less than six different houses, and not only has this kind of desensitized me to house attachments, I actually start to get nervous and kind of weirded out when I spend more than two or three years in the same place. When I'm in Northampton I don't miss Maryland, and vice versa. But, as it turns out, I've never lived anywhere that was more of a city than a rather large town. Paris is definitely a city. And, as it turns out, I do miss something. I miss trees.

This isn't the only thing, really. I also miss grass that I'm allowed to stand on and being able to see the moon, and rain that lasts more than fifteen minutes at a time (this was actually really confusing, and my host family seemed rather shocked when I tried to explain that at home, sometimes it rains gently for two or three days at a time). But the most visible thing is probably the trees.

Trees in Paris, I think, are like animals in Paris. They are either in zoos, domesticated and confined, or suspiciously groomed. It's not that you don't see them on an everyday basis, but the ones that you do see seem weirdly isolated, set into squares in the sidewalks or encircled by those little metal cages. In some places, the trees - full-sized trees, mind you, not little shrubby things but big, upwards-of-twenty-years-old trees - are cut into squares. Like they just weren't neat enough before. I find this hilarious.

Or you can go to the parks, where you are not allowed to touch the grass but the trees are mainly unharmed, and which are about the only places where you can tell that seasons are actually changing. I go to parks a lot, mainly to sit and eat sandwiches, but if I don't go for a while I get kind of a shock when I arrive after a long absence, like, "Oh, dang, it really is the end of october. I hadn't really thought about it like that."

A while back we went to the Centre d'Arts et de Nature de Chaumont-sur-Loire, which is a large garden abutting a chateau and filled with various plant-related art installations.



Needless to say, I had a bit of a love spasm upon discovering the elaborate system of stairs and platforms wandering throughout the wooded part, complete with constant bird sounds and, awesomely, a mist machine that turned on every few minutes and filled the whole valley with dense fog. And I guess this establishes conclusively that I am fated to live in the middle of nowhere like a crazy hermit. I am pretty much okay with this.

I've been painting some.

These are acrylic on sealed paper, which is why they look a little like I painted them by dipping my hands into the paint and then flailing vaguely at the paper. I'm used to oil, and I still have a tendency to put large quantities of one color onto the surface and then expect it to still be wet five minutes later so I can mix something into it.

The class is called "drawing and painting from a model" and is taught by a woman with an English accent and the widest pants I've ever seen.

a cumulative list...

...of instruments I have seen people playing in Paris.

1. Accordion

2. Didgeridoo

3. Acoustic guitar

4. Electric guitar (on the metro, somehow)

5. Saxophone

6. Various wooden flutes, followed immediately by...

7. Bagpipe! Also on the metro.

8. Some kind of... steel drum... thing...

9. Hammered dulcimer (this guy was so awesome I was compelled to give him at least some money, even though I am poor and thus felt kind of stupid giving him the thirty cents that I had at the time)

10. Really epic set of panpipes.