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.

mysteries

oday on the way back from class I came across a mouse flattened on the sidewalk. It wasn't a dramatic, unpleasant flattening, not like a mouse was just sitting and got a piano dropped on it. It had remained mouselike, but been shrunk down heightwise to a few millimeters, like somebody was projecting the image of a mouse onto the sidewalk. It looked vaguely mummified. And this was baffling for several reasons.

1. How does a mouse get flattened on a sidewalk? By an extremely wide bicycle? By the cumulative force of hundreds of pedestrians? Readers: have you ever stepped on a mouse? I haven't. I wouldn't expect a lot of people to step on a mouse. How many people have to step on a mouse before it is reduced to paper? I lot, I bet.

2. What happened to the other 90% of its mass? I will accept that it was probably about 70% water, which is gone now, hence the mummification. But what about the rest of it? I mean, if you mummify a human it's still pretty big, even (I assume) if you flatten it out after the fact.

Anyway, long story short, I saw a flat mouse. It was pretty interesting.

let's look at some sounds

Chladni Singing from meara o'reilly on Vimeo.

Have you seen this? I had not, until now, but OH WOW. This is incredible for the following reasons:

1. geometric patterns
2. a person making really awesome sounds
3. a person making sounds that manifest as geometric patterns
4. I just really like that one shot of her looking serious with all those spoons and things hanging about
5. SCIENCE!

(via the debonaire)

various things

Today:

- slept extremely late.

- bought my fencing glove.

- sent my resume to a dude teaching English at a private high school. I'm hoping he'll maybe give me a job as a tutor so I can be a functional member of this society I'm only vaguely part of.

- ate cheese bread in the park, watched ducks/geese/pigeons/one swan/one strange little white bird. Was caught off-guard by the progression of fall, which is indistinguishable outside of contained Nature Zones.

- was unable to remember my dreams except for frequent and vague flashes. If these are to be trusted, the dream took place partly in my quartier and partly in a metro station, involved a large crowd of people (some of whom were smiling creepily) and an avocado, and was generally unsettling.

- went through my huge unsorted bookmark file trying to decide what I actually needed in there. If you know me on facebook, you may notice me posting a lot of unrelated links in the next few days, this is because I want to get these out of my bookmarks but don't want it to go away entirely/feel I need to show it to people.

Related: here are some things.

This is something I found last year in my digital media class, and which I like a lot. You can put in places you want to go, and it will show them with a satellite image and cycle through all the places that have ever been submitted. Two of these are mine.

Also, I kind of want to do this. What do you think?

a list of ten things I think should be socially acceptable

1. bare feet in public establishments. I don't actually know what the reasoning behind this one is. I saw a web site or something once where some people did some intense research and figured out that being barefoot inside a store isn't actually illegal in most states. But one time I had to go to the store unexpectedly and wasn't wearing any shoes, and it was maybe the most uncomfortable thing I have ever done.

2. similarly, women taking their shirts off in public. I'm not sure how they're still getting away with this one.

3. adults playing pretend. I just feel like this would make the world a slightly nicer place to live. Also, nobody yell "LARP" at me here, because I am sorry but as much as I like public swordfighting (hello, I am taking a fencing class, did you know that) it is not socially acceptable. Also, this.

4. related: public costume wearing. Now, this is the kind of thing that I feel like I'm going to end up doing whether or not it's acceptable or not, particularly because by my own definition most of my regular clothing counts as costume and it's a slippery slope between "dressed kinda funny" and "pirate costume." But it really does make me happy when, for instance, I see a kid going to school in a Superman costume. I have a deep and undying love for halloween, but I want to be able to get up and go, "Today I'm going to be a pirate. Oh, and I'm going to the library." And! Not but, AND.

5. being extremely blunt. Do you know how much easier my life would be if I could just be like, "Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about." "Do we know each other well enough for me to hug you?" "There's nothing wrong with this food, but I really don't like it."

6. pointing out cool things to strangers. Once I was on a bus with somebody I was sort of friends with, and I was looking out the window and suddenly, without thinking, I turned to her, pointed out the window like a small child, and said, "LOOK, A BIPLANE!" And when rather than being confused and awkward she actually looked, I knew we were destined for greatness.

7. men wearing their hair in two braids. I actually don't know why this should be acceptable. I just think it would be interesting I guess.

8. related: men wearing dresses/skirts. This one's just not fair. If I had to wear pants all the time I think I'd be pretty angry about it.

9. climbing on things. Okay, this is pretty weird, but I do this a lot. I remember my mom coming into my room when I was little and being unable to find me for a few minutes before realizing I was on top of the chest of drawers. In middle school, whenever I got out of class for some project, I used to sit on top of the lockers. I suspect that the only things keeping me from climbing up the exquisitely beautiful lampposts here is fear of getting arrested in a language I don't know that well, and the fact that I'm too short to reach most of them.

10. eating food with your hands. The basic rule in France is that if it's hot, you need silverware. There are exceptions to this (street-vendor crepes, some sandwiches), but generally speaking, you will eat your pizza with a knife and fork.* Which is just silly, because pizza practically has a handle. If I were responsible, I think my rule would be "if it's physically impossible or severely unpleasant to hold, you need silverware." Which pretty much rules out soup and pudding. Pancakes are a matter of choice. And that's how I like it.



*Unrelated story: once in high school I walked by two kids having a conversation and all I heard was one of them saying , "He told me he thought I was gay because I eat my pizza with a knife and fork."

things europe does better: fruit

If you know me, you may know how I feel about fruit. Or you may not, because this is one of those things that most people would try to avoid going around talking about too much. I am a big fan of fruit. Like, seriously. Like I could eat fruit three times a day and never feel like it was too much, partly because there quite possibly more fruits in the world than there days in a year. Since I was maybe thirteen one of my major life goals was to eat every kind of fruit there is.

I thought this was going pretty well, until I got here. Americans, you may not realize this, but your country is bad at fruits. This was a revelation to me. A revelation totally obscured by the variety of fruits suddenly available to me. Let us not expound on the ways that fruits became even more awesome when I got to France.

1. Plums. What, you say, we have plums in America. Yes, we do. But we do not have these plums. Our plums don't have names like Reine Claudes or Mirabelles. And while this might seem like by-any-other-name territory I'm venturing into, believe me, there is a difference. I'm not sure what it is. But a Mirabelle is not a "strangely tiny yellow plum." It is a Mirabelle, and it is probably grown in the gardens of magical fairies and then if you eat one you can never go back to the human world, and I ate a tart made of them. Sorry, humans.

2. Figs. I said this one before in my General Food Post, but I am going to reiterate. I had never eaten a fig before I got here, mainly because I had never actually encountered a fig before. I remember, as a child, reading a short story in a Highlights magazine in which a kid visits his grandfather and they have mundane male-bonding adventures like drinking buttermilk (?) and eating figs, which is apparently a male-specific activity, the reason given being that "girls don't like figs because they're weird and squishy." Figs, not girls. Though from my experience the description fits the girls better.

Anyway, I remember finding that oddly fascinating, because I had never seen a fig, and it was tricky for my mind to come up with a fruit so unpleasant that an entire gender would reject it. As it turns out, whoever wrote that story was just a crazy person because figs are neither squishy nor unpleasant, though my mother did once describe them as "weird." They are like mulberries except huge, and except for the fact that fig sap is mildly irritating and once when I ate one without washing it my lips were somewhat numb for the rest of the day.

3. Juice. I love juice (I'm pretty sure everyone does), and being here is making me suddenly realize just how limited the juice selection is in most US stores. Apple. Cranberry. Grape. Orange, tangerine, grapefruit, orange-tangerine, orange-tangerine-pineapple. And maybe one lonely pomegranate. I remember wondering why nobody made peach juice, or straight pineapple juice. But here it's another thing entirely. Apricot! (apricots are everywhere for some reason) Kiwi! (a freakish green color that I haven't tried yet but am looking forward to) Apple-raspberry-lychee! Something called "seasonal fruits" which had a picture of a fig and a pear on the front! Boggles the mind.

4. Applesauce. Well, this probably doesn't count so much, because the applesauce was pretty much applesauce, I don't think there's a lot of room for error. But: applesauce in little juicebox-type pouches that you suck out through a tube! I can't decide if I feel like a five-year-old or an astronaut. Also, once I came home and my host father was like, "Oh, hi, I made applesauce." As if it was something that you just do once in a while. Maybe it is, I have no idea, but it was pretty awesome.

So there you have it. In addition to bread and cheese, I now have fruit to be mildly disappointed about when I get back home. Do you think a fig tree would grow in Maryland?

Chenonceau

An Italian queen paved the floor in monogrammed tiles,
and now I walk over the eroded remains of her name in my worn sneakers.
In the spiral staircases the half-loosened soles catch the dip
where the king would have stood, where his feet and mine
took pieces of dust as souvenirs.
They never refinished the painted floors--
the gold cowers in the corners, backed up against walls,
defending itself against time--
but the front tower is shrounded in canvas
printed with its own image, and if you look hard you can see through
to the scaffolding bones where they remake, remake.

Now it is october and the vines on the arbor over the terrace
are going yellow and sparse,
and I am thinking from beneath them that this
is how it should be.
I am wearing yellow and still the smaller fish flee from my shadow
as I walk by, and this is okay,
the way the water climbs up the white bricks and descends again
with a grain or two of stone to remember this day.

Maybe someday the rain will come in the windows
and collect in the hollows of someone's initials,
run down the stairs in arcs and turns, a spiraling, carved-out throat,
and catch in the basement,
fish weaving through the window bars.
I think of the swallows' nests hanging lobed and papery
under the lips of the high towers--
will the pigeons huddle in the rafters in Louise's bedroom?
Will they nurse their children on her tears,
knit the crowns of thorns into nests of tapestry fiber?
Someone has scraped their initials into the sand in the garden path,
and now they are gone, and so will be their signature,
and they do not mind this.