boys and girls

this should blow your mind.

story time

a good friend from high school asked me to meet her somewhere for drinks last night. with my parents already in their pajamas, my brother's car in the shop, and my bike in baltimore, i was pretty much stuck at home. just out of curiousity, i google mapped it. estimated travel time with walking directions to my destination? an hour and twenty-five minutes. yup. and even though i usually average a good 10 to 15 minutes less than google guesses, that realization was ridiculous. it's hard to come back from a city where you could just go. anywhere. and i wonder why i'm loosing my mind right now...

ok. enough whining for one day. i'll stop now.

mind the gap

one perk of studying abroad? seeing how different places graphically expressed the danger of closing doors. i wish i had taken more pictures in other cities. but i have to say that i think the weird rabbit on the rer was my favorite...

clockwise from left: london, paris, brussels, back in the usa

the coming insurrection

sometime last fall i picked up the coming insurrection from an anarchist coffee shop in baltimore. all i had to do was read the back cover to know it would be coming home with me. and i had every intention of reading it before i left for france. you know, for context and such. (the book is associated with a group that sabotaged electrical lines on the national railways in 2008.) but for such a small book, it's a surprisingly dense read. you definitely have to be in the mood, and willing to reread sentences and paragraphs multiple times.

now that i'm back in the us of a i've finally finished it. and i'm glad i was able to get some france under my belt to know first hand about things like edf and la défense. or to see graffiti about greece and "l'insurrection qui vient" on a visit to brussels. and while, as with any extremist position, it's smart to take the whole of it with a grain of salt and pick and choose the pieces that resonate with you, it's worth the read for the many morsels of brilliance hidden inside. you can read the entire thing here.

"it's useless to wait - for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. to go on waiting is madness. the catastrophe is not coming, it is here. we are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. it is within this reality that we must choose sides."

nice

the power of lyrics? when they're really good, they resonate. and they let you know that you're not alone.

there's more where these came from. if you go to music philosophy.

reverse culture shock is real

coming home is like pulling of a band aid. you know it's going to hurt. but you have to do it eventually. and you find ways to cope. you replace crepes with slurpees, the metro with your dad's mini van, the actual eiffle tower with a desktop screen saver, and going to the marais with going to your brother's graduation. you do things like turn french subtitles on when you watch episodes of friends. and you drink lots of coffee. it's dumb to think that you can go away someplace for five months and not experience things or change in ways that will make it hard to leave. but ultimately, all it takes is a quote from the oc to help you pull yourself back together.

"the sooner you realize things will never be the same again, the sooner you can move on."