Impact

First a ticket, then my car gets hit in the same week and both times it was parked. The person who hit me was honest enough to leave their number, but I’m thinking about the dangers of motionlessness these days. Any number of accidents could have happened throughout the week while I was driving my car, any number of more dangerous ones in fact. I could have gotten a speeding ticket instead of a parking ticket. I could have had a freeway hit-and-run accident.

But twice this week, something bad happened to my car when it was at a standstill. Being at a standstill myself right now, I’m taking that as a warning. Sometimes it’s worse to stop moving. I was talking to a friend a few days ago and told him I had changed my mind about the concept of waiting. I’ve been in a waiting stance, at times meditative and at times not, through my studies and my mild job search, thinking that eventually the right direction, the right job, the right move to make would become apparent to me. I expected this to somehow hit me across the head with obviousness.

Now I realize that things can hit you will you’re at a standstill and that they can sometimes not be the ones you are expecting, bad things can hit you and you’ll be a sitting duck. Moving makes any chance of impact more dangerous, but at least you’re going somewhere. I know I’m back in California on a side note, because when I don’t have much to say, I can always just talk about driving.

Meeting people

In the parking lot of a photo store today, we made an acquaintance. My friend is visiting from Paris, and is following his passion for music. He struck up a friendly conversation with a guy coming out of his car, and we ended up talking, the three of us, for twenty minutes in the parking lot, in the afternoon sun.

We talked about choosing a new career, moving, raising a family, the years going by, French and American culture, music and film, finance and the world economy, living in Los Angeles, following our passion or finding it.

I was thinking about this meeting again tonight, and how wonderful it is to meet new people, especially people like this person, whose genuine kindness just gives you more energy to go on with your day. He and my friend will stay in touch, hopefully, but even just our short afternoon encounter served to make LA a smaller place for my friend, maybe even helped him to see himself at home here, making friends and meeting people on his own.

This is just a short post, but I need to keep writing, keep focusing on the positive, just one step at a time, every day for the next little while.

poetic spam

I want to try and write something every day this month, to resist my hiding instincts. I’m looking for work, planning, thinking and that tends to elicity ostrich behavior in me.

This is something I received in my junk mail folder today and thought it was quite beautiful:

From: Tazmaniandevil

Subject: But ran home

The king’s child went out into the forest.

I’ve noticed some original subject lines, and sometimes even witty phrasings that have caught my eye as I delete the folder, and I’ve often wondered if someone is paid, much like telemarketing jobs, to produce email content for these spam emails, and then given random email addresses to send them to, just like telemarketers are given phone numbers to call.

Drove around town today, running errands. Through Silverlake and Hollywood. After a successful stop into Amoeba, I gave into the hot day and stopped for less than ten minutes to get a watermelon juice on Hollywood Blvd. I noticed Elizabeth Taylor’s star as I stepped around my car. As I ran back, juice in hand, I saw the white envelope of failure slapped against my windshield, tacked by the wiper. A $50 parking ticket. Driving back in the sluggish rush hour traffic, I thought about why tickets make me feel so overwhelmed. I suppose it’s because they’re one of the few instantaneous punishments we get as adults. You do something bad = you pay a fine. Getting a ticket makes me feel like a kid caught in the middle of doing something naughty. It’s embarrassing because there is no excuse.

The sun is setting now, and everything is forgiven. The sweat, the traffic, the ticket and my momentary loss of courage, the heat. The temperature is dropping by the minute, and the sky is changing colors, warming up to golden tones as everything is refreshed. We get a short break before everything starts back up again in the morning. It gets hot early. Maybe I’ll go for a walk tonight.

Evening of findings

3 findings tonight (late)

1) Crossing Delancey

…a surprise of a movie about a microcosm of the New York Jewish community, and a meditation on singlehood and finding love. A 33-year old single girl–happy, successful, loving her life in the literary circles of the city–reluctantly finds herself in the talons of a well-meaning matchmaker who sets her up with…the pickle guy. Even though the movie is over 20 years old it is still accurate and doesn’t hit any wrong notes. It’s very well written,  the dialogue is witty, funny, and the acting is great.

I’d never heard this poem by Confucius about a woman waiting for love and it was so beautiful I paused to read it online before continuing the movie:

ripe plums are falling
now there are only five
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

ripe plums are falling
now there are only three
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

ripe plums are falling
i gather them in a shallow basket
may a fine lover come for me
tell me his name

              Chinese Book of Songs

You need to hear the Jewish grandmother recounting why she married her husband, a great story delivered perfectly by Bubbie (Rizl Bozyk).

2) A random piece of writing that I did a couple of years ago that I just found by accident on my laptop. Here are the first 2 paragraphs:

She could still feel the warmth of his body where he had been standing a moment ago. She heard the familiar sound the door made behind him as he left. Her senses were vivid even as she was trying to bury the argument, let it recede into a faint memory. Senses are more stubborn than memory, she thought. She looked through the window, streaked with wayward drops from the unrelenting rain, and her vision played tricks on her. She saw him pruning the trees the way he used to before dinner. He was everywhere in the house. The faint smell of his occasional hand-rolled evening cigarette, the clean cotton scent of his work shirts. They were bound together, regardless of how many times he walked out that door.

She placed the dishes from the counter into the sink and turned on the faucet. She rolled up her sleeves, and, holding her forearms under the warm running water, closed her eyes. Even the troubled times with him weren’t hopeless. The water was still running, she wasn’t really going to wash dishes now, but she needed something to keep her mind from wandering.

3) Eduardo Recife

This is a linked image (I didn’t download it) to my new favorite artist: Eduardo Recife. He is Brazilian and works on collages with vintage images, and is a typeface designer–another one of my obsessions, have you seen Helvetica? I could write about his work, it causes little sparkling water bubbles in my imagination.

authenticity

The months that have slowly stretched, like a lazy confused cat, between January and August have been leading to a decision on my part. January is when I was laid off from my job with Disney, and I went from having the title of  “Associate International Localization Producer” to a more nondescript status as a “student”.

I could say this existential period of going from one job to another job, trying to see myself as a project manager, localization producer, document analyst, NGO administrative assistant, Parisian, Angelino has been going on for a while, more specifically since after college. I’ve always managed to be useful and productive in my search for the career, or the field, or the job, or the place I needed to live in. I think it’s fair to say I’ve given each chapter its fair trial and have really believed in each of my moves. I’ve tried to fit in, tried to find my place every time. I don’t think I’ve come to any conclusion, but along the way I’ve crossed some things off my list.

To quote U2 I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, and I’m still searching. We’re in mid-August and I haven’t signed up for any new classes at Pasadena Community College. I’m working through each day, getting up, making my bed, cooking all my meals, starting a regimen of going for walks in the evening when the oppressive semi-arid desert heat lets up a little and the birds squeal of contentment. This is a familiar state of mind for me: the evaluation of the leaving possibility.

I need a job and I don’t want to get a corporate job in the US, which is what my resume currently would point towards. I don’t want to spend productive days in school studying various classes, three-quarters of which will end up being disappointing or the wrong direction for me to go in. I’m thinking of spending three months in Congo, working on three or four different projects. A personal writing project about my country, teaching art in the elementary classes of our school, possibly teaching English at our language center, and working with my father on his museum project.

I’ve been watching old masterpieces lately, Hitchcock, Film Noir, Katharine Hepburn and lined up a few silent movies too. I’m working through a mini-list I’ve been keeping in my head. Yesterday I saw a Film Noir must-see:  the 1944 Laura with a favorite actor of mine, vitriolic deadpan Clifton Webb, who has a line in the movie that I find authentic and courageous and absolutely hilarious. (He’s Lydecker and being interrogated by Detective McPherson, played by Dana Andrews, handsome devil):

Lydecker: McPherson, you won’t understand this. But I tried to become the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.

McPherson: Have any luck?

Lydecker: Let me put it this way. I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbors’ children devoured by wolves. Shall we go?

I’m figuring it out, too. I’m trying to hit that note of authenticity in my own life, and I’ve not been taking the task lightly. But I grew up in Congo, in between a father’s middle eastern culture and a mother’s French culture binded by a shared Baha’i culture, bathed in Congolese culture. I grew up traveling constantly, and those were my formative years. I have a trunk of personal journals and letters dating back to when I was 8 where I’m still trying to find my place and figure out my life. Options for careers go from Lion Tamer to Policewoman and teacher. My list has changed over the years but I still add those three at the top for old time’s sake.

Maybe some people aren’t meant to settle down and have an apartment, and a career and formal education. The times when I feel most myself have never been when I’ve been in that exact situation, and I have tried very hard to stay in this situation. I’ve hung on longer than I should have been able to, in jobs and cities that were not a good fit for me and I am trying to learn from those experiences. It’s awkward to see this written down, but maybe I need the adventure and the crazy unpredictability of Congo, with a ton of different responsibilities in order to find my path, maybe even find myself. It’s almost the only thing right now that keeps me from feeling like I’m withering away into nothingness.

Wild things

“the book is probably better” but still…this is promising to be a breath of fresh air, compared to all the crap that we usually pay ten dollars to see in theaters. Admit the preview made you smile…

Epic confusion

I’m back from my trip in France. After the short and disappointing visit to Bretagne (I was so sick we only made it out to the beach that one time), I went to Auvergne where our family home is, in a village in the high mountains above Le Puy en Velay. I ate cherries from our tree and non-pasteurized cheese, fresh foods prepared by mom, and slowly got my health back. Then we visited a couple of castles in the Loire valley between Orleans and Tours before my flight home.

You never know what life has in store for you. I wasn’t expecting to be sick for five weeks when I left Pasadena, or to feel so anxious about my future while I was away. From the conversations I’ve been having with friends about life choices, different paths, new careers, changing directions, going back to school, trying to “figure it out” and find what it is you really want to do, and what it is you’re really good at, it seems like a lot of us are in the same boat. Single, married, parent, just out of school, in your thirties or in your forties, with a masters or without, with a long career behind you or a string of short-term jobs, a lot of us are sharing in this confusion, and it’s not a very happy place to be right now.

“what am I going to do with my life?” seems like the scratched record soundtrack of my days, in between applications, inquiring emails, personal moments of reflection. What’s strange is that in this miasma of confusion, I’m still best placed to see clearly, better placed than career advisers, job search experts, but I still can’t find my way out of the murky waters. Deep down I know from observing other people’s lives that this confusion is temporary, but on the surface, it truly feels like it will never ease, and I will forever stay far from the comfort of knowing my path and having confidence in the direction I’ve chosen.

So when I found this quote by JK Rowling (of Harry Potter fame) I felt comforted, strangely. It’s nice to know someone who has made it so successfully felt the same way I do at one point in her life. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” That’s really interesting…

“A mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. … I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Virginia Woolf’s stones

I tried to imagine what was going through her head, as she walked to that river around where she lived and wrote, her pockets filled with heavy stones, marching to her death. Probalby not very close to reality, or what that moment was like, but I always loved that scene in The Hours, with an unrecognizable Nicole Kidman playing the role of a tortured, strange Woolf, walking into the river with that heavy step. 

It was more or less easy to imagine because there I was, at a late dusk–the sun goes down around 10 PM these days and it was around 9–with my sweater pockets filled to the brim with at least a pound each of heavy grey stone pellets, walking straight into the receded Atlantic on a beach deserted of everyone except my mother, a crab and a couple of hungry seagulls. 

Granted, there was nothing suicidal in my march, just a desire to walk into the sunset, straight towards the freezing ocean with heavy pockets. I hate wet feet, so I didn’t even get that close to the water. 

I get it from mom, that love of walking on the beach and looking for stuff. We do it for hours, when we’re together. Walking on empty beaches, looking at pools of crabs and anemones, moss, and sea snails, lumps of snot (I’m sure even they have a name), mussels, oysters, all kinds of other shells. Picking up sea glass and shells, stones and handfuls of sand we stuff in our pockets to find months later and remember what that late afternoon was like. 

We’re in Bretagne right now, in a beautiful untamed part of the French coastline called “les cotes d’Armor”, a fiercely beautiful and proudly guarded part of the natural national heritage. Britons are extremely independent and have a regional identity almost separate from their national one.

For example, all French highways are toll-roads–they’re the most beautiful and best-maintained roads on earth and they are expensive as heck to drive on, tolls can be up to a couple hundred bucks for a long trip. Well…in Brittany, there are NO toll roads. There’s a story behind it, about Britons never having bowed down to paying for roads and they had it written in stone that they would never allow toll roads to go through their country, and they haven’t.

They’re just “insoumis”, indomitable. You’ve read about Asterix and Obelix…well, this is their country. It’s beautiful, it’s wild, and it’s as indomitable as the people. Sweet, loving, butter-and-crepe-and-cider-loving people but with a temper. 

Everything is beautiful here and everything is green. Little tiny two-lane roads that curve around stone houses with slate or thatched roofs and blue shutters, huge, wildly colored flowering bushes up to six feet high popping your eyes with the brilliant hues, the sweet smell of sea-water and wild flowers everywhere in the air, mixing in with the cooking coming from houses and small cafes. Fishing boats and yachts in the distance, a rugged coastline with perfectly maintained paths. Overlooks into the ocean speckled with  hundred-year old crosses signaling a lost boat or deaths at sea. 

This is beautiful country. This is my France now, I prefer to come straight here, rather than spend any time in Paris, that I know too well and where I can too often predict the altercations over silly stuff. You’ll hear people say it often, here too. Life is more “human” in these parts. And they have all kinds of fun stuff on the beaches to fill your pockets with. 

This is where I am, courtesy of Wikipedia:

And this is what it looks like, a half-mile from where I’m sleeping:

life in the fishbowl

We saw a movie tonight, called “Le hérisson” with three stellar actors, which you should bookmark if you like the following movies: Cinema Paradiso, As Good As It Gets, The Visitor, Lars and the Real Girl, The Girl in the Cafe, Bella, The Lives of Others, Sex and Lucia, Children of Heaven, The Red Balloon, Happy-Go-Lucky, Kolya, King of Masks, Whale Rider or any movie that is touching, sensitive, intelligent and understated.

I don’t know why I added the IMDB link since it is useless. I don’t think it even has a synopsis. The cast of three main actors are an utterly unrecognizable Josiane Balasko as an aging morose but innerly rich concierge, a breathtaking Garance LeGuillermic as a suicidal 11-year-old and Togo Igawa as a perceptive loving new proprietor in the building who brings with him Japanese culture, a shared love of Tolstoy and a sense of humor that will bring all three lives colliding together in a happy ballet. 

Josiane Balasko is a little of the Nicholson from As Good As It Gets in her solitary habits of an aging antisocial, with kinks and habits but without the crippling OCD and inability to function successfully. She’s a little similar in the sense that she gets yanked out of her daily routine of decades against her will (and way more directly than Nicholson), by a child, and finds herself transformed permanently by the interaction. 

The movie takes place in the Paris of the very privileged, in the 16th arrondissement, in a family where no one is happy and the precocious and depressingly aware 11-year-old suicidal daughter decides to chronicle the unhappiness in a hand-me-down super-8 camera she carries everywhere. The way she sees the world, and the way you learn to see the world through the eyes of the three main characters, the touching moments of inner life that you glance, almost always non-verbally, through sheer brilliance of acting, facial expressions, tone of voice, looks, notes, details in the apartments or props makes the movie a real emotional feast. 

I hope the movie comes to the States, it would do everyone good to see it. It’s a rare, rare gem. 

sick on a trip

I don’t like being sick on a trip because I’m not as comfortable as when I’m at home. I never like being sick, anyway. I’ve been sick so much, I’m pretty sure, after hours of internet, that I know what it is. I got some sort of E-Coli bacteria with a meat I ate (the times I wish I was a vegetarian), because all my symptoms check out. The treatment is basically: drink lots of water and don’t take over the counter medication. 

So I’ve been pretty sick, and sleeping a lot, getting better at computer card games, getting online and wasting time, in between bouts of feeling better and strutting around the town with mom. But when I get sick, all I want to do is lie down and sleep and stay in my PJ’s. That’s basically what I did in Morocco on my 12-hour layover. I had wanted to discover Casablanca, having dreamt of that moment for at least twenty years since I first saw Bogart walk into Ric’s Cafe Americain, but when I get sick, I just curl up and sleep. 

So today’s post of the day is a boring post about being sick on a trip. It’s even lame because I repeat the same words over and over again like “sick” “trip” “sleep” and “like”. 

One positive point: the yeast medication I’m taking to soothe my digestive tract comes in a nice old-timey glass bottle, that is so pretty I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it. Can’t you just imagine it coming straight out of an apothecary?

Boring life.