Hug o' War

French Fabien shared his favorite poem with me, and wanted to know if I had a favorite poem (since I fed him some stereotypical e.e. cummings ones, but told him they weren't my favorites)
Sensation

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue :
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la nature, heureux comme avec une femme.

Arthur Rimbaud
Mars 1870.

__
On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass :
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing :
But endless love will mount in my soul
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman.




this is what I sort of came up with, less of super super favorites, more of ones with meaning for me:

Hug O' War
Shel Silverstein

I will not play at tug o' war
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses
And everyone grins
And everyone cuddles
And everyone wins.

_____________________________________________
Juliet: Act IV, sc. 3
Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life:
I'll call them back again to comfort me:
Nurse! What should she do here?
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial.
What if this mixture do not work at all?
Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?
No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there.

Laying down her dagger
What if it be a poison, which the friar
Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd,
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point!
Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,--
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,
Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed:
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort;--
Alack, alack, is it not like that I,
So early waking, what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:--
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears?
And madly play with my forefather's joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?
O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point: stay, Tybalt, stay!
Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.



Two things I had to memorize in younger amanda days to recite in class.

I need to start hanging out with people my own age

So I took a little field trip to Saint Denis recently. In Saint Denis there is this huge basilica that houses all but three of the dead Kings of France, many of their spouses, nobles, and relatives. Instead of attempting to convince someone to take a half hour metro ride into a banlieue with me to go see nerdy historical things I figured I'd go by myself. Thus, including the two random British tourist twenty-somethings that showed up that day, there were only three people at the basilica under the age of 60. Whenever I started to listen to the tour guide all the old people would give me a look of "why the hell is this random girl here by herself?"
(old people)

Alas, it was pretty fucking awesome. The background story that I understand is that underneath the currently basilica there was a huge mess of people burried in sarcophaguses from the first millenium. After an archaeological dig about a decade or so ago, most of those tombs were brought upstairs to the main floor and are placed around the cathedral. Aka Holy Shit, there are people in these tombs and they are really really old. Another cool thing to think about is that these carved figures where actually painted with really beautiful bright colors but now they are just white, sad.

(archaelogical site under the crypt)
(tombs brought upstairs)

Final cool/weird thing. Down in the crypt, woooooo crypt (insert erry music here), is many of the Bourbon royalty. One of the things is Louis XVII's heart. Legit, it's his heart.



Other thing in the crypt is the graves of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but funny story - their remains were taken out of a mass grave and put here, aka they could be their remains, they could not, who knows.

All in all, if you're in Paris and you have 3 hours to kill you should go. Especially because Saint Denis is a pretty cool city with alot of old buildings and a huge indoor marche right in the center of town, which is cool to walk through (even though I kept awkwardly getting hit on by random vendors since I showed up right as they were cleaning up and no one else was around).


(Henry and Catherine de Medici being all naked in their tomb. weird)

The crap that has compiled onto my laptop keyboard, Dad don't read this post.

I think it's a combination of:

Velib Shmelib.

So Jay and I went on a biking adventure this afternoon. We got Jay a Velib and biked over the Seine into the 16th and wandered around a bit before actually finding Bois de Bologne - course we ended up at the Arc de Triomphe which is at the top of the park when we planned on entering it at the bottom. Alas. We ended up finding a neat park which was suppose to have a chateau, but instead just had some nice buildings on the premises and a garden that I wish I had pillaged. Then to finish off our park adventure we went over to another gated off park (you have to lock up your bikes outside since you can only walk around them) that has this really cool Shakespeare Theatre that's basically built into nature. You sit on grass, the backstage is in a little hill, the stage is made of stone, super cool. On our way out - around sunset - Jay goes to unlock his Velib, and oh funny story, the key breaks. We can't get his bike unlocked, I have no more credit on my phone, and it's about to be dark. GREAT






So we minorly freak out for a second and then I scoot off on my bike to go find a velib station and get credit for my phone. I get to a velib station and call an operator who I can't understand between my poor French and the fact that I'm on a major street. A nice French guy tries to help me out, but I need Jay's pin number which he has on him. GREAT.

So for the next half hour I frantically look for a place to buy credit after trying a super market, a gas station, a newspaper stand, and a pharmacie, a minimart has it. It's dark by this point, I race back to the middle of the park and I find Jay literally about to leave the bike and walk home because I've been gone for almost an hour.



The moral of the story, JUST BORROW SOMEONE'S PHONE. Because that's what Jay did right after I left (and of course didn't have my number on him, silly us) and found out he can just mail the key and his pin number to the velib people and they are just going to come pick up the bike in the morning. REALLY? Yes, really.

So we take the metro to the Marais and eat a butt-ton of falafel. So all's well that ends well.



AND! Best part that I cannot believe I forgot we saw TWO prostitutes in the Bois on the walk out of the park last night. One was standing on the side of the road leaning against a sign post - completely dressed in black and unable to be seen without the light of a passing car. The other coming out of the woods with a man in tow who's breasts were basically falling out of her shirt - if you could call it that.

Apartments and Rants

So I'm at this awkward turning point in my living situation where my 'contract' is up at the end of January and as long as my fake host family doesn't really hate me that much I can probably renew my so-called 'contract' until the end of May. Just because I kind of want to switch it up a little and maybe see if I can get housing closer to campus I have started looking for stuff. But in reality I won't really be able to find anything until end of December/beginning of January because anyone who is posting now is looking for people to rent now.

But all of this apartment stuff swirling around in my head got me thinking about the fact that I know no one in my building. And the fact that they all make so much freaking noise all of the time. For the past three days someone has been blasting music from god knows where at strange hours of the day. Sometimes it's Cream. Sometimes it's pop-rock. Last night at 2am it was baroque music. Really? Really? And then it always sounds like there are mice running around in my hallway and the floor above me and below me, but I have to assume, for my sanity, that they are just weird neighbors, doing weird things.

And that gets me to the one really legitimate reason why I want to move. They have started construction on my building -they are installing handicap related things, so kudos for them, but not for me when they start work at 8am on Saturdays. It definitely reminds me of last year at Guthridge and Munson, and I would not like to repeat that situation for the next seven months.