One of my favorite bloggers, hmmm maybe she’s a former blogger now, said when posting less, “There’s nothing I have to say that I can’t say in 140 characters or less.” And so she uses twitter and facebook, and I like both of those sites well enough I suppose but they lack a lot of the camaraderie the true blog offered us when we were all using it on a regular basis. For me, if I had to pinpoint why I hate facebook most (there are probably 1,983 reasons) is that it’s training my brain to think in 2-sentence snippets.
- Bob Dylan tonight! I hope he plays All Along the Watchtower!
- Every morning six eyes gaze up at me looking for kibble.
- Everyone loves cold weather after 6 months of sweltering sun… I’ll still be smiling and embracing my sweaters come January.
And so forth, and so on, and something is getting lost or used up in the brain’s organizing words, spitting out 140 character witticisms. A lot of which are just plain boring. Although I, personally, love knowing what people eat any time of day, such is my love of food.
So why are we splitting our lives up into these miniscule sound bytes? They’re like catchphrases for an advertisement or the punchline to a joke.
The best part about blogging for me is crafting a post that connects ideas and images through paragraphs of past, present, or future, and relates to the bigger picture or at least gives enough explanation to paint a picture of a moment, day, experience, week.
I went back to my old blog and randomly typed in June 3, 2006 to see what would pop up. This is what I found… the beginning of travel posts from my first trip to France:
going backwards to day 1
I flew out of Miami.
To get there I used a one-way car rental. It was cheaper than I thought it would be. And much cheaper than driving Annie and paying to park her. I drive like a bat out of hell in a rental car.
Until I hit a Florida blackout downpour. Then I slow down.
People here often look at me with wonder when I tell them I am perfectly comfortable driving in 12 feet of snow blizzard whiteout conditions at midnight. The rains here are another story. They are like driving in a wading pool while a dump truck pours water constantly on your windshield. Drive in that. Your wipers shrug their shoulders and move at their own speed.
I experienced this in central Florida. I’d like to say where but it all looks the same from the Turnpike. I started to get nervous about catching my flight. I took a deep breath. These days I’m successfully not getting my underwear wrapped around the axle about things I can’t control. It rained all the way to the airport though thankfully not to that extent.
I stopped at a Turnpike plaza close to Miami to fill the rental car with gas. Do you know that their “fuel service charge” is upwards of $6.80 a gallon these days?
I pulled in to an open pump and started to fill. The nozzle kept clicking off and I only got about 3 dollars in the tank before the side of the hoze split open and soaked my thigh in gasoline.
It was a *this-cannot-be-happening* moment.
I pulled up to the next pump and filled my tank. I headed into the service plaza past Starbucks into the women’s room. I sighed the sigh of acceptance, removed my pants, and started to soak them under a sink. Strangers look confused when they enter a Turnpike bathroom and see a twentysomething in her underwear soaking her pants in a sink.
Unfortunately the smell of gasoline doesn’t wash out. I believe it needs to dissipate.
I reached the airport to check in for my 9.5 hour flight soaking wet and smelling like automobile fuel.
Grand.
I boarded the plane to find an individually wrapped fleece blanket and pillow on my seat. I was sitting next to an African man (if I had to guess – over time I realized I didn’t know which language he was speaking to his travelling partners though he spoke french and english to me). He was quite lovely and reminded me of a colleague of mine from graduate school. He didn’t seem to mind the smell of Lead-free 87. Though intermittently a waff of it would reach my nose and I would grimmace.
It would be 9:30 AM when we landed at Charles de Gaulle and I slept as much as I could on the flight. My legs woke me up to walk around. I ate some sketchy airplane food. They played two or three movies. I don’t remember which ones.
When we started to land people started to wake up and open their window panels. Light flooded the cabin and I peered over an aisle to see that we were descending into countryside. It was rolling hills of green grasses, some flowering. Rolling hills of green. Surrounding an airport. I started to tear up realizing that I was finally out of the United States.
We landed and exited the plane on the runway. We were led to a shuttle bus and brought to the airport. I went through customs, found the baggage area for my flight, picked up my pack, and headed through the ‘Rien déclarer’ line into the airport. At this point I needed to buy a phone card. I love that there are still pay phones all over in Paris; they haven’t been eliminated by the cell phones. I walked up to a magazine stand to use my french for the first time. I asked the woman if she had a telephone card. She said yes and asked me if I wanted it for international use or use in France. I responded use in France. She sold it to me. Success.
I found a payphone and figured out how to use the card. I called Jennifer and told here I was on my way. I asked an employee of the airport, which bus goes to Gare Montparnasse? I found the bus, confirmed that it was going to my destination, and asked the driver for a ticket. I chose a window seat to view the city from and sat proudly with my communication abilities. It was about an hour and a half to the train station.
I wish I could say I remember much about the drive in but I was really wiped from my flight. I was staring at buildings and cars and green space. It was spring there and everything was blooming. I saw a sign for a George Michael concert and thought, so you have to live in Europe to see George Michael in concert. Lucky bastards. The man sitting next to me started asking me questions in French. I stared at him trying to pull words out of his sentences and put them back together in my mind to understand what he was saying. He started speaking in English when I didn’t respond immediately. Is this my first time in Paris? Yes. What am I here for – and he gave me four options – work, studies, a man, or vacation? Vacation. He said he lived half his life in New York City and half his life in Paris. He was a businessman. I didn’t like him well enough to prod anymore.
I got to the train station, called Jennifer to let her know I’d arrived, and walked out to our meeting place – a carrousel. There are carrousels all over France. I must have seen half a dozen of them or more in my two weeks there. I sat on the grass next to it and waited. About twenty minutes later I thought maybe I wasn’t visible and then realized that I was less than 20 feet from the carrousel with an enormous Lowe Alpine backpack. If someone was looking for me at the carrousel, they would find me. I moved closer to it and sat on some steps 5 feet away another twenty minutes later. I looked at my watch and realized that I had been waiting for a little over an hour and thought, She isn’t coming. No, she will come. She would not leave me at a train station in a city I don’t know after 24 hours of travel. She will come. What if she doesn’t come? If she doesn’t come I will pull out my map and I will get on one of those trains and go somewhere. Somewhere that looks cool and has alcohol.
She came. We had lunch and she took me to her flat. I had four or five hours to kill until she returned from work. I just needed to stay awake. I rid myself of my 24 hour old clothes and washed the gasoline pants again in her sink. I took a long, hot shower. I dried my hair and put on lip gloss. I e-mailed my mom to let her know I’d made it. I started to peruse the internet but abandoned reading almost immediately because it was making me drowsy.
Jennifer came home and we went out for an apertif. This is what you have in France before a meal to whet your appetite. It is a drink of some sort and they bring peanuts. We ordered champagne with liquor in it – kier royale, I believe. It was very good. I sat on the street sipping my champagne and watching clouds roll by above a park. Another kier royale later and I needed to use the toilet. I had to ask the counterwoman for a token and Jennifer didn’t know the french word for token. This started a conversation with the man sitting at the table next to us. I went to the bathroom.
When I returned, the man who knew the word for token and Jennifer were in full conversation. We ended up getting pushed away by the brasserie closing and the rain. His name was Jerome. He lived in the 16th arrondisement also and commuted out of the city into a business district somewhere to sell insurance. He asked us if we would accompany him to another bar. We agreed. At first I was interested in trying to communicate with him but his english was as good as my french. That coupled with Jennifer’s loquaciousness left me on the outside of a conversation I didn’t understand.
I think they were talking about politics and McDonalds. Or World War II. Or both. It didn’t matter. The conversation drowned into the background by a cold rain picking up speed and pummelling the pavement. Taxis splashed through puddles and pedestrians ran under umbrellas. I thought, here’s to my first night in France; I made it. I took out my journal and started to write,
I am sitting on the street listening to American music from an overhead speaker where the traffic and rain beats drown out the sound…
I met my goal of staying up all day. I fell into bed and didn’t wake until morning.
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And there were 12 people that had been reading my blogs for at least a year that made thoughtful comments to that post. Was blogging fashionable in the early 2000′s?
What happened to the art of crafting a real story? I miss it. And I miss it when my brain used to think in multiple paragraph format, connecting idea to idea that could then be crafted through guileful language and vivid imagery into something more than,”Thursday night – Grey’s Anatomy style… “making” myself dinner and watching Greys in sweats on the couch!:)” Sigh.
Lastly, I really don’t need updates from people as they are doing everything. “Going to Pizza Hut to see how many meat toppings they have!” “Damn I’m sweaty after that workout, ooh la la!” “Tomorrow’s a new day, mother fucker! There are a lot of fish in the sea!!!”
I want my brain back. The one that writes poems and declarations, the one that writes short stories and recounts epic rendezvous.
Nice blog.