Entries this day: Awesome

Awesome

9:17am JST Thursday 7 August 2003

I received an awesome package from my mom and an awesome letter from janette! Package = shampoo and M&Ms. Mmmmm. M&Ms. Letter = black paper and multiple markers and many pages. I haven't even finished reading it yet!

comments

Name: Ma

Email: ellisfile *redacted*

Comment:
Hi, Rob,

Glad the package got to you okay. I was worried about the shampoo. We're not really supposed to mail liquid, either. There was no tube of shampoo "goo" to be found.

I'm reading a book of autobiographical essays by David Sedaris (*Me Talk Pretty One Day*). Here are some excerpts from his essay "See You Again Yesterday." He met a guy who has a house in France and this is about some of the annual trips they took for an August vacation....

"Hugh had moved to New York after spending six years in France. . . . There was, he said, a house in Normandy. This was most likely followed by a qualifier, something pivotal like 'but it's a dump.' He probably described it in detail, but by that point I was only half listening. Instead, I'd begun to imagine my life in a foreign country, some faraway land where, if things went wrong, I could always blame somebody else, saying I'd never wanted to live there in the first place. Life might be difficult for a year or two, but I would tough it out because living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

"I didn't see this as a romantic idea. It had nothing to do with France itself, with waring hats or writing tortured letters from a sidewalk cafe. I didn't care where Hemingway drank or Alice B. Toklas had her mustache trimmed. What I found appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals. . . .

. . . "On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned 'Lie down,' 'Shut up,' and 'Who shit on this carpet?' The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window. 'I want me some lamb chops with handles on 'em.'

By the end of our sixth trip to France, the house wasfinished and I'd learned a total of 1,564 words. It was an odd sensation to hold my entire vocabulary in my hands, to look back through the stack and recall the afternoon I learned to effectively describe my hangovers. . . .

"When the cranes arrived to build a twelve-story hotel right outside our bedroom window, Hugh and I decided to leave New York for a year or two, just until our resentment died down a little. I'l determined to learn as much French as possible, so we'll take an apartment in Paris, where there are posters and headlines and any number of words waiting to be captured and transcribed onto index cards, where a person can comfortably smoke while making a spectacular ass of himself, and where, when frustrated, I can lie, saying I never wanted to come here in the first place."

I thought you could relate to some of this. Hope you enjoyed it!

Love,

Ma--I'll write more in a moment..... permalink