A strange shifting of worlds: last Sunday I woke up in my brother's apartment.  One sister was sleeping beside me.  The other was on the floor beside the bed, looking at a book (she had fallen asleep on the couch so we left her there, but waking in the middle of the night she had apparently decided she would rather sleep on the floor).  I got up, made them breakfast, and took them to the Exploratorium.

Today (Sunday) I woke up in my own bed, squinting at the sunlight, in a house with cupcake-frosting-smeared floors and sixty fading gold balloons.  We had a party last night, and I got around six hours of sleep.  I shuffled into the kitchen, where my roommates and our out-of-town guests were eating leftover M&Ms from the party.  We attempted the Sunday NY Times crossword, cleaned a little, read aloud funny snippets from blogs and from the paper, debriefed on the party and told each other about what had gone on in the rooms we had not been in, and later went out to brunch.

Conclusion: There are different kinds and levels of adulthood.

Second conclusion: I love my sisters, and I want to be a mother someday, but at the moment I am happy that I am 23, and that I stayed up until 3:30 am last night dancing in my kitchen with a bunch of unknown Germans.

The day after a party is always a letdown.  I am groggy and out-of-sorts, even though I had a wonderful time.  My apartment is now a perfect metaphor for my mood.  I went to a movie by myself this afternoon, because I couldn't be bothered to call anyone and make plans, and when I came home, all the balloons had fallen down.  (Backstory: we rented a helium tank yesterday and blew up 75 gold balloons and an assortment of balloons of other colors, some of which have been popped or sent home with party guests or punctured this morning in order to inhale the helium and talk in strange voices for 10-15 seconds a pop.)  Once clustered in two rooms, the balloons have now made their way into every room in the apartment, where they float, discombobulated, between two inches and eight feet off the floor.  As I sit in my bed writing this, a balloon hovers next to me, golden string making a circle on my sheets.  If I touch it it rebounds, bouncing up before settling back just above the bed.  It has a little life left in it, but not much.

Tomorrow a thoroughly San Francisco juxtaposition of events will take place in Dolores Park.

First event: The culmination of an anti-war march.  Marchers will have a “die-in” (I believe this involves lying on the ground in the park and pretending to be dead) to remind apathetic citizens of those who have died in Iraq.  The protest is time to coincide with protests across the country (and perhaps the world?)

Second event: A re-enactment of the dance from “Thriller” (Michael’ Jackson’s epic zombie/werewolf/whatever battle), timed to coincide with “Thriller” re-enactments all over the planet (and thus break the World Record for most people re-enacting “Thriller” at one time).

On one side of the park: committed activists still willing to lie their bodies on the ground (granted, there will be no tanks) to protest an unjust and unnecessary war, even though they (and everyone else) knows they will probably not make any difference.  On the other side: a bunch of hipsters who have watched the Thai prison re-enactment of the “Thriller” dance one too many times, most of whom cannot remember when Michael Jackson was not scary.  In all: a lot of privileged white people with too much time on their hands?

I am feeling cynical, and a little guilty.  I want to protest the war, and believe that it will make a difference; but the “die-in” feels like a stunt, the ridiculous name feels like mockery rather than reverence.  I want to join in the “Thriller” dance because it is ridiculous, and funny, and why not spend a Saturday afternoon laughing in the park, coming together with hundreds of strangers to be publically weird; but juxtaposed against something serious the ridiculousness loses some of its appeal, I am reminded of why older people rant about my generation.

This could end up being a really long post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, given what feels like a constant bombardment of Baby Boomers declaring that the “problem with the ___ generation” (they all have different names, but they basically mean 18-29 year olds today) is that we aren’t angry enough, we aren’t out on the streets protesting, we are too quiet, we are too distracted, we are too cynical, we are too complicit with the system, we are too accepting of authority: we are too content.  This argument makes me angry, because all the things that we are supposed to be angry about are things created by the Baby Boomers.  They have the money and the numbers and the power; why don’t they stop the war?  I also feel (as others have said before me) that it misses a fundamental point about the modern world, and political change: things are different now than they were in the ‘60s.  What worked then won’t necessarily work now.  We have to try things our own way.

So what’s our way?  That’s where I get stuck railing against Baby Boomer commentators.  Because I don’t have an answer.  Protesting the war doesn’t help?  Well should we all go dance “Thriller” instead?  Hmm, maybe not.  The old paradigm for youth movements feels broken and useless.  So what’s the new one?  The typical answer is the internet.  But I have yet to see internet political organizing accomplish anything of significance.  Mostly what I see online is a lot of in-fighting, a lot of obsession with scoring points off the other side, a lot of recrimination, and attention to things no one outside the Beltway could possibly care about.

Maybe the truth is that our generation is not politically mobilized.  Maybe it’s because we have to fight so hard just to get by, to get a job, to get ahead, that we don’t have time.  Maybe it’s because despite everything truly frightening happening in the world right now, none of it hits close to home for most young people; the Baby Boomers reacted to the imminent threat of being shipped off to Vietnam; to police beating black people in the streets; to women being raped and prosecuted for making decisions about their own bodies.  Maybe our lives are actually too comfortable.  What did the Baby Boomers really win?  They ended the draft, so that the children of middle class white parents no longer get shipped overseas.  They ended overt, brutal discrimination, so now minority groups have only the shadows of structures to swing at.  In short, they made the problems invisible.  And now they yell that we don’t see them.

This does not really serve as a valid excuse to dance to “Thriller” in the park tomorrow, because I do see the problems and I still don’t know what to do to fix them.  Most likely, I’ll just lurk around the edges, take a few pictures to illustrate the weird wonderfulness of this city, feel guilty, laugh, and then go home.

I have a desk chair now, which means I don't have to hunch over my computer, or carry it elsewhere.

I am tired, and sicksicksick.  (Actually, I don't deserve three sicks.  I am fine.  Just dry-throat-muffled-sinuses-tired.)

All week, I have been coming here and I have not been able to begin an entry.  Because too much has happened, and nothing has happened, and my brain or my spirit or something is on hold.

Last weekend a man followed me on the street, and touched me, and now my orange dress, that I love, is hanging in my room, mocking me, and I know I won't wear it, not even for Halloween.  And I was eating ice cream, and now I don't want to go to that ice cream place again; and, in short, I hate being a girl.

Last weekend I wore fairy wings and danced with Colin, and strangers: a college party, but not my college.  I was sore on Monday.

On Monday Alicia visited and we sat up talking, a group of people, and it was one of those good talks, those talks that feel solid, that make me miss people and places I have been, where I had those talks more often (or imagine that I did).

Besides that I have been sick.  And there have been envelopes.  And attempts, failures, to sleep.

I want the election to be now, so that nothing can happen between now and then.  Every day I am terrified that the news will deliver some coup, that Karl Rove will remember how to be an evil genius, and the change that I can feel solid in my hands will disappear as if it never was.  Which it wasn't, which is isn't, yet.  But it could come, it could come.  Eleven days.

So last night was Gala, of course... I went over to Rawaan's around seven thirty or eight to get dressed. We all swapped make-up and I borrowed some fabulous fake pearls from Rawaan, which definitely made the outfit. Rawaan painted zebra stripes on her roommate Laura and we all had strawberry champagne before we left. We met some other friends at their house and then took the bus. The Gala is in Pawtucket, which is about fifteen minutes away. I sat with Rawaan's roommate Kate on the way over, the roommate I knew least well, and we had a lovely conversation about names and naming and, among other things. We arrived at the hall, and trooped in about 10 pm - a good time, because it wasn't crowded when we got there but it became crowded within about twenty minutes. The room was large and high-ceilinged and decorated and so on and had tables around the edge (you could buy them for a slightly discounted price if you got a group of 10 together) and then a large dance floor, where we all immediately headed. I found Annie and other friends and we pretty much danced for three hours. We took short breaks to sample the food, and at one point be told a story about peanut butter crackers by a guy at the bar who told me I was giving him bad body language (because I wasn't really paying attention), and say hello to various people and admire everyone all prettied up. I took my shoes off about twenty minutes before the end, which was necessary, but also problematic as someone's heel spiked my ankle. My gloves stayed on the whole evening though! I was quite proud of myself.

A little before 1 am they kicked us all out and we took the bus home and Annie and I held hands and then we all walked back to Rawaan's - me without shoes, Annie in flip flops, and Rawaan's roommate Kat wearing Annie's pajama pants under her dress. Rawaan's made vegetable soup and we sat around eating warm bowls of soup until late into the night, when we all went to sleep. All in all, it was a lovely evening.

A few pictures.

Today Kate, Rawaan, Laura and I went to another French film - Quand La Mer Monte. This one was much more comprehensible, and really quite lovely in a very awkward sort of way. Then we had Thai food.

And now it is after 6 pm on Sunday, and I have yet to do any work all weekend (I spent yesterday sitting outside in the sun), or laundry, or groceries, so I currently have no clear underwear or socks, no food, and lots of work to do. And yet all I want to do is curl up in bed and watch the rest of "My Fair Lady."

A short update because this keyboard is driving me crazy. The z and y are switched, which is more annoying than one might think.

Prague. I went to the old Jewish cemetery yesterday, where gravestones pile against each other like families, seeking support. In the synagogue next door the walls are covered with the names of Holocaust victims from Czechoslovakia - 80,000 names, in black and red paint, by region and last name. In a little room, children's drawings from Terezin are beautiful and tragic and I hate when I am happily surprised to see "survived" next to the name of an artist.

Last night I went dancing with a group of people from the hostel. I took a nap in the afternoon and was spilling axiety about the evening into my travel journal and then a minute later I was talking to two Scottish boys who went out in kilts to attract the ladies, and then other people drifted by, and before I knew it there were six or so of us, and we were dancing to oldies mixed with techno beats: will you still love me tomorrow, california dreaming.

I got my hair cut today, back to chin length and it is currently overzealously curly and enormous, and I am quite pleased. It had reached my shoulders, the point where the lower layer of hair refused to curl, even when newly washed, just lay flat against my neck while the upper lay curled or waved or stuck out in random directions, each hair deciding entirely on its own what it wanted to do. Now it’s all curly, and big. Hallelujah. (This joy will last for, I predict, another ten hours, and then I will remember why I wanted my hair to calm down.)

Half of my excitement is the feeling of accomplishment. I decided on Friday I wanted to cut my hair, when I washed it especially so it would look nice to go out on Friday night, and it failed to look nice. I straightened it out of vengeance, and was karmically rewarded by a rainy evening and a run from the tube station which destroyed all my efforts. So Saturday, when I got up, I decided I needed to cut my hair. It takes me a long time to work up to a hair cut, but once I’ve hit that point, I become incredibly impatient — the hair must go immediately. Imagine my frustration then to find that everything is closed on a Saturday at 4 (which is not when I woke up, I swear, just when I made it out of the house). I wandered around, hungry and annoyed, unable to find a place where I could pay an exorbitant amount of money to have someone cut two inches off my hair. Nothing. Last night I ended up begging Ashley to cut it, but she was worried about screwing up, and I had to wait until this afternoon.

Reading back over the last two paragraphs, I am amazed that even I am interested in this, and if anyone else is reading this, then — well, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

I am tempted to discuss the weather now, just because I can (and it has been warmer lately), but that might just be too much trivia for one journal entry. This is the moment when I once again lament my lack of initiative, the fact that I am living in London and the thing I most want to say about my day is that I got my hair cut. Why am I not attending musical, literary or cultural events? Where are the pubs, the clubs, the crazy and aimless and memorable nights? Where are the boys? Where?

The fact is, I’m apparently incapable of having crazy nights of fun, even when I try my hardest. Friday night Lily, Ashley and I went out, all dressed up, to a very cool club with a very cool DJ playing — and couldn’t get in, because we got there too late, and spent ten minutes waiting unsuccessfully for the rain to abate, and arrived at the end of a long line damp and bedraggled. Of course, the rain stopped after we were under shelter. Nevertheless, no club for us. Apparently there were others nearby, so we set off to find them, intrepid as ever, and managed to get lost in The City, an area of London which is completely deserted on the weekends. After walking around on large, empty streets for a while, we found a tube station and since we knew where we were, we took the tube home. Granted, we did make it to a pub thereafter, and we did dance to some truly terrible pop music, as well as some truly terrible but nostalgic oldies music — but it was not exactly the same. I don’t think I went into detail here, but this was close to what happened to Lily and I last week — apparently I am just incapable of going out like a normal person.

Amir said that while we were in London we should be making memories — doing those strange, stupid, amazing things that we’ll remember for years and laugh about later and not believe ourselves — and yes, I want that. But it can’t be made to happen, it can’t be forced. There’s an element of fate involved, but you also have to be open to it — ready for whatever comes, willing to stay out walking as long as it takes, to find the tube station, reorient, and head right back out in search, re-losing yourself without expectation.

Really I’m just procrastinating from doing my work. The internet is so bad for me.

But before I go: Rawaan is coming to visit! Next week! And I might get to go to Seattle for Passover, contingent on my not having an exam that week, and doing my work ahead of time. (!)

The weather is changeable. I woke up to bright sunlight drifting from beneath my curtains, reminding me that contrary to what my bedtime last night (or morning) would suggest, there is a time of day in which humans are supposed to be up and out. An hour later, when I returned from tea and lunch in the kitchen downstairs, it was raining, heavy slanting drops, and then the telltale sound of hail bouncing against my window. Five minutes later it was sunny again, the sky blue. Now clouds faintly purple hang over the horizon, and wind stirs the tree branches. The construction across the street, which takes place even on Saturday mornings, has ended for the weekend. The high pitched beeping from the construction site remains, 24 hours a day, a constant maddening drone.

I’ve been reading Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler on and off since the end of last semester. Today, hands cradling a mug of tea, I read:

“…what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment of place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told. In fact, looking in perspective at everything I am leaving out of the main narration, I see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it is much richer than what I have chosen to put in the foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let’s say it’s a trick of the narrative art that I am trying to employ, a rule of discretion that consists in maintaining my position slightly below the narrative possibilities at my disposal.”

It’s reading week now, which means I don’t have any class until a week from Monday, when Mamame and Michael and Laura will be here. We’re supposed to use this time to catch up on school work, and I do hope to do that. Yesterday afternoon I went to the library and emerged with six books, including hopefully all the critical material I need for my Shakespeare essay. It’s not due until the 25th, but I want not to worry about it when I have visitors, and by that time I’ll have other essays looming as well. First I have to read Macbeth, so I can use Lady Macbeth as a counterpoint to Constance and Ophelia, my other mad women — though madness is a questionable term in some of these instances — I’m not sure if I’ve ever read Macbeth, though I remember seeing it at the Lord Leebrick, and Lady Macbeth writhing on her black bed. The Royal Shakespeare Company is putting it on this season, I need to get student tickets and go.

The most immediate effect of reading week was that Lily, Emir and I went to the student union last night and then met friends of his at a pub up the street where they played bad American music, and a few oldies, and one U2 song. I ran into the Brown kids — Jeff and Indrani, who I haven’t seen for weeks, and we exchanged slightly awkward reports on how everything is going (fine it seems all around). We danced haphazardly, and complained when the bar closed, though it was late for London, 2 am. Hungry, we came home and ate cheese and hummus and crackers in Emir’s room and made him play guitar, sang Oasis songs very badly, looked through his CDs and then debated the Better Beatle (Lily likes Paul best! I can’t believe it! I thought everyone intelligent loved John more!) the category of gender and Emir’s essentializing of gender roles until very late (or very early). He insisted that women just are naturally more sensuous, more nurturing, and men are more aggressive, and wouldn’t admit that even if there is some biological difference, we can never reach it because we’re too embedded in cultural roles, and that by insisting on discussing it in that way, he was not only denying the possibility of a gender spectrum rather than a binary, but also buying in to cultural stereotypes, and that to insist on fundamental difference is to implicitly privilege one side or the other, even if it’s not on purpose. It was actually a very interesting and fairly intelligent conversation for 4:30 in the morning. Lily and I have been well trained by our (liberal) liberal arts educations — Emir didn’t stand a chance.

Also, I’ve discovered that if you stay up really, really late, you’re able to sleep through the construction in the morning, because you’re too tired to be bothered by the pneumatic drill. Clearly I should just do this every night.

I hate rewriting. Once I’ve committed words to paper I want them to remain; I am happy to edit, to revise, but I can never recreate. I had a beginning to the story of my weekend in Lille, and a good page of single-spaced writing to follow. Now I have nothing again, and I don’t remember how it was. Even if I wanted to copy my lost entry, I couldn’t, I can’t. I have to rethink the entire thing, reframe.

Woe is me, I know. Poor baby, went to France for the weekend, and has to consider how to write about it! The horror, the horror. This (paragraphs of circling self-pity) is what happens when you overthink journal writing. Or maybe when you (or I) keep a journal at all, since I overthink everything. (Microsoft Word doesn’t believe that “overthink” is a real word, and I guess I could insert a space, but I think this is more truly representative — so Virginia Woolf is wrong, we can still create new language!)

Anyway, back to the actual point: my trip.

Friday morning began bright and early (and I mean that literally, I did actually force myself out of bed at 7 am), and auspiciously, since on my way from the kitchen to my room carrying a steaming mug of tea, I was stopped at the front desk and given a package. Said parcel turned out to be from my friend Rawaan, who sent me a gorgeous shawl (which I am wearing in pretty much every picture of the trip), earmarked to have adventures in.

Lily and I used almost every mode of transportation to get to and from Lille: bus, ferry, train, and on the way back, car (a taxi). We missed out on airplanes, and rickshaws, but we still felt quite well-traveled. Everything ran very smoothly, we had a map of Lille and a youth hostel to head toward, and by 7 pm (there was an hour time change between Dover and Calais) we had made up our beds in Dublin (each room in the youth hostel was named after a European city), met our roommates and were back on the streets of Lille, plan-less but ready for action.

Rather than give a blow by blow of every moment of the trip, I will break it down in to a few pillars: food (which will not be described here, since I’m afraid the subject is jinxed and my computer will crash again; suffice it to say we ate a lot of bread, cheese, crepes and chocolate, and it was magnificent), shopping, going out and walking around. No, we did not see any art, except outdoor sculptures. I may be very culturally lacking, but living in London for six months, I don’t really feel the need to go to Lille to see paintings. However, I do feel the need to go to Lille to spend money in Euros instead of pounds.

We planned to go to museums but we were seduced by the stores. In every window, huge signs shouted Soldes! (which was rather confusing actually) and Derniere demarque! (less confusing). Street after street of shops, all proclaiming that this was your last chance! Lowest prices ever! Now was the time to buy! How were we to resist such temptation? Had we been allowed to sleep in on Saturday, we might have started the day with a museum and only spent half the day shopping, but since we slept through the hostel breakfast and were then kicked out of our room, delirious with hunger and the need for caffeine, and were forced into the center of town to fulfill that hunger and need for caffeine, and therefore were already among the stores — well, clearly it was just fate. By the time we collapsed into our beds again for an early evening nap, I had tried on somewhere upwards of fifty items of clothing and bought two shirts and a jacket (all massively on sale), as well as cheese from a real fromagerie and chocolate from a real chocolaterie (not on sale). On Sunday everything was closed, so the flea market was the only thing we could do. While I avoided temptation (mostly provided by kitchenware in this case), we did spend several hours walking around the huge outdoor market. People say that in this place or that place you can really buy anything, but it’s actually true at the marché Wazemmes. Anything. We did give in and buy avocados and clementines and more cheese (fresh produce! cheap fresh produce!)

Back to Friday evening. After dinner (I said I wouldn’t talk about food, but the tartine avec chevre et miel was stunning, soft and light and liquid on my tongue) Lily and I went looking for a bar or club to get a drink. Unfortunately it was a little early, so we ended up walking for a while. Quite a while. This may also have had something to do with the orgy of shopping that followed, since it involved us walking by hundreds of stores remarking on the sale signs, and noting locations. Also, for some reason, lots of giggling. Everywhere we walked, people seemed to be going the opposite way, so that we would walk all the way down one street, realize there was nothing there, but we’d seen lots of people going the other way, and turn around — only to have everyone headed the direction in which we had just been. Finally at 11:30 or so, we picked three girls who looked sort of cool and as if they knew where they were going, and we followed them. Yes, we became stalkers. It’s something everyone has to do at some point.

The stalking turned out to be a brilliant idea. We followed the girls into a bar called Le Bateau Africain or something along those lines. The décor was “African” — palm leaves and tribal masks and paintings on the walls. It would have been interesting if everyone in the place hadn’t been white (except for the bartenders of course). Also, the African warriors painted on the wall of the back room were going way too far. The whole display was a complete objectification of “African”-ness that was fairly disturbing, and I doubt would have survived long in America. It felt like the bars in Harlem in the 1920s, filled with white people searching for something “raw” (later, a man actually told me that this bar was “different” it was “very African, very raw” — “but there’s only white people here!” I said, and tried and failed to explain the concept of “exploiting”). But it was also crowded, and lively, and we decided to stay. After hovering for a while we found a table, and Lily went to the bathroom while I sat down. A man from the next table came over to ask me why I was sitting alone, and when I intimated in very broken French that my friend was coming back and I didn’t really understand, he revealed that he spoke English, as did his friend, and somehow we ended up at their table, explaining why we were in Lille.

When the bar was close to closing, Lily and I accompanied our new group of friends to a discotheque, which was the most bizarre place I have been in a very long time. They played music from Grease, and also the YMCA song — neither of which I have heard in a context accompanied by dancing since middle school. Lily and I danced for hours — given the music, it was like middle school dances without the awkward inhibition, or the fear that someone will mock you. French people cannot dance, at all, so I knew whatever I did would be better than anyone else in the room, which was a nice, if judgmental, feeling. Other highlights of the evening included a cultural misunderstanding resulting in several men discussing Lily and I in rapid French, and possibly someone defending our honor, we weren’t really sure, and repeating “je ne comprende pas” about twenty five times to the same person, who insisted on trying to make me understand. We got back to the youth hostel late, but full of endorphins from dancing, thoroughly bemused by the French population, and smelling very strongly of cigarettes.

Saturday night after a long nap and a cold shower (the one problem with the youth hostel) we went out at 11:30 to avoid the wandering-around phase, and found a street of bars which seemed to have more students/younger people. We continued our trend of strange culturally-themed bars by going to Le Bar Latina, where we witnessed an attempted bar fight and met French, Dutch and American people, none of whom could dance either. Oh well. Oh yes, and one of the French men told Lily he was in love with me, but he was actually just really drunk, in a nice way though. When we left there was still a middle eastern food place open across the street (thank god for France — everything in London closes by 11 pm) and we ate French fries with miniature plastic forks and then walked home.

There are so many things I haven’t said or can’t say: all the random hysterical moments which I’m already forgetting, and the crepe bought right on the street, which dripped chocolate as we walked, and the hot chocolate so thick and dark it came with sugar on the side, the way we became the token Americans, and suddenly everything we did was shaped by that fact in the minds of the people around us, the strange looks and the way people would laugh, or conduct a full-scale search for someone to speak English to us, and the necessity of being stupid, because no one has enough language to understand the complexity of what you want to say, and the freedom of saying anything on the street, because even if everyone understands, you can pretend they don’t.