this article is clearly a waste of time, but “hug drug”? “hug drug”?
CNN.com – Senate panel probes so-called ‘hug drug’ – July 30, 2001
… and more disinformation from your trusty newsmedia:
[snort]
ok – i know you hafta love amazon – bleh bleh blah.
but i really can not stand their “Customers also bought.” This is so transparent it actually makes me angry. So supposedly customers who bought Mama’s Gun also bought albums by only other women R&B artists. They bought only movies directed by black people and can only stand to read books by Terry McMillan and E Lynn Harris. Why can’t they just call it “Shit We Think is Like This, But We Haven’t Tried Too Hard.”
fuckers.
well thank goodness for the blog or i’d have really nothing to do with the sillyness swimming in my head these days.
i made my first french friend. we met at a cafe and then i walked by him having dinner the other night and he invited me to join. nevermind that he’s like 65. he’s very nice and i have this evil plan to set him up with my mother’s boyfriend’s mother. ( yeah that takes a second ). she lives in paris, and they are both very cute french older people. i mean what else do ya need?!? plus everyone should be in love here. really
speaking of, everyone knows that you might be able to move cities, but you can’t run away from yourself. i know. i know. but there was a bit of me hoping to run away from bits of myself. didn’t work, duh. as i have another,
other,
oh brother,
skirmish with the ex. who, by the way, is surprised to be referred to as “the ex.” maybe the same way he was surprised when i called him my “man” outside my bathroom once. a long time ago. i haven’t asked. it’s always a wonder how the closer you get to someone, how much more you can completely misunderstand each other. how do you fix it? why does it always end this way? anyone know?
i finished The Way of All Flesh yesterday. It was okay, i guess. supposed to be one of the english-language “100 Best Novels” (according to Modern Library publishers). ehh – i think it’s aged kinda badly. the tone is supposed to be so “forward thinking” as to brush aside the entire female gender? i just can’t enjoy books like that. i don’t care a whit how fucking “classic” they are.
A point for Paris: In their version of the Voice are eight pages of film festivals. pretty cool.
i don’t have tons of time at the moment. i actually have some [gasp] work to do. but i just wanted to jot down a note about how sucky life is when you don’t have music. as i have been staying in a completely disconnected room, i haven’t been able to listen to music really. it feels like the life of a transient and a prisoner at the same time. i found myself this weekend lingering in stores for the sole purpose of listening to music. any music. whatever.
it was in the Esprit store that i surmised Erykah Badu has a new album out. I am downloading it at the moment, and will be carrying the Rio with me everywhere from now on. I even pretended to read a menu at a cafe for 5 minutes just to hear the curtis mayfield that happened to be playing.
i have to move!!!!!!
last night i got caught in a huge rainstorm. i had no umbrella cause i had no idea about the weather. i realized that without a TV, phone, radio, internet connection at home the entire world could be at war and i’d never know it. talk about being incommunique!
anyhoo – i’ve got a mobile phone now and i feel slightly more in touch. as well as that the office is permanently connected and i have the web again, for working hours anyway. the mobile phones here are cool you just buy the phone and then can buy minutes as you need them at any “Tabac”, which is sorta like a bodega but not at all actually. OK it’s ubiquitous like a bodega, but really it’s like a little goods counter that can be found in a cafe. it has primarily cigs and gum, and mobile phone minutes. lovely, right? no more buying 2000 minutes a month you’ll never use. gimmie a shout and i’ll give you the digits if you want to spend some dough on a phone call to yours truly. hey, it’s exciting – you never know where i’ll be… incoming calls don’t count – heh heh
otherwise, i got the keys to my new place but it’s still not ready :(
i really want to move in so i can stop spending so much money eating out and having cafe’s out just so i can be somewhere that’s not a bedroom. i also need to set myself up with some music and maybe a TV so i can join the modern world again. speaking of, did i mention how old everything is here? sometimes i think it is so damn cool. but sometimes i get a bit irked. like when it rained last night. all the water was being gulped down by these old street drains and i just wonder, when was that shit built? where does it go? i mean sanitary conditions were kinda sketchy back in the day… you think they upgraded?
meanwhile there’s some new anti-rave law that just passed here, which is kinda a drag. i’m not typically down with raves, but i must find a group of like minds to hang wit here. there is a lesbian bar accross the street from my new place. there’s also some sort of communist art collective just below. it looks kinda dilapidated though. i mean there’s probably only like 2 communists artists left. the US must’ve had them all killed.
speaking of, we Americans have a really bad reputation in the rest of the world. “American” seems to be synonymous with violence, racism, guns, capital punishment and other appealing ideas. i can’t say i don’t understand the sentiment. i also really cannot defend against any of it. we’re pretty much the big asshole at the party. the one that spills drinks on people without apologizing. who eats all the chips and doesn’t offer to get more. and then takes a dump which clogs up the toilet, then saunters off without a thought to who cleans it up. btw, i think i’ve come up with this brilliant imagery just cause i’ve thrown a lot of parties and there’s almost always a dude like this.
but we got all the cash so we don’t care… nyah nyah nyah.
no really – we kinda suck.
An interview with Janus Marcovi, a retired fish merchant living in Trenton, NJ. Better known as the dude who invented the Tiny Wireless Video Camera!:
Thanks Stoopid Science for this link. i’d link back, but the image of the day is.. err.. umm.. well, my mom reads this, ok. if you must know, drop me a line and give ya the goods.
…playing catch-up… read on
it is tuesday afternoon and i am currently having a cafe creme at the cafe beaubourg. since i had to lug my laptop home for the move anyway, i decided to be unself-conscious (sort of) and take out my laptop and write for a bit. i asked around the office and found it was indeed “un-french” to bring out a laptop at a cafe. but i am at the iconoclastic centre pompidou, and i’ve also decided to not give a fuck.
although i’ve only been here for a week exactly, it is already a much different experience knowing that i live here. mostly because i have no real timetable for anything. like new york, i can put off “doing things” indefinitely. i can also go on drinking cafe creme’s unhurriedly, which is nice.
this past weekend was my first french weekend. on friday i went to a horrific party in pigalle. it was like a frat party in the limelight. only like a hundred frats, and the building was like a hundred times older. it was the sort of affair with just an entrance fee and then all-you-can-drink. i am once again reminded that cash bars have an upside. we left during the theme song from flashdance, if that’s any indication.
the rest of the weekend was quite nice though. the weather has taken a sharp turn for the better, and it is actually downright “hot” these days. which is wonderful for sitting in cafes, but awful for sitting in a small office among 25 french engineers (peee-uuuu). i have discussed with a coworker posting a stink-o-meter (or stink-o-metre, in french) to measure my… err quality of life in the workplace. i have also been working on plans for a redesign. heavy on the CSS, so it will take me awhile to educate myself.
ok let’s get the obvious out of the way. i bought a pair of amazing shoes, on sale no less. it is the big sale time here. great way to kick off my new non-materialist lifestyle. gotta stock up first, like going into hibernation. yes, clearly this is not the point. they are rilly cute.
it goes without saying that paris is an amazingly beautiful city. the buildings radiate this sense of permanence. they are very old (much older than the ones in nyc), and unlike nyc, they are almost all in perfect condition. to look upwards at the street one could easily imagine it being anytime in the last four centuries. i don’t think i’m projecting when i feel like they have an influence on the way i think here. also, parisian women are gorgeous. even though i’ve spent a fair amount of time here before, i am only just noticing this. it is really kind of amazing. the women in the city who are not pretty are tourists. unfortunately i haven’t much of a taste for french men at the moment. i just can’t get used to the tight jeans and the tucked in izod shirts. and the guys who rock their wardrobe american style, are just kinda… umm.. off. but maybe that’s for the best considering i’ve proclaimed this the “summer of celibacy”. i’m actually rethinking this one. it is just so romantic here. i can’t think of a reason specifically, but paris is for lovers.
i have found myself a bit lonely at times, but not more so than in nyc. yet. btw, i am getting really pissed at people who respond to my efforts at french in english. it just seems really snide, like “don’t even try you fucking american.” how’s a fucking american supposed to fucking learn!?! in the meantime i am try to translate my thoughts into french so i look like kind of a loon talking to myself in public. maybe i should get one of those goofy cell phone earpeices for cover. actually i have yet to see one of those earpieces here (score for the parisians).
since the office is closed tomorrow (wed.) i’ll probably go out with some coworkers tonight. tomorrow is a trip to the cemetery and hopefully hopefully in the evening a spooky trip to the french catacombs. by the time i get to post this i hope i’ll have some interesting reports from underneath the city of love.
with that i close up shop at the cafe, tho i feel like me and my laptop are like sort of a fixture now.
a tout a l’huere.
bad news : our connection is going down for the day in 15 minutes. and then nothing tomorrow as the office will be moving. i have plenty of updates but keep being foiled when sitting down to write. i owe a lot of people e-mails too which i haven’t a chance to write. forgive me. soon.
a few notes:
- i keep waiting until the end of the day (here) to write, but by then the office is so hot and stinky that i can’t bear to stay late.
- i have made some minor changes to the right column.
- the time stamp is now correct to france time.
- i keep losing all the work i do here. there’s just no trace of the illustrations i worked on all day yesterday. i lost all my morning’s work to a system crash.
- i will write as soon as i do over what i’ve done this morning.
- i’m not sure if my french is getting any better, but i have a feeling my english is getting worse.
- the food continues to amaze me…
i was thrilled to find an interview with the savior of all my wednesdays, Heather Havrilesky aka Polly Esther, who wrote suck.com’s filler. of course since npr.org uses crappy shitty icky real player i’m still in buffering mode after apx 30 minutes. if someone manages to hear, let me know if there are any particularly gems of snarkiness that i missed. thanks emmanuelle.net for this link.
ok so instead of burying my head in a laptop i should be exploring paris, no? of course! but someone’s decided that at a certain age, barring any bizarre occurrences, you pretty much have to hand over the choicest part of your day to some miz company or other. well i’ve been doing all i can at lunch and at night.
i’ve been eating incredibly well. i have no idea if i’ll end up as big as a house after this lil jaunt. everyone here seems to be so thin. despite the fact the food here is so amazing. i wouldn’t mind eating all the time.
also it smells like smoke everywhere. in every restaurant, cafe, the supermarket, and even in my office. this is killing me. it feels like the first week of quitting again. i always want a cig and i am surrounded by them all the time. i didn’t realize how much their interdiction helped me in the states.
well i have to go at the moment as we’re having our friday fete (party-thing). i bet the food’ll be delish!
New Angeles Monthly, June 2008
Weekend America, March 30, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2008
Nil by Mouth is written by Neille Ilel. Neille is a writer, reporter and user interface specialist in Los Angeles. If you think that's a lot, she's also got a host of meandering sidelines including improv comedy, tennis, cooking, drawing and thinking about learning to play the guitar.
Nil is her given name. It's a long story.
E-mail her here:
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