"Je t'aime Paris"

Not really. I have been in France for the past 6 months, commuting to school in a town called Fontainebleau, and I don't know jack from s**t about Paris except the train station, Gare de Lyon, and some general workings of the train that takes me to/from Fontainebleau to Paris. To be specific, anything that is useless to the average person I know. (e.g. There appear to be about 2 suicides per month on our train tracks, which has me a bit concerned as the Fontainebleau/Paris track on one of hundreds of tracks around the country)

I don't speak much French. I took one month of intensive courses and now I know just enough to confuse the hell out of any French speaker. Hopefully I'll do more this summer to unconfuse them a bit.

(above and below: scenes from Chateau de Fontainebleau)

I actually came back to this blog, first time in almost a year becuase of a blog entry in NYT, about being busy ... which I wrote about a long time back. Since I've consciously gone out of my way to disable regular linking of this blog, here goes the original:

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 Published on

5/3/06 10:04 PM

Eastern Daylight Time

The funny thing I have found about keeping journals/blogs is that they help you measure time. Wasted time. I dind't do anything I would consider fruitful in the past 3 weeks (besides going to work - not that I'd a choice. I guess time is, indeed, money. ) and yet I couldn't even bring myself to sit down for ten minutes and put down my thoughts.

Americans like claiming that they don't have time. But seriously, how busy can life really be? I think it has become a culture to think that Americans are busy.

If I fail to call home on a regular basis, other members of my family cover for me by saying i've been 'busy', and that excuse always works like a charm. In fact the standard habesha description for uncommunicative people is "min yidereg ingidih ... nuro'ko ruCHa new!".

Ok. I understand there are some people who work two jobs. Maybe those people are truly busy. But what's with the rest who work, say 10 hrs a day. Let's say they sleep 6-7 hrs, and commute for 30 - 60min round trip. That leaves 6 hours free per day. Lets say another hour or two for taking a shower, meals etc. Abesha people in America don't have to do zemed Tyeqa (ok, locations that are recreations of Ethiopia on the wrong side of the Atlantic, like DC, don't count), leqso, daily beteskian mesalem .... and to prove we've the time to waste, many among us will not miss the routine entertainment, be it a party or a wear-out-the-seats session at Starbucks. If there is a time and place for everything, then place seems to be the key word.

So how did we acquire the "ruCHa nuro" reputation? I for one feel like i'm wasting shitloads of time. Yes, time is flying ... but no, i'm not feeling cured.
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As for you, Paris, this summer you're my project: je t'aimerai!