C'est l'été, on fait la fête!

Summer, comme d'hab, is chugging along swiftly with no intention of slowing down. You think I'd be used to this by now, having gone through "summer syndrome" every year for the past...I dunno, 15 years? And yet every summer, around the end of July, I start repeatedly and astutely declaring, "OMYGAW, I can't believe how fast it's going by! It's almost overrrr!" Well, it's true, dammit.

My weekdays are generally uneventful. I sit at the console desk and listen to Pandora play the same songs over and over (popular playlists for me this summer have been Mika, Lady GaGa, Adele, and the ever-reliable Guster) and occasionally do work. And by occasionally, I mean rarely. I've watched a few good French films...Persepolis was EXCELLENT, really loved that one. Bon Voyage was amusing but I don't know if I'd watch it again. Watched one called When the Sea Rises about a mime/performance artist who falls in love with this vagabondy-type dude...it was weird. There was another film called C.R.A.Z.Y. (which was quite good) which was a coming-of-age story about a gay kid growing up in the 60's/70's. I started watching that one and decided I'd do it without the subtitles, then freaked out when I couldn't understand anything and thought I had lost all my French and was ready to die...then I realized it was Canadian French and that's why I couldn't understand. Durrr.

I had a few weeks where I was really generally productive...played a lot of guitar, was reading a lot, was working on learning Spanish, eating healthy, and was running several times a week. Then I kind of fell off the bandwagon, if one could call it a bandwagon, and I've kind of fallen into this cycle of not getting enough sleep, watching crap movies on YouTube, and drinking too much on too regular a basis. Now I have a cold, which I'm sure I was asking for with my sleep and alcohol habits, so I've made the decision stop being such a lazy slob and get some stuff accomplished for these last couple weeks of summer. Mais on va voir...

I have been getting some reading done, though not as much as I would like. After seeing the 6th Harry Potter movie, I decided there was too much I didn't remember and I needed to re-read the entire series. FABULOUS IDEA. I hadn't read the first two books in ages, and it was so delightful to read them now that I know how the rest of the series ends, especially Chamber of Secrets and anything involving Snape. But I digress. I could talk Harry Potter all day but I know not everyone cares. Otherwise, I'm about halfway through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (had to take a break...the Hell Sermon brought my Catholic guilt to the surface in a bad way), I'm in the middle of Disgrace, which is excellent thus far, and I intend to read The Omnivore's Dilemma and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by summer's end.

Speaking of reading, I got my book list for the fall. Good God. I have 25+ books to buy! The good news is that I've already read a good chunk of them, including Macbeth, Four Works of Ibsen (had the same book 2 semesters ago! Merde!), Huck Finn, Great Gatsby (this'll be the 3rd time I've studied it...one of my favorites, but still, kind of obnoxious to be reading it AGAIN for school), Catcher in the Rye, My Antonia, The Bell Jar, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. It looks like such a high school reading list...but I'm sure we'll go more in-depth with the books and their literary significance than we ever did in Junior Honors English...despite my wrong love for Mr. Rubin.

I watched Paris, Je t'aime for the first time since coming home from Paris. Shockingly, Erin, Meredith, and I all got through it without weeping, though it made the gaping, France-shaped hole in my brittle heart feel all the more vacant. I think my favorite vignette is still the Montparnasse one, the one with the American who visit Paris alone and narrates in broken, academic French. So sad and funny and lonely all at once! And I thought I didn't like the Natalie Portman one the first time I saw it, but upon seeing it again, I rescind...that was another one of my faves.

I've heard two of the tracks off the upcoming BosTones album, Love You I Do and Missing the War...holy shitskies. They sound phenom. Not going to lie, I'm super psyched to hear my song, Death by Chocolate. I've never heard myself fully produced and auto-tuned to perfection. Should be fun times.

Donc, I need to go get some sustenance, and that sustenance begs to take the form of a delightful Loose Leafs salad. Let it be, man. Let it be.