May 6th, 2006
114766964980137885
Passion, artists, and communication
I didn’t want to think that jet lag would really affect me coming to Europe, since it was a day flight and I’d arrive right before bedtime. The first day I woke up easily at around 5:30 and just bided my time on the bunk until a reasonable hour to arise. The second day I woke up a little later, but still had no trouble in getting out of bed. However, each night I seem to be getting more and more exhausted. Today was a bit more of a challenge to wake up, with the familiar grogginess that I’m so often fighting against back at home. I wish I knew the discrete causes for such laborious mornings so I could remedy the situation. There must be some combination of food intake and the timing of it, coupled with a regimen of exercise or sleep preparation that can eliminate this. In any case it’s 9:30 now so I don’t get the free breakfast and will spend my requisite forty-five minutes before showering (hair) writing and collection my effects as today I migrate to a single room at the hotel Royal Voltaire in the 11th.
 |
 |
Yesterday I visited Luxembourg Park for the second time, despite the freaky orthogonal trees, because it’s been hard to find grass that you can really lay down on. On the way out last evening in search of food, I came across an incredibly passionate filmmaker whose pathos amplified his limited English ability to collosal levels.
He first described to me his desire to get a grocery store deal that would put his art into millions of cellular phones across Europe. His struggles with a producer telling him that he needed to improve his marketability were familiar and tragic, and I was veritably transfixed as he proceeded to explain really the entire plot summary of The King of Comedy in incredible detail. He spoke of De Niro and Peckinpah, Hoffman and Voight, and I was moved and impressed by his soliloquy of film. Like a freight train gathering momentum he went on, only occasionally pausing ever so briefly to ask the more functional English word for some complicated, esoteric French noun whose Latin root I could parse.
It still seems kind of depressing that it’s quite possible to have a full day exhaust you to the point of feeling a strong urge to rest before it even gets dark. I’m thinking about going to the market at Port de Clignacourt, even though it’s already past the suggested visiting time of eight in the morning. If only the shower queue wasn’t three men deep.
