All change please!

The season is in a transitionary period, an Indian summer Audrey says, the weather jolts from cold, wet and windy nights to hot, muggy days, when I inevietably have to take the metro several times and arrive at my classes all sweaty like I used to in BA.

My work continues thick as ever, lots of courses are finishing though so I'm not sure what work there'll be in a few months. We'll see.

The biggest change is the return to Rueil chez les Rossi and my common struggles to define what kind of future I envision for myself at the moment. I know I'm looking for a career change and I've pretty much set my heart on working internationally, perhaps as an analyst like Dominic but more excitingly I'd love to work as a journalist or as a writer. Only problem being that I don't write..

I just found an advert online for a journalism internship in San Telmo at a "respected BA publication" but they are asking for two notas so I'll have to get on with scribbling down something serious! I've been trying to write a kind o short story about a night out in BA with a few emotional twists and turns but so far it hasn't turned out too well and needs a lot of editing if not a complete re-write. Hopefully Rueil will give me the time to get cracking on that.

Oh, and did I mention I've become a classic love fool? Yep, I may go through life with an armoire of regrets but in this current case I feel that a bold and beautiful redemption could be possible if we're as mad as we say we are!

But that chapter is yet to be written, for now I'm off to the wall and the France match, a pleasure to see other big teams suffering what may be a similar fate as that which we were subjected to after that ignominious night at Wembley all those months ago. I'll gloat at the French, and maybe the Argentines, but deep down I'll be disappointed not to be pitting our re-vamped, thoroughly motivated Capello machine against those perennial giants of the international game. Messi for one deserves his world cup moment an so too Ribery and the exciting young French team.

Let's see how this all works out then, I hope to be writing a lot more very soon indeed!

Be strong red puppy..

Today I've awoken to a new world, a fresh beginning that I long thought impossible. It took a desperate night of jangling nerves and raw fear to make me realise that all is not as guttural as we believe it to be and that our brains, although intimately linked with our hearts and stomachs, can display remarkable clarity in their resolve..

Many cliches came back to me after having been dismissed along the by the wayside, passed over and forgotten. Strength is not only physical and pain is a shared emotion, to be overcome together through maturity and resolve, not heartfelt yammerings, the whimpering yelps of terrified puppies separated from the maternal embrace. Life will throw us many curve balls and sometimes that boomerang we throw will come around and smack us in the face but we get up and we throw it again and again, fearless of physics and the damned biology that hampers our rational minds..

I am again determined and hopeful. There have been daemons inside of me that needed expelling and I hope that now having crudely ejected them in an emotional outburst I can begin to take those steps towards an emotional enlightenment that will liberate us from the pain I've caused.

"Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be."

Is this the life?

So after labouring through a day of what are now fairly bog-standard reaching motions it was out to the bank and of to the metro to entertain friends over glasses of wine and sincere conversation on such typical Parisien topics as women, love and romance and employment, promotion and laboral fuck-ups.

It was hardly the melée of drunken revelry I've become accustomed to enjoying on those regular forays to the bars of odeon, Belleville, and grands boulevards but then some restraint is called for after living a blur of frantic activity the week before around the Latin quarter, Bastille and Montparnasse... Teaching pays the bills but it's the social excitement that gets me flowing, yawping and feeling the intense tension, the groups and challenges of my eternal infiltration quest; Brigitte says I'm a sensitive youth, touched by human kindness and in no need of the harpies, the wretched urchins, but I'm eager to run and skate to some unknown destination, just moving, gazing through the window portals of my eyes alon the way, regarding the fast moving shapes and the constantly changing visages of my friends and acquaintances as I hurl through on my way in one solo direction. Ahead, don't stop or you'll stagnate in your own filthy existence, strive for more, never settle, ever. There's always a new highway or a drunken embrace awaiting around the next corner and that strange intrigue that draws me to the people who hover near my sphere of conscience and they to me in equal measure.

Rape your comfor barrier permanently and never repent your passionate explosions, fly free Icarus, without the sun you would no legend be!

When worlds collide

A strange feeling of distance from reality, an intertwined perception of the trillions of realities that we hold true in their existence has washed across me in a night of philosophy and history, a classic blend of entertainment for weary souls still damned to walk this once paradise.

After indulging in some high-brow but youthful banter at Les Etages with my colleagues; discussing human nature, positive attraction, and the practice of wearing a one-piece on Bondi beach, Australia, I returned to my pleasant little garret slipping away on my new blades to therein find an e-mail from my Father in my sparse hotmail inbox.

In the mail he had attached his discoveries from a family geneology trip that he and my mother had taken to the far northern reaches of Scotland, even in his humble pensmanship a bleak and depressing sounding place. There they had travelled the Lochs and Glens in search of the remaining traces of our family's past, the cottages still standing and the records and censuses that with such basic information prove to so unveil the histories of our ancestry and create a vision of where we come from.

In the bar, legs shaking from my short trip, we discussed the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next and F's idea that ambition is an unneccessary hindrance to true human expression. It seemed to me to be an enthusiastic but early theory that lead me to think once again, but while watching these young philosophers debating earnestly on the rain spattered sidewalk I could not help but think back to my Kerouac essay that revealed to me so much of the suffering of the post-war generations. L seemed to have had experience of the changing perspectives of parents and children, the tensions that family life seems almost destined to carry in a world that perhaps systematically denies us the nourishing childhood that we so need, the familial rifts that separate us from our elders, the folly of youth versus the weary cautiousness of old age and the desire to see our children grow strong and proud but coupled with an oft crippling fear to dominate and unwittingly stiffle the development, or by alienating the youth from a prescribed path, drive them to greater advancement through a difficult struggle for independence.

The realisation that our family has risen from the humblest of origins, highland shepherds and local constables, to become professors at the country's most respected universities, computer engineers and international citizens of the world's great capitals was for me an awesome moment of revelation. The short expanse of 200 years has taken the blood of this mountain dwelling clan across the globe, and perhaps it was indeed that dreary existence on the fells of the extreme north that provoked our inherent wanderlust.

Whatever the pessimism of modern adolescents and weary travellers trying to pen memoirs and struggling to make teacher's salaries meet on an international budget I cannot be turned from the pursuit of something as yet unattained, a drive within me that is yet to realise it's full potential. As the Ted talk declared there are perhaps invisible forces that surround us, inhabiting the nooks and crevices of this Earth providing us with inspiration for our creativity, daemons to the Greeks, Genii to the Romans... How will mine be manifested?

"Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with them?"

Was it a delicious meal or a lonely memory of you lying across my pillows??

It's 5:50 am and I don't know if it's my imminent seminar that's hanging over today like a slow dead or memories of you that lie next to me in this bed as I clutch my pillows tightly, but my stomach is knotted, an unsettling pain that can only be worried away over time. It's a sleepless night worthy of remembrance, I spent the prior evening happy with Amaury and then upon returning home beat myself against the empty vacuum where you used to sit online, faint traces of you to be found on Facebook and I'm leaving MSN running only to tempt a message from you when I know that you're trying to forget me and that window may never appear again.

Were you here I would hold you close as you loved me to, it would be all I know how to do; enveloping you in my arms as if telling you feel safe!, be confident in my love and melt your back into my chest, your buttocks into my groin and we would interlace legs like so many knots that we tied ourselves into, the warmth of our bodies provoking a leger sweat to form between us. You wriggling backwards to reach that perfect corporal harmony, eyes closed to lock out forever and stretch this dream into our own, personal, tender infinity...