A Short Message from a Droplet of Flesh

I'm in Paris now. In the quatorzième. What a time to move to Paris. The military rifles displayed by the gendarmes who litter any and all public areas stare me down as I walk to the métro. I pass a woman who is Charlie Hebdo. I pass a market that is Charlie Hebdo. I pass a billboard also claiming to be Charlie Hebdo.

Valentine, the 4-year-old, asks me about the "méchants." She asks where they go if they don't go to paradis. She asks if a bonhomme is killed by a méchant, and at the same time the méchant is killed by the bonhomme, where does the bonhomme go? I have much more difficulty answering this question than I did any posed at my master's defense.

With adults the questions are easier. Just mention coming from Switzerland for immediate sympathy. Sympathy, that's not a word I've used much in the past year and a half. Boy, how things change. I'm just a droplet of flesh being pushed this way and that by the social currents, each adjective I use to define myself is a new dimension in the state space of life.

What am I doing with my life? Bah, the currents will decide. The currents will push me where I need to go. No use trying to live against them. I'll submit some applications and put on my biggest smile at the interview but in the end it's all up to the currents. There's no such thing as lost. You are where you are and wherever that is it's definitely a place that one can be so you might as well make the most of your time there. Check as many items off the bucket list as you can before you find yourself somewhere else.

Why do people put up with unhappiness? That feeling that something could be better is enough for me to leave everything I know. I guess most people are neutrons, unaffected by the changing currents. But I'm more of an electron. A fleshy, nerdy electron.

For now my main job is to think and to explore. To regain my sympathy and to tick off the list. I am not Charlie Hebdo. Who I am can't be described in 4 words, or in any number of words for that matter. By the time I got halfway done trying the description would have changed anyway.

I think soon enough I'll be ready to go home. The meteorologists predict a tsunami heading for America and its spacious grocery stores and banks ready to accept what little remains of my money. It will be nice not to have to apply to live somewhere. Why does anyone have to apply to live somewhere? Because he was born on the wrong side of an imaginary line? That's stupid if you ask me.

Well that's all for now, à la prochaine, whenever and wherever that might be.