Merce & The Muse

Today I saw Cyndi in the morning, then got some lunch, then sat in on a lecture about how to film a movie. Our script is turning out well and the project itself is a lot easier and more manageable than I first imagined. Goes to show how flawed imagination is, like my book said, projections into the future and mostly inaccurate, and you can actually determine more from what other people actually experience in situations than you can determine accurately how you will feel in that given situation.

Then I met Nassim and Katie at Merce and the Muse. I got "The Gabriel" which was this special latté with infused sugar, so it was thick and tasted of caramel. I read about 100 pages more of my Freud book. He discusses art, literature, and dreams. I find this book the hardest to follow out of all the Freud I've read, just because he draws so many allusions and expects you to already be well versed in before he explains his analysis, and sometimes he doesn't explain his analysis at all. One passage I found particularly striking was one in his fantasy, or Freud refers to it as "phantasy" chapter, about how we fantasize because we are unhappy with our realities, and if we were happy with our realities, we wouldn't fantasize at all because within each fantasy is wish fulfillment, therefore, a lack that exists in our current state. He talked about the differences between child fantasizing and adult fantasizing, and differences within male and female fantasies. Child fantasizing mostly revolves around imagining adulthood, whereas adults feel guilty when they fantasize about being children, and women's fantasies are mostly erotic because women's sexuality is more repressed in our culture, and males fantasize about a combination of authority and eroticism.

At this café, a man started talking to us, he got his masters in international relations at NYU and came after graduating to hang out in Paris. I told him that I preferred Parisians because they approach me more and are more open to having conversations with me on the street whereas new yorkers tend to be more stressed out and isolated. He said that he experienced the exact opposite, and often misses New York. I then talked to the owner of the shop, and she told us that she graduated from NYU and went abroad her senior year as well, fall semester, and then graduated and moved back to Paris but got deported, then came back and started baking with her friends, and then established a business and made a café. I told her that during my whole life I always felt anxious in places, never felt like I belonged anywhere that I was, until I came to Paris. And she said she felt the same exact way, hence why she decided to move to Paris. I told her I was considering the same thing, and that I hoped to figure out what I can do to move out here one day, permanently.

Paris has been raining, freezing, and a bit sad these days.

Everyone will be gone this weekend, but I'm staying, because I know that everywhere I go I'm going to be missing Paris so why not just stay and pretend that I'm only here for the weekend and make the most of it?