Light of day

 

As I am doing a lot of drawing and layering of pictures, I am accumulating many images that haven't found a place here yet. But in looking them over I did come to the stunning realization that

NOT EVERYTHING I WORK ON HAS TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!

So with that in mind, I'll leave off a few thousand things I was thinking of showing you and go with just these:

A few days ago I came up with a Tolstoy inspired title for my post and felt strongly enough about it to put it on my shirt, at least fictionally. Then I spent quite awhile making it into this self portrait drawing:

Here we have a picture from Tokyo, of a train crossing near the house we were staying at just beyond the edge of a fabulous park.

We loved that place we stayed at despite it being FILLED WITH SPIDERS! Which speaks to its other qualities. We often came home late at night (for us), down a canal path and across these train tracks. We were in the biggest city in the world, but it felt like a lonely country railroad crossing:

And finally (and with that word I will be axing hours of prepared material for you!), there is this drawing I made or worked up out of an already much worked up image from the Kyoto Botanical Gardens, one of my favorite places in Japan.

Me me me me me

With a bit of injury in my household that I won't go into right now, though everyone is currently doing well,  I have been continuing my drawings which have increasingly more drawing in them and less photo manipulation. I am the subject yet again of today's drawing. This could be narcissism or just the fact that I am a very handy subject matter, available at a moment's notice. 

I suppose these are not mutually exclusive.

 

French apartment

 

There are so many things I haven't had a chance to discuss about our move to France, and since hundreds of thousands of people follow clerkmanifesto now looking for tips on their own future relocation to Europe, I feel a certain responsibility to cover some of those things that got lost in the heady rush of our arrival in this country.

That's why today I am going to discuss... The French Apartment.

You see, I live in one.

I am writing to you from one right now, tucked in a dormer window of a studio apartment that likes to put on airs of being a one bedroom but really really isn't one. 

The rain is pleasantly falling outside in an otherwise quiet night. 

Here, let me get up, turn around, take a random picture through my window, and report back:

 Well, whatever. It is now an hour later and that's my picture... drawing thing, through the partially reflecting dormer window, and that's France. You wanna move here, go for it. They do many things sensibly and with great style here in France, though they lack a bit of whimsy, and for the first ten or eleven years that you stumble around here still trying to learn French be prepared that you will often feel like Mr. Bean.

Well, maybe not you.

Anyway, one thing we read a lot about before we came is how very difficult it is to rent a French apartment.

It sort of is, but I don't want to go much into that now, especially after I already used up all my time I have for this post on making a four layered picture/drawing of me reflected in my window.

What I really want to talk about is what I didn't understand when I obsessively researched French apartments from an anticipatory vantage point in Minnesota.

The prices for renting French apartments are not too terrible considering how the cost of all houses and apartments in France is nearly as bad as those in the United States. And yes, though there are 67 million people in France, there are only about 10 apartments available for rent at any given time in the entire country.

 But the most shocking thing even in that is that there aren't any bargains.

I just didn't figure on there not being bargains.

Let me put it this way:

Say you're at a restaurant, and though the lobster seems nice, you don't have 85 dollars for it. So you're like, well, what are these no frills ham sandwiches going for then? 

65 dollars. They are going for 65 dollars.

That explanation maybe didn't work.

Let me try it like this

 If you can't save a bunch of money, or get an amazing apartment, by living in some wildly out of the way place, with few shops or services available, or by living in an ugly apartment block wasteland that France is full of in their own weird version of suburbs, why wouldn't you just live, well, somewhere like we do now?

I don't know.

But I am glad we got the one apartment they had available in this city 350,000 people.