Jour... du Jour

Oh, my favorite: being kinda sick but not really sick, but kinda having it around as a good excuse to stay in for the night and drink tea and listen to hours and hours of The Misfits and Of Montreal and Selda. Even if I'm in Europe, I still want a night completely to myself to do nothing but listen to music, which, for some reason, I've been fasting from for no logical reason other than to additionally starve myself of happiness. Yesterday on the Metro I gave up on talking to people and just listened to some Ratatat, and my life suddenly had a lovely glamour to it. Subways are such (somewhat unlikely) romanticized spaces, listening to awesome music and pretending you're shooting a music video is somehow so much better than sitting around spacing out and nodding and laughing at the appropriate parts of a discussion about beer/amsterdam/weirdos on the metro.

Also, my "sickness" is really just a perpetual need to clear my throat. Which is not helping me in the battle against coming off as a judgmental snob, because how can you not seem like a douchebag when you clear your throat before you, say, try to get the attention of someone working at the student center desk. "Ahem - oh, sorry, I didn't mean that 'ahem...' ...uhhh... those are my printouts." Seriously, I'm not trying to be a bitch, I'm trying to express myself in non-mangled sentences.

Other things not helping my war against judging others: listening to my trip mates make fun of disabled beggars, hippies on the metro with pet rats that live in their hoodies.

The latter was pretty hysterical though. Well, until some people continued to freak out about it, and then make fun of them directly behind their backs in the crowded train car. Did you know that if you can't understand anyone because you don't speak French, no one can understand you either? It's like a linguistic asshole cloaking device.

But I'm trying, or something. I'm trying to remove myself from bad situations, I'm trying to do more on my own rather than float along with the group until I start to crack. A couple of days ago we read Descartes, and I've been whispering his third maxim to myself like a mantra, or like a nutcase: Change my desires rather than the order of the world; There is nothing completely within my power except my thoughts.

But maybe it's my serotonin levels I really need to be controlling.