Everything in Paris is goth or too expensive if you want it to be

People said it to me many times back home- ¨Parisians are ass holes and they're very rude. They won't give a shit about you.¨
Thank goodness.
 I am so ready and very excited for it. There is a passive aggressiveness that has evolved into something so thick in San Francisco that it was literally driving me insane, amongst various other factors of course . Not that I wasn't overly an ass hole this year, definitely drunk and owing many apologies I felt lazy towards eventually. Still I haven't figured out a way to properly apologize for being psychotic without seeming trite and as if I'm trying to dismiss full responsibility.
 At the very least, aside from being an embarrassment to myself, I left the city semi-content and with a printed, published magazine feature for amazing BelleSF, a pending magazine release for Lump Sum, and several hundred dollars.
C'est la vie or whatever the fuck.
Also, I found five euros at SFO during the TSA violations and I drank a lot of wine in first class.

So far in one day the city has been only good to me and I have all ready tried five different kinds of wine. Something to say of people who speak french is they all seem to have the most beautiful lips. The buildings here are old with intricate french framework. You can most certainly tell which buildings were founded recently but they at least take inspiration from a very classic look.
It's raining hard and I have a friendly girls date at some punk bar in the 11th at six'o'clock.
For some reason also, I have been very nervous. Not about the friend date, just about my position in general.

I start a lot of things I can't finish. Comics, paintings, silly business ideas, fights, proposed articles, all of it. Namely because I start new things everyday and I have the attention span of a three-year-old. That I've maintained a room at the 5shop for three years now, only once coming close to burning it down, is an absolute shock to me, as is any complete piece of writing or illustration. This year I had every intention to write out three articles and completing, sharing, and perhaps even publishing one. I started them all, the one about the police brutality case no one wanted to talk about that occured at City College of San Francisco in which several students were injured by SFPD, one about the discrimination case that may or may not have occured at a restaurant on 25th and Bryant that some people talked about, and one about how my mother is the strongest person I know having saved an immigrant from coyote bandits on a last minute emergency trip to LA and a very seedy hotel in Las Palmas- but never finished. The story I would like published is that of my mother's. I noted most of the détails mentally as she told me about what had happened the weekend before in LA while on a trip to northern california; when she rented a car and offered to give me a ride to a valley i won't disclose the name for. That happened in 2011. I'm waiting to interview her again so I can record it.  I named the article ¨The Trail of Skulls¨.

My great aunt Maria is wonderful. This is her story of coming to France.
It was 1975 and everyone was making the dash to the states from then and also now politicqlly tulmultous and civally dangerous Guatemala, mostly through illegal coyote routes through the mountains. Coyotes are people who are paid to bring immigrants to the states from central america. The practice is illicit and dangerous. Many people die along the trails or are kidnapped and held for ransom. My grandmother and my aunt's friends had either made it to the states or were well on their way but Maria was very afraid. She had heard of the terrible conditions like going through whole miles of dark tunnels filled with shit and cat sized rats and having to sleep in them. Women were often violated or sold off. Despite the increasing turmoil and political unrest in Guatemala, Maria struggled to come to grips with what the journey to the US would entail. She finalized her decision to seek other means after one of her girlfriends phoned her to let her know that she had made it, but not before being raped by four men, kidnapped, had everything stolen, being brought back to Mexico, and having to find the means to again pay for another coyote to help her in again. After that call my aunt picked up a newspaper and began to look through the classified. That evening she read a wanted ad for a cook for the Guatemalan ambassador in Paris. Although it was five in the evening and the paper was let out at six in the morning, she went to the office to try to see if no one had applied yet. When she arrived the applications list was three pages long. Although discourged for the day, she sat in the office looking through the paper for more ads. While reading a manager walked out and asked her to step Inside and fufill the application anyway. While applying my aunt told me she made a joke and made the manager bust up laughing. The joke isn't coming to me now but the manager was so pleased by it that she ripped up her applications list and told my aunt that she seemed very sweet and likable. She gave her the job on the spot. The only problem was that my aunt could not bring her 13 year old daughter with her. My aunt insisted on the position, put her daughter, my cousin, Ariselli in boarding school for the next four years and was flown to Paris the following month. Her daughter later joined her in Paris. My aunt worked closely with the ambassador for many years but later took a job cooking for a french princess after the ambassador moved to back to Guatemala. She stayed friends with the ambassador until her death and is still in touch with her family. Of the whole experience she says she is most glad that she had hope that day and ever since she has not had to ask help of anyone for anything.
She now happily maintains a studio four blocks from the Eiffel Tower, where I am living currently, and has a two year old terrier named Elliot.

She drinks damned good wine, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWdhSccWd3A