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Residents in Deloit, Wisconsin came together to recreate George Seurat’s ‘Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’

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Deloit Daily News: Art is Alive Along River

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The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and three hundred sixty two admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love heterosexuals. It’s just that they need more supervision.

- Lynne Lavner

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In a tragic irony, Allen Carr has been diagnosed with lung cancer.
Allen Carr Health Statement Press Release

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You can never be too safe. I put myself in charge of the terrorism task force and went searching through people’s offices this afternoon. I’m always looking for reasons to search my associates’ desks, so this was a perfect excuse. Took a couple bottles of Jack Daniels home with me after finding them in people’s drawers. A few bottles of wine. Some toothpaste and shaving cream for when people are stuck in the office overnight. Tossed that stuff. They’ll need to buy it again, but we can’t take the risk there are explosives inside.

Anonymous Lawyer: On the heels of the TSA announcement today…

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I’m living in Brussels now, or as it’s called here, Bruxelles. The summer has been insane, not in a very busy kind of way, but in a strangely unstructured sort of way. Everything I’ve been doing has had to be planned and organized very tightly, but once I’ve arrived at my destination the pressure quickly drops and there’s a lot of waiting around. Oddly, in that sense the summer began as it was to go on.

Of course, as I’ve written here already, I started the summer with British Army on a two week camp in North West Germany. That was a great time and really revealing, not only because of all the techniques we were taught, the equipment we used or the officers we met but generally because of the attitude on the base. An army base, when the forces are out (those based at our camp were in Iraq at the time), feels like a sleepy mid-western (or home counties if you’re British) town where not a lot happens apart from one big event in the summer. There’s a feeling of potential, but at the same time a lot of people really just hanging around with not a lot to do. I would never suggest that these people weren’t working, but rather that, the men not being ‘home’, the pressure, and its associated hustle and bustle, order and marching and traffic and noise, was reduced.

I was then at home in England for something like four days. Of course, this being the army were not told what time we would return to the UK or to Leeds until we were actually departing for Germany, and so everyone had to have highly flexible arrangements made for the return. That means accommodating friends who don’t mind providing accommodation. My new best friend forever was a wonderful guy called Scott who I’ve only just begun to get to know well toward the latter half of this year. I know him from ‘GaySoc’ as some people rather hilariously call the LGBT Society, and with various events in our respective lives we’ve hung out over the course of the year. When we get together it’s an odd kind of situation because we are, if I may say so, both excellent listeners. While obviously an admirable quality to possess, this can be rather frustrating when you want a solid opinion or in fact just want to not speak and listen yourself! Scott has done some trained counselling work and one of the things I always have to try and make sure he knows, when we talk is that I don’t want an unbiased opinion, I don’t need to talk my problems out-loud because I can do that in my head, I need a one sided, partisan, forceful, biased and prejudiced opinion! I guess that’s kind of rare in his area of expertise. Anyway, he put me up for the night when I finally turned up and was gracious in being concerned that I would dislike the quality of his kitchen and cooking (apparently I have a reputation). I had a fantastic time there, even though I only stayed for something like 24 hours. It reinforced my opinion that it would be a lot of fun to live with a whole lot of gays in my final year of University. Explaining why that is seems rather strange and obvious to me, but essentially I think it boils down to being surrounded constantly by friends who have the same outlook as you and just in a way understand who you are. My friends from my house last year were fantastic, but being all straight girls, their impression of me seemed to be constantly grounded in the fact that, yes, I do have Madonna and Britney Spears songs on my computer rather than everything else that goes on in my life. Having a house of ‘gay bois’ would certainly make going out a lot easier: people who have real taste in clothes when choosing an outfit, they have similar cosmetics so if yours run out then it’s easy just to run and ‘borrow’ some of theirs, taking taxis and simply deciding to go out together becomes a lot cheaper when you don’t have to drive around five different properties to get everyone home or spend an hour on a mobile phone just to ensure you won’t be standing alone at the bar come nine o’clock!

I spent a couple of calm days at home where my family were all racing around doing their own things and I was kind of in the middle without a role. That was fine with me because some time off is never to be sniffed at. I enjoyed it, but it also made me realize how much I appreciate the autonomy and slight distance that my University life allows me. When I got home I was surprised to find that my Grandfather was going to be celebrating his 90th Birthday the day after I was to fly to the south of France. There are claims and (my) counter-claims t hat I had been told, but it’s immaterial for I had told the farm that I was going to arrive on a set day and I couldn’t just move it around. Furthermore, airline tickets aren’t cheap when you’re on a budget my size even when they call them ‘low cost’ carriers. I got the earliest train I could and went to visit him in London before hand. It was an awful situation really because I hadn’t seen him for months and months and yet again I was going to miss a big family event and celebration. But I spent the day with him, mowed his garden, spent time in his house, made lunch and so forth. It was an insignificant day but one that felt like quality time rather than trying to constantly do things. I feel that at times, doing things gets in the way of simply getting to know people. We spend so much energy trying to avoid boredom that we don’t really understand the people around us. Then in the evening I crossed London and stayed over at Luke’s house. That was funny because he was staying at home for a couple of weeks before moving back up to Leeds to take up a position he’d been offered at an events agency. It was the perfect job for him, but it didn’t start until several weeks after he had left his previous house in the city, so he also had to find somewhere to live. While looking he stayed at his parents’ house in London, where he has two single beds in his bedroom. Hmmmm.

The next morning I took a train home then the day after, a flight to Nice. It was a hellish journey with a little three-year-old sitting next to me. I think his parents thought it was a great opportunity for him to meet people, have fun, and keep me alert. I wanted to sleep, that certainly didn’t happen. On our very delayed arrival in Nice I found my train out of the city had already left and, all the relatively cheap hotels being full, I was left to spending a night sitting on the beach, constantly alert to the many people who appeared interested in the (admittedly huge) bag I had with me: unnecessary and uncomfortable interest. Once the night had passed and the sun risen, I took the 6AM train toward the farm I would be working on for the next four weeks.

The farm in a very few words to spare the whole description: hot, canicule, dry, legumes, tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, house-made-from-chipboard, chickens, dead puppy (no milk), dusty, hot, hotter, hot. Wind, mistral, caravan, stars, perfect, darkness, cold nights, blue skies, fires. No: eau courant, electricity, douches, anglais, sun burn, energy, mobile phone.

It was a family of four; dad, mother, girl of 6 and a girl of 8. In the absolute sticks, a good 30 minute drive from the coast though only perhaps about 10 kilometers away. Very very windy roads, no running water, in fact no water at all. Tiny plot of land of about one hectare, growing all kinds of summer vegetables, like bell peppers, leeks, strawberries, tomatoes and more tomatoes, squash and artichoke and aubergine. The isolation was punctured by my days off (roughly one per week). I didn’t count days at the beach as days off because the girls would come too and I’d end up watching them most of the day so it was just as tiring as a normal day working in the fields, or ‘le jardin’ as they’d call it. We’d work from (the rather late 9AM) until 1PM then have lunch and either restart work from 3 until 5 or I might do some French work and start again from 5-7 or so. That was the general trend for four weeks and by the end I was itching to leave. For me it’s to monotonous, always the same never many big changes, challenges, no intellectual work. When you wake up every morning knowing that the first thing you have to do is feed the chicks, ducks, hens, geese etc, and you will have to do the same thing for the next however many years, that would get me down. We simply ran out of water. With no connection to mains water they relied on water from the large pond next to the house, which was murky and unsafe looking at the best of times. By the time I left there was about a foot left, down 20 feet below the height of where the normal water level should be. The frogs were not enjoying it, and the mud was cracked and hardened as drought-afflicted areas always look like. We couldn’t shower, had to wash dishes with a total of about 3 litres of water, and generally couldn’t function properly as not having water often implies. It was a great time, and my French certainly improved from its disgusting level beforehand to simply mildly atrocious as it is now.

Then a disorientating TGV ride up from the Cote d’Azur to Paris. The train sped from my tiny tiny little station west to Marseille then zipped up to Paris lickety-spit. When they say Train Grande Vitesse (is that how the spell it?), they really mean it. Up the length of the country (Marseille to Paris) in about 2 hours and fifteen minutes if I remember correctly. Madly quick, though when you’re sitting on them they don’t feel like they’re moving all that fast, though I guess this is a testament to their engineering as much as anything else. I say it was disorientating because, having come from 35-40 degree heat and praying for rain, the first thing we hit in Paris is… rain! And it didn’t stop for the whole two weeks I was there. Awful awful rain. And it was cold, though my host Caroline, annoyingly continued to claim that it wasn’t cold. If you’re reading this Caroline, you were wrong, it WAS cold!

Most of the time in Paris was spent doing not a huge amount but that’s kind of ideal in a way because it gives you a bit of a break but also lets you just see the city without having a huge agenda of places to go and things to gawp at. We had coffee probably every day, went running around the Luxembourg Gardens most days, and didn’t really do very much shopping at all. We were very well behaved. In the middle of Paris I went down to the Bourgogne region for my uncle’s 50th Birthday party. I thought it was housewarming, so my gift local (ie Provence), organic honey wasn’t really appropriate; what 50 year old needs honey? Perhaps for a 50 year old a good session at a chiropractor or a yoga mat might have been better. Anyway, I just said happy birthday to him and gave the honey as a housewarming for their lovely, astonishing, rural former barn, house. Oh, and I met my younger sister in Paris for the TGV down to Autan. She had just received her exam results that confirmed her as the smartest person I will ever know, and someone I will always look to for inspiration to work. I love her and she’s fantastic and she’s going to Cambridge next year. Yeah baby yeah!

From Paris I came directly, again by train, to Bruxelles. This explains my massive bag in Nice because I had to pack most everything I would need to have in Bruxelles before I left for France and would need to take it with me the whole way. My parents brought a little carry-on size bag of my stuff with them to Bourgogne, but that doesn’t make a huge difference to the fact that you must carry your supplies for the next year on your back. So this year I will not be looking fabulous all the time, and if you tell me you’ve seen me wear an outfit before, I’ll just have to smile and know to myself that I’ve probably worn it exactly the same way a dozen times before, and it’s just lucky if people don’t notice. I looked around a couple of properties before confirming that I wanted to have the one I had seen online before I’d even arrived. They call student rooms ‘kots’ here, so while in France a housemate would be a colocateur, here it’s a cokoteur! Kind of funny like that: I’m really going to have to make an effort not to learn Belgian French otherwise no Frenchies will understand me! Bad bad bad!

It’s an ace little house. Well, I say little: it’s shared with 6 other people from a whole handful of countries. They haven’t all arrived yet so I don’t know them all, but there are two French (a couple – eugh!), a German girl, a Spanish girl, a Russian girl and an Italian girl. And me! All these girls, wasted on me! The house has just been remodelled/renovated from a previously dire state to the now Ikea-like bliss state. There are still some funny things about it, but it’s nice. Crazy tall (I’m at the top top top of the house in a duplex type thing), and all wooded floors so when you walk anywhere the whole room reverberates with the creaks of the floor.

This coming week I’m just going to be at home because the language course I had been hoping to go on was not running for lack of demand and the only option the school could give me was a hugely expensive one-to-one type thing. I’m not made of money, despite my aspirations otherwise, and so I’ll be doing French work at home, translating the newspaper, hopefully watching lots of tv (!) and reading stuff online. I’ll try not to waste time, but of course I know that will happen. It’s life.

Today I’m due to have four packages arrive via couriers/delivery firms, but none have yet turned up. I don’t know what they’re doing. We shall see. And when this overly long diary entry is up online, that will imply that our Internet connection has been established. Good news for all.

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