Stubbing it Out – Bittersweet Ends

I know it is just plain rude to leave you like this.

With the New Year, I have decided that I have to decide now, who I am and where I am going. I have been waiting for something to come along and make that choice for me. In the back of my mind I thought that time and the world was standing still waiting for me to do that. My trip home has shown me that it has not been. The people I love are getting older... their lives ever changing. Time has not stood still and I am getting older too.

This blog, something that once helped me -- now seems somehow perverse. I can't construct my identity while putting it on display. I feel obliged at times to play my character and this makes it hard to be myself. The blog though has served its purpose... somehow bringing me here to this place. A place I needed to be and bringing me one entry at a time one step closer to myself.

Its just – this part of my story is over and I have to get on with the rest of it. I hope the odd regulars around here will understand. In a few months... I will put a copy of the film I made up for those of you who are still around to watch. I have to find finishing funds first and get it into festivals. No easy feat. My money is all gone. Like everyone elses...not that I had any before... but it is good that the whole world is starting over at broke. I don't feel so alone that way.

I am also, looking for money to turn this blog and the two years of my life that it highlight into a webseries... so perhaps you will see this one day in the future with Maggie Gylenhall playing me and Louis Garrel playing – uh -- every single one of my French love interests. Ok. Shit. If Louis says yes, then screw Maggie Gylenhall, I'll play me!

As for France and its fine city of Paris.... I came here wanting to live a youth that I missed out on in my twenties. I have surely done that. I don't think there has been a soul who has enjoyed or explored Paris, its people and its language the way that I have even though every step of the way there was some obstacle threatening to end it all. Holding on proved to be more difficult than I had imagined, but alot of kind people came and held my hand along the way... transforming Paris into a wonderland. Most of those of people are gone now. Some took off on their own adventures to Bejiing, Australia, back to the States, others have just moved on and grown beyond me. Some are still around trying to help me make a leap back into the world where time and they are marching forward.

I have many fantastic memories some that I have shared here.... but there are three moments that I will take with me wherever I go. I'll offer them up as a sort of parting gift?

One was during my first year here. I was riding a borrowed bike (before the advent of Velibs) across the city at midnight heading to the place I was staying near Convention and crossed through St. Germain de Pres -- on one of its very quaint and quiet streets to get there. From a window three floors off the street I heard the sounds of laughter and glasses clinking, then fingers on a piano and suddenly music and silence from everyone inside the apartment. Someone began to play. It was the most beautiful piano playing I had every heard. I sat beneath the window and listened alone for an hour recognizing that I was no longer the miserable girl dodging debris and looking for misplaced commas on Wall Street. I listened and felt victorious, I had escaped New York into a better more beautiful life.

The second was also during my first year in Paris before I spoke French and when I was working on the English language team at the call center on the outskirts of Paris. I had many friends at that time and this job was a big reason. I was always getting in trouble for talking to everyone and making people laugh. I never minded the little bit of flack I had to take for all the fun we got in return.

None of us liked the job, and all of us young and youngish Europeans were on the move with no money exploring a brave new Europe. There was one night, not unlike the nights before or after. I was working with my good friend, a Polish girl names Magda, a girl who befriended me after finding me standing on the edge of the RER D platform five months earlier crying. She asked me what was wrong. I told her I was just being overly emotional... that my only real friend in Paris had jumped out his window the week before. I told her that I would get over it soon. She didn't believe me. Magda and I we were working the phones alongside a 21 year old British boy named Alistair who I had a crush on and who, of course, had a crush on me. There was another girl -- a quiet and beautiful half Egyptian half Finnish girl sitting with us. In between calls, the four of us just couldn't stop cracking each other up. Suddenly, Alistair shot a glance at me and I don't know what it was about his glance, but I realized that I was happy. I had to get up and go into the bathroom and cry.

The third is a moment from not so long ago... a moment on the quai at Bastille. A smile between me and someone else -- the simplicity and honesty of it all healed something in me that had been broken since high school but actually it is private...and I am beggining to see the need to keep things to myself.

I am not yet sure how my story ends, and I don't know where I will end up at the end of it all. I guess only time will tell.

Below is a poem I read in the New York Times at Starbuck's on Christmas day where I sat reading the paper with my sister while waiting to see Benjamin Button... a story about two starcrossed lovers, kept from each other by their opposite fates .... and who learn how to let go. Funny how the two messages came to me one on the heels of the other. I am learning to interpret the signs.

There poem is by a man named Jack Spicer. 'Jack Spicer, a poet of heartbreak, ' says the NY Times, 'lived the forlorn life of an outsider.'

No one has lots of them
Lays or friends or anything
That can make a little light in all that darkness.

There is a cigarette you can hold for a minute
In your weak mouth
And then the light goes out,
Rival, honey, friend,
And then you stub it out.

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year!

Kiss No More Strangers -- Drink No More Champagne

I knew that going to the States this time would be a big deal and I should have gone much sooner. Something has been calling me home for over a year now and I have been mostly lying on my bed plugging my ears, trying not to hear. Angels start to whisper... and if, after a while, you don't listen, demons begin to howl. For a while now, every night a new demon appears. Ever able to endure my own suffering, I just tell him to join the damn chorus... but its getting hard to sleep with the noise. Anna says I am just stubborn.

« Most people...just give up on all this by the age of 30. »

Maybe I am stubborn, but I see now that I cannot go on with one foot in the old world and another in the new – vacillating twice a day from being an American nationalist to being a French nationalist from loving both countries to loving neither. Nationalism, any good historian will say, grows out of a country's deep-seated insecurities. I tap into insecurities wherever I seem to go. If you sent me to Iceland tomorrow I am sure that within a matter of months, I would begin to think that the one true way is the Icelandic way. I am not sure which place is better, Europe or the US... probably neither but I think they both must be better than any other place in the world. Although I hear that Buenos Aires is pretty cool. Maybe I should head there next -- but I don't know anyone there and the loneliness is catching up with me. Sigh. It is the same old refrain... listen to the Eagles song 'Desperado' -- play Eric Carmen's 'All by Myself' and you get the picture.

My recent entries here about my time in the States were more about me trying to come to terms with me -- than with me trying to understand current geopolitical realities -- me trying to reconcile who I was with who I have become. The judgments I have levied against both the French and the Americans are really silent judgments I have been levying against myself for forever now. I have not been wanting to take my place amongst the lot of you – no matter which country you come from. Humility is something I am not so good at cultivating.

My sister drove me to Atlanta to take the plane back to Paris on New Year's Day. We had spent a few very nice days hanging out and being nice to each other and putting aside the problems that plagued us in the early days of my visit. I, sick on the ride up, was still half tipsy from the champagne that I drank in downtown Knoxville on New Year's Eve while wearing my black sheer dress.

This was the same black dress that I wore in Hollywood a week or two back while hanging out in an chic dance club watching a group of young dancers pay homage to the late great Betty Page. Just before I jumped in a little blue and white Mercedes sports coupe and drove high up in the Hollywood Hills to just under the Hollywood sign where I kissed a well-dressed German production designer named Hans who I met at an alumni event that I had gone to earlier that evening just off Hollywood Boulevard where I had arrived after hopping on the Chinatown bus from Las Vegas to LA. Hans was the only European in the room, so naturally, I found my way to him.

« You look like Maggie Gylenhall. » he said
Three people in LA told me that. I guess this is what people do there... look for movie stars.

« Its your eyes...they are key the key to your soul... I can see it there. »
« Who Maggie Gylenhall? »
« No. You. »
I smiled. How do people live here?

He bought me a glass of wine and then, when I spit the wine out because it tasted too Californian, offered me an Irish whiskey -- that went down a bit easier.
« You should be mean. » I told him... « You would get a lot more girls that way.»
« I'm doing ok, » he responded.

I went to LA to see a few old faces and plant the seeds for a few new deals, thinking that maybe it is time I finally made my way to Hollywood. I tried to see Marc, the man in my very first blog story. Already thinking about how to end this blog and thinking that a story about him would be a great button to put on it... but he was trapped in his house on Wilshire Boulevard unable to make his way to his car. I was unwilling to make my way to Wilshire Boulevard so that was that. Los Angeles? I don't know... the donuts are great, Venice Beach rocks, but the traffic sucks and so people have a hard time making connections.

I hopped the Greyhound back to Vegas forfeiting my Chinatown bus ticket after I missed it by an hour. Arriving back in Vegas, my mom was waiting for me with donuts in the terminal. The donuts in Vegas aren't bad. My mother had spent the two days I was in LA, making her Christmas T-Rings for me and sewing together a Ms. Santa Klause costume for a charity event she was doing later. She asked me to drive... saying she was too tired. It is a delicate thing to drive my mother's car with her in it. Every gust of wind freaks her out. 

« Elle! Slow down. »

« Mom! I am going 35. Are you afraid of dying or something? »

«No» she responded instinctively. « I just am afraid of living without a car. » She was serious.

« Well, that pretty much sums up life in the United States, doesn't it? » I thought to myself. I couldn't say it outloud. My mom can hear no criticism of the States. She is a veteran. I guess she is right though -- now is not the time. There are other places in the world that need the criticism more -- but we are all afraid to say things about those places.

My mother and I looked at each other and laughed.

In the Camero driving the highway from Knoxville to Atlanta I moaned. I was grossed out by myself from New Year's Eve bash -- I drank six glasses of champagne and kissed five complete strangers at midnight. I kissed one guy and then the others just formed a line. My sister grabbed me and pulled me out of the bar saying

« Elle, you are too nice! Stop kissing everybody! »

In the car reliving it she explained « You were even kissing the fat ugly ones. What is wrong with you? » «Ugly fat people need love too. » I said.

I felt sick.

2009 Resoultion No. 1 – Kiss no more strangers. No. 2 Drink no more champagne.

Standing on the curb at the airport, my sister sat my bag down... she gave me hug and walked back to the car. I turned and looked at her -- my bottom lip trembling -- she stopped, crossed back and asked if I wanted to just stay in Knoxville.

Lay Me Over: An International Orgy in the middle of a Domestic Flight

People in Europe always qualify their Anti-Americanism by saying "It is not the American people I don't like... it is the American government and what it is doing to them that I can't stand"

Well, for me -- it's the American people that are driving me nuts.

No matter where I go I can't get away from them – and the only thing left to do is create distractions. So, while on a layover in Atlanta, headed to Vegas to see my mom a few of weeks ago, I looked for the gate with the next flight to France. I was hoping that I could go there and speak French with someone. I headed over, but since the flight wasn't leaving for another hour and a half there were nothing but Americans and a few super-organized Swiss people waiting. I should have known better. French people never show up early for anything, besides no French person in their right mind would take a flight to Paris from Atlanta.

After waiting around for half an hour to see if any French people would show up, I abandoned the effort and went back to the Starbuck's near the Duty Free and next to the bookstore to sit and read. At least I was in the internatioal terminal, I thought. These people, just by their very presence here, whether American or not, must have an idea that other cultures exist.

So I sat.

One very good thing about the States is that here you can go into a bookstore with a cup of coffee, pull a book off the shelf, sit in one of the comfy chairs that the store provides for you, and, if you want to, read the whole book before the shop closes and never be asked to buy it. I see no sense in buying a book when I can just read it at the bookstore -- but book sellers have discovered that people will still buy the books -- even if you give them a place to read it for free! Only rich people and I take advantage of this kind of freebie in the States. Everyone else is too proud to show that they are trying to get something for nothing. I don't care if people see me pinching pennies or trying to get something for nothing anymore. The French have taught me that where money, sex and food are concerned, there is no such thing as pride.

So, I plopped down, grabbed a book and pulled out my French language 'Philosophe' magazine (the November USA election special). I set it on the table so that everyone who passed could see that I spoke French. It worked. Seated in the comfy armchair next to me, a woman looked up from reading her book and reached out for my magazine thinking it belonged to the store.

« Oh » I said. « That is mine, but you can read it if you like. »
« Thank you she said. »
« Do you speak French? » I asked.
« No, but I read it. »

She and I started talking. She was an professor of ethics in Holland and a frequent traveller to the United States. She said that she had the travel bug and a fetish for the Southern states and the people here. I told her that I couldn't wait to get the hell out of here -- that I felt so heavy. I explained that I was beginning to understand that one of the great things about going to live in another culture is that one can unburden oneself of their own culture's irrelevant and unnecessary baggage.

For example, I said, one of the first programs on TV that I had seen upon my return featured Ozzy Osbourne. I told her that in France, I wasn't required to keep the cultural memory alive and know things like who Ozzy Osbourne is. I resented the fact that upon my return to the States that I was forced to remember. Moreover, I explained, that as an immigrent in France, I was not responsible to carry around France's useless cultural knowledge either... no one holds me, a mere American, responsible or considers me trustworthy enough to care for France's cultural heritage and know things like who their version of Ozzy Osbourne is. One clear advantage to going out and seeing the world. The Dutch lady explained that she too, feels this sort of lightness when she leaves Holland.

The conversation and the gross generalizations that I was making about the differences in European and American life attracted alot of attention in the bookstore, and pretty soon we had a crowd gathered around, everyone wanting to put their two cents in: A British woman, now living in the states explained how she has grown to love the states and our inability to understand Geography, though she pointed out that most Europeans would not be able to pinpoint more than 20 US states on a map. I admitted to her that it wasn't until I moved to France that I knew that the term British Isles did not refer to a little sunny Island paradise off the cost of Great Britain (and I am, technically, a British citizen). An American woman joined in and told us about her own need to leave the country for weeks at a time and her dismay over how quickly she seemed to reassimilate and lose the perspective she had gained by leaving.

Hearing I was from France, the American told me about the few weeks she had spent in France and the lovely French people she had stayed with and how she had grown to love them so much so that at the end of the trip she decided to ask them what they thought of Americans. After hearing what they had to say, she had never been so offended in her life. She said she left the next day and that she never spoke to them again.

« No, no! » I excitedly explained.

« This is how French people love. If they tell you all the things that are wrong with you...and critque you then you can be sure that they care for you »

«  Are you serious!? » « Yes, dead serious. If they didn't like you they would have said nothing. »

I understood her pain... it took me a long time to figure that out and to understand that just because someone expresses their opinion, and you don't like it, doesn't mean that you shut them out of your life completely.

« You should get back in touch with them.» I said.

A French man standing behind us, turned and laughed. " I am sorry if I am interrupting... but she is right... she knows the French."

Pretty soon there were nine or ten people of all different nationailties just hanging around talking about all the places they were going and all the places they had been... until finally, the Dutch lady and I got up to take our planes. I admitted to the group I was flying domestically, but that I needed a minute in an international environment before I could plunge myself back into the heart of America.

Finally, after about 2 hours of conversation we all said goodbye congratulating each other on contributing to improving multi-cultural understanding and international relations.

It was really nice... I am pretty sure it wouldn't have been as interesting in the domestic terminal.

Showgun -- A Credit Card Samurai

I took it up on myself after seeing this same damn commercial repeated over and over because I have been watching like 10 hours of television every day, to write a complaint letter to Discover Card (for you European readers, it is a credit card like Visa and Mastercard that you have through your bank only there is no money in the bank when you use it but... ah fuck it it is too hard to explain)


Dear Discover,
I am writing to express my extreme displeasure with an advertisement for Discover Card that was recently broadcast on television. "We are a nation of consumers" says the spokesperson, "and there is nothing wrong with that." I find, that considering the financial climate, this is a very inappropriate message to be sending out. Furthermore, I consider myself and the people that I love to be human beings rather than consumers. I was not put here to consume. I was put here to live and learn and I am deeply offended by Discover reducing the American population, myself and my family included, to something less than human.

Signed,
A former Discover card member.



Ha! Good for you, Elle. I thought. That'll show 'em!

But then screeching to a halt, on the heels of that self-congratulatory celebration came the thought. "Damnit! Its still happening, "I am turning back into an American and becoming one of those preachy, irate, entitled complaining types." If I were French, I would have just turned off the TV, gone to the cafe to hear some accordian music and smoked a cigarette or something.

"You are American, Elle!"

My sister screamed at me a few days after I got here...

"and so am I and I am going to the store to buy some food so I can EAT EAT EAT! Cause I am a STUPID, fat American!"

"Vas-y!" I screamed back as she slammed the door and fired up her Camaro. I ran to the door and screamed out

"Et tu n'est pas grosse!!!!"

She isn't fat. Never has been and she knows it and since I now have this French compulsion to be blunt and call it like it is, I am required by French ideas of what is good and noble to apply this this ethic fairhandedly and to correct people when the say something that empirically seems false, regardless of whether or not they will take it as a compliment. It wasn't because I was concerned that she would think she is fat that I chased her to tell her that she is not... rather it was more important that I be right and even more important that I show her that she was wrong in making the assertion that she was fat. Yay! I won.

Anyway, I had a Discover card like 15 years ago, before I cut it up along with all my other cards, threw them out then cancelled my accounts. A few years later, like an imbecile, I opened them all again. Credit cards are bad news.

I loved, at least when I first got to Europe, that precious few people even understood the concept of unsecured revolving debt. I remember walking through the airport in Cologne one day about two and a half years ago, just after coming back from the city center where I had been shopping for bargains when a German representative for Citibank stopped me in front of his small table with pamphlets and tried to convince me to apply for a Visa card. I had wiped my hands clean of credit cards before coming to France and was living on a cash basis and still am.

The German held out a credit application to me and invited me to apply. I thought for a minute then turned to him and said...

"No way!" and then started to run off
"Well," "you don't have to use it" he said chasing after me.

I shook my head no again, wanting to tell him that he had no idea the sort of damage those little plastic things could do. He couldn't possibly understand the devestation it could bring if it caught on in Europe, and if everyone started to sign up for his card. I struggled thinking of a way to explain to him the dangers.

I knew then that Germans liked to critcize the States for our violent society and lax gun control. I had had two German girls living with me in New York City and we debated these things frequently.

"Guns." said Kristina, a commuincations student from Jena, "There is violence in the states because there are guns everywhere!"

Every German I had ever spoken too expressed the same sentiment and just didn't understand how we couldn't make such an obvious connection.

"If you have a gun in you are like nine zillion times more likely to shoot someone then someone who doesn't." she said

"Oh you are a crazy German, Kristina. People kill people. Guns don't kill people."

"No! I can't sign up for that... those things are dangerous" I told the credit card dealer.

"What's dangerous?" he insiste "If you are responsible, you take it, put it in your top drawer and only bring it out in case of emergencies."

"Well." I said considering his response. "That is the same thing that people say about keeping a gun in their house in the states. 'We'll keep it in the event of an emergency,' and then what happens? Well, there are always emergencies."

The man set the application back on the table saying "Oh. Well, you are right. Have a nice day." he said.

Just a Petite Poo

I have invented a little fantasy while hanging out at Panera bread. In it I would happen upon French people speaking French and saying bad things about Americans in French and then surprise them and say « Aha! Ce n'est pas gentile! » revealing to them my advanced level French skills and then watch their shocked response. Then the French people and I would laugh and drink coffee together spending the rest of the afternoon speaking French so loudly that we would drown out all the English speakers reading their bible verse and just be French secularist snobs together.

Sadly, I haven't caught anyone speaking French in Knoxville, so I haven't been able to realize my French cultural elitist fantasy yet.

The closest thing was that exchange at the Liquor store the other day where my sister and I went to buy her Spanish bubbly wine/champagne. I am not sure if it counts though. The clerk, trying to impress us, said in a thick American accent...

"C'est tres tres bon!"

"Oh," said my sister "You speak French?"
"Oui." he responded. "I just said that this was very very good." he said translating for us.

"C'est vrai? Mais c'est espagnol, c'est même pas de vrai!" Really... but its Spanish. I said... It isn't even the real thing. 

"No, no no." He said waving his hand desperately at me

"Just a petite poo. Just a petite poo."

Really that was it -- the extent of his French.

The old Southern Man working the other register, who had moments earlier shocked and horrified me by telling a shy female customer after she walked up with her bottle of whiskey, saying.. "Ok. I am ready to go!" to which he responded "Well, you aren't yet, but if you drink that you will be" snickered at his colleague who by then was turning red and explaining to me in English that he had lost all the French he had learned somewhere over the years.

 "Oh boy." said the old man "You're in trouble now."

Everyone in the line all sinners, clutching their bottles tightly to their chest and trying to keep their heads down for fear of being seen by the respectable people who send someone else to buy their booze, started laughing.

Sigh. I am a total snob and just go around trying to show off. This is what my sister would say but she's conceited so she has no room to talk. This is the first time that I have come back to the states that I have found it so difficult. It is probably because I came thinking about staying -- hmm seems I have changed my mind.

It also could be that now, with the recent events on Wall Street, that I finally have confirmation of all the things I only suspected before and now that everything is laid bare I just don't understand why the whole country hasn't transformed itself into something... I don't know something less American.

There are worse places in the world I could be, I remind myself. Truth is, I know it is my self-loathing that is making this so difficult. I have a Woody Allen thing going on.

I only want ot be seen as American if I am outside of the States and in the States, the last thing I want people to think is that I am is one of them. Here they let just about anyone be American. Well except for Sarah Palin, she has criterion.

Banging Heads: Two Girls and Jesus at the Light Pole

"Let's face it, Elle, you wouldn't have been able to come here at all if it hadn't been for me buying you the ticket! Just -- Go ahead! Go! It's on me! Merry f-ing Christmas." I, for less than a thousand bucks, was apparently, now indentured to my older sister.

Two weeks after I arrived, I flew from Knoxville back through Atlanta to visit my mother where I had a three hour layover en route to Vegas. I used my frequent flyer miles and got the ticket all against my sister's wishes.

My sister is not doing so well. After twenty years of being a prisoner -- now she is taking them. But, I am not held hostage easily. While she was figuratively locked up for most of her twenties and thirties, I was constantly escaping.

"Il n'y a pas un homme qui peut t'attrapper, Elle."  Said my bank man over lunch just before I left. "There isn't a man who can catch you."
"Oui. Je le sais." I responded.

Men, I learned early -- after watching both my older sisters get pregnant in their teens and be dragged off to the other side of the country by young men who put them in cages far out of our reach -- want to possess women and think it is their right. Most all the problems in the world come from the dynamic that ensues. I would like to find something snappy to say that puts the guilt also on women, but I think we get blamed enough as it is.

My bank man tried his best to get me to come see his 400 or something square meter house. He has been trying to convince me that my recent anxiety and existential crisis mean I need to have a baby, preferably his.

The last man who told me I needed a baby was my ex boyfriend – the one who called me sa 'papillion'(his 'butterfly'). click here too -- he is the guy feeding me the chocolate cake

"Do you ever think about starting a family and getting married?" He asked me one Christmas from his parent's house in France.

"Maybe, but only if I find the right person." I responded to him from my lonely apartment in New York where I had been crying over him for weeks. He broke up with me not long after that.

In my defense -- he had told me the November that he left me in New York before that Christmas exchange that I was a 'wild horse' and that he wanted to be 'careful not to break me and my wild spirit.' How was I supposed to know he was thinking seriously about marrying and having babies with a horse?

"But, I love you!" I told him. "Tu m'aime seulement quand je ne suis pas la."
"You love me only when I am not there." Now, about that, he had a point.

My bank man hasn't reduced me to an animal yet, but when I told him that I was working on very imporant problems for the world just by thinking... he laughed. I thought to myself that I shouldn't go see his house.

"Well," I told my sister. I am going to Vegas to see mom!" She slammed the door and stormed out. I have never really talked this way to Kerry, but something told me I needed to stand up for myself this time.

She is, after all, the one who taught me to do that. I was at the age of 7, a Catholic like my mother and until the age of 9 or 10 -- a believer in Christ. It came naturally to me this idea "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." The golden rule. Kerry was different. No one pushed her around.

As a child, I was always very impressed by the notion that Jesus had always turned the other cheek, even when people had hurt him. With the exception of my brother, and occassionally my little sister -- I never hit anyone. I suppose I thought them the only exceptions to the rule.

One day whe riding home to the trailer park on a school bus full of poor white kids -- the children selected by Clark County for a forced integration projet to be bused ito into a black school where most of 'the white trash kids' got their asses beat by black kids who had been getting their asses beat from other white kids and on and on -- I felt something familiar, a sort of hostility from the other kids on towards me. I was the fattest white girl in school and as such I often got the flack that everyone else couldn't deal with.

I heard the whispers going around on the bus: There was going to be a fight and apparently it was going to be between a skinny tough little blonde girl and I. Getting off the bus, I was terrified. No sooner had the bus pulled away than a gang of around 20 kids pushed me into the middle of a big circle where this blonde girl started hitting me. I did not strike back nor did I raise my arms to defend myself. The crowd of kids eventually broke up and went away leaving her, me and her best friend standing near the clubhouse of the trailer park staring blankly at each other. I asked her why she wanted to fight and what the problem was, but every question just got me in deeper and deeper trouble.

I outweighed them both by a good 20 pounds, so I wasn't easy for them to throw around. Somehow though they drug me over to light pole and started banging my head up against it. I just stood there and let them do it. That is what I thought God wanted me to do. When they say turn the other cheek, that's what I took it to mean. I was very literal as a child. Someone should have told me I that if I turned the other cheek it didn't mean that I couldn't turn the other cheeks and book it out of there. It wasn't until later that I learned how to run. I wonder if the little girls in Saudi Arabia who were allowed to die in the school fire a few years back for fear of showing their unveiled faces, accepted their fates in the same way that I had accepted mine that day. I can't say I remember the pain.

It was just before I started bleeding that the then 13 year old Kerry walked up, late back home from drill team practice.

"Elle, what are you doing?" They let go of my head long enough to let me look up and respond.

"I don't know."

"Get off of her." Kerry said calmly. They let go.

People always do what my sister says. I do not know why but she has a sort of authority that was, even then, undeniable.

"You do not let people just beat you like that." The girls took off. My sister hollered

"Stop!"

They turned around.

"Come here."

They approached.

"Not you. Just the blonde. You against her," she said pointing to me. In a fair fight! Elle, and this time, you fight back!"

So the blonde and I started fighting. She pulled my hair (Which did not hurt at all. I have a very thick skull.) and I dug my dirty unkempt nails into her arm as my sister stood watching as a referree. After a few minutes, my sister broke us apart and I got up feeling better, after having what felt to me like a sort of scalp massage. The blonde got up, bloodied with marks from my nails and skampered off like a wounded dog. I have never forgotten the feeling of my fingers going into her arms. It was strangely satisfying.

"Don't you ever let anyone do that to you again. Do you understand?" said Kerry. I nodded.

"Come to NYC! Get out of there, Elle. You can't help her if you are at her mercy." said my friend R, the ex Israeli special forces girl, after I explained what had been going on.

I almost took her up on it, but I decided that I couldn't just leave my sister. She is sorta getting her head beaten up against the pole here.

What she needs to do is get up and walk away from it all, wipe her hands clean not dig her nails in deeper -- but that is the problem with Kerry -- There is no telling her that. I am trying to pry her nails off...though I know I have to be careful. I can't be dragged to anymore light poles -- not even to take her place.

Knoxville's Champs

OK. Ok everyone. I called Sparky's owner about ten minutes after posting that last blog entry. Both my mom and sister said that it was better if I told Sparky's owner...as did many private comments sent to me by friends and readers of my blog... mostly Americans all echoing the same refrain -- that it was better to know the truth than to remain ignorant of it. This somehow gave me hope. Maybe Americans want the truth? Seems wierd to me but maybe we are ready for it.

The man asked even before I said hello.

"please say you found my dog?"
"Hmm. I'm sorry. I have some bad news for you."

I paced around my sister's apartment for ten minutes after that. I hate the telephone... all the bad news I have ever had has come to me that way and all the bad news I will ever get will probably come to me that way too.

I offered to mail him the collar. He said he didn't want it. I guess I'll keep it. Don't know why, just seems important.

Kingston Pike. Knoxville's Champs Elysses...without the sidewalks, the charm, the landscaping, the pedistrians... Here is a story from the Knoxville News... No dog or pedestrian is safe. Probably the guys from the dealership trying to drum up some business.

This is the street I was crossing to get to the bookstore. Scroll down and read the comments... my favorite is from Cheetosrule, apparently he has never been shot when walking his dog.