A'ight, that's it, I'm never going to be a real cinophile.
*grin*
I'm such a geek, I was actually looking forward to the promised showing of "A Beautiful Mind" on the flight back to Paree, and by the time the lights started flashing I opened one eye, and swiftly shut it again, the pretty pictures nowhere nearly as interesting as shutting out the terrifying anti-anglos stuffed into the seats beside me.
Not that I'm going to start my anti monolingualism rant again.
Paris looks exactly like Montreal from one thousand kilometers in altitude.
My most prominent thought at that point: "if I had a parachute..."
...which reminded me of a fleeting conversation at Friday night's party with Yet Another Really Cool John, who left early because he was going flying Saturday morning.
Planes without engines, he claimed to prefer the slow drawn-out adrenaline rush, surprising me by using my own metaphor at me - comparing the week-long cocaine-like high of skydiving and then explaining how when the rush creeps up on you on even quieter cat's feet, it lasts even longer.
Openly admitting the addiction to the rush. Admitting it to himself and the room at the same time, not hiding from a word of it.
Who was it that was standing beside me as he stooped for one superfluous hug goodbye, copped a feel and sounded like he intentionally mis-pronounced "have a great par-tay" with "have a great body"?
He was SOOOOOO cool right up until then.
The rest of the party was more of the same, all the best people leaving early and all the scariest staying behind with their sticky hands until Seb and Steven and I snuck out the door.
Marv, in case I didn't thank you enough on Saturday, thank you so much for sticking around and breathing a slice of our particular brand of sanity into rooms that had long since lost just about everything.
Remind me why I keep throwing these?
(Cuz you're an idiot dad. -- Heathers moment)
Saturday was as brilliant a Saturday as any I'd spent in Montreal, on the mountain, grinding grass stains into my jeans with David's girls.
We played on the see-saws, the swings, the monkey bars, the climby-thingy, and tried gymnastics in the grass.
We ate hamburgers at Harvey's and by the time David dropped me off at home I was lost from lack of sleep and the brilliant outpouring of energy that certain surroundings pull from me the way a brilliant conductor pulls notes from his symphony band.
I crashed. For an hour. Missed Isabelle's party, missed the boys, didn't miss the guilt trip.
Got to CF's party just in time for the depanneur brown-water to hit, for hugs and giggles and outrageous amounts of physical contact from operatic bisexual women.
And origami. Where in hell do you find pipecleaners in Paris? I've got a fistful of lillies the size of my thumbnail that I might just mount on twist-ties and curl about this or that antenna in my appartement.
Which hasn't changed.
Not even the smell, faded jasmine incense and the mimosas that lived on my table for so many weeks, fancy shampoo residue and the pervasive slight dampness that every building in Paree seems to harbour.
And then there is Amsterdam. I nearly missed my connection to Paree, sneaking out for one last glimpse of the tulips, to beg a conversation from on of the billion people that speak far too many languages and are all too eager to explain how to say this or that word in the two or three languages I don't have it listed in.
In Dutch, those conveyor belt thingies that carry people across the airport, are called "Rolpad".
I love that.
I also love that there are upalators everywhere, but no downalators, and you have to take the stairs to head back down unless you've got a baby carriage or something non-stairable, at which point there is no shame in elevator-ing down a floor.
I had a billion other observations rush through my head, the usual travel-lucidity, eyes too wide, swallowing everything, too many observations at once that unless I wrote them down the way we tried to sometimes on amphetamine days, I'll have to wait for them to fly back and explode in the forefront of my brain to remember them.
And yet I learned from each thought nonetheless.
Coming home to a mailbox that took twenty minutes to download, most of them from work...
...I chose the busiest week of the year to fuck off on vaccacciones.
Consequently, I have a meeting about the Swiftnet project at 10am tomorrow, which'll last until noon, and then I'm off to the gare to hop a train for Limoges where I will spend every available minute reading the several hundred double-sided and reduced printouts that I carried home with me two weeks ago.
In my mailbox were two more job offers for Ottawa, one of which was particularly right on the spot. Object oriented, cryptography, math games and a crew of madmen to do it with.
I'm going to apply sometime around 2am on Saturday morning, a couple of hours after returning from Limoges, time enough to swallow one more coffee and caffeinated mint that I smuggled back from my old Gemplus stash, and fix my CV to take out some of the whoring bits and put in some brain bits that I'd taken out for this place.
Ahhh, the sheer panic of having too much to get done.
It gives the heart time to rest and strengthen before facing the issues that will make sleep far too long in coming in my hotel room in Limoges tomorrow night.