I could have written a treatise on the brilliance of the Yellow Submarine with my head pushed back into Alex' IKEA couch in his IKEA living room, pushing as hard as I could to maintain some liaison with reality.
What a gorgeous movie. I feel so stupid expounding on its virtues so many years after everyone I know has understood every aspect of it, but I'll pull the "always doing everything backwards" card and sit back and revel in the wonder that is the growth of the mind.
The first time I saw that movie I'd never heard of drugs, liverpool, or puns. I thought it was a fun cartoon and at least I was clever enough to d�niche a few of the metaphors and marvel in them.
Thirteen years later, my laundry chugging away in Alex' kitchen and turkey defrosting on his stove, I continued to marvel, and added to my score of bad movie watching habits the constant near-tumbling from the couch at this or that leaver-puller pun, singing aloud the first bars of all the songs that ended up quoted as lines in the movie.
I cried when they invited the blue meanies to Pepperland. We paused the movie to discuss the evolution of Beatles music from the pop stuff that I still have a hard time not finding a little irritating, to music I'd never known about until this year, and am learning to appreciate more and more.
I went home with a backpack full of laundry, a belly full of lemon-and-spice turkey and ratatouille and moroccan salad, and a brain full of visions, a couple of books, and The White Album.
We also watched a handful of Evangelion episodes, finally figuring out that I'd already seen the first sixteen and not only the first eleven, and episode seventeen and eighteen had me cringeing and shivering and strange things crawled along my shoulderblades when Eva 1 ate the S2 module of the other angel.
*shudder*
Sunday we ran and ran and ran. We watched the football game and cried for germany. We were too busy catching up with Cristal to watch pay much attention to the game itself but whenever Br�sil scored a goal we could hear it explode in the cour.
They walked me to the Salon de Th� where I was meeting my cousins and Andr� came out and charmed their proverbial pants off. Hours later, belly aching with laughter, singing Vaccaj's with Jackie, for the first time ever, I had worked up the guts to match my soprano to his tenor.
Jackie is the reason I got up the courage to take singing lessons. Jackie, a direct relation to my tone-deaf father, can sing with a warbling emotion that shakes me to the core everytime I hear him hum a tune.
He suggested conservatories and encouraged me and I was still terrified and when David and Steven and a thousand other people pushed me from behind while Maja pulled, I started.
It turns out that Jackie and I do the same practice lessons.
We sang them together in a tiny little tea house, surrounded by tart lemon and gooseberry pies, surrounded by family surreptitiously pretending not to watch us.
Tenor and shrill monstre, and I hid my voice behind Jackie's boom and still I felt that jolt of electric thrill to be singing beside someone so powerful.
After tea and cakes and ices, my first Salon de Th� experience, eighteen of the family wandered off to movies and homes and places, and Andr�, his three sons, and their spritely ninety-something grandmother who forgets herself and starts playing with her dentures on occasion, wandered past Napoleon's tomb and the thousand tanned kids playing soccer in the grass, and discussed Daniel's hardware prolems.
We talked until dark and ate cold chicken and veal and salad and fruit, and I called Cristal and they had just finished their picnic along the Seine with poor Alex in tow, and I managed to drag my three cousins out to the bar for after-dinner caf�s.
I was shocked to learn that two of the three little ones smoke.
They're alll wayyyy into the Beatles, and drugs, and Monty Python. We rehearsed sketches in bad english accents silly-walking all the way to l'Ile de la Cit� to meet the gang.
Then we laughed for a handful of hours, beating up on Wallace and his digital camera and beating on Gian-Carlo and his overt italian-ness, beating up on Dominique for being a windows guy, beating up on Yazziz for being Yazziz, and on and forth and when the beers arrived and the bartender asks "Who ordered the GUinness?" all three cousins yelled out "It could only be monstre!".
Wandering to the metro, Yazziz and I beat on each other and when we stood on opposite quaies we taunted his algerianness and he taunted my canadianness and his girlfriend spoke to me in arabic and looked all shocked when I answered.
Granted, I have no idea what I said.
Then random people from the quaies jumped into the mock-argument, and the evening got stranger until the trains arrived.
Then Alex left me at R�amur-Sebastopol and I buried myself in a new book and things got ugly when an angry young arab sat across from me and started screaming about Le Pen and how I should go back to my damned country.
It didn't bother me so much as if it had been overtly sexual somehow, unafraid of his shoves and screaming, I smiled inwardly that he was capable of still feeling that anger and being so damned witty and sarcastic with it.
Then he left, and it got sexual, three stops from home and surrounded by strong-smelling men.
One of them followed me home and kept asking me for a light and began swearing at me when I wouldn't respond.
When I keyed in the code for my front door my hands were shaking, sure he'd follow me in, and the door is so heavy there's no way to push it shut quickly enough.
He didn't follow me in. He just stood there staring in the doorway while the door swang far too slowly shut.
I raced up my stairs to shake loose the things crawling up my spine.
My dreams were peppered with strange nightmares, and tonight there's a Canada Day celebration at the embassy and Alex and I are going for a change of scenery.
Alex and his unassuming utterly canadian kindness are a guilty treasure in these dirty parisian streets.
I feel as though I've integrated poorly, unable to lose some cultural bias inside my head, for hanging out with so many Canadians.
Well, that's not right. One canadian, several Quebecois, who I am slowly cutting ties with.
Tomorrow, I'm checking out an appartment in the 11ieme, right by the Pere Lachaise cemetary and the fetish store.
It's fully furnished and rents out by the month, which would enable me to start liquidating my furniture and preparing to leave.
A strange coincidence that I happened upon it now, but it's motivating me to work on my CV, and while I doubt the large studio is what I'm looking for, perhaps, just perhaps...
It might change things inside my wee head.
On verra.
In the meantime, it's green tea bathtime, with Stanislas Lem.