How to curb the amount you eat over lunch (monstre patented techniques!):
Eat lunch with a gang of maniacal limougeos and participate in the conversation regarding pussies.
Vivi's pussy, that is.
The one that woke her up at 3h20.
See, now I understood what everyone else in the room understood.
I didn't realize she was talking about her female cat and the dead bird that he brought in through the window.
Marie and I ended up laughing so hard we couldn't see our dinner plates through our tears.
I guess you had to be there. Or as depraved as the lot of us seem to be.
Us.
"She's never going to be able to work in another company again, if she tries to carry on this conversation in some stuffed-up parisian hellhole."
I'm paraphrasing Limoges-Guillaume, of course, but he's right.
Now step two in this Incredibly Simple Yet Effective diet plan is to skip your chocolate pie dessert, leaving it in the fridge for the second day in a row, and carry the coffee that JP insisted on buying you up to the t�l�-conference room on the third floor.
Where Marco and Limoges-Guillaume have already set up the wall-screen TV.
(Note that we call it a wall-screen TV not only because it hangs on the wall, but because it takes up the entire wall it is hanging on.)
And the France-Uruguay footbal game is already playing.
Swallow your guilt at the little time left to finish your project and surmout the unforseen bugs you encountered this morning, and sit through at least the first twenty minutes, until your daily never-goes-away urge for an after-food cigarette actually goes away, along with any thoughts of dessert.
Leave the gang to their football (soccer) watching while you go downstairs to install a packet sniffer to see whether the hell your pam-ldap queries are being sent encoded in TLS or not.
They're not.
Yet.
But while it's compiling, think about football and hockey.
Think about grace. Think about how although you've played hockey, you might just enjoy watching football a tiny bit more more, how despite being more intimate with the difficulty of certain movements and manipulations in hockey, the utter lack of violence and surplus of space and appreciating that you couldn't even run the entire field without falling over gasping, you might just like watching football better.
Watch a player get a carton rouge for something. Argue that it should only have been a carton jaune. Realize that in hockey, there are no cartons at all, and that this makes a difference somehow, or perhaps it's the bizarro backwards european politeness.
Some of which is good, some of which is just as hypocritical as anything else.
Remember that the kid at the bus stop this morning, who asks you for a light every morning despite you never having one, suddenly reminded you of a happy moment.
His floppy hair and sharp features and slightly-gangly adolescent frame, and especially that charming akward grin, reminds you of a TV character.
Yes, a television character.
Realize that you're not filled with self-loathing at making this connection.
Proceed to think about the kid on that tv show "Ed" that David still tapes and who will hopefully let me watch old episodes of that I've missed, chez lui one day.
Remember the kid and how much you wished you'd known him in high school, the way he gets excited and passionate about the most wonderful things, about Thoreau and integrity.
Remember discussing Thoreau afterwards, rehashing important lessons learned and re-reading underlined passages, thanks to a TV show.
Remember what a great time I had.
Realize that you don't always need to run to the woods to learn how to live. Realize that sometimes you manage to do it now.
Look at the kid who's now crossed the street to the bus stop heading the other way, and hope that he's got as much wonder in him as all the people and all the moments of my life, even the bits with the television shows in them.
Thank you, strange young man with the floppy hair, and thank you David...
Another thing that seems to be healing. I don't have to hate television anymore to not lose too many precious hours watching it.
And I'm going to head upstairs for the last ten minutes of the game, and not feel guilty about it, or cringe at the gang in the corner with the cigarettes.
And Andy and her story advice...
(along with Marv's, of course)
Might just have given seed to a place that was very dry in my head for a very long time. And I don't care if it's cheesy and redundant and classless and uncool and been done too many times.
It's a start, and a story.
All these little things... So wonderful, each of them.
EVen the Woody Allen movie that I got dragged to at the repertoire theatre last night wasn't so bad. Someone just needs to explain why he's funny to me, and why he's not just pathetic like my dad instead...
But even that, is not a frightening thing.
Not in the quiet sunshine, not in the ab-crunching laughter.
I mean, really, how many people work their abs while eating lunch?
Multi-tasking at its finest, and we didn't even have to try!
I'm such a crackhead.
Post-game update.
That's the most exciting null game I've seen since the Stanley cup playoffs went into overtime in 1994...
Partly due to various coworkers (the room was packed for the last 13 minutes) yelling out extremely educational things like "Dugaris!!!" "DUGACHIS!!!!" and moaning in various simultaneously deep and sharp tones.
Good gods, I know how some of these guys moan.
Just wandering upstairs after the swiftly disappearing Jean-Marc and giving the secret password (a kiss on the cheek of gran-pappy) to gain access to the room, was a brilliant moment.
We wandered down to the coffee room afterwards to discuss chances-this and unfairness-that and watching people pick their next favourites in case France doesn't win... Eventually everyone filed out but the core group of us, Alain (my boss), LG, Marco and I, and they taught me history of football in France, Bernard and the way he bought out a team that inadvertently won the cup for France in '98, this player or that player's temper, record, affinity for kicking people in the ankle, the reason that Germany won 8-0 against Saudi Arabia having to do with a bunch of giants playing against a bunch of midgets, to which I pointed out that frogs are midgets compared to good canadian lumberjacks, at which point LG announced
"I didn't seen Canada in the cup roster, did you?"
And Marco shook his shaggy little head and we all laughed from the belly and headed for the stairs.
Not bad for a 0-0 game.