Are we still Tuesday?
Two interviews and a lifetime later...
...there are mathematical symbols rattling about in my head.
When an interviewer has to stop and ask you to explain your answer because it was too complex in it's design, I think that's a good thing. Of course, this is the contract in Limoges, which they modified to two days every two weeks for three months, while they try to implement my host of wacko ideas.
This will apparently not do if I have another contract at the same time and have to fuck off a couple of days here and there seven or eight times.
The other interview was one of those the-world-is-a-marble moments that stretched into hours. One moment my counsellor is warning me that this lady interviewer is strict and hard, ten minutes later we're jabbering at each other in polish and talking about our home towns. An hour later she's thrilled to have met me, thrilled to have found a geek she can discuss Mandelbrot sets with (even though they had nothing to do with the mission at hand) and my counsellor is shaking her head with wonder.
I love it when people do that, egocentric as it is.
Of course, the interview was with HR , but I guess this means I at least make it to the technical interview.
Unique profile, she said, and my heart was near to bursting. The week I just spent rewriting my resum� was intended to hide that, too complicated said my counsellors, too unorthodox. Somehow it fell so sweetly that she got the original, that she looked at me with the eyes of someone who understands where I want to be. In the bowels of a laboratory strewn with unidentifiable pieces.
Gods, I hope. It's such a thrilling contract. So much what I want to dive into and drown my suddenly alert brain amidst greek symbols and un-pronounceable ciphers.
Chtulhu is so pass�, long live the new flesh. I mean math.
Stumbling into my appartment hours later, one look at my grimacing laundry pile and I hadn't realized I've learned so many filthy french words.
Tired. Gods, I was drained, ready to lie down and wait for morning.
Then I checked my messages.
Oh dear. When Gavin told me he was coming to Paris this week and not Spain after all (an ooooold friend from London) I hadn't realized he meant he'd been staying with me. That conversation was two months ago.
Moments later the phone was ringing and Seb was demanding that I head out to the movies with them, Crystale would be so happy to see me, he said.
I really have to learn how to say no, only then so much more magic wouldn't have happened, would it?
He was at my door before I'd even finished listening to Gavin's series of messages, the "I'll call you in half an hour", "I'll call you in an hour" the "I guess I'll get a hotel room for the night"...
By the time we got to his hotel he was gone for the night and I left a rambling panicked note apologizing, taped to his door.
We're meeting in the morning, after I pick up my carte de sejour, and hopefully snow pants for the ski weekend.
Somehow from there we found ourselves racing the streets of Montparnasse looking for a movie that we hadn't missed the beginning of, eventually ending up in a bar filled with screaming students dancing on tables.
Then WE were dancing on tables.
And playing pool.
And you know it's going to be a looooong game of pool if Monstre is the fifth to play and the first to sink a ball.
From there we walked the kids home to their places in Montparnasse and somehow got sidetracked again.
To the most wondrous bar.
La Beliere.
When David and I had wandered the streets of Montmartres, I had itched at his little guidebook. But I remembered when he read out the bit about Montparnasse being the continuation of Bohemian Paris.
It is. In this tiny little bar with a piano up against one wall, filled with uncountable turtlenecks and jackes with holes in the elbows, the most unassuming boys playing the most wonderful things on so many instruments, spontaneously, gloriously.
I can still hear them.
Hopefully, strains from that old piano will still be echoing against the wooden floorboards of my skull when I wake up in four hours, and maybe we'll try to spend a whole evening there tomorrow night.
Ahhhh, bohemian paris. How did you become lost in the concrete sprawl of La Defense?
Why did you let your embers get so hidden.