The latter half of this week has been a study in gentle euphoria, beginning with a relatively impromtu pilgrimmage to St-Joseph's Oratory for a stunning (yet somehow rather swiftly paced) rendition of Mozart's Requiem.
I'd never heard it performed before, not by a mature and confident choir, not in person, and certainly not in so accoustically stunning a millieu as the crypt, esconced in brilliant white stone, gleaming so many hard-worn stairs up the side of the mountain.
It's still in my head, still playing on the stereo, I wake up with Lacrimosa lilting tearful refrains, I make love slowly and luxuriously to Confutatis Maledictis every night. Sometimes it plays, pouding out slowly from speakers perched slightly too high up on the wall, sometimes I hear strains of it resounding in the back of my head.
When I collapsed into his arms afterwards, on Wednesday, when I described it simply and deliciously as "the most beautiful thing I've ever heard", I meant every syllable with a certainty that has been all too rare the past few months.
And so the superstition goes that Mozart helps you think smarter. Dunno what it was but by Thursday afternoon, not only had I helped solve two, count 'em TWO x509 certificate questions on the OpenSSL mailing list (in private e-mails though, I'm still too shy to answer questions back to the entire list), but my code miraculously started working again.
Two weeks late, considerably faster than the last project, and despite strange tension and pressure coming down on us from on high, we survived. Everyone survived. We've all been doing so much overtime lately, that going out, going to movies, curling up on the couch and renting something profound and brain-teasing has become a vague memory.
But not this week. This week we caught a movie on Monday, went to fetish night at Foufs on Tuesday where our arrogant heroine watched the fire show with a critical eye, catching movements here and there that I'm half-able to do but screw up on the third iteration.
Then last night was the culmination, my code working, my next project already half-designed, my knowledge of PKCS-11 (and 7 and 12 by proxy) rising exponentially, and my knowledge of the SSLEay implementation bounding along nearly as delightfully.
Last night we curled up on couches at Ian's place, which has become so much more comfortable since the pressure of polygamy has been taken away at David's behest, hugging and discussing blowjobs (the topic of the month it seems) and little purring gay boy describing specific un-circumcised penis techniques, and this morning when Tia and I went over them in my office I think Peter (who by then had ingested six 25mg capsules of ephedrine) nearly blew a gasket.
But driving home from Ian's, heading into work this morning with my newly-broken-in-bright-blue rollerblades gleaming proudly at me from my passenger seat, wandering out to lunch with the teammates and discussing our favourite bikini calendars and why fellatio is empowering to a woman, not demeaning, and planning to take our boss to a strip club for his birthday...
...and naming Viet as a vietnamese mafioso, and claiming Sebastien to be a yuppie in beatnik clothing, and leaving Peter to his drugged meandering, and listening excitedly to all the movies that Benoit is going to bring back from his vacation in France next week -- we're going to housewarm his place with meat, wine, and french comedy.
And I have a partner for the next project, and we already know the skeleton of the token API.
I've done more this week than I have all year, but somehow the glow and the warmth and the brilliance of the million moments I've etched into memory have turned it into one glorious vacation.
And I can still feel princess warm and close in my arms, stuffed into a pew together at the oratory.
~