Today I walked the streets of Senegal, sandals slap-tapping the ground and sweat beading off my arms beneath the sleeves of my spanking new t-shirt.
Sometimes you don't realize how much you've missed something until you're able to appreciate it again. Until it isn't gone.
Like these non-stark-white streets, devoid of monoculturalism or bourgeoisie.
Limoges is a striking place, but I'd forgotten what a glorious hue different shades of skin and wild attire add to the air.
______I'm not the cleverest girl, sometimes, confusing the amount of work that needs to get done with the idea that I need to spend that many straight hours in front of the computer.
The explosion on the train on the ride in, arriving two hours late, too tired to appreciate the adventure...
...didn't help. I was too busy staring listlessly out the window to get involved in the panic on the train. I missed an excellent adventure, but I'd been pushing so hard...
(I did sing bad 80s songs with the cab driver on the way back, though)
When the gang called from the P�rigord, I had to feign joy at hearing them. I spent all of Saturday bowed to the machine, I lost a beautiful day to what I thought was my duty.
Alright, I stopped for an energizing masturbation session in the bath, but that was it...
Ahhh, but then I discovered a chat room, for the first time in so many years. Nappyhed and an accoustic girl, a hunk of bologna and a sweet young man obsessed with spheres. There was something great in touching their individual brilliances.
Photographers, writers, sharing their work. I drowned amidst talent, thrilled to find something to move me from my zombie stupour.
Today, I walked the streets of my neighbourhood, at the foot of Montmartres, where I bought fresh food from the market to celebrate being in town for longer than two consecutive days.
I made the best spaghetti sauce ever (excepting David's, of course), meatballs the way Annie had explained them once, brimming with onions...
And I stirred the kilo of tomatoes and listened to the cheering in the streets through open french windows.
Football's pretty cool if it can make people that happy.
Car upon car, cheering and thrilled.
Today, I walked the streets cheering for Senegal, arms hanging with vegetables, and I am sitting at my kitchen table with my extra-long ethernet cable that Patrice made for me, and I am eating perfect spaghetti and peppering my work with momentous conversations in a tiny java window. Crossing souls, crossing ideas. Talk of everything from linux kernels and everquest to sockhops and abuse and equalism versus feminism, art versus quantification.
Poetry and granite walls, my farmer's tan showing off the geeky spaghetti-spattered logo on my chest.
I encountered humanity today, on the cobbles of the 18eme, and at my little kitchen table, sunlight streaming through the open window to warm my hair.
______Then the door buzzed. Immediate forboding. All those hours alone locked up with the machine and I wasn't ready for them.
Endless chatter, we did this and that and heyyyy Guillaume picked up a girl... I feel tremendous guilt somehow but she's a big girl and generally treats me like a psycho hosebeast so really, it can't work out better if'n he disappears awhile...
And Annik's crying. She's leaving in eight hours. She's "tout � l'envers". She's eating spaghetti, the rest of the kids left with the rest of the sauce, she's slurping down a hearty serving and she's halfway through a bottle of Chateau Fronsac that I had two or three sips of. Gulps, maybe.
Annik's crying. Or was. Now there's designer toilet paper all over the table, the marshmellows are all gone, and she's laughing that desperate I want to stop crying laugh. We're making fun of everyone she'll never have to see again. We're laughing about her stupid job. We're talking about the guy she left behind in Quebec who can't wait to see her but who gave her such a hard time about not being able to wait for her that she's not sure he won't resent her the moment he sees her immense grey eyes.
Annik's laughing to make the walls shake, tears streaming down her face.
I was there so many times, the latest only forty eight hours ago.
But today, I walked the streets of Senegal and breathed in the sun, and tomorrow the bankers are waiting for my super solution.
RS-232 is the predominant thing in my mind. I keep trying to tell myself that.