White nights remind me of University deadlines and the gnawing terror that lived perpetually in the depths of my poorly fed student belly.
Tuesday night I took off of work and spent it in glorious conversation with one of the people responsible for Naked News in his delightful but overly bourgeois (we played spot what he DIDN'T purchase at IKEA) with two brilliant friends of his up from Toronto.
Talk varied between porn, gaming, paganism, the occult, the templars, the freemasons, british freemasonry vs french freemasonry vs modernized american freemasonry, hunting the moors and then making treaties with them. Illicit consummables, from green to speedballs to freebasing, to peyote and vision quests.
Talk of running away to Europe.
Talk of the spectacular food that Alex prepared, cooked carrot salad and spicy moroccan salmon with tomatoes and red peppers.
Talk that somehow had been crying to burst out, my brain suddenly less cowed by the universe after this too-rare of connections.
Gods, I miss insane Canadians. I spent my formative years there, and despite my wanderlust and perpetual homelessness, it would appear that I'm stuck with something irreversibly canadian in my blood.
Either that, or I'm really fucking cool.
Canadian it is, then, eh.
I brought along a bottle of wine that Guillaume had gifted me with, knowing that St-Emillion is my favourite, thinking I would be impressed that he bought a case of the most expensive stuff he could find.
But it's a good wine, and I figured the visiting barbarians of the great white North (even though Toronto has never seen REAL snow ;) would appreciate it properly, and would rid me of a ghost in my cupboard at the same time.
Did they ever.
Wednesday was designated resume day, and I truged down to la D�fense to work on it with Roxanne.
Who was having serious problems staying awake. She called today to apologize for her behaviour yesterday.
I thanked her for helping me out anyway, even though it took the better part of three hours and I got yelled at by my boss in the interim for not handing in the analyses I'd promised him on time.
Which resulted in a white night, when I found out that this project has to be finished AT THE CLIENT's by next Friday.
A bright white night, filled with caffeine and e-mail jaunts, thirty second instances of the dolphin pose (the only thing I can remember) to get my blood flowing, cherries to keep my mouth awake, gum to do the same when my belly started twisting, and on and forth.
At 6am I sent in a work of art. At four pm I sent in an even greater work of sheer FUD and barratin.
Over the course of the night I learned the aZerty keyboard by sheer force of need, I needed the ������ and so on, and the other keys fell into place after I got tired of getting them wrong.
In an hour, I leave for the opera, to cower before the greatness of a woman touted as one of the world's leading sopranos.
Then we're off to the bar, my beautiful blonde and I, to avoid being groped by Kebekois.
Two reports down, two to go. I still have an excuse to not stick around too long in the bar, just show my face and put forth the idea that I am still in the land of the living, then escape back to work.
Like I did last night, entirely forgetting Sophie's dinner party that she decided to throw when I accused her of never inviting me to her place.
Anybody got a spare PDA? This is beginning to get silly.
Last night, lost to the sour taste of panic, I heard the stern disappointment in my boss' voice and fought down the urge to just go to bed and quit because I'm going to get fired anyway.
Today, when the phone rang and the number was one from work, my entire body sank into a pit I haven't visited since the turn of this century.
It was Roxanne. Apologizing for yesterday, and telling me that she'd gotten the report of my performance in Limoges.
They're trying anything they can to get me back, to invent any project. Full marks for teamwork, leadership, initiative, and bonus marks for technical ability they didn't expect anyone to have. Again I am thanking Gemplus for the gift of low-level understanding that working there gave me of smartcards and APIs.
Unfortunately, their budget for any more outside consultants is zero. They're working on it anyway, and said to call back in the beginning of July to see if the presentation that I helped them prepare opened up any doors.
THey're already being commended on a few of the papers we published on our research - their little group is leaps ahead of the ENTIRE rest of the country on this project. Way head of the suppliers, even.
Suddenly, I am raring to forge through that next document.
Positive feedback still has the capacity to make me marvel at the sheer strength of its capacity for change.
Tell me that I'm good and you give me the power to be great.
And so many of you do, so often.
Thank you.