Boucles-du-Rhône

A passable night s’est passé at the boîte; I was only asked “ça va?” one intolerable time. After a few hours of joyless dancing I drank too many paillassons, heavy on the pastis, with the predictable effect of feeling like I was being walked on, and that my function in life was forever to lie, flat and unremarked, on some kind of seuil. Soon I realized that I truly loved Stephane, the coloc who never was, as his red vest shone through the crowd, and a nymphet in a pantsuit popped a chili-peppered chocolate in my mouth; half I laisser tomber in my lap. Upon our return Romain and I found our apartment infiltrated with marins-pompiers, whom I half-hoped I knew, and Manon slumped in a wheelchair, having trop bu, à l’américaine.

My students are mostly assholes, especially Zakaria, a skinny pariah who flatly refuses to complete his worksheets. Most of these worksheets, granted, are inane, heavily focused on anagrams (LRAISUNJLTO? are you serious?), which are so lightly delightful in modernist literature precisely because they serve only for convoluted self-reference, figurative only in the sense of being both literally and not at all à la lettre. But I adore some of the gamest gamins, most notably a little boy with soft blond hair and a huge head who speaks to me in sweet quick French. On the last day before la Toussaint I was helping him with his rédaction on Karim, the Rebel of the Forest, when the sonorous bell a sonné, at which point he stood and said gravely: “Madame, c’est les vacances là.” I also harbor good humor for Rafiq, who when asked to approach the board and write a sentence in English produced instead his mnemonically-optimized phone number and a sly clin d’œil in my direction. Thug life.

I’ve finally been paid, in euros Gott sei dank, and I celebrated by buying a cahier for students preparing for their bac in German and an expensive hair product that holds, I'm told, the key to making boucles de rêve of my undreamt-of locks. Liz and I tried to come up with costumes for Halloween, but the best we could do was sexy assistante de langue, sexy fetish of cultural capitalism, or un enfantôme, a perversely Siamese calembour nabokovien for an aborted fetus.