Last weekend I had dinner with Liz and her colocs, who are nice enough despite their reductive politics; postcards reading SARKO=BUSH are plastered on the walls among an impressive array of multi-cultural capital, including my favorite fetish of authenticity, an African mask straight out of a Sembène film. Liz and I lovingly peeled Persian cucumbers and I sneaked some skins. When Lucas cracked an egg I felt compelled to share a joke, a staple in my father’s repertoire, often inflicted upon waitstaff at moderately-priced French restaurants:
Q: Why are French omelettes so small?
A: Because in France one egg is “un œuf”!!!
Lucas doesn’t speak any English, but he got this one right away…he just pretended not to, to be polite. Later I was borne by national feeling to a boîte de nuit. My cohorts, a pair of marins-pompiers and their elfish copines, kept tousling my hair and asking me “ça va?” I found this unnerving because in most social situations, no matter how hard I strive to m’amuser, I always look like I’m about to cry…in the past this has inspired such self-fulfilling inquietudes as “Are you sure you’re ok?” and “Eat, eat, have a zooloobia!” Naturally I burst into tears and was appeased only when someone explained that en fait it’s quite normal to ask “ça va?” with great frequency over the course of an evening. The pompiers drove me home at daybreak and I awoke at five p.m. to an empty apartment; the newly installed internet router taunted me with ambiguously flashing lights. I’m pretty sure it works, but my roommates haven’t told me the password, and I don’t know quite how to ask them…the password for the password, the key that is itself a code, a metaphor for feeling like everything is a metaphor, but for what? I spent all night eating bitter pomegranates in front of TF1. Every television commercial in France features Zinedine Zidane, which brings back stark memories of last summer; he is the only celebrity who has ever figured in my dreamlife.
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