miracle at canna

Every day I go to work, twice. I am reprimanded for failing to say Bonjour, Bonsoir, Ca Va to each member of the equipe individually, for using the passive voice. Yesterday I ate most of a small early pumpkin. Today I ate lunch in a mosque…I have the profound sense I don’t do anything.

And yet I traverse great distances, I wind up on staircases. I carry bags of bread from the bakery, tourists point and tell each other, “Look! Very Traditional.” The ground around the arena is blanketed with rotting leaves, soccer balls pound against the walls, bugs bite me and I feel I am becoming part of this pit of History. Various members of the equipe don’t understand how I drink 10 1.5 litre bottles of Vittel a day, I don’t understand how they don’t. I used to just fill up the same bottle from the robinet, I hate wasting plastic, but it tasted too animal, vegetable, my neural pathways needed something more, and it is precisely this sense of profligacy that makes water a little more like wine…it’s Leah’s birthday, what cann I do?

jardin de l'internet

I've made little progress. I do yoga. At work when no one's looking I pique some pickled ginger and it piques right back, my body-mind commits speech acts all day but I remain the abject object of my own affectation. I use the internet at an ancient Roman arena where now kids play kickball. But I've transcended the internet...it's not even real. These days I'm more interested in virtual internets, like the restaurant. I have recurring dreams the premise and promise of which is repetition; three chefs turn out plate after plate in the Jardin du Luxembourg as I run laps, pausing every so often to set paper napkins on bread plates.

Dear Abou's gone to New York to become an avocat, my cabinet is empty, and if no one comes to me chercher at midnight tonight my Coach might turn into a kadu. Mao pouts her red lips, promises "ça va aller, chouchou," offers me a chocolate. I smear red cabbage with avocado. The (black) kitchen staff asks me if I know Barack Obama, if I would like to visit Africa in October, shut up I'm busy setting paper napkins on bread plates.

Only two weeks left of work, praise be to Allah or ardor, it adds up. I amble along Rue Monge, Adderall-addled, I mange almonds, apples, avocados, all AB. I feel awesome sometimes, awful full-time. I'd assign my body-mind the name Brother Assonance, barring bad associations, adding bar associations (to set, to raise, to pass, to drink).

chaque matin, pour gagner mon pain

Paris is Paris, business is business; I've spent the last week and a half tying bundles of nine napkins up with a tenth. I work at a cozy cafe with a bibliophilic bent and an archetypal staff. To give only one example, the soi-disant Madame Martine celebrated her last day before (forced?) retirement by making off with a client's sparkly shoes and belting out, hands in air, head thrown back, "C'est la luuuuut-te finale!" To give another, the Marseillais chef with the mane and snarl of a wild horse of Camargue sings slightly vulgar folk ballads and speaks only in improvised aphorisms. Everyone treats me like a strange animal whose genetic proximity to humans is unclear, handling me very gently and with only an optimistic expectation of sentience. At the same time I have the sense that someone has paid them to entertain me, with the predictable effect of skewing my perception of subject/object relations. We can see the Eiffel Tower from our window. At night it blinks wildly or turns blue...why?

sex ex post facto

These past few weeks I've been negotiating the fragile economy of the familial and the strange. I barely know my extended family but lately I've being seeing them a lot, relatively. My mother has dreams that someone is suing us, they just keep suing us, it's unreasonable, what does it mean? After my grandmothers go to bed we have long talks about marriage, tax, how women can't have it all. I know the entire corpus of community property.

Last night we saw "Sex and the City" with my cousine gamine. Mom liked it because the girls are Just Like Us: they buy expensive shoes, but they check out library books! After her nth glass of wine I was as short of temper as she was short on temperance and unleashed a half-hearted but full-throated invective about how the film was nothing but a delivery system for commodities (clothes, bodies) and how Miranda failed to "read Steve like a text," because people aren't made up of pros and cons but rather of prose and cons ("aw sweetie you made a little joke! good for you!"), i.e. texts and performances...at which point my mom muttered, "Everything is a text to you, isn't it," in the same tone in which she said I wouldn't appreciate "Eat, Pray, Love," because I haven't lived enough. Tomorrow I'll probably see the movie again and try to take a surreptitious camera phone picture of Warren Buffett's house, again.

Now on to sports: Lakers and Celtics, like the old days!

Last Lecture

On the bus between Gatwick and Heathrow I talked to a Texan married to an English accountant living in Romania, which is full of feral dogs; she has to walk with a stick.

For Mother's Day I went to Minnesota, where my mother made a whole set of chip and vegetable dips and then tried to make an "Obama Girl" of my father's 88-year-old mother from Mississippi. We did women's work: cooking, cleaning, and worrying in hushed tones over my grandmother. My cousin came over with his babies, who have the biggest heads. My estranged aunt took me shopping; she's on the blood type diet.

LA has been subject to some wacky weather. Hydration is my ardor and my arbor, but when I drink coffee the task becomes all but arduous. I sit on the floor of my room amongst all the wreckage I've accumulated in my life, begin to sort through it, and, overwhelmed by a heavy feeling that it's all too easy to go home again, break into heaving sanglots de fou. Costco brand green tea's got me trippin like ritalin, when it's ready it looks like a swamp. In each package, underneath the nylon sachet, lies an excess sprinkling of fine green powder, I rub it on my gums.

ma petite non

With the boys off at the front, Manon and I are spending some time entre filles this weekend...so far I've subversively eaten some of her taboule orientale and turned up the TV while she was on the phone; maybe tonight we'll have a soirée pyjama. She resembles more and more the little Russian countesses in War and Peace, shrieking and clenching her tiny fists when she doesn't get her way, or wandering the apartment with big, empty eyes, mouth slightly agape. She doesn't even seem to get any pleasure out of her music anymore...the blasts from her clock radio at all hours are technically correct, but lacking in feeling. I've learned a lot about the human condition from reading Tolstoy, and I think she's probably upset because not one of the young men who frequent our apartment has proposed to her. She's not a brilliant match, but...she has such nice eyelashes, and a dainty little brain, and it can't be denied that elle fait un effort:


Aujourd'hui

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 10:26
Damien Irving

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 10:26
Simran Paras

Manon a ajouté l'application Who Has The Biggest Brain?. 11:18

18 avril

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 20:48
Daniel Holms

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 20:48
Webster MsG

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 20:48
Damien Irving

15 avril

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 19:44
Sudhanshu Verma

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 19:44
Don Cooney

Manon voted for these singles on Most Eligible Singles. 19:44
Adrien Poitou

13 avril

Manon voted for these friends on Most Eligible Singles. 14:58
Schoebel Vincent

Manon a changé sa photo du profil. 14:58

Manon a ajouté l'application Most Eligible Singles. 14:47


I tell her every day, "Ma puce, marriages are made in heaven," but she insists that they are made on the Internet, which, she reasons, is shaped like heaven.

phonophage

Without the Internet in my apartment, my life is only mediated a medium amount, but I make do with metalanguage. A viellard sold me a weathered one-euro copy of Ulysse for fitty cent, because "vous êtes jeune." I watch Le Mépris most nights.

Last weekend Jennie, Jen, Alexandre and I made vegetarian meals à la provençale, tanned on the terrasse, and (almost) went to a beautiful island. Jen and I struggled nightly with the clic-clac:

Me: Clic!
Jen: Clac?
Me: Did it clic?
Jen: Yeah but…how do we make it clac?
Alexandre: Mais putain, hit recline!

I told my kids my “un œuf” joke, once they unscrambled the French and the English they seemed to get it. Then they offered me one of their own; unfortunately, l’anglais a effacé l’anglais:

Man arab meets woman english, he dit, he says, You want do party with me tonight? She says, Never! He says, I cannot do never, but never et demi?

Eventually I got the pun on “never”/“neuf heures,” but...it was too late. Soon after this a friendly feud broke out between two boys who usually agree on everything (“We have already fuck,” “Sometimes we like films pornos,” etc):

Subira: I am African!
Mel: I am Asian!
Subira: I am African!
Mel: …

…I think that was it. My girls meanwhile were doodling, giggling, as I approached covered their paper but begged me, “S’il te plait, dessine-nous un sexe, on n’en a jamais vu!” I drew them one…it was beautiful, perfect color.

You can never go home again, but Romain has gone to Rome again (so homonym), meaning I will never see him again until he joins Facebook. On the way to our romaintic farewell dinner which we let Marwan come to, he remarked how there was no one around at night in Marseille, and feeling this was a good time to parody/perpetuate racism, I dutifully and ominously replied, “Sauf les Arabes!” Romain loved this, and, feigning fear, warned, “Y a des Mabouds partout!”, which Marwan (not Arab) loved too.