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I bought a coat too sophisticated for my tastes; the sleeves are of an opulent amplitude. Manon marvels as I eat whole huge pears. I think I’m losing my voice (literally literally, in the lettered sense). Liz invites me to an assistants’ night out: salsa dancing at the Cuban bar. I didn’t even feel like thinking of a piquant pun on salsa/sauce/getting sauced. “Past my bedtime, but salsa it up for me!” “Will do, catch ya later gator.” I went to sleep for 14 hours.

BA me manque, but I’m doing my best to preserve the delicate détente he established with my roommates, a peculiar balance of alienation and amity. For la plupart of an epic phone conversation with H Face, Romain dangled some jewelry in front of my face.

Romain: C’est à toi?
Me: Non…
Romain: T’es sûr?
Me: Oui…
Romain: Tu ne l’as jamais vu?
Me: Non…
Romain: Euh…je l’ai trouvé par terre, du côté de mon lit.
Me: oOoOo
Romain: [blushing and changing the subject, as if such innuendo were not the express purpose of this exchange] Et Akbar, il est parti?

I have a new batch of terrible Tuesday brats, but Zakaria, ever the prophet, swooped down amongst them and warned in a whisper, “Elle comprend! Elle comprend!” They still talked shit, but they also flirted with me more. I switched to Lucky Strikes, which remind me of my friends out on the west coast, who quote Hefner lyrics on Facebook walls to remind themselves of each other...my coat floats through my thoughts with embarrassing buoyancy.

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I was so happy the other day that even the gravest texts bore a lilt of life: that Hopkins poem about the fell of dark, ominous tidings from Liz, Fumer peut entraîner une mort lente et douleureuse. Someone actually told me "Franchement vous êtes jolie," and I hadn't so much as asked him for directions. Frankly France is lovely, maybe it's that Provençal light...or maybe it was the Adderall after all. I promised M. Laval, slouching all through his chemise, to be more vigilant in monitoring my casier; I dropped a désormais in conversation, which perked up his posture perceptibly.

Meanwhile poor Andrew reads his practice LSAT passages for the écriture. Last night he explained to me a thought experiment about an Indian, a basket of figs, a note...it sounded like a nice dream.

décalage horaire

Romain grows nobler every day; he never misses an opportunity to use the subjunctive. The other day, with a faraway look in his eyes, he ordered Marwan to clean the kitchen table, and the latter saint obliged with savage servility, scuttling low and dark around the bright blue Ikea...it was like something out of Moby-Dick, or Frankenstein.

I chat with Oskar (Oscar?) in his Texas persona, laid back but quick. I remind him he is exquisitely textual, many-personed, of a rich unreality; that's him all right.

I've had periods of dull mania. The delicious idea of eating Nutella on the subway, je suis folle, I shelve it. A sudden gust of wind and toutes mes feuilles se sont enfuies...I don't want them back (I do, I do). I rock in the wind and recite to myself. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours...are all the lost like this? Romain whistling en haut, the wind turning and turning in the wide outside.

communicable diseases

Some odd evenings I stumble into the souk by accident, making through creative navigation a labyrinth of only slightly serpentine alleys...the score from Battle of Algiers pounds in my head as I dodge darting children and guard my cache of grenades. Last night I made courge spaghetti à la JE dining hall, then forged a new nexus of the virtual and the real by half-consciously ashing on the discarded radio of my lungs. Later I used Romain's computer, the sole to siphon the neighbors' internet, and managed to taper on the foreign keys, which would arouse Liz's jealousy if her erotic imagination were as virtually mediated as mine.

Still I try to engage Liz in critical inquiry, knowing full well it will degenerate into a performance of political correctness.

"So, gays in the military...?"
"It works in Britain, and, like, Israel..."
"Yeah well there's this crisis in, like, heterosexual male subjectivity..."
"No I'm pretty sure homophobia, the Red States, some general wants gays to burn in hell..."
"...the fear of infection from within, the emasculation of being under the homosexual gaze, you know the Lacan thing about bathrooms?"
"Isn't that what they used to say about black people?"

We didn't really communicate anything...I wanted to make a pun about AIDS but thought that would communicate too much, although it only would have been topical.

recoucou

Romain’s in Rome, doing as the Romains do. Maelle counseled Liz to le taper; on va voir. Meanwhile Marwan, previously and temporarily the holder of the key to my happy home, retains an impish power over me. I let him use my phone and risk missed calls from pompiers, I share my chères cigarettes cher… In the kitchen I play Joy Division on repeat. These days the sincerely sinister, most notably in “Nip/Tuck,” seems to me gauche, but something about this music strikes me obliquely as right. My most sober pleasure is deriving etymological jeux de mots, more or less recherchés, as a dangerous supplement to the ever-errant righting and rewriting of my senior essay.

My mother, whose primary mode of communication is phatic, writes me e-mails just as saccharine and impersonal as the local news. One such missive literally included the phrase “Now on to sports,” as if either of us cared about the World Series, followed by detailed information about the household pets. Pious Parker had a stroke, but according to Mom’s most recent report his recovery is “nothing short of miraculous”; he’s back to begging for zucchini. To lend some levity she jibed that the dogs have sent her to the ER more times than I ever did in those tumultuous teenage years, once upon a time, which was just once, actually, just literally one time.

I drink wine alone, which isn’t done. False rhyme, the gap between writing and speech. I’m having trouble with English homonyms, I can’t write “write” write. I spend a lot of time on false rhyme, true ones too, and tongue twisters: “Ta Katie t’a quitté, qu’attends-tu, t’es cocu!” and so on.