Seuils

On Friday the teacher told me, dreamily, that she had to go upstairs “for trip to England,” and Ynes, instead of correcting her essay on her dream life (“I have no dream, I am girl perfect but I will say about girl perfect too Paris Hilton”), took this as an opportunity to splay herself, lollipop in mouth, on Amir’s desk. I let her do her thing…Amir wasn’t really into it anyway, Ynes has serious skin problems. I was helping a beautiful delicate girl named Camille when a cry started up chez Ynes; she was straight up kissing Margot (not as sassy, much better skin). All the Arab boys were all “Lesbian! Lesbian!”, all the white boys were all “Be Quiet Please!”, I was all, “Sexuality is a continuum…” I told Ynes she should be more like Camille, who was a very good student and probably didn’t eat much sugar…Ynes was like “Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes, No,” a joke which I only enjoy(c)ed in retrospect.

Later Liz texted to ask if I was feeling extra textual. I wasn’t sure if she meant extremely textual or hors de texte; the opposite meanings cleaved. My frequent searches for “Marwan” break Facebook, rendering the Search function temporarily unavailable and proving him a force more powerful than the internet…finally he divinely intervened to friend, and duly poke, me. “Tu vis sur internet,” Romain said solemnly, and since I often confuse Roman-featured Romain with the romanesque romans I read, I assumed he was using the passé simple of “voir” instead of the simple present of “vivre,” which explanation he graciously accepted in his vast nobility.

I spent the weekend in Cambridge getting wankered with Jamie and some other chavs in bars of mythic nomenclature, discussing Lacan’s wanton equations, the Prussification and Proustification of Nietzsche, and why Nietzsche and Jeremy Kessler are against public education. I hitchhiked to the airport with some Dutch chavs catching the EasyJet back to Amsterdam. At the terminal I explained to the cashier ringing up my candy that instead of converting my extra pounds to euros I was converting pounds to kilos; that got a grunt.

After arriving in Marseille too late, hors d’horaires of the navette, I’m back in my propre appartement propre, poking Marwan, reading about la jalousie persane and, with my carnet épuisé, writing vignettes in the paratext of the Persian Letters. The last entry, évidemment, was written by Ice Cream Girl...Happy Hannahkah baby.