Marthaseille

My parents are here, which makes me feel alternately like a long-suffering native and an insufferable tourist. I've spent all week shuttling, à la marwanienne, between their bourgeois enclave in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, weakly weaving the threads of my life for their benefit and letting them unravel as I go back towards the looming beacon of Notre Dame de la Garde.

Before I went running last week, I joked to Marwan that I was going to smoke immediately afterwards, pour équilibrer, and by that gesture which inverts Romance to Realism, a gesture that, pour équilibrer, is itself Romantic, he literally had a perfect pétard waiting for me when I came back. This gave me a dangerous sense of my own power over him, such that these past two weekends when he has stood up me and my parents to go to work at Quick Quality Burger Restaurant, I'm more than un peu deçue, mostly because this conversation will never happen:

Marwan: Hello mister how are you yes I am fine, you do what in your life??
Dad: Well Marwan, I'm an employment lawyer.
Marwan: Sérieux?

My linguistic relations with my mother and everyone else remain emphatically phatic, and the longer I live in a foreign country and the more I watch this video the more I'm convinced that contentment lies in communicating without content, or at least devaluing content, and eating organic vegetables. I understand my students' extra-academic exchanges only when they turn meta, when someone thinks to whisper "Mais chuuuut, elle comprend ce que tu dis!", and, by an operation of metonymy, I can pretend that this is true. I asked young Yasmine if she knew what the message emblazoned on her t-shirt, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL HOOKERS, meant; she mimed the action of hanging a coat on a hook, repeatedly, despairing that I would never grasp the concept...after a while I said Yes, Exactly.