Ever since marching through Les Miserables I’ve laid pretty hard off doing any actual reading. Maybe the internet has finally frazzled my mind for good. Let’s I hope not. (And sorry, I never did get the notes for that bitch onto the computer, it’ll have to wait until I’m back home.) But the reading of a book in little chunks off a tiny, glowing screen still raises questions for me. Thinking: “hey, I’ve got a quick free moment, why not try and knock off a few pages?” seems a bit unfair when I used to think: “hey, I’m so enthusiastic about reading, why not go spend a few hours curled up somewhere with a book?”
Technology cripples even while it gives so much. Do I lose my ability to sit and focus when such a huge portion of modern life is spent staring at beautiful, moving, blinking, but all-too-often non-dimensional, intangible, and attention-impoverishing things? Now that I’ve had an iPhone for 2 months—(supposedly) giving me an internet connection no matter where I am or what I’m doing, not to mention the ability to ping and be pinged by anyone I know—I suddenly feel a bit out of place without the thing in my pocket. Can’t leave the house without it. But for all I know with the added confidence that I’m less likely to get stuck somewhere is a worthwhile tradeoff for the dependence, or maybe the fact that the reassuring little brick lowers the bar to stepping out the door (in the least it’s easier to do without needing to predict and then memorize or write down whatever information I might happen to need).
But all the same. One of the best days I’ve had here in France was last sunday. I’d stayed the night in the city, woke up, talked for a while, then headed out. Hopefully to catch a bus. (I’d checked the times earlier on my telephone, so I could minimize waiting.) But about halfway to the bus, I got distracted by a fried-fat-and-sugar cart, and all of a sudden couldn’t get by without a bag of 7 little churros. So I ordered them, and talked with the two women in the cart in my sometimes decent and sometimes utterly broken french, they were nice. I mentioned that the process of making fatty dough followed by frying it and covering it with sugar was taking a while, and I had a bus to catch. They eventually got me the stuff, and it was good. During this transaction my phone died, at which point I no longer had a pulse for the exact time nor a very good idea of how long it’d take me to get to the bus stop. I ended up turning the corner just as the bus was pulling away across the street and about a block away from me, going the opposite direction.
Now I’m no stranger to missing the bus. The last one goes at 9:30 most days, and most anything social that happens here happens in the city proper, while I live up on the plateau about 25 minutes away by bus. I’ve got no problems walking home, it’s actually something I relish as long as I can pop in earbuds and listen to music for the trip (being under the influence of certain types of substance never hurts). But I was a bit tentative here, and ended up deciding that if I was going to walk home, I’d try and find a path through a forest that sits atop the big hill. So I headed towards the hill and forest, walking through a part of the city I hadn’t seen extensively.
At some point along the way the sun falling through a street climbing off to my left caught my eye, and I got distracted and wandered up that way. There was a pretty courtyard with a concrete foosball table built right into a concrete patio (outdoor foosball!) and the more common concrete ping-pong table (also pretty sweet). A couple of guys jogged past me, bewildered. Something in my head clicked and I decided to keep walking that direction. Rouen is surrounded on the north and east side (and I think west, not so much south) by hills. Nothing huge, but decent sized hills that plateau for a while. There’s a river that’s—
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and here’s where I gave up writing. Don’t really remember what I was trying to say—oops—but I think I was on some kind of halfwitted pro-con-technology spiel. But the moral of the story was on the day my phone had died and I was stranded downtown, I walked up this hill and at first it was kind of a cold day but then the sun came out and it was intensely beautiful and I need to just fucking walk around without an agenda more often.
And then to top it all off I was back in town for an organ concert at the cathedral—which turned out to actually be a choir concert, but it was half solo organ and the accompaniment for the choral pieces was a harpsichord/cello/2violin quartet, so I could handle it—and then as that ended I took off because I felt like I was goddamn about to miss another bus, and this time I’d be really pissed.
So this time I stood firm through the onslaught of junk food vendors. I was about the exact same distance away from the nearest bus stop, but fortunately it was the second stop on the line instead of the first. When I got down to the street the bus runs along I looked towards the first stop, and the bus had just pulled away. So I’d gotten down to the street at the exact same time as that morning, but now the bus was coming towards me instead of driving off.
There was about a 5 second period where my brain froze up spinning its gears. About a block towards the bus was stoplight that I hoped would be red, but as I checked the bus was pulling through the intersection. So now I’m either going to have to give up or tear off down the road, hoping that there are enough people at that stop that the bus has to wait there for me. Because at this point the bus is less than half a block away, and the stop is maybe a block and a half the other direction. So I snap into gear and sprint along the sidewalk for a while, then find a lull in traffic (this is a busy road, 2 lanes each way with a lane in the middle going down into a parking garage, and no crossings between my starting point and the bus stop) to dart out into the road. As the bus passes me by. But I’m across the road in no time, just as the bus is slowing down for the next stop. I see that now I’m going to make it so the feeling of victory washes over me and I could run forever. I step up out of the street onto the curb just behind the bus and the last guy at the stop gets on just ahead of me.
All is well. Couldn’t have cut it closer. But at least I didn’t up and leave in the middle of a Bach organ piece.
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And so the whole point of that story was: it feels pretty good running faster than the bus and saving yourself having to wait for the next one. The difference between the endorphin rush you get from defeating a bus that didn’t want to let you ride and the depression that comes on after coming so close but having the bus pull out of reach is especially magnificent. 3 times since I’ve been here in france I’ve done it in what I imagine to be a fairly dramatic fashion. I’m always hoping that at least someone on the bus saw me as the bus was pulling away and went: ‘sucks to be that kid,’ only then to see me take a deep breath and fly towards them only to catch up at the next stop. Also it’s the only exercise I’ve been getting over here, aside from commuting and running a few errands on my bike. Oh, and trying to learn to do handstands, which is killer on the back and shoulders.
Someone should make catching the bus into a game. Once all the busses in the world are tricked out with sensory equipment and everyone has little pocket brains connected to the same network as the busses you could give it a sample of your running ability and then the phone could get on the line with your daily schedule and the busses, spooking the shit out of you with messages saying something like “…bitch! Hurry! Your bus is pulling into the station in ~2 minutes, and you’re 423 meters away! Out you go! Godspeed!” And that there would be some real HCI.