Great moments in cinematic history #3: myself, shirtless, sitting down to a monster plate of French toast, buttering, syruping, and sugaring it as Chopin’s Op 28°1 in C plays. Then devouring that shit.
(My kitchen table faces a big window, or a mirror in the absence of daylight. I was eating french toast for dinner, because there’s no more worthy food. The best moment was my shaking powdered sugar out onto the toast: the bulk of it hit the toast, but there was a fine powder that floated up, so I could see it floating there and then again reflected in the glass. Behind that there I was sitting and chomping on this glorious battered and fried bread, staring back at myself through a double cloud of powdered sugar. But it was really the prelude that crystalized the moment. If I ever make a movie I’ll be sure to work that into the soundtrack somewhere. Most likely in a glorious, slow motion, emotionally charged, and happy shot.)
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Also, tomorrow (fingers crossed, knock on wood) I’m off to Norway. I’m a bit worried because northwestern europe has apparently fallen under the spell of vicious father winter, and motherfuckers here cannot handle it. It’s snowed maybe two inches in the last few days, and I have not yet seen a snowplow. Just to make note: if wars were fought with snowplows, Minneapolis is a city that could shock and awe just about any goddamn city on the planet. Rouen would be toast. So the day it started snowing all the busses were out of business, the next day the city busses ran on modified routes but the school busses were still hosed, and today is saturday and the busses are on some kind of strike.
So hopefully tomorrow I can catch the bus into town to get on a train. That train will hopefully be able to get me to Paris, where I’ll hop onto a metro which should be underground and therefore free of any congealed precipitation. From there I’ve gotta find a shuttle bus that will take me to the shitty airport for low cost airlines. God willing I’ll get this far without issue, and the airport will do its job admirably, launching me towards Oslo. Actually towards another tiny airport no less than an hour outside of Oslo, but to Norway none the less.
And christmas! I don’t think christmas has ever snuck up on me so much. I could give a rats ass whether I get any presents, so I didn’t whip open my christmas list the day after thanksgiving. I haven’t done much giving myself, the difficulties of being busy with trying to teach children english and being half the world away from anyone I’d usually give things to. Also I hadn’t seen snow since last spring, so my internal calendar must have been all fucked up.
The first time a french kid asked me what I wanted for christmas I thought for a few seconds and came up totally empty, grasping for anything I could think of. I said something about how the only thing I really wanted was to go to Norway, and I’d already bought a ticket because I had a friend who lived there and invited me to stay with his family for christmas, so that’s what I want for presents. The kid got that bug eyed look in his face that says: stupid fucking american, don’t go off and talk like I have any fucking idea what you’re saying, because I’ve got aucune, but then there’s a part of me that wishes I understood you so I’m just going to sit here and nod. So then I went: ‘I want snow for christmas,’ and pointed out the window.
I settled on snow as my standard response to that question, which wasn’t in any way a lie. I still can’t think of anything I really want for christmas (this Lumix GF1 review would have been the first thing to pop onto my list, if I were making one). So monday through wednesday I told all the kids I wanted some snow already, and then woke up thursday morning to that bizarrely tinted, snow magnified light. It was great.
I catch the bus at 7:59, so I headed out of my building and trudged through the typical french schoolyard, which are how I imagine a prison yard is: a fenced in slab of concrete with maybe a few basketball hoops for the kids to glob about at recess. I cut through the yard and hop the fence, because that’s the quickest way to the bus line that runs behind my apartment and which takes me to my second school. Between me and the bus stop is a park (which the kids cannot play in during recess even though it’s right next to their slab of concrete) with a soccer field and running track and some nice (formerly) green space. I was so lifted by the snow that I was basically jogging through this park towards the bus stop, wearing a thin fleece pull. With the snow I could hardly feel my feet! Walking on clouds &c. Then I saw a french kid walking towards school and he popped my bubble a bit, so I calmed myself down and walked past him in a respectable adult manner, but he was so well bundled up I couldn’t tell if I had him in any classes.
But the bus didn’t come, so I’m thinking wtf. There’s been a few times when for whatever reason the bus hasn’t come (strikes), and it always pisses me off. So the previous time I missed the bus because of a strike I hadn’t heard about I figured out that there was a system of school busses, one of which went from 100m in front of my apartment right to my second school, and that was going to be my fallback. I waited for that bitch a while too, and it didn’t come either. So by now I’m pissed, and I tried calling the teacher whose class I was supposed to be at in 20 minutes. No answer.
I decided to pull out my mountain bike and roll my way through that goddamn snowstorm (a mild one by any minnesota standards) and so 25 minutes later I’m at the school. It was actually a beautiful ride through the norman countryside, which isn’t often blanketed in snow, and I ate it up. Everyone at school thought I must have been crazy to bike through that, but if I’d been in a car the traffic would’ve been so bad that I’dve probably gone 10-15 minutes slower.
So that was good. But again I’ve lost any thread that I might have at one point held onto and hoped would lead me to the end of this story, so I’m going to give it up here. I’ve got to check on my packing and cross my fingers/knock on wood one more time before closing this up and going to bed and getting up early and hoping that none of the many legs of my journey are fucked up by this snow. I’m not bringing my computer to norway so it’s unlikely there’ll be anything here for the next week or two.
2010 ahoy?