|
|
Funky Town
One afternoon some time ago Jul and I encountered this horrible falsetto of a song, wherein the woman (or castrated man) kept on singing about getting to 'Funky town' and how he/she couldn't wait to get there. When the song ended, Jul, irritated, turned to me and said, "She doesn't even say what she's going to do in funky town!"
Ho, I have a magic drainer. You know, that kitchen thing you use when you're cooking to drain the water out of the pastas. It's silver and magical and I bought it yesterday at the market down Croix Rousse square. I don't cook but I have a magic passoire! And the magic passoire, along with our yellow plates, blue bowls, and wooden spoons are coming with us to Aix-en-Provence, the south of France, which will be our current location. Aix-en-Provence where the sun shines and where fountains spurt (that doesn't sound so right) and where there are strawberries and other curious fruits. Aix-en-Provence where it's hard to find parking space (as the case is in the whole of France). Aix-en-Provence where it's not as cold as Lyon. Aix-en-Provence where maybe we can get a loving, affectionate cat and call him Euclid. Aix-en-Provence which is more or less near the beach. We could very well dub Aix-en-Provence Funky Town.
Man, the thing about moving is that you're obliged to lug around all your stuff in crates and boxes, install them somewhere new, forget about them while you're there, and discover them once more when it's time to move again. It makes me sad to pack things you know you aren't even going to remember when you get there. I left all my books in Manila because I didn't think of them that much, and now that we're moving I wish I'd brought them along. Like my Don Skiles short story collection that I bought for around 10 pesos at the Booksale that was filled with all these winner short surrealist stories. How could I have done that? The ugly thing about forgetting and remembering is that you can only have them one at a time. And you always end up with some sort of unavoidable pang of regret.
However, going back to Funky Town, I can't wait to continue my French lessons, where I shall be 'Degree 2 Niveau 1'. I had some funky classmates at Alliance Française Lyon, though. We are linked by the unanimous goal to speak perfect 'Fransh' and to be understood by the 'Fransh population'.
Yuichi is from Japan and his boots have fur. He also has a black-and-white checkered pair, but that is another story. He smokes cigarettes whose brand I'm not familiar with. He's going to be a fashion designer in Paris as soon as he's fluent. He wears this nice hat with a little ball of yarn on top. The thing I like about him, aside from his being shy despite the loud clothes, is that he has a Magritte notebook. "Tu aimes Magritte?" I asked him as we were packing our books after a day of lessons, pointing at his notebook cover. "Hai. Oui," he replied. There was a Magritte museum in Japan which he liked, he explained. The next day he arrived two hours late for class, looking like a guy with a very healthy alcoholic hangover. Still, he showed this Japanese girl and I his newly-purchased Magritte calendar from the store Artès. Even while his head was probably still spinning, can you think of that. Years from now I'm going to be wearing a Magritte-inspired dress. Hopefully, without the fur.
A boy from China in my class is a genius. I can hardly understand him speak, but he's a genius. He's the earliest one to arrive in class (I know because I'm the second) and he's always mumbling to himself, memorizing irregular verbs or Subjonctif conjugations. All that, and he doesn't even own the required class books! I sat next to him most of the time in class, so he always shared my book when we had to read something. "Did you lose your books?" I asked him - not to be rude or anything -but just because I was amazed that for someone as 'obsessed' with learning French as he was, he didn't seem to give a horse's ass about not having a book. He gave me a long, lengthy answer complete with hand movements, and ended with a hearty laugh. I stared at him blankly. A conclusion as to why I probably don't understand him is because he ignores the periods in sentences. He just doesn't like them, I guess; much less respect their presence in a sentence. He's going Univeristy in Lyon afterwards. In a class discussion, he always looks like he's bored, and to prove his point he yawns occasionally, but when everybody's stumped and can't answer a question tossed at us for the last five minutes, he suddenly gives the correct answer, his expression a bit impatient, bulldozing his way into sentences without stopping for the periods, of course. So that's how he is, the Chinese genius. Occasional bursts of rain and thunderstorms, in comparison to the weather. At one breaktime, we were all discussing about our countries when suddenly he joined in the conversation, out of the blue in dominant decibel level, wanting to know if we knew something-or-other about China. He clear cut off the Spanish girl in midsentence, too. We were kind of shocked that Chinese Genius spoke to us. He wrote down Chinese syllables on a paper, explaining to us that in Chinese, you wrote words according to syllables. We were talking about oceans and he was talking about another thing, but that was all right with us. He's really intelligent. I know it because he got the highest score at the end of the course. And because he didn't buy the 20€ workbooks, which we used not-too-often, when you really think about it. I could almost see him smiling at us for 'falling for the book trick'.
It's really sad that I have to go to another school, especially since we were more or less in the same age range and there were some pretty terrific people I've made friends with. But life goes on, times are a-changing as Dylan says, and I wouldn't mind making more friends down at Funky Town.
I want to hypnotise you!
Why can't every man be as cool as Wayne Coyne?
 (photo courtesy of the flaming lips' blatantly unabashed pink website, of course)
The Loneliness of a Recurring Emotion
You tell me it's over and the birds fly south, leaving their nests untended, worms on their beaks, while I wilt away not knowing how to call them back. I have ink for tears staining calligraphy on my cheeks, eyes an octopus spitting venom like cobras, I really have ink for tears. And then you say it's lovely, this sky, and we stare at it together, arms-around-waist; and you say it's lovely, this moon by the beach, and I nod because I agree, it's lovely.
And then there are times when I leave you, and it's not a gap but a patch, it saves my life, just enough for me to come back to you. Flying south to reach the north where you will be waiting. And then just like that it stops, until everything happens, all over again.
And then
Movie of the year is Lost in Translation. Watched it 3 weeks ago. Still affected.
Nothing personal, just a wedding.
If there's an event I dread going to, it a wedding. First of all, you get an invitation with names of all these people you don't even know, in flowery, heavy-scented stationary cards that smell like my fat and flowery aunt whom I only get to see around once in ten years. The invites always stress that you come in 'semi-formal attire', so you worry all week about what you're going to wear and settle for a dress you know you won't be using again. What a waste of money. Then you buy shoes in colours such as 'mauve', 'peach', or 'off-white' to match your crappy dress. Good god. But the clincher is that you get to the wedding --- all uncomfy and woobling like hell on your heels --- and see someone like the aunt of the bride wearing brown pants and a flowered top. Purely cracker crap.
That's only the beginning, of course. What's worse is when you start eating. You're in the middle of eating some stupid steak when the newlyweds glide towards your table and you have to stop eating to smile like an asshole for the 'table photographs'. Very big deal. Of course you never see these 'table photographs' unless you're closely related to the newlyweds, which probably isn't the case because if you were, you'd be stuck in a worse situation of being part of the sucky entourage, wearing an ill-fitting mass-made silky dress with 'elaborate beadwork'.
Satan's Spawn of Weddings is The Photographer who asks you to 'Smile naman diyan, miss, picture...', right when you're yawning of boredom in the back pew of the church or when you're shovelling dessert into your mouth.
And where the hell's the wine during weddings? Where are the beers? Why do the newlyweds get to drink champagne, arms entwined, when all I'm having is an iced tea jazzed up with a fuckinglemonslice? Where's the cake? You mean I can't have a slice of that gigantic, two-storey high wedding cake? Is it a cardboard hatbox covered with icing, going incognito as a cake?
The best part, of course, is the program. It's supposed to be a very big deal in the life of a couple. After the speeches filled with inside jokes you don't get, some singer comes up to the microphone to belt out a tune, by Celine Dion or Stevie Wonder. Even the doves go into epileptic seizures in their cage trying to fly the hell out of the room when the song number starts.
Then, they ask all the single people in the room to come to the stage in order to humiliate themselves in front of the oldies. The bouquet-tossing routine worked for a while, but now wedding coordinators have invented other games such as popping balloons or musical fucking chairs, the trip-to-jerusalem kind of gig. They could ask you to swallow razor blades and it would be the same kind of fun. God, I really hate that. Like you're really going to look attractive up on stage with those games ... these 'single' games are meant to keep you single your whole life, just because you make an absolute ass out of yourself.
Then when you leave the wedding, finally, you see a table set up outside the ballroom with pictures taken by The Photographer, and yours is the most prominent one, a picture of you shovelling dessert into your mouth. There are always approximately 50 other guests hovering over the picture desk, so you can't buy it off as quickly as you'd like. They sell it to you for around 50 pesos, and of course you'd pay gold nuggets just to get it off public grounds.
Thank god my wedding party wasn't like that. I wore jeans to my party, and everyone got drunk, and we didn't have any games, and the next day we flew to Boracay. And if we'd had a cake, everyone would've gotten a slice, I swear to god.
Almost Spring
I suppose all I'm doing is waiting for spring to come. I've been such a case of hybernation, doing nothing all day except burying myself in the comfort of thick comforters, my National Winter Pasttime. I hate being like this, but winter seems to be stealing the best of me.
So in an attack of nostalgia I'm putting on some pictures of autumn, at least the days when the trees weren't too bald and the sun was shining; an ode to the days when it wasn't so damn cold that you'd die of frostbite on the way to the grocery shop to buy Coke or something.
 Parc de la Tete d'Or
Also, if someone from France is reading this, send me an email and give me something to do. Or at least scare me or something with a story about a girl who died because all she did was stay in bed all day instead of discovering the joys of winter. über pathetic kala
The reason
The reason why I'm not updating is because I'm making a new website.
Get ready fer skool
Ah, my French. Ah, the conjugation, the irregular verbs, the 'fucky-third-group' conjugation. The conjugation. Ah, my French.
I'm having an exam this Friday on my French progress, for the Alliance Francaise to figger out which level of classes to put me in. Yes! Classes! I'm going to skool again!
Now. If there are some truths in this world one of them would be that Pavement was the best band of the 90s.
Gloat Post
Guess what band I'm going to watch play live tonight?
 Nyark nyark nyark!!! :-) Evil Kala
Sale
The world has twisted itself into a saltless pretzel, and everything upside down is now is left-side-up. Fragile content of the box? Let me shake it first to know, then I'll tell you.
The whole of France has gone whack over the sales. Stores are slashing their prices down to 60%. I'm not a big fan of sales, or of shopping. Needless to say, I'm rather plain and I only start owning clothes when people stare at my exposed flesh due to shredded threads. I make up for it by wearing fantastic underwear, which, in retrospect, doesn't really make up for anything.
So we dragged ourselves through the stinging cold to look at the sales. To be more human, to partake in the interest of the masses. Doesn't hurt to try.
Monday is the worst day to go shopping. Half of the stores are closed. The sports store was open, though. Jul asked me what would interest me. "Rollerblades," I said. Fine. We ask for rollerblades in my size. No stock, says the salesman. In his eyes I knew he was saying that my feet were too small.
And so, in the middle of winter, the coldest month of all the winter months, I visited the sales and bought...
A bathing suit.
Listen, now is the best time to go swimming. Mainly because no one in his right mind would go. But I'd rather submerge myself in water than go shopping.
Like I said in the beginning, the world has twisted itself into a saltless pretzel, and everything upside down is now is left-side-up.
The End.
Sleek gray, shining at me
When it snows the sky is a sleek gray, a dull, lifeless colour, and everything is quiet. North of Lyon the snow is thick, and there is a field huge enough for children with sleds. But if you walk a bit further you can find empty fields you can call your own, virginal ones would be the right term, violating them with your footsteps.
You can find the quiet you're looking for, anywhere in the world, if you move away from the crowd and walk a bit further than most people would.
|
