Un Très Bon Week-end
Posted on | June 23, 2009 | 1 Comment
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Loading ... First off, yes, week-end is a word in French- it seems like Franglais, but it’s not. I find this system of using shorter English words to be much easier than saying something like ‘fin de semana’ as one would in Spanish or Portuguese. Anyhow, I haven’t posted for, like, ten days OMG, but I have a perfectly valid excuse, to be delivered toute de suite in two separate but equally important parts:
1. We had a lightning strike that blew out the router and didn’t get it replaced for five days.
2. I am a lazy bastard. Well, not technically, and I’d like to wish my father a happy birthday and father’s day (the same day every seven years, even).
But all that’s over now, sort of (my inherent laziness is one of the many facets of my personality that keep you coming back, loyal reader, and showering me with praise, which is something I expect to continue directly).
Moving on to a legitimate topic, because that’s what 24% of this blog is actually about (I can’t help it if the robotic ninjas are greedy and take the other 117%), I’m going to tell you about my weekend (FYI, that’s what week-end means, so try to keep up). It all started with me going into Rodez on Saturday, where I somehow managed to forget that in addition to being closed all day Sunday & Monday, the entire world is closed from 12:00-14:00 the other five days a week, and that I should be thankful that I’m able to procure oxygen during that time. After purchasing a pair of jeans (my only other decent pair met a fateful end at the hands of barbed wire about 3:30 the previous Sunday morning), I found myself unable to get a haircut, and returned to chez moi.
I arrived to find that Agnès daughter, son-in-law, three grandchildren, and another couple with three kids of their own were all there; oddly enough, her son-in-law is American, so he and I did what American men the world over do to bond: drank beer, sat around with guitars, and bitched about politics. After going two weeks without speaking a word of English to anyone, it was nice to be able talk without having to think about everything first. The next day we (all eleven of us) went on a hike around Salles La Source (a village about 10k away from the estate) and I took some pictures which will tell a much better story than I ever could.
After we got back, I took a nap for about an hour before being awoken for a previous engagement: a cookout at the home of a friend of Agnès. And when I say ‘home’ I mean ‘900-year-old Abbey in the process of being restored.’ After playing petanque (or boule, if you prefer) and drinking a bit of local red wine, we cooked some local sausage over an open fire pit, and then spent the evening sitting around the fire drinking walnut wine that one of the neighbors had made. In case you were curious, walnut wine is surprisingly similar to port- it’s a stout, sweet dessert wine that has probably double the percentage of normal wine.
Yesterday, I got some help: a British kid is working with me for a few weeks, and apparently there’s an American girl arriving on Thursday and two more British girls early next week. And a new social season is starting- Friday night we’re all going to some weird hippie circle-dance thing, which I expect to be truly epic in every sense of the word, and there’s a folk music festival in a neighboring village on Saturday. Hopefully I’ll have some decent stories soon, but for now my laziness is taking over.
Film Review: Sitcom (1998)
Posted on | June 12, 2009 | 2 Comments
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Sitcom (1998)
As some of you may already be aware, I’m a bit of a movie buff; as I now live pretty much alone on the French countryside, I’ve started watching quite a few movies in French to help me progress with the language. I’ve discovered some really great movies that way, like OSS 117: Le Caire nid d’espions and Le dîner de cons.
Sitcom is not one of those movies. I lay awake after watching it the other night trying to figure out how to describe it in one sentence, and this is what I came up with: It’s like Kafka vomited all over a stack of Freud’s worst case histories, and then David Mamet wrote a play about it. For those who don’t get those references, this film truly has everything for the dysfunctional family on the go: gay orgies, suicide, S&M, incest, and a guy who turns into a giant fucking rat (which is still less scary to me than Sonny Bono turning into a giant pickle).
Did I mention that this is billed as a comedy?
Like in any good family comedy, everything (well, everything after the dream sequence where the father kills everyone) starts with a rat. The emotionally unavailable and sexually non-existent father of a seemingly wealthy family is apparently some sort of scientist, researcher, or miniature-albino-zookeeper, so he does what everyone in his vague profession would do and brings home a creepy-looking red-eyed albino lab rat for the family to have as a pet. The overly-worriesome and strangely hot mother is freaked out by this (and pretty much everything else).
So far so good, right? Well, as it turns out, everyone who touches the rat goes batshit crazy.
First it’s the son. One touch of it and he immediately announces that he’s gay, although the idea just occurred to him; this also freaks out the mother (are you sensing the pattern yet?). Then it’s the housekeeper’s husband, who touches it and immediately turns gay for the son, which is pretty convenient, because they both get laid on their first night of being gay.
But the rat has other powers besides amplifying latent homosexuality- later that night, the daughter touches it (and by ‘touches’ I mean she lets it get to at least second base, which made me slightly jealous) and then jumps out of a window, paralyzing herself.
Flash forward several months, and everything is different. The formerly-relatively-normal daughter now wears all black to complement her wheelchair and Princess Leia hairdo while making her boyfriend act like a dog with a leather collar and everything; the son has turned into a slightly-more-flamboyant version of Richard Simmons and hosts regular orgies in his room; the housekeeper just lounges around drinking all day; the father ignores everything, and the mother worries about all of the above.
My microscopic attention span (along with my sense of human decency) is making it difficult to recount the rest of the plot, so I’ll make this brief. The mother touches the rat and then decides to seduce the son, because obviously having sex with your mother is the cure for homosexuality, and then when that doesn’t work she decides they all need to go on a family-saving weekend counseling session. The father stays home because he obviously doesn’t have any problems, and when the mother calls to say they’ve figured out that the rat is causing all of the problems, he gets rid of it by putting it in the microwave (alive) and then eating it without even using any ketchup, which is just wrong. When the family returns, he’s turned into a giant rat and attacks the mother, who was worried about everything else except being attacked by a giant fucking rat. The family kills it, and then suddenly everything is A-OK and life can move on. Fin.
The reviews of this film on various French sites seem to indicate that this is the best of the director’s many movies, which makes me question my decision to remain in this country for the summer. Hopefully there will be no giant rats.
The Best PSA Ever?
Posted on | June 8, 2009 | 3 Comments
(4.00 Total) Loading ...I know we’re all thinking it, so let me be the first to say, “What the FUCK?” I noticed this in the window of a poetry café in Toulouse last week, and felt it was worth sharing. I apologize for that, of course. At first I thought this was an absolutely terrible PSA, because I was so distracted by the picture that I didn’t actually read the message.
Then I finally did read it (it translates to “Summer brings new ‘encounters,’ so protect yourself!”) and I realized the true genius of this campaign. Seeing these posters makes me NEVER WANT TO HAVE SEX AGAIN. Mission accomplished, I guess.
See it full size here.
Chickens, Cookies, Pickles, & Parentheses
Posted on | June 7, 2009 | No Comments
(4.20 Total) Loading ...The other day I was trying to make an omelet: I had four fresh eggs (and by fresh I mean, like, I’d pulled them out of chez les poulets about an hour before), some wicked Toulousian sausage, and a bit of Roquefort (which turned out to be not such a great combination, actually). All systems were go for an omelet of epic proportions, especially with the addition of my twelve secret herbs and spices (yeah, suck it, Colonel).
Unfortunately, eggs #2 & #3 turned out to contain a little more than I expected, raising the question: why the hell do the French keep the cocks in with the hens? (Side note: The cock is the national symbol of France. Just thought you’d like to know.) I should clarify one thing, for those that may not be aware- an egg with a dead chicken in it is possibly one of the most foul-smelling things to exist in this galaxy and all neighboring galaxies, if I had to guess, and you can trust my perspective on this, because I’ve used Cambodian bus-station bathrooms in the summer. You don’t even want to know how bad it was when combined with the fortnight-old Roquefort.
Anyway, nothing kills your appetite like a foul-smelling blob staring at you eagerly with that giant overgrown eye as if to say, “Hey, what are you having? Can I have some? You want to grab a beer later?”
No, greedy chicken fetus! Get your own damn- er, sorry about your egg. And you’re not old enough to drink, even in France, but I’ll have one for you.
That afternoon I finally looked at my foot, which had been hurting for several days. The best I can figure out is that someone used a 1mm drillbit to put a .25cm hole in it somewhere between the #4 and #5 toes. It’s either that or I’ve developed some sort of weird French flesh-eating bacteria, like the kind that puts the holes in the cheese. If I was ever turned into a food, it’d be cool to be cheese. That would be about a million times better than being turned into a pickle, which is what happened to Sonny Bono in a scene from the 1986 film Troll, which still haunts my dreams to this day.
In case you didn’t know, pickles are fucking disgusting.
The day did get better, though. Agnès, the woman who owns the house I’m living in for the summer, had gone to Paris for a few days, so my American female housemate (who will remain nameless due to future revelations, and in the literary world we call this foreshadowing) and I whipped up a pretty amazing dinner of cous-cous, lentils, sausage, caramelized onions, garlic, tomatoes, and basil fresh from the garden, which we ate picnic-style on the lawn over probably too many Kronenbourg 1664’s.
After dinner, she baked some totally righteous chocolate chip cookies (using eggs sans-poulet, fortunately) and then we took them on yet another picnic down by the creek around 10:00 that night. After having a couple of the aforementioned righteous cookies, we totally made out (cookie breath and all) on a blanket by the light of the 3/4 moon filtering through the trees, with the gentle sound of the creek ambling past. On a related note, you should just accept the fact that my life is better than yours. On yet another related note, a fucking miracle occurred.
Twice.
Parlez-vous Franglais?
Posted on | June 2, 2009 | 2 Comments
(4.17 Total) Loading ...It’s finally happening- after years as that annoying grammar Nazi, my English skillz is fading. I didn’t notice it until one of my Facebook friends pointed out that I’d used the word aubergine as if it were an English word; I spent 30 seconds trying to decide whether or not it was, and then another five minutes trying to remember what the correct word is. I think it’s an eggplant, but I’m too lazy to get my google on and recherche it.
I’m getting to the point where something that started as a joke has become an increasingly natural part of my speech. There a lot of French words that are similar to English, but with ever-so-slightly different meanings; I’ve begun using the English versions of those French words inappropriately. I no longer, for instance, look at something; I regard it. “Hey, let me regard the map for a sec.” I’ve also stopped using the word important; the word grave en français holds a somewhat similar meaning as it does in English, so I use the literal translation of the français Ce n’est pas grave. This is not to be confused with the very, very commonly used grève, which means strike (something the French do a lot).
The biggest, and soon-to-be most embarrassing piece of this (when I return to the states), is the word douche. Over here, it’s an everyday word; prendre une douche means simply to take a shower. I have a feeling that the expression “take a douche” could be interpreted several ways in the U.S., all of which would get me kicked out of Bath & Body Works, because I totally go there all the time.
I’ve noticed that the franglais goes both ways, though. Obviously there are similarities between English and français due to the shared Latin roots, but some words just don’t belong. The words “shopping” and “camping” exist here, which is bizarre considering that the French present progressive uses -ant instead of -ing, but more surprising still is the usage of the word “love.” It’s not incredibly common, but still- why on earth would the culture that claims the word “amour” have any need for something as clumsy as “love?”
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