Vers l'absurde

Wednesday randomness.

There is nothing like drinking half a liter of "grape juice", cut with Sprite, to make one completely uninterested in the famed soliloquies from Shakespeare's Hamlet performed on the Common. But the food. At least the food was good. That's right, that's a lovely mousse aux truffes all the way to the left and fried chicken all the way to the right. That's why we had "grape juice", you know. Because it's supposed to help the heart. And there are no alcoholic beverages allowed on the Boston Common, of course.

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté is a fabulous film, with many gorgeous closeups of Romain Duris. He would be my next celebrity love, but only if I only got to view him naked only from the back, unless he did something about the carpet of chest hair he sports. All I could think when I saw him naked from the front was, "eek, his chest hair adds like a full extra inch to him in silhouette". Incidentally, the piano tutor? The majority of the time, she is speaking Vietnamese. While I suppose that this is permissible given that in the movie, she is described as speaking Chinese, Vietnamese, and a little French, it's a touch incongrous given that she's supposed to be Chinese. Her first words in the film are Chinese, but the rest? Nope. Not at all. I did have a second there, though, where I was all, "OHMYGOSH I MAGICALLY UNDERSTAND CHINESE!!!" Then I realised that it wasn't Chinese, that I'm sadly not an overnight linguist, and that also sometimes, I'm a little delusional.

Finally yes, I read the NYTimes wedding section weekly, because I like to torture myself with the fact that other people are getting married whereas I'm not. I'm actually okay with it sometimes, as people tell me I'm young yet (nevermind the fact thatin the last 7 months, 7 girls in my sorority, all younger than I, have gotten engaged - but the grand question is, did I want to marry someone from AEPi? HAHA drive a stake through my heart first) especially in cases like this. It's a touching story at first, especially as I value the written (or I suppose, in this day and age, the emailed) word over the spoken one. And it's all cooing and sweetness, until you think about it a little, and realise that the guy kept after the girl for NINE YEARS until she caved. That's a fair amount of persistence - and STALKING. That's right, STALKING. NINE YEARS wherein he sent her letters proclaiming his love and affection while she was dating other people and not seemingly interested in him. I call that stalking. I have personally encountered parts of this announcement from two separate guys. One was when I received anonymous postcards praising the loveliness of my hands and other such platitudes in stilted English. Not only were they were anonymous, they also depicted those quasi-erotic Rodin statues, which freaked my 18-year-old self out (especially as it turned out the guy was 27 and a Belgian grad student in the French department). Memo to all guys: Postcards (especially multiple ones) with quasi-erotic statues that are not signed with your name are not mysterious and romantic. They are creepy. In the other instance, I have received oral proclamations of everlasting affection and the like. It's lasted for seven years already, I'm tired of it, and all I want to do is throttle the guy and smack him upside the head for being a stupid imbecile. I guess I have another two years to go before I too cave in. Awesome. I look forward to the day when I lose my final operating brain cells.

This was also a particularly annoying announcement with the scattering of celebrity names, although my favourite line in the whole announcement does come from Linda Ronstadt: "You bring a guy home and he's a goat or a camel and he speaks no human language." Goat or camel. Teehee. How about baboon? Baboons make me laugh.