Right then. Someone hung a piece of paper on the wall downstairs. Down there in the stairwell in a not-so-obvious place. Something about the water being turned off for 3 days. Yeah…from 8:30 am to 5pm with no running water.
Fuck yeah.
Being the bright & clever creature that I am (but haven’t always been) I realize that the only solution is to peel my baffled, bewildered & befuddled body from the bed at a halfway decent hour for a change.
In another life, this was something that was easy – too easy. So easy in fact, that I had the opposite problem: if I slept past 4am, it had been a good night. If I actually slept for more than 3 or 4 hours, I had a chance of getting through the day with the ability to discern what was a dream & what had really happened.
Indeed, it was another life.
But, that was living alone…as a reclusive drunk, reeking of cigarettes & waking at 4am to step on an old chicken bone – which does hurt unless you’re still drunk.
What? Oh, right…yeah. The water. No fucking water. So, after 8 or 9 hours of sleep (which just isn’t enough these days) I’m in a walking coma. No cigarettes. No caffeine.
Yes – I chose to deny myself a pot of coffee & a half a pack of cigarettes for breakfast every morning. Why? Well, I don’t remember now. I suppose because the extra weight that I’ve gained has enabled me to grow more squeezable parts…just in case Olivier had grown tired of trying to squeeze bones.
Anyway, the best part of all of this is, the sun doesn’t rise at a decent hour; it’s still dark at 8am. After that, the sun still isn’t out – it’s just a brighter shade of gray. Usually this comes in rainy gray or pollution gray.
How can anyone in his or her right mind expect a person to be awake at any hour of the day here? That is just absurd-iculous.
Yes. That IS a word – do not try to tell me that it isn’t.
I spend most of the day studying. Luckily, this is something that does not require much in the way of physical activity. 6 to 8 hours a day I spend on this. 6 to 8 hours a day trying to understand a language where “terrible” & “formidable” have the opposite definitions – yeah, terrible & formidable are GOOD things.
…6 to 8 hours a day learning to say sentences that I’m pretty sure are backwards.
French people here have told me that I “speak French like a Spanish cow”. How do you respond to this? Where exactly does one steer the conversation after this? Tell them that they speak English like a Greek chicken?
The last time that someone said this, I asked them what it meant. Big shock – they didn’t know.
It’s really just another typical day, here. My cat is trying to attack pigeons on the other side of the window. She runs, leaps, then: SMACK! THUD! There’s an opera singer 2 floors up practicing for…something. The pigeons are outside, threatening to come inside & poop in my house. Someone is pounding on a wall downstairs. The neighbors above me are not human – that sound can only be the sound of humping rhinos.
Maybe I would still be sleeping if it weren’t for…oh, yeah. The water. Well, it’s still running. I suppose that in French when it says that the water is going to be off for 3 days, that actually means, “Oh…well, we were just fucking with you”.