By the skin of mes dents

Admittedly, I'm cutting it awfully close on my solemn promise to write something today, but that is because I went to see Les Enfants du Paradis at the Castro, where, I am delighted to recount, the organist at the Mighty Wurlitzer added a little "we wish you a merry Christmas" coda to the traditional pre-show "San Francisco Open Your Golden Gate" which I'm quite certain is not the actual title of that song, but that's what I think of it as being. Feel free to Google it to your heart's delight; I'm on a deadline here.

Uploaded by Emmanuel Eytan on 2013-07-17.

The point is, The Children of Paradise is three hours long. And then, after all that, it ends in an infuriatingly French fashion, though certainly not as French as it might have been, for which I thank it.

My favorite bit was:

Policeman: What do you call yourself?

Accused: I never call myself. There's no point. I'm always here. 

I enjoyed it, though I'm not clever enough to tell you in what way it was a statement about Nazi-occupied France (which allegedly it is) other than the fact that several characters have lines about loving freedom.  The good news is that if you want to read a critical analysis of the film, you should have little trouble finding one.

The film let out an hour ago. All the intervening time was spent trying to get home on MUNI, which was as slow as it ever is, but also unaccountably as crowded as rush hour both going to the theatre and coming home.  Who are all those people? Some of them are visiting, but surely not all of them.  And I can tell you that only a few of us showed up at The Children of Paradise.  The rest have some explaining to do.

The J-Church between my house and Dolores Park goes through two little train cut-throughs.  They are not tunnels, so I don't know what to properly call them,  but they bypass some hills and pedestrians are forbidden to walk through them (which is just mean because as a pedestrian what I want most in the world is to bypass those very same hills) since it is a narrow enough passage that if there were two trains passing at once, an extraneous person would be squished.

A teenaged girl was traveling on my inbound train with some friends. We made our way through the first cut-through and her eyes got very wide and she said, "We're really close to those plants. We're really close to the plants. You guys, did you see how close we were to those plants?"  No one else seemed to share her concern or, indeed, even her interest. After a pause she said, "That just shows how easily amazed I am."

Then we went through the second cut-through, where the hedges have not been quite as rigorously maintained. I cannot deny it: there is hedge brushing to be had.  Newly astonished, our heroine announced, "We are touching the plants!  We are touching the plants!" Her vegetation-based alarm was quickly supplanted (as it were) by her pure joy at the vista spread out from the top of Dolores Park of downtown glittering all the way to the Bay Bridge. It is the one bright moment in the J-line journey and well worth looking up from your cell phone to see. I get excited about it myself.

She was, by a considerable margin, my favorite fellow passenger. 

MIA

As my boyfriend aptly said the other day, "I think this relationship is killing your blog." I think he's right.

Yep. There's a boyfriend in the picture (did you see how I causally sneaked it in up there?). You cannot possibly be more surprised by this than I am. Despite our collective astonishment, he does exist and, what's more, he totally likes me. That's the good news.  The bad news is that he lives in...Singapore. 

I know very little about Sngapore, but I can say with authority that Singapore is very, very far away. (Unless, of course, you are in Singapore, in which case it's right there.) In my defense, when I met him, I didn't know he was only pretending to live in San Francisco. When he told me, it was already too late. Granted, that was only about 15 minutes into our first date, but what can I say? He's pretty charming.

Now then. If you are a very verbose woman who has found herself thrust into in an epistolary relationship, you may find that your email correspondence is suddenly very voluminous indeed. You may also find that you can't think of a single additional thing to write on your damn blog.

So, it's like that.

Tomorrow, though, I will come up with some triviality to share with you--just like the olden days. I promise.

Injustice

I woke at 5am on the sofa, fully dressed and broiling hot with the lights and the heater still on. This is often how "watching television" ends. It's not very dignified, but one of the benefits of living alone is that you can be nearly relentlessly undignified and no one need know, unless you're foolish enough to write about it on the internet.

Though bleary, I was also still filled with indignation from the dream I'd had moments before. I was playing a board game with a large group of people in what seemed to be an old fashioned school gym. A card was read out. I was supposed to identify which of three people nearly vomited when given Marmite.  The answer was "the gangsta rapper" (duh) which I totally got, but the stupid girl said the other team said it faster. Which they did NOT. It was very obviously a tie.

Cold front, bright side

On Sunday, it was about 70 degrees, now it's 49.  This is not all about how California doesn't know from real cold, etc., etc.  I've already shared my feelings about that (in short, I'm cold. You may be colder. That's fair. Let's all wear mittens). The point here is that a rapid thirty degree shift is startling. To tell you the truth, we had forgotten it was December and have been left scrabbling around for our coats. I don't mind, actually.

Me: I don't know. I feel like when it gets cold, you're allowed to watch television.

Leslie:  Oh yes. This weather legitimizes a lot of my lifestyle choices.

Amen, sister.