pretty good weekend

Jacques and Sophie invited me out for dinner/movie Friday night, as is the habit. We went to an Italian place they had tried before. There was veal on the menu, and visions of veal parmigiana at the Underground Restaurant in Innisfail blinded me to the inevitable arrival of a piece of meat reminiscent of a foetal bovine than an infant. A similar blindness occluded my vision with regards choice of film, and as such I quickly found myself watching "Meet The Fockers", dubbed in French. To be honest, it didn't lose much in translation; the rat-dog is still blue. A couple of hours of my life that I won't get back, but it could have been worse. I giggled occasionally.

On Saturday, I finally got back to the library. James has been tormenting me too long now, and I felt the need for a quick diagnosis as to whether I had lost my reading form, or whether Ulysses was just dragging me down. It turned out to be quite definitely the latter. I grabbed "Catcher in the Rye" (I'd been looking for ages, but hadn't found it until Liz tipped me off that it was hiding in a black cover entirely devoid of indication as to title, author or subject), and finished on Sunday, despite a conscious effort to pace myself. Cryptonomicon, a tome of somewhat more significant girth, is taunting me from my bookshelf, but I'm trying to hold off for my train trip to Switzerland this Friday. I instead tapped the Salinger-instilled momentum to knock off another 40 pages or so of Ulysses.

On Saturday night I was met with the very unusual conundrum of two possibilities for social outlet. Benoit was playing free jazz at the FAI, a concert I have been waiting a long time to hear, and there was a match of basketball on, not unlike the one I'd watched the week before, nor the one I will watch in another fortnight. Naturally, I chose the latter, and wasn't disappointed. Although it dragged through the middle under the weight of travelling violations and innumerable free throws, by the end it heated up. Despite some dubious substitutions by Rennes' coach (I suspect motivated by fear over the future loss of a star centre), Rennes almost snatched it on the back of 2 enormous 3s and a tough putback by said star centre late in the final stanza, before the other mob forced overtime with a basket to their Russian import. Rennes crushed them in overtime, to the joy of what had bothered to make up just under half of the less-than-capacity crowd. Chatted afterwards.

Sunday, forecast for rain, was a blue-skied picture of a winter day, so I stayed inside just about as long as I could, feigning sleep then feigning intellectualism by reading my Salinger in my yuppy turtleneck jumper and drinking espresso coffee and listening to some rubbish jazz-type music. Finally, I broke back through to my geek underpinnings and went and watched a manga film, Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence (there's a mouthful), in the afternoon. On the way there, it was bitterly cold, so it was almost required that I stopped along the way to get a gallette saucisse from the guy who stands on the corner just over the bridge, hereandafter to be known as "Gallette-Saucisse guy". Tasty. The film, too.

Brevity is for the weak. Editing is for nancy-boy journalists.