proverb du jour

"it is better to have an opinion about socrates than to have actually read socrates."

so i am feeling exactly five million times happier at the moment than i was this time last week, without any real difference in my situation, which really just goes to show that the brain is a completely irrational peculiar organ with no rhyme or reason to it. well, that is not strictly true: material improvements since last week include my coffee-shop day in angers yesterday, a very long walk in the sunshine around apple orchards and cow pastures today, the arrival of a CARE PACKAGE!! containing a new yorker, a large picture of antonio banderas, and crystallized ginger, among other things; a long chat with J. (hello again J!) via gmail; and a very enjoyable dinner with M&P and M's parents. which just goes to show how easily well-being can be removed and then restored. i hope i am never captured by the CIA and extraordinarily renditioned off to guantanamo bay or somewhere for brain washing in an isolation cell because i would last a whopping thirty seconds.
i slept in, and then spent the morning slobbing around in my pyjamas catching up via larine's computer with all the various links for youtube videos people have sent me over the last few weeks. faves: the mp3 from H. about taking public transport to go to wilderness areas, the pro-obama sarah silverman video for thegreatschlep.com, and the movie 'zeitgeist', on google video, sent to me by slightly kooky friend L, which is a documentary purporting to prove several conspiracy theories, starting with christianity and ending up with 9/11 and the war in iraq. the christianity-as-giant-conspiracy was interesting without being particularly shocking, as i don't have that much vested interest in whether jesus as a historical figure did or did not exist, but 9-11 part was kind of traumatizing, to be honest, because there is i do think a real chance, albeit a small one, that it was at least partially engineered by cheney et al looking for an excuse to invade iraq and thereby involve us in a quagmire that had no solution but which would make bajillions for halliburton etc., and some of the evidence presented is a little spooky if it is true. i don't know which is the worse option: thinking that there are a group of terrorists in the middle east hell bent on eradicating western society as we know it, or that western society has become so immoral and decadent that we have leaders would be party to 9/11 in order to make a buck. anyway. C came over right after i finished the movie and was bouncing off the walls with paranoia, and she believes (being a midwesterner) that at heart everyone is a nice person and that democracy is functional, so she talked me down, fed me some tagliatelli with artichoke hearts mmmmmm and sent me on a walk.

i went out to sanzay again, a three hour trek, and it was really good to stretch my legs. i also went the long way home via the apple orchards which are in full fruitiness - they must be close to harvesting, as all the windfall apples made the air smell like cider. also i got chased by an aggressive cow - i have never seen a cow run, let alone kick and buck and jump and go nuts. luckily she was behind a barbed wire fence, so she couldn't actually get at me, but she was very pissed off at me about something. that was very exciting. and yes, it was a cow, not a bull. i looked. she had girl parts. my farming paternal grandparents would be proud of me.

i got back from my walk in the evening to find a drawing of me and six year old A. dressed as princesses in rollerskates on my door, with a note inviting me over for boeuf bourgignon, a pretty irresistible combination, so even though i was not really really in the mood for dinner i decided to go anyway, and am so glad i did. M's mum is a bookbinder and restorer of old books, so we spent the whole evening talking about fun things like gold leaf and embossing and different techniques to marble paper etc. i think i have a book somewhere about paper marbling - i should pull it out when i get home and give it a try. i remember we did it at summer school when i was about six and it was really fun. (a tribute to len eisenhood, art teacher extraordinaire: how cool is that, to get six year olds marbling paper?? i hope he knows how great he was). marina of course was very sniffy about paper marbling and how impossible it was to get right etc., but it turns out that when she did it she was trying to create (this is such a representative M thing) an exact reproduction of some 18th century marbled endpapers for some project she was doing, and it took several weeks to get it exactly right. "of course, if you are just having fun and making mess, buf, it takes maybe one afternoon, but to do it properly, buf, much time is needed..." i threatened to come and move in with them for a year to do an apprenticeship to learn bookbinding, drawing, painting, paper-marbling, etc., and P said, oh i teach you too to make windows. is very complicated. take ten minutes to learn, long time. four pieces wood, glass, bapbapbap, put together, voila. rest of year you learn paper with M.' he is so nice and funny and sweet i just can't stand it. after dinner M&P and i had a very fun conversation about religion as we were doing the washing up, both of them being atheists who had grown up in fairly religious families and me still buzzing from having watched zeitgeist.

i saw M's light was on as i walked home after dinner, so (true to operation sanity's prime objectives) i stopped by to say hello and see how his trip went - he had literally just walked in the door after a sixteen hour drive home and was knackered but we have a date for a drink tomorrow night so i can hear all about italy.

okay time for beddybyes oh goody i get to read my newyorker. it is REALLY COLD in my room - the same snails that run the internet here also are in charge of getting the hot water from the basement up the pipes into my radiator, and they are definitely slacking. voici the down side to socialism - no incentive for hard work (she says after her long day devoted to sloth)...