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pinot noir

 

 

psg won the championship this week, which meant paris became briefly uninhabitable in the way that only victory can justify. people were shouting from scooters, honking at nothing, hanging flags out of moving vehicles. it was a mild apocolypse, but i liked being an observer to such extensive joy. i watched from the sidewalk as the buses filled with ecstatic soccer players drove by in a cloud of cheers. a man climbed halfway up a streetlamp and waved what i think was a towel.  but oh, what a day it was.

in all the chaos, i lost my favorite red cardigan. somewhere between asnières and saint-lazare. whoever’s wearing it now, i hope you suffocate in how nice it is. i miss it every day.

 

i’ve just started working at a crêperie near my apartment. i tend the bar, wipe tables, and very occasionally carry food from the kitchen to customers who assume i know more than i do. but when someone asks a question or tries to order with me directly, i can feel my face go slightly blank.

"je comprends pas, désolée" would be the simplest answer.

but i do comprendre, i just can’t always répondre. and that makes it tricky.

 

it’s a strange job. slow, contractless (pretend i didn’t say that), underpaid, and mildly uncomfortable. the dishwasher is broken, which means i hand-scrub every single glass, cup, and espresso spoon during friday night’s dinner rush. by the time i get home, the top layer of skin on my hands has been fully shaved off by the amount of dish soap it saw that day.

my boss is mad because "the time i waste washing dishes i could be doing more productive things, like waiting tables." safe to say, i am having so much fun.

one customer comes in every single night. my coworkers call him pinot noir. he orders two glasses of red wine and one crêpe sucrée-salée. always the same thing. he brings nothing to read, nothing to do. he just sits and people-watches. i already pull the cork when i see him coming through the door.

 

i am still looking for something better. ideally a job where i can hide behind the bar and occasionally refill the olives. this is my current dream.

 

i am still reading sapolsky. there is something about scientific books that brings my poetic side out of me, and i always end up writing little notes about the meaning of life and the sun and the moon on the margins of more minimally crowded pages.

 

my biggest takeaway from his teachings this week: the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. chemically, hate and love share a lot of ground. your heart rate spikes. your hormones go off. to be careless towards someone you used to love, not in an orchestrated way, but truly indifferent, therefore, is the end of said infatuation. maybe there is more nuance to it than that, but i do understand the grounds of it. hate is a strong feeling. it sits very close to passion, and therefore also very close to love.

 

thank you for sticking around, my dearest reader

 

my song of the week is my life by billy joel.

listen to it.

you’ll know why.