a good corset
Steady, old scholar! I’ll turn off the light and write in the dark a resume of tomorrow’s Indian chapter that I must get to work on. Discipline. Click! “Triompher du mal par le bien.” St. Paul. That will begin the chapter. I feel better already. Foreign languages are a good corset.
worked. result: oneandahalf petty pages. tomorrow i’m going to buy a rope and hang myself. oh wait, tomorrow’s sunday and the shops are closed, so i’ll have to wait till monday.
jodie and mel are working at the café today, and there’s a new girl: rather tall, brown hair, cut in a very, hm, interesting way. her hair is not really “cut”. it’s shoulderlong and it looks as if it simply arranges itself sort of naturally around her face and neck. she looks slightly asian at first, but when i go up to the counter to pay i realize that she probably has inuit ancestors: her eyes are pitch dark.
“i want you to meet our new colleague who is filling in for sebastian…” jodie says to me and then to her:
“this is the weird guy we’ve been telling you about…”
“hi!” i’m smiling “i’m philipp. “
“hi. i’m victoria. victoria lucas.” the name sounds familiar, even though i don’t know her face, and for a moment i’m wondering why she is introducing herself so formally and whether she has been in one of my classes. she’s looking right into my face. now, if people introduce themselves i expect them to glance at me and then politely look away. but she doesn’t. she’s looking straight at me with open curiosity as if i was an exotic animal in the zoo and i begin to wonder what the hell jodie and mel have told her about me other than that i’m sitting with the ibook and about five thousand books in the corner each day and keep swearing under my breath. after a couple of seconds her eyes make me feel so uncomfortable that i turn away and try to get a conversation started with mel and jodie.
“so, what about sebastian! becoming a big movie star! i still can’t believe it. filming with tom hanks and philip seymour hoffman!”
“i knew that little punk would sleep his way up.” jodie says, then turns away and mumbles “guess i’ll miss him.”
“i will, too!” mel sighs.
“boy! he really *was* everybody’s darling, wasn’t he?”
“well, at least *one* of us is having a career!” jodie says and hands me the check. “that’s 8.90″
leah commented: what part of canada is princess superstar emigrating to?
her prince will be associated with the university of montreal, so they’ll live directly in cohen-city 
mia commented: … writing paragraph after paragraph of beautifully woven fiction (*gg* sebastian to star with philip “capote” seymour hoffman…
oh well, i wish it *was* a fiction 
mia further commented: … plus: bernd was reeaally cool with this sigur rosish xylophone. great show!
he was! i think it paid off that we did not try to look cool. we just said: let’s go in there and have some fun. and maybe we were so far off in uncool-country that we were cool already
