Paris

Almost four days in Paris. Its charm turning over in my mind through extremes of spring weather which the French take in stride and without changing their clothing. We arrived to heat, humidity. Suffered through wind. I danced through the driving rain to the metro station, smelling water on hot pavement, sparking those vague sensory moments of homesickness, secretly exaggerating them within my heart and building them to a subtle crescendo, knowing that the moisture working its way up towards my knees would erase any pleasure I had gained. Convectional precipitation does not even begin to equate itself to the downpours and week-long drizzles that millennia of tectonic orogeny have brought my fair Vancouver.

Enough of what Douglas Coupland would term Obscurism (my copy of GenX, page 192). What was Paris all about? The city that I've visited enough to no longer feel like a tourist in. The reminder that somehow I take to new places quicker than most, or perhaps am just more inclined to know where I am within a given time and space. Perhaps it was the weight of neurotic discomfort that shadowed my every motion which led to me absorb the streets of Paris, as an alternative to dwelling upon my own awkwardness. The trudging sense of my own inanity that I failed to shake. The selfish thinking that nobody knew me. The emotional childishness that I attempt to distance myself from. Homesickness for someone who no longer has a home.

Regardless, Wednesday night hockey-awards-night debauchery (read: too much whiskey and fun trophies - one flatteringly voted for by my teammates, the other painfully embarrassing) led into three hours of drunken sleep and beginning a two-day hangover on the 7am train into London. Joyous.

Ending after four nights of very little sleep in deep conversation with two of the people I am most impressed by and feel most inane besides. Cannot decide if I walked away feeling better about things or worse, but still recall every event thanks to my sobriety. We covered most topics, their overpriced beer buzz wearing off as Paris moved towards dawn. And looking back I can think of how I want those hours back, because the next morning things felt as if we had engaged in something devious, that we would not speak of what had been shared. And perhaps this is just my neuroses again.

So another week begins in Oxford, one closer to the end, and I am faced with yet another visitor and a pile of work in my head that I cannot begin to send out into practical application.