How to approach the new year with serenity: on December 30th, follow a bad movie with a depressing bad movie with a series of karaoke mishaps with a cute little love story on DVD. Ah, and make sure the New Year’s Eve supper is as improvised as can humanly be.

I’ll consider myself lucky just reaching 2006.

And of course on the very next day I receive the papers I needed to switch telcos.

On the one hand, I feel like waiting a while, enjoying my free month of Wanadoo DSL, because I’m not in quitte a hurry to lose the internet again while they mess with phone cables and I wait for my Freebox to arrive. On the other, after I switch I’ll have TV over DSL and I kinda do miss TV a bit… (But only a bit.)

P.S. Considering how unreliable my connection is (blame the ISP or the modem, it doesn’t matter) I might not wait too long.

It’s a temporary connection (waiting until I can switch phone providers) with a temporary modem (I should have two or three times that kind of bandwidth), but boy does it feel good.

A Leroy-Merlin Rambuteau (joli magasin, côté vendeurs j’ai un doute mais je n’en ai testé qu’un, je ne peux pas généraliser) :

— Bonjour, vous n’avez pas de débouche-WC spécial sanibroyeur ?

— Si, ils sont là.

— Non, spécial sanibroyeur.

— Ah, non, j’en ai pas. Suivant !

Au sous-sol du BHV (marrant comme on passe d’un monde à l’autre en descendant un petit escalier, ce magasin est complètement schizophrène, mais ça va bien avec son nom) :

— Bonjour, j’ai un sanibroyeur à débouch–

— Ah, non, il faut des produits spécifiques, pour un sanibroyeur, on n’en a pas ici. Vous pouvez en trouver à Carrefour ou Auchan, je sais qu’ils en ont. Enfin, demandez toujours au troisième étage, au rayon produits d’entretien, ils en ont peut-être.

Au troisième étage du BHV, rayon droguerie (il y a un rayon produits d’entretien au BHV ? même d’un rayon à l’autre, au même étage, ce magasin est schizo) :

— Bonjour, est-ce que pour un broyeur–

— Ah, non, pour les broyeurs il faut des produits spéciaux, on ne les fait plus.

— Mais celui-là, sans acide ni soude ?

— Non, on ne vend plus de produits pour les broyeurs, je ne sais pas trop pourquoi, je sais que c’est difficile à trouver mais on n’en a pas, désolé.

— Euh mais…

— Oui, enfin si vous deviez en prendre un, ça serait le bio, c’est sûr, mais bon je ne peux pas vous le conseiller. Ah, j’aimerais pas être à votre place, parce que je saurais pas quoi faire, là.

Il n’y a que les pauvres dans les chambres de bonnes qui ont des broyeurs, donc ils n’ont qu’à se démerder et aller dans les hypermarchés pour pauvres à la périphérie de Paris, et qu’est-ce qu’ils foutent à Paris de toute façon s’ils n’ont pas les moyens de se payer un 150 mètres carrés avec de vraies toilettes ? (Note : mes toilettes ne sont pas bouchées, elles sont juste… un peu paresseuses, depuis quelques jours, et je préfère tout essayer maintenant plutôt que d’attendre de devoir opérer à merde ouverte.)

Did I tell you I’ve got a mailbox of my own, with my name written on a label, and a tiny key on my chain, and I have to check my mail myself every day when I get back home? It’s so funny.

Of course, it has to be when I’m at my parents’ home, on Christmas Eve, filling my cavities with stuffed potatoes, that the server decides to crash after working seamlessly for a while. Looks like the hard drive is full, but that’s hard to tell having no access to anything.

It’s official now: when I’m old, I’ll be an asshole. Instead of empathizing with the poor people who (like me) didn’t think of booking their train seats in time and (unlike me) didn’t even bother to get to the station one hour early and not wait for the billboards to display the platform number to get into the train, I had to refrain from laughing when I watched the mess around me, people getting booted from reserved seats, others sitting crosslegged in the aisle — and it was only a train to Granville, not to the Alps or… a grand city. Yeah, even on Baby Jesus’s birthday I’m deeply, secretly, a misanthrope. When I was young, I didn’t imagine for a second that I’d become bitter as I grew older — and particularly not so soon!

I really do belong in Paris, don’t I? (he writes, remembering of the clichéd bitchy Parisians in the Sex and the City finale.)

La lettre de résiliation Canalsat, pour cause de déménagement à Paris youpi mon propriétaire a fini par encaisser les chèques ça y est je suis chez moi et aussi à découvert, est prête à partir (je ne sais pas trop si ça incluera Canal+ ou non, ça n’a pas l’air clair) ; tant que j’y suis, est-ce que je dois profiter de ce que je vais bientôt prochainement un jour avoir une Freebox, et aussi de ce que je capte très mal dans mon nouveau chez moi, pour résilier mon forfait SFR illimité soir et week-end que je n’ai jamais vraiment exploité et que j’ai gardé pendant des années au cas où j’en aurais besoin un jour ? Il faut bien arrêter les frais, à un moment.

God how long evenings are when you have a cold and no internet.

C’est quand on se vide par toutes les narines^* depuis deux jours qu’on regrette de ne pas avoir du papier-toilette Renova (même si quand j’avais testé je trouvais l’odeur de crème Nivea un peu trop forte pour se moucher dedans).

(J’aurais juré avoir déjà posté ça. Whoa, déjà blogged.)

^* Non, en fait, c’est uniquement la narine gauche, mais ça sonne mieux comme ça.

Est-ce que j’aurais dû / devrais encore prendre un mois d’essai ADSL chez Wanadoo, en attendant qu’ils se décident à envoyer les papiers nécessaires au dégroupage (ben, forcément qu’ils ne sont pas pressés de les envoyer), ou ce serait ensuite les douze travaux d’Hercules pour réussir à s’en débarrasser avant que ça devienne un engagement d’un an ?

P.S. Quelqu’un a un modem-routeur “ADSL Max” qui traîne, à me prêter pour un mois ?

My new quasineighbor Jérôme was telling me he was in no hurry to buy a washing machine, and going to the laundromat was a nice opportunity to socialize, meet people from the block.

So it appears my neighborhood is one half stressed-out girls hanging to their phones, and one half assholes who smoke cigarillos or something equally disgusting and go in and out of the laundromat three times without ever managing to pull the door closed behind them, on the very first day of winter.

Hurray.

• It’s evidently less Japanese all of a sudden, but California rolls are definitely more to my taste — of course: you couldn’t tell the difference if there weren’t any fish at all inside. So not only is sushi a groundless craze, but Americans, who are responsible for that, eat sushi that doesn’t taste like sushi.

• When I saw there was a Franprix right down my street (whereas the Monoprix is farther) I was a bit scared, traumatized by the Franprix where I lived, which was populated by “Leader Price” discount products. When I saw it was a Franprix with a delicatessen aisle, because, hey, this is Paris, I figured it might be alright. When I went to check out… I don’t know which I want to kill more, the tellers or clients. Why do all Paris supermarkets have insufferable tellers? Is the pay worse than at McDonald’s?

• And other stuff I don’t have time to translate and it’s not really interesting anyway.

(A Japanese restaurant, rue de la Verrerie.)

These days I’m all about trying new experiences, like moving to Paris and signing a lease and all, so I’ve been thinking it was time for me to try out sushi, and the worst that could happen to me was dying because of poorly-prepared fugu. So last Sunday I let friends drag me to Kyo (there’s bound to be an accent somewhere in the name, but when I googled it to check I only found the name in uppercase, so I can’t know): it’s well located (in the Marais), the place and waiters are pleasant, prices are reasonable, the food is fresh and there’s the lead singer of a punkish-rockish French band at a table.

Obviously I’m not going to compare this restaurant to others, seeing as it’s my first take at sushi (as for the meat skewers, they’re neither better nor worse than in the last — and first — Japanese restaurant I tried; I just don’t like their skewers), so I’ll trust the others that it’s a good Japanese restaurant. I found the white rice quite insipid, but maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be (I know that’s what soy sauce is there for, but I don’t like it too much either).

What I can judge now is the concept of sushi: true, it’s quite edible even if you don’t particularly like fish (especially salmon, because tuna does taste of sea); true, it’s quite different from cooked fish and you can’t really know whether you’ll like it or not until you try it; what I don’t get, though, is that you put a tiny piece of fish, with a relatively shy taste, in a lump of rice, with no taste at all, rolled in algae, with no taste either, and dip the thing in soy sauce, cover it with wasabi, and wrap it in fresh ginger. And now that’s considered a refined meal, even though it amounts to putting a slice of truffle in a ball of mashed potatoes and covering it with peanut butter and ketchup. I’m okay with eating raw fish because it’s healthy, but if crazes, culinary and otherwise, were motivated by health, the world would be a very different place. No, really, there’s got to be something I don’t get: sushi can’t be fashionable in the Western world just because people are so proud they could go beyond their initial disgust for raw fish. Can’t be. People aren’t so stupid.

The taste of coffee, minus the bitterness, added to Pepsi Max, and probably a double dose a caffeine — in the great “let’s mix everything we can think of to revive our colas” game Pepsi’s designed an original cocktail that you’d expect to find more on thinkgeek.com than in your Walmart.

I’m not much of a coffee fan, what with the bitterness and all, but the result here is… weird. Interesting. Seducing. I’m quite tempted to abandon my Coke bottles here and buy a few more of these on my way back home.

Which reminds me, I’ve got to give Starbucks a try (or two) now that I’m in the city. Actually, they’ve got to be sponsoring this new Pepsi variant in order to lure youngsters into the coffee drug.

Note to self: when cleaning a mouldy fridge with a bleach-based product, do not wear your brand new jeans. I know, it’s obvious to anyone else. Now that it’s too late… any advice on the best ways to artistically bleach your own jeans, so it looks like something more elegant than just stains?

Note to self: when moving into a new apartment, do not fill up the fridge before you’ve checked the dial isn’t on the “I light up when the door’s opened but I don’t actually refrigerate, sucker!” position.

Woken up at eight thirty in the morning by power picking (blame Google Translate if that makes no sense), because obviously when you have to drill holes into the pavement you have to do it at dawn (poor guys don’t even start their day at nine?). Seeing how the whole place was echoing the vibrations, I wonder how many times a building can withstand construction work in the street before it crumbles.

After a few days using Fxxxx’s fast connection with my slow Mac mini, I have trouble adjusting to the slow connection on my fast iMac — seeing Safari lag in the back I always have a little apprehension before pressing Ctrl to trigger Quicksilver.

Anyway, the water’s fine now (the electrician removed a circuit from the fuse box, that’s not particularly reassuring but we all know that’s the way technology works) and the phone’s there (my connection is slow, but I hope it’s due to my ISP’s dialup network rather than my brand new phone line itself, or I’ll be crying when it comes to setting up my DSL); I’m beginning to feel at home, only missing some furniture now.

Oh, and there was a hole, and a remnant of cable in it, above my door. Which means those sadists removed the whole phone setup when they renovated the apartment, and nevermind that it’s costing me an additional fifty euros to get the line back. (Which isn’t that bad, compared to failing to electrify me to death.)

I was sitting, meditative, on the crapper, thinking that, yes, in the end, even though the main room isn’t small, even though I’ll have to pay the rent every month, I could be fine here. Because the crapper’s comfortable. Strong with this newly found optimism, I got up (you’ll forgive my skipping a few details here) to wash my hands, and… ZAP! Ouch, must have poured hot water right into my finger cut there, it’s odd it was that painful, but I’ll start with the other hand instead. ZAP! Ah, must be too hot — even though it didn’t feel that hot. Odd, but let’s try cold water. ZAP! Water is electrified. I’ve only just moved in (with all my stuff, and carrying it all to the fifth floor wasn’t quite a walk in the park) and already my flat, or maybe the whole building, hates me. I wanna go home.

Garoo out. See you in a week or fifteen.

Ca y est, je ne subventionne plus Pink TV (j’aurais bien fait une capture d’écran du message “vous n’êtes pas abonné à cette chaîne”, mais la carte de capture est dans mon PC, dans un sac poubelle, dans l’entrée) ; sinon, SciFi est très regardable (mais manque de VM, et je vais rater le démarrage de Battlestar Galactica dimanche… et les deux ou trois week-ends suivants aussi).

To celebrate my departure, my parents have finally upgraded to ADSL Max. Three or four megabits, two days before I leave — yippee.

A six-floor building, with three doors per landing, for a grand total of… two phone subscribers (and, of course, no phone installation at all in my flat). Where the hell am I? Which century is it?

Lease signed.

— And where is it again?

— It’s 69, rue des Archives.
Hold on… did I just say I was gonna live at number 69?

Est-ce que quelqu’un dans la salle, et dans Paris, a une perceuse ? Une scie sauteuse ? (Ca a beau être basique, une perceuse, connaissant mon lectorat je ne m’attends à rien. J’aurais dû poster des captures d’écran de The L Word.)

Et est-ce que quelqu’un ici serait menuisier, tiens, tant qu’on y est ?