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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Is it a real place? See beautiful_losers, but I think I have to go back a third time to make sure it's real.
...
Two or three Saturdays ago, my human host (a small nondescript female with square glasses) went to Parc La Fontaine to meet people for a barbeque. This, without knowing where in the park they were. The park is very big.
A beautiful black-haired girl was walking beside her. She was from Brazil, she said. They were walking together because they'd both asked the same person the way to La Fontaine Park, both in clumsy French, and now they were talking, also in clumsy French. EoI made it understood she was looking for people, while the student two or three years her junior was simply going there for a visit, because it was a nice day.
A person passed, walking a dog.
Ce chien, c'est mignon, said EoI.
C'est quoi, mignon? asked Ariana (or a name like Ariana.)
Cute, said EoI.
Cute? asked Ariana.
Er... petit?
Pas tres petit, said Ariana.
Mais, c'est vrai, non, admitted EoI.
They stopped next to a tree with a pond below and Ariana asked Kirsten to take a picture.
(The human host tells me to call her Kirsten, or maybe Kris if I can't pronounce Kirsten. I told her, it's epitome of incomprehensibility, full stop - or not full stop, that would be like "fun" and I hear that one of Us gets annoyed at the singer's body language. Speaking of whom, "Kirsten" tells me to tell him he "DOES look a bit like Chris when Chris had a beard, so my dream about the non-Decemberists was clearly intuitive." I dislike relaying petty messages, but I find it the workings of the human mind quite fascinating. Right now "Kirsten" is trying to recall everyone she knows called Kris/Chris, up to and including herself, instead of allowing her alien overlord to write a Leonard Cohen-inspired narrative about a three-dimensional park she claims is "real." Humanity these days!)
Ariana posed next to the tree and Kirsten took a photo of her with Ariana's digital camera. It was successful. Ariana then took a photo of Kirsten - which puzzled the poor human, because she was convinced she was not as attractive and, furthermore, that Ariana was not attracted to her. Then she thought of being a stranger in a strange land. She looked at the water and thought of Russia, and how she was better off not living in Russia.
(Kirsten is jabbing her thoughts at me, irritably. She says "You mean Austria. But I wasn't thinking of Jürgen, and we were never serious, and I hadn't recognized the park as the first_date park yet.")
Russia. She was thinking of Russia. She was thinking of the "Anti-Gay Olympics" petition, and Edward Snowden, and the Soviets, and the fact that the good guys are often the bad guys an hour later, and of Irene Nemirovsky, and Natasha and Boris. She was thinking of Chekhov, and Mussorgsky, and snowy mountains, and pretty but complicated names.
(Kirsten: "Bullshit.")
They went over the bridge, and Kirsten was trying to work up the courage to tell Ariana that she would be better off looking for the group on her own, when they saw the ducks.
Oh! C'est mignon, said Kirsten.
Ariana laughed.
Tu vois les... les ducks? Les canards, said Kirsten.
Ariana looked at Kirsten's bag and asked her if she'd brought a lunch, and if maybe they could eat lunch together? But there was something oddly familiar about the bridge when Kirsten imagined it snowy and duckless, and she replied regretfully that she was having flashbacks to her childhood in Russia.
(Ow! Stop it!)
She said she was looking for a potluck that had a barbeque attached, which was what it sounded like when she said it in French, because she can't speak French very well.
On the other side of the bridge she found a corn-on-the-cob festival, with tents and people advertising their organic farming co-ops, complete with enticing smells. She felt like stopping, but she wanted to find the potluck with the barbeque attached.
Further on she saw more barbeques, but none of them were the right ones. She ran across runners and cyclists wearing pink or red to stop cancer. A few men wore leather jackets with "Cell's Angels" written on them. In fact, there were quite a lot of people stopping cancer. A news camera was getting pictures of them and she ducked out of its way, moving towards the street, which was maybe Sherbrooke or St. Laurent. Near a fenced-in basketball court she finally found the group. She shared her basket of apples, peaches, oranges, and garden-grown tomatoes as she sat down and started flirting with a twenty-year-old from Taiwan.
(Kirsten: "I object! I wasn't flirting, I was engaging him in light conversation about neuropsychology, which happened to be his collage major!")
Collage major? Of course. You need to combine observations of human behaviour (principally the domain of psychology) with observations about the chemical workings of the brain (as in neuroscience).
Kirsten ate tomatoes, reflected that Benito Mussolini was perhaps a better-looking dictator than Kim Jong-Il, and thought longingly of her childhood in the wastelands of Russia.
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