Things I Love/Hate About Montpellier, Volume I
One of the things I dislike most about living in Montpellier has nothing to do with the city or country itself: it's the fact that I live alone, or more accurately, the fact that I live with someone I never care to see or speak to. There are a few advantages, but mainly a long list of disadvantages to this arrangement. When I was in Edinburgh last week, I was reminded of another drawback of which I had hitherto seldom thought.
I am not a morning person, and I hate waking up. Often, getting out of bed is one of the more torturous things I have to experience on a daily basis. Thus, I often take days off as opportunities to sleep well into the afternoon. Even when the sun or my body clock wake me and I feel fully rested, I'll often elect to stay in bed and carry on sleeping until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon just because I know I have nothing to do. But while I was in Edinburgh, I experienced a phenomenon about which I had all but forgotten: the desire to get up. When you're living with people whom you know and like, and when those people aren't morning zombies like you are, oftentimes, you'll hear them up and about before you'd ever considering dragging yourself out of bed, and having awoken to the sounds of gentle bustling, you might even be curious enough about the activities to want to get out of bed yourself. The smell of cooking breakfast, the muffled sounds of Jeremy Kyle playing in the living room, your curiosity about what happened last night and why your left ankle hurts when you bend it... all of these are things which, at one time or another, have trumped that strong inclination I have to while away the day in bed. And none of these are things which I will ever experience in France. On the other hand, however, there is an advantage to this: drifting between sleeping and waking for hours on end does produce vivid memories of dreams, which I always find entertaining. So, if this Sunday afternoon you're feeling bored enough to brave though accounts of someone else's dreams, here they are.
Dream Number One, aka Desperation:
I'm a Prisoner of War. Some of my friends are too, I think. It's the French Revolution or the Civil War or something - some ambiguous time in the 18th or 19th centuries. We're all wearing be-laced dresses with big skirts, and we have elaborate hair. We are meant to be mannered, well-behaved, "morally upstanding" ladies.
Some soldiers come in wearing britches, carrying guns and announce that they're going to violate our propriety and rape us. Everyone looks shocked and frightened. My immediate reaction? I point at a long-haired, rugged-looking man and call "Shotgun!", then spend the rest of the dream employing my waiting women to help lure him into bed with me, wondering why they'd threatened rape if they weren't going to put out.
Dream Number Two:
I'm an astronaut. I'm one of a team of five or six. I'm not sure what our mission is, but we're not even in this galaxy, and we're light years away from the Earth. We come to a solar system in which there aren't many planets as such, but there are many gigantic orange tubs which look like they're made of painted corrugated iron or something - like massive floating metal kegs amoungst the stars. Later, I learn, that they are airtight, and inside one can build a house purchased from google for £29.99. I'm never quite sure how google manage to ship house kits out this far, especially as the indigenous "people" are hostile toward earthlings and earth culture (read: America). But the affordable housing is the reason that the sole fellow earthling cites for having relocated there, and eventually her reason for betraying me. This extra-solar expat is a mysterious thirty-something woman married to an alien with whom she has produced several half-breed offspring which all look pretty humanoid to me. In addition to her house, she is in possession of a space car, also an inexpensive DIY google project. I seek her out because my spaceship has broken down and I have no way of getting out of this galaxy, or home to earth. She says that she can't help me, that we can't go home because the people here hate Earth, and don't want her inhabitants to know where they are. I promise that we won't say; all we want to do is leave, leave, never come back. She says it's too late. I question how they can profess to hate us so much when they still order their houses off of google, but i am not answered. I go back to my spaceship, hopeless. We try to fix our ship ourselves, but it proves to be impossible; we are falling. We seem to be crashing into a planet we had not seen before; it is built up, a veritable city. We try harder than ever to fix our ship or to veer off course, not wanting to kill and destroy the civilization below us. But, the ship slows down, and we land softly in the middle of a highway. We get out of our ship, amazed to be alive, and there are thousands of tiny people all around, crowding us. These people are not particularly hostile; they just seem curious, silent. Then, the point of view flashes back to an image of our ship, floating lifelessly in space. The perspective has changed, and so will our perception of everything we just experienced/saw; it's like the surprise ending of a bad sci-fi movie. The camera pans around the ship, and then eventually moves inside, where we see our decaying bodies lying with their eyes glazed and open, all of us asphyxiated. Flash back to the planet on which we had thought we landed, but which we now realize is the effect of our own deaths. We shrink down to the sizes of the people who had surrounded us, and as we shrink, we are all imprisoned in acrylic boxes, becoming little colourful plastic baubles who will never speak again.
I am not a morning person, and I hate waking up. Often, getting out of bed is one of the more torturous things I have to experience on a daily basis. Thus, I often take days off as opportunities to sleep well into the afternoon. Even when the sun or my body clock wake me and I feel fully rested, I'll often elect to stay in bed and carry on sleeping until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon just because I know I have nothing to do. But while I was in Edinburgh, I experienced a phenomenon about which I had all but forgotten: the desire to get up. When you're living with people whom you know and like, and when those people aren't morning zombies like you are, oftentimes, you'll hear them up and about before you'd ever considering dragging yourself out of bed, and having awoken to the sounds of gentle bustling, you might even be curious enough about the activities to want to get out of bed yourself. The smell of cooking breakfast, the muffled sounds of Jeremy Kyle playing in the living room, your curiosity about what happened last night and why your left ankle hurts when you bend it... all of these are things which, at one time or another, have trumped that strong inclination I have to while away the day in bed. And none of these are things which I will ever experience in France. On the other hand, however, there is an advantage to this: drifting between sleeping and waking for hours on end does produce vivid memories of dreams, which I always find entertaining. So, if this Sunday afternoon you're feeling bored enough to brave though accounts of someone else's dreams, here they are.
Dream Number One, aka Desperation:
I'm a Prisoner of War. Some of my friends are too, I think. It's the French Revolution or the Civil War or something - some ambiguous time in the 18th or 19th centuries. We're all wearing be-laced dresses with big skirts, and we have elaborate hair. We are meant to be mannered, well-behaved, "morally upstanding" ladies.
Some soldiers come in wearing britches, carrying guns and announce that they're going to violate our propriety and rape us. Everyone looks shocked and frightened. My immediate reaction? I point at a long-haired, rugged-looking man and call "Shotgun!", then spend the rest of the dream employing my waiting women to help lure him into bed with me, wondering why they'd threatened rape if they weren't going to put out.
Dream Number Two:
I'm an astronaut. I'm one of a team of five or six. I'm not sure what our mission is, but we're not even in this galaxy, and we're light years away from the Earth. We come to a solar system in which there aren't many planets as such, but there are many gigantic orange tubs which look like they're made of painted corrugated iron or something - like massive floating metal kegs amoungst the stars. Later, I learn, that they are airtight, and inside one can build a house purchased from google for £29.99. I'm never quite sure how google manage to ship house kits out this far, especially as the indigenous "people" are hostile toward earthlings and earth culture (read: America). But the affordable housing is the reason that the sole fellow earthling cites for having relocated there, and eventually her reason for betraying me. This extra-solar expat is a mysterious thirty-something woman married to an alien with whom she has produced several half-breed offspring which all look pretty humanoid to me. In addition to her house, she is in possession of a space car, also an inexpensive DIY google project. I seek her out because my spaceship has broken down and I have no way of getting out of this galaxy, or home to earth. She says that she can't help me, that we can't go home because the people here hate Earth, and don't want her inhabitants to know where they are. I promise that we won't say; all we want to do is leave, leave, never come back. She says it's too late. I question how they can profess to hate us so much when they still order their houses off of google, but i am not answered. I go back to my spaceship, hopeless. We try to fix our ship ourselves, but it proves to be impossible; we are falling. We seem to be crashing into a planet we had not seen before; it is built up, a veritable city. We try harder than ever to fix our ship or to veer off course, not wanting to kill and destroy the civilization below us. But, the ship slows down, and we land softly in the middle of a highway. We get out of our ship, amazed to be alive, and there are thousands of tiny people all around, crowding us. These people are not particularly hostile; they just seem curious, silent. Then, the point of view flashes back to an image of our ship, floating lifelessly in space. The perspective has changed, and so will our perception of everything we just experienced/saw; it's like the surprise ending of a bad sci-fi movie. The camera pans around the ship, and then eventually moves inside, where we see our decaying bodies lying with their eyes glazed and open, all of us asphyxiated. Flash back to the planet on which we had thought we landed, but which we now realize is the effect of our own deaths. We shrink down to the sizes of the people who had surrounded us, and as we shrink, we are all imprisoned in acrylic boxes, becoming little colourful plastic baubles who will never speak again.