Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Friday, Aug. 25, 2006 - 12:57 p.m.

The Marching Morons
The first time I flew to Paris, back in 2003, they swabbed my bags for explosives before they checked them through or allowed me to carry them onto the plane. It was July, just shy of the two year anniversary mark for September 11, and I guess airports and airlines were still a little antsy. Now? Not so fricking much.

Seems a college student was able to board a plane in Argentina with enough explosives residue on/in his bag to cause a dog in US customs to alert authorities to the bag, who then questioned the guy about why he had explosives in his bag. Here's my question: isn't it a little too fucking late to notice, "hey, there might be explosives in that bag," once the plane has already landed? I mean, if someone's planning on blowing a plane up, I'm pretty sure they mean to do it while it's in the air, so I'm sorry, but finding explosives after the plane has already landed really doesn't do much fucking good, now does it?

What the hell happened to swabbing bags for explosives residue before they get put on the plane??? I mean, seriously, people, it's not fucking rocket science. Swab the bag, x-ray the bag, THEN put the fucking bag on the plane. I seriously feel like I am dealing with a world full of morons. Which would be hard enough on me if my safety weren't involved. But when you tell me I can't take a frigging bottled water on a damned airplane, but you'll let people take fucking matches onboard, and you'll load suitcases containing any amount of explosives onboard, then I'm sorry, but I have to seriously question your competence and stop giving you my money.

Seriously.

E.T., Phone Home
Those of you taking bets and making odds may settle up:

I have a phone! Woot!

Cable? Not so much.

But the nice man who came to install my phone called Noos and told them the cable guy never showed up and that I don't speak french for beans (really; I totally heard the french for "for beans" in there) and could they send another guy to fix the decoder box. They told him the guy came on the 21st, which he relayed to me, and I said oh no, he di'int; I waited all damn day for his ass. Only what I actually said was, "Il n'arrive pas; j'attends tout le jour." Which literally translates to "he comes not; i wait all the day." But damn it, past tense verbs are freaking hard here. It should have been something like, "Il n'est arriver pas; j'ai attendre tout le jour," or something like that, but frankly, the compoundiness of the negative past tense gives me a headache. And also is hard to come up with right on the spot. Plus the spelling is probably all wrong. Silent s's, silent t's, silent x's, silent ent's...who can keep this stuff straight? Seriously, alla y'all who actually speak the french as a second language, my hat is off to ya.

So anyway, the cable guy was supposed to show up yet again (for the 3rd time) today, between 30 and 80.

30 and 80? I hear you ask. But Katie, 30 and 80 are not times.

Ah, this I know. The guy on the phone at Noos, however, thought they were perfectly acceptable times of day and that I was a freaking moron for not being able to grasp the concept of a window of time running between 30 and 80 o'clocks. He was quite adamant about them, in fact, and rapidly lost patience with my inability to grasp 30 and 80 as times. So I had to hand the phone back to the guy here, who did not speak english at all, but was able to tell me clearly that the guy would be here between 16 and 18:00, meaning between 4 and 6, which the more astute of you will remember as the window of time in which he was supposed to show up like 6 freaking weeks ago, when all this cable mess started. Only actually, the times were supposed to be 13 and 18, which would be 1 and 6, and wonder of wonders, the cable guy actually did come today...at 3:38, during the one time in the entire day when I was indisposed, AND he went to the wrong apartment, so while I could hear him down the hall yelling through the door that he was "Noos Americain," meaning, I supposed "cable for the American" (Noos being the company and me being American), I could not get to my door at that very moment, and he either could not hear me yelling "C'est moi! Attend, attend, c'est moi," or he was too pissed off to care, so he stomped off, back downstairs. He sounded really pissed off, actually. But jeez, dude, try knocking on the right damned door. :(

It was pretty funny yesterday, though. The guy here was really patient and very nice, and even spoke mostly slow enough that I could grasp a large chunk of general gist as to what he was communicating. I told him several times I was sorry my french, she sucks the derriere, but he was very nice and said no, pas grave, which basically means, well, it's only marginally below what a 2 year old pygmy from the farthest reaches of desert could speak after only 5 minutes in this country, so don't you worry your pretty little head about it. Then on the phone, I hear him tell the guy at Noos, that I don't speak french, and it's terrible. Mauvais, as a matter of fact, which means atrocious. Several times. The last time he said it, when he hung up, I was all, dude, I study. I study by myself, and again, he's all no, no, it's not that bad. Uh-huh. I just said well, he was very, very nice.

When he was done, he couldn't get outta here fast enough. I'm sure he thinks I am the stupidest American girl who ever lived. ::sigh::

Alas.

After the guy left me high and dry today, I spent the next hour trying to reach a human being at Noos...to the tune of 34 centimes a minute. I'm not kidding. When you call the cable company here, they charge you roughly 44 cents a minute to sit on hold and listen to the worst jazz music I have ever heard, on a 1 minute, 36 second loop. So after sitting here listening to the loop play 6 times through, I finally got a real person, who could speak enough english to understand my problem. She couldn't actually help me, though, so she patched me through to another department, where I listed to the loop 9 more times, and then got a person who spoke less english than the first girl, but enough to understand my dilemma and reschedule an appointment for me on Monday, from 1 - 6:30. My favorite part of the whole phone call - aside from paying someone nearly 50 cents a minute to leave my ass on hold for a total of about 20 minutes, when it was all said and done - was when the second girl (who kept calling me Madame Chagall*) told me that the guy had called my "husband's" cell phone when no one answered the door, and I'm like, he may have, but Mr. Chagall is in Turkey. She pauses and goes, "Turkey?" And I say yes, he made the appointment for me and then went on vacation. There's this long pause, and then she goes, "Well." ...In a tone that very clearly said only an idiot books the cable guy on an appointment he won't even be in the country for. I just said "Exactement," and she gave me a new appointment time and told me to be sure and answer the door, to which I replied thank you very much, and yes, yes I will. ::sigh:: All told, that call was 25 minutes long. So it actually cost me 8.50 euros ($11) just to schedule an appointment so I can get my fucking decoder box replaced. There are times I do not exactly love France.

*name changed to cover my ass

After dealing with Noos, I made an appointment to get my hair cut properly (god, i *hope*) tomorrow at 1:30, and then I went to Place Denfert-Rochereau, which was supposed to be the start of a 1.5 hour walk through Cimitiere de Montparnasse and ending at Tour Montparnasse to take pictures, because the afternoon turned out pretty nice. But I got caught up in pictures of the park at Denfert-Rochereau, so I ended up just taking pictures there for 3 hours instead, until I ran out of disk space and came home. Although, I just realized one of the cards was taken up with old images, and I could have deleted those to make more space. Doh!

Obsessive-Compulsive Much?
I got woken up this morning after a whopping two hours of sleep by my neighbor, who apparently has the worst case of OCD ever. Which apparently necessitates the carrying of a very large and loudly jangling keychain. This is what I heard in the early, early hours of the morning after an all-nighter spent taking and editing images:

Insert key attached to incredibly loud and annoying keychain into lock. Lock door. Unlock door. Lock Door. Unlock door. Lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock, unlock, lock...for half a fucking hour, FINALLY fucking culminating in removing the fucking key from the fucking lock, about the time I lost all patience and yelled "Alors!"

Now, you might think this is some sort of aberration and that there must have been something wrong with the lock.

Au contraire, mon ami. I listen to this every single time that door gets locked, although usually only for 15 minutes at night. During the day, though, yes, it goes on for anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes. Over and over and over. Regardless of which side of the door the locker is standing on. Usually I'm fine with it until about 10 minutes go by, at which point it sinks into my consciousness as "wow, that's been going on for a *long* time," and then for the next 5 minutes, it becomes just slightly more annoying with each turn, until by the time it's been about 15 minutes, I really want to throw the door open and take the fucking keys away from the psycho with a need for gigantic loud keychains.

So anyway, the doorlocking finally ceases and the person goes away. I just about get back to sleep when I hear the woman who lives there enter the apartment...and proceed to make the loudest, bitchiest phone call in the entire history of loud, bitchy phone calls, and apparently with her front door standing wide open. For another half hour, during which, to signal either "no" or her displeasure on those rare occasions when she shut up long enough to let the other person get a word in edgewise, she grunted a gutteral "uh" into the phone. I swear, if I ever hear someone make that exact sound ever again, I will fly into a homicidal rage without even knowing it, I have been so thoroughly conditioned to it now.

::sigh::

I'm sorry. I'm PMS'g. And I recently had to come to terms with something I have been trying for a very long time not to come to terms with. So I'm depressed as all hell, and irritable to boot.

I may end up staying until mid-November, now. I have to talk to the landlord and see if he'll give me a one month lease when this one is done, in lieu of my second 3-month lease, which I can not keep.

Say Cheese!
If any of my flower pictures from are nice and pretty, I'll post them. Maybe that will help make up for the crankiness of this particular post. I have discovered that I really love taking pictures. I get really lost in it and am perfectly happy taking a million different shots of the same damn thing for hours. Witness my brass floor grate at the Paris Opera. I used to take tons of pictures when I was a kid and would pester the hell out of my mom to let me use her big expensive Minolta every time we went on vacation. Flowers are my favorite things to photograph, but I also like taking pictures of shapes. Other things are nice too, but those are my favorites. Oh, and shooting directly up the side of buildings, the taller the better. I don't know why, but I love doing that. I could be quite happy making a living taking pictures. Which is not surprising at all to me, since most of the things I actually really like are stuff you can not in anyway make an actual living at without being completely dedicated and willing to live out of your car to pursue. I am not willing to live out of my car, so I stopped acting. I can't imagine I'm any more willing to live out of my car for photography than I was for acting, but of all the things in my life that have made me happy, photography runs a very close second. When I get back to Cali, I'm going to take a photography class to remind me of all the things I've forgotten about how a camera works, because frankly, juggling f-stops, aperture sizes, shutter speeds and ratios is sort of like trying to do calculus in my head. It gives me a headache and sucks the joy right out of a photo. So I really need to pound that stuff into my brain until it comes easy. And I have discovered I will never lose my love of film and a good old-fashioned 35mm camera in favor of flashcards and digital images. The main advantage digital has over film is that my hands shake quite a bit, and with digital images I can tell right after I took the picture whether or not my handshake screwed it up, which saves me a helluva lot of money I would have wasted developing film.

Once upon a time, I used to develop my own black and white film and print my own pictures. That was cool. It was also way back in 9th grade. I couldn't do it now unless someone walked me through it and reminded me what order to doe the chemicals in. I could still expose the print paper to the focussed negative, though; that part's pretty self-explanatory. :)

At any rate, I should probably get on that whole picture thing. I have a lot of images to wade through.

Peace out,
Katie

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Yesterday's News - Next Stop

In which Katie shares sad news - Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2015
In which Katie returns after a very long absence - Monday, Jun. 25, 2012
In which Katie pokes her head in and brushes some of the cobwebs away - Thursday, May. 06, 2010
In which Katie asks you to write your congressman again. - Monday, Jun. 02, 2008
In which Katie asks you to please click the link and send the message to protect the rights of artists - Wednesday, May. 21, 2008