This afternoon, B. and I went to see our notary to sign the first series of legal papers for the purchase of our new house. There is so much paperwork involved in buying a house that it can get pretty overwhelming at times. Our notary, a woman, was pretty patient with my desire to understand every single step involved. At some point in the process, she wanted to make sure that I got a copy of a specific document, so she asked her husband to make photocopies for us. Later on, she asked him to check her agenda to see if she was free for our next meeting. Then she got a little impatient when she found out that he didn’t get the tax information he was supposed to.

I don’t know much about this couple, but it seems like at some point in the woman’s career (maybe from the start), they decided that the husband would be her assistant and that they would run their business from their house. He answers the phone and returns the calls, greets the clients and probably makes coffee (though he didn’t offer us any). I think it’s great.

In a not so distant past, I worked as an administrative assistant to two different publishing executives (but not for both at the same time). One of them was younger than me and both were less educated than I was (though they did go to Ivy League schools). They were extremely bright men with whom I had a great rapport, and since we were in politically-correct San Francisco, both of them were rather uncomfortable about the situation. I have caught them sneaking out of meetings to run to the photocopier or the kitchen because they couldn’t stand the idea of asking me to make photocopies or get drinks for the people in the meeting. I didn’t really complain but hey, I had taken the job, and I knew what came with it.

I have no resentment about my past as a “glorified secretary”, yet this afternoon, I loved to see the notary holler at her husband and repeatedly ask him to do tedious tasks for her. It’s silly, but I just love the idea of a woman having a male assistant. Our notary’s got it good since she gets to call her assistant sweetie and slap his bum and he can’t even sue her for sexual harassment! She didn’t do anything like this, of course, and thanked him every time for his help. If I had a male assistant, I would be a very classy lady too!

Avant que ne commence la folie du d�m�nagement et pour c�l�brer l’acquisition de notre bagnole, B. et moi sommes all�s faire un tour dans la belle r�gion des Cantons-de-L’Est. Nous avons fait le choix de suivre la route des vins et nous n’�tions pas les seuls! La route n’�tait pas trop occup�e mais le stationnement du vignoble L’Orpailleur �tait plein � craquer! Quelques d�gustations de produits du terroir (terrines, p�t�s, foie gras, beurre d’�rable et bien s�r, vin!) et nous reprenions la route. Nous �tions l� un peu trop t�t dans la saison pour pouvoir profiter des couleurs de l’automne. Les v�ritables coloris, ce sont les raisins qui les offraient! Dans deux ou trois semaines, cette route sera belle � couper le souffle.

Au Lac Brome, nous sommes encore une fois tomb�s sur une petite foule. Sans le savoir, nous avions atteri dans ce charmant village aux demeures somptueuses en plein Festival du canard! J’ai r�sist� � la tentation des hot ducks (hot dogs avec saucisse de canard) pour me tourner vers une d�licieuse salade ti�de de canard. Nous sommes revenus chez nous le ventre plein et le sac rempli de bouteilles, question d’�tirer le plaisir de cette visite.

Je connais mieux les petites routes de la Californie que celles du Qu�bec, ce qui est compl�tement absurde! J’esp�re donc que l’acquisition d’une auto nous encouragera � prendre la route de mani�re spontan�e comme nous l’avons fait ce samedi.

Je n’avais pas “googl�” mon nom depuis belle lurette, et voil� qu’un �lan de curiosit� m’apporte une surprise: Apr�s une vingtaine de mois d’existence de ni.vu.ni.connu, voil� que je bats le Martine Inn en Californie et les Chocolats Martine quand on fait une recherche avec mon pr�nom sur Google.

Vous pouvez donc tous aller vous enregistrer sur la liste des fans de Martine. On ne rit plus.

The much expected (yet slightly feared) change in lifestyle has started! This morning I took the subway. Three hours later, I was driving back home.

I have owned two cars in my life, including this new purchase, and both of them have been used Corollas. I didn’t specifically look for Corollas but they were both great deals, sold by people I knew, so I chose not to pass on the offers.

I paid 800$ for my first Corolla in 1996, in San Francisco. My ex-roommate (who was also acting in my short film) had decided to move to Florida so she was selling everything she owned. The car had a bit of rust which got much worse during my 3-year ownership. There was a big hole in the back, where the antenna used to be, and when it rained water accumulated in the trunk. Every time I braked, the car went “wooooshhhhh, wooooshhhhh”. It was very zen and oh so very Californian. I felt like I was driving a giant aquarium. Or a loud lava lamp.

The new Corolla I just got this morning is in much better shape, in and out. Blork and I have read reviews about that model and it’s a truly reliable, no-fuss car. Still, it remains fundamentally unsexy.

Reliable and unsexy.

Oh well.

Let’s not turn this into a comment about B. and I as people. Ok? It’s bad enough that I had to stop by Canadian Tire and buy myself one of those little-old-lady cushions, so that I can sit higher and get a better view when I drive.

And could it be destiny? On the same week I get an offer to write a new screenplay, which has to take place in the football milieu, I get a license plate that ends in these letters: NFL.

Cette explication des nombreux termes finissant en “oune” utilis�s par les qu�b�cois m’a beaucoup fait rire! Dommage que Laurent ne soit pas l�, lui qui se demandait r�cemment ce que c’�tait qu’une poupoune.

“Une guidoune, finalement, c� une ancienne pitoune devenue toutoune qui fait la baboune parce qu’� se trouve nounoune d’avoir �t� moumoune?”

Lien d�couvert gr�ce � Hou-Hou Blog.

“At the age of eleven she wrote her first story – a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader’s respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character’s weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.”

From Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I started reading last night.

Anybody who has ever put together plays as a kid, and taken them very seriously, can painfully recognize themselves in these lines. Heck, anybody who still writes as an adult can still feel that way!

For me, it started with Barbies. I had no interest in dolls because they represented babies or children. Yes, Barbies were blond bimbos, but at least they were adults and therefore could have interesting lives. I would come up with elaborate stories for them, playing with my friends and suggesting lines of dialogue when they ran out of inspiration. Later, with my sister and my niece, we put together small plays, most often adapted from short stories I was reading. We rehearsed for a few days in the basement of our apartment and then we would ask dad and the upstairs neighbors to move the cars out of the backyard to make room for our stage. We would invite friends and family and charge them 50 cents. The performance was never my favorite part of the process and most of the time I felt like the story was out of control, with actors giggling and spectators paying very little attention.

The producer I’ve been working with called me yesterday with some good news. She’s very happy about the first draft of the screenplay and we’re going ahead with the next steps. If everything goes as she plans it, the shooting of the feature (in English) should start mid to late 2004. In the meantime, she was wondering if I would be interested in writing another screenplay for them (in French). They already have a talented director booked as well as an important distributor. All they need is a good story, a romantic comedy this time.

I guess I’m going to have to get my Barbies out of the closet! Oh wait! I threw them out years ago, damn!
(Wink wink, baby ;-)

La journ�e En ville sans ma voiture � Montr�al, vue par Web cam.
Merci � Mikel.org pour le lien.

C’est dommage qu’ils ne laissent pas passer les scooters! Je ne prends pas beaucoup de place, moi, et je peux me stationner partout!

Si vous appr�ciez l’exp�rience du centre-ville sans auto, jetez un coup d’oeil du c�t� de Voyagez F�t�, qui sugg�re des alternatives � l’auto en solo. On y retrouve aussi plusieurs liens forts utiles concernant les d�placements � Montr�al.
Merci au Carnet Techno pour le lien.

Je suis d�chir�e entre la joie de savoir que les mouvements alternatifs � l’utilisation de l’auto commencent � gagner du terrain � Montr�al, et le fait que je me cherche actuellement une voiture d’occasion. Si vous connaissez un bon filon…

As some of you might already know, next month, B. and I will be moving into a house we’re about to officially purchase. Since we live in separate apartments, packing will be a complex issue that I’m only starting to face now. We’ve got a lot of stuff in double: some of it will be combined, some of it will go to the basement and, if I can help it, a lot of it will go straight to the trash can. I’m getting headaches just thinking about it.

You see, my beau is a P-R type, better known as the dreaded pack rat. He has a strange sentimental attachment to the weirdest objects and won’t let go of anything by fear of needing it sometimes down the road, and having to face the terrible, horrible fact that he threw the damn thing away. This applies to books he will never read, magazines he will never, ever look at again (anybody wants all the 1995 issues of Saturday Night Magazine ?), flyers for classes he will never take, clothes that are out of style, stolen spoons from airline companies and strings of all lengths and sizes.

B. has moved every two years or so since the beginning of his adult life, but since he hates packing, he waits to the very last minute and ends up dragging every single one of his possessions from apartment to apartment, without any kind of pre-selection. After his last move, I found a 10 year-old package of popcorn in a tin can in his fridge. He had taken that can of kernels with him on 5 different moves, without ever looking at the date on the box and with no true plan of ever eating the damn thing.

I, or the other hand, love empty space and freak out when I start realizing that I have too much stuff. My fridge always looks empty because I don’t keep food for very long and I love to see some negative space in my closets. We are planning to move into the house in about a month, so Sunday I sweet-talked B. into cleaning the content of his bedroom closet.

It would have made a perfect episode of the television show What Not to Wear, with B. modeling old clothes for me in front of the mirror and with us playing a tug of war game with some of his oldest pieces of clothing. The discarded pile grew high on the bed and I was starting to breathe better until we got to the t-shirt section.

Oh. My. God.

At first he was good about it, getting easily rid of a couple of plain white t-shirts that had turned yellow around the collar. But then we got to his “collection”. This was a geek’s paradise and my worst nightmare. Computer tradeshow t-shirts, software launch t-shirts, dead high tech company t-shirts… I kept finding them in every single corner of that closet. “We can’t get rid of this one! I wrote the software manual for it!” “You can’t make me throw away this t-shirt, it was in honor of our first beta testing. It’s a unique piece!”

I decided to count the t-shirts, just to make him realize how crazy this was. I stopped at 47 because the tears in my eyes kept me from finding any more of his “treasures”. “You’re a freak!”, I said to him. “What am I getting myself into?” I couldn’t tell if the tears in my eyes were there because I was completely overwhelmed or because we were laughing so hard. Maybe it was just the dust coming out of the t-shirts he never wears.

In the end, he got to keep his damn t-shirts and we still took 3 very full bags of clothes to a local charity. I came back home, took a shower, and looked through my own closet to find something to wear. My eyes were drawn to the little pile of clothes B. keeps at my place. I looked through it and found 4 more t-shirts, 3 of them sporting computer related logos.

This must be true love or else I’m completely crazy.

“The more I read the Quebecois bloggers, the more I admire them. Maybe it’s the helpful latitude – long, cold winters seem to make for good weblogs (says the Vermonter). Maybe it’s good old fashioned Canadian wry humor and civility. But I think a big part of it is their ability to navigate the US and French Internet while maintaining their own perspective and critical distance. I’d be curious to hear what my colleagues up North think of all this, and find out if the language wars that turned every burger in Quebec into a ‘hambourgeois’ are now moving online.”

From Idle Words, by American blogger Maciej Ceglowski.

Dear Maciej,

I am a regular reader of your blog, which I greatly appreciate, so I got nervous when I saw that you chose to write about the OQLF incident with the Quebec Urbain blog. Yes, I admit it, I was afraid that your blog would disappoint me for the first time, because I am rarely pleased by the comments I hear or read from Americans, who generally don’t understand the politics of language in Quebec.

I am glad to say that you did not disappoint me! It was refreshing to read such a tolerant and researched perspective, and it is because I appreciated it so much that I am now taking the time to answer your call for comments on the subject.

I was born and raised in a completely French speaking environment (Quebec City) and it wasn’t until I moved to California in 1990 (and lived there until 1998) that I spoke English on a daily basis. I was in San Francisco during the 1995 referendum and I was surprised to see that some of my friends and coworkers, who were never very curious about Quebec, suddenly started to ask me questions about the political situation back home. Even the most liberal or left-leaning people seemed stunned. What on earth was going on in Quebec? Was this Parti Quebecois a right-wing party? Why would anybody want to separate from a country as wonderful as Canada? (”But, you have the National Film Board!”, said a lot of my friends from film school…) I took a long time to explain to each and every one of them, to the best of my knowledge, the history of our language problems and some of the reasons for a desired sovereignty.

On the night of the actual referendum, I joined a group of expats quebecois to view the results of the vote via a satellite broadcast at Berkeley (offered by their Canadian studies program). After the stunning results- and the killer comment from Monsieur Parizeau (”How dare he!”, I thought, “after all the time I spent explaining to people how this was not a racially based national movement!”) – the whole gang went out for pizza. That group of quebecois included independentists, federalists, francophones and anglophones. The conversation was animated but there were no fights, no attitude, no bickering. We were all completely moved by what we had just witnessed (a very high voter turnout for a democratic election, showing how important the issue was for all quebecois) and we felt close to one another, probably because of our expat status.

8 years later, I am back in Quebec, writing a bilingual blog. Why bilingual? Because I didn’t want to lose touch with a language I rarely spoke on a daily basis anymore (until I met my beau, an anglo from Nova Scotia), because I wanted to keep in touch with my California friends who don’t speak French and because I wanted for my blog to be part of a larger network, with more potential readers. Since I started my blog, 20 months ago, I have not received a single complaint, not even a single question from a reader wondering why I’m a quebecoise francophone writing in English. No hate mail, no hacking of the site, not even a bitchy comment. One person once told me that he didn’t like it when I switched between languages in a single post. Fair enough, I thought. When it’s English, it’s English, and when it’s French, it’s French.

The OQLF incident you talked about is an isolated one. I doubt that it will happen again, at least on private sites like blogs. I like the fact that I live in a place where there is such a thing as tolerance, a place where people can say “this was a mistake” and we can drop the subject. I’m still nervous though that the anglo press in Canada will jump on this occasion to point their eternal accusatory finger at the so-called language police, accusing once again the franco quebecois of xenophobia or even totalitarianism. But anyone devoid of paranoia tendencies will tell you that this is not the way things are experienced here on a daily basis.

So next time you’re in Quebec, stop by Montreal and hang out with the amazingly bilingual crowd of YULbloggers. I’ll be happy to buy you a hamburger, which, by the way, nobody ever seriously calls a hambourgeois.

Months and months after everybody else, I finally saw Bowling for Columbine, which I rented on DVD. I had heard so much about the movie and I had seen parts of it on tv or over the Internet, so I felt like it was a second viewing. Watching this documentary months after everybody else gave me a strange perspective on it. I couldn’t stop thinking that Michael Moore is a strange character. He obviously deeply cares about the subject of the movie and yet he cannot seem to help putting himself at the center of the stage, as if the whole thing was somehow about him in the end. As we watched this relatively young man struggle to carry his heavy frame around, Blork made an interesting observation. “This guy would be really daring if he made a movie about the American problem with obesity.”

There is one place where Moore happily took the backstage position: instead of doing the usual director’s audio commentary track, Moore chose to let the crew speak, particularly the people at so called low-level positions. Receptionists, production assistants and interns sat around in a recording studio and made comments about their experience while watching the movie.

The resulting soundtrack is hilarious yet scary. These young crew members don’t have much to say about the movie’s subject, which is surprising in itself. They hardly comment on the actual documentary, except to make fun of the people being interviewed. After 15 minutes or so, they completely let go of the movie to joke around about stealing office supplies (”You got a stapler? I got nothing!”), about the tedious tasks they had to do for the production, and about the fact that they didn’t know what it meant to be American (”That is so American. But what is an American?”). They even make admiring comments about some of the guns shown in the movie!

At one point, one of the crew members notes that maybe they should start commenting on the movie again. “Nobody is listening to this anyway”, answers one of them. “Except maybe for the boss and a bunch of stoned college kids in a dorm, at 3am”, replies another one. There’s a short silence followed by a burst of laughter.

I wonder what Michael Moore thought when he listened to that commentary track? Was he disappointed that he didn’t seem to have any influence on the young people who worked on his movie? Or was he simply cracking up while listening to the audio track?