Grève, grève, grève, grève, grève, grève, grève, baked beans, grève, grève, grève, and grève,
Hey, did you know there’s still a strike going on? In France? Same as the past month-and-a-bit?
Yeah, it’s still getting on my nerves. At least this week I haven’t had to endure self-righteous foreign-exchange students debating the matter. Each of my professors is clings to her previous attitude, only moreso; one is ever more passionate about the justice of the strike, one makes ever-more-acid comments about Sarkozy, one laments how it shortchanges us poor little students, one mentions in vaguely then goes on to subjects like reincarnation or the power one feels in the air during the Spring Equinox.
Oh, and this is my 24th post. 24 is an important number, what with being the number of hours in the day and all. And, of course, it’s 2 x 12, and 12 is like 10 (which is important, since we like decimals), but 12 is cooler. And zodiacs like 12. And 24 is a TV series with Kiefer Sutherland, and who doesn’t like Kiefer Sutherland?
You see, this is the sort of babbling to which I am reduced when there is really nothing much to report.
The promised pictures of grèvified St-Denis:
On Wednesday, all these chairs were lined up in the big hallway that goes over the highway. Whatever could they be there for?
Hey, that’s what they were there for! In the morning, there were students standing among the chairs, and clustered by the doorway, handing out flyers. The doorway itself had a table in front of it, positioned to reduce the clearance to about 5’6″. The whole thing was rather endearing, but it will start getting old fast.
Did I say it will start getting old fast? It already has started getting old. Look, here’s another doorway:
Side view:
View from inside:
And another doorway:
Can we say “fire hazard”? I’ve mentioned it before and I’m mentioning it again–even for a nation that builds one-lane spiral emergency stairs, the blocking-emergency-exits thing demonstrates a striking disregard for basic principles of wanting-to-minimize-ways-in-which-we-might-all-die-horrible-painful-deaths. I’m sorry, it’s just stupid. If you want to block entrances, put people in front of them. People can move if the building catches fire. Granted, there’s so few people actually in the building that, except at morning rush hour, it’s not likely that you’d have much to worry about even if someone truck-bombed the place. The risk of a life-threatening emergency is quite low, as it generally is. I just get the impression that the possibility hasn’t even been considered, and that bugs me. I don’t like the thought that people do things without considering all the possible effects of their actions before undertaking said actions. Also, I don’t like the haphazard way the furniture is thrown in there. Yes, it’s probably harder to disentangle that way, but it offends my aesthetic sensibilities. I’d rather an arrangement that did not look so chaotic, and that went for maximum efficiency by using a minimum of pieces of furniture to fill the space.
Oh, and here’s a totally random windmill:
And the view of a courtyard and outdoor passage from my lit class window:
