Very Little To Say
So today, all the lovely chair-barricades (chairricades?) were gone. Even 2/3 of the overturned tables in the lobby, which had been there forever, were gone. So much for impact. I dunno, I’d kind of expected that if the students were prepared to drag around all that furniture, they were going to assume it would be cleared away overnight, and that they would redo it again the next day, and the next, and so on. I’m frankly a bit disappointed. I mean the whole thing was already more symbolic than anything else–and a cliché symbolic at that–but the least they could do is show some real dedication. I’m beginning to think that the students involved haven’t done much in the way of researching the history of this sort of movement. They certainly aren’t coordinating well. It’s almost as if they don’t situate themselves in any greater historical or social context, they just respond without analyzing their own responses. Not sure what their aim is now. If they wanted to actually shut down the university, they could simply glue windows shut and paint them over, remove light bulbs and put superglue over the lamp sockets. That would surely only take a few more people than it took to stuff chairs in every nook and cranny. If they brought along some screwdrivers, they could even dismantle furniture, possibly reassemble it with the chair back interlinked and whatnot. That would be a real pain, a chain of linked chairs stretching down a hallway. Closing off the restrooms–a line of heavy-duty sealant along each door, I’m sure you can find something effective at a hardware store–would also wreak havoc with the school’s normal operation. There are dozens of things they could do if they really wanted to shut things down, even things as simple as holding sit-ins in classrooms playing loud music. So that, obviously, is not their goal. I just am lost, at this point, as to what their goal is.
Okay, that’s getting a bit too rant-like, so I’ll stop. In other news, a couple pretty buildings in the 18th:
and
I’ve also noticed that, for whatever reason, I apparently cannot pronounce the word palmier. I order one at a bakery and they think I’m saying “pain de mie.” This is odd only because it’s one of those words I’ve known since forever. It doesn’t have the French r sound on an unstressed syllable, which often trips me up; nor does it involve a stretch of sibilants/fricatives/affricates, which I also have trouble with from time to time. So I don’t know what’s up with that, but it gets me rather frustrated and leads to my repeating myself at a slightly impolite decibel level to the nice lady/gentleman behind the counter, eventually degenerating into spelling the word and/or emphatically pointing at the pastry in question. So it goes.
