Oasis

Last night we had dinner at Dancer’s place. Dancer is an exceptional person, intelligent, kind and very noble. We have been working under the same roof for four years but we would hardly say much to each other, until very recently.

We went for dinner at his place at 8. He lives in Enclave in a house he renovated largely on his own (Dancer is an accomplished handyman, inter alia) and in a mightily (but understatingly) tasteful way. Food was great, music was intriguing, company relaxing, discussion exciting, ranging from preferred ways to preserve olives to the inevitable elegy on local politics, from childhoods to gossip, from Foucault (!) to the Human League, from homosocial practices to curry — pretty much anything. We would have stayed beyond 1 am but he was really tired by then (he had had a long day yesterday, tending to an orchard his mother owns) .

As Jod commented, it was one of few times in the Outpost we went to someone’s place where we stayed longer than, say, three hours without ending up in the throes of agonising bewilderment. Myself I was completely at ease — the second or third time this has happened in the presence of an Outposter: I was feeling we were in the company of an absolutely pleasant person, someone relaxed and with no ulterior motives: a wondrous blessing.

Who am I?

Partly the music that has shaped me, moved me and comforted me; for example:

Incomprehensible matters

Jod was teaching essay writing this morning. The topic they were discussing in class was the Press. The students, highschoolers at the equivalent of Year 11 (Year 5 of high school), complained that they find the press confusing and baffling:
“We keep reading about the three estates: legislative, executive, judiciary — what about other powers? The Archbishop, for instance? It’s all so confusing. And all that news from foreign countries? Why do we care?”

The discussion continued and then the observer (there was peer class observation in Jod’s class this morning) intervened:
“Well, if you can hardly understand what the stories the newspapers run are about, it is hardly a problem of the papers — it is a matter of education.”
Students disagreed with that, in the local silent and vacant-staring way we have learned to discern.
“For instance”, Jod added, “the fact that I don’t understand Nuclear Physics, is that my problem or of Nuclear Physics?”
“Of Nuclear Physics, of course.”

From today’s photo safari

A lamb jawbone on the pavement. Someone finished lunch and discarded it.

Dream lord

“So we named him Morpheus after Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Although Breton-Domecq [her husband] has not read any of the books in the ‘Sandman’ series, he nevertheless trusts me.”

him in ‘we named him’ referring to their son, I just once more salute and hug the wonderful Outposter couple, thanking them for having got out of their niche and into our place tonight for dinner and chat. Morpheus proved more than a match for Gizmo the Cat, too (hehe).

Finally, succumbing to the general trend, here is one of my favourite songs and video clips ever.

Psycho Killer, qu’est-ce que c’est

“Germans… they are all so weird.”
“In what sense?”
“Well, my uncle has lived in Germany for 30 years, he’s a businessman there. He’s married to a German woman. He’s confided in me that two out of three of his business partners have offered him their own wives. Two out of three. That’s a statistic, my uncle has had more than three business partners. See?”
“…”
“They are all perverts. There was this German couple who have this house in Governor’s. They have made friends with a local shepherd, a friend of mine. Now, the three of them would hang out a lot…”
“(Uh-oh, lewd description of pastoral menage à trois coming this way?) [Nod]“
“So, he happened to be going by their place the other day and he happened to see through the window [description of bestiality]. He got into the house, the door was unlocked, and shooed the dog away. The wife complained to him. Not only that, but the husband came down from upstairs to complain. What kind of people! The husband complained the shepherd interrupted his wife’s pleasures. The kind of people…”
“Well, it’s their own home and they can do anything they wish in it, isn’t that so?”

NewYorker’s boyfriend gave me a stare full of puzzlement, contempt and slight queasiness. All that, and more, on Friday.

Thankfully, we hanged out with some fellow foreigners yesterday. We visited some of the few (this year) open artists’ studios. We bumped into some long-lost friends, an Outposter couple hiding inside their own niche. The photos are from that little tour of yesterday’s.