O I am weary, let me tell you, and that “O” yawns with me—

I am weary enough that I fall asleep with the Saturday newsmagazine on my head. (I woke when I rolled over in my slumber and banged my knee into the wall. “OW!” I said, and this was closely followed by “FUCK!”, before I remembered I had guests in the next room—at which point I hugged my knee and said, moanily, “Ai-ai-ai-ai-ai.” Even when asleep, I am a danger to myself.) (But the yelling? Turned out, the next morning, the houseguests hadn’t gone to bed yet; they’d been up with raging stomachs—and I’d been so weary I hadn’t heard them being violently ill all night.)

The girl is beat from the daytime work and the nighttime party, which, I gotta say, is one of the best ways to be beat. There’s something quite satisfying about a complete exhaustion, an exhaustion so complete, really, that it also takes into account all the stuff I have yet to do over the next couple of days. I don’t know how it has happened, but mid-December is upon us, and I leave town on Monday (“Je singapourise”, as Olive would say), and of course I’m doing that thing I always do before I leave town, where I suddenly realise I have sixty-eight things I need to do before I go. Rest assured I will, the night before I leave town, do the thing I always do the night before I leave town, where I say, Fuck it, none of this REALLY needs to get done before I go.

For now, though, I seem to have taken it upon myself to tell the story of Rapunzel. You think this is easy? You go do it in French. It was such an innocent comment; I’d said, essentially, “Bla bla Rapunzel”, and he’d said, essentially, (and here I am translating the sentiment of the question, not the question in its entirety, which included a reference to a strudel): “What is this Rapunzel?” And I suppose it is quite possible—in fact, to borrow the alliterative distinction my ex-boyfriend was so fond of, it is probably both possible and probable—that the story of Rapunzel exists in French, just under a different name; which means I could, really, simply Google the long-haired lass en français and email a link. But I mean, COME ON, if there’s one thing I do, it’s tell a story. Tonight, we began, for there was no other way to go: “Il était une fois...”. Tomorrow, I think, we will go with: “La pleine lune a bâillé et a tiré autour d’elle ses couvertures de nuages.” If I were more on the ball, I might be able to say: “La pleine lune bâilla”, but I can tell you right now that trying to tell a story in the passé simple would ruin me.

Ah, the comic hijinks of an education-in-progress. Last summer, in the Marais, I think it was on the rue Vieille du Temple, I pointed at a street sign—under the “P” indicating a parking garage, it said BAUDOYER—and said: “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, ‘baudoyer’?” It’s the name of a place, I was told. “Oh,” I said, “je pensais que c’était un verbe.” “Je baudoie, tu baudoies, il baudoie,” we said. “Que tu baudoyasses,” we said. “Nous baudoyâmes.” Maud was there too, which means chances are good, in between the guffaws, that we also snorted.

I forget where I was going with this, and maybe, now that I think about it, that answer is “nowhere”. But now that I think about that, I think the answer is “to bed”.