thank you notes (L)(2)

I’m thankful for g’s new shift pattern, even though it changes the weekly rhythm we've gotten used to that lasted almost 5 years. I'm thankful that although it means we will have less time off together, it allows me to spend time alone at home, which is a luxury I haven't had with any regularity since circa 2010 (I hadn’t realised I was subconsciously keeping count).

I'm not sure what I can best use this time for, but at least I've got it.

I'm thankful for the eclectic request-based radio show which is always on when I'm working at my night job and has a different theme every night (the most memorable recent ones have been ‘depressing songs’ and ‘songs which require a risk assessment’. The former because I thought it was a brave choice for a popular radio show-three hours of universally sad songs- and the latter because the requesters put real thought into their choices: obvious ones like Burning Down The House by Talking Heads and ones that made me laugh, like Catch A Falling Star, by Perry Como). I’m listening to it at work right now as I write this, the theme is ‘Indie Disco’ and they just played my favourite ever indie disco song-- Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order.

I’m thankful I finally sent away the hopefully-final draft of a journal article that I’ve been periodically working on for two years and the abstract of which I first submitted in 2012. The more I worked on it the less convinced I became of its merit, so I’m thankful that I was forced to stop poking holes in it and just send it in, for better or worse. Coming to an academic publication near you….sometime, hopefully.

I’m thankful that the doctor was both mystified and serenely unalarmed by the weird lump on my chest that’s been near my shoulder for a few weeks. I’m thankful that, inevitably, due to sod’s law, it stopped being painful and began to shrink the day after I went to see the doctor. I’m thankful that I can take one thing off my list of ‘low level things that seem medically wrong with me but I’m too busy to investigate fully’.

I’m thankful my latest conference abstract got accepted, since it was a long shot subject-wise and the first conference I will have attended outside of my fairly young and hip academic niche. I’m thankful the panel want me to add some things to my paper to make it more relevant to their audience, because it’s something I’ve never been asked to do before and it seems like a worthwhile, interesting exercise. I’m thankful that the organisers pressed reply all rather than BCC the conference attendees, so I could see just how different the other attendees were from me, how many people whose books I cite are coming, etc. I’m thankful I can choose to give the paper in English or French, and thankful that I can admit to myself a few months out that I’m probably going to chicken out and give it in English in order to communicate my research most effectively to a new audience and that’s OK. I’m thankful for the acquaintance I emailed on the off-chance that she had some obscure books I need to write the paper, who both had all the books and offered to post them all to me. I’m thankful to finally find someone whose niche even slightly overlaps with mine. 

I’m thankful for the big group of teenagers who volunteered to help me lift a heavy, broken gate back into place today, meaning that I could finally lock it and leave work only 10 minutes later than I was meant to. I’m thankful that my apprehension when I saw them watching me intently across the street was unnecessary and misplaced, and I’m thankful that I was able to have a conversation with the boys after seeing them hang around my work at night on and off for months. 

I’m thankful for the Cédric Klapisch film When The Cat’s Away. I’m thankful that a decade after I first saw it, it still feels fresh and relatable to me. I’m thankful that I got to live in the part of Paris it depicts at such close range, years after telling myself that some day I would live there. I’m thankful that its Paris still feels like my Paris, even though much has changed there since it came out in 1996 and indeed things have changed since I left, things almost imperceptibly altering each time I go back to visit. I’m thankful for the constants too, things that are always the same: the feeling of belonging when I’m  in Filles de Calvaire metro station, the café opposite the park where the coffee is good and affordable, the cinemas which show anything and everything, the walk down to Bastille through the improbable mixture of camera shops, motorbike shops and musical instrument dealers. I’m thankful that I am able to go back and keep my experience fairly current, to avoid idealising a fossilised idea of what my Paris once was; rather I can see it for what it is. Currently at six-month intervals.

I’m thankful for Agnès Varda, who I consider together with Louise Bourgeois one of the uncompromising, creative, kickass women I hope I can emulate when I grow up. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about her 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès, a film where she looks back on her life and talks us and herself through it. The film is necessarily self-referential but never seems to tip over into self-congratulation, and asks some interesting questions about the importance of memory. The film’s final scene is my favourite; after a surprise 80th birthday party, Varda sits alone, holding a frame which then refracts repeatedly into an infinite mise-en-abyme of her sitting alone. among the remnants of her party. She says, in voiceover, ‘it all happened yesterday, and it’s already in the past. A sensation combined instantly with an image, which will remain. I will remember, while I live’. I was struck by this scene on first viewing, how it underlined her mortality, how it changed the message of the film-for me at least- from ‘look at all these things I have done’ to ‘These things I achieved are gone, all I can do is remember them (often by preserving them on film)’. It made me think about the validity of experience; how long after you do something does your experience of that thing remain relevant? Forever? Is it finite? Is it more important that you remember, or that there is evidence to prove the validity of your memories to others? I don’t know and I suspect there isn’t really an answer. I’m thankful that I can think this through as I try and work out what to do with the rest of my life, as I worry that my most exciting experiences are behind me. I’m thankful for women like Varda-still going strong at 87- who show me that, even if I have to construct an unconventional career for myself armed with a PhD in French and a slightly pretentious love for the aesthetics of Wes Anderson/ meandering French films/ Mafalda, I have plenty of time left to make the best of it.

- L (3/5/16).