Full Circle

The call from the French consulate came yesterday around 2:00 pm: my Competénces and Talents proposal was approved. Two three-year working visas coming right up!

When Scott came to pick me up around 5:30 to go to the opening of his friends Rob and Amy's boutique in the Marina, I was definitely ready for a glass of Champagne. Thankfully there was an endless supply flowing at Conifer, where we met up with several other of Scott's friends, including Wendy from the band TITS (Technicolor Inner Trol Syndrome; no, I don't know what that means, either).

We three talked grad school--Wendy just got accepted into the music composition program at Mills--and I discovered she did her undergrad at SFSU in the creative writing department. With no mention of Paris at all, she said her favorite class ever was an English seminar on expatriate writers in Paris during the 1920s. Damn, how I wish that class had been offered this semester! She's going to dig up her syllabus if I can't get it directly from the professor, Loretta Stec. It fits in with one of the tourism-related business plans I've got up my sleeve.

Around 7:00 we took off in the direction of the De Young Museum, where we'd planned to see rockabilly band Red Meat. We arrived just as the band hit the stage, and I was surprised to see how many cowboy hats there were bobbing about in the crowd. (I didn't know what kind of music the band played at this point; I'd only been told the singer's name was "Smelly Kelly," and thus assumed it would be punk.) Surveying the sea of hatted heads, I turned to my left and standing beside me was Ethan, whom I'd not seen since May of 2004--in Paris. The strangeness of it all!