Laughable loves

I brought this book by Milan Kundera to Barcelona called Risibles amours. It can be translated as "laughable loves". I had already read the book before, and it is a pleasure to reread it. There are seven short stories in it. In the first one, there's a great moment where a couple comes into a factory of some sort in order to find a woman. (I'm sparing you the details.) The wife asks her husband to describe the woman to her, but the only thing he can remember is that she was beautiful. He is then pressured into giving out more details about the woman, and so he says she was blond and tall. But the woman, who is terrified to be found, is neither blond nor tall. The man had simply been so impressed by his beauty and so, to him, she was certainly blond and tall.

In another story, there's a great passage I will be attempting to translate:

"It was a situation that was never to be repeated in his life: he had confronted the unimaginable. He had just lived this brief period of his life (this heavenly period) when imagination is not yet saturated by experience, (...) when you know very few things, so that the unimaginable still exists; and if the unimaginable is about to become a reality (...), you start to panic. And he really did panic when, after a few more meetings where he remained irresolute, she started to interrogate him in great detail about his student room, almost begging him to invite her."

Besides that, today my taximan seemed like he was about to cough his lungs out. And the weather is not that great today in Barcelona, but I still hope to get some sun at one point!

This is for Alex (the first few sentences :P)

Yes, I am going to Brazil this summer. For a month. For a research project. I don't know which one yet, I have merely given out my choices, and they are the ones who have my fate in their hands. :) So, Alex, have you got any travel plans for the summer? If anyone else want to share their summer plans, feel free to do so :)

On a side note, I am going to Barcelona for spring break tomorrow... actually today. This will be the first time that my complete family (my parents, my sister, my brother and I) will be in Europe together. Usually, my parents bring only one of us to Europe each summer. Yes, I am a spoiled brat. I will mostly be studying in Barcelona, though, as lame as that sounds. I have exams coming on when I come back, and I do hope to get some studying done while I am in Barcelona. I have already been to Barcelona once, and in my mind, there is not that much to see in Barcelona, so I let it stay that way, so that I am not too tortured while I am over there. I mostly consider it as a gastronomic trip. Tapas every day, yum.

I don't know if I will be able to pursue this blog while I am in Barcelona. Perhaps not every day, as I have been doing, that is almost certain. I might just be telling you about the places I go, since it is so useful to you, since you are all always going to Barcelona... ;)

I have to pack my suitcase now, and I really don't feel like it, as I have just returned from a semi-goodbye party, where there was lots of wine and this Beauty and the Beast movie... I have to, though, all in all, I have five hours to pack my suitcase. Gaah.

I love this scene 9

Portugese food

For my friend's birthday, we went to a Portugese restaurant in St-Hubert, on Chemin Chambly. (Really random place.) It is called Viana-Sol. It was a great little place. Loads of good hot soup and olives. After that, I had tons of mussels, with really good fries, and there was a great chocolate mousse for dessert. I don't know why, but Portugese restaurants always seem to give out huge portions. I hope that this is what I can expect from my trip to Brazil this summer (I knooooow). I look forward to coming back to this place.

So...

I don't have that many comments, except for the fact that Sean Penn proved my Canadian papers wrong. They were all rooting for Mickey Rourke. Yeah, well...

IMDB's daily poll asked us to choose our favorite Oscars moment. I obviously couldn't vote, but I got to know which were the key moments of the night and checked some of them out on YouTube later on. There was the Jimmy Kimmel spot with Tom Cruise, which was kind of cool. There was also the Pineapple Express skit, which was OK. Just watching James Franco being funny is great. :) The best part is when he just stares happily at himself kissing Sean Penn. Good times.

I love this scene 8

"You're studying, I'm prying into your personal life."

"Oh, oh, Guns of Brixton!"

"You've tried to explain to me how on earth Coldplay could be considered an alternative band..."

The Rules of Attraction

My list of books I still have to read is a bit traumatizing to me. It seems like I have never read any book at all. To reassure myself, I'll start reflecting from time to time on books I have read recently... even though "recently" covers a rather large span of time.

I found The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis in a bookstore the last time I went to the United States. I was very happy to have found it, because it seems as if there are always the same Bret Easton Ellis books in Canadian bookstores: American Psycho, Glamorama, etc. I had seen the movie adaptation of The Rules of Attraction a while ago, but I didn't remember it much, and so I was curious about the book.

After I had finished reading it, I was very perplexed. Apparently, in American liberal arts colleges, all they ever do is fuck, drink, party, intoxicate themselves and sleep. And, from time to time, they go to class for three hours. After reading the book, I looked for scenes from the movie on YouTube. The movie made the story look a lot more... colorful than when I had read it. The book had seemed so bleak to me. I then realized that I had read it as a drama, when I should have in fact expected a comedy. I now have to reread it as a comedy, when I will be done with the other 50 books I have to read, I guess. 

One thing I've learnt from the book: Nobody likes the right person.