under surveillance

One of the things I love about my apartment in Paris is I get to spend so much time in it. All of my classes are in the late afternoon or evening so I tend to spend the day at home preparing or doing other stuff. And because I'm on the first floor overlooking the street, there is always lots of interesting people and things in the street to peer at. In fact, it was while spying on a handsome many trying on jackets in the zhoozhy menswear store opposite that I had the inspired flash to set Hitchcock's Rear Window for one my classes. The effect of this film is even more present when the concert pianist in the apartment somewhere across the street starts playing, filling the street with beautiful music to drift in and out of. I can only hope, like Hitchcock's apartment-bound voyeur, to witness a neighbour disposing of his wife's body, and I dream of having Grace Kelly visit me nightly in 1950s couture.

One event in my street that did get me all hot under the collar recently was the emergency arrival of not one but two firetrucks at the building directly opposite. My street is quite small so this dominated the street for a good half hour, and my apartment's front windows are quite large so I barely even have to get up from the dining table where I work to get a full view of the action. Obviously, there's some particular fascination among gay men for firemen (to state the obvious), and unlike most things I don't especially feel the need to unpack this. Rather, I'm happy to go along with it; I suspect I may not like what I reveal if I dig too deep into homoerotic desire for dominant masculine types. But whatever. The Paris firemen, however, are a whole new world of homoerotic potential. The other day, I saw a bunch of them outside the fire station near my work, running around in teeny-tiny red shorts. I tried not to stare (and I was off to give a class, by delicious coincidence, in gender and spectatorship). So when two truckloads of them appeared on my screen (I mean, through my front windows), I was moved to actually get up from the table, stand at the window and gawk. Then I tried the angle from the bedroom window. I even took photos. No red shorts, just lots of beautiful shiny silver helmets with tantalising hints of handsome man underneath. Who cares if they're the same tired old version of dominant masculinity as anywhere else? They're French!

Something else that happened this week, however, took the shine off my building and became an annoying, distracting little saga. Trying to describe it now in words makes it sound all the more petty and ridiculous, but it was enough at the time to make me forget all about a student consultation I had scheduled. In short, someone in my building took me on in the Battle of the Sticky Letterbox Labels. Even though I've been here for over three weeks, I don't yet have my name on the letterbox. We put up a temporary label when I first moved in, but it had been ripped off by the next day. At least one important item had arrived safely, so I figured there was no urgency. Plus my friend who owns the apartment said he would deal with it. Then my conseiller at the bank called (everyone gets assigned one, and you can't open an account without going through an interview procedure with them) to say the letter advising my card was ready had been returned because my name was not on the letterbox. Now there was some urgency. I went down and attached a new label. Within an hour it was gone. I attached another, hoping the postie hadn't come in that time with my bank letter. This one, too, was ripped off by the end of the afternoon. And then once more for good measure. Who would do that?, I wondered. What kind of mean spirit takes the minor visual blot of a hand-written sticky label on someone else's letterbox above that person's potential inconvenience? Where they lurking around the corner waiting for fresh labels to rip off? And what were they doing with their time, if that was the case? Get a life! I emailed my friend/landlord to try to speed up the official name plaque, and he sent an impeccably polite email to his neighbours introducing me and asking for their indulgence of my temporary name label, "nuisance visuelle" though it were. At last check, the latest sticky label still remains. And I did receive some mail, just not what the bank woman called about. I really hope I don't have to speak to her about it again. Understanding only about 80% of her French, combines with a general discomfort with banking to make me feel like a child. Enough to make me stay in the safety of my apartment all day and spy on the neighbhours.