Busy Sunday and the end of pleasure

After a cold, drizzly Saturday and an awful night where my neighbor and his friend sang U2, shouted in incomprehensible French, and drank until 4 AM, I woke up thinking that today would suck.
And it looked like it might, as I waited in line at the grocery store stuck in front of yet more French drunks who just talk incessantly about anything and break into song and, in general, make everyone around them feel uncomfortable.
But it was so beautiful out today -- just like an early Fall day. Sunny, slightly crisp, but also warm in the sun.
And it's "rentrée" at the cinema for the next three days, meaning that each showing only costs 3.5 euros. So I decided to see "Mama Mia." Wow, what a movie. It reminded me of Laura Mulvey's essay in which she calls for the end of narrative pleasure in cinema, a pleasure that for her arises out of a male (or masculine -- since both men and women occupy it) gaze of the female body. This movie was definitely unpleasurable, but only because it was sooooo ecstatically joyous and insanely celebratory of female pleasure. It was totally weird and I wanted to leave every second I was watching it, but I was also curious about how this awful movie was celebrating and reveling in different kinds of feminine "jouissance," as they say. The movie ended with a burst of water that sprang, not from a fountain, but from a gash -- a gash, I say -- in the concrete. There was singing, and melodrama, and giggling, and dancing and it was totally stupid -- but this might be what Mulvey meant, after all. I hated it.
Anyway, after that I met with my landlord's daughter, who recently gave birth to her second son. I was totally petrified about going over to her house and chatting with her in French about god knows what. But she was really nice, and my French wasn't that bad -- or it was, but I decided not to care too much. She talked about "accouchement" in France and walked me past the hospital that, in case it was necessary, I could get treated.
And then I took myself out to dinner at a Korean restaurant called Seoul 88 (in honor of the 88 Olympics). The food was pretty good -- I got duk mandoo gook -- and the pan chan was delicious. The service was kind of bad, only because they seemed overwhelmed, even though there weren't that many of us in the restaurant. And weird, again drunk, French people would randomly walk into to tease the patrons. Seriously -- there are way too many drunks in Paris (which has even become a topic on the news recently). But the other patrons were enjoying themselves and sometimes, even though I don't know exactly what they're saying, it's really nice to hear people speak Korean.