Serge Gainsbourg

            On Sunday morning when got up I could hear the sound of ploughs scraping the streets outside of my view. It was such an industrial sound that I felt like I was living inside of a factory. Queen Street was a perfect strip, sharpened like a knife, with all the snow cleared and neatly placed along the sides. At 7:30 when I was doing song practice it was still pitch black outside and with the number of pedestrians out walking it might as well have been 3:00.

            I spent most of the day getting caught up on my journal.

            The snow has quieted the neighbourhood down. The middle-aged woman with the un-brushed curly hair and the bent forward back hasn’t been panhandling loudly on Queen Street or shouting at her boyfriend panhandling on the other side. The middle-aged bald guy who usually busks while singing loudly in a fake US southern accent every evening in front of the Dollarama hasn’t been there for a while.

            I downloaded a couple of books from a Russian site. One was a biography in English of Serge Gainsbourg named after Gainsbourg’s own concept album, “Histoire de Melody Nelson”. The other was Gainsbourg’s only novel, “Eugenie Sokolov”. Both files started out in .djvu file format, but the biography converted to pdf automatically as it was downloading. The novel however didn’t. I remembered that I’d downloaded ABBYY Fine Reader several months ago but had never activated it. It seemed that I was able to successfully install the program but I couldn’t open it, after spending about an hour trying. After dinner I tried again and stumbled on it being an administrative problem. Once I wrote in “Christian Christian” instead of “User” things started to work and the file converted. I think I can even convert pictures of text with this program, though of course it is bound to get some of it wrong.

            I still haven’t gotten the mark back for my final essay. It’s been over three weeks since I handed it in. The quiz marks were posted on Saturday. I only got 63% on that but it was better than the 59% I got on the first one. I got 8 out of 10 on the weekly writing assignments.