http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPrJNKJcRrs <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPrJNKJcRrs>
Have you ever gotten a song stuck in your head for no apparent reason? The other night, watching the "History of the Eagles" documentary, among the many musical personalities flitting across the screen was Joni Mitchell. I don't remember whether the song itself was played during the film (although it might have been because the person it was written about loomed large in the Eagles' history and was onscreen a lot), but ever since seeing her face again I've been hearing "Free Man In Paris" non-stop in my head. This is a good thing, because to me it's a song about change, and release, and...uh...Paris, a city I love, and associate with freedom and liberation. The song was written about David Geffen, and a period of time he spent in Paris, blessedly away from "stoking the star maker machinery of the popular song" and, as I understand it, also leading to his...uh...coming out party, when he revealed himself publicly as gay for the first time. Suffice it to say that didn't happen for me when I moved there; French women made me more boringly heterosexual than ever before. But I *did* find living in Paris liberating, in many ways. As a result, hearing this song *always* makes me smile, and the last few days, with it ringing in my head almost non-stop, I have been smiling a lot. Working at home as I do, I even got to play the song on my sound system while working, and that made me smile even more. I'm really fortunate to have been able to work at home *since* I lived in Paris, not having had to go into an office on a daily basis for over six years, being able to play my music as loud as I want while working, able to work *when* I want. So imagine my surprise when I received a phone call from a trusted technopimp, asking whether I'd be interested in a gig, and I found myself smiling when I heard about it. The money is good, which is always a good thing, and it's on a really cool project, really hang-ten, future-of-the-Internet stuff. But it is also a gig that has to be done onsite, in an office. And it's in another city, meaning that I'd have to commute and live there during the week, returning home to Leiden on the weekends. Ick. My first thought was, "I've SO been there, done that, commuting to work in the Midwest the whole time I was living in Santa Fe." So why was I smiling? It could possibly be that the reason I stumbled across this song and got it stuck in my head is that it was a bit of an omen. The office is in Paris. The gig is not certain, so I won't post any of these musings about the horror :-) of someone offering to pay me big bucks to live in Paris several days a week until it is. But I thought I should write down some of my reactions to this possible change in my lifestyle, while the change is still pending, rattling around in the Big Pachinko Machine Of Karma, the future still undecided.
