the earth, it is the shaking and the cracking

Yes that's right, I got my act together, finally, and posted something new and sassy. Unfortunately, it's over at my new website (for which I am PAYING; what would Tyler Durden say!) on blogs.com.

HERE HERE HERE!

Please update as needed/wanted/desired/lusted after. I should mention that the new sitename is Aller Simple. Good grief, it's only a matter of time before I join the Académie Française.

unrequited

I know what you're thinking - new post, finally. Pictures, where are they? Unfortunately, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday in a funky mix of depression and guilt. You know, the typical cocktail of emo.

So the Friday night I was soooo looking forward to - didn't go so well. I don't even know why; I think I was just so nervous about being with my parents and what they'd expect me to have accomplished in the time I've been in Paris... My own thoughts overwhelmed me, and succeeded in keeping me away from both a schmaltzy dinner and the ballet gala.

Saturday in Strasbourg? Hay-ellz no. More like, shivering on the platform of the RER A at Auber at 7:20 in the morning. Why was I there? Because I didn't feel up to a four-hour train ride; I was queasy enough on solid ground as it was. Although the flooring at Hotel Opal couldn't be something I'd easily refer to as 'solid ground'.

At least I had B. to come home to - oh wait, I didn't. Since my French loveur works also as an author of bandes-dessinées (as well as my on-call masseur), he was doing signings and interviews at the festival in Bercy Village. I spent the better parts of the day, afternoon, and evening listlessly roaming around our apartment, reading something when I was interested in it, then dropping it to the floor five minutes later.

Things didn't look so well, and a clash of the titans (read: my mother and I) was looming on the horizon if I didn't shape up my attitude and guilt-problems in a jiffy. Plus, I disliked my growing dependency on the constant availability of our toilet.

Tuesday evening to the rescue! Yesterday couldn't have gone any better - I had a scrumdiddlyumptious dinner with my parents at Au Bon Accueil - a cozy restaurant situated just a stone's throw from the Eiffel Tower. And when I say scrumdiddlyumptious, I mean it. I don't think my teeth have ever had the pleasure of sinking into veal that juicy and that perfectly roasted. I was even game enough to try the saucy mushrooms, and I was never a friend to fungi. Dinner for three persons, at around 30 euros a head? That's a deal and a half, especially when there's excellent French cuisine involved.

Previously, I had believed that serious discussions about "what's going on" between my mother and I would always end in either one of us laughing, the both of us laughing, or the both of us yelling at each other and then grumbling for a 24-hour period. Somehow, she (Mommy dearest) never ceases to surprise me - after voicing her concerns about my behavior on Friday and Saturday, she talked a lot of sense into me, and got some confessions out of me.

Was our discussion awkward? Yes. Did my father not have a clue what his wife and daughter were talking about? Certainly. Filial relationships survived parental visits unscathed and re-strengthened? Awwwwwww YEA!

Ja, Oui

This weekend, I'll be heading up to Strasbourg with my parents, to get in touch with my non-existent German side. Yes, I know Strasbourg is not in Germany, but the fact that Alsacien is just French for "so close to German culture, we reek of the same sausage meats", I'm going to go ahead and stick with that.

Buuuuuut before Saturday, there is always a Friday. And this Friday will indeed be sassy and wonderful - the three of us (Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Ludivine Bear) have tickets to a ballet gala at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, an event so charged with starpower that it may just combust and turn into a supernova. I look forward to being the only idiot in the audience who can't contain her excitement and lets it slip by clapping furiously at awkward moments. Don't blame me; I was the one *on* stage for most of my childhood and teenagedom.

Anyway, DVDs of Messieurs Conan O'Brien and David Letterman call. Ciao!

for a good cause

There is a project undergoing development now, called Voice of a City, consisting of guest-bloggers submitting bits and pieces of their lives for general review in the public blogosphere. The catch is... we (the bloggers) all live in Paris and write on life, here.

I was luckily selected for the test run, which will extend until the end of September. From there, eight "full-time" bloggers will be chosen to write for the official site. I don't know on what basis the head honchos at VoaC would want to keep me or dump me, so I'm really flying by the seat of my pants right now.

There is financial compensation involved for the eight chosen, but not of the Time to Cash that Check in at Louis Vuitton kind. More like, This Could Buy a Fancy Meal! And (a little sadly) I am genuinely excited by this. I'm not jibba-jabbing on VoaC so I can talk about my glaaaa-morous Parisian lifestyle (any literate person would realize this, since my last entry was about the phenomenon of self-performed bagging while grocery shoppping).

If I feel inclined and inspired, I write on this blog. And I love it here, with my cozy audience and delightful-to-read feedback, so my blogging needs have been covered for a while now. No, I write on VoaC because it means I could help B out with the cost for those darn cartes oranges, which run at 70 euros a pop.

For someone who's unemployed and a live-in girlfriend, being able to pay for something as important and necessary as a carte orange (métro/bus/train pass) would be very, very awesome. Finally, a concrete reason to not feel like a complete leech and/or useless person. Yes, B does well in letting me avoid thinking of myself in a completely negative light. But helping to cushion the monthly blow of bills and fees, from my own 'work' so to speak - that's cool. I'd know that I contributed. To a small degree, but nevertheless.

And with that, I'd better indulge my obsessive-compulsive side and spellcheck my last entry for the fourth time.

let me back into the loop!

So I've been off American soil for around 6 weeks or so. A small amount of time for a girl my age. I could name plenty of 6-week-long periods in which I contributed nothing of import to the world without worrying for my future. In essence, 6 weeks is not the amount of time wherein I would expect to be surprised by the speed at which my contemporary knowledge has become irrelevant.

Juliana's comment to my last post, about the movie The Constant Gardener, did well in reminding me that the 'scene' in the U.S.A. waits for no one, especially not young girls who've abandoned it for (dare I say it?) better shores.

Many of my classmate friends have parted for college throughout the states but have stayed in very close contact; some of them talk to me on a twice-daily basis through e-mails, IMs, etc. when time zones allow. So imagine my surprise when every last one of them started off his or her respective conversation with a "OMG DID U SEE 40 Y/O VIRGIN? IT'S HILARIOUS LOL". I mean, I was literally blindsided by this news - what? who? Most importantly, WHEN?

I left 6 weeks ago for France. Could this supposed "gem of a comedy" have been carefully publicized and popularized throughout America in the short time of my absence? Didn't studios take a lot longer to craft a salivating pre-audience for their films, as in a couple of months or so? Or, with my coming of age (HAH!), did what seemed like a great deal of time, turn into a thimbleful of moments? Is this what the proverbial 'they' meant by years accelerating as we grow older?

So what, by tomorrow France will have a new president and everyone gets a free car?

p.s. Any idea as to when Constant Gardener makes its debut here? I want to see it. Not just to be back in the loop, but because the premise and execution sounds like it justifies the inflated price to see a movie.

prone to feel

I've rewritten this entry five times over, in a futile effort to express how I'd love it if movies wrapped themselves snakelike around my throat more often. I'll just pretend everyone understands.

Les Choristes was such a movie, certainly. I am never ashamed to be the obnoxious sniffler in the dark of the theater, wiping her wet eyes and keeping her mouth tightly drawn. And I certainly behaved this way upon seeing this movie in the privacy of my apartment.

It seemed that every occasion wherein the boys of the film let their rapturous voices fly into song was a cue for tears to swim at the rims of my eyes and befog my vision. But the mild filmic angoisse doesn't end in my ocular region. It spreads hotly and viscously down my spinal cord to my throat, and then constricts, feeling not unlike an elegant silk scarf tied a bit too tightly.

And yet, things don't stop there. While it's not practical to stay at home all day, replaying the movie to savor the temperate and theatrical faint despair, I accomplish the latter by hearing alone. No more than a quarter of an hour had passed between the end of Les Choristes and the downloading of its soundtrack onto my iPod, so I could remain (paradoxically) delightfully forlorn and transported by what I had just seen.

Vois sur ton chemin
Paroles et Musique: Bruno Coulais et Christophe Barratier

Vois sur ton chemin
Gamins oubliés égarés
Donne leur la main
Pour les mener
Vers d'autres lendemains

Sens au coeur de la nuit
L'onde d'espoir
Ardeur de la vie
Sentier de gloire

Bonheurs enfantins
Trop vite oubliés effacés
Une lumière dorée brille sans fin
Tout au bout du chemin

Sens au coeur de la nuit
L'onde d'espoir
Ardeur de la vie
Sentier de la gloire

a faucet, but an expensive one

Oh blog, my darling blog, why does it seem like every other week I find a way to avoid your calls, your SMS, your hands squeezing around my throat. That last one was strictly for fleshing out the metaphor. The day my laptop grows hands, that's the day I call off my allegiance to the good folks at Apple, Inc.

So, what have I been doing in the space of seven days? Savoring these last fleeting days of summer, and dutifully swashbuckling at stores with the help of the good ship MasterCard. I think that's why I have not felt impelled to blog. I mean, what's uniquely Parisian and French about shopping for clothes, in preparation for winter? Readers in Minnesota would laugh at my folly if I said I had loaded up on henley sweaters not much thicker than my thinnest T-Shirt. Which I haven't. Yet.

The point is that I dislike the notion of turning my blog into a spreadsheet of my weekly expenses. I mean, the occasional adventure to Franprix wherein I encounter some old dude who tells me my future (forecast: heaps of misfortune) is cool. Telling the Interweb where I bought the coolest Admiral-style jacket in the world is bof (H&M, but I didn't write that).

In more important and less-bitchy news, the kitten I have been kitten-sitting for 3 weeks now is going home tomorrow. I expect that some tears will be shed after her departure, but only when my racking sobs sniffles cannot be overheard. That kitten has endearingly but rather savagely clawed her way into my heart, God bless her.

Speaking of being overheard - there appears to be a very bright kid in my apartment building, a kid who's picked up on the fact that I parle anglais. It's not like I run around the common yard singing the Star-Spangled Banner at the top of my lungs, nor subscribe to any Anglophone magazines. Nah, this kid has the hearing of a bat (bats do hear well, right? They're just blind?), as apparently he's overheard me speaking to B as we head out the parking lot to the bus stop. I've named him "onetwothreefourfive" because every time he sees me, he begins to count in English. He's actually pretty good for his age, it's only past the number seven that he starts to get a little franglais-y.

Anywho, so if you'll excuse me, it's time I go blow my nose. I have a runny nose that's headed I-don't-know-where at 170 km/h. Which is to say, things are getting pretty bad.