Surprise! This is what we look like this year!

On a trip to the picturesque and somewhat deserted Parisian suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, I fell in love with a six-year-old boy, the little cousin of my French Goddess. He spent ten minutes eating his soft-boiled egg from the rooster-shaped egg stand that his older sister had hand-painted. After cracking and laboriously picking away at the top of the egg shell (with my assistance), he dunked his delicately buttered baguette pieces, into the orange center of the egg and scooped out the contents little by little. Gleeful at his success in cleaning out the egg shell, he presented it to his mother. Most American children miss out on this elaborate procedure typical of European households.

I arrived back to New England from Paris to find a stack of Waspy holiday cards in my mother's kitchen. The tradition of circulating family Christmas cards always manages to bring out a vanity and tackiness in people that goes otherwise undetected throughout the rest of the year. Below is a sampling from the most egregious ones.

Gauche Things To Do In Your Christmas Cards:

1. Covering the front of the card with collage-style cutouts of the heads of your family members, the largest one being the newest born baby. This gives the card a startling high-school-year-book effect and makes the people appear disembodied.

2. Commencing the inside letter with the words, "What an exciting year for the ____s, as you see." If the offensive cover (and interior) collage of your family and a giant looming baby head is evidence of your "exciting year," I'd rather not read onwards.

3. Using any of the following terms in the body of the letter: Wall Street, nuptials, our newest addition, University of _____, skeet shooting, summer renting, empty nesters, start up company, Alpha Chi Ro, VP, bathroom renovations, tennis, golf carts, family clambake, gorgeous bridesmaid, detached retina, strategic real estate investment. Note: all of the previous terms were direct quotations from this year's batch.

4. Formatting the letter as an "Alphabet Soup" and mentioning each "significant" event at least three times so as to come up with twenty-six sentences.

Wasps have a special dialect sometimes incomprehensible to the untrained ear. The penchant for using the word "golden" as a noun (especially in describing the health, arrival, or death of your retrievers), and the overuse of the word "summer" as a verb, are just two fine examples of this tradition. I miss France. I wonder if they do this sort of thing over there.

Out and About

Sipping champagne and eating macaroons at Hotel Fouquet's off of the Champs-Élysées was followed by dancing at the grungy-but-cool art-and-film-world boîte, Le Baron. The second storey terrace of Fouquet's was dolled up for Christmas and had a revolving light installation reminiscent of Las Vegas. Parisian Christmas decorations are surprisingly tacky and American. There is an excessive volume of blinking twinkle lights that drip from every window of the Crillon Hotel in the middle of Place de la Concorde. At the entrance to The Ritz there are life-sized reindeer with creepily robotic bobbing heads.

After a big night out, I woke up to my French Goddess home from morning shopping, her hands full with fresh goodies for a crazy French breakfast: a loaf of beautiful seeded bio (organic) bread, perfectly prepared eggs, slices of ripe avocado, plump dried figs that were juicier than I thought possible, clementines and fisalis (small tart fruits inside delicate brown leaves that look like round orange hearts enclosed in birds' wings), and, last but not least, two sea urchins (uni: a Japanese delicacy I had never tasted before).

My friend bought the sea urchins (pictured above) from her corner fish monger. He has a crush on her and told her excitedly that the sea urchins came to him fresh from the shores of Brittany. Their taste was far too strong for me, especially before having my morning coffee, but I enjoyed them immensely as decorative accents to our colorful breakfast table. In The States I usually have a bowl of cereal.

Le Cinéma Parisien

Things I love about Paris:

1. Men at 7pm walking home eating le croûton of the baguette.

2. The way the nightclubs are a bit lousy. It is not a city for going out to les boîtes (like Manhattan) but more a place of private parties and dinners.

3. The lack of proper standing showers. Though it irritates me at first, it forces me to relax and take a bath instead.

4. The way people take their time. Though this lack of efficiency also annoys me at first, it is a refreshing change from northeastern metropolises. My friend says it's because a lot of things don’t work properly in France. For example, there will be a strike on the metros and it will be impossible to get a taxi, but it's not a catastrophe since no one is in such a desperate rush.

5. The hundreds of small cinemas showing everything from Cary Grant marathons to Agnès Varda's latest autobiographical documentary.

I saw a beautiful new American film near the Place de la Bastille, Two Lovers, which is a dark romantic story that takes place in Brighton Beach, the Russian neighborhood of Brooklyn that is lovely in its foreign and almost outdated atmosphere. Though the movie's poster presents it as a trite romantic comedy with hunky Joaquin Phoenix and former Hollywood belle, Gwyneth Paltrow, it is an emotionally complex and delicately told story of a man suffering from bipolar disorder and caught in between two loves.

Paris 2

A critical difference between French people (especially Parisians) and Americans is really something of privacy. Parisians tend to be so private. The kind of self-exhibitionism that is rampant in the states is not cool in Paris. For example, one never looks at other people in the metro. I wear my aviator sunglasses to watch at people without giving away my extreme Americanism. It is tiring to always have to avert one's eyes and to not be able to laugh and smile so much in public.

Gauche Things To Do As An American In Paris
(Though I've Observed French People Doing Each One):

1. When dining in a French bistro: bringing food from somewhere else and eating it (in France, that is just about the worst thing a person can do).

2. Brushing your hair (or someone else's) in the middle of a restaurant (I think that is indecorous in any city).

3. Going to Starbucks, or "Mac-Do."

I came down with a terrible case of food poisoning (une intoxication alimentaire) from some seemingly harmless chicken and was bed-ridden for sixteen hours. It is especially disorienting and uncomfortable to be sick and wretching when in a foreign country and staying as a house guest. I awoke, starving and disoriented, to find an elegant late-night dinner of caviar, salad, and chèvre waiting for me downstairs. It proved quite good for restoring my energy.

Edge of the Seine

I arrived in Paris to join one of the loves of my life, a French actress whose classic beauty is a mix of Sophia Loren's cheekbone sultriness and Audrey Hepburn's waifish charm. My friend was raised in the forest but escaped to Paris when she was thirteen years old to pursue drama classes and begin her life as an artist and international girl of mystery.

She has spent time in New York and for a moment even wanted to move there. But after her recent life epiphanies and a trip to an obscure meditation retreat in Egypt, she says frankly, "It has nothing for me, New York. C’est si décadent, et pas dans une bonne façon." It's so decadent, and not in a good way. Manhattan is given to a rather sinister seeking out of distraction.

There is a decadence about Paris as well, with its snobbish and obsessive approach to everything from the proper poulet to the tying of scarves. But Parisian decadence seems more intuitive and natural, stemming from centuries of well-meaning traditions.

My French Goddess (pictured above) said of Paris, "It is a city of so much history, everywhere you go. The buildings are much older. New York is so young in comparison, and it feels as though it is desperately trying to compensate for a lack of history."

Maybe this is what gives Manhattan its frenetic and destabilizing ambiance. In Paris there are medieval ghosts occupying the flats, but in New York there are investment bankers and upwardly mobile fashionistas ogling the streets.

Paris versus Manhattan: the difference between a glass of wine everyday at lunch and a bevy of vodka shots every end-of-week night. One seems intuitively wrong.

Departure

I am leaving for Paris tonight. In French the word for flight is the same as the word for escape. The expression "to take flight" is the same as "to flee." The word is feminine. I wonder if women take to hopping on planes and relocating for karmic realignment more frequently than men do. A former Wanker of the Week told me that he attempted to lift his spirits by taking a last-minute trip to L.A. for the weekend. Holiday season depression is a rampant problem often left as an unspoken malady. When cheer is institutionalized, drear can be closer than one thinks, and there is nothing more satisfying than the moment of takeoff.

In the above photo I am running through the Sol LeWitt exhibition at Mass MoCA.

Wigged & Dangerous

Last week a band of cross-dressing jewel thieves stole 102 million dollars worth of loot from the Harry Winston store on Paris' fashionable Avenue Montaigne. Armed, wigged, and dangerous, they not only snagged items from the display cases but also knew the ins and outs of the goods in the back room and called the salespeople by their names. Maybe they were the husbands of international socialites doing their recession time Christmas shopping.

I recently watched the 1968 Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway film, The Thomas Crown Affair. The Pierce Brosnan remake had a sexy art heist tone to it. I figured that the original would be even more alluring, especially since it was shot at my favorite mansion on Mount Vernon Street in Boston's Beacon Hill.

Verdict vis-à-vis The Thomas Crown Affair original
(click on the highlighted links for visual examples):

***** for pre-1970's cheese-factor
(though rather fetching male short shorts)

***** for atrocious Steve McQueen acting
(and absurdly unrealistic smoking skills)

***** for erotic chess-playing incidents

***** for fabulous over-sized hats

***** for excessive use of snazzy new split-screen editing

(and of typical high society leisure activities such as
polo playing, sauna sitting, and small plane landing)

Maybe the cross-dressing Harry Winston robbers are merely bored tycoons expressing their secret fetish for women's luxury items. It seems like more than a violent criminal act: perhaps the culprits have performance art aspirations.

Red All Over

The holidays fill me with cheer at the fact that the sooner they approach, the sooner they are over, and the sooner we can get on with a brand new unsullied year.

All I Want For Christmas:

1. A literary agent for my recently drafted novel (well, preferably a book deal from an established publishing house, but I'm not one to ask for things I can't get).

2. A kitty cat (to keep illegally in my new dorm room starting in January--I can fashion her as one of my childhood American Girl Dolls. When the college dean knocks on my door to inquire about the proliferation of cat sounds and fur balls wafting from my room, he'll think she's just a regular old Kirsten doll dressed up as the youngest virgin with candles on her head for that Swedish holiday, Santa Lucia.

3. A non Wanker of the Week male to give me a kiss underneath the mistletoe.

Notice that I have ordered things from most likely to receive, to least likely to receive. A cat is unrealistic and out of the question, as I am not sure of my life plans after April 28th (the last day of my senior spring classes). For all I know, my Carney Sandoe application won't pan out as hoped, and I'll be uprooted to Minnesota to teach runny-nosed preschoolers. Yes, cats can travel on planes, and certainly ones dressed as hot Swedish virgins, but I still think a cat is out of the question, especially since my college dean reads this blog.

That's what the holidays are all about: unfulfilled expectations. Since my picturesque early years in New England, the only thing in my holiday season that's been merry, jolly, happy, red, glittery, and shiny all over was an Elton John album, The Red Piano.

So please please someone alert me to a literary agent who is interested in dark chick literature that is decidedly mistletoe-free.

The above Christmas card is of my sister and me at Edith Wharton's house channeling Gilbert & George.

Unsuitable Boys

I received a bizarre email from a past lover who is now buried in an unfortunate conjugal bed. It seems that his desires for me have been resuscitated, or maybe they never died. Unfortunately, his grand gesture came out as a somewhat violent proposition for "intense physical engagement (no holds, no limits, fully engaged blow your mind)"....whatever that means. The desperate cries of a lonely man came off as an offensive and degrading proposal with little romance or sentiment attached. He even created a phony GMail account with a cheesy Italian pseudonym in order to cover up his tracks in case his wife abducts his Blackberry or breaks into his emails.

I am leaving for Paris in seven days and am excited to reunite with a man from my past who is NOT (and never will be) a Wanker of the Week like the above mentioned fellow. The Parisian homme has impeccable taste in art objects and a refined coolness to his personal styling—The Sartorialist should be so lucky as to catch him smoking outside of the Café de Flore in his ostrich-skin belt. But more importantly, he respects women and is absurdly funny. I asked him if he would pick me up at Charles de Gaulle airport, and he responded:

"je serai a l aeroport a 11 30 BIG LOVE"
Translation:
"I will be at the airport at 11:30 BIG LOVE"

On a somewhat unrelated note, I just read that the Iranian government has set up a "marriage bureaux" to help young people find spouses. According to the BBC News, "Iranian women complain of a shortage of suitable marriage prospects." Maybe they should flee to Paris.