"shabby people"

While skiing in the French Alpine resort town of Val-d'Isère, I encountered many a Slim Aarons situation. From the lounge chairs at the foot of the slopes, to the Frenchies drinking mid-afternoon red wine in those lounge chairs, it was a surreally elegant ski experience.

From my early years, I recall awkward moments at ski school involving a combination ski suit with suspenders and a desperate need to go pee while riding on the chair lift. I always wanted to become that girl in the snow bunny outfit like some Bavarian ice princess at her chalet in Gstaad sipping slope-side champagne and wearing furry boots that look like animals.

This time around, my sartorial choices were more 1970s-pimp than 1980s snow princess. But no matter what sort of Italian magenta jumpsuit or rabbit fur chapka hat you wear, the awkward mountaintop experiences of youth still abound. Ski boots inevitably make you walk like you have a load in your pants, and falling on your ass is practically a requirement.

The Bay of Bengal

Jet setting is the best, especially if it is on the arm of a dashing man or woman who has piles of money to spend on plane tickets and lavish hotel suites. In theory. In the movies, that is.

A flight attendant friend of mine makes a lifestyle out of meeting men in the first class cabin. She's seen most of the globe and has more stories of luxury travel at the top than Hugh Hefner, or Condoleezza Rice.

She was recently invited for a romantic last-minute trip from Barcelona to New York. Unfortunately, when she arrived to the Manhattan hotel room of her gentleman friend, she picked up his cell phone and found that he had sent the same text message invitation to a multitude of women. It was an international chain text message booty call, and she was the unlucky one who responded. This time the Wanker of the Week met a literal Princess in Flight.

"a reformed rake"

The lovely indie-chic romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer, tells the story of a male 20-something phenomenon: the guy who is desperate to settle down to one woman and only one woman. He is the prince in this modern Los Angeles anti-fairy-tale, instead of the emotionally unavailable wanker so prevalent in popular films and everyday life. Unfortunately, the boy falls for the female twenty-something phenomenon: the girl who is desperate to remain "casual" and never commit to one guy. She is the princess in flight.

The disarmingly disgruntled leading man realizes that he is not the prince to his princess. Romantic relationships are so often littered with this imbalance of expectations -- one person wants to have a baby, and the other person just wants to go to happy hour at a karaoke bar. You could call it "bad timing." But for the ones who want to have a baby, it's more like an extended mourning period of bleak wandering in streets that are haunted by the girl who liked to sing karaoke.

Francis Bacon Paintings

Pierrot Le Fou is a garishly sumptuous New Wave French film featuring the studly Jean-Paul Belmondo, as Pierrot, and the angel-faced Anna Karina, as Marianne. Pierrot begins in the throngs of a boring bourgeois party and quickly skips out on his wealthy Italian wife to sleep with the gamine babysitter, Marianne. But her apartment is a crime scene of smuggled weapons and ambiguously bloodied Algerian gangsters.

So Pierrot and Marianne make a chaotic game of road-tripping it to the French Riviera, to escape the terrorists and live as outlaws in the pleasure of their youthful good looks. But life on the beach soon turns to ennui: after Pierrot made the mimbo-wanker move of dropping his real life for fantastic escapedes with princess in flight Marianne, he becomes just another one of those emotionally unavailable men and takes to reading philosophy books and writing diary entries. Not even the vivid pop art colors and Mediterranean journey to nowhere can save this tragic couple.

A Bulldog Shot

One of the most endearing ways to pass a Sunday afternoon is at the guignol theatre in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Parisian children become entranced by tranny-looking marionettes beating each other on the heads with sticks, brooms, feather dusters, and other phallic objects.

On this particular Sunday there was a brawl between a woman and the portly owner of the theatre. He wanted her to move to a back row to make more room in front for the children. During the dispute a mysterious mustached man stood up and called the room to order.

The curtain finally rose to reveal a magical land where Prince Charming underwent various metamorphoses, the Pretty Princess fainted frequently, and the Evil Witch tried to spoil everyone else's chance at happiness. Maybe she had a traumatic childhood. Or maybe she was just born that way.

"with dyspeptic impatience"

Walking home through the semi-deserted streets of Montmartre, past the tourist trap of Sacré Coeur, I was aggressed by a drunk man. He left his posse of equally inebriated midnight creepers, came up very close to me and said repeatedly: "Comme tu es belle, comme tu es belle." I refused to make eye contact or utter a word to him, as I knew that he second he notice I had an accent, he would pin me as an American girl and the situation would inevitably deteriorate from there. American girls in Paris may seem to be glamorous princesses in flight from their own country, but in most cases, they are prime prey for wankers of the week who reek of body odor and bad whisky.

After I walked efficiently down the cobblestone street away from the creeper, his dialogue turned from "You are so beautiful" to "Comme tu es moche, comme tu es moche." Translation: "You are so ugly." I guess he wanted to test out a variety of pick-up lines that night.

Lurking Imminently

Psychological pregnancy is a little-known phenomenon that makes someone who is not pregnant feel and act like a pregnant woman. Abdominal swelling, food cravings, and even labor pains can arise—only no baby comes out at the end of the nine-month physical discomfort.

Pseudocyesis arises when a woman is desperate to become pregnant, or when she is around someone who is pregnant and feels a strong desire to connect with the baby. Increased estrogen and prolactin hormones in the body can lead to a swollen stomach and milk excretion. Her mind affects her hormones, which affect her body, which then affect her mind even more. My not-with-child sister recently suffered through a month of "morning sickness," but I am still mystified as to why she would have been desperate to have a baby, since she recently extricated herself from a Wanker of the Week and is en route to live in a cold, expensive, and dangerous city far far away.

Rolling Pastry Cutters

The classic Hollywood theme of the magical makeover is ever present in Sydney Pollack's oh-so-'90s version of Sabrina. A sojourn in Paris transforms Sabrina from an awkward "ugly duckling" wallflower to a radiant vision of femininity. Her lifetime crush (played by Greg Kinnear) is a shallow trust fund baby and a quintessential mimbo: blondish, boyish, and easily distracted from the task at hand. In true mimbo form, he sits down and cuts his ass on a pair of champagne flutes that he had intended to use in seducing Sabrina (aka not his fiancée)—talk about quick karmic disaster.

The older brother (played by Harrison Ford) is an endearingly geeky pimp who does all the billion dollar deals for the family company. In the end, I have decided that Harrison Ford circa the early-90s is my ideal dreamboat. His preppy-pimp-boy-scout virility in Working Girl and Sabrina could make end Princess in Flight stop running.

Bits of Magnesium

Maintaining an LDR (Long-Distance Relationship) can be taxing at best, especially during the humid summer months when peoples hormones are blazing, and men want to act like wankers, and Princesses in Flight want to flit about town. But there is a practical solution to this plight: SKEX, which I can only describe to you as Skype + Something Intimate. Journalists have named Skype "the best practical-turned-sexual invention since handcuffs."

I know many transatlantic couples who resort to Skyping as a way of lighting up their lonely summer nights. Plus, if one person is in Cambodia and the other is in the Midwest, then Skex can be an evening nightcap for the former and a morning wake-up call for the latter; it's the twelve-hour time distance of destiny. It is depressing that some of the most lasting relationships are virtual ones. After all, web cams give everyone's skin that luminous glow.

Freudian Field Day

What happens if you are finally lucky enough to find your Prince, and he makes you feel so happy and settled in yourself that you no longer want to be a princess in flight? Usually, couples refer to this moment as: "the decision to cohabit." Some say that living together before marriage leads to no marriage at all. But then, wouldn't it just be a rational step towards avoiding divorce?

A girl I know has been living happily in an apartment with her boyfriend of five years. The realities of her domestic communal existence mystified me, since I have never met my own Prince and I could never imagine folding a Wanker's underwear with any feelings but spite. But just as this laundress-slash-girlfriend was daydreaming about her upcoming anniversary plans, her boyfriend reported that he was no longer in love with her. All it took was a "boys' weekend" away playing field games with balls and mallets for her Prince to devolve into a class A Wanker of the Week. He told her that the only thing that kept him from cheating on her was the fact that there were no available women on the playing field. I guess there were only balls and mallets.

An All-White Suit

Marina Abramovic, the performance artist famous for testing the limits of the body through a variety of media (Russian knives, catatonia pills, bullets, etc.), just announced that she will be installing herself in the MoMA for 586 hours next year. Abramovic will stand on a shelf suspended 50 feet high against the wall of the museum's atrium. The shelf will be no larger than the top of a desk, and the ladders descending from it will consist of upturned knives.

For seven hours a day and five days a week, the artist will stand like a lighting fixture, staring down at the visitors who will lounge back on chaises and peer up at her through telescopes. Abramovic does not have a precise notion of what this awkward-and-dangerous high-up prolonged experiment will feel like. But she has no interest in doing a "run-through" either. Performance art is not about rehearsals. It's mostly about successful failures. Let's just hope Abramovic does not end up as a Princess in Flight.

Cambodian Doughnuts

I met a blonde woman in Manhattan wearing an enormous diamond-encrusted watch and those Dior flower rings that I imagined were only bought as sweet 16 gifts for Russian heiresses. The blinged-out woman's exact age was ambiguous, but she could have been anywhere from 24 to 40. I asked her what she did for a living, and she responded, "Nothing. I used to work in marketing. I made no money. Then I met a banker, I got engaged, I stopped working. He got everything I had always wanted: a Range Rover, a Porsche, a house in East Hampton..."

And then her story took an unexpected turn: "But then I just got bored. And I broke up with him." Just as she ended her engagement, her therapist diagnosed her with multiple personality disorder. She says that people accuse her of "living in a fantasy world."

She fled to Paris, where she fell in love with a French man who relocated to New York for her. But she recently broke it off with him too. Perhaps "Princess in Flight" is an apt term for such difficult-to-please damsels who flit from one man to the next. Or maybe she's just a pimp.