Paris in the summer begins to take its toll

Tomorrow I have an interview for an English language teaching program and then possibly a meeting with the cat, Chita, who may be coming to live with us at the end of September. I don't know which one I am more nervous about.

Every once in a while, you read or hear or see something that seems to penetrate so deeply into my personal psyche that it is frightening. On a recent flight from New York to London, I had a choice between a billion films (go British Airways!), including a series that was curated by Cate Blanchett. The film she had chosen for my flight was Brief Encounter, a British film from David Lean, made in 1946. Apparently it is a classic of British cinema, but I had never heard of it. The script is by Noel Coward.

I went on to IMDB and apparently, my "discovery" has already been made by cinephiles everywhere. Oh, well. Original or not, I still must advise all to see this movie--film noir setting in which a married housewife meets a married doctor at the train station and they have an "affair." A lot of people on IMDB claim that the plot line is dated, as taboos about adultery and divorce have been destroyed in the past 50 years. But for me, both the moral and emotional content of the film seem perfectly applicable to contemporary life. Or at least to mine.

I don't want to spoil the film for anyone, so my discussion has to be a little generic and cryptic. But here's a solution. Order the film from NetFlix (and if you live in the US and aren't a member of NetFlix, you should be), watch it, and get back to me. I promise you won't regret it.

So, this afternoon, despite my sonic explorations on Epitonic, I have had a standard in my head: Every Time We Say Goodbye. What can I say? When it comes down to it, I am a singer and all the weirdo, avant-garde unsingable music, while stimulating to my mind and ear, can only hold my heart's (or spleen's, if you want to get Baudelairien) interest for so long.

Of course, this song is in my mind for a reason. Tonight, one of my favorite people in Paris will get on a train to go back to Munich, to her family, to her friends, to her studies. And Thursday night I attended yet another event in a seemingly endless stream of going away parties and housewarmings. Seems like "my clique" will inevitably be a malleable hodgepodge of wanderers and dreamers, coming and going, profiting as much as we can from life, but never staying still. And those friends who do stay still, go in and out of focus as I scurry around trying to figure out where the hell I am supposed to be and what I could possibly do in this world to be useful.

But no matter how many times I have to say goodbye to people, I always become irrationally upset. It is a brief wave of desperation, like I just can't hold on to anything. Soon, rationality heals my panic, and I go on with life, but I rarely forget someone. In fact, I rarely say goodbye anymore. I simply say, "until the next time." I wonder if it is some kind of Freudian separation anxiety, rooted somewhere in the dark corners of my childhood? Or perhaps not forgetting others is my way of combatting being forgotten by them. In any case, it is this disturbed side of my personality that probably inspired me to write this blog, so I guess we are all benefitting from it! Once again, solution: embrace your crazy!

Accompanied by my mother and brother, I enter into a room in a small, barely furnished apartment. The room has sea green walls and there are twin beds covered with bright white sheets and blankets. In one of the beds is a little girls around 10 years old. She seems to be my mother's daughter, yet not the sister of my brother and I. She is very, very sick. Cancer has spread itself through her blood and her heart is slowly beginning to to become stiff, losing its ability to beat. The machine next to the bed shows that 97% of her heart has stopped (it looks like a bar you would see on a computer when you are downloading something) and it is only a matter of minutes before it stops all together.

My father enters the room with another young girl (perhaps 14 or 15). He approaches the bed and holds the little girl's hand. She smiles at him and says "It makes me really happy that you came." My mother explains how strong it was for her to be able to smile. "With 97% of her hear stopped, she has pain up all the way up to her ears," she says. We all know why we are there. To be with her when she dies. But instead she says, "Don't worry. It's going to be a while. I want Sarah to eat first. Go have dinner and then come back to see me." Sarah is the girl who came in with my father. She has fine red hair and is frighteningly thin. She is the sister of the little girl, but again, not related to my brother or I. Sarah begins to cry. "As if I needed another reason not to eat," she laments. "If I eat, she will die."

But the rest of us think she is overreacting and respect the wishes of the little girl. We move from the room into a small, completely white kitchen where we try to have a eat dinner, nibbling at a platter of unappetizing food in silence.

Soon we go back to the room, only to find the bed where the little girl was empty, sheets changed and bed re-made. All of the machines are gone. A nurse comes back through the door to tell us that the little girl died while we had been in the kitchen. "Sometimes they just don't want to die in front of anyone." She says. Her body seems to have just disappeared and we know we will never see it again.

The photo I posted of my brother's dog got a huge response, so I thought I should share some sad news in hopes that you will all be able to help. Bailey has fallen ill and the vets believe he has a serious neurological problem (possibly meningitis). Please send positive energy toward my brother, his girlfriend and Bailey. Hopefully our mental support will help the little guy pull through.

My search for new sounds to listen to has led me back to Epitonic.com, a place I visited years ago when NewMusicBox wrote an article on their inclusion of 20th (21st?) Century Composers. In any case, I was poking around and realized that the best way to be introduced to new music is through their radio feature. You can choose as many "genres" as you want from a list of dozens of fun choices (for example Dronology, No Wave, Math Rock, Power Pop, Shoegazer, Slo-core, Noise, etc.) and choose the number of tracks you want to listen to (20, 50, 100, or 500) and it creates a custom-made, random playlist.

I am having fun.

My current playlist starts with these songs:
The Bees - A Minha Menina (a cover of a great Mutantes song)
Quasi - Mammon (poppy, melodic indie rockers)
Windy and Carl - Trembling (a long, trippy drone that, um, well, trembles)
Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston - Undying Love (strange, strange microtonal music, with a singer that lisps)
Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 2 (avant-garde guitar God goes crazy)
Les Savy Fac - Wake Up! (punk, with plenty of accusatory screaming)

I highly recommend trying this. The more adventurous you are, the more satisfying it will be. But for the more conservative amongst the masses, they do have less colorful genres like funk, rock, and pop available.

All this talk about pets got me thinking about my first cat:

I had a boy cat named Catie. We got him when I was 3. I was his only friend because my parents are not cat people. In any case, the reason we got "her" was that one of the kids in my Mom's class brought "her" in because the family had just got a dog and they couldn't keep "her." (Did I mention my Mom taught retarded kids in the inner city?) My mother has never turned an animal away in her life, which is why our front yard looks like it should belong to Snow White and why there is a permanent chipmunk infestation in the house. So when my mother picked me up from pre-school (this was right before I was kicked out for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance), there was a furry present for me that frantically was bouncing off the windows and my head.

We took Catie to the vet and found out that she was in fact a he. I was very excited to get to rename the cat, because I didn't like the name Catie. (I just realized, right now, at 25 years of age, why we spelled Catie with a "C", because it's "Cat"ie). Anyway, I thought that the perfect name for our new boy cat would be Rainbow! My decision was vetoed, mostly because Catie was already 6 months old and could respond to his name and the name was a little femmy.

So Catie stayed with us.

He weighed 23 lbs. and would only run if he heard the can opener going, his belly swaying with each step. When he slept in bed with me, he would take up the entire bottom and if I moved he would scratch the shit out of me. You could only touch him on his head, anywhere else would result in hissing and getting the shit scratched out of you. I rubbed him under his chin for hours and he grew to love me. He once fell in love with a cat named Princess who looked just like him (gray tabby cat with black tiger stripes) only about 14 pounds smaller. She stayed with us for 2 weeks while her owners were on vacation. She rejected him and he didn't eat for days.

When we got Daisy (the dog) he thought it would be funny to guard her food dish and then scratch her if she tried to get by. He also enjoyed blocking doorways and staircases. Daisy was terrified of him. But one day, when I came home from school, I found the two of the in the living room curled up next to one another, sleeping. I tried to take a photo, but as soon as the got a whiff of what I was doing they quickly got up, acting like it never happened.

There was a time when I, too, was frightened of Catie. I couldn't be in the same room with him and I wouldn't let him sleep with me. You see, I had this nightmare, where I was looking down a flight of stairs and I saw him down at the bottom. He slowly turned his head to face me and then his mouth morphed into this hideous Cheshire Cat smile and he had these maniacal, twinkling eyes. I woke up screaming. It was a good month before I forgave him for being so malicious in my dream.

My father referred to Catie as a "she" for the entire 13 years he was with us. Maybe that's why he would lay down with his front paws crossed. He died at age 13 of lung cancer from second hand smoke. So all you pet owners out there. Think twice about smoking around your animals. They have lungs too.

Catie still comes to visit me in my dreams and I am always happy to see him.

Yeah, so if you haven't seen the Jibjab.com cartoon spoof of "This Land Is Our Land," I command you so go and see it now. I saw it this morning on TV. The site is getting bombarded with hits since the creators, Gregg & Evan Spiridellis, appeared on FoxNEWS on the 18th, so it is a little slow, but worth it!

If you have seen it, share your favorite parts. Mine are obviously the nuclear bit (see title of this post), how the two of them dance, and Hillary slapping the crap out of Bill.

My brother and his girlfriend just added an addition to their family. His name is Bailey (named after the Dawson's Creek dude or, in frat boy fashion, Bailey's Irish Cream?) and he is a 5 year-old, 25-lb beagle. Here's a picture. My mother is in 7th heaven, I really think while most women her age want grandchildren, she would rather have grandpets. She keeps asking me when I am getting a cat. Jeez! So much pressure. Anyway, here's a photo of Bailey. Full name: Bailey Licker MacBlane.

I distinctly remember an episode of Leave It To Beaver where the 10 year-old Beaver is sitting in what was called Civics class. As I had no idea what civics was, I figured it had to be some outdated discipline that, like the pogo stick, went out of style by the dawn of the 1960s.

I think of myself as a smart, well-informed person. But I have to admit, I have no idea how our government really works. A product of a decent public school in upstate New York, I received half-a-year of instruction in Economics and half-a-year in American Government. Of course I can tell you how a bill becomes a law and all that, but beyond basic ideas, I really have a hard time navigating the economic, policy, and political functioning of our country.

I have a been reading Bill Clinton's book, and although it's construction is a hodgepodge of colloquialisms (you can just hear his accent when you're reading the book), I have to say that I am learning a lot about the structure of political campaigning, the role that the executive branch of our government plays, and the day-to-day activities, decisions, and struggles our leaders face. Yes, Bubba spends a lot of time talking up his achievements and dropping names, but I am quite impressed by the solid political, social, religious, and economic philosophy he follows in (even if I do not always agree with it). I believe that George W. Bush would be hard-pressed to offer a similarly articulate portrait of his own philosophy (after all, during a Republican debate 2000 elections he responded to the question "Who is your favorite political philosopher?" with "Jesus Christ, because he saved my life.") Ok, this may be a good answer if have forgotten the principle of "separation of church and state" (which unfortunately many, although not the popular majority, have). Furthermore, it wouldn't be a bad idea for Mr. Bush to follow Jesus' teaching a little more closely if he is going to make this claim. Clinton is a scary, born-again Southern Baptist too, but he keeps it on the low-down. After all, there are a lot of voters who are not Christian fundamentalists. What kind of leader alienates huge numbers of his population like that?

I want a president who is intelligent, who makes me feel confident that he (or she, but let's face it...) will make the right decisions most of the time. I don't trust George W. Bush and I don't respect him. How sad is that? He scares me, not because I believe in some conspiracy, new world order theory, but because he is the person that is responsible for my well-being and the well-being of my country. He is our first line of defense and he can barely string a sentence together. He is caught in a tangle of lies and sketchy scenarios, and he doesn't even have a reassuring speaking style. I don't want to feel ashamed anymore.

I long for a country that teaches its citizens how to be good citizens. Where we understand that the job of the president isn't just to be "a good guy", but a policy maker, an ambassador, a politician, a manager, a caretaker, and a symbol. We also need to understand the role we each play as the electors of a leader who, although he may not seem to directly impact our daily, blessed lives, influences the lives of billions of people living on this planet. We are citizens of the most powerful country in the world and our responsibility is great. We need to make our decisions carefully. We need to be informed, to learn how to process political messages and make judgments based on more than Jesus and facial expressions. I hereby dedicate myself to becoming a good (albeit absent) citizen of the United States. I don't care who anyone votes for, as long as they can give me some well-supported reasons.

Ok. I do care. I really don't think this world can handle 4 more years Bush and his cronies.

I am off to order my absentee ballot.

I had a really weird dream a couple of nights ago. I think it might be prophetic. The dream featured my friend Greg, a poet who left Paris at the end of May to go work for the Kerry campaign. In the dream, we were at a train station and he was heart broken. He asked me to read the letter he had written to the girl he loved, who he was apparently leaving behind. I looked at the letter, addressed to a girl named Victoria. It was written in French, but the only word that stuck out to me, because it was much bigger than the other words, is "cocasse". I have no idea what this word means and Stephane (who is the first line of defense against my dream tales) had no idea, so I looked it up today. My old school British English-French dictionary translates it as "droll, laughable." The Robert Micro describes it as a situation or event that is both shocking and funny. Will Greg's work lead to a Victory? Will the 2004 elections create yet another "cocasse" situation like the 2000 elections? Does Greg's heartbreak over abandoning an aptly named girl indicate the inevitable failure of the Kerry campaign? Or does his pain and dedication mean that it will be a hard road, but the message is being sent? I think I am going to try to manifest a sequel to clarify this image a little. If you have any wisdom, do share.

So, I was going to let this joke go on longer, but, alas, Stephane doesn't feel comfortable with the illusion. Truth is our apartment is huge and beautiful, but in a more "modern Swedish design" way (read: IKEA) than Art Nouveau masterpieces (all photos appearing in the previous post were taken at the Musee D'Orsay...).

As for housewarming gifts, here are a few things we do NOT need, because we already have them: a VHS tape of The 3 Tenors, Shabbat dishes, escargot utensils, New Kids on the Block trading cards, sea monkeys, SpongeBob valentines, an NYU diploma, Alex Kolinovsky's Covert Java, United States and world colorforms, a Booble mug, any more comic books.

Also: Chez Mandounette is currently taking reservations for fall/winter visitors. However, do to an unfortunate incident earlier this year, all prospective guests will have to go through an intensive interviewing process. Chez Mandounette does not accept credit cards, traveler's checks, pets, or posers.

Voila les photos!


Clockwise from upper left: The "American" kitchen; the salon featuring half of our couch (the other half due to arrive in September...yikes!); our awesome Japanese bed...some would call it a futon; the shitter; the bar and our trick bar stools; the garden from the salon; the meal corner; the study, featuring Tigrou and the infamous Hulk Hands

Well, Stephane and I have finally moved and settled into our monstrous new apartment (after 9 months together in a studio, I feel like a princess in her massive 3 room apartment. I spend my days walking from room to room, basking in the glorious space and the sunshine that streams in from the garden in the back. We still have some boxes yet to unpack, but most of the big things have been installed (we've been going to flea markets and auctions for the past several months to amass art nouveau furniture and trinkets, which is the look we decided to go for in our apartment.) I am putting some pictures up on Mandounette for all of those that will not be able to attend our housewarming party next weekend. For those that are attending, we are in great need of: a blue plunger, a remote control for our television, sake juice boxes, a ThighMaster, and a coffee table book about coffee tables. Oh, and a coffee table would be helpful.


Clockwise from top left: Carey, visiting from Rochester, knocks at our front door; our dining area; our office (computers not yet installed); our bedroom (before it got messy).

Karebear sent me this link to World66: You can find out how well-traveled or ill-traveled you are on this site that allows you to create maps showing where you've been in the US and in the world. I have visited 11 countries and 21 states. Not bad, but there are some serious holes. Like the the Rocky Mountains. And Asia. Guess I should start saving up for that trip to Sri Lanka.



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It seems that as soon as I arrived in the US, I was smacked upside the head with "low carb" everything--low carb cooking shows (everything tastes better with bacon fat), low carb beer, and my personal favorite, low-carb bread. As if American bread isn't disgusting enough. And what exactly is bread with no carbs? I think it ceases to be bread.

Anyway, Smilla sent me this article a couple of weeks ago and this is the kind of research I like to hear. Sleeping = Losing Weight. Yes!!!

Well, it is July 15 and I must admit, the blog has gotten pushed to the back burner frequently over the last month and a half. But that's not because I don't love it! I do and I will be spending a great deal of time with it in the next few weeks.

My excuses for this most recent break include moving (we are finally in the new apartment!), a trip to Aveyron in the south of France, where I hiked, ate, and drank to my heart's content in a town of 350 people, and trying to decipher my acceptance letters from various universities to figure out which program I want to pursue next year. Will it be political communication? Will it be education research? Or multimedia design? We shall see. Fortunately, I have many options (for once!). Now I just have to figure out which path will be best for me. In any case, lots and lots of change going on here on Avenue Parmentier.

But first, I have to go to the pool and try to shed the vacation bloat. Damn munchies!

In this scene, Mandounette bums around at the Place des Vosges, whose former residents included kings, queens, Victor Hugo, and a bunch of other classy types.

Shortly before my impromptu departure for the States, my friend Roya and I invested in a "portable bar", which consisted of several cans of 1664 (simply called "seize" here), a pack of Gauloises Rouges, some matches, and a bag of salted pistachios. We made a lot of friends at the Place des Vosges, where we sat for hours, including an Esmeralda-type bohemian with whom we bartered a cigarette for some indispensable advice: Don't go into the fountain, it will cut your feet. She had been dancing in the fountain when we arrived, egged on by her beet-red manfriend, who we decided must be a painter. When we finally were able to peel ourselves from the grass, we made our way to the Paradis du Fruit to meet some friends and drink a smoothy...followed by happy hour pints of Guinness and a wine-filled picnic by the Seine. Yeah, didn't feel so hot the next day...

When I was home in Rochester a few weeks ago, my dad, relayed the epithet that my brother had recently applied to our family. "You know what we are?" he had apparently said. "We're rich white trash."

For years I have been searching for a simple way to describe where I come from—a 1950s mint green, split-level house with a pink oven built into the wall, worn down brown carpeting camouflaging years of hairballs and canine kidney problems, a huge yard in which the grass doesn't grow, dead rose bushes, giant multi-colored Christmas lights thrown haphazardly over bushes that haven't been trimmed in years, white walls turned yellow by a 3 pack-a-day smoker, a plastic wall clock that dons 12 composers faces and plays a sampling of their oeuvre each hour--Eine Kleine Nachtmusik at 7 that gets slower and lower in pitch as the batteries wear down, a water-damaged, framed poster of Baryshnikov, a mirror inscribed with the "Footprints" poem, a lavender bedroom scarred by masking tape that once held up dozens of New Kids posters, a book shelf made of cinder blocks and papered 2x4s, a computer so ridden with viruses that it fights back, hardwood floors that haven't been varnished in years, white-painted brick on the fireplace used semi-annually to light a DuraFlame log, an out-of-tune upright piano, Hamburger Helper and Chicken Tonight, all-you-can-eat Little Debbie snacks, a crooked basketball hoop only 8 and a half feet off the ground, "beef burgundy" which was stew beef cooked in cream of mushroom soup served over mashed potatoes, a chipmunk infestation egged on by my mother's Snow White complex…

All of this in a beautiful prewar neighborhood, one of Rochester's first suburbs…a far cry from the white, treeless labyrinths that characterize the deep suburbs. My brother and I both went to prestigious private universities, have (or had, in my case) impressive white-collar jobs and are surrounded by people from important families, who have always had the right connections and opportunities. But we also both worked several summers in factories, like cheap beer, and dream of going back to a rented summer house in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where once a year, with thousands of other middle class New Yorkers, we pretended we were really rich.

People at our family Christmas parties really do have mustaches and wear trucker caps, did so before it was a hipster fashion trend and will continue to now that it is "out". They are suicidal alcoholics and abusive wives, single mothers with brilliant kids and irresponsible gamblers, bus drivers and nurses, university deans and teachers, cooks and travelling salespeople. They drive revved up Camaros and Jimmys, Toyotas and Hondas. A strange mix, straddling gentrified yuppie-dom and down-home trashiness.

Every day in France, I have the impression that I am tricking people. The only Americans they ever really see (apart from the tourists, who rarely stray from the center of the city) are well-educated, well-dressed girls that don't have much first-hand experience with Middle America, meaning the true middle class. And the French assume I am that way too. After all, when I am out of context you would have no idea, except for my innate fear of sparsely decorated boutiques and taxis and love of working class neighborhoods and dives. And the way I fly around the planet like it's nothing…in New York one day, London the next, Paris, Istanbul, Chicago. But believe me, I do not travel in style. I am a member of the small white trash jet set: taking the subway to the airport, traveling in coach, sleeping in airport chairs, treating myself occasionally to a magazine, and always having transfers in weird ass places because the direct flights are so pricy. The past couple of weeks were spent traveling to my various "homes" and were marked by a lot of funny events that somehow made me hyperaware of my rich white trash side. I've mined some of the highlights from my memory that will be appearing in the next several posts.

Oh, and by the way, it's Old Milwaukee and Bud not PBR, my white trash wannabe friends.