NUMBER FIFTEEN: Paris Alone

Victoria has been pissing me off lately. It comes and goes; one minute I'll be furious with her, and the next I'll be fine. This morning I was furious. I woke up at 9 a.m., because I'm not going to waste what little time I had in Paris, got ready, and waited for her to wake up. Ten o'clock rolled around and she was still asleep, andalthough I wanted he r to wake up, I didn't want to do it myself, so I took my breakfast outside, into the courtyard. A little girl approached me and I had to talk to her a while, which was actually really cute. She called me "vous," which was weird for me. I go back in the apartment. She is still asleep. I go for a walk, call Adrianne (whos e phone was OFF, today was the day she was coming to Montmartre and we were supposed to meet), come back. She's still asleep. I go for another walk, come back. She's STILL asleep. It's eleven. She didn't end up waking up until about noon. I came back into the apartment and she was cleaning the tiny kitchen. Really cleaning it.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. The constant, "Isa, est-ce que tu as besoin d'aide?" every time Isabelle does anything to the point where it is truly obnoxious, even to Isabelle I think, the constant ass-kissing. I understand that Isabelle is being really nice by letting us stay in her house, but was bringing her gifts, cleaning up after myself, and helping when help was needed too little? Should I have scrubbed Victoria's house raw? Does Victoria think I'm rude, ungrateful? She probably thinks she's better than me because she cleans the kitchen, because sometimes she acts that way. Am I rude and ungrateful?

I couldn't stand to wait for her to finish over-cleaning the goddamn kitchen then take a shower and get ready, and I couldn't help in the kitchen myself because a) kitchen is too small, and b) then it would look like I thought that was a good idea and I wanted to like, even the tables or something. So I cleaned up the room we sleep in, as I did yesterday (rearranging the furniture, putting away the sheets, futon, etc), and then got the fuck out of the house.

Fucked around Paris for a while, which was cool, and ended up in a McDonalds near the Opera/Printemps/Galeries Lafeyette watching Mika sing about "big girls" on a million different screens lined up on the walls. This Mickey D's was pimped OUT. It was made to look like a restaurant, with an upstairs and a downstairs, booths, dark colors, fancy-fancy this and that so that you don't feel like you're eating in a public restroom (McDo's on Haight, for instance), and television screens lining the walls.

I have come to the conclusion that Mika will not ever be worth my time. What a two-bit act, he can't even think of his own ideas except to flame up Freddy Mercury (even more). Here he is, singing the 21st century's "Fat Bottom Girls" and singing in a high voice and dressing funny.

The next video they showed was shocking. It was a long, drawn-out, horribly violent video game fight scene. The only reason the creators got away with being able to show the thing on many, many television screens in McDonald's is because it was a computer generated thing. Literally, one of the guys jump onto the other's chest and trampled all over it while the guy was standing-and the trampler was wearing shoes with BLADES on the bottom. The next thing I remember is the two of them, back-to-stomach, a sword through the both of them, writhing and writhing on the blade. I'm not usually one to nag about video games and violence, but it was kind of obscene having it pumped into your brain at McDonald's.

Oh and by the way, if you're ever in Paris, make sure to bring some Feist for the daytime, Man Man for nighttime, and MGMT for whenever you wish Feist made more songs.

NUMBER FOURTEEN: Back in Paris

Third day back in Paris. In an internet cafe, and although it is nifty that I am in Paris, in MONTMARTRE, blogging away in an internet cafe, I hate writing in public.

Today we decided not to go to the Louvre, and instead visit Pere Lachaise cemetary. Somehow, the fact that just about every celebrity ever is buried there did not tip us off that Pere Lachaise is fucking gigantic. I highlighted some graves I wanted to see-Chopin, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, and of course Mr Morrison, and then Victoria took the map and said There are probably some you don't know. I tried not to take offense to that. She highlighted a bunch of names, and I developed a sneaking suspicion that perhaps she only had a vague idea of who some of the people on her list were. Colette? Just Colette. Not even a fucking last name.

We searched for Colette first, too. My suspicions were confirmed. Any grave in the area bearing the name Colette, followed by any last name, was a suspect grave. She asked me if they seemed too early or too late to be Colette herself (himself?). I said they were all too late, but fuck if I know.

The first grave we found was Chopin's. It took us about an hour, searching through narrow isles and past OPEN tombs, open, I kid you not. Some of those are just trashed, it's awful and disgusting and morbid. They probably clean out the graves that have been opened by like, growing trees, but who knows-the graves are so deep it's hard to see the bottom, and they're probably so old that any earthly remains (AP Comp, anyone?) have probably turned to just earth by now. So anyway, we finally find Chopin, and just in time; an entire group of stupid, fat, pastey foreigners speaking a language that could have been Russian or some eastern European language have arrived to pay their respects to the man. They line up to take their stupid, fat, pastey foreign pictures, one by one, and Victoria doesn't just want to take a picture and leave. I respected her wishes to wait out the entire gang of assholes so that she could have her moment alone. This takes a long time. Everyone in the group of thirty or more wants a picture. Why? I don't know. They probably don't give a shit about Chopin, they probably could not pick his face or his music out of a crowd, and yet they still want a picture. I hate people.

After Chopin, I was on a roll. I learned how to read the confusing and complicated map and succeeded in finding all the following graves on our list, including Chompollion and Jim Morrison. Asking for a moment alone with Jim would have been too much, especially when there was a slightly younger teenage girl staring at the grave forlornly. I already felt like Jim was the asshole of the cemetary because people had scratched his name and arrows towards his grave on other tombs, a totally asshole thing to do, and this was sealing the deal. I heard the girl say to her mother that she wanted to wait until everyone was gone, which to me meant game on. I was not going to leave until she did.

Or so I thought. I watched her, in her short skirt and high boots, watch Jim Morrison's lifeless grave. I watched her take pictures with a fancy high-tech camera. I watched her film the grave a bit. And then she took out an old, black, POLAROID camera, aimed the thing, and pulled the trigger. FUCK THAT. You win, bitch. I would never take a Polaroid of his grave after that. Victoria caught on to this, and I think the girl heard Victoria ask me if the reason I wasn't going to stay was because she had just taken a Polaroid. Yes, Victoria, yes. That is why I am not going to do that.

I was in a groove. I found our way through small, confusing little paths to the plot where Moliere and Lafontaine were hidden. I had learned, by that point, that the famous graves (with the exception of Jim's) are pretty easy to find. They're normally right along the path so that you don't have to hike through other people's graves to find them, and they're usually kind of big and flashy-Champollion had a big phallic obelisk, Chopin had a bust and a LOT of flowers, Balzac had phallic obelisk with a bust on top, etc. So Moliere and Lafontaine were not too hard to find. They're big, surrounded by a gate, and right next to each other. The only problem was that Victoria had not found them. So I waited for her to show, called her name a bit-nothing. I kissed a grave, thanked the occupant, apologized, and sat on their tomb for ten or fifteen minutes, then decided I could not do this any more. I left Pere Lachaise, bought a diet Coke (Coca light, sil vous plait) and got into a phone booth.

I called home collect twice, and the second time my brother answered. It was five in the morning California time, I knew that, but I also did not care. I spent a good twenty minutes or half hour in the phone booth and managed to get ahold of my brother, who told my mom had spent the night at someone's house, my father, who wasted my time, and no one else. I walked down the street and got in another phone booth, called the grandparents. Although panicked, they were probably happy to feel important and needed, so they were happy to call up the ENTIRE FAMILY in France trying to get ahold of Victoria. It is a well-known fact in the family that the grandparents are a HIGHWAY for information. If you tell a grandparent ANYTHING, within a day, the entire family will know. These are women who can speak for hours on the phone. Not one hour, or two-my grandfather once clocked six, six hours on the telephone. Alexandra tells me that her mother, the sister of my grandmother, calls daily (and ALWAYS during dinner, no matter at what time dinner is had, I have observed this firsthand) and speaks nonstop. She talks about every detail of her old, boring life. Old, boring life. Again: old, boring life. What color the neighbor's new dress is, how she should have gotten it in a different color because this color really doesn't suit her, how many centimeters the grass grew and how much they cut it so that it was only one centimeter high, how many flowers bloomed on the plants outside. I cannot make this shit up, my friends.

So my grandmother calls Yvonne. Line's busy. Of course. So she calls Yvonne's daughter Alexandra, no one answers. She calls Alexandra's brother, Jean-Louis, who is gay and lives in Brest with his life partner Pascal, and Jean-Louis is not home. I interrupted her here by calling her again. Had I not, she would have probably proceeded to call her other sister Suzanne, Suzanne's crazy daughter Catherine, Catherine's son Lenaike, our family friends the Gardets, etc etc. She tells me to take a taxi back to Montmartre and wait for Victoria there. I go to the cab station and FAIL at getting a cab. My fatal error? Using tu instead of vous to address him. Faux PAS. That is considered impolite, so I can only hope that he heard my accent and forgave me as he drove away. Thankfully, Victoria received a call from Yvonne, left the cemetary, and found me as I was standing on the street and failing at getting a taxi and taking the metro. So that was fun. And I didn't even get to see Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, or Oscar Wilde. Just Jim Morrison, what a dick.

NUMBER THIRTEEN: f.y.i. i.m.a. u.s.a. m.i.a.

I have decided to forgo the discothèque tonight because I simply cannot stomach another expensive and, on the whole, unpleasant experience. I went last night because I figured, hey, I'm only in France once, it'll build character, and most importantly, it'll be a good story. But I had a kind of shitty day and absolutely do not want to dress up tonight. So I guess a minute ago, when Laura walked out the front door, I guess that was the last time I'll ever see her. Boo hoo, I'll miss not being able to communicate to you. Ironically, tonight is probably the more exciting night because a) it's Thursday, not Wednesday, and lots of people start the weekend on Thursday night-I read that in a college guide book, b) they're going to a new club, c) there's a special DJ there, so hopefully he won't absolutely suck at what he does like the DJs at the Pearl. The DJs here really make you appreciate Moby and Diplo. I am now fully aware of how much Diplo rules, having seen a variety of DJs and a fraction of the spectrum. Maya, good work. I'm sorry he shat on your head an heart when he went "TO SAVE STRIPPERS IN BRAZIL [COZ they ALWAYS NEED MUSIC TO DANCE TO]" and d) There are actually going to be new people there. Well, from what Victoria and Laura told me, just one new person, and Maureen, which is two more people than we usually hang out with. 

I copped out so that I can lie on the couch watching The Office and occasionally yell out the window to the kids below like a crotchety old lady. They're obnoxious and, and evidently "French people are loud and obnoxious, shut up" means absolutely nothing to them. 

So here's some details I forgot:

1. Once I was in Nice at the bus station and a guy with an Italian accent kept calling me "bella." Not flattering. He was wearing capris. 

2. Last night Victoria's mom had friends over and I got a weird vibe from one of the guys, so I asked Victoria and she said that he's a bit of a pervert. I was sitting across the room from him and had to reach over to my shoes and put them on, which was a tricky maneuver while wearing a skirt. I noticed that Creepy was staring at me, mouth open. Look sharp, asswad.

3. I was following Victoria and Laura the other day, and for some reason they led me across the street when the light was red. I was almost hit by a car. The guy started yelling at me, and once I regained my composure I summoned the lung power to shout, "Fuck you I'm foreign!" Way to rep the USA. 

NUMBER TWELVE: Elissa Says No to Drugs

I was originally going to call this post "Who Goes to the Discothèque on Wednesday Night?" and have the body of the post be "white people," but enough went on tonight that I can't leave it all out. 

We went through our usual pre-outing ritual this afternoon; Victoria talked about everyone who was going, but by the time we actually got to our destination, it was just us and Laura. At least I was allowed to dress myself today. I looked like a hipster. Classy, though. Classier, as usual, than my companions. 

The discothèque was damn near empty when we arrived, and I immediately wanted to leave. The thing about my friends is that we would have all seen the old, old ass white people and the young, young children on the dance floor and all headed for the door. There were maybe twenty people max, and at one point I counted seven, on the dance floor. The DJ was NOT THERE, he walked away and let his MacBook play the EURYTHMICS. The day I dance to the Eurythmics...

So I chain smoked blacks and watched hokey white people dance, a category that includes Victoria and Laura. Eventually, the PG crowd was replaced by a younger and equally small collection of people. One of them was a really, really cute guy I saw when we were walking in. Victoria and Laura were mortified to be in his presence. They knew him from school and thought he was ugly and did not want anything to do with him. So I did what anyone as bored as I would do; when Victoria and Laura were dancing, gosh, I just don't know what happened, but suddenly I was talking to the boy and his friend.

The boy they know, Nicolas, asked me stupid questions about Victoria and Laura, who were moving like whities on the dancefloor in their Euroclothes. "They like to dance?" "They're French?" "They're in high school?" Finally, he got around to what he really wanted to know. "They're pretty," he told me, flicking his head at my friends. What do I say to this? "Do they have boyfriends?" I told him Victoria did, and I wasn't sure about Laura, but I thought so. I mean, they made such a big deal about not wanting to talk to him because he was ugly, isn't that what they wanted?

Apparently not. They invited us to go smoke a joint with them outside the club. It was a cute little scene; several French youth-three girls, two boys, and young couple-hanging out outside a discothèque, smoking joints and leaning on vespas. The joints they roll their are very tight and much like a cigarette, and consist of a block of hash surrounded by tobacco. I really did not want to smoke, so I declined and watched Nico's friend, Victoria, and Laura smoke the joint. Nico and his friend asked Victoria and Laura if they had boyfriends. Suddenly, the answer was "no." Way to make me look like a fucking lying idiot. Nicolas had been literally throwing himself at Victoria on the dancefloor, and even now he was making a big deal about how cold she must be. Maybe that had changed her mind about his looks and whether or not she had a boyfriend? And at the end of the night, numbers were exchanged. So you're welcome, French girls. I enjoyed having my ego steamrolled so that you could have another notch in your bedpost.

On an animosity-related sidenote, Victoria and I have entered an unspoken competition. I noticed that Victoria wasn't eating all day, which pissed me off. That is a skanky thing to do because it makes all other girls feel fat, and I'm competitive. And now even more than that, I'm hungry. Fuck!

NUMBER ELEVEN: Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo is, in general, a fast and loud town.  It is a town full of young, good looking men in business suits and cigarettes driving fast, loud cars. It is a town built for and by handsome, debonaire, wealthy assholes, like Kanye West, only white. It all smells faintly of cigars.  Self-indulgent, egotistical, materialistic, and ostensibly lacking any moral code, Monte Carlo is a cool town; the only problem is it knows that. And that it's a complete fucking cop town. 

Perhaps Monte Carlo feels insecure because of it's reputation, the Las Vegas of Europe, the town the gigantic casino where Ian Flemming based his first James Bond book, Casino Royale. They have cameras stationed on every street, as well as several police officers whose job is to wear that small-town-cop look on their faces all the time. The cop orgy is most dense in front of the palace, the home of Prince Albert, and the raised flag on the roof means that he's in Monte Carlo, probably in his gigantic house, right now.

For the tour of the Palace, they give you these little devices that they tell you to hold up to your ear like a cell phone. This is your tour guide, and not only does it make you look like a douchebag, it takes a full two minutes to tell you the rules. This is currently the home of Monaco's princes, so please refrain from taking pictures and videos in the palace walls, it says. Yes, that would be weird if a bunch of people stampeded through your house every day taking pictures, but it would be weird to live in that house in the first place. Get over it. It's not like Albert even goes into the one wing of the house they let tourists see anyway: he lives in the other wings and ignores the public one completely.

This is not how my palace would be run. I had a lot of time to think about how I would do it if I was Grace Kelly's daughter and lived in the Monacan palace, since I abandoned the little tour guide. It was too much for me, too much of an obvious ploy to keep everyone quiet and simultaneously save money and time on live tour guides. But all that you can hear in the place is the occasional conversation, held usually in another language and among children, footsteps on marble floor, and the hum of someone else's pocket tour guide. 

Here's an average morning in the palace as I rule it:

I am woken up in the morning by the sound of tourists talking in a language I don't understand. Initially, this pisses me off, because I have a headache, but then sets a wave of panic over me as I realize that I am naked underneath the sheets of the four poster in La Chambre Louis XIII. I grab the sheets, green as the wallpaper, and stumble through the banisters separating the alcove from the main room and parade through the already knocked-over separators that they use at airports to form lines. Past the early birds I would fly, through the large, red Salon Trône and into the courtyard, across the stage and chairs set up there, and up into the wings where I am supposed to live so I can sleep until I can get inappropriately drunk again. Fuck you, I'm the princess! I RUN this shit!

NUMBER TEN: My Celestial Liturgy

As I write this, Victoria is doing what she does best, which is listen to music on her iPod too loudly. There is nothing more annoying to me than when you can kind of hear the music someone else is listening to, especially if it is the same techno song they listen to in the shower every morning. Oh wait, there is something more annoying: fanatical religious bullshit (and that includes fanatic scientific bullshit). 

I was in a large room today full of self-important religious bull fucking SHIT today. The Cathedrale St Nicholas de Nice was the first Russian Orthodox Catholic church outside of Russia, opened in 1912. It looks like it's supposed to be about a million years old because all the paintings are so fucking creepy I can't believe they weren't trying to draw aliens. The people all look alike-sharp noses, small, beady eyes devoid of any emotion except maybe sadness, tiny puckered lips, dark hair, and hands. Hands in every fucking picture. Hands where they should not be, throwing what looks like gang signs, floating around near the face like Ricky Bobby, being weird. The features often took up about 10% of the depicted person's face, which is ugly as a butt, oh my God. Culty, culty shit everywhere. If there were children in the paintings, they didn't look like infants, but they were drawn to be about the size of an infant, in the arms of a creepy parent or priest. A kid who could have been anywhere from 7-12 was about the size of their carrier's head. That doesn't even...I don't even know what to say about that. And then there was this tiny, ornate, ugly as a butt sarcophagus that I later learned was PRETENDING to be Jesus's tomb. And a painting of an ugly man with reddish spots all over it; apparently that's Saint Nicholas himself, and the painting was hung outside for a couple of years in the very spot where Nick died, and the heat and weather turned the painting black. Then, they brought the thing inside and for some fucking reason hung a completely black painting on the wall and the fucking healing powers of Christ inside this creepodome brought his ugly face back from the black. The woman who was explaining this to me, she said, "It's magic, it really exists." 

And the Pope went to Australia to lecture a bunch of Catholic kids about how bad the world is today and how to make their entire generation Catholic and bring the moral center of the universe back to religion. The New York Times reported that it was a pretty peaceful gathering of several thousand people, and that the only crime committed was that a Catholic youth punched a speaker for handing out condoms.

Straight from the church's literature:

The top part of the iconostasis represents the celestial liturgy: in the center, Jesus Christ, God incarnate sitting on his Throne as King-Creator of the Universe, his left St John the Baptist. They are flanked by the two archangels Michael and Gabriel, the St Apostles Peter and Paul, the Apostles John the Theologian and Andrew. At one extremity of this row of icons, you can see Saint Serge of Rodonezh and Saint Irene, and the other, Saint Nadeja and St Ann-

One extremity? One second, my phone's ringing; its my friend Nadeja. 

NUMBER NINE: Leave Me Alone

We were scheduled to go on a bike ride yesterday. Victoria told me that she and her friends often ride their bikes out to the river for which La Colle Sur Loup is named, have a picnic, swim around a bit, and have a nice, sunny little day. This didn't sound too bad to me, especially because yesterday was probably the hottest day I've experienced on the Riveria since the day I arrived, which was also hot, but at the last minute I backed out and Victoria and Laura went alone. I had a mood swing. I was waiting downstairs for everyone to get ready and got kind of pissed off at Victoria for I don't remember what reason and wanted to be alone, so I did. I took a shower, watched an episode of the Office, and took the bus into Vieux Nice, which is the Haight-Ashbury of Nice, only not at all. Vieux Nice is not another city, okay, it's a part of Nice that is, as the name suggests, old. It's the part of town with the old buildings, cooler stores, narrow streets, and pubs. 

I was walking through the main square in Vieux Nice, and this guy who fit the description of a Haight bum exactly held out his arms to me. I was like ummm omg no thank u!!! and hardly looked at him, because I mean ew gross. Then I found a hipster store. How did I find it? Dndndn dndndndnch dndndn dndndndndn what I'm searching for, to tell it straight, I'm tryna build a wall... Not only did I hear that while I was walking by, I saw those hipster sunglasses you see at Haight that I think are a stupid fad for suckers. They're not even real glasses, they just make it so you can't see. They're the ones with the bars of plastic going across the part you're actually supposed to see out of. I think those glasses are total hipster mindfuck. People complain about how the Man controls fashion and people just follow trends because they see it in the window at GAP and J. Crew and that tells them that it's cool and they can't even make up their own minds about things, but those glasses are proof that there is a hipster Man up there too that you should be watchful for. Because those are stupid glasses. They showed up in Buffalo Exchange one day and suddenly they're on peoples faces too. Once I bought a bag at Buffalo or one of those places and there was an old candy melted into one of the pockets. Ew, clean that shit before you sell it helloooo that's gross I'm totally not going to eat that, it's butterscotch. 

So anyway I was thinking while I was in their really cool dressing room that I wanted a Polaroid of those guys that were camped out in front of the church and tried to hug me. I might be kind of shitty at talking to French teenagers, but if there's anything I know how to do it's relax around groty dirty homeless youth in cool parts of cities. So I marched out there and asked the cute one who had some kind of rotting teeth if I could take a picture of them and I did and it was funny and the best Polaroid ever. Then they asked me for money and a Polaroid that they could keep and I was like umm no you can just have the Polaroid because they're like two fucken dollars each so I took another and gave it to them and gave them money anyway because they kept asking. I gave them like 25 Eurocents, which is like a lot more in the exchange, for all that money I probably should've gotten my d sucked but whatever. 

Then I came back home and Alexandra invited me and Victoria and Laura to Antibes and then to the discothèque because her friend was having a birthday party at a fancy restaurant and then going dancing. I agreed to go, so I completely freaked out about what to wear. I did NOT want to wear those fucking EuroClothes again, I was not at all down to feel that awkward for another night, so I just wore some weird clothes (leggings, a long, loose white dress, and a scarf) and felt awkward still. But the thing is, it's better to dress weird than to fail at looking sexy. 

So Antibes was really boring. It should have been fun. It was Saturday night and Antibes is a cool town, but I was pissed off again. Along the shore, there were all these stands set up and at random places the crowd would get so thick that you couldn't get through, which was obnoxious because every fucking stand was selling the same fucking thing. There was one thick crowd around a stand selling those stuffed animals in Ideal that look like they're breathing. Really? Breathing stuffed animals? They look they're sleeping, really? God, fuck me, which stand here sells the joie de vivre enough to give a shit about those fucking things? Keep moving, fat assholes. 

I was getting pissed off about everything. I was pissed off that I never know where we're going because I never listen when people tell me, but whenever I try to listen to a conversation, I find that I don't give a SHIT about what is being said anyway so I stop listening and then miss something important, I was pissed that I was walking behind Victoria and Laura and felt like I was being ignored but I knew it was because I never say anything anyway because I don't care about or listen to the conversation and I was pissed off because that's such a shitty feedback loop. Then I started getting pissed off about Jewy things like money, which I shouldn't have cared about, and I got so pissed off that I couldn't even pretend I was somewhere else like I usually do. Well, I don't pretend like I'm somewhere else, but I do pretend like I'm with other people. I completely relapsed into nail biting, which pissed me off because these past couple months I've made very little progress and the results have been AMAZING, really...and then I saw this guy I thought was definitely gay but he was walking with his girlfriend and I realized he was just a tool...

When we went back to the on-the-beach restaurant where Alexandra was having dinner with the birthday party, the three of us could not resist the urge to dip our feet in the water, so when that got boring about thirty seconds later, we had to go to the bathroom to wash the sand off our feet. Laura had a foot in the tiny, pearly white sink in the tiny, tiled bathroom when in walked a fancily dressed girl, so that looked bad. And when I looked in the mirror, I realized that the guy who sold me hair products in Cagnes had ripped me off because my hair had not, as I was promised, relatively neat or close to my ears and neck, but it had expanded in the hours it took to dry. 

I realize that this is becoming such a staple awkward coming-of-age story that Judy Blume may have written it, but let's get inside my head a few minutes later, when I was standing behind Alexandra. A lady was staring at me, and I understood. She was probably thinking Who is that teenager with such a crazy mane of hair? Is she a Katrina victim? Why are her shoes silver? And then Alexandra pointed to an empty chair in the sand and told me to grab it and sit down, so I waddled into the sand in such a way that I wouldn't get sand in my shoes again and barely got my ten fingers on the chair when its owner came swooping in and I looked like a weirdly dressed thief, so I said something in English to explain myself. And walked away. Then I got angry again because Victoria lectured me in French about not walking away and getting lost, so I didn't go to the discothèque. Actually, no one in our party did, but I decided I wasn't going before Alexandra decided she didn't want to go and therefore wasn't going to take Laura and Victoria.

Did I mention I was PMSing?

NUMBER EIGHT: Very Old Villages, Hilarity Ensues

At the beginning of sophomore year, Jessica and I debated the origins of Michael Brinkman's ostensibly silent persona. Jessica believed that Brinkman was constantly thinking wild, crazy thoughts and that he was really smart, while I maintained that nothing went on behind those guarded eyes. As first semester became second semester and second semester became late second semester, I found that Jessica was right-or at least, she was closer to the truth than I had been. Being silent leaves a lot of time for daydreaming...not that I, too, don't always daydream and think about stuff, but in France I find that I live more in my little imagination than on the actual French Riveria.

In about twenty years, an intimate group including Wimbo, Brett Dennen, and not M.I.A. (too loud, too drunk, too not classy-she holds down the fort back at home while we're gone) will pack barely anything and move to a tiny cottage in Haut Canges or St Paul (I have a house selected in each village, I haven't decided on which one we will actually live in just yet). Our days will include, but will not be limited to: playing music on the porch in small performances for the many tourists and passerbys to enjoy, drinking wine, being obnoxiously artsy, smoking cigarettes and mota, taking pictures, putting on little plays like a sixties mime troupe, and occasionally promenading around in full sixteenth-century garb. 

These towns are crazy. They have not changed in the hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, of years that they have existed. St Paul is like a fortress, a little castle on the mountains with breathtaking views of the valley and the mountains and the little beige houses below. The streets are narrow and cobbled with stones from the beach, arranged by some guy hundreds of years ago in the shape of little suns. The little suns on the ground are put in places so that they are hit by a circle of sunlight at different times of the day. The streets are filled with cafés and art shops crowded with the products of the inhabitants of the place, forty-somethings with tiny children that paint fantastic little murals on their tiny mail slots, have doors and windows in colors you can't even find in the US, and have little gardens, front doors covered in ivy, tiny garages where horses used to be kept. There are fountains (only they don't look like the fountains you're thinking of, mind you) that run fresh water, and have been doing just that for so long that those very vessels probably carried the Bubonic Plague. 

I wasn't completely silent all day; I made my first legitimately funny French joke! Laura, Victoria and I were eating lunch in Cagnes and Victoria and Laura were mooning over this guy. When Laura is happy, she does what is known as "faire le pigeon," which means that for some fucking reason, she purrs when she's happy. I cannot make this shit up. She was pigeoning-I guess that would be the verb in English-and I said, "Est-ce que tu le fais au lit?" I'll leave that up to you guys to translate, but it's funny. 

And speaking of jokes, Victoria's mom just asked if she could go in my bedroom, and from the living room, I said "I'm naked" but she went in anyway. She wanted to tell me a joke. The conversation went as follows:

ALEX in a strong french accent: I have a joke. 

ELISSA: Yes

ALEX: What is the difference between a stewardess and a chicken?

ELISSA: The chicken is smarter.

ALEX: No.  What is this part of the brain called? Here? 

            She points to her forehead.

ELISSA: Pituitary gland.

ALEX: No, no, noo-ron? Noo-rons?

ELISSA: Neuron, neuron.

ALEX: Yes, nerrons. She has one more nerron, the one that prevent her from shitting everywhere.

NUMBER SEVEN: The Halfway Day

When I was about eleven or twelve, I hitchhiked for the first time. I was on a bike ride in the middle of the Nevada desert. It was actually an Indian reservation, so as you can imagine, by sundown there was buttfucking no one except for some cows and an empty Indian reservation school. The group of people I was biking with not only did this ride, kind of a pseudorace, every week, but they actually lived and were used to the altitude. At the beginning of the second and final lap around the reservation, I fell off the back off the peleton-but I was not the first. My mom had dropped off long before I had, so I figured that she was still toddling around back there. She never showed up. The sun started to set and all I could see were those cows and the road and the grass and the mountains. 

One lonely, old orange Bug came tumbling down the road, the first car I had seen in ages. I got off my bike and the car pulled to a stop in front of me. It was stuffed with shit and an old hippie-ish woman with long grey hair. I told her I needed to get to the fire station, and she said that was on her way and she'd be happy to give me a lift. I was a little uneasy, but I figured she probably didn't want to rape me, especially because she was going through so much trouble to fit my bike in the car. About a minute after we got going down the road, my mom came screaming, really tearing 

past us in the opposite direction. 

After our trip to Aquasplash was cancelled at the last minute (something to do with Laura's period, probably something she wouldn't be flattered to know that I broadcasted on the internet, but I have two words: "Aleve" and "tampons"), I was left with nothing to do, so I went on a solo excursion. I passed bus stop after bus stop until I reached one that looked promising, and began to wait. And wait. And when a car rolled up to ask if I needed a ride, I figured why not? Again, the person offering the ride was an old woman, only not a hippie, and she offered me a ride by saying she was going to church. Dangerous? I think not. 

So I hitchhiked into Cagnes sur Mer and walked around searching for a Coke, something I have been fucking craving because all we have to drink here is milk, 

water, and this olgeat shit which tastes like yeasty dirty dish water. I have no idea why there are pictures of some kind of nut on the bottle. I could have picked anywhere, but I chose the place that sold a bottle of pop for two and a half Euros. Why'd I pay the price? Simple. The waiter was an adorable boy. All future entrepreneurs take note: sex sells.

Oh, and speaking of sex, I had a dream last night that I had a newborn son. I was going to a school dance and there was someone taking a shower in the stall next to me and getting the water all over me, and then Mikalia Woods, who was in the stall on my other side, thought I was one of her friends and reached under the barricade and I was like, Wow you are drunk, and then my brother bitched out on of the people who were busting kids for drugs in front of the whole school and was like the hero, and the whole time I couldn't stop thinking about how weird it was that I was pregnant and I was really enamored of my young son, who was apparently a nameless bastard, because my subconscious did not provide such details. 

Oh, and here you go, assholes:

NUMBER SIX: Cocks in the Wild

I've seen Blue Footed Boobies in the Galapagos, colorful fish in Hawaii, sea turtles in the Caribbean, rhinos, leopards, and mating lions in Africa, and now I've finally seen it all.

It had to happen while I was alone, of course, the first time I had actually been alone since arriving in La Colle. I was on a run through the French wilderness, which is really pretty and a bit like Mill Valley, if we hadn't stacked houses and streets on every spare bit of land. I was listening to LCD Soundsystem on the way out, following the road that runs alongside and above a river, and the Ruby Suns on the way back. The Ruby Sun's sophomore album, Sea Lion, starts with a song called "Blue Penguin," which is slow and followed by "Oh, Mojave," which is fast. I was at the end of "Blue Penguin" when I arrived this little bridge over the river, right next to a park with lots of kids and their mothers and next to an adorable little French café. On the other side of the street, I noticed a young man, maybe in his twenties or early thirties, dressed in the black outfits strapping young European motorcycle gents sometimes wear; shiny black shoes, black jeans, black jacket, black helmet. But I noticed with a jolt and the opening chords of "Oh, Mojave" that there he was, facing the road and the passing cars, facing the park, facing me, rubbing his gigantic purple cock!

NUMBER FIVE: Can You Believe It?

You won't believe it. I just had the craziest dream. I dreamt that I flew to Chicago and then had to run through O'Hare International Airport to get on a flight I almost missed. The flight was long and obnoxious and I didn't sleep at all, but I ended up in Paris, in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where they have escalators wrapped in cellophane like you're in a big chute or a slide. And then I saw my mom's friend Isabelle, and she drove me into Paris, into Montmarte, but first we had to find our way out of the airport parking lot and there were these black people in a car and she said "Noirs dans une voiture noire, c'est dificile voire" and that made me a little uncomfortable, which is a bit intriguing. And in Montmarte, I had to drag my suitcases into this old apartment up three flights of stairs, and the apartment was fucking TINY and the shower was in the bedroom. I dreamt that Isabelle got her nails done as I wandered around Montmarte, up and down these streets full of waiters and foreigners and bucheries and sex shops, cigarettes and raw fish and fromage, shops full of fromages and rosés and frozens quiches, and the hobos, les clochats on the streets were openly drunk and dribbled wine down their fronts in plain view of everyone and washed their faces and their clothes in the water that ran through the Parisian gutters and swept the metro tickets and cigarette butts away. At some point I was in a supermarket with Isabelle, and she was saying something about laundry detergent and tomatoes and juice, and I picked out cereal and fell asleep in the kind of horseshoe shaped courtyard of her apartment complex because I got the code wrong. People kept opening the door to the complex about forty or fifty yards away, so I couldn't have slept more then fifteen minutes and my feet hurt. And I stood in the middle of Montmarte, and I ate dinner at a little place just below the Moulin Rouge and drank wine and felt this rush of drunkeness so I stopped drinking, I had cold tomatoe soup and ratatouille and potatoe something and then climbed up to this church, through the most touristic part of Montmarte to this place where you could see the whole city, all of Paris and that I went on the metro and to the Notre Dame and walked along the Seine. It was almost ten o'clock but it was still light out and we couldn't see the Eiffel Tower because there were trees in the way. I dreamt that I had breakfast in Paris twice, and both times Isabelle smoked a cigarette, every time we were in the house she smoked a cigarette and inhaled the smoke through her nose and emptied her ashtray at night. I dreamt that she smoked Benson and Hedges cigarettes, the kind my mom buys when she's really upset and then throws away.

I dreamt that I flew to Nice, and a little kid kept kicking my seat, and I listened to URAQT on the plane, and Brett Dennen, and when we got to the coast, I kept thinking, Oh wow, there's Nice, it's beautiful, but we would keep going to see identical towns speckled with boats and pink sand. And when we finally landed, it was humid, and when I got off the plane I was listening to "Blessed" or "She's Mine" by Brett Dennen, I don't remember which, but it was very fitting and I was happy. And then I saw Victoria and she led me to her mother, who works at the airport. I dreamt that everyone in my French family worked at the Airport. I dreamt that I talked to Victoria about my friends and what we were going to do during the summer, and then I met her dad and crammed my stuff in his car and drove through this pretty little town and ended up outside Victoria's house, only she had forgotten the key so her dad got angry and had to go get it and we sat around and listened to music. And at some point I was in this church, and then I was with her friends and I had to kiss everyone we met and then we were buying booze and I was uncomfortable and kept picking things up and pretending that they interested me. And then I dreamt that I cried for a few hours while Victoria kissed this boy with a girlfriend who kept calling and she had these two friends who just laughed even though they seemed pretty nice.

And I dreamt that we saw fireworks and went to discothèques and pools and had nothing to do and did hair and makeup and her dog kept growling at me all the time but somehow I knew he still loved me because I didn't ever really understand what was going on on the TV so I just played with him. I dreamt that I saw Temptation Island, Cruel Intentions, two Audrey Hepburn movies, Unbreakable, all in French. At seven in the morning I was still awake and at two in the afternoon I was still asleep, and I remember smoking blacks in a park in front of her high school until I was sick to my stomach and wanted to toss my guts all over this bench that her friends had graffitied a bit. I dreamt that her best friends all worked at the local McDonalds and that her town was incredibly small and that one time I thought I saw Violet in front of the supermarket. Coincidentally, all her friends had good looking, very European brothers and I bought shoes and dresses and watched Victoria smoke Lucky Strikes everywhere and ate ice cream that tasted like a flower, a fucking flower, and I bought it at a place with one hundred different flavors. The whole time I was very quiet, and the quieter I was the lonelier I was so I tried to think of things to say but I could only think of things to think so when I drank and I smoked I said things that I wasn't thinking because I was really only thinking of you guys and assigning you guys places at the table and thinking that if all these people would please stop speaking French I could close my eyes and pretend I was anywhere, I could pretend I was in that parking lot in front of the twenty-four hour Safeway on that night after BFD or on the hill with the goats and the dogs and the cats and the birds and the guinea. And then suddenly I was sitting on the windowsill watching the sun rise with these heartbreakingly beautiful clouds over these green hills and beige old houses with the garbage man below taking away all the trash, and then I closed my eyes and I woke up and it was all a dream.

NUMBER FOUR: The Discothèque

First, I'm sitting in Victoria's bathroom, once again in front of Virginie. She and Victoria are insisting that they straighten all the hairs on my head, and why haven't I learned not to fight the Euroflow? "But," I protest, touching my hair nervously, "I have so much volume that when you straighten my hair, it looks silly." I really wouldn't have said this if I didn't know that you can't take the Jew out of the girl (even if her curly hair is from the French side of the family anyway), but Victoria and Virginie still think I'm shitting them. Twenty or thirty minutes later, most of my hair is more or less straight, and the rest is still untouched and curly. They pin it up kind of funny and set to work on my makeup.

I knew well enough not to propose that we keep the layer of makeup kind of light, because whatever I said would make no difference. So I let them put a bunch of crap on my face, including gitter, which I thought only strippers and prepubescent girls wore. Go ahead and put that lipgloss on, I said to myself as Virginie spread a thick layer of the stuff across my mouth. I'm just going to eat it off anyway.

When I got a good look at myself, I was relieved to see that I only look pretty ridiculous. And once I had eaten the gloss off my lips and and rubbed the glitter off onto my fingers, I just looked like a young, easy Jewish bitch. It could be worse.

Next, I am being introduced to Maureen's family (including her brother Thomas, pronounced Tohmah, which is infinitely sexier) at a famous beach resort in Cagnes sur Mer, for Wednesday was Maureen's birthday,and tonight we are celebrating by going to a real French discothèque. Her parents kept offering me food and her grandparents could not have been more tickled to have an American in their midst. Her grandmother, a rather small, round woman with accented French, called me "Mademoiselle Amèricaine" chattered about the Pacific Ocean, hula dancers, the Silicon Valley, and Mexico. My life, basically.

A few hours later, around 11 p.m., we arrived at Maureen's mother's house to change into our disclothes. Her mother's room could have been Maureen's room; it had no door, just a kind of purple transluscent curtain, a computer with a webcam (a little device that is a given on any French computer, all of which are PCs, so they think Macs are fucking NIFTY), stickers, candles, and pictures of a pretty young woman that strongly resembled Maureen. "That's my daughter," Maureen's grandmother said, literally bursting with pride. She had come into the room shirtless. The pictures of Maureen's mother were fantastic, really. It was hard to believe,and a little unsettling too, that her features had shifted and sagged and that the same woman was only a few yards away. A portrait in the hall displayed what was obviously Maureen's grandparents with their three young children, the whole family stunning. There was her grandmother, thin, dark-skinned, classy, smiling through thin lips, and here she was, taking off her white jean capris and revealing rolls of soft old flesh.

And then we waited. At seven past midnight, all the boys in our party had bailed out, and by twenty before one we were finally in the car. I was expecting bright colors and body paint and neon shots of vodka and a lot of techno.

The Pearl sits right on the water in a nearby town called Antibes. The dancefloor is bordered on one side by a dock, upon which sits long, high tables and several bars, and on the other by a pool. It was really more like your average outdoor club than anything else, with a restaurant, slot machines, and gigantic bottles of champagne. Upon entering, we received little cards for one free drink, and the poor, repressed Californian in me flipped out. We could DRINK here! I mean, okay, Maureen's grandmother and mother had both come in with us, as well as Laura's mother (because although Laura, and now Maureen, were eighteen, they hadnt gotten their licenses yet) but whatever!
If we had brought a creative assortment of pills, it probably would have been infinitely better. The dancefloor alternately filled with white smoke, through which you could see nothing, not even your hands, just pulsing white light, pink light. By about 2:30, everyone had used up their free drink and had begun to pay for their next. And their next. And their next. I was not really down to pay 12-14 Euros for a little drink that was more juice than alcohol, so I sat around and watched people start to make out everywhere. A guy across the table from me ashed his cigarette and leaned in to me, said something in French. Dark hair, average looks, young-much less sketch than the men who had stared hungrily at Laura's ass and tried to rub their crotches on Maureen.

Oh wait, let me not get ahead of myself. We were on the dancefloor, right, and out of nowhere, Victoria points at one of the platforms and says "Mika!" which is OF COURSE short for MICHAEL which is OF COURSE short for MICHAEL, THE EX BOYFRIEND. If anyone remembers this girl from last summer, you remember Michael, the boy who scootered his ass to Victoria's house in late December to beg her forgiveness because he played too much PS2 and spent too little time with our little Vicky. Mika, as it turns out, is good fucking looking, and I'll leave it at that.

Back to me and my guy- our conversation was easy and moving along, but before I know it, we are rained upon by teenage girls and a grandmother, who grabs my face and plants a kiss on my cheek. After they left, the first question out of his mouth is of course "How old are you?" Eighteen, right?

NUMBER THREE: Discostress

I had no idea discotheques were so stressful.

Every morning (or afternoon, as the case may be), I wake up and immediately take a shower, I think because I don't want to be seen just after I've awoken. I always have this little feeling, because each night so far, I've dreamt of hanging out with my friends. The first night, I dreamt I kept seeing everyone everywhere- and not just my friends, either; random Tam people. I had a dream that Emmett and Avery were mad at Brinkman and I (and we told Violet about it later), and last night I dreamt that Deborah was driving us around the canyon. I hang out with the Frenchies all day and the Americans all night.

Anyway, this morning we had to get up early to go shopping in Nice for something to wear to the disco tomorrow night. Victoria and I met Laura at the bus stop. There were these two obnoxious-looking girls on the bus today, sitting in such a place that I kept looking over at them, which made me angrier and angrier. And I couldn't even express it, I couldn't tell anyone about how one of them looked like that girl Courtney Mahan, so I just got more furious with them and kept thinking mean things at them and I couldn't stop myself. Thank God they didn't say anything when we passed the children's hospital on our way into Nice. Yesterday, these people on the bus were like "ISNT THAT WHERE ANGELINA JOLIE IS GIVING BIRTH TO TWINS RIGHT NOW? WHY DID THEY CHOOSE THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL HOW WEIRD." It's not that weird. They have about a million kids and the hospital is right on the beach.

I do not want to see Brangelina pushing their fucking strollers around here, let me tell you. Imagine what kind of people they think they are. Ugh. They go wherever the fuck they want wherever they want; imagine how nifty they must have thought it would be to fly their asses down here to have children on the French Riveria.

So we get off the bus and enter the first store, this horrible, Godawful joint playing the radio/television/music station NRJ (pronounced "energy" with a French accent), and there they are, those two dumb bitches with their crimped hair, pinched faces, poorly painted fingernails, and Jonas Brothers t-shirts. Everything in the store was shiny and full of fake rhinetones, and I had to sit there and watch Leona Lewis and various awful French artists music videos for like, a half an hour. Every time I saw those girls, I wanted to attack them. "Attack" was the word I was using in my head, as in, "If I have to see you one more time, I will attack."

Renon was supposed to come, by the way, but he didn't show up or answer his phone, so at lunch, Victoria sent him a kind of bitchy text message. By the time we stopped for lunch, both Victoria and Laura had bought things; but I wasn't ready to stomach so much Euro shoved down my throat. Victoria and Laura were concerned and kept trying to get me to try shit on, but shopping is kind of hard for American hipsters in mainstream EuroStores like Pimkie. I ended up buying some stuff in H&M, but it was apparently not enough to get me into a disco. Victoria began to panic.

We met a friend of Laura's at Victoria's house, a girl named Virginie. Virginie had come to practice doing our make-up for tomorrow. She took before&after shots of me, both of which were probably ugly. She is training to be a professional make-up artist or whatever, which means she knows how to do fancy things with makeup, but was delightfully unaware that I look like a fucking tranny when I wear too much makeup. When she had finished, the cloud of French girls surrounding me were all tittering and excited, and they were like "Look in the mirror!" and I was really scared. I already sounded like a retard because they were treating me like I couldn't speak any French at all, so they would say what they could in English, which only confused me. I kid you not, they did not say more than two words in a row in English ("look me" etc) so when they spoke, I didn't always know if they had just said something in French or English. So that was confusing for me.

Sure enough, it was too much makeup, but I shut the fuck up. They all really liked it. I'm a bit worried about tomorrow, when Virginie is scheduled to redo my makeup and do my hair, which is also a very, very technical process. Victoria tried to dress me really, really Euro, but I couldn't stand it. I don't understand-are you not allowed to be remotely classy at a discotheque? I kept thinking Oh my God, my brother would laugh his ass off as I stood awkwardly in front of a full-length mirror in a short skirt, gigantic silver sequined top, crisp white jean jacket, high heels, and a shitload of makeup. Oh what a Polaroid that would have been. Say "high school!"

NUMBER TWO: What I Learned in Paris

I realize that I completely glossed over (or rather, did not mention at all) my first few days in France. The flight over was a nonevent, but at least I learned a few things:

1. I can't sleep in public, and planes are very public. I was watching Rock of Love at the gym prior to my departure, right, and in this one episode, Big John woke up all the girls ("It's rock n roll, not rock n sleep") and I thought to myself I would not want the country to see me sleeping. So anyway, I woke up at 6:30 on the morning of my departure and did not sleep again for over twenty-four hours. I had been walking around Montmarte, where I was staying with a friend of hours, Isabelle, and she had given me the key to the apartment while she was getting her nails done and told me the passcode, 3641. I heard 2641. I fell asleep in the courtyard.

2. I'm not allowed to bring more than a few ounces of toothpaste, makeup, water, deoderant, etc on a plane, but I'm allowed to bring an iPod, which apparently has the ability to bring the entire fucking plane crashing down if I don't turn it goddamn off during take-off and landing.

So Isabelle (who lives in Montmarte, works for Air France, smokes like a chimney, and does the French Thing with the smoke more naturally than anyone I've ever seen) and I were walking around L'Ile de la Cité, and I heard this woman say to a man "...and she said, 'Oh really? Well, let them eat cake.'" WRONG ANSWER. RETARD. We wonder why the US is famous for being ignorant assholes. Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake." If anything, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau or maybe even Marie Antoinette's mother who said "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," which David Emery said means "Let them eat rich, expensive, funny-shaped, yellow, eggy buns." Just as a side note: the brioche I have encountered so far has not been funny-shaped.

And by the way, I put the gauges in. It didn't hurt, so when Victoria and I went to Nice today, I looked for some new ones. People thought I was crazy when I asked for glass gauges, and all the gauges I saw were fucking retarded, so I guess I'm the coolest person in France wearing gauges. Glass gauges.

NUMBER ONE: Je Suis Nul

I was a bit shocked by how much older everyone seems than me. In the morning, when she's in her pajamas watching cartoons, Victoria seems a lot younger than when she’s canoodling with some olive-skinned French boy on a mattress downstairs, or when she’s next to any of her friends, really. This became strikingly apparent when I met Laura, a skinny, pretty, sharp-faced girl in makeup a bit like Victoria’s and a bit of bleached hair on her upper lip. I looked at Victoria and thought, Oh, she looks older than she did last summer. They look quite a bit older than my friends and I. All I could do was sit there on this couch in front of a small, quiet television screen, surrounded by tacky little knickknacks that I couldn’t stop thinking about stealing. I just wanted to steal their shit. I wanted to steal something stupid, like one of the little pillows shaped like cats all lined up next each other.

When we left for the supermarket, Laura mounted the front seat alongside her mother, because in France, you have to be eighteen to drive, so Laura only had her provisional permit. Victoria kept talking to me in English, maybe partly because she could and her friends couldn’t. And at the supermarket, this dusty little place alive with empty plastic bags rolling around like tumbleweed, we grabbed a few bottles of liquor and fucked around, waiting for another one of Victoria’s friends, a guy who I think was named René or Reneau or something.

At first, Reneau seemed a lot older than me as well, and I was like, Fuck, this sure is akward for me. Someone had written in blue ink on his fingernails, which were otherwise neater than mine, well-manicured. His legs were only visible from mid-calf down and were covered in a layer of hair as dark as those on his head, which were cut short and neat. He had this black messenger bag that we filled with our bounty, the alcohol we had bought and did not end up drinking, and which he handed to Victoria at some point between the supermarket and the bus stop.

Victoria was wearing his sunglasses at the bus stop. She had taken them out of his bag while he was talking on the phone, slipped them on her face, and pointed this out to me. « What do you think of him ? » she asked me, and I, who knew perfectly well that she was inquiring about his looks, replied, « I don’t really know him. »

« No, just, ah, his appearance, » she clarified. He was pacing back and fort hand talking on the phone. I was pretending to be distracted by the passing cars. I glanced at him, as if I needed a second look to decide if I thought he was handsome or not. He was, but not in a way that turned me on or anything.

On the bus, Reneau continued to talk on the phone. Victoria leaned in to me, the black strap of his bag digging into her shoulder, and said, « He is talking to his girlfriend. She was on this bus before and she saw me with his bag and now she calls him. »

Big fucking deal, right ? She’s wearing his bag. Ooh, fuck, bad news.

But, alas, I am American, and I lack any social context in which to place these people. For all I know, they are the popular little group at Lycée Cagnes or whatever. Fuck if I know what that looks like, right ? If Victoria is hanging out with your boyfriend, maybe you have just cause to worry. Or, these people are just melodramatic.

They live in a pretty little town, Victoria and her friends. It’s a bit reminiscent of Mill Valley—white houses carved into mountains and valleys. I walked a few paces behind the others, pretending to be occupied with my video camera.

Now here’s a moment I’ll never fucking forget :

I’m standing at one end of the room, hovering over my new Polaroids so that they wouldn’t get crushed by Victoria and Reneau, who are rolling around, hitting each other with pillows, giggling, etc etc. Victoria looks at me, her eyes all bright and shiny, and says ; « Elissa, help me ! Come help me- ! » between blows. I know what she wants me to do—she wants me to join in on the fun. She wants me to let loose and flirt with Reneau as well, but I can’t. I mean, sure, part of me wants to. Why not ? No one here knows that I have no idea how to bullshit the emotions required to flirt with someone I could give zero shits about. But let’s face it : no. Just no. No. So I throw a pillow at them, kind of playfully, and third wheel my ass out of there.

I think Reneau just failed my test. Doesn’t he have a girlfriend ?

Here’s another moment : I’m sitting on a mattress, I think pretending to be absorbed in whatever boring shit that I’ve seen a million times on my computer screen (ie pictures of M.I.A., my friends, and my hometown I’ve rifled through dozens of times, videos taken at parties, setting and resetting the desktop to my computer), and Victoria and Reneau are talking about cutting up the pizza. To get my attention, Reneau, who speaks exactly zero English, waves a knife and barks « Hey ! »

Victoria laughs, not in a mean way, but a bit surprised. « T’es con ! » she tells him, which means « You’re an asshole. » or a dick. or something.

So anyway, we (Victoria, Reneau, Laura, Maureen, and I) were outside a bit later, and Victoria and Reneau went to go like, fucking look at the stars or something. I started walking that way, then realized that I probably did not want to be wherever they were, so I skipped over to Maureen and Laura. We ran out of conversation quickly (because what else do we have to talk about besides Victoria/Reneau, whose conversation had surreptitiously died as well ?), so I asked for Maureen’s phone to write in a text message what I knew was true. Il a une petite amie, n’est-ce pas ? I wrote, which means He has a girlfriend, right?

Does a bear shit in the woods?

She's calling him nonstop right now. His fucking phone keeps vibrating with the all too ironic legend "Ma Chèrie" which is like "My love," kind of. "My dearie" would be a more literal translation. I mean, she doesn't just call him once, either. He's right outside the room, definitely making out with Victoria (I know because I had to walk by and pretend not to see; even when Victoria said hi to me as I passed, I physically could not say anything in return. I think, had I been at home, I would have said something snippy) and she's called him four, five, ten times in a row. And I'm there with Victoria's friends, giggling, and I decide, Fuck, this is the perfect time for my first joke. I grab the French-English dictionary and flip to 'm.' "Monogamy is there, right next to the translation, "monogamie." I snap it shut. "Je peux pas touver le mot 'monogamie,'" I said, emloying my Dry Humor voice. It's fucking lost on them, of course. They look confused, flip through the dictionary, and offer me possible translations.