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?