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?