Great minds think alike

Sentence from my Sex and the City review on SASSY, posted yesterday, but finished the day before: "And by us, I mean the cosmo-sipping, Manolo-coveting, sex-talking – or wannabe-sex-talking – fans."

Sentence from Joe Hottie's Dating Blog on Cosmo.com in a post about SATC, posted yesterday: "it's those Manolo-loving, Cosmo-drinking gals from Sex and the City who have female hearts around the country aflutter."

I'm just saying.

Also, I found out today that Gérald will be in LA in August for a week, so I'm happy that I'll have at least one interaction in French over the summer. Also also, the play is almost done, and he's sending it off next week for approval. I'm so excited!

That's pretty much all I have to say. I need to do some writing, not just my thesis, but some of my own writing, because things are bouncing around in my head and they take up so much room and sometimes they won't let me do anything else (like sleep, concentrate on other things, etc.) until I type them out. I want to have something completed by my birthday so I don't feel like a total slacker.

Spent

Well, that's over with.

The last few days I've been killing myself trying to get ready for my thesis presentation and finish up a few last minute academic things, like my last research paper EVER (which I got an A- on and am very happy about). I was the first to present my thesis, which was incredibly intimidating, but someone has to be first, and it might as well have been me. I actually think it was better this way, because I didn't have the opportunity to get freaked out by anyone else's presentation, constantly comparing it to mine, which I would inevitably deem inferior to everything ever written or presented in the history of NYU. But the truth is, I rocked it. I rocked it hard. I'm really happy with my grade, and everyone on the jury thought it was a great presentation - very interesting, well-organized, and delivered well. So basically, in conclusion, I rock. Hard.

Last week was crazy, apart from working myself up about this thesis thing, but because of the other work I had to do, the library strike, and various other annoyances that come with the luxury of living in Paris. However, we did finally do a reading with real actors of the play we're translating, which was definitely the highlight of my week. (Sorry, I still can't tell you what it is for confidentiality reasons, but if you ask me in person, I'll probably tell you.) It was a group of actors Gérald is working with on this show, and they were all extremely nice and forgiving of my inefficiency at reading lines in French. Additionally, a couple of them were quite attractive, hence the highlight of my week. One was named Aymeric, who was probably the most adorable-attractive person I've ever met. You can tell he was an irresistibly cute kid, and lucky for everyone he kept those pouty lips. Then there was Julien, who was actually pretty American-looking, which is funny because he started paradoxical conversation about how the domination of American English in the world is actually going to lead to its demise. Alright, so maybe not the brightest tool in the shed, but great eye candy and a deep, sexy French voice, and I've always wanted to date a Julien, so what more can you ask for?

My brother and a friend are coming in on Thursday for their first stop on their Grand Tour, which is very exciting! My apartment currently looks like a tornado hit it, as per usual, but I'm working on it. Slowly but surely it will once again resemble a habitable space.

Ok, so I just hit a wall and can't write any more. I'm so burnt out from all this academia and worrying about all this academia... I should get some rest. Or at least relax just a bit with some trashy TV.

P.S. Who's excited for the new Indiana Jones? I think I actually want to see it more than Sex and the City. Sacrilege, I know.

Procrastination? What's that?

There's something about the way Paris smells in nice weather that just makes me happy. It's some mixture of freshly baked bread, various flowers, goodness, puppies, and sex (masking the usual urine/dog poop/diesel/alcohol concoction, which also includes bread and sex, but sex somehow becomes more pungent in the summer. I think I'll stop this hyperbole now.). Unfortunately, nice weather does not make me want to do work, even though when I got back from Scotland, I was going to get up early and go to the library and write that paper and clean my apartment and make real food because it's nice outside and that puts me in a good mood. End result: I'm supposed to turn in a paper tomorrow (no official due date given), but I'll be lucky if I get it in by the end of the week because a)it's the last two weeks of classes and every professor is giving us assignments, b)it's summer in Paris, c)I have memoir shit to do, and d)my life is currently in large part consumed by translating Tom Stoppard, which is fun, but it's been about 7 months now, and I'm kind of ready for it to be done. Although there's supposed to be a reading of it with real actors in a couple of weeks, and I'm really looking forward to that. We also got to work outside today for a few hours, sitting on picnic chairs on the grassy knoll on avenue Foch, which was a really welcome change from the sometimes dungeon-like obscurity of the director's ground floor apartment. And I got a free lunch, which was, as always, awesome. I could be a billionaire, and I'd still be pleased when someone offered to buy lunch - cheap or just cheerfully grateful?

I'm coming back to the States in less than two months, and after I finish my thesis, I'm going to start some serious job searching, but, um, I kind of don't want to work. Especially not for the corporate monster (ugh, I can't believe I just said that. ok, I can.) or some company where I'll be photocopying and answering phones all day. After watching a bunch of Jake and Amir videos, I'm pretty sure collegehumor.com would be the most amazing place to work, but I'm also pretty sure they're like a secret society and I'd have to drink raw eggs and brand myself and possibly perform sexual acts to secure a desk. So, please give me some ideas and I'll think about them, and maybe the person that comes up with the best one will win a free meal and get to experience that aforementioned cheerful gratefulness/cheapness.* And if you can actually land me some super-cool, highly-coveted job, I might just throw in dessert and a movie.** Something extra if it pays really really well.***


*Dinner at the following places: McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, or any other respectable establishment with a dollar menu. In-n-out not excluded because it is awesome.

**Dessert must be some form of chocolate and movie can NOT star Dane Cook, Kevin James, Jessica Simpson, Eddie Murphy, or Carrot Top (so, no midnight showings of Chairman of the Board, ok?), OR be about a group of high school students out to lose their virginity while camping in some creepy cabin in the secluded forests of one of the Carolinas.

***TBD. T really BD if we're talking six figures.

Now back to that paper on caricatures. Funny, it feels like I've written this paper five times already, and I still don't think I know anything about the subject. Ah, academia.

Une pause

Well, it's been a while. And the sad part is not much has happened since the 18th.

Every semester there's that week or two where all of a sudden you have mountains of work to do and it seems like you'll never get out alive, and the only hope you have, the only thing that lets you see the light at the end of the tunnel, is knowing that as soon as it's over, you can party, sleep in, or do whatever it is you do to celebrate the end of Hell Week. Well, my friends, my Hell Week has just ended. I had two huge exposés to do on Wednesday, and thankfully, it is now Friday, which means Wednesday - and my exposés - have come and gone and I don't have to read anything more about Haussmann or Don Juan. As yesterday was Toussaint (a Catholic holiday which is also a national holiday here - so much for Church and State, right?), I was really looking forward to sleeping in until who knows when, maybe taking a stroll in the Jardin des Plantes, and generally just chillaxing until ultimately having to start the behemoth of a novel that is "Au Bonheur des Dames." But then I remembered I'd agreed to work on the translation of the play, so I did that for four hours with another girl instead of seeing how long I could spend in bed before I really got sick of staring at the ceiling.

After that, I caught up on Californication and headed out to watch Superbad - Supergrave in French - with some friends. I don't really understand how this works, but the French people laughed more than the Americans. Maybe it was the mistranslation/omission of half of the dialogue (which was kind of interesting to read in subtitles), but the French thought it was hilarious! They didn't get the awkwardness, though, like when that creepy guy goes "Are you Jimmy's brother? Because you look like him. You really do. ..You really do...." or when Evan says "samesies", which is perhaps my favorite line in the movie. Well, no, it isn't, but still funny. Anyways, I just thought it was interesting that a movie that was so blatantly American managed to be a success in France. Especially since they like to pride themselves on the fact that what they do is "art" and what we do is "business." Please. Like France doesn't have rich movie stars and producers? Excuse me - Juliette Binoche, Daniel Auteuil, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Cassel, Monica Belucci, Jean Dujardin, Marillon Cotillard. And need I mention the movies Les Bronzées 3, Taxi 1, 2, and 3, OSS 117, and Camping? Come on, France. Let's be a little more hypocritical, shall we?

So today I'm going to try to clean up my place a little, since an old friend is coming to stay for the weekend. Hopefully my jeans, which I washed two days ago, will be dry by then, along with the towels I still have to wash. I have this weekend all planned out - the perfect first Paris visit. This tour includes, but is not limited to visits to: the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, Sacre-Coeur, the Luxembourg Gardens, l'As du Falafel, the Champs-Elysées, and the fashion district. Also included: partying (perhaps on the Seine), and a pub quiz where we will win a bottle of wine like we did last week. But truthfully, the part I'm most looking forward to is the falafel. It's been a month since those golden, crispy balls of chickpeas have entered the vacuum of an orifice that is my mouth, and I'm starting to have withdrawals.

Also, I wanted to talk about the Opera being on strike, but I think just saying it sums up the ridiculousness of the statement. Come on. The fucking OPERA is on strike. An artistic organization, in FRANCE, is on strike. Come the fuck on!

Ça commence

This weekend we went to Giverny for our little orientation/get to know each other thing. It was a weekend filled with food, Impressionism, boring lectures, long bike rides, gigantic arachnids, adorable houses, beautiful French countryside, and wine - many, many bottles of wine. It was good to get out of Paris for a little while, which I think may be a bad sign if I'm saying it this early in the game. Things are just different everywhere else. Americans (and a lot of other people, for that matter) tend to think that Paris is all there is to France, but the truth is that things are only "French" in the Parisian sense inside the environs of Paris. In the country, things move a little slower, people are a little more jovial, they speak a little less English, portions are a bit bigger and nature actually exists! And staying in a room as big as my apartment in a huge country house just made all of us depressed to come back to the city and our humble - really humble - abodes.

During the weekend, we had little conferences on the programs that we're in (there are three master's programs) and the classes we have available to us, which was good because no one in the program knew what we were doing. It turns out this isn't as much of a bullshit program as I thought it was, or at least it doesn't seem that way right now. I'm going to have a lot of work to do, but the other students are relatively cool, and the professors and directors seem relatively personable, so hopefully there won't be any crying or any problems a quick verre de vin rouge can't fix. So far, I'm taking all of my classes with the program, but I might take a film class at Paris 7 (a university here) on French cinema between 1945 and 1960 and its relation to the United States, because it kind of seems like it's exactly the kind of thing I want to study, and maybe something I want to write my thesis about. The thing is, it's at 9am on Fridays, and as of right now, I don't have any Friday classes, and I'd really like to keep it that way so I could maybe take a weekend or two to travel this semester because once I start writing my thesis, I won't have time to breathe, let alone jaunt around Europe like I did last time I was here.

I really don't know what I want to do with my life, and that's starting to become a problem. It's not just the actual tangible issue of not having any plans, which worries some people (ahem, parents), but it's a major difficulty when talking to people here. I was talking with one of the professors who was supposed to assess our language level and make sure we were taking all the right classes for what we wanted to do, and I had no idea what I wanted to do, so she had no idea if the classes I was planning on taking were going to help. We kept going 'round and 'round in circles, "Well, this is something I'd really like to study more," "Oh, well that's good! You can definitely write a thesis on that." (five minutes later) "Well, I'd really like to study that too," "well, that's a good way to go too." When I tried to explain to her that I study for love rather than obligation, she just came out with the French philosophy of it all: "You have to figure out what you're going to do before you can pick what you're going to study." And, yes, this does make sense from a logical, efficient point of view. But for someone as indecisive, ambitious, and interested-in-everything as I am, being forced to pick your career at age 12 like they are here is extremely problematic. Yeah, I know how much everyone hates that word, but it really works in this situation, so deal with it.

Last night was the first meeting for the theater company. I thought there were going to be 15 of us, but there were only five, which I think actually worked out better for the director. He wants to kind of streamline the company into a core group of people that actually care, and make it into a more professional group than it has been in the past. The whole time I was sitting there listening, thinking, "ok, well I'm just a temporary member, I'll help with what I can, blah blah blah," and then towards the end he said, "well, we're five for the moment," including me as one of the main people. It made me all warm and fuzzy inside, even though I know I won't be doing as much work as everyone else. He finally revealed his big project which is, in a word, monumental. If we pull this off, it will be the single most important production for the company and for anyone that works on it, and if it's a success - which I think is inevitable, it'll catapult the company to actual company status, I think. I really want to talk about it, but because nothing is final and I don't want to get into legality issues - and really, this is HUGE, I won't. I'll just say that I'm really excited to work on it, and hopefully I'll be able to make it into some part or the whole of my thesis, because it's kind of perfect.

Classes start at Paris 7 this week, NYU next week, and everywhere else either that week or the week after. Sometime this week I'm touring the big academic library, taking a boat ride, and seeing the gardens of Versailles with all of the fountains on and music playing. Other than that, I have some free time, so I'll do some more exploring, I think. I have some bureaucratic stuff to take care of, like my metro pass and museum cards, but for the most part, I have nothing to do. I'd go to Germany or something if it weren't for the fact that I can't leave the country until I get my residence card (silly rules). I think today I'll head up to Notre Dame and maybe over to the Marais. It's nice out, so maybe I'll be French - excuse me, Parisian - and bring a book to sit on the bench and read, after stuffing my face with the best felafel in the world.

I have a very good feeling about today.