Wednesday, January 31, 2007

So this is me?

So this is me? Fresh off a flying boat from the distant shores of Cheeseland. I planted baguette trees, raised a couple of pooddles and cows that only make Camembert, living the happy life of the expats' in my ersatz of community, now re-baptised New-Paris. But who knows for how long? So heck, I take advantage of the poor natives by offering them whisky in exchange of pretty pearls and spicy nights... One day maybe, the flying boat will have to go back home. So I keep a journal while I am here, a testimony of my journey abroad to recount how peculiar the trip has been. Something that will be published as a local history book with a soon yellowing tag. Once in a blue moon some ethnology students will flip through it to try to envision how life must have been on that side on the Ocean, back in the day when France had kings. Or was that later on ? (Ethnology students always got bad grades in History.)
And maybe this is a One way ticket. Either because I will miss the boat or because I will chose to mingle and disappear among the weak and innocent natives. Who knows ? Then I just write to remember, for myself, and share with my friends how hard I tried to fit while preserving what is left of my identity. Nothing ever serious about what I write, I guess what I really have to say is barely hidden between each line.

Monday, January 29, 2007

January night (Birthday resolutions)

Just how many jests does one need to justify to turn jejune jabber January nights into jubilant juggernaut of joy?  
Exiting last year's chimeras - and while I might still josh around...dare I say sometimes literally too?- as part of the traditional January gestures I hereby officially renounce gents and jerks with jaunty attitudes, checkered shirts jinxes and anyone jumbling frantic juggling with shabby cheating. (I'm not even sure that meant anything at all)

As my biological clock still seem to be running under 2006 (or maybe I just have fiscal year cycles?) I will then pray for consistent chummy jousts, one J at the time. And maybe one day, and just for grandpa, I will even come back from shul with a jovial jew-ish journalist?  
  
Happy Bday to me.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Curtain Call, New year' Eve 2006

Jan 2, 2007

11.30am , swimming in the turquoise water near Cancun , Mexico.

2.14pm. boarding on a plane for Philadelphia , PA.

7.01pm boarding on 3 different trains to reach NY , NY.

9.55pm on our way to a New Year's party in Brooklyn .

Why am I telling you all that? It's not like it was a really complicated trek –granted a gruesome one- nor that I am about to rave about attending the party of the year. But I still would like to share with you what I called my 2006 New Year's Eve bash…

The thing is, I'm not really into parties that are more packed than a Sunday at Wallmart and that cost $150 for the all-you-can-drink, especially because in my case, all I can drink is half a glass of wine before looking deeply intoxicated. I then naturally planned on crashing a private party, the kind with less people to push on your way to the temporary bar made out of four chairs and the bathroom door. And as far as meeting the host, well, just backtrack a couple of pages...

The problem with online dating is that you are as soon forgotten as a deleted email. It is a bit like warming up your food in the microwave: it gets hot pretty fast, and cold even faster. With that in mind, try to imagine His face when He opened the door: We hadn't spoken in 3 weeks, I had flown to Paris, Miami and Mexico and had told Him I would not be reachable during these trips. But who cares about what I say anyway? So back to the party I was "sort of invited to." Passed the surprised He seemed genuinely happy, and genuinely drunk too. We lingered there for a bit, staring at each other by the entrance wondering who should start to feel uncomfortable first. And then She saved us all, walking towards Him and looking like she had just sipped a whole bathtub worth of homemade whiskey. She stumbled and pushed Him somewhere between the couch and the Ikea frame, deciding it was time for a well deserved make out session.

I took advantage of this brief clearance of the entrance door and eased my way into the apartment, straight to the bar/bathroom door.


11.25pm. 35 minutes to go and I don't know anyone besides my two friends.

11.35pm and a vodka tonic later we're dancing in the living room to some poppy sound. It's funny how Americans don't seem to dance at parties and Europeans never seem capable of talking without convulsing to the beat of whatever they recognize first. You don't believe me? Gather a room full of Italians or French, blast out some 80's music and watch them all joyfully jump up and down, shout all the words out of tune with tears of pride in their eyes, holding each other like they were already friends when that song came out. Now they are ready to meet each other. But this is an American party and we're only 3 French shaking it on the dance floor, soon followed by a Turkish couple (…see?)


11.48pm , everyone is sent to the roof when I get held back by some hairy hand and quickly sent sitting down on a chair. A guy called Conan, (thank God his name is not spelled with a K) jumps in and proceeds to what his buddies call a lap dance but what to me resembles more an epileptic attack. As the guitar solo kicks in, he bends over and whispers in my ear "don't be afraid, we both know we'll end up together before the end of the night." I'd laugh but I am scared that if I open my mouth something that has not been invited will sneak in.


11.56pm someone I will never thank enough puts me out of my misery and drags all the belated guests to the roof so we can admire the fireworks. My lap-dancer, whom I now gather is also throwing the party, starts the countdown for everyone. 10…9….8…(let go of my shoulder, please)…7… 6….(hands off my waist too if you actually want to make it to 2007)…5…4…(look up! A flying snowman! Escape missed) …3…(closer)....2…(closer)….1 (too close)

Happy New Year!!!!

His starts with an elbow in his gums, mine with a missing elbow and a partial view of the fireworks hidden behind the building across the street.



"2006, Year of the Shit" had said the Chinatown psychic. "2007, Very-Very-Lucky-give me-5-dollars-even-more-lucky" now started to feel like a rip off. Although granted that he had been sort of right for the first part. 12.32am, January 1st, 2007. I am walking home under the rain, repeating to myself that it can only go up from here.

Monday, January 01, 2007

Last Day in Mexico


Dec 30th. One more day in the Caribbean. One more morning of hot sun tanning on our originally green skins now beautifully turned pale yellow after a full week of deep exposure. One more Scrabble night to go. In a common effort to keep this trip memorable, we agreed we would splurge on a nice hotel room for the last night, away from the rusty/bloody/dead buggy sheets of Tulum. We decided to set camp in Puerto Morelos, because it was a fisherman’s village that wasn’t yet welcoming its springs with wet t-shirt contests on the Zócalo, so said the French Routard. When we got there, we were famished so we sat down in a nice little café and ate tortillas, listening to a jazzy elevator tune on a loop. The idea of going to bed in a genuine place where modern civilization and X-boxes had not yet reached the shores was delightful. Our eyes were sleepy, our heads heavy with scrambled memories of the past week.


Barely carrying ourselves, we walked to the first pensión and asked for a room. Lleno. Ah. On to the next… Lleno. And the next and the next were all Llenos. God damn tourist guide! After the 7th attempt, I asked the owner, desperate, where we could go. He said that so close to New Year’s eve everything would be fully booked and that there would not be anything here, or anywhere along the coast included our dreaded Cancun. He was even renting rooms that were not fully built yet: business was that good and our planning that bad. I asked again if there was anyway, anywhere besides in our car where we could spend the night. “Well” he said, there is a Motel on the highway between here and Cancun, a kilometer after the airport. Turn around on the Southbound and here it is. It is on the highway but it is clean, secure, and nicely done. I believe you will find a room there.”


It was past 10pm, meaning way past our bedtime, and anything else than taking turns to sleep in the half sized car would have done. The instructions where pretty straight forward and it didn’t take long before we spotted our shelter. Indeed it was secured: 2 guards were standing at the entrance asking for our room number. We said we were looking for a place and he lifted the gate. The owner of the cute hostel was right, empty rooms they had… to the point that it started to look suspicious. But who has time to be suspicious when you’re about to get the only vacancy on the whole coast? I visited a room before agreeing to anything as we would always do. It was indeed very clean, the king size bed big enough to fit four people and elegantly placed on a… hem, podium with purple dimmer lights. As I got out, I told Emmanuelle and Vanessa what I had seen. We laughed at our tacky Vegas style room with a private garage embellished with African statues, and opted for a more traditional bedroom with 2 large beds. Asking about the price, the receptionist inquired “¿la noche entera?” “What do you mean, the whole night?” “can we take it for, say, half a night? Ahaha” I replied. Funny me. “Yes,” she said “3 hours, 8 hours or la noche intera.” Ah. Well, the full night please. Hem.” We unloaded our bags, still unsure of where we had landed. As I walked into the über bleached room, Vanessa worded our unexpected concern “this can’t be a brothel.” (well, “hôtel de passe” in French, where rooms can be rented by the hour. But maybe the Victorian English language I have learned has conveniently chosen to elude a translation and the question altogether.) “This can’t be a brothel,” she said, “or there would at least be condoms.” “Point taken,” I shouted from the other room, “I just found them!”

J date. part Deux

After seriously believing I had exhausted the list of "Js" in my social network last month, I was ready to move on to the next letter. As "K" had already been tried the day Zinedine Zidane headbutted that cocky Italian soccer player, I figured I could directly tackle 'L." maybe I was finally about to meet Love?
In the meantime, I would stop pretending being a New Yorker and really try online dating, chatting the night away. (i am only revealing this now because the one month trial is over and my profile taken down...eheheh)

So, after filling out some kind of profile, I logged into a virtual world of happiness. First there was James -I guess I had not exhausted the J's after all- to whom I explained that SanFran was the first US city I had been to right after high school. I had gone there for 5 weeks to learn English, but everyone in my class being a foreigner as well I had came back speaking Italian. He replied within the regulatory 2.3 days by saying he was a recent Vet. school grad, and how he would totally try reading novels if the right person asked him to.

I felt like I was back in the whole set of implied house rules one had to decipher, ingest and integrate, just like in the (sur)real New York life. But being oblivious to the fact that I should probably wait for another email 1 1/2, plus 2-3 business days between replies and another 5 hours just to be safe, I offered him to skip it all and meet up in a bar after he was done handing out prescriptions to horses with pounding headaches. From our online delayed -or maybe just jet-lagged- conversations it seemed at the time that we could get along rather easily (and if I were wrong, one one us can always fake a sudden doctor's appointment in the middle of diner...) He had said he liked to watch Star Trek re-runs and I was sure I could find something to do in this city to make him feel we actually did meet on the set of a Sci-Fi novella. So it was set, Thursday night, 8.30pm.
And strangely enough that was all that ever happened as far as my last J went. His horses got the flu, and I got an autograph from Peter Graves instead.


2 pints of therapeutic Hagendaaz and 3 bags of Oreos later, I came back online, determined to do a little bit of homework before voluntarily exposing myself to yet another disaster: I would read what the other women wrote about themselves and take lessons from what the sum of Miss Perfect had to say. According to these profiles, the wonder girl was voluptuously pretty -of course-, loved to have fun, deeply loved her family and friends, would go out to diner but also stay home sometimes, played hard worked hard, and, yes, loved to laugh. Basically, if I were to fit in I had to revised my profile a bit, as none of the above keywords appeared in the section I had filled under "My ideal relationship." Instead, mine read:
"My long term goal is to meet people who will not denounce me, adventurous nerds, people who like absurd stories and pillow fights. I do not wish to meet anyone related to celery or fennel."
Browsing through, I carefully read Amato profile (backtrack in the alphabet...) and decided to do my best to adapt to the norm while personalizing the message as much as possible:

"I thought I would drop you a note, because I think you're the perfect man. I mean, yeah. You're blond and you read comics. I mean. What's not to like? I also think that men who bowl for a living are hot. Or at least popular, but isn't it the same?
Since you might ask, I am not blond, but as I mentioned in my profile I am French, so it helps. I lived in D.C for a year and offered a co-worker to fly to Vegas to marry me, just because we had nothing else to do that morning. Unfortunately, he turned around before entering the subway. I want to meet someone that will actually make it to the airport with me. I have no manners, no plan on getting any, but I don't have a goatee so it's not all bad I guess. I'd love to hear more about you, your dreams in life, and how they got shattered so you ended up on Jdate.
I mean.
yeah.
best regards.
M."


Looking back at this email now, I guess I can sort of understand why he never replied, and that switching to DSL would not fix the problem. I signed off -or so I thought- and started another journal entry at 3am.