4.25.01

i have this page-a-day calendar on my desk that offers 5 things to be happy about each day. i didn’t really appreciate how nice the calendar is until last year when i departed from my usual happy thoughts and got the shakespearean-insult-a-day calendar. lets just say that after about january 3rd, being insulted first thing in the morning stops being so fun. anyway, today’s page (technically, it’s monday’s page – i’m a bit behind) reads:

vintage posters
tulips and warm breezes
iron kettle soup pots
really thinking something out
savoir faire

first of all, dictionary.com says that savoir-faire can only be spelled with the hyphen. but the really curious part is the pen-and-ink illustration in the corner. it appears to be a vintage poster advertising Le Moulin Rouge. underneath the title it says, “La Goulue”, which altavista’s babelfish so helpfully translated to “The Goulue” for me. there is the silhouette of a man wearing a top hat, smoking a cigar, and apparently ogling the dancing girl on the stage behind him. she’s holding up her petticoats and kicking up her legs with great abandon. the curious part, tho, is that there appear to be doughnuts flying out of her skirt and all over the stage.

when i was 19 and in paris for the first time, callie and i met these guys from jordon who tried to seduce us and take us to the moulin rouge. where, presumably, they would have made us very drunk and then tried to kidnap us or something. they kept bringing up the subject of american visas/passports and the need for american wives in order to obtain such documents. the picnic dinner we were eating was this still-frozen casserole, so callie tried to thaw it by putting it on the hood of a warm truck. when our new friend grew tired of her wacky antics and ordered her to sit down next to him, we knew it was time to make an exit. we lost them somewhere on the metro.

i don’t like paris. and more importantly, paris doesn’t like me. on one visit it tried to sell me to strange foreign men, on another i was tear-gassed by the french police after stumbling into an anti-american political riot. other adventures include getting lost in the ghetto late at night and being chased by these creepy guys until we bumped into (i kid you not) a group of american boy scouts who escorted us back to the metro. the last time i tried to escape from paris, the eurostar broke down and we were trapped underneath the english channel for several hours. while i was coming down with apocalyptic food poisoning. on my 21st birthday. paris hates me.