un petit mot
hello from Paris where I hope to stay forever and on its streets be diced up as crepe filling when I die. I also hope that my hair dries more normal looking tomorrow but given the rainy conditions once more anticipated I won’t hold my breath and that’s finally basically fine. My treacherous sinuses seized up and began to scream somewhere in the armpit of last night after I’d fallen asleep naked and past midnight shower damp following an astounding evening eating a fancy dinner on a boat on the Seine which two of the great erotic symbols in my life—Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio—both have been on before. It was perfect. Being a stupid in love lesbian in Paris rules and I cannot recommend it enough. Anyway I woke up sickly but the miracle of French decongestant—purchased at a pharmacie where I was shouted at for standing in line wrong. chic!—rocketed me back to life with almost alarming efficiency and then today we walked nine miles and had a lesson in cheese from a deliciously enthusiastic blond man named Pierre (“like Peter,” he said to us, checking our names off on palm sized and smeared handwritten list as we elbowed our way into the tiny fromagerie at the appointed time) who deserved better then to be so shamelessly sexually harassed by the middle aged women from Florida in our class but also you couldn’t not get it. I like the way Parisiens walk into the street without pausing and against the red stop signal as if daring anyone to be so gauche as to hit them and I love the soothing little grocery stores and the metro is almost too nice to be believed. When I was annoying about Paris as a teenager I had no frame of reference for the intensity I did nonetheless feel and when I came at seventeen with my grandmother it was three days of overcast sky like a layer of graying yogurt in the air and I was happy and I bought magazines I could not read and I remember it all so fondly but it really wasn’t like this and I know that has more to do with changes in me than changes in the city but I am glad for it either way. Pleasantly wined and dined and with a whole empty weekend ahead waiting to be crammed or stroked I’m now having ginger ale in bed and when morning comes I’ll wear my Barefoot Contessa hat out and about in the cigarette clouds and cinema rain showers and be as gay as ever only now French. Bonsoir!!!!!!!!!!!!!!