Christmas resolution #534928**

Right, OK, well, hmmm, let's face the music here, shall we. I have a crick in my neck the size of... my neck really; Christmas is approaching fast and I'm, gasp, kind of looking forward to it; and although my smooth love affair with sleep seems to be continuing, it's of the brief and intense kind, seeing as I only sleep about 5 hours a night these days - and clearly, when you're making up for lost time, 5 hours is just not enough.
'Tis not the season to be writing then.
Thus... Let me simply wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, wonderful holiday season, joyful non-denominational birth-of-the-baby-Jesus celebration*, blissful (and overdraft-inducing?) shopping spree, and all sorts of other seasonal sentiments. Pick one, several, or all.
Have fun and be merry, people!

* Am I ripping someone off with this? I have a feeling I might be. It just doesn't seem possible that considering the state I'm in right now, I could think up big words such as "non-denominational" all on my own.
** You are quite right. There is not a mention of resolutions in this post. Tough.

Tagging along

All right then, second tag... The culprit is Kyknoord, and I'm not sure which meme I'm supposed to... answer? do? execute? so... in a Christmas-miracle sort of spirit, I'll be... answering? doing? executing? both.
I know. I'm a pushover, let's leave it at that.

The dinner party - it's always the same quandary, isn't it. Who makes the list, who doesn't, and where are we sure to meet the best conditions for a successful evening. To be fair, before I even tried to draft a "serious" list of guests - blame an (extremely) early spring and the related raging hormones - I immediately thought of George Clooney (the guy just doesn't want to leave my mind, OK?), the entire cast of Prison Break (yeah OK, maybe not entire), Daniel Craig (minus a few pecs), Owen Wilson (minus Kate Hudson), John Cusack, the entire cast of Spooks (yeah OK, etc.), Jeff Goldblum (minus a few inches?), Robert Downey Jr., the entire cast of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (yes, entire), and Jeremy Piven. Aaaand, that's 10.
We'd be holding it in City Hall, 'cause then it'd be easy to tie one of those fine specimens and me through the powers vested in whatever officer who happens to be on duty around the time I get there.
Alternatively, I was thinking of having the HR departments of London 2012, the French rugby world cup, Aaron Sorkin's production company, the Cannes Festival, Eurosport, and several subtitling agencies over for a good talk about the latter's blatant inadequacies and the former's crucial need to have me around. I believe that take-away Chinese is de rigueur in these kinds of meetings, so I guess we'd all convene at my place.

Now. Five things you probably didn't know about me.
Hmmm.
1. I can kill a plant just by looking at it. (and forgetting to water it, but really, it amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?)
2. I love to play games. Not of the mind-fucking variety though, just, you know, games. And I'm a very gracious loser too, even though inside, I'm probably fantasizing about ripping your eyes out with my teeth.
3. I used to swim a lot. These days, just watching a swim meet gives me sore muscles.
4. Stairs scare me witless, especially on the way down. I can picture the fall, the broken legs and probably the bones sticking out the sheen.
5. And oh.my.god. everything else you already know.

Yeah, if you think that the Christmas miracle will extend to me tagging someone, you simply have got to stop believing in Santa.

Riiiight...

It's been a while. Hello, my name is anne, and I'm a lapsed blogger.
In order to ease my way back gently into the sacred art of posting, I'm going to stand proud before the world and clamor "I've been tagged" - twice, in fact, and oh hey, that'll be two posts taken care of already.

First tag was by Alan, and it was a long time ago.
Ten Things I'll Never Do.
Are you afraid? Good.
1. I'll never watch Titanic. I still haven't seen it, and I suppose that now I've typed it, it's set in stone, isn't it? There will be none of that Céline Dion bleating in my DVD player.
2. Talking of which, I'll never go to a Céline Dion concert either (isn't it funny how I keep typing Céline Fion, when Fion means "butt" in French argot...?)
3. As a complete non-sequitur (or... is it?), I'll probably never turn vegetarian. Meat, for lack of a better word, is good. Meat [...] works (for me, Alan. For me.).
4. I'll never thoroughly answer a meme call. In my usual (now legendary?) cop-out words, I will probably not list ten things. In my defense, there are a whole lot of things that I would consider doing. In my other defense, well, I haven't posted in two weeks, surely that says something about my dedication to all things keyboard these days.
5. With the French presidential elections looming, let me get political - or at the very least, current-affairy. I'll never vote for a far-right party. Goes without saying, but it feels much better saying it.
6. I'll never sing a duet with Dean Martin. Feel free to laugh, but that pains me to no end.
7. I'll never understand the appeal of Antonio Banderas, let alone be part of the female th(r)ongs that follow in his wake.
8. I'll never tag - but please, do feel free to rebel in the comments.

Nah.

Don't wanna, not gonna.

Damn this work situation thing

The work situation is busy, people. Busy busy busy. Busy.
And right now, I'm spending way too much time in front of my computer, which, ungrateful bugger that it is, is sending all sorts of noxious waves to my brain by way of my left eye.
Not in the best of conditions to write raving lunatic mad... stuff, then, except maybe in a stream-of-consciousness type of way, and frankly, consciousness is not a state I like in the best of days, so letting it stream out right now is not an option I'm willing to consider. Let's wait till the laptop's evil waves have fried the one remaining cell in my skull.
Sending that application today might not have been such a hot idea, huh.
Poo poo poo.

You either have it or you don't.

A guy I didn't know raced me today while I was walking my butt off and my calf muscles into a painful lactic episode on my belated way to a movie.
Could that sentence be any more complicated?
I won.

And the dragons were slayed.

George Clooney has regained the place that is rightfully his at the firmament of the world's sexiest guys. At long last.
I mean, come on people now. Jude Law? Johnny Depp? (I'm still reserving judgement about Matthew McConaughey. (Or spreading my options, I'm not completely sure.))
Then again, the good people at People Magazine (how not to make that redundant? I'm confused) seem to make it a habit of losing it every now and again. They must be kicking themselves every year when they look at the previous records and see... Nick Nolte. Wow.
Moving on... Michael Jackson. Not only do they let him sing again, but he's backed by tens of teens and pre-teens? They're just asking for trouble, aren't they (no, I'm not adding credence to, or believing, or saying, or implying, anything. I just thought it was funny. In a sick way, yes.)
And bam... It's 99.9% official: Ségolène Royal will be running for president. Whoa.
I tried to make up for lack of content with a flurry of links. Didn't work, did it. Ah well.

It cannot be Wednesday already, can it?

Because if it indeed was Wednesday, then my ironclad willpower and discipline would insist that I write something - when I don't have much to tell, really, apart from the fact that I'm stuck on a Sudoku puzzle that resists so hard that it wouldn't be out of place in the French maquis. And try as I might to blame the numbers, the stupid buggers will not cower in fear before my ire. Mighty frustrating, that.
Although, my Sudoku obsession is to be thanked for a little moment of sheer, unadulterated joy when a little girl, maybe 7, decided to try her luck with me on the metro:
- Is that a game?
- Yeah, it's sort of a game.
- How does it work?
- You have to fill in the missing numbers in the grids.
- That's easy. (cheeky so-and-so)
- Yeah well, it's not quite as easy as it sounds. Wanna try?
- Er, no.
And she went back to her mom, looking scared.
anne: 123456789 - little girls the world over: 0.

If it wasn't so funny, it'd be frigging hilarious.

Saturday night, three of my friends were coming over for dinner and a DVD session. On the menu, cheese soufflé and "its" green salad, and lemon meringue pie.
Yes, all of this does, in fact, go well together, shut up. And that's not the point of my impending tirade, stop judging.
Soufflé and meringue. What to these two dishes have in common, apart from an apparent difficulty that is in fact, sheer myth? Egg whites, beaten if not into submission, at least into almost-solidness, that's what. I'm not completely down with the lingo, but you get the meaning, I'm sure.
With everybody expected around 8pm, I started on the egg whites at 7-ish. And wasn't that the exact time that my electric whisk chose to die on me? Wasn't that the exact time that my neighbours chose to be out or without an electric whisk of their own? Wasn't it? Yes. Yes class, of course it was.
It didn't even go gracefully, with a flash, a charred wall and a plug ripped out of the socket by the sheer force of the... something-something. Oh no. It just kind of spluttered to its demise like it was it that had been smoking all these years, and those egg whites were the one marathon that it should never have undertaken.
I did think of calling Pizza Hut to the rescue. And then, something that if I didn't know better I'd call pride - and I know it wasn't, 'cause that feeling is as alien to me as mercy is to the All Blacks - took over, and I decided to go it unplugged. So I whisked. I whisked like a mad person. I whisked like there was no tomorrow.
And, let me tell you. For my arms, there wasn't.

Shuffling my options

We've determined that try as I might, I'm never going to be an Oscar-winning actress. It's also been asserted that winning the lottery is not on the cards for me. So I wonder... How on earth am I going to get to the lifestyle of the rich and mighty that is rightfully mine? Yes, rightfully. You see, I'm a bit like Cinderella's poorer sister, but there's not a fairy in sight, if you discount my best friend. Which means that I'm a princess in hiding, and that particular chip on my shoulder is seriously weighing me down.
There's a poker show on TV right now, and I'm wondering if that couldn't be my way out of the proletariat. We've started a thing with a couple friends where we play belote, but no money's involved. I might have to change that soon and strip them of all their assets. That means I'll have to share the proceeds for a while, but surely that's nothing a good contract killer can't put to right, is it?

Why gawd why?

I am ill. Again. Yes, again.
If things go on like this, I might have to consider giving up the cigarettes for good. Plus, I have this fabulous new red wooly jumper that keeps leaving unpleasant fluff on my butts - my cigarette butts, I'm just not flexible enough to check my rear end for fluff. This whole sentence is wrong on so many levels that I might just keep going down that particular track until my whole mental credibility is down the toilet. There. That should wrap it up nicely.
Needless to say, I am not looking forward to that particular prospect - giving up the ciggies, that is, I'm kind of used to imagining the whooshing sound of my reputation as it whirls its way down the drain by now - especially as the tobacconists' protest in France is so effective, seven months prior to the elections, that the government has already postponed the smoking ban for one year. Forget public health if it means winning the presidentials, right? I mean, they did get rid of an awful lot of people during the 2003 heatwave, surely a surge in the lung cancer statistics could kill two birds with one stone: contribute toward the complete resolution of the pension problem (again, the heatwave helped) and ensure that we're so busy smoking ourselves to death that we kind of forget to hold our leaders accountable for... whatever.
Damn. I'm obviously running a fever.

Whoa... easy there, tiger.

Either fashion has an extremely quick turnover rate, or I'm stuck in a very bizarre, and not a little scary, time warp. Allow me to explain. This weekend, I saw things that I thought only happened - nay, that should only ever happen off Broadway, in a production of Hairspray that would make John Waters have a tiny orgasm. Beehives that had so much Elnett in them that I could feel the ozone hole widen in sheer awe, female mullets that would make the most fashion-conscious of East-German football players green with envy, and the colours, sweet baby Vidal, the colours. Platinum blonde with black and purple highlights all together on one head? I'm lost for words. I want to believe, honestly I do, that somewhere, a well-intentioned hairdresser did that without snickering, but you see, this close to Christmas, my whole belief system is already stretched to bursting.
And the crux of the matter here - because my whole life is but a series of ordeals all happening in rapid succession - is that I know my own hair desperately needs attending to, but the idea of getting something even remotely close to a platinum-and-purple mullet beehive - and let's face it, we all know that with the type of luck I've been enjoying lately, this is exactly what I might end up with - fills me with dread. It's OK, I'll just keep my thatch of longish, lank, nondescript but predominantly mousy strands until capillary trends are back to, at the very least, short and curly on top.

Any resemblance to actual persons or events is unintentional and purely coincidental.

Let me tell you a little story.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who wasn't so fond of attending weddings. One year, as luck would have it, she was invited to a wedding that, try cunningly though she did, she couldn't wriggle her way out of. Luckily, she was able to go with a couple of friends.
Once they'd finally managed to wind their way out of the usual pre-weekend traffic jams, the drive to the wee village where the wedding was taking place was uneventful. She even managed to not bend her friends' ears with a rendition of old musicals favorites that would have made The Sure Thing's Gary Cooper and Mary Ann Webster proud. All in all, an auspicious start to the weekend.
Little did she know.
On their arrival at the hotel, they discovered that one of the two rooms booked had two beds, and decided to unbook the second room, to give the weekend a more summer-campy feel.
The next day arrived - way too soon, if you asked her - and after much huffing, puffing and whining that they just. didn't. look. good enough., off they went. As they were departing from the hotel, a car parked, and a very good-looking male let his long legs out.
While the crowd was waiting for the bride and groom to arrive at the "town" hall, said specimen appeared again. Add the gorgeous weather, and things were decidedly looking up for our grouchy heroine, despite one of her friends' claims that his shoes were just ridiculous. Which they were not.
The incredibly stunning bride and groom arrived, said "I do" "I do" and happy-ever-after life it was for them. Lucky buggers.
And then came cocktail time (not soon enough, if you asked the little pest at the origin of this tale). As she was drooling a lot over the long-legged man, she needed to drink a lot - also because she was kind of dreading dinner, as there was a guy that she really really really didn't want to be sitting anywhere near, and feared that she might be. Not him of the shoes fame, that would have been nothing short of a miracle. Thanks to very good nibbles, though, she didn't topple over before she had a chance to sit herself down to eat and drink some more.
This being a sort of a fairy tale, a miracle did happen, and she was sitting right opposite long-legged him for dinner. And when she finally heard the sound of his voice, he was funny! And single! What was going on?
As it turned out, just fate having a laugh, that was what. You see, he didn't have a room booked*, and couldn't find the hotelier on the premises when he arrived. But she didn't have a room to share anymore, did she**? Oh no.
Oh yes, and this being a sort of a fairy tale, all three friends suspect that he was, in fact, gay.
Ah well, a wedding, what did she expect.***

* So what... good-looking, funny and single never meant organised, right?
** Just to give a poor soul shelter for the night, of course, nothing... fancy.
*** Every tale needs a moral, does it not?

e-roar

My Internet service provider and its hotline technicians can all take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, preferably in space, preferably without any sort of oxygen source, preferably while an Alien is hatching somewhere close.
Hello people, I'm back, and I'm in a bad mood.

Blah blah... bleuargh?

Damn, I can't remember! My fingers have been poised over the keyboard for, like, ever... or two minutes, but two minutes can feel like an eternity when you're dying for the loo. Right?
Anyway, I can't remember the important topic I had picked for today's endeavour. And it was important, I swear. Not like Wednesday's... debate. Wow, that went well... The good thing is the response was overwhelmingly in favour of my opinion. You... beg to differ? Tough. You should have said something then. That's democracy for you. Or... something.
Awright, m'darlings. I can't find it in me to drag this on and on until Monday comes along, especially as I have a wedding to attend, a bag to pack, several litres of assorted wines and champagne to get through, and no one to hold my head over the toilet bowl. That particular McGyver contraption is not going to build itself.
Have yourselves a merry little weekend.

It's high-school debate society all over again!

Hello people... she says with her most engaging smile. How are you all doing on this fine grey and crisp day*?
I need your opinion on something. I mean "need", as in "will stop breathing until I actually get your opinion" kind of slightly tantrumy need, but need nonetheless. Now is the time to start using that comments link until it fades into the background, because I would very much appreciate a heated debate, the likes of which could make the French Socialist Party green with envy. But let's not get political...

A Year in the Merde.
That's it, that's what I need your opinion on. I had a sort of preview of said heated debate with a friend recently, because I find the book to be a not-very-funny catalogue of stereotypes (with the occasional chuckle, thank god), but he accused me of showing bad faith, and of not being able to look at (down on?) my own country with a little bit of self-derision. Pah!, I say. As if.

So here goes. Have you read it, and if you have, what did you think?

Small aside, for Stephen Clarke himself - should he ever stumble upon this site (or Voice of a City, because I'm obviously posting this there too...), pharmacies in France never ever ever go on strike. And when the EDF personnel does, you still have enough of the old elektron in the copper wires to boil one kettle or a thousand. There, my bile is spent.

Apart from those petty quibbles of mine, it's probably a pretty good book for people who want to come live in (or visit) Paris. See? See? I am unbiased. There.**

*this is pure conjecture, seeing as, right now, it's more of a "fine cold and dark night" kind of moment.
**Come on, peeps, I'm trying to leave this country. Obviously I love it with my eyes wide open.

Celebration of life

All right, my brother's been a dad for a week, so let's take a moment to celebrate this tiny wee new (and really, honestly, unbiasedly gorgeous) life.
Done? OK then. Let's not get too carried away here. Remember we're all about restraint on this site.
Rather, let's move swiftly on to feeling sorry for me-me-me. Because let's face it, that's why this thing exists, isn't it? ("This thing" referring not to my new-born niece, but to this site. Hard though I may try, I'm not quite that callous yet.)
See, I have lost any trace of novelty that I may have held for my parents and extended family. You know, the whole "she's gone far away to live her life, how's it like overseasin Paris then?" kind of thing.
Well, that's a thing of the past. It's all about the brats now, even more so than before. And I've been relegated to the ranks of spinstery, if a little eccentric, old aunts. It's not completely official, you understand, but I'd started noticing the oblique glances last time I saw everybody, so I can tell it'll be full-blown next time I'm home. For Christmas, for instance. Ugh. Can't wait.
It's all right, though. I'd already started perverting my older niece (she's only eight, but compared to a one-week-old, she's older. Tough, but they gotta learn early. I may have to ask her soon if she's finally met someone.) with inappropriate language and songs, and last time I talked to her, I planted seeds for her to come visit without her mom so I could fully accomplish my life-mission. And I intend to do the exact same thing with the young one.
I'm evil.

"My bed was shaking. I can't get to sleep."

For the love of all that is holy, please make the spinning stop!
It's like this. It's 6:00 am, and I've been awake for about an hour now. Don't believe what the time stamp says, it'll probably have taken me a very long time to write what's about to spew forth from my brain and build semi-coherent sentences with it.
Yes, I was out last night - on a school night, I know... naughty - and I think I'm still drunk. The problem though is I was in bed at around two, couldn't sleep for, like, ever, and now this.
No, I'm lying - which does fit in well with the whole 'Exorcist' theme, but whatever - the real problem is that when I woke up, over a whole HOUR ago, it felt like all my chakras were open and I had access to oodles of information I didn't even know existed, certainly didn't care about until that point anyway, and it was all there, accessible and ready, and it wouldn't stop tumbling the big empty expanse that is my skull at the best of times.
Wouldn't stop, that is, until I got up. Bastard information.
I'm holding on to this little revelation though: I want to marry Lemsip and have its yellow powdery children. The cold that has been making the cyberworld's headlines (please see this (through BoingBoing - in George Clooney's eternal words, "what else?") for other, often more interesting excuses) has come and - all together now, let's cross our virtual but industrious little fingers - gone in less than two days, all thanks to Lemsip. I love you, Lemsip.
See, if I was a TV show host, I'd be in supply for the rest of my life now. Damn the unfairness of it all.
Unless it was the wine last night, in which case, fine, wine, I want to marry you and have your yellowred velvety liquid children. Now, if I was a TV show host, would I receive cases of wine from grateful winegrowers? See, this is probably information that was readily available to me before I got up.

It's going to be one very, very long day.

Got plans?

Now you do.
Wednesday next, be in Paris. One of my friends is playing his very funky* music at 9 Billards, in the 11th arrondissement. And it's free. So really, you have no reason whatsoever not to splurge on that plane ticket you've been dying to book anyway. (And I'll be taking names.)



* Funky is a word I loosely use to describe any music I like. The words true musicians such as himself use are "a rapper? A punker? Some electro-geek type? Or yet another French singer with a heavy debt to the late Serge Gainsbourg? The correct answer is probably: all of the above!"
There you have it (which apparently is my new favourite phrase).

"Because there are heterosexual couples left"...

One wedding down, one to go.
Boy was I tempting fate with Friday's post - and not in a good way.
To recap. No hired job - just more assignments. No lottery win, which, I guess, makes it a net loss. And of course no man.
Although it must be that I'm too picky, because I almost scored on the way back from the wedding.
At 3:30 am—yeah, the dinner and party were fun. The wedding mass was lovely until the priest decided to go on an anti same-sex marriage (and probably not a little homophobic) rant, which did give me the title for this post, so I guess I should be grateful.
As I was saying... At 3:30 am, the taxi dropped me home, or, more precisely, outside of the ATM next door, because he was rather adamant that I pay him, the moneygrubbing bastard. When I came back to his window in order for my newly acquired cash to change hands before I could get too attached, a man was already hopping in back, about which fact the driver was surprisingly none too happy. Apparently deciding that walking was better than having to hear the driver's griping, however, the man left the car. As I was crossing the street, he approached me, preceded by his perfume, a pungent mix of his own B.O. and, I assumed, the two kegs of beer he'd drunk —so far?— that night. He then proceeded to talk to me, which made me up my estimate. Make it three kegs then.
"Ma'am?"
"Yes?" I replied calmly, while frantically wondering inside how in the world I could ever fend off the inevitable request for my purse.
"Can I go home with you?"
How irresistible can I get? It's anyone's guess.