Alright, I'm done.
Jul. 15th, 2011 04:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lesmisloony When I work on my book it turns me into a character and everything that happened to me into fiction. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it is helping me cope with the idea that even when I get back to Paris I may not see Patrice Maktav again. It's also kind of making me think it never happened... haha.
I'll stagedoor that mofo if I have to. It worked once.
Obviously my monthly Irma crazy is retreating at last. Spent the whole day lounging around feeling sorry for myself and watching Horrible Histories, which is an amazing show.
I'd never heard of the mouseskin thing or the caulk... show, you taught me something about eighteenth century fashion!
Anyway, things seem brighter now. Plus I can add that depression for my argument to get me on birth control. Can't tell my mom that I actually want it because I HAVE MY OWN DOOR IN PARIS.
Well to be fair I haven't heard from the family themselves yet. I am so attached to these kids now though seriously. Ten and eight are, like, real people ages. And tiny Nil is so presh. Come on family, I need to talk to you before I can do this visa stuff and then get my ass back to Paris and then make use of MY OWN DOOR and shop at pimkie and feast on cheap bread and cheese and use euros...
Here's a tiny piece of my story! It's a first draft written really quickly, so don't judge its clunkiness por favor.
Bebe’s class had let out early; she and Victoria were already waiting in the Rue du Fouarre. We decided to go toward Châtelet since google had told me that there was some kind of fruit market nearby and we each planned to buy our own pumpkin.
The whole process was already kind of confusing: we had all learned in our high school French classes that the word for “pumpkin” was “citrouille,” but that morning when I had stammered my plans for the day to my host mom she had given me the word “potiron”. Things got worse when there was no giant fruit market in the general area of Châtelet, when none of the passersby we asked knew what we were talking about, and when, without any sort of warning, it began to rain. None of us had umbrellas.
We finally gave up our hunt for a mythical fruit market and settled on one of the little produce shops that can be found on almost every French street. There were crates of avocados and melons and things on display out front, then a narrow shop inside with walls lined by stacks of fruits and vegetables. All these shops seemed to be maintained by the same squat man with dark hair and a plaid shirt. I always wondered how they kept people from stealing all the fruit that was on display at the sidewalk.
I had never actually gone into one of these fruit stands, since in any narrow store I constantly felt the shopkeeper’s eyes on me, waiting judgmentally for me to buy something or leave him in peace. This store was no different, but today I had my girls with me and today we did intend to make a purchase.
Unfortunately, there were no pumpkins in the fruit stand. My heart ached for North Carolina, where every Food Lion, Wal-Mart, and Harris Teeter surely had a crate of massive orange pumpkins right by the entrance, all of them marked down to some outrageously low price since it was Halloween and no sane family could go through Halloween without at least one jack-o-lantern on their porch. At my house we usually bought three and I usually ended up taking over designing all of them. I loved non-traditional pumpkins almost as I loved assembling my own original costumes and hearing people compliment it and ask for pictures of it all night. What kind of monstrous, soulless place was this France to not be as obsessed with Halloween as I was? What was I doing here?
In the end, Bebe, Victoria, and I refused to give up on our sad little Halloween party, so we bought a watermelon, a pepper, and an apple. Because I was the most careless with my money, I paid way too many euros for the watermelon and struggled with its weight all the way home. In French stores you aren’t usually given a grocery bag because everyone is from the 1950’s and is expected to bring their own little rolling shopping trolley thing from home. Bebe and Victoria easily slid the apple and the pepper into their purses while I had to cradle my enormous watermelon like a sturdy baby as we journeyed through the metros and the trains and back to my little suburb.
Once we got to the kitchen, Bebe had the brilliant idea to order Domino’s from the store in Bois-Colombes. We were initially frustrated to find that the menus were nothing like what he were used to seeing back home, with a large selection of what Americans would think of as specialty pizzas rather than giving you the chance to construct your ideal dinner out of the greasiest possible topping options. We settled on a pizza called “La Reine,” or “The Queen,” which arrived on the back of one of those little European scooters, the sort of thing that every teenage girl in a chick flick ends up riding with her arms around a hunky local in a leather jacket. Unfortunately for us, the pizza was delivered by yet another stocky shopkeeper type in a plaid shirt who didn’t even smile at us as he took our money, gave us the box, and puttered away.
The pizza was gone almost instantly, especially after I surprised the girls by revealing that I had just received a package of ranch dressing mix in a care package from my parents. We feasted American-style, licking the last of the dressing clean from our plates and complaining that the pizza had disappeared far too quickly.
I then fetched a few of my host mom’s massive knives from the kitchen. The family wasn’t home yet (save for the Swedish girl, whose music I could hear playing up on the third floor) so we had free reign of the kitchen. I settled myself at the dinner table with my watermelon in front of me, studying it in an attempt to assess just how to go about carving it into a convincing jack-o-lantern. My job was far less difficult than Bebe’s: she had cut out the core of her fat yellow apple and was using a spoon to scoop out its innards, which were rapidly turning mushy. Victoria settled for a more reasonable endeavor and her pepper was completed almost instantly. She had simply carved two triangle eyes and a mouth with gappy teeth into one side. She sat back and dabbed up crumbs from the pizza box as Bebe and I continued to work.
I eventually committed to a design and began carving out a round spot with jagged edges, the way one usually carves around the stem of a pumpkin. Of course, there was no stem on my watermelon, but I could lift my little lid if I used my fingernails. Once the watermelon was open, I got a big spoon and did my best to hollow it out, putting the extracted fruit into a tupperware container so I could snack on it later. About half of the watermelon didn’t make it to the container, though: it was a fantastic melon, worth every centime I’d paid!
The biggest problem with trying to hollow out a watermelon is, well, the water. The thing was full of juice. After a few minutes of my hacking at the inside with a spoon there was a giant wet spot on the table that was slowly spreading out toward Bebe’s workspace and Victoria’s empty pizza box. I quickly understood why I’d never seen a watermelon jack-o-lantern before. When I began the face, things got even messier. I started with the eyes and by the time I got down to the mouth it looked like my little melon was drooling out pinkish juice. Its incontinence was getting funnier and funnier as the table was getting wetter and wetter.
Bebe finally finished her apple and held it up for us to see. It had round spectacles and a lightning-shaped scar on its forehead. “Harry Potter!”
“Harry Pomme-ter!” I joked, using the French word for apple. The girls responded with fake laughter and groans at the awful pun.
Since emptying the fruit had taken so long, I continued to work while the girls started cleaning up a little. They obviously couldn’t do much since every few minutes I would tilt my melon and a fresh stream of watermelon vomit would leak out onto the table, but they at least got the browning apple interior and the pizza box into the trash can before they began sword-fighting with my host mom’s ladles and gossiping about Not-My-Beau and Armand. I was very intent on my carving—I was about twenty minutes away from the Louvre, there was no way I was going to let this melon be anything less than a work of art!—and between my concentration and the clacking of the ladles I didn’t hear much of their conversation. At one point I did catch the word “orgasm” and I immediately starting humming M’empêche pas, Giakomo’s big solo. No need to pry into my friends’ personal lives.
It was odd how different my friends here in Paris were to my friends back home. The sauciest thing any of those girls had ever done was kissing on a third date. I had one friend who had dated a guy for several months before she had allowed him to hold her hand. Bebe and Victoria were actually a year younger than me and my friends from university, so why were they already so much more worldly than us? Still, I had learned in my bad experience with friends a year and a half ago, the experience that had led me to Les Liaisons Dangerock, that it was best not to judge other people’s choices. They knew what they were doing. Obviously.
The swordfight ended as I was putting the finishing touches on my epic jack-o-lantern. I set it triumphantly on the table and leaned back in my chair to get the full effect. It was the Doctor as portrayed by David Tennant, holding up his sonic screwdriver. I thought I was a genius.
“What is it?” Bebe asked. “It’s cool.”
“David Tennant. I love him,” I answered simply.
“Is he famous?”
“He’s the celebrity love of my life. He plays the Doctor in Doctor Who—or he did until last year. The show has been going since 1963, so every few years the Doctor regenerates into a new actor. It’s pretty genius. David Tennant is the Tenth Doctor. And I love him.”
“Cool,” Bebe said again. “I’ll have to watch that sometime, it sounds good.”
“Really?” I asked, overexcited. “Bebe, I need someone to watch this show with when it comes back in the spring. It got a new writer last year and he’s evil. It’s terrifying now and all my friends who like Doctor Who are at home in North Carolina!”
“But I won’t be here in the spring, remember?”
“Me neither,” said Victoria.
I groaned and threw my hands up the way my host mother so often did. “Why did I decide to stay two semesters? I’m going to die of no ranch dressing!”
“You’ll learn to love it,” Bebe assured me, grabbing a dishrag and tackling the huge mess on the table.
I huffed again and got to work helping her. “Maybe.” I wasn’t convinced.
I'll stagedoor that mofo if I have to. It worked once.
Obviously my monthly Irma crazy is retreating at last. Spent the whole day lounging around feeling sorry for myself and watching Horrible Histories, which is an amazing show.
I'd never heard of the mouseskin thing or the caulk... show, you taught me something about eighteenth century fashion!
Anyway, things seem brighter now. Plus I can add that depression for my argument to get me on birth control. Can't tell my mom that I actually want it because I HAVE MY OWN DOOR IN PARIS.
Well to be fair I haven't heard from the family themselves yet. I am so attached to these kids now though seriously. Ten and eight are, like, real people ages. And tiny Nil is so presh. Come on family, I need to talk to you before I can do this visa stuff and then get my ass back to Paris and then make use of MY OWN DOOR and shop at pimkie and feast on cheap bread and cheese and use euros...
Here's a tiny piece of my story! It's a first draft written really quickly, so don't judge its clunkiness por favor.
Bebe’s class had let out early; she and Victoria were already waiting in the Rue du Fouarre. We decided to go toward Châtelet since google had told me that there was some kind of fruit market nearby and we each planned to buy our own pumpkin.
The whole process was already kind of confusing: we had all learned in our high school French classes that the word for “pumpkin” was “citrouille,” but that morning when I had stammered my plans for the day to my host mom she had given me the word “potiron”. Things got worse when there was no giant fruit market in the general area of Châtelet, when none of the passersby we asked knew what we were talking about, and when, without any sort of warning, it began to rain. None of us had umbrellas.
We finally gave up our hunt for a mythical fruit market and settled on one of the little produce shops that can be found on almost every French street. There were crates of avocados and melons and things on display out front, then a narrow shop inside with walls lined by stacks of fruits and vegetables. All these shops seemed to be maintained by the same squat man with dark hair and a plaid shirt. I always wondered how they kept people from stealing all the fruit that was on display at the sidewalk.
I had never actually gone into one of these fruit stands, since in any narrow store I constantly felt the shopkeeper’s eyes on me, waiting judgmentally for me to buy something or leave him in peace. This store was no different, but today I had my girls with me and today we did intend to make a purchase.
Unfortunately, there were no pumpkins in the fruit stand. My heart ached for North Carolina, where every Food Lion, Wal-Mart, and Harris Teeter surely had a crate of massive orange pumpkins right by the entrance, all of them marked down to some outrageously low price since it was Halloween and no sane family could go through Halloween without at least one jack-o-lantern on their porch. At my house we usually bought three and I usually ended up taking over designing all of them. I loved non-traditional pumpkins almost as I loved assembling my own original costumes and hearing people compliment it and ask for pictures of it all night. What kind of monstrous, soulless place was this France to not be as obsessed with Halloween as I was? What was I doing here?
In the end, Bebe, Victoria, and I refused to give up on our sad little Halloween party, so we bought a watermelon, a pepper, and an apple. Because I was the most careless with my money, I paid way too many euros for the watermelon and struggled with its weight all the way home. In French stores you aren’t usually given a grocery bag because everyone is from the 1950’s and is expected to bring their own little rolling shopping trolley thing from home. Bebe and Victoria easily slid the apple and the pepper into their purses while I had to cradle my enormous watermelon like a sturdy baby as we journeyed through the metros and the trains and back to my little suburb.
Once we got to the kitchen, Bebe had the brilliant idea to order Domino’s from the store in Bois-Colombes. We were initially frustrated to find that the menus were nothing like what he were used to seeing back home, with a large selection of what Americans would think of as specialty pizzas rather than giving you the chance to construct your ideal dinner out of the greasiest possible topping options. We settled on a pizza called “La Reine,” or “The Queen,” which arrived on the back of one of those little European scooters, the sort of thing that every teenage girl in a chick flick ends up riding with her arms around a hunky local in a leather jacket. Unfortunately for us, the pizza was delivered by yet another stocky shopkeeper type in a plaid shirt who didn’t even smile at us as he took our money, gave us the box, and puttered away.
The pizza was gone almost instantly, especially after I surprised the girls by revealing that I had just received a package of ranch dressing mix in a care package from my parents. We feasted American-style, licking the last of the dressing clean from our plates and complaining that the pizza had disappeared far too quickly.
I then fetched a few of my host mom’s massive knives from the kitchen. The family wasn’t home yet (save for the Swedish girl, whose music I could hear playing up on the third floor) so we had free reign of the kitchen. I settled myself at the dinner table with my watermelon in front of me, studying it in an attempt to assess just how to go about carving it into a convincing jack-o-lantern. My job was far less difficult than Bebe’s: she had cut out the core of her fat yellow apple and was using a spoon to scoop out its innards, which were rapidly turning mushy. Victoria settled for a more reasonable endeavor and her pepper was completed almost instantly. She had simply carved two triangle eyes and a mouth with gappy teeth into one side. She sat back and dabbed up crumbs from the pizza box as Bebe and I continued to work.
I eventually committed to a design and began carving out a round spot with jagged edges, the way one usually carves around the stem of a pumpkin. Of course, there was no stem on my watermelon, but I could lift my little lid if I used my fingernails. Once the watermelon was open, I got a big spoon and did my best to hollow it out, putting the extracted fruit into a tupperware container so I could snack on it later. About half of the watermelon didn’t make it to the container, though: it was a fantastic melon, worth every centime I’d paid!
The biggest problem with trying to hollow out a watermelon is, well, the water. The thing was full of juice. After a few minutes of my hacking at the inside with a spoon there was a giant wet spot on the table that was slowly spreading out toward Bebe’s workspace and Victoria’s empty pizza box. I quickly understood why I’d never seen a watermelon jack-o-lantern before. When I began the face, things got even messier. I started with the eyes and by the time I got down to the mouth it looked like my little melon was drooling out pinkish juice. Its incontinence was getting funnier and funnier as the table was getting wetter and wetter.
Bebe finally finished her apple and held it up for us to see. It had round spectacles and a lightning-shaped scar on its forehead. “Harry Potter!”
“Harry Pomme-ter!” I joked, using the French word for apple. The girls responded with fake laughter and groans at the awful pun.
Since emptying the fruit had taken so long, I continued to work while the girls started cleaning up a little. They obviously couldn’t do much since every few minutes I would tilt my melon and a fresh stream of watermelon vomit would leak out onto the table, but they at least got the browning apple interior and the pizza box into the trash can before they began sword-fighting with my host mom’s ladles and gossiping about Not-My-Beau and Armand. I was very intent on my carving—I was about twenty minutes away from the Louvre, there was no way I was going to let this melon be anything less than a work of art!—and between my concentration and the clacking of the ladles I didn’t hear much of their conversation. At one point I did catch the word “orgasm” and I immediately starting humming M’empêche pas, Giakomo’s big solo. No need to pry into my friends’ personal lives.
It was odd how different my friends here in Paris were to my friends back home. The sauciest thing any of those girls had ever done was kissing on a third date. I had one friend who had dated a guy for several months before she had allowed him to hold her hand. Bebe and Victoria were actually a year younger than me and my friends from university, so why were they already so much more worldly than us? Still, I had learned in my bad experience with friends a year and a half ago, the experience that had led me to Les Liaisons Dangerock, that it was best not to judge other people’s choices. They knew what they were doing. Obviously.
The swordfight ended as I was putting the finishing touches on my epic jack-o-lantern. I set it triumphantly on the table and leaned back in my chair to get the full effect. It was the Doctor as portrayed by David Tennant, holding up his sonic screwdriver. I thought I was a genius.
“What is it?” Bebe asked. “It’s cool.”
“David Tennant. I love him,” I answered simply.
“Is he famous?”
“He’s the celebrity love of my life. He plays the Doctor in Doctor Who—or he did until last year. The show has been going since 1963, so every few years the Doctor regenerates into a new actor. It’s pretty genius. David Tennant is the Tenth Doctor. And I love him.”
“Cool,” Bebe said again. “I’ll have to watch that sometime, it sounds good.”
“Really?” I asked, overexcited. “Bebe, I need someone to watch this show with when it comes back in the spring. It got a new writer last year and he’s evil. It’s terrifying now and all my friends who like Doctor Who are at home in North Carolina!”
“But I won’t be here in the spring, remember?”
“Me neither,” said Victoria.
I groaned and threw my hands up the way my host mother so often did. “Why did I decide to stay two semesters? I’m going to die of no ranch dressing!”
“You’ll learn to love it,” Bebe assured me, grabbing a dishrag and tackling the huge mess on the table.
I huffed again and got to work helping her. “Maybe.” I wasn’t convinced.
