Waiter, I'll take the apple strudel with mushrooms, please

kK's Random Thoughts: Things I Meant To Write About At The Time And Never Did ... Until Now

On a fine (also read: FUCKING COLD) Paris night quite a while back, Squash, Buckeye and AAAH (not only an acronym for African American Art History, but also an attestation of 'aaahhhh she's so hot') and I mange-ed at a lovely salon de thé, where the veggie soup was warm, the vanilla tea was pure soul balm, and we very nearly missed the English-menu offering of an apple strudel. With mushrooms.

Oh yes, you heard me right: Apple strudel with mushrooms. And it was not a joke! I teased the waiter that it was a prank they played on Americans, since this dessert entry was missing from the French version of the menu. He assured us that it was no laughing matter (even though he could barely get a word in edgewise between my maniacal cackles) and brought us a slice on the house.

Delicious? Well, I guess it was interesting. Born Again Mikey decided it wasn't quite an *EPIC FAIL*, just kinda *WTF...woulda been better with raisins*... and moved on to more palatable mouthfuls of sugary espresso.

A few weeks later, just as a random side note, I rode my first Velib', and realized that there was a good reason I hadn't been on a bike since my last one burned up in an explosion (long story) about 8 years ago.

I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride my biiiiiiiike

Miraculously, my bike riding skillz held up even through the Parisian roundabouts. Thank the goddess there's no action photos of my white knuckles and bug-covered teeth.

That night Madame made tea and we sat down for my first viewing of Bridges of Madison County. Clint Eastwood doesn't sound quite the same as a breathy, trying-to-make-my-voice-low-and-manly-like-the-real-Clint-Eastwood Frenchy, but hey, I understood an entire movie en français! woohoo!

And then, in the wee sma's* of another surreal Parisian day, I returned to my formerly-known-as-nutella-glass full of cognac and ruminated on the foregone conclusion that tonight the wine wins out over the shower. Again.

kK

*Before you scream out PANDA SAYS NO, think on this: It should read "wee small hours" and thus the apostrophe replaces the "ll hour." Plus it just looks better with an apostrophe, and you might not even know what the hell I'm talking about if I just said "wee smas."  Gotta keep it real for my plebes.

Spanish 101

So I have discovered how much fun it is to relive childhood moments with real life youngsters. Like an out-of-body experience, I have watched myself actually enjoy reruns of Sesame Street (who knew Feist could teach fuzzy monsters to COUNT TO FOUR so melodically!), get upset when the Hercules disc was too scratched to play on the dvd player, and gulp Nesquik chocolate milk while singing The Climb with Hannah Montana and admiring Billy Ray's new haircut. (I still vomit in my mouth a little when I hear the words "Jonas" and "Brothers" anywhere near the same sentence, however. Actually, a lot. All over the desert island to which I banish them.)

After posting an ad for private tutoring at the American Church, I got a call from a Spanish family for Wednesday night 2-hour sessions with their 8- and 10-year old children. I was a little hesitant at first because, well, me and kiddies...erm, not so much. But hey, I'll try anything (almost) once, and if they turned out to be little terrors, I consoled myself that I just wouldn't go back.

But to my surprise, they were actually really well-behaved and smart! I helped them with their homework and, when there wasn't enough work to fill the hour, we'd dance around in plastic Asterix helmets and sing songs from High School Musical. (I know, I KNOW! Number 3 IS the best one, I totally agree!)

The first time I babysat and ate dinner with the kiddies I was interrupted from my stuffing-my-face reverie with a little 8-year-old-boy squeak: "Pleeze to 'elp wis fud?" as he made cutting motions in the air with his knife and fork. OMG! After picking my jaw up off the floor and looking around to see if he might not be talking to someone else, I, feeling exceptionally awkward, cut up SOMEONE ELSE'S chicken cutlet into bite-sized pieces. And didn't eat them myself.

And one night around Christmastime we settled in to watch Rudolph the the Red-Nosed Reindeer, yes, that Christmas special from the '60s hosted by Burl Ives the Snowman. I hadn't seen it in a reeeeeeally long time, so I was really excited when I stumbled upon a European dvd player-friendly disc at the library a few hours before I was due at their house to babysit. A few minutes into it, though, I began to fear it was too old-looking and weird for this new generation, but as soon as the first song started, Jaime started bopping his little feet and Blanca even tried to sing along with the lyrics as the subtitles popped up in time with the music.

Yay, old fuzzy Rudolph animé wins over another batch of kiddies!

Anyway, they found my camera one night and took a lot of really incomprehensible, fuzzy photos of I-don't-even-know-what objects, but here's one where we actually all came out looking like human beings, which is kinda sad because that means my photography skills are only slightly better than a 10-year-old kid:

Movie night!

And thus endeth kK's adventures in babysitting. Maybe they'll come visit me in America. The parents are really anxious for them to learn English and they all think I'm super sweet and mature. Haha yar, if those kids come over here I'll take them to all my usual shady hangouts, you know, the library, the local cemetery, dangerous places like that. 

It's Wine O'clock Somewhere, or Commence Chapter 30

I think it's about time to tell the tale of how I rang out the twenties and brought in the thirties with a costume party, some live jazz, and a new song to be added to my Christmas Eve playlist of favorites.

First up: Masquerade, themed "famous pairs." Here's Pull The Prick Out and me, getting ready. I'm surprised this came out at all clear--we'd had a shit week and lots of wine by 7.00 Friday night. (Photo taken at 7.01 Friday night.)

We packed a (really large) backpack full of alcohol and trekked over to Squash's apartment, where every single stick of furniture had been removed to make way for what seemed like 800 people in about 400 square feet of space.

Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues: We Hate Illinois Nazis

My personal favorite (or second favorite, right after the Blues Brothers, of course): One person as both Sonny AND Cher!

SonnyAndCher

PTPO made amazing (also read: really f*ing strong) concoctions of tequila, lime and something else and quite possibly a fourth ingredient but buggered if I can remember anything about anything.

And that's all I really have to say about that, I think.

Anyhoo, six days later was the big Three-Oh, which started out nicely by me sleeping off staying awake until 5am the night before reading Diamond Age and listening to French news podcasts (omg who AM I!)

Then it was off to the Paris mosque for hammam, where I sat in the second-hottest room (I got one foot in the third room and thought it was going to melt off my jambe right on the spot) and sweated and warmed my way up from the inside for hour upon glorious hour. This was followed by a spot of thé à la menthe in the dimly lit welcome room surrounded by murmured conversations of the other ladies-in-repose and the white noise of water running through the fountain in the middle of the pillared, vaulted space.
Ahhhhh.

To fill in the hour or so before dinner, Pain Quotidien came to the rescue with a bowl of creamy coffee and a brioche aux raisins.
Ahhhhh.

Dinner was a DELICIOUS salad niçoise, bottle of wine (it's wine o'clock all day on birthdays, I'm just sayin'), and a chocolate yumminess for dessert at a cute little restaurant near Ile St Louis. Squash, PTPO and I segued to the next event by strolling up Blvd St Michel to a jazz club, where we cheered on a group of cute old Frenchmen playing New Orleans style tunes.

Le Petit Journal Saint Michel

And then, of course, no self-respecting birthday celebration is complete without crepes aux nutella!

Best. Crepes. EVAH.

And the next day, wrapped in one of my favorite expletives and a short story about a toothbrush by way of apology on being a day late, the one and only DT, known in some nefarious circles as the Ramblin' Mand'lin, emailed me a song he'd composed for my big day. (N.B.: I would never stoop so low as to beg ask him to do this for me. Nor would I follow up to give him a week's notice-reminder out of paranoia he'd forgotten.)

It is, ironically and yet undeniably aptly, titled "It Is What It Is." I push play, hear the first bare notes of mandolin and see ... 

... winter, the darkening skies, the chill wind with a spattering of cold rain, the hunched-shoulder half-run to your front door as you struggle with your errands-bags and finally manage to shut the door behind you and lean against it with trembling knees in relief of the warmth you can now feel seeping by degrees into deeper and deeper layers of your every cell. You might have just had a shit day, but right now it all falls away and you take a deep breath and unzip your coat and your sleepy lazy cats curled up with the sleepy lazy mastiff-named-Murdoch raise their heads (b/c they can't be bothered to move from their comfy spot on the doggy tummy and as much as the doggy loves you she's so excited that the cats are hanging out with her she doesn't want to move either) and see you beeline for the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. (Was that a half-smile you let slip when you decided on vanilla roobois with a spot of agave nectar?) 

Putting away groceries and other things you had to go out in the cold for before the blessed relief of warm chez toi, the snow that held off as rain all day finally starts to fall intermittently in small, goopy-wet flakes, nothing too serious. You are a bit melancholy, but not quite sure why, and yet it's not the melancholy that turns downward into depression, just the melancholy that, when it dissipates (which it's sure to do when Murdoch and the kitties finally rub against your legs after admitting they love you too much to leave you alone in the kitchen and you remember there's a Castle marathon on TV tonight), leaves you feeling even more acutely the happiness that was lurking just under the 'choly. You have miles to go before you sleep, but these next few miles will be friggin fantastic and lazy--miles of cozying up in your favorite big sweater cooking ratatouille and Trader Joe's cornbread.

There's even a perfect kK tangent at the end of the song. You think it's over, and then just as you're mentally prepared for the next song on the list to start, there's a little afterthought that pops up and catches you off guard in a "yar, nope, not finished yet, there's plenty more good stuff where that came from ... whatcha think, will I leave you hanging this time, too?" way, and then it's done, nothing left it wants to say. And leaves you to retreat inward to process your own thoughts for a while. Or screw the inner monologue and LET'S GO DANCING.

There's no denying it's a perfect addition to my Christmas Eve playlist. The imagery might change with another hearing; there are no words, so it's perfect for personal, depending-on-my-mood interpretation, which as you know is the ONLY WAY I ROLL.

Now I am going to pour a generous splash of cognac (happiness-in-a-can-baby!) into a glass that was once used to house the deliciousness we call nutella (happiness-in-a-can-baby!) but has been emptied (probably in one go, by me), rinsed out and recycled as part of a glasses set that, without the nutella labels, really does look like a stack of regular ol' water glasses. 

Before

After

Once that incredibly arduous task is done, I am going to sit back, relax, and watch the rest of Supernatural season one. Dubbed. In Chinese. OK, just kidding, in French.

Anyway, now that I'm 30 my life experiences and level of bizarreness have maybe quite possibly developed into something resembling inner wisdom. I don't really know what that means, but as les Blues would say:

It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.

kK

Wastin' Away: Part Deux

So I've been wanting to go to Mont Saint Michel since I was a cute, innocent étudiante in Aix-en-Provence. (How many years ago? LOL) It's a little difficult to get there because there's no direct train or bus or whatever, so you basically need access to a car in order to even think about going.

Saturday afternoon at le château it was announced that we were going to take a road trip to ... yar, MONT SAINT MICHEL for Sunday mass! woohoo!

Again, I'm just going to let the pictures do the talking:

Surrounded by intermittent quicksand (apparently someone dies every year on the pilgrimage to this place, what the waht!), this churchy fortress spent time as a prison after the French Revolution, and you can still see the pulley-thingy that was used to wheel up food to the prioners.

My favorite room, of course, was the scriptorium, where the monks used to laboriously hand copy books 'n' stuff. It's empty now, but I filled in the room weird-half-animated-movie style with all the necessary deets: 8 thick wooden desks spread with stacks of books and piles of loose paper, with one monk at each bent over in their brown woolen robes and ink-stained fingers leaving streaks on their cheeks when they absentmindedly reach up to scratch a faint itch. It's silent but for the crackling fire at each end of the enormous room, a scratching of feather-pen on parchment and an occasional cough. Although seriously, maybe those monks sweating over a manuscript just let out a scream now and then, getting to the last of the page and then find some typo (hando? lol!) and were all, "sheeeet, I gotta start over! Again! For the third time! Whatves, I'm just gonna leave it in, no one will notice it should read 'celebrate.'"


It felt like the monastery went on forever and ever ... all the different levels and beautiful cavernous rooms ... it was quite fantastic. The music was awesome (love me some organ tunes), and even though I heart the morbid, I was still freaked out by a darkly-hooded monk slo-mo pulling a fat rope attached to the somberly-ringing bell. muaaahhaahahaha!


Thus concludes kK's quest to fulfill a long-held dream visit, and also the weekend Wastin' Away Again in GreatBigChateau-Ville.

kK