“I was scanning the class roster when I saw the name ‘Le–a.’ I thought it was a typo. So I call out, ‘Lea? Lea?’ And one girl goes, ‘Me? My name’s not ‘Lea.’ It’s ‘Ledasha.’”

“Spelled ‘T-y-j-u-a-n.’ Pronounced ‘Taiwan.’”

“Who can name a defenseless baby girl ‘Bud’, anyway?”

I mentioned that a girl I went to high school with named her baby Brie (and managed not to use the word ‘white trash’), but I just couldn’t compete. Until this afternoon, when I looked at my receipt from Walgreens and saw:

Yogina. Reminds me of yogurt, yoga, and…. umm… well of course there’s a big difference between “Yo-JI-Na” and “Yo-GEE-Na.” Sort of like how the capital of Saskatchewan is not pronounced “Regina” like the girl’s name, but “Regina” like rhymes with vagina. The previous company that I worked for did a lot of business in the middle Canadian provinces, and so people were constantly flying to Regina. “How was Regina?” is really impossible to ask with a titter.

A quick Google reveals that Yogina is a Sanskrit word meaning “sorceress” (here). The fact that the teenagerish woman who rang me up at Walgreens was white and fat leads me to believe that her mother was a Wiccan who had very high hopes that her daughter would excel in the arts of potions, spells, and assorted black magic.

And here’s Yogina, working at Walgreens, thanking me for allowing her to serve me today. No, thank you, Yogina.

I mean, like I don’t have enough shit that I must concern myself, that I must also take mental ownership of all the shit that is happening in Iran, China, Afghanistan, Washington, the Gulf of Mexico, and Thailand (Oooo, I’m sick about what is happening in Thailand). Every day it’s the same…. I hate to keep using this word, but the same shit. Politicians pontificating, fanatics subjugating, mongers mongering, idiots whining, people dying, children crying. Yes, the news is important in an abstract theoretical feel-good sense, but how does knowing the news positively impact my life? What motivates me to welcome the world’s problems and pestilence into my brain, so that I can strut around all informed and depressed and shit?

Besides, a cursory glance at my sparse postings as of late is evidence enough that, these days, time is a precious commodity. At the bare minimum, I have to work (8 1/2-9 hours), commute (~45 minutes), sleep (7-8 hours), cook and eat dinner with Mr. Pinault (1 hour-90 minutes), and shower-groom-dress (~40 minutes). That gives me roughly 4 hours of free time to exercise/yoga, read, write, correspond with friends and family, maintain a semblance of a social life, play the viola, clean the house, do the laundry, and oh yes… learn the French language.

That last item has lately become a priority. After five years (!) of half-assedly devoting my attention to the rote memorization of acutely basic French, I suddenly feel a disquieting urgency to just learn the French language, already. I have indefinite access to a native Frenchman, and I’m still struggling to conjugate the imparfait? I still don’t know the French word for cupboards? For shame.

Something’s gotta give. I used to read the Times for 45 minutes every morning at the gym, either on a spinning bike or the stepmill. I was so proud of myself for multi-tasking, until the Times became an actual task. Ugh. The news…. again. For the past two weeks, I’ve been exercising while reading articles from Liberation, a left-leaning French newspaper that does not write with the same sort of inscrutable panache of Le Monde. Am I learning French? Am I exercising? Am I also sort of reading the news? Peut etre. Un peu. Ce n’est pas un malheur tragique mais un crime.

The smoker turned out to be an older man in his late 40s-early 50s, resting just above the steep section of the trail at a four-way intersection. He had extinguished his cigarette before we saw him and was peeling off slices of a fat, dried sausage with a knife as we approached.

We exchanged friendly greetings. Mr. Pinault took out the map and the man asked,” Are you headed to Sandwich Dome or the shelter?”

“The shelter,” Mr. Pinault answered.

“That’s where I’m headed too. I think it’s that way,” the man said, pointing.

Mr. Pinault verified this on the map and we continued on out way. “See you there” the man said.

I waited until we walked for 5 minutes and I said, “He was creepy. He looked exactly like the murderer from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Mr. Pinault considered this. “Yes, he did a bit.”

“I bet if we said we were going to Sandwich Dome, he would have followed us there, too. I’m not going to be able to sleep if we have to sleep next to that guy,” I said.

“Maybe we can bum a cigarette from him before he murders us in our sleep,” Mr. Pinault said.

We made it to the Flat Mountain Pond Shelter in about an hour. There were already four men on the shelter platform, so we decided to take a nearby established camping site with a fire pit. I busied myself collecting dry wood for an anti-bear-and-bug campfire as Mr. Pinault set up the tent. About 10 minutes into our activities, the smoker came by. ”Is there space on the shelter?” he asked. We told him it was too crowded for us, but probably enough space for him. After we set up camp…

Sticks

More Sticks

We headed to Flat Mountain Pond to wash off the day’s sweat with an evening swim. I removed my boots and socks while Mr. Pinault stripped down to his boxer shorts. Yo-ow!

Time for a Bath, Perhaps

Suddenly the smoker sat down next to me on the beach. ”There are leeches in this lake,” he told us. “You can see them.”

“Oh yeah?” Mr. Pinault said, crestfallen. We recently watched Stand By Me (part of Mr. Pinault’s American cultural education, as taught by me) and the leech scene in the swamp totally freaked him out. We peered into the clear lake water and observed a small, light-colored slug-like animal circling a rock.

“Okay, I’ll go in quickly for my bath,” Mr. Pinault decided. I waded in up to my ankles while intently monitoring my feet. I dunked my bandanna and squeezed fresh water on my head several times.

“Creepy,” I said to the smoker. “The leeches. Thanks for the warning.”

“Sure,” he said. “You know, not all leeches will attach themselves to humans, but still.”

“Yeah,” I said, assenting my squeamishness towards exposure to blood-sucking parasites.

When Mr. Pinault came ashore, I checked his body for leeches. I could have teased and pretended to pick one off, but the smoker was still on the shore, fiddling with a CamelBak. “All clear,” I told him, and we sat on the shore and stared at the lake with longing and peace. And we never saw him smoke another cigarette, leaving me to wonder if the mysterious smoker was still out in the woods, lighting up in between increments of elevation gain.

Leech Lake

Tonight it was, shamefully, the trash can, which foments lustily in the summer heat with fish bones and melon rinds. No need to worry about cross-contamination. I gingerly grasped a particularly putrid sponge and set upon scrubbing away all of the random dried splatters, crumbs, and bits from the plastic white shell. When I finished, I unfurled a garbage bag into the hygienic receptacle and tossed the sponge into it. Like a sadistic murderer who made her victim dig their own grave.

Ah, the body thickens. So I hastened to my Yoga DVD collection and pulled out Shiva Rea’s Creative Core and Upper Body, which I bought last year in the midst of all-out Shiva Rea mania. I had been disappointed to discover that this 25-minute yoga routine is centered around 108 wide-leg prostration push-ups — like gym class, like the military, only before each of the 9 rounds of 12 push-ups, there’s a serene, smiley blissed-out blond yogini offering flaky motivational tips like “make a dedication in your heart.” I would like to dedicate this round of push-ups to all of the malnourished children in the world, for it is their twiggy physique that I secretly covet.

Still, a push-up is a push-up, and I loath calisthenics like I loath school cafeteria food. I took a Ultimate Total Body Pump Bootcamp class last month, and the instructor was an equipment minimalist who had us warm-up with squat thrusts. “Huh! I haven’t done squat thrusts since third grade!” I thought, fondly reminiscing about my elementary school gym teacher, who I now realize was a stereotypical lesbian. Nostalgia quickly turned to pain, and about two squat thrusts, I wanted to puke. It wasn’t the squat so much as the thrust.

Despite my difficulties with any exercise that involve my own bodyweight, I try to do Shiva Rea’s push-up workout at least once a week. Because push-ups really will improve one’s yoga practice by giving them the ability to indefinitely hold Chaturanga Dandasana (aka Four Limbed Staff Pose, aka Low Pushup, aka I’m Only Pretending that My Stomach Isn’t On the Ground).

I know that spot-reducing is a myth and that push-ups, however yogic, will do little to counter my accumulating upper arms. But it can’t hurt to have a little bit of muscle definition supporting that droopy flap of flab. It makes me look just threatening enough to ward off any suppositions of sloth.

“There’s not another ferry to P-town until 1pm,” I said, though we were in no danger of missing ours. “You’d think that ferries would simply be swarming around P-town. Ferries, ferries, hundreds of ferries!” Mr. Pinault showed no sign of understanding my double entredre about P-town ferry/fairy, but I persisted. When we arrived to find a long line of people waiting to board, I whispered, “You’d think most of these guys could fly to P-town.”

My humor is really too bad to be offensive, is it not? The fact is, Provincetown has become one of our favorite summer destinations in New England. And the ferries are only one reason why.

To begin, P-town is one of those marvelous bike-friendly places where truly only the idiots drive. The downtown strip of Commercial Street is total locomotory anarchy, with pedestrians darting on the sidewalks and street in every direction. Bicyclists freely mingle among them, and the tiny, congested streets force automobiles to inch slowly down the street. That’s right, guy in the hulking SUV with the Connecticut license plates — everyone thinks you’re a douche.

And just outside of town there’s some great beaches that are easily accessible by a bike trail. In fact, one popular beach doesn’t even have a parking lot. (It’s no mistake that this non-minivan friendly beach is reportedly the friendliest beaches on the Cape, wink wink.)

While the paved bike trail that snakes through the sand dunes is (duh) hilly and sandy, it doesn’t matter if you get all sweaty, because you are just steps away from clear 64 degree ocean water. Yes, it’s cold, yes, it takes steely nerves to submerge your head, but there isn’t anything more refreshing to your entire being than Cape Cod’s ocean beaches. It’s like air conditioning for the soul.

I’ve spent time all over Cape Cod – Falmouth, Harwich, Chatham, Yarmouth, Nantucket, Dennis, Wellfleet — and have found that the tourist pandering is either completely honkytonk or utterly snobby. P-town is not immune to either of these extremes, but overriding everything is its funky, anything-goes vibe. No town can take itself too seriously when a troupe of amateur Dame Edna impersonators sashays down the street at 5:30pm. It’s like this bizarre rainbow-tainted alternate universe, where hawkers stand on the street trying to lure patrons into their restaurants, bars, cabarets, and even spas with drippy innuendo (“$10 gets you a 10 minute chair massage from a big boy! Get a big boy massage!”) or just bawdy bombast (“Come watch beautiful naked boys singing!” calls a young man dressed only in boxer shorts that are strategically cinched to give the appearance that he is wearing a tiny white bath towel). The atmosphere is fun and frolicky — not exactly Sodom, but not exactly Nantucket, either.

Gay men and lesbians coexist in P-town, peacefully, but with striking contrast. At 6pm, we gulped down raw oysters and clams in one waterfront restaurant, sitting next a party of nine women all with close-cropped hair, jeans, and baggy button-down shirts. They scrutinized the menu in silence, and then joylessly ordered lemonade and plates of fried shellfish. Compared that to a table of extremely stylish men in tight colorful clothes, all of whom seemed to be chattering simultaneously as they sipped mixed drinks and picked at salads and shrimp cocktail.

Waterfront Raw Bar

I always feel a twinge of guilt for intruding on Provincetown’s rainbow utopia as a straight outsider — and, even worse, I bring along my gay-licious husband who garners more than a few appreciative glances. Sorry boys — he’s not gay, he’s just European. He does help us blend in among the hordes of likewise skinny, well-dressed and well-groomed men. As he waited in line at a Bank of America ATM, the man in front of him grew impatient towards the guy who was holding up the line. “What’s he doing, opening a freaking Roth IRA?” he hissed in a supremely bitchy simper.

White Strip Sunglass Tan Line... Red Stripe

Gotta love the P-town ferries. Because after all the biking, the hot-sand baking and cold-water swimming, the Happy Hour cocktails and raw bars, who has the energy to stay in P-town and take in the homotourism nightlife? The Beyonce impersonator, or the lesbian comedian, or the multimedia presentation about gay primates, or Hedda Lettuce reenacting Mommie Dearest all sound just great, but by 8:30pm, all I want to do is climb on the ferry and conk out on my husband’s shoulder as we plow through the Cape Cod Bay and back to our somber Bostonian reality.

P-town Pier

The P stands for Phallic

Oui, c’est moi with the red shawl and blue-and-white polka dot dress, waiting patiently for my sausage! Since I am in centered in the photo, I do not believe I’m flattering myself too much when I assume that I am the photographer’s intended subject – probably because I’m dressed so festively, and also because I’m a babe buying sausages.

Thank goodness I look good in the picture. Otherwise, I would have to sue the photographer for booty defamation.

Mr. Pinault, however, didn’t fare as well (he’s really getting too assimilated, if you ask me) …

The French try to play down the whole guillotine thing. A proper woman will wear a blue dress to her Bastille Day festivities, not red, because Bastille Day is not about insurrection, but about liberty. It’s about going on strike. The French are passionate about striking. Witness the disgraced 2010 French World Cup team, who went on strike during the World Cup. How fucking French is that?

It’s no accident that this blog’s banner glorifies the more violent ideals of the French Revolution: A fearless sans-culotte, brandishing her shackles in one hand and the head of an aristocrat in the other hand. Not a day goes by that the inequal distribution of resources and services does not pique my inner radical. But do I really believe that society’s poor and oppressed should violently rise against the wealthy? That depends… am I considered wealthy? Or are we talking about the CEOs with $9 million salaries? Yes, I would sharpen the blade for BP’s CEO, whether or not he had a direct hand in the Gulf oil spill. This company makes money hand-over-freaking-fist while recklessly pillaging the planet, and they would rather heap dividends on their investors than spend a few bucks to prevent cataclysmic environmental disasters. Corporate negligence and greed is literally turning this planet into a cesspool, and on behalf of the thousands of oiled birds, coated turtles, and contaminated fish beds, I would march through St. Jame’s Square in London, demanding Tony Hayward’s head.

Okay. Must stop with the cavalier death threats. Honestly, I only believe in capital punishment for capitalist pigs in principle.

Boston’s Bastille Day street party was last Friday night. We paid an inexplicable $28 to enter the cordoned-off area and buy expensive wine FROM CALIFORNIA and Frenchified foodstuffs (although the sausage sandwich from the Beehive was super.) I suppose we were paying for the live music, although anyone could stand on the sidewalk and dance to the sounds of the Tabou Combo from Haiti and Caravan Palace from France. (Guess which is which…)

We shared a table with another couple, and it turned out she was from France (like Mr. Pinault) and he was from Pennsylvania (like me)! Everyone thought that was très drôle.”What is it that French people like about people from Pennsylvania?” I asked Mr. Pinault as we savored our sausages. “Is it our peasant qualities?”

“Dumbest movie ever?” Actually, no. It was an international comedy-thriller-action-adventure romp with lots of scenic, sophisticated… um, romping. There are planes, trains, boats, buses, and automobiles. No sex, but a staggering body count and more than a few over-the-top action scenes, in which Tom and Cameron dodge literally hundreds of bullets while simultaneously flirting. Heck, there’s a reason why these people are movie stars. I watched them act ridiculous for almost two hours and I never once glanced at the clock. I was too busy getting lost in Cameron’s bluer-than-blue eyes and Tom’s rugged, sprightly mouth.

I can pinpoint the exact scene they were filming when Tom Cruise waved to me. That alone was enough to thrill me. “He’s getting paid millions to flirt with Cameron on the screen, but between takes, he’s waving to me on his own volition,” I thought, only half-self-mocking.

The movie’s plot was beyond inane — repeated ridiculous contrivances involving world domination or something. Don’t bother to wonder why or how. Only the who really matters. And if you live in Boston, the where is pretty darn entertaining. Who hasn’t driven through the Big Dig tunnels and wondered how a high-speed car chase would play out… or how it looks when cars are mired in 20 mph traffic gridlock?