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****Au revoir

According to Emily Post, There are only two forms of farewell: "Good-by" and "Good night." Never say "Au revoir" unless you have been talking French, or are speaking to a French person. Never interlard your conversation with foreign words or phrases when you can possibly translate them into English; and the occasions when our mother tongue will not serve are extremely rare (here.)

This is a rare occasion where my mother tongue seems inferior. Tomorrow I leave for 2 weeks in France, meaning this website will be untouched until July 4th. So, with apologies to Emily Post for my flagrant interlarding, bonne nuit et bonne chance, mes petits.

Packing for my trip has forced me to forge new neuron pathways. Straw man for story: An American female packs a duffle bag for a two week vacation in France. She intends to travel light so she can circumnavigate the country with ease, but has an array of occasions to plan for: Sight-seeing in Paris, formal wedding in Strasbourg, Alpine hiking, and Riviera lounging. She agonizes over every article of clothing: Which casual long-sleeve black shirt to bring? Which formal short-sleeve black shirt to bring? Are two pairs of tight black pants enough? Why don't I own any black shorts? Just when the duffle bag burgeons with black clothes, she rips everything out, verbally lamenting her lack of versatile wardrobe and her caste as a fashion infidel, and eats leftover cheesecake under the rationale that, since she's leaving tomorrow, it will otherwise go to waste.

****End Women's Suffrage

Tragicomedy defined here.

****Googles

Recent favorite search-engine phrases from my site statistics...

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****Groomed by Charbel

3 months ago, another Boston-area hair salon was crossed off my list because I received a 90 minute hair color followed by a two-minute haircut from a white-trash kid who talked about infected tattoos. I had been going there more than a year. The salon owner, a radiant Chinese lady, has more than once spied me outside of the 1369 Coffeehouse, which is next door to the salon. She greets me with a smile - "Hi It's so good to see you!" and then examines my hair. "You need a trim," she says all professional, her voice kindly lowered to not embarrass me in front of the Cambridge hipsters.

Today I tried a new salon: Leeba in Downtown Crossing, for the cost-conscious yuppie. My problem with hairdressers is the small-talk. I need common ground, beyond my hair, to convincingly banter. Which is why I choose Leeba. They only hire stylists too cool to make small talk with me.

I was handed off immediately to Charbel, a total babe who whisked me off to the sink. He kept saying my name: "Here comes the towel, Meredith. Lean back, Meredith. Is it too hot, Meredith." Charbel claimed to be Swedish but I doubted it. Aside from his dark skin, he sounded Hispanic. "I'm from Europe. I have been here for four months. I'm from a country called Sweden," Charvel said, stroking my wet hair as he circled me like a cat.

Sweden! Oh, I've heard of that country! I nodded. Then he said "So Meredith, do you have any kids?"

I felt as if he had shaved me bald. Hairdressers used to ask me if I was in school. Now, do I have kids? Do I look that old and frazzled? Though this is the era of the Yummy Mommy, I felt indignant that Charbel tried to make small talk by assessing my appearance - obviously that of a woman with other priorities besides obsessive grooming - and thinking "kids."

"No, no children. Someday... it could happen. Not that I'm trying. I've never tried," I said lamely. Charvel seemed completely confused by what I said, so he moved on. "Do you have plans this weekend?" he cooed.

I told him I was going to France next week. "For a vacation?" he asked. "Yes, with my boyfriend. He's French," I said.

"You have a French boyfriend?" he said incredulously, as if I told him I had a Nigerian fairy godmother. He sized up this ungainly dyed blond with three months of split ends, a slight sunburn and shiny nose, sneakers, and cloth handbag, and concluded no French man would date this beast of American sportiness.

The small talk ceased when he began to cut. Charbel layered my hair like an Italian wedding cake while promoting himself as a superb candidate for all my hair coloring needs. When the blow-dry was done, he said my "French boyfriend" would become my "French husband" when he saw my new haircut. Oh, Charbel. If only all French men can be snagged by virtue of a $45 haircut!

Overall, I liked Charbel. He took a paternal interest in my hair, determined to protect it from all my wild ways. When I got home, I googled "Charbel baby name" to find out its origins... and it's Australian. If Charbel won't believe I have a French boyfriend, I won't believe he's Swedish.

****9 Holes, 9 Snowmen

There are sports that are: Fun to play but not fun to watch (soccer being a timely example... also baseball, bowling and badminton), fun to watch but not fun to play (football, tennis, and competitive eating), fun to play and fun to watch (basketball, billiards, and beach volleyball), and neither fun to play nor fun to watch (golf, golf, golf.)

If I graphed a quadrant chart of sports on axes labeled "More fun to play" and "More fun to watch" (which I considered doing until faced with the prospect of self-teaching myself Mac's Grapher in five minutes) golf would lurk in the -x,-y zone near Jazzercise, ultramarathoning, and boxing.

I readily confess that my passionate aversion to golf is due to the fact that I lack technique and, more dire, the patience to hone golf swings. I admire golfers for their willingness to engage in hours of tedious ball-whacking, but am bewildered by their want to do so.

I've learned to co-exist in a world ruled by golfers by simply: Not golfing. If I'm not reminded of how ridiculous it is to endeavor to place a little ball in a little hole by way of measured shots with a club, it's okay. But today...

The software department went golfing, wreaking divots on a chip n' putt course to celebrate another major release of core product without anyone losing their minds, jobs, or will to live. FORE!

****Magazine Review: Shape

I picked up my free copy of July's Shape from an astounding pile of magazines accumulating by my building's mailboxes. A (male) former upstairs neighbor, a second-generation Indian-American MIT undergrad, subscribed to ESPN, Outdoors, Bicycling, Men's Health, and a host of other "active" magazines that his former roommates obviously had no interest in. Perhaps that's why he moved out after six months. Any guy who reads Shape, well, you gotta wonder.

What about the women who read Shape? It's one of the most popular magazines floating around the gym, appealing to Cosmo readers to Real Simple readers to Us Weekly readers alike. When I first started gyming five or so years ago, I used to pick up old sweat-drenched copies. Shape educated me about things that health class never got to because we were busy learning about AIDS, drugs, and suicide. Like:the names of my muscles and the top 5 ways to tone them in 10 minutes; how to make salads that will lift the winter blues; how to eat healthy in an airport; and how to dress to "minimize" the problems areas that haven't yet been properly, um, shaped.

But all this gets old after awhile. Nutrition and fitness is mostly common sense. Revolutionary new exercises to tone triceps are not being discovered, nutrition research makes the headlines, and most women know that emulating Jennifer Lopez's ab workout won't work without the coaxing of a $500/hour personal trainer.

Denise Richards is on the cover of July's Shape, airbrushed to a Barbie-like glow, her gaunt limbs carrying a bare hint of tone. She shrugs off rumors that she starved herself after her pregnancies in order to lose weight, crediting her goddess bod to "life," pilates, and a messy divorce. Richards eats "small meals with a balance of fiber and protein"... in other words, a ton of chicken salad. She "swears" by the rejuvenating power of deep-tissue massage. It's the boilerplate Hollywood actress diet and fitness regime, right down to the claim of always having a pint of Haagen-Daaz "stashed in the freezer." Naughty girl! Even Denise Richards has mortal fallibility.

Moving on, we have a "New Diet Strategy: Think Before You Indulge." Two glasses of wine (200 calories), is equivalent to 52 minutes of housework! Two pieces of pizza (600 calories) is equivalent to 55 minutes of kickboxing! For those who dare indulge in calories, there's a "Monday a.m. recovery plan," which imparts advice like "avoid the scale" and "plan to eat healthy." That's almost as ingenious as the article about transitioning from the gym to the outdoors (actual quote: "If you like the treadmill, try running outdoors.")

Like all uber-female magazines, Shape deftly weaves together content and advertising with articles like "The Best New Razors" and "5 Stay-fit Cruises." Indeed, Shape is definitely a bit more bloated since the last time I've read it, with advertisements for low-calorie sports drinks, preservative-free deli meat, and Elexa ("the first condom for him to wear but designed to feel better for you.") Ew.

If it weren't for the deluge of new products aimed at Shape's demographic, nothing would ever change. It's the same thing, month after month, and I suspect it's only read by women passing the time on an elliptical machine and my former upstairs neighbor, who will never know "The Vitamin that Can Save Your Breasts" (D) and how to brighten your summer wardrobe with "flirty, fun stripes."

****Four Memorable Bits of Weekend

****Another Green Day

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

According to an article in the Globe, "If the more than 18 inches of rain that has fallen on Boston in May and June were snow, we would be digging out of 180 inches of the white stuff" (here).

****Rain Man

"How was your day?" asked a young white man with a brown-bagged 40 oz open bottle held at chest level as I swiftly made my way to the exit of the Central Square T station. He stood in the stairwell with a circle of a half-dozen of his demographic peers, hiding from the rain and getting publicly inebriated.

I pondered this inquiry for a millisecond. The past week of constant rain, at times torrential, was depleting my Vitamin D stores. My head was vised by 8 hours of running foreign-language text through my online-help generation tool, which always quit half-way through without reason. Tomorrow's department golf outing to celebrate the latest software release was postponed (FORE! cast is stormy). And the worst: The potatoes consumed for lunch balked at digestion. I felt as bloated as this guy's face.

"Great," I said. Why? Why did I answer him? In urban society, males only talk to female strangers if 1-They require directions 2-They request spare change 3-They want you to sign a petition or 4-They think you're eff-worthy.

Since I had given this guy an In by actually acknowledging his existence, yet was rapidly ascending the stairs and out of his bloated face, he blurted "Can I call you sometime?"

Spring and beer emboldens even the Omega male. To endeavor to court women by hanging out in the subway, drinking malt liquor out of a bag, hair overdue for a cut, face overdue for a shave, sweatshirt overdue for the Salvation Army... does this ever result in phone numbers? Do I look desperate enough to turn around and begin some sort of stilted flirtation with a drunken stranger, allow him to express awkward affection that leads to joyless and emotionally void sex, ending in a sober realization of how tragic our humanity is?

I stepped onto the sidewalk in a deluge of misty drizzle. I am beginning to suspect Mother Earth is madly trying to purge herself of the wicked creatures that befoul her lands. Why is rain always a metaphor for gloom? Rain is cleansing. Rain is renewal.

****Oh, look! It's a .... ?

I was a little bummed no one got me the bitchmakemeasandwich beer mug that I wished for my birthday (see May 9). Said a friend, "You were serious?" I don't joke about things like bitches making me sandwiches. It's just not funny.

Other birthday goodies will fill the void of offensive beer mugs in my life. My most interesting present was from my Uncle Eddie. When I was younger, Uncle Eddie always gave us money... that is, he gave us coin collections that we pried out of the albums to use as money. So I was most surprised to open... this:

(I promise not to pry off the gold to sell.)

It's a wall plague made by my late Uncle Colin. As you can see, the plague features a maxim, hand-written in magic marker on what appears to be varnished, fine-grit sandpaper: An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications. Beneath are two gold figurines: A mouse with a movable tail and one intact ruby eye, and an elephant with an upraised trunk. On the back is a gold sticker that says "Original work of art / by Capt. F.C. Williams / Maastricht."

How enigmatic. A quick Google found that the quote comes Robert Heinlein's 1973 science fiction novel Time Enough for Love through the notebook musing of a recurring character named Lazarus Long. Heinlein built intricate plot-lines around Lazarus Long involving cloning, spaceships, and interstellar slavery.

I couldn't find the exact context of the quote, but I can easily see why it appealed to my Uncle Colin, who abhorred inefficiency. Colin was a Brit who married my Aunt Mary Anne when they were older. She worked for the CIA, he worked for British Intelligence - it was a match made in a Ken Follett novel. Though I saw Colin and Mary Anne frequently when I was younger, we never got a chance to intellectually converse as adults. How I wish I could see them again! They were not only loving relatives who doted on children, they were frigging spies.

So this plague is indeed a gift. It's my Uncle Colin bestowing his world-weary knowledge to me. And after several large projects with government clients, I totally understand its wisdom.

****La Derni�re Classe Fran�aise

Tonight was my last French class until the fall semester. Since I'm leaving for France in two weeks, I am despairing over what I don't know instead of marveling at what I've learned. Sure, I can say things, but actually conversing in French is une tarte dans le ciel.

Two men inspire me to study French. Here are some quotes from the one who has not heard me murder his language by inflecting everything with a Spanish accent, Albert Camus (who I can only imagine is more divine in the French):

"Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears."
"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. "
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
"We are all special cases."
"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."
"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."

The other man who inspires me to learn French said something memorable today as well: "You looked sexy today." The weird thing about dating a co-worker is knowing that at least one person in the office may be mentally undressing you. (Verification of today's sexiness was received when I was walking on Mass Ave and heard a man say "Nice ass." I turned around, not thinking I was being addressed but wanting to see who dare utter such un-PC compliments in the heart of Cambridge. Two young men smoking in front of the Plough and Stars bar stared at me. "Wide and firm," one said confidently. I promptly walked away. It would have been way more charming in French.)

****Tackling the Gay Love Crisis

Just when the initial backlash against same-sex marriage seemed to be ebbing, just when conservatives seemed to accept that society is largely unchanged when two lesbians in Wellesley decide to make it legal, just when Republicans seemed to give up on amending our Constitution to prevent Jack from marrying Jack...

GWB gave a special speech today in support of the amendment to ban same sex marriage, which he called "the only alternative left to the people" to protect society from judges who "impose their arbitrary will on the people" (here). "Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them... changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure."

Need I waste words by ranting about what a slimeball GWB is, not only for supporting legalized discrimination, but for dwelling on hopeless legislation while ignoring so many other issues that truly undermine family structure? Like the climbing poverty rate, climbing number of families without health insurance, and climbing number of military families who have lost their sons, husbands, and fathers in the name of carrying out Bush's "bring it on" rhetoric. Let's worry about the morals of the poor children who parents' loving and committed relationships have been arbitrarily un-stigmatized by these mad-with-power activist judges when they begin indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians.

****Surveillance from the Comfort of Your Own Home

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced plans to install web cams along the Mexican border so that "concerned Americans can help protect our nation through online neighborhood watch programs" (here). So you - yes, you - can proactively monitor the border from the comfort of your own home, and call a toll-free number to alert authorities when the border is breached. Imagine the thrill of spotting an actual Mexican illegally entering the United States! Xenophobic frontier justice ain't just for the Minutemen anymore.

While I'm not entirely opposed to vigilantism as a concept, there's something perversely distopian about enlisting anyone with an Internet connection to hunt border crossers in their free time. So Fahrenheit 451.

****Land of Calvin, Oat-cakes, and Sulphur

This shot of somewhere in the Scottish Highlands was taken by my boyfriend's sister and used without her permission, but I can't help stealing such charming, scenic content.

Give me but one hour of Scotland, Let me see it ere I die. - William Edmondstoune Aytoun

****Book Review:Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes

This book was hot stuff two years ago, which is about how long I was on the library's waiting list to check it out. It was penned by a winsome editor for Vogue who has been compared to Holly Golightly, which lends it an air of credibility. Who better than to write a novel about uptown NYC rich girls and their vapid, tony lifestyles than the only one among them who would endeavor to do so?

Obviously, it would be unfair to deride this book's inanity, because inanity is the point by default. The narrator, known only as Moi (she proclaims herself semi-fluent in French for making frequent use of the word tres) is a career girl who never seems to work. She's constantly obsessing over men, Chanel sample sales, and, well, that's about it. She calls sex "Brazil" because of the prerequisite wax. She tries to commit suicide with Advil. She seems to survive on decaf-lattes and Bellinis.

Moi's the brunette best friend of Julie Bergdorf, a Park Avenue department store heiress whose blonde dye job is "the hair to worship... like Caroline Bessette Kennedy's was" (CBK being an oft-mentioned icon among these women.) Julie is always fabulously dressed (she rarely appears without a reference to her wardrobe - "that tiny new Mendel mink jacket that everyone's gone nuts about" or "a new pair of Rogan jeans by a tailor from Barneys" or "a thigh-slimming, black silk minidress (Chanel. Couture. FedExed from Paris)." Julie is looking for a "PH" (Prospective Husband) with one prerequisite: He must "believe in drivers." She is a constant source of fabulous dialogue like "I've just been to the Van Cleef uber-uber-private-favorite-clients-only studio sale that, like, virtually no one gets invited to." Tres annoying, but with a heart of gold and platinum. - "as transparent as a glass of San Pellegrino." When Moi is thrown into grief-induced anorexia after her fiancee leaves her, Julie tells her "You look totally heroin chic."

Need I mention that I could feel my brain literally rotting as I read this book? Aside from the predictable, incidental plot and constant mention of brand names, there's this light-hearted, guileless tone. Julie and the other heiresses with whom Moi lunches, parties, and shops with honestly don't fathom that life is anything more, making them bland and one-dimensional, albeit amusing. While Sykes does attempt to portray them in a sardonic, Jane Austenesque way, the fact is, she seems to like and respect her characters too much to pull it off. It needed to be twice as vulgar and tabloid to make it a guilty pleasure rather than just a guilty.

****Book Review:American Vertigo by Bernard-Henri Levy

To prove that I'm reading more than chick lit these days... American Vertigo is an intellectually-satisfying travel vignette book by rock-star French philosopher Bernard-Henry Levy, who literally wrote The French Ideology.

BHL aims to guage the health of American democracy, to see if we're on our way down and dragging the world with us, to see if, as Sartre said, "L'Amerique a la rage" ("America has rabies"). His method is to travel in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville to places that French people normally don't go, like Mount Rushmore ("an outrage"), the Mall of America ("lonely social misfits... come to experience reality and get a shot of physical community") and the Eastern State Penitentiary (the one mention of Philly - since Tocqueville originally intended to write about the penal system, BHL makes a few token stops at prisons, but like Tocqueville, his heart isn't in it.)

Given the recent crest in frosty France-American relations, this book was guaranteed to be the philosophical smash of the year, and possibly years to come. BHL seeks to enlighten the French about America (and enlighten us about ourselves), saying that the French suffer from a lack of understanding about America. I think it's jealously and insecurity. What they really want to know is, why are people all over the world eating Big Macs, Hershey bars, and Coca-cola instead of braised rabbit, Reblochon de Savoie, and Bordeaux?

BHL has this way of sounding objective and even praising of America while insidiously hinting of our backwardness. In the Florida Everglades, he says "In Europe, they would have exterminated the wildlife that continues to paddles around in the swamp's deep waters... victims of the great prophylactic cleanup demanded by European civilization... The Floridians don't tame nature, they push it back." He praises out "culture of risk, stronger than the culture of security and the inclination to self-protection... No pity for our enemies, the Americans of the 21st century seems to be saying: no mercy for terrorists, certainly, or even for opponents of the country's economic supremacy. But let Nature take her best shot."

He also spends a fair amount of time observing politics. In Tempe, he attends the final Bush-Kerry debate, and admires the vitality of the press, the "horde of interns in jeans and sneakers [reacting] like acrobats of democratic virtue" to the candidate's statements. BHL later sweet-talks his way into a one-on-one with Kerry, "a European at heart... a rationalist, above all."

This is a good read. It jumps around a lot - no topic or place receives more than a few pages of succinct attention - but, after all, this is a big country. The cities BHL likes include Seattle, Savannah, and Boston. He talks to Amish people, Sharon Stone, a home-school family, Francis Fukayama, Norman Mailer, gun nuts, strippers, hookers, and military recruits. He keeps looking for "notorious clusters of fat people photographed in European tabloids... but I didn't find many more fat people here than in any provincial French town." The obesity BHL sees is "a stranger obesity for which the reputed expansion of bodies is perhaps only a metaphor as well as a veil of flesh and smoke. A social obesity. An economic, financial, and political obesity."

The book closes with an absorbing essay called Reflections in which he debates the current state and future direction of America, and while he is keen to point out faults, he says "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country." Coming from a philosopher, especially a French one, that gives me comfort.

****The Gym

It's June 1, and the atmosphere at the gym is thick with seasonal humidity, aluminum-based antiperspirant, and desperation. The beach looms...

In the locker room, a woman tells her friend, "I dreamt last night that I ate, like, all these pastries at a buffet. It was so vivid! I was just gorging. And I was so relieved when I woke up and realized it was only a dream."

As I warmed up on the rower machine, I heard a chubby woman arguing with her personal trainer. The trainer instructed her to do walking lunges to the other side of the gym. The woman sighed, pointing with the 5-pound barbell in her hand, "Down there? All the way? No. I don't feel like doing that."

I got on an elliptical trainer next to a woman who I always say Hi to, by virtue of a five minute conversation one year ago about why half the TVs are always on ESPN2. She saw me coming: "Hi how are you" she said, her legs pumping frantically beneath her. "Good how are you" I said as I began programming my workout. She usually reads homebody magazines like Real Simple and Food and Wine, but today she had an untouched newspaper in front of her, probably just to cover up the clock. All her concentration was pinned on burning calories. 25 minutes later she got off, wiped her machine, and left. We say Hi, but never Bye. One conversation doesn't warrant Bye.

Here we are, so civilized that we require a dedicated area to engage in useless exercise. The New York Times has an article (here) about the changing demographic of gym-goers: How gyms are no longer for 20-something hardbodies, like in the 70s and 80s, when "there used to be a feeling that you had to be fit before you even joined a gym." Now the over-55 crowd is the fastest growing age group of gym members, who have "less sexy concerns" than looking good in butt thong shorts over flesh-colored leotard - like their own mortality. Indeed, at my gym, I am sweatin' with the oldies.

With gym memberships now as essential as cable TV, gyms have stopped being a place to fraternize and make dates with other specimens of physical perfection: "Working out used to be a leisure activity; now it's a personal responsibility, like flossing - which is pretty much the antithesis of flirty fun." In all the years I've been going to a gym, I've never made a friend that I hang out with outside of the gym, and I've only been verbally hit on once (by an instructor, incidentally).

Once I thought a guy who shared my morning schedule had a crush on me. He would get on adjacent machines, and a few times I caught him watching me and smiling. Though it was no big deal, I subtly avoided him. Then one weekend morning I ran into him in the diary aisle of Whole Foods. The shock of seeing this all-too-familiar face in a non-gym context stunned me into speaking to him for the first time: Hi! How's it going? We prattled through some pleasantries, just enough for me to realize that he was very, obviously gay.

****[FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]

I'll share one of my Documentation Coordinator tricks: When I don't feel like writing something at the moment, or if I may need to revisit a section, or if I'm writing about software that hasn't been developed yet... I use INSERT as a placeholder. Pretty logical, although it has confused a few of the intrepid souls who review my drafts ("What is INSERT mean? Should something else go here?")

Placeholders are handy, but as a recent Greenpeace memo proves, potentially perilous (here).

****666

When I was little, my home phone number was 666-6927. It was easy to remember and it paid homage to Satan.

Turns out 666 is one of those numbers with "interesting properties" (like how it's equal to the sum of the digits of its 47th power, and is also equal to the sum of the digits of its 51st power) that delight and amuse mathematicians (here.)