looking for au revoir.

last night it came into my mind in a very real way that i am leaving paris. i am moving away from all this that has in many ways (and despite what i thought was the case) become home. people ask me when i am leaving to rentrer aux états-unis -- when i am going home -- and it seems silly to use the verb rentrer, which is quite specific to going home. indeed i am about to retourner (return) or even revenir (come back), but to a city in which i have never lived., and which is more unfamiliar to me than it was before i settled into paris.

last night i ate dinner with isabelle and arnaud, two of the most amazing folks you could ever have the honor of meeting, and that's what sunk it in. after dinner and a viewing of profondo rosso, they walked me to the metro and then into the metro and then waved goodbye all the way until i disappeared into the tunnelled stairway leading to the 8 train, leading back to bastille and margaux's apartment which is filled with luggages (one of which weighs, no joke, *more* than i do), various hair products strewn about, and insomnia.

i want to tell you briefly about isa and arnaud, because they are of that rare breed of intellectuals that are not in school at all. they are beyond smart, have a beautiful living room filled with bookshelves, and possess above all stunningly astute critical-thinking minds coupled with a commitment to art and artistry. it makes me feel like cardboard, my intellect held up and sustained and pushed mostly by the unrelenting bootcamp of academia rather than my own desire to understand things (notwithstanding the amount of time i spend cruising articles on wikipedia). isa works in a bookstore and translates articles on sharks and such for national geographic and reads like a maniac and is able to put her finger on the pulse of books and ideas better than most academics, and arnaud is a pion (a lower-level highschool employee), but does so only in order to devote time to his auto-didactic art studies and his writing. a more succinct example: he reads kant's critique of pure reason every year just because he enjoys it. both of them are so admirable because they choose to be.

as i was heading back from the metro and their goodbyes, i was walking down the sidewalk and sneezed. a guy many several yards away came up to me and said, in english, "bless you." i looked up and was so shocked that it took me a few secocnds to say not "thank you" but rather stammered "merci." it has been awhile since i've been blessyoued, and i was very surprised. although you might tell your friends "à tes souhaits (ah tay sou-ay)" most folks who sneeze in public excuse themselves. to my mildly germophobic mind this makes perfect sense; why bless a perfect stranger who is actively spreading potential disease? sneezers, i think, should apologize for their germ expulsion. but both that well-intentioned blesser and especially my reaction solidified the growing realization that (a) perhaps i have after all become quite parigified and (b) i am leaving.

all this and the fact that for the first time in a long time i am no longer sharing a bed with my partner kept me up until 5am. at 4h30 or so i despaired of falling asleep and went outside to sit on the stoop and smoke, and was amazed for the first time since moving here by how quiet paris gets. on sundays and late at night, and certainly at 4h3o am after a sunday, no one's around outside. and bastille, which borders the marais (the gay and jewish and currently-infested-with-yelling-tourists district), is a pretty hopping neighborhood (except at post-sunday 4h30 am). it was so quiet that i could hear the rotating ads on the metro signs flipping, and there was no one to stare at or be stared at by, so i looked up at the buildings and it made me so sad to think that i will be leaving these buildings, and this city which i even until recently denied belonging to or belonging to me in a way.

more updates on all this dissumulating and sublimated whimsy as departure progresses.
xo.

news from the land of imploding innards.

well, well, well : bon-fucking-jour.

the next week should hopefully bring a bit of a drop-off in postings to my blog. i'm saying goodbye to paris, and to round things off a bit, goodbye to a 3-year relationship with a partner
whom i am still in love with, despite everything.

needless to say, it's all mixed up, and i'm rather at a loss as to how i should deal with it. yesterday i spent most of the day sitting on the floor, alternately crying and getting overwhelmed by folding a pair of pants. that freaked me out a bit, and today i've entirely called off responsibility and at 3pm, i am still in my pyjamas and on season 3 of sex and the city and my second baguette drowned in butter and cheese.

me watching sex and the city proves how despondent i am. dialogue-wise, i think it's a crap show, and even though i am not familiar with the mating habits of heterosexual women, i really really hope that these are fictions. those ladies rather scare me. but crap shows distract me from sitting on the floor or musing on the overwhelming nature of trousers, unlike music. i have forbidden myself to listen to:

• ani difranco
• catpower
• the alkaline trio
• elliott smith
• belle & sebastien
• nina simone
  
• really anything that falls under soothing strumming and lovely lyrics or is anyway meaningful.
  

likewise, reading is a bit too much too, which is unfortunate because i have a lot to read. comic books are about it, because like bad tv they are rife with color, movement, and are less likely to involve people talking about feelings or symbolism.

that's it. i'm trying to muster some funny or at least some sardonic for this, but all i got is a wavery willingness to find out what carrie bradshaw will be wearing in the next episode.

har.
har.
har.

becoming a pariginer, part one.

so yesterday thomas and i went for a stroll from our house to bercy park over a new pedestration bridge named the Simone DeBeauvoir that spans the seine between the national library near us on the left bank and the park and stadium and cinémathèque on the right bank.

they just finished the bridge, and it looked really nice. i feel like bridges in paris (of which there are a shit ton) are an art--none of them look the same as the others.
as we were approaching the bridge, i made some comment about how it looked like shit for a long time (which is true; they had to rip up all these sidewalks and there was shit everywhere). for a quick vocab break:

thomas: c'est beau, non?
pony: ouaaais mais c'était bien bordel la dernière fois qu'on l'a vu. ils ont mis du temps à le faire. mais maintenant c'est génial.
thomas: oh le vieux grognon que tu es... t'es un vrai parisien maintenant.

so basically, i've been pronounced a true parisian. it's not the first time that i've heard it. when i questioned thomas about what exactly makes me a parisian, he offered this list:

1. threatening old ladies on the bus
2. getting into yelling matches with people on the street
3. complaining about how the government takes forever to get shit done and how it looks like crap while they're doing it
4. bitching about tourists
   
5. being a snob about bread.
   

i've also been told however that i'm so american. these are the corresponding circumstances:

1. i moan about the bugs coming in the windows because windows in france don't have screens. apparently screens should make you feel as though you've been emprisoned. i disagree. i like laying down in bed and not getting cozy with six or eight-legged friends. diva, on the other hand, is fine with it. she loves her new toys.
2. i cut the mold off my cheese. this is, by all appearances, tantamount to cheese rape.
3. i drink too much water. by french standards, proper hydration consists of perhaps a glass a day.

so there ya go. i have been thoroughly bastardized. so, in continued preparation for my imminent departure, and celebration of my bastardization, this post is the anti-tourist post. i recently took issue with the Amélie paris that tourists love, so i wanted to be more explicit about the places i love here. most of these pictures were taken by thomas and manipulated by me.

enjoy.
(or not if you don't dig it, but know that je t'emmerde mémé - et si tu me cherches tu va me trouver !) :

trains, trains, trains :

this is a trainyard, taken from an overpass in the 12th arrondissement near vincennes :

from nearby the overpass, there is a beautiful graffitti-filled tunnel:
a lot of the 13th arrondissement where thomas and i live is a weird mixture of things. the buildings don't match and are in tons of different styles, and there are whole sections that don't seem at all like paris or a city for that matter. this is another train:

and this is deserted traintracks. in the middle of paris, but who would know? :

i love the cute street cleaner trucks. it has to do in part with my love for bright kelly green and the garbage men's kelly green jumpsuits, as well as the fact that from this perspective, the cleaner truck looks like an insect (i like them when they're not all up in my house) :
dog poo. dog poo everywhere. there are signs all over that say j'aime mon quartier je ramasse ("i love my neighborhood so i pick up after my dog"), and all i can deduce from this is [a] that everyone hates their neighborhood, and [b] that man is sodomizing his dog :

this is a recycling plant nearby. there's always smoke coming out, but apparently it's not pollution. that's the official line at least. it's a byproduct of making gâteaux de filtration, or filtration cakes. that is the actual term:
graffitti on a squat nearby :

and my favorite picture of all (taken by tyco and donna while they were here visiting), can be found in pigalle, the sex district :
***
j'aime paris. et paris m'aime aussi.

say it with a french accent: dude!

okay, welcome to the dude post. i shall cover herein several excellent techniques to becoming a bona fide french dude.

first of all, what kind of dude do you want to be? to make this easier for you, let's split it up by age groups:

1. mini dude (the under 13 dude)
2. voyou dude (teenaged upgrade)
   
3. middle aged dude (to begin after you get tired of throwing cans in people's open windows)
   
4. ole pappy dude (set of boules required)

great, let's get started!

1. mini dude

the mini dude is best epitomized by one of the boyfriend's of my super's 6 or 7 year old daughter (who, by the by, i once heard say to her mother "what is this bullshit?" after her mom was yelling at her in portugese). so little mouthy miss has a boyfriend, which i know since i've seen them strolling around together a lot. but let's separate this fact from another regular building occurence: at least once a week, for most of this year, i've heard someone banging like holy hell on the front door, wanting to be let in. it's aggravating, because i'll be trying to work or read or watch a movie, and all of a sudden i'll hear what sounds like godzilla trying to destroy the building. now i might be right at the front and could therefore easily let godzilla in, but who wants godzilla in their building, especially if they obviously don't live here (since they dont have the code)? after months of trying to ignore godzilla, i finally went out onto the landing to tell godzilla to fuck off and just call whoever his friend is before coming over, or at least writing down the code his friend gives him and carrying it in his wallet. but when i stepped out onto the landing, godzilla turned out to be the nerdy 6 year old boy with glasses who wishes that he was 3 feet tall.

2. ado-dude (F.D.S. version and Arab/African versions)
as hinted at above, all of the ado-dude models mostly just like to throw trash in my window. when they're not doing that that, they are also titillated by standing near my window and giggling, or yelling sexist comments at Margaux on the street (a favorite activity of all dudes, actually, except perhaps mini-dude who hasn't yet figured out what that lump o skin between his legs entitles him to). after that, it gets more complicated. F.D.S. dude (Français de souche, or 'native'-born french dude with frenchy sounding name) gets left out of Sarkozy's (conservative minister of the interior) and Le Pen's (big ugly facist face) candlelit dinner parties. The CRS and the very thuggish RATP (metro) cops don't like to play with FDS dude so much. They prefer focusing on dudes with tans.

3. balding dude (sober and drunken versions)

3.a. drunken version

Personally, this is my favorite dude of all in La France. Me and him like to have long chat which may seem loud and violent, but really, when it comes down to it, drunken middle aged dude loves me.

3.b. sober-ish version
When not asserting his dudely virility by eating steack tartar (raw hamburger meat with a raw egg on top. seriously, people eat that), sober middleaged dude can be found stroking his cock (in a totally heterosexual way) over Zinedine Zidane sweating a lot and running around in a thong, while repeating over and over Oooh Zizou, oooh ohh Zizou, ohh Zizou caress that ball, yeah. That is except for when he takes a break from Zizou in favor of Margaux.

4. hé pépé, yer balls are hangin' out !

i promised y'all a couple of posts ago that i would revisit the boules thing, and i'm trying to get better about my flakiness. so since i've finished my abstract, i can now tell you about me and margaux's pétanque trip to the jardin luxembourg. it started off well: we found a cranny with not too many folks where we could play. after a few rounds, a grandma came by with her grandkids, let them and herself walk through our game, and when she noticed the little boy picking up one of our already-played balls (thanks!), she picked up the kid by the arm and dropped it real hard. then the cops came over and told us we had to go to the special boules terrain in the park. so off we go, looking for the pappies. and lo and behold, when we got to the special pappy terrain, it was stunningly clear just how virile a sport this is. the only woman over there was in a small kiosk cooking (and selling) food. almost all the terrains were full of pappies, some of whom had special hats and gloves. there was a coat rack in the middle for their sports coats, but the best part of all was the piss trough in the bushes with no walls, just like that. can we say marking our territory? so needless to say, since margaux's a high femme and i'm just an ambiguously gendered kid with a mohawk, and both of us are well under age 65 even if you add our ages together, everybody stared at us and we were a little bit intim-A-dated, y'all. what's more, you have to ask permission to use one of the terrains, and they kindly gave us the one right next to the piss trough. all in all, though, we held our damn own, cos we some HOT SHIT when we play boules. that might just be because we're some spring damn chickens, y'all.
want more boules? watch bill csby and his dad get all grumpy pappy widdit on the cosby show, or go play boules online (click on Ouvrir le jeu, then in the pop up window type your name and click on Jouer une partie). or, even better, you can play with my balls. i have my own garishly colored set and i'm always down.

o=o=o=o=o=o
obviously, this dude post is my vague nod to the now-over world cup. folks were crying in france yesterday, y'all. The craziest thing of all is that the aforementioned Zidane (the chou chou of french football) got voted the best player in the world cup-- after he end his career by getting thrown out of the game because he headbutted a player (who didn't even have the ball) really hard. that's when the crying started. but it's okay, because italy won, and they deserved to since they are not only the prettiest boys on the field, but also posed in their skivvies for a dolce & gabbana ad. yay italia!

so that's it, really. but i have a question for y'all:
am i the only person out there who thinks that the World Cup Trophy looks like a golden turd?

i heart the superhighway.

file under N.G. (No Good)(thanks donna's dad): revising conference abstracts for an article i now HATE. here's an exchange that took place yesterday with my friend margaux who is doing the same thing.

pony: this article is ridiculous. i think i've taken on way too much for one article. but then again, it'll be easier to use it for a dissertation chapter. of course that means 4 more years of staring at this goddam thing.

margaux: well, look on the bright side...at least you already hate it. you're ahead of the game.

file under fun: bowling in paris.

i know, i know, paris to most folks equals romantic strolls along the seine or wandering up the eiffel tower while eating baguettes (soaked in wine and raw meat with crème fraiche).

a quick side note: i have a french friend here who says that american food makes her anorexic, but the other night thomas and i went to a restaurant with his aunt. we ordered something that we had ordered before at that restaurant, but this time we ended up eating not just meat by accident, but rather all kinds of meat by accident: chicken, shrimpy bits, and fucking beef. and i thought southerners were sneaky about slipping me meat (and i don't mean that meat. no, really, stop giggling.)

that aside, the ideal of a lovely summer evening in paris does not for most americans involve going to a bowling alley and hooting and hollering "strike, strike, motherfucker!", but recently, me, thomas, margaux, and joey (a pal of margaux's who's visiting) trotted ourselves down to montparnasse to the arcade-slash-pool hall-slash-bowling alley. we strapped on our shoes (which make the germophobe in me have nightmares about working at the shoe station in a bowling alley), and margaux certainly won the hot-look contest with her evening dress and knee-high fishnet stockings with the bowling shoes. at one point she got up to answer her cell phone and a girl actually laughed at her to her face. such is the price of mixing an excellent femme fashion sense with bowling shoes.

thomas, however, without a doubt, won the bowling style award. apart from his habitual grandstanding, we got to make fun of his odd bowling approach style, which invloved an overhand throw and short swings before letting go of the ball. after an hour of fun-making (quick vocab break: foutage de gueule), we noticed actually, that other folks in neighboring lanes were doing the same thing. and so we came to understand that french folks bowl as if they are playing boules (also know as pétanque), which is like lawn bowling or bocce ball.

pictures of the 3 pétanque techniques (for visual reference):


while looking for these pictures, i found a video on bowling basics, the highlight of which is this quote:
"this is the nitty gritty, bob: you gotta learn to walk before you can bowl."

a few days later, now thirsting for a rousing game of boules, margaux and i trotted on down to the jardin de luxembourg with the grumpy pappies to play. more on that later, promise... for now, i have been reprimanded for my rampant procrastination.

bowling for academia.

file under N.G. (No Good)(thanks donna's dad): revising conference abstracts for an article i now HATE. here's an exchange that took place yesterday with my friend margaux who is doing the same thing.

pony: this article is ridiculous. i think i've taken on way too much for one article. but then again, it'll be easier to use it for a dissertation chapter. of course that means 4 more years of staring at this goddam thing.

margaux: well, look on the bright side...at least you already hate it. you're ahead of the game.

file under fun: bowling in paris.

i know, i know, paris to most folks equals romantic strolls along the seine or wandering up the eiffel tower while eating baguettes (soaked in wine and raw meat with crème fraiche).

a quick side note: i have a french friend here who says that american food makes her anorexic, but the other night thomas and i went to a restaurant with his aunt. we ordered something that we had ordered before at that restaurant, but this time we ended up eating not just meat by accident, but rather all kinds of meat by accident: chicken, shrimpy bits, and fucking beef. and i thought southerners were sneaky about slipping me meat (and i don't mean that meat. no, really, stop giggling.)

that aside, the ideal of a lovely summer evening in paris does not for most americans involve going to a bowling alley and hooting and hollering "strike, strike, motherfucker!", but recently, me, thomas, margaux, and joey (a pal of margaux's who's visiting) trotted ourselves down to montparnasse to the arcade-slash-pool hall-slash-bowling alley. we strapped on our shoes (which make the germophobe in me have nightmares about working at the shoe station in a bowling alley), and margaux certainly won the hot-look contest with her evening dress and knee-high fishnet stockings with the bowling shoes. at one point she got up to answer her cell phone and a girl actually laughed at her to her face. such is the price of mixing an excellent femme fashion sense with bowling shoes.

thomas, however, without a doubt, won the bowling style award. apart from his habitual grandstanding, we got to make fun of his odd bowling approach style, which invloved an overhand throw and short swings before letting go of the ball. after an hour of fun-making (quick vocab break: foutage de gueule), we noticed actually, that other folks in neighboring lanes were doing the same thing. and so we came to understand that french folks bowl as if they are playing boules (also know as pétanque), which is like lawn bowling or bocce ball.

pictures of the 3 pétanque techniques (for visual reference):


while looking for these pictures, i found a video on bowling basics, the highlight of which is this quote:
"this is the nitty gritty, bob: you gotta learn to walk before you can bowl."

a few days later, now thirsting for a rousing game of boules, margaux and i trotted on down to the jardin de luxembourg with the grumpy pappies to play. more on that later, promise... for now, i have been reprimanded for my rampant procrastination.

nationalism's blue period.

ah, france. paris, the city of lights.

more pertinently and more currently, the city of "if i hear you speaking english i will assume you cannot speak french and so hear and see me making fun of you."
with the 5 gabillion-million tourists -- mostly anglophone -- who have descended upon the downtown of paris, i hear the same conversation over and over and over again. english speaking tourist clusters are comprised of a couple of people looking at shit and running into folks (their only lines in the conversation are ooh and mmm and je ne sais quoi, a phrase i have never heard uttered by any french folks) and invariably one show-off who is laying out the most superficial and mundane information you could care for: "ah, look there, that is the Sorbonne, the universit-ay. ah, the Seine. ah what beautiful architecture. ah, blabla Culture blabla The French blabla Noder Dame blabla"

SIDENOTE: this is not to say that The French, when touristing, have better conversations. those consist primarily of parents inflicting The History of a place on their children who are ignoring them.

i don't know why i hate tourists so much. i think it's almost certainly rooted in rampant elitism. i begrudge them their superficial bullshit that passes for knowledge/understanding, and their dillettante knee-jerk reaction towards anything that is high art. they point at what everyone points at, they wrap scarfs around their necks in summer because they are in paris, they complain about graffitti that i find beautiful and that is a very real part of paris (one reason why parisians hate the film Amélie is because it is a tourist's Paris, and they digitally did away with all the graffitti and real parts of parisian life). but i also understand that you don't have to and shouldn't have to have a non-superficial understanding of places and things, and that enjoying all that is okay, really.

but right now, english is the mother tongue of downtown paris. and whever i go there with margaux, speaking english, and i buy cigarettes or books or whatnot, *even though i speak french to the shopkeepers*, they will refuse my french debit card, assuming that it is an american credit card. or folks on the metro will talk about us as if we couldn't understand.
it's given me a new outlook on being bilingual. when i hear people speaking other languages, i don't assume they don't speak another as well, but there is this idea that they cant speak in another language and understand the language of the country they are in. this, i warn you all, is false. i can carry on a conversation in english and listen to motherfuckers make fun of me in french.

french, french, french.

soon, in a month or so, this won't be an issue. are you tired of my postings on french culture? have you, more to the point, contracted a dire case of ennui ?

gay gay gay paree.

this saturday was paris pride, so here's the key vocab:

gouine = dyke
pédé = fag
marcher pendant des heures en dansant à la fois = dance-walking for hours
tout le monde drague ceux qui sont bien sapés = everyone hitting on the best dressed
en buvant des diabolo-menthes = while drinking mint-flavored lemonades
putain, ça déchire = what fucking fun.

i got more excited about pride than i've been in years. the idea of pride in a new place and in a different country made it somehow all the more lovely. the idea sparkled to the tips of my toes, which bounced accordingly through the streets of a very very gay paree. the funny thing is that what is different here is still so much the same. lesbian dancing is still lesbian dancing (you know, the way that the arms don't really move), and drunken lesbian dancing is still drunken lesbian dancing. the float music is the same song as in the us: it's raining men, y.m.c.a., or anything by shakira/madonna/glam 80s girl groups.

what is not the same? well, for one, the commie reds never miss a marching event:

and, since the parisian homos know that they'd rather not paradeify at the butt-ass crack of dawn after dancing all night, the parade itself doesn't start until the afternoon. so for the first time, i saw the entire parade. me, thomas, margaux, anne-laure (a great parisan queer that i met in one of my socio classes) and the girls from Anatomie Bousculaire (a fabulous queer rock group who restored my faith in french music after years of learning french from pathetic pop singers or terribly outdated crooners) all scored three tables at a sidewalk café from where we could see the floats (and the commie reds).

that's anne-laure (with the fraggle-style hair) talking to cécile (the lead singer of Anatomie Bousculaire).

it was good times. but after 7 hours spent dance walking in the sun with tons of folks and loud music, we came to place de la bastille (as in the Bastille, scene of the big french revolution) and saw this:

you can't herd gay men to a big phallus-shaped monument on pride day without them getting up and grindin' on it. you know how it is.

so even though folks were still in full-on party mode, we looked like this:

(that's anne-laure again and anne-julie, but please note margaux's fierce cyndi-lauper stylin')
because maybe we are getting old. that was the talk that ensued actually: are we still party people? can you be just by wanting to?
even if you can, we just went to margaux's house, took off our shoes, and lounged in various prone positions on the floor discussing feminist solidarity and russian literature.
we maybe are old, but damned if we aren't pretty and smart.

reasons to take up watching the world cup instead of leaving one's house.

yesterday was paris's fête de la musique. high school students and the elderly alike were unleashed on the streets of paris to drink too much beer and dance violently badly in public.

this was followed by tonight's venture to a club to see a drag show that ended up being someone (who, to give you an idea, was an eerie version of peaches only 30 years older and with no fans) lip synching and barely dancing while wearing, i shit you not, a headband with three pieces of fruit stapled to it. the word tragic is highly applicable in this instance.

good taste, 0.
french taste in the musical arts, 2.

to stapes, tu savoir good parlor.

WARNING: this post contains words in a non-english language and may therefore cause discomfort to monolingoids. this could not be avoided, but we have taken measures to ensure that no words were left unharmed. brought to you by the american embassy of france.

so, as i was finding out that i was accepted to nyu, thomas found out that he will be receiving a fulbright grant for next year to go play in the archives in d.c. last week he received an extremely fancy embossed invitation to a garden party at american embassy in paris. when he showed this fancification to me, i told him to call those motherfuckers with a swiftness to say that he was going to be arriving with a pony. so begins the tale of how the pony crashed the ambassador's garden party...

but first let's back it up a bit to last august, when pony was hiding in a corner of its apartment in seattle watching strangers come and buy all of pony's worldly goods. after the strangers left with the worldy goods, pony set to packing its bags and getting on a plane to paris. when winter came, pony realized that it had brought a total of 4 sweaters with it to paris. when i started teaching at the high school, i also realized that although i had brought with me 7 or 8 pairs of shoes, none of these were not garishly colored sneakers. this means that often, pony was denied entrance through the teacher's door at the high school because it was mistaken for a high school student. what can i say... mohawks, tattoos, raggedy jeans, and garish sneakers do not scream "i am a professional!" nor even "i am a grown-ass adult!"

not surprisingly, the garden party demanded tenue correct : nice dressin' that the pony couldn't muster. while there were plans of me showing up as Cherry Poppet in a borrowed tube dress and lee press-on nails, because i am a flake (c.f. previous posting) i forgot to acquire the necessary accoutrements before the ambassadorial soirée. so my tenue not-so-correct involved 3 different non-matching shades of black, all slathered in white diva cat fur, and bright green sauconys. add mohawk, tattoo, and a cigarette hanging out of my mouth for half the party, and you get why thomas kept giggling and calling me a gavroche (= street urchin boy).

when we got inside, it was crazy gaudy. think mini-versailles for those of you who have been to versailles or seen sofia coppola's marie antoinette. thomas immediately got ushered towards an intellectual elite photo shoot, which meant that i could stick lots of petits fours in my mouth and stick my nose into everything all over the ambassadorial residence. there were things on every wall, with tags that claimed that these things were art, but i refuse to acknowledge a poorly-taken photo of a door with two ribbons entitled "god and country" as art. ditto for a cardboard statue of liberty colored with tempera paint. even if you're the ambassador, and some kindergartener makes you some piece of poo statue of liberty, that does not give you still do not have the power to deem said piece of poo "art". no. no. no.

my other find was 2 photos of Craig Stapleton, The American Ambassador To The Whole Country Of France Where They Speak French, displayed at the entrance for all to see. on the first, there was an inscription:

To Stapes, best wishes.
George W Bush

so. Stapes. Stapes is The American Ambassador To The Whole Country Of France Where They Speak French. i've spent hours online hoping to find that same picture (to no avail), because both georgie porgy and stapes are doing excellent impressions of elmer fudds in expensive suits. it's like stapes is saying "hey thar geroge-o! whatcha dern?" and georgie is saying "wull hay thar stapes, let's go git us sem brewskis in gay parr-ee. duh ya know how to order us sem cold'uns un that frenchie talk?"

good question, georgie. let's hand the mike to stapesy. cos stapesy is a-tappin' a glass with his knife and he's gonna talk us some french!

"boon jour mon-surrs and mas dames. vous etes lays bienvenidos a mon castle pars kway vous etes tres trays smart."

thomas and i were laughing out loud. it was impossible not to, because i've had many many french students who speak better french than The American Ambassador To The Whole Country Of France Where They Speak French, and because all the way to the garden party thomas was doing his excellent impression of american tourists in paris (the whole downtown of paris is currently flooded with anglophones), which always makes me almost piss myself. long story short, stapes can't really talk frenchie talk. and so thomas and i just shoved lots and lots of petits fours in our mouths so as to muffle the sound of our snickering. once we were done, we got the hell out of there.

and so crasheth the poorly-tenued pony the garden party of stapes.

have you been?

ok y'all, my love for wanderlust has been both requited and incited here:

http://www.43places.com/person/ohponyboy

where are you going? where have you been?
xo

open house.

so i have been negligent with the blogging of late (blogging really sounds like a nassty body function, non? like i ate too many fish tacos slathered in chunky blue cheese dressing and it all was forcefully rejected from my body). i am also about 3 weeks behind on email, so if you've sent me an email in the last month, i swear that i am not a hater nor too cool for school and i will i promise eventually write you back. there are several reasons for this behindedness:

• new york, new york, i'm gonna be a part of it!
• i am unemployed!
• it is spring and it is sun!

first of all, i got into nyu. that means a fat-ass fellowship, getting paid to write my dissertation in paris, and getting about any job i want one day. most of all, that means you will soon see me and tyco at barcade spending that fellowship money on arkanoid and galaga. so soon it is time for me to pack up the 500thousand books i've bought here and the 50 pairs of shoes i brought with me and my cat and head back to the land of ranch dressing, burritos, and people who think i am anorexic just because most americans are larger than life. on that last note, it's been really nice this year to not have strangers and family and friends feel like they can comment constantly on my body size. i realized this when my parents were in town and succeeded in giving me a complex about being a very small pony. i mean look, i don't want to be skinny, and aside from standard cultural notions of beauty that state that being skinny is good, having no padding and no insulation is a pain in my (admitted lack of) ass. it's even more of a pain in the noassitol that folks think that because i get to cash in on those beauty standards that that gives 'em free reign to accuse me of eating disorders and general shit-giving about my size-- but god knows that folks don't walk up to more-fluffy -sized strangers and friends and tell them they are fat and therefore must be mentally off. only in america, folks.
but excuse that rant. aside from missing bread products and yummy espresso and not getting harassed about my weight, i am growing more and more psyched about the return of the pony. my parents, though are worried. this is the email that my mom sent when i told her i was looking for a place for me and my cat to live in brooklyn:

Dad is concerned Brooklyn is not a safe neighborhood so send some information to relieve your Daddy from concern for his firstborn! I want to encourage you for your love of Diva - I think the love of pets is important BUT know if Diva ever needs a stay away place because you need housing - she is always welcome to stay with us until you can graduate.

apparently my parents think that brooklyn is comprised of only one neighborhood and that they can steal my cat. miss diva bitchy-bitch has traveled all over the us and to france and she is psyched about going shopping for fabulous cat outfits in nyc.

and just for visualization purposes, this is my cute mom:

the second tidbit of goodness is that i am unemployed. (concurrent with this goodness, i celebrated having no more income by going to greece. it was amazing, but i'll spare you the touristy photos for now while reserving the right to inflict them on you later.) no more going 6 days a week to the most horribly managed high school in paris. no more yelling matches with the principal when i get called to her office regularly (some shit just don't change. even as an adult, pony + public school = regular visits to the principal office) where i am required to stare at her rats' nest of a hair. i don't think it's going out on a limb to say that her inability to purchase and use hair maintenance devices reflects her (in)ability to run a high school. my last week of school they celebrated my departure by scheduling me to proctor practice bac exams, which resulted in me working 15 or so hours, and that's not counting the extra 5 hours that i refused to work. i am legally required by the french government to not work more than 12, but they seem to think that my position there is so appealing that i want to go there for free. what's more, one of the teachers handed out my home phone number to students so that they could ask me to put in more free hours, since i refused to do so after the teacher asked. when i saw her afterwards, she ignored my hints that i could use some tutoring jobs since i was about to be income-less, and asked me to correct 10 pages of her shitty english for her side job. and y'all, one sentence with 3 colons just doesn't fly in french or english. so that is the end of my stint as the exploited linguistic bitch of lycée émile dubois. i now have no money but plenty of play time, which is great since:

it is sunny sunny spring! birds are chirping, some my flowers are resisting my death-thumb, people everywhere are having more sex and experiencing increased vitamin d intake, and the windows of my apartment are open to let in the joy of it all. but open windows on the ground floor is not so good. yesterday the stream of passers-by who poke their heads in my window to ask for cigarettes and drugs started back up again. while i was tutoring a student, i heard a woman say "excuse me, um..." at which point it went like this :

pony: "no. just no."

intruder lady: "but it's just that i want to ask you..."

pony: "no. i said no."

intruder lady: "but i'm waiting for a friend and i'm out of cigarettes..."

pony: "i said no because i'm not giving you one. there are plenty of tabacco shops in this street and i suggest you visit them."

intruder lady: "why? i just want one cigarette!"

pony: "jesus christ, do i come up into your house and interrupt what you are doing to insist that you give me some free shit? as soon as lose all concept of private space and common decency and do that, then and only then will i give you shit out of my window. until then, spread the word that you and everybody else coming up into my house asking for shit can fuck off."

intruder lady: "jeez, but, um..."

pony: "oh but are you fucking kidding me, no no no!"

but seriously y'all, this happens all the time. the day before i was chilling on the couch working (read: playing text twist and flipwords) when someone threw an empty soda can in my window. i jumped up real fast yelling "aw hell naw motherfucker" before i realized that french would be more effective when dealing with french can-throwers, adding "...i mean, va te faire foutre, sale con!"

ah, spring...

smite!

on the general topic of smite, i seem to have fallen very out of touch with the genteel southern notion of how to deal with strangers. from the grandmama bus incident several months ago (where i turned around and smote the hang-on bar with my hand, looked at her and growled "shit-eating whore") to last week's latest incident of me yelling at strangers who ask for shit from my house, i asked my friend margaux last night if she thought i was developing a rage problem. because yesterday i was walking and smoking and having a chat with my friend carl who is moving to gay paree when a drunken dude asked me for a cigarette, and i didn't think a very drunken dude would be able to converse in english very well so i said "oh i dont speak french" and he kept asking so i was like "no no no i dont understand". finally he started muttering (translation) "get the fuck away you filthy thing fuck off" and carl started laughing because y'all i am a horrible liar and from my face it was pretty obvious that i understood. but he still kept asking so i (my liar face red and contorted) said "um no i still really dont understand please leave me alone". then he called me (and i give the french version because it's one of the worst possible things you can call someone, because '-asse' is a really really vulgar -- and surprise surprise -- feminine ending in french) a "sale pouffiasse de merde". translation: a "dirty fucking shit-eating skanky ho bitch". so at this point i exploded and started yelling at him that "look i understand perfectly fucking well what you're saying and i'm not going to give you a motherfucking cigarette neither am i going to get the fuck out of a public fucking square and i'm certainly not going to listen to you call me a sale pouffiasse de merde because you, sir, are a sale pouffiasse de merde and you can go sodomize yourself in a painful way." so he starts yelling back that i'm dishonest because i pretended not to speak french, carl is dying laughing because he doesn't understand what we're saying yet it was obvious that i was going to crack, and so i throw down my cigarette and go into the metro from inside the metro i hear the guy say "aw fuck yourself you fucking bitch" and i scream back at him from inside the metro that he is the bitch *and* a skanky ho and since he's a woman-hating fuck i bet he doesn't like being treated like a woman, does he?
so since i am now in touch with my long-latent inner verbal smiting of strangers, i asked margaux if i have a rage problem. she says no, that she thinks it's just road rage without a car. isn't she smart?

and for more smiting fun, go with great swiftness to: the smite stick !

very very naughty.

so i'd like to take a break from my afternoon at shooting people with arrows at the fair and getting slapped in the face with thomas' titties so as to share with you both a tidbit of linguistic wisdom and an attestation of how much i love second-wave lesbotrons.

first, let's take a quick jaunt away from me talking about france and frenching to learn some english. thanks to my new irish friend claire (who, i must state for the record, has a very pretty mouth), i have learned that the verb "to diddle" means two very different things depending on if you are to the right or the left of the atlantic ocean. apparently claire occasionally finds herself getting diddled by guys who work at convenience stores, which she finds a little annoying. whereas if i got diddled by a convenience store clerk, i think i would be quite grodied-out and mighty pissed. so in ireland you don't diddle the fiddle, nor do nasssty ole mens in trenchcoats diddle small children on law&order s.u.v. getting diddled means that someone shorts you when they give you change.

segueway: during my first year of undergrad, the professor of my mandatory english course used to "segue" a lot. that's all. there's not really any segueway between diddling and this next thing. sorry.

so my friend lessa called me yesterday to apologize about not getting back to me soon enough for me to borrow a mini-skirt on friday, and to tell me about a show she is having tonight. she is a member of the drag king fem show, a drag-slash-burlesque here in gay ole paree. she told me that their last performance was apparently turning into a great big lesbodrama on gayvox.fr, so i plugged in my laptop and went cruising on down to gayvox. let me just say that there is lesbodrama and then there is hate, and these are two different things. let me also make very clear that while i have no love for separtist 2nd wave lesbian feminists, i in no way support lesbian bashing or feminist bashing--there are plenty of other trannyboys who have that covered and i will leave that to them, may they be punished with bad sex for years to come. but i spent enough time getting bashed on by separatist 2nd wave lesbofeminists at Anxious Twat (my alma mater) for me to merit not wanting to talk with or to them, may they be punished with lesbian bed death for years to come if they insist on staying ideologially in the 70s and 80s and being overly influenced by sad heaps of philosophical diarrhea such as The Transsexual Empire.
but getting back to gayvox hate. so after trotting my cute but really fairly invisble asscheeks down the homo information superhighway it took me a minute to find the drama in the forum, which is largely divided up into "for women only" and "for men only", but also has "for bisexuals" and "for trannies" and other things two. to my mind, this reflects fairly well the extent to which homohood in paris is segregated. most soirées are segregated, but one of the few exceptions to this is the Very Very Naughty Girls night that to the chagrin of many Janice Raymond fans and Michigan Womyn Fest lovers, allows both real and simulated dick to pass the doors (which surely signifies penetration). so it didn't take me long to find the hundred-or-so messages talking about the burlie gurlie drag show. and let me say, i was whizzed back years to a memory of me sitting on the grass at the Twat listening to a second waver ream me out for being not genderqueer, just a traitor, dick lover, and a confused anti-feminist girl. just as that second-waver so concisely hit upon the true nature of my social existence, so has gayvox revealed to me lessa's true nature: she is, among other things, a "cheap bisexual prostitute addicted to ass and dollaz" with no political agenda who was just hired to titillate the "invading penises". jesus christ, i think it is sad -- on a personal as well as intellectual level -- that queers and feminists still need to spend time refuting this kind of bullshit. first of all, drag and burlesque, if it is done well, usually attempts to be politically engaged. second of all, bisexuals and queers are indeed a threat to sexually hegemonic systems, and i don't think that's a bad thing. i do think it's a bad thing when homers with membership in conservative groups like the HRC show demand that straighters let them into their club "because they're just like them" and then turn around and shit on bisexuals and queers because they won't behave like straight people. thirdly, there's nothing wrong with establishing safe space for certain groups, but when all (or almomst all) space is cordoned off according to a hegemonic group system with no appreciation for the fact that some people who are marginalized in some ways can also have privilege in others, that is called fanatical hate.

so before i sign off, i have two nota benes:
(1) i think that hegemony is a yucky grad school word so here is a link to its definition but if you don't want to follow the link it just means "domination".
and
(2) i have been instructed by lessa that i am to say that she is my sexiest friend in all of paris.

love and diddles.

pony locked up in austerlitz!

okay, okay. i was indeed locked up in austerlitz, but it wasn't *that* austerlitz. it was the Gare d'Austerlitz metro station, and a tip for all of you visiting paris: avoid metro stations with "gare" in the title. so anyways, i will explain in one hot minute how VilePinHead got me locked up in austerlitz, but before that i must say that shit is going down fo'reals fo'reals in france. yesterday was the big protest day against the CPE, and about 3 million people were protesting. check it:

do also note the commie reds.
and in the last blog i talked about the skirry CRS riot cops in their body armour, looking like they're up for some hard core rollerblading. this is what they look like, with a touch of nazi too i might add:

i also have to note that they are, on some level, seriously stylin', aside from all the skirry nazi-looking tendencies. there's been multiple unpleasant encounters between protesters and the CRS, and tons of insults thrown around against the CRS (band of pigs, chickens, etc), and people talk about beating down the pigs.
so here's the thing i want to weigh in on...when i was at the GOP protest in 2000 in philly, there was this insane police presence, like seas of blue everywhere. and it's always the same thing, it's The Righteous Protesters versus The Cops. so after one long day of protest, my friend dylan and i were trying to find our way back to the tent city where we were staying in kensington, but we were a bit lost. we came upon 3 cops who were talking, and we looked at them like "are they going to beat us" all the while they were clearly looking at us and thinking either "are we going to have to beat them" or "are they going to shoot us?"
so we asked them how to get around, and we stayed awhile and started chatting with them. it was an amazing experience really, because we found out that the city was so freaked out by the amount of protests that they hired all these auxiliary cops from all over, and these guys we were talking with, they didn't have jobs, so even though they supported a lot of the protests, they were happy to get a job. and there's the thing; dylan and i were attached to the Empty the Shelters contingent and were working on poverty reform; and here these guys, The Enemy, The Cops--they were just trying to feed their families. that really made me think a lot about that juvenile "kill the pigs" kind of discourse that i threw around as a teenager, and that i hear so many folks throwing around now. so i was talking with a friend last night about this too, and he pointed out that when you think about it, there's a very fucked up class dynamic at protests, because a lot of protesters are "bobos" (bourgeois bohemians, or trustifarians) or upper/middle class, and they are hurling insults at the cops, who are most generally from lower class backgrounds. and that is not so good, i think. discuss.

okay, so back to pony trapped in austerlitz. yesterday was the big protest/general strike day. i have to say, the french know how to strike. they don't fuck around. there's even a high school where all the teachers and administration made their students go protest instead of going to class. this must have something to do with all the french revolutions (there's not just one...there was like 6. we'll talk about that some other time...)
so general strike. about 1/3 the usual metro trains, and pony, who is damn smart, decides to go hang out with folks on the north side of paris, which is pretty far away from where pony lives. um, its the distance between little 5 points and alphertater. or maybe coney island and washington heights. pony then, in its ongoing intelligence, hangs out there until midnight. surprise surprise, not a lot of trains at midnight when the trains people are on strike. i managed to get a train to about halfway home, stepped off the train in austerlitz, and that is the end of the train day. what's more, the austerlitz station is a pain in the anus, it is huge and changing trains there takes way too long. so at midnight:30 they decided to lock up all the exits, which leaves pony wandering around for a long time looking for a way out. i totally support the train people for going on strike, so i'm blaming vile pinhead instead for me getting trapped in austerlitz. i did finally get out and got to walk home.

so finally, my parents get here tomorrow. this is the neighborhood that their hotel is in:

that should be interesting. paris is definitely the city of lights.

whose streets?

so all of france is pissed off. not against me though--in fact they've offered me a bit of a present: an impromptu school vacation. i got up this morning to go teach, and when i turned the corner onto the street where the school is, i saw hundreds of students outside. at 9am, this was a bit out of protocol. then a bunch of my kids ran up to me to tell me that the students had taken over the school and barricaded it, so no classes for the rest of the day. you gotta love the french strike ethic; its like the american work ethic turned on its head. and instead of overworking, french students over-strike. but hey, only one of those gets me out of going to the jail.
so professional as always, when they told me this i have to admit that my immediate reaction was to do the fist-pulldown accompanied by saying "oh fuck yes". this kind of thing is why the students like me, but also why they are pretty misbehaved in my classes. having a mohawk and teaching things like the grammatical joys of the word 'fuck' (there is no equivalent in french, plus fuck can be almost any part of speech, so i think it's totally valid) and how to do the cock-rawk-lock do not seem to imbue me with the ability to make them behave in class.
but since the school makes it impossible for me to teach well, what the fuck (noun) do they expect?

by the way, the reason why the french are pissed off is not sarkozy (see picture below) (he was the one who was responsible for the recent riots, calling young men of color "voyous" [hooligans] and racailles [hoods], then saying he would bleach them [kacherise = a verb derived from a heavy-duty cleaning product] out of france.

text says: when i hear the word "ghetto", i go ahead and pull out my anti-riot gun

this time the hater is villepin (the prime minister). a quick key-player update: sarko is the racist and villepin is the sleazy capitalist. i propose calling him "vile pinhead". so anyway he has decided to push through a bill called the CPE (contrat de première embauche = first job contract) which means that companies can hire young people (under 26) without offering them a contract, and fire them at any time without giving notice or a reason. to americans, this doesn't sound so bad since most states have at-will employment, plus we americans, we work too much (the french work week is capped at 35 hours with at least 6 weeks of vacation a year). but i can understand why someone who goes and gets degrees and training and all this then tries to get a job with no security would be pissed. france is moving away from socialistic policy to sleazy capitalism. thanks, vile pinhead, for trying to push through a bill that 68% of france opposes strongly. don't you love elected representatives that represent their constituents like that? at least it means he won't get re-elected.

text says: Dominque de (Villepin), Laid-back. Diplomat. Superhero.

good news & bad news.

good news: in france, there is the PaCS (pacte civil de solidarité), which is the equivalent of a civil union. according to statistics, more people are pacsing than marrying (heteros too), and only 1 in 10 partnerships are dissolved. yesterday a french divorce court ruled that two lesbians with a baby (had by insemination, and carried by one of the mamans) who were un-pacsing themselves must share custody of their child.
go french divorce court!

bad news: in south dakota--which is the hardest state to get an abortion--is passing laws like crazy to challenge a woman's right to access abortion services. they are hoping that it goes to the new (and dis-improved) supreme court. quote: "In 2005, the South Dakota legislature passed five laws restricting abortion, after a bill to ban abortion outright had failed by one vote in 2004. And new laws are virtually assured for the coming year."
oh sandra day, why did you abandon us?

hoist the balls & prep the poop chutes!

once upon a time two young divas decided to take a fun trip to the sewers of paris. they thought it would be an interesting afternoon, learning the history of the the sewer system, and going underground in paris looking at old walls and tunnels and things. because how often do you get to go see old sewers? as they were walking down the stairs, one of them, whom we shall call monymoy, said: "hey you don't think it will smell bad down here, do you?" to which the other, whom we shall call shargaux replied, "i dont know, maybe..." so monymoy said, "naah, they wouldn't let folks come down into a sewer museum if it smelled bad, i mean, its a museum."

so the two young divas, dressed fabulously and smelling schweet, continued down the stairs. when they reached the bottom, they were relieved; they found themselves indeed in an old tunnel, and it smelled perfectly harmless. they came upon displays of manikins dressed like sewer workers:

the two (insightful and perceptive) divas noted that these manikins looked suspiciously homoschual, if you know what i mean. they decided that the strapping young man penetrating into the dark pipe must be inviting his friend that he met in the alley into his manhole. and all the other jauntily outfitted manikins throughout the tunnel all seemed to be engaged in similar manhole activities.

so shargaux and monymoy continued on, giggling a little bit all the way into the next tunnel, going deeper into the sewery history of paris. when they reached the third passage, both shargaux and monymoy quickly brought their (fabulous and classy) scarves over their (lovely) noses (with excellent bone structure). "oh sweet jesus" exclaimed the divas "what a horrid smell". and so it was that in the third tunnel, their (well-coiffed) hair frizzed a bit at the offensive and distinctly sewery smell. soon they came upon grated walkways overlooking an underground river:

mysterious machines hung over the river doing only god knows what. as monymoy was inspecting the machinery, suddenly (the stunningly lovely) shargaux exclaimed "oh my god there is poop in the river". monymoy (in his logical brilliance) began to assert "oh no way, they wouldnt let people into a museum if there was actually raw sewage floating around"....until he noticed a familiar shape, floating down the river. "are those condoms?"

as usual, monymoy was right. those were indeed condoms. and shargaux was also correct (as is the wont of classy and intelligent ladies), amid the condom were distinct turd-shaped boats, floating happily down shit river.

the divas, after staring incredulously at the digestive and sexual output of paris, decided to flee into the next tunnel. so they crossed the grated walkway overhanging the poo-ssippi, praying to all available deities that that walkway was very well installed. when they reached the next tunnel, their (marvellously tasteful) scarves still plastered over their noses and mouths, they to their anti-delight saw that the grated walkway continued. this tunnel featured information on the history of the sewers and the process of filtering used. both divas, being studious doctoral students as well as pretty, wished that they could read these panels and displays, but their stomachs were starting to feel a little queasy from the less than friendly smell of flowing parisian ass juice. startlingly, the two divas remarked that of all the other visitors to the lovely sewer museum, they were the only ones covering their noses. "what the fuck is wrong with these people?" exclaimed monymoy. "i have no idea but i think we should hustle our darling buns out of here" replied shargaux. and so they did.

in the next tunnel the offensive smell of chemically-treated anus lightened the slightest bit. "whew" sighed the two divas "thank god". in this tunnel they were able to admire the available information on the filtering process, which involved very large balls being inserted into the poop pipes. there was an abundant amount of displays showing different balls, and strapping sweaty men in uniforms laboriously inserting their large balls into their holes in the pipes. "hmm" uttered the two divas "they certainly decide on a thematic and develop it thoroughly". the big balls were indeed impressive:

they moved more slowly through this tunnel, admiring the strapping sweaty menses' handling of their big balls. when they came to the next tunnel, their (elegant) scarves covered once again their (still elegant although repeatedly offended) noses. and finally, at the end, they espied a kind of poopish tributary to the great poo-river:

luckily for you, dear readers, this picture does not depict well the post-filtering sludge treats that inspired our two lovely heroes to wretch, squeal and run like little girls towards the exit. because they are classy ladies, they did not recount to me the details of that sludge. and so they ran to the gift shop at the exit, gleefully playing with the pens that--like the pens sold in truck shops across the great america depict a lady or a man's clothes coming off when you tip them down-- the pens that showed a man dropping his ball into a hole. "my my" pronounced the divas "they do keep so lovingly to their theme".

and so the divas fled, feeling a bit abashed at their lack of foresight. many have since mocked the poor divas, but they, having witnessed the filtering process of city water, do now possess a knowledge that allows them to laugh in reply as others drink their tap water.