kerouac says

i could get used to it.

it sounds cliche to admit that it is ridiculously beautiful here. we are out of provence, in the dordogne valley, and everything looks fairy tale. except for the occasional cell phone or undersized sedan.

and we are all getting along. its pretty easy to set frustration with your familys peccadiloes aside when theres always a new castle around the corner. i havent eaten near enough pastry, but working on it.

also cliche: i feel enormously lucky. all of us here, all of us healthy, all of us capable of happiness. i miss the monkey like i left half of an arm at home, though. i think maybe i wont come back without him. we are a unit of measure, now, and its not quite family without him.

funny keyboard means no contractions (i cannot find the apostrophe). pls forgive.

suddenly, my cookie problem has evaporated. the french bizarro keyboard is making this awkward, but see comment below for half update.

the bad news is the inexplicable ubiquity of bad american pop songs. i had forgotten. good news; everything else.

so, brit boss works right beside me now. and he bought this expensive coffee machine for work--it's a cuisinart one that grinds the beans and then makes the coffee. every evening he sets it up for the next morning's use: tosses the grounds, rinses the gold filter, washes the pot, fills it with water. he gets in earlier than most of us, so i understand why the coffee is important.

but for the last week or two, every time i've been at my desk when he starts the evening coffee pot ritual, he's asked me to help him--carry the pot, or do some rinsing, or something. this is weird for three reasons.

i do not drink the coffee from this pot.

it is totally a one-person job that takes only two hands and about five minutes.

he does not seem ever to ask anyone else to help.

it's not like whoever's around when it's time for the coffee task gets roped into helping. i've never heard him ask anyone else. so, what is this? is it because i'm new in the department? is it because i have boobs? is it because i'm the youngest?

and i've gotten oddly paranoid about it, like i'll hide in the bathroom when he starts getting ready to leave the office. i did that yesterday and then came out when i thought it was safe, skirted our desk area and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. he was there, finishing up, and said: "would you mind taking this back?" and handed me the carafe full of water.

and then he walked right behind me back to our desk area, carrying four ounces of plastic in one hand, with the other one empty. WTF?

i am oddly creeped out by this. i'll keep you posted.

in other news, i am newly mini-obsessed with being pretty. the combo plate of continuing bad haircut recovery (yep, 10 months later, it still completely sucks) and an unexplained and shame-inducing spate of bad skin have gotten me twisted up like you wouldn't expect.

and it's about to get better. i mean, worse. i ran out of birth control. i thought i had another refill--because, you know, i had a perfectly fine pelvic and pap a year and a half ago, and am not due for another for at least six months and according to some guidelines eighteen months, so i mis-remembered the prescription as being renewable for a long stretch of time. no. the doctor only gave me scrip for six months' worth of pills. why? i called and asked. so i'd be compelled come back and "check in" in six months in order to get another.

check in? for what? to tell you some more about my long-term monogamous relationship and outstanding record of responsible self-care? oddly, this guy gave me a year's worth of antidepressants without blinking, though he did request "a note"--a note! like, to get out of gym class--from my therapist. weirdo.

so, the upshot is that i can't get back to Dr. Stingy Pills before leaving for france, so i gotta go off the pill for at least a month, probably two. so glad that his conservative treatment has now made me MORE LIKELY to get pregnant. chump.

it's also making me significantly less likely to have gotten over this bad patch of adult acne before the wedding of the one who is least afraid. which, you know, it'll be fine, and i wish it didn't matter so much to me, but the idea of being spotty at this viva glam wedding is so, so unappetizing. sigh.

i got an email from an old teacher today letting me know that this guy who taught at my high school died in his sleep last night at 59. which is terrible and odd and the weirder thing is that i can't find any information about it at all on the interwebs. i checked the hometown paper, my high school's website .. . olympia isn't the fastest moving place on the planet, but usually when someone dies, they announce it.

i did, however, find ample coverage of this.

hoquiam, you are not safe.

someone from here is interested in talking to me about programming. that's never a bad thing.

i haven't seen the monkey in so long. this is what happens when we both work full time, him at night and me during the day. lemme just say, it sucks. i eat crap when he's not around. mac and cheese two nights running.

i'm sorting out my student loans. there's something i wasn't sure i'd ever say again.

and let me just say this: i think the world is possible only because there are some people who try to do the right thing. not just recycling, not just holding the door, not just turning in the found wallet. when someone changes the way they do something because their old way occasionally barked your shins, or put the sugar where you can't reach it, or made you want to combust in frustration inside your chest . . . that is some good stuff.

this guy who taped my solo show on a kind whim, because he was taping another performer that night and had space left over on the tape, has not only agreed to help me come up with a sample for a festival application by monday, but is doing it for free.

he says his mother told him what she wanted for mother's day was for him to do something nice for someone. this, without any skeevy energy on his part whatsoever. he said he just really likes my show, and wants to help.

i don't know who i like better, this guy or his mom.

on our incredible bike ride on saturday, we stopped to eat our picnic lunch. as we walked the bikes down the path to the pond, i was talking about some of the bennies involved with being an NYU student. i'm pretty excited about the big gym/health center. the monkey is wondering if there is a way for him to get in on that action.

"i dunno," i say. "they offer some benefits to same sex domestic partners or spouses, but you have to pay. and there's the 'same sex' part."

"so unfair!" the monkey cried. "why would they discriminate against us?"

"well, we could get married if we wanted to, which isn't true for everybody."

"true." pause. "should we do that registration thing?"

silence silence silence.

this came up a few months ago, when an older friend in a committed relationship said that he and his girlfriend went to city hall and regisered their partnership. you should do it, he said. it's a good idea. i mentioned it to the monkey, but my feeling was that it's more important for us to sign the papers giving each other power of attorney and leaving our equity in the apartment to each other in the case of unimaginable disaster. we keep forgetting to do this, and remembering and getting it done is probably important than waltzing off to city hall to gain a title.

but he, apparently, kind of wants to do it.

i'm curious about why. my instinct is that he's interested in this 'registration' for the same reason he goes out of his way to use the Equity discount at Kinko's: he loves qualifying for any new toy or priviledge, regardless of its actual value or utility. i asked him if it was more about practicality--gaining the right to visit each other in the hospital--or more about some sort of public recognition of what we are.

and he said it was the latter. which, actually, is nice. but confusing, because he did not say: let's announce it and have a party with our friends where everyone wears funny hats! let's make a special day! let's call your parents! let's buy each other rubber bracelets! or anything that would make doing this thing an actual statement to anyone around us. not to mention the giganticly begged question of why one wouldn't go about satisfying the desire for public and legal recognition with what we traditionally call a wedding.

in fact, he didn't say he wanted me to be his registered partner, or ask me if i would. he asked me if i thought we should do it. groan. the love of my life is such a weenie. he's too shy to ball up even for the st. joesph's baby aspirin of all proposals.

how badly can you want something if you can't even bring yourself to ask for it?

if you want to know where i am when i zone out of your meeting this afternoon, i am far inside my mental filing cabinet planning my 36 hours in paris.

right now, something about this stolen outing tacked on to my by-itself-splendid-and-luxurious vacation is driving me bananas with the best kind of anticipatory juju. partly because, duh, paris, and partly because i wasn't expecting to get to stop on my way to the airport and it just sort of magically happened that way, which totally feels like: woah, free paris. partly also because i know that two weeks of being a daughter in the country is going to make it feel so fantastically good to get on the train to paris and spend a day and a half tearing all over hell, doing drinking smoking eating and seeing whatever i want. i will have a hotel room for the night, but i'm not really planning to use it.

a tiny bit more than a day there is so freeing. there are no "have-tos" when you've only got a day. i really should go back to the musee d'orsay. i loved it, and it's been years, and i really should go back. but i only have a day, so i guess i'll eat chocolate in the park instead! i really should try to go to that museum with the picassos, too, and to mass at the church where i crashed a funeral during my last visit and see that one mosque i read about in someone's novel, but: only a day! guess i'll have to sit by the river with an ice cream and do whatever i want instead!

and man, i am going to stay up late and get up early and sleep like a tree trunk on the plane. i am not missing one bit of parisian daylight. i am going to take those photos you can only get at dawn. i'm going to have that conversation you can only have after midnight. and for once in my life, no naps. i am going to get it on.