December 11

Oh! I forgot to tell you that I went to Paris this summer!

I was all set to show you photos of it but the uploader isn’t working for inscrutable reasons of its own. So I guess I have to resort to words.

Paris looks exactly like Paris. It’s a shock, seeing as how so many places don’t really look like themselves these days, except maybe for a little bit in the middle. You can see the sky everywhere in Paris because they don’t believe in tall buildings. They also don’t really believe in ugly buildings. They have some, but they don’t believe in them.

Paris also tastes exactly like Paris. I went into a little bit of mourning when I came back to America because it had become clear to me how terribly wrong almost everything about our food is, from the ingredients to the preparation to the quantity to the places we eat it to the amount of time we take to eat it. I’m not sure how sanguine I can be about the future of a country that doesn’t even know how to eat.

I understand spoken French on about the level of a three- to five-year-old child, though I don’t speak it nearly that well. One of the things I want to do someday is stay in France until I can speak the language like a grownup or at least a middle-schooler.

My sister and I stayed in the 11th arrondissement, which is now my favorite arrondissement, in the Airbnb apartment of a woman whose furnishings were so exactly to our taste and so perfectly French that we want to be Céline when we grow up. Or maybe just we want to be ourselves, but in the 11th arrondissement.

That’s all I’ve got today, no poetry, maybe tomorrow.