January still

I've been back from Paris for a week and a day now. My jet lag is gone, but January is still here. I took Neko for a brisk walk today, and boy was it brisk.

This is a photo of one of my few but -- I think -- well chosen purchases in Paris. It's the Caroline bag by Lili Cabas. Great bags, great prices. I wanted a red bag; I don't know why. This one is cool and I love the vertical silver lines. Plus, I didn't pay a fortune for it. I found it in a small, funky shop near my apartment. The main Lili Cabas store is in the 10th, on Rue des Petites Ecuries. So forget Lancel and the Champs-Elysées.

I took my Seattle friend to Lancel because she was intent on buying a bag from there on sale. The bag she bought was not on sale, and it was expensive. The store was overheated, made worse by the intense lighting on the upper floor. It was like being in an oven, with an extremely tenacious Franco-asian saleswoman following my friend everywhere. That bugs me about the Lancel shop at the top of the Champs. They have a better selection than the Rond Point store, but boy are they clingy.

At the same time, I understand that they don't want people pawing their pretty things. The saleswoman at the Rond Point store tried to do a little pre-sales wheeling and dealing, but it did not work on my friend. I saw a lot of pre-sales W&D going on. It felt a bit like living near Place de Cliché, as I did for a few years. At all times of day, the racoleurs would be out on the sidewalk soliciting passers-by. On the night before the sales officially began, lots of stores in the Marais were open. As I walked past, stopping to look in the windows, people would come out of nowhere and offer me special, illegal deals. Tonight only, cash only. Not interested.

Modest proposals

Since I became a university student again, I have gotten tons of "proposals", most of them blocked by my spam filter. None of them have anything to do with marriage, which is probably a good thing because I am already married, and happily so, and polygamy is illegal. The "proposals" in question all concern making extra money as a student. They generally involve telemarketing and stuff.

The subjects of email proposals and polygamy are just pretexts to mention that my friend and waitress extraordinaire Nicole Hardy managed to get published in the NY Times and find an agent while I was away in France. I saw her just before I left, so I knew about the NY Times gig. The agent and the article by Nicole Brodeur of the Seattle Times came about while I was away.

Nicole (Hardy, not Brodeur) wrote a short autobiographical piece about the experience of being a practicing Mormon woman who wants love and marriage but not children and about the resulting experience of finding herself a virgin at 36. Now an agent wants her to write the rest of her story. Personally, my favorite part of Nicole's essay was the part about Planned Parenthood -- the disconnect between what she had learned to think of PP and how she felt being taken into care by PP. It was really poignant and made my eyes well up with tears.

I just now read Brodeur's article and started to read the 178 comments it generated. But I had to stop fairly quickly, because the religious nuts seem to have taken over the comments section. How boring. One comment really pissed me off. Here it is:

It's bad enought that Hardy sinned. That she disclosed it, even bragged about it is despicable. The she profited from it is evil.

The sin? I suppose for the commenter, it was losing her virginity outside of marriage.
She did indeed disclose it, in an indirect way. Her essay does not describe her "deflowering" or name names.
Bragged about it? Well, if she did not really talk about it, then how can she be accused of bragging about it?
Profited from it? By getting an agent? Are you kidding me? She's a writer with two published books of poetry to her credit.

Whatever. She's a hard-working and talented writer, a generous human being and a wonderful waitress. She wears great t-shirts, like the one that says "talk nerdy to me" on it. Words like despicable and evil are out of place. She did not start World War Three or gun down innocent bystanders. See for yourselves. Just click on the title and it will take you to her essay for Modern Love, which appeared on January 9, 2011 in the NY Times. She bared her soul and got $300 bucks for it.

Time management is the key, but what is the key to time management?

You know I don't make New Year's resolutions. It isn't that I feel I am not perfectible - au contraire! - but the word resolution brings to mind the image of a treadmill, one that you get on and then feel stuck on, watching the clock, wishing you were elsewhere.

Perhaps another reason I don't like making resolutions is that they seem part of the ceaseless quest for "self improvement", a peculiarly American malady. There is something dispiriting to me about the idea of self improvement. In my mind, it is linked to another peculiarly American malady: perpetual dissatisfaction.

I prefer the Emersonian notion of self reliance to the "Oprahesque" notion of self improvement. Emerson was an American, so why does self reliance seem to be so foreign in this country? I met a Frenchman once at a wedding; he was the husband of the sister of the groom. He basically told me that he thought Americans were the least self reliant people on the planet (he called us "un peuple d'assistés"). I thought he was full of shit at the time, but I have since come to see what he meant. I think he has a point. But never mind. Today's rant is about time management, something I am hopeless at.

So I don't make resolutions, but I have had an epiphany: time management is the key. The question, however, is this: what is the key to time management? I wish I knew. All the ideas that come to me sound repugnant: stuff like ruthless dedication to a schedule, obsession with control, constant motion, intricate planning, no tolerance for mishaps and serendipity. Maybe I have the wrong attitude.

I'm going to study the issue and get back to y'all. I'm going to see if there is any useful advice out there about time management. And I will admit that I would like to improve my time management skills. Maybe this year. Or maybe I'll put it off until next year, I don't know. Hmmm....I think I'll see what the WWW (world wide wisdom) is on the issue of time management. Is this just another self-deceiving ploy to postpone the huge job that is staring me in the face?

I have done some preliminary research and, as I suspected, list-making is a popular piece of advice. It is true that, when you have a list of short tasks to complete, lists can be helpful and even necessary. But what if your tasks are things like this?

1. Integrate all of the extensive revisions made to the French version of the 90-page book you just translated.

2. Find a workable topic for a 25-page paper, needed to get credit for the seminar you took in winter of 2010, find the right secondary materials and write the paper.

3. Do all of the bookkeeping that you masterfully avoided doing over the entire twelve months of the previous year ended (note to W: I am exaggerating!).

4. Finish reading A la recherche du temps perdu, a 3,000 page masterpiece that I have read about 500 pages of.

You get the point. Do I really need a list to remember that these things are hanging over my head at all times? When I look at these tasks and think about the number of hours needed to complete each one, I get dizzy and my jet lag asserts itself. Sleep, it says. Close your eyes. Put down the book. Look at Neko. She has solved the time management problem once and for all. Here she is, giving a public lecture on the subject to a rapt audience.

Jardin des Plantes

Casque obligatoire!

Initially, I thought I would write regular posts during my 2+ weeks in Paris. But the fact of the matter is twofold: I would rather be doing than writing about it and, more importantly, the "livebox" (wifi router) in the apartment I was staying in did not work. I tried without much enthusiasm to fix it. I did figure out that the 26-letter code I had been given was wrong. I figured this out by finally counting each individual digit one by one, which in fact is not that easy to do. There were 27 numbers and letters in my WEP key. I even figured out which was the letter "de trop" in the code I had been given. But even this genius technology intervention on my part did not do the trick. I quickly decided not to spend hours and hours on the problem and found a nearby café with free wifi instead. This actually solved several problems, like what to have for breakfast. For information, un grand crème, followed by un café allongé. The only downside to this arrangement was that I had to be in the café to connect, which in fact is not such a downside after all. I connected less with the wired world and a lot more with the real world. And how can that be bad?

Anyway, freed from the self-imposed obligation of posting, I was more observant of my world. The first thing I noticed was that if you want to be hip in Paris, and provided that you are between the ages of about 13 and 25, you have to be wearing super big, super visible headphones. The days of smaller and more discreet ones are over, at least for now. And the funny thing is, this look is hard to pull off if you are over 25. I saw many who tried and just as many who failed. They all managed only to look as if they were trying too damned hard to be hip.

I asked Julien, who is 19 and the son of a good friend, what was up with the big 'phones when I noticed he had one in his possession. He denied it was a fad and insisted he only owned them because they are practical. Fashion groupies always pretend to be oblivious to whatever trend they are slavishly following. I don't mean this as a criticism of Julien, who I suspect really gave it no thought. He just bought a set of big 'phones, like everyone else. The funny thing is, and it truly makes me laugh, is that on this basis I am way ahead of the pack. I started using big 'phones ages ago, simply because the little ones hurt my ears and never fit right. Plus, they make me feel like I could get a massive headache any time. I have never trusted tiny earphones. So I walk my dog on Alki daily, listening to podcasts through oversize 'phones. To all you suckers looking at me like I am some sort of throwback to the past, some kind of cave woman, all I can say is that you clearly haven't been to Paris lately.

I have to go now. Jet lag is taking over my brain.

Best of 2010

It's over, 2010. So last year. 2011 is here and I am starting the year off right with a dinner composed of the best marinara sauce (sauce tomate) in the universe, made by the W.
We saw the year out properly too, with a Moroccan dinner inspired by Nawal, who was here from Paris via Fez last year but - alas! - not this year.

Three days later...

This was going to be my first day of the year post, but I got called away to eat that marinara sauce and then got involved in watching a movie "on demand". A very good movie on demand. One of the best of 2010, at least as far as I am concerned. It's called Please Give and stars Catherine Keener, one of the best actors around, as a guilty white liberal from the Upper West Side waiting for her bitchy elderly neighbor to die so that she and her husband can break down the wall separating their apartments and expand. The couple's day job is selling newly hip and hugely marked-up furniture from the past that they mainly purchase from the bereaved adult children of the kind of elderly people who live next door. Thematically, it reminded me of a largely overlooked novel by Nick Hornby from a few years back called How to be Good.
I recently mentioned True Grit, also a top movie pick for 2010, though it is not destined to be as underwatched as Please Give.

Did I see other movies in 2010? I went to SIFF, but all the films I saw, mostly French, were released in 2009. We liked Roman Polanski's The Ghostwriter, but I can't even remember if we saw it in 2010. Could have been 2009. I also liked a Claire Denis film I saw two weeks ago called White Material, which ran for a nanosecond at the Harvard Exit. Isabelle Huppert is always great as a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. In fact, one of the best movies I revisited in 2010 was Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, starring Isabelle Huppert as a madwoman/postal worker who kills her baby and then, in an act of cold blood fueled by simmering class resentment, an entire family. Sounds grim, doesn't it? But actually, the movie is quite funny.

There were notable books in 2010 as well, though the only ones I read that were actually published in 2010 were Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, Just Kids by Patti Smith, and Angel Face, by Barbie Latza Nadeau, about University of Washington exchange student Amanda Knox, who was convicted in Italy in December of 2009 of participating in the murder of her then roommate, British Erasmus student Meredith Kercher. Knox and her erstwhile boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, are currently serving time while awaiting the outcome of their appeal, a process that is automatic in Italy. Unless you have been brainwashed by woefully biased coverage in the US, you probably know that the case against the pair (and the third accomplice, Rudy Guede, who has exhausted all appeals in Italy) is strong and was well-argued by the prosecution. Two forensic items (out of far more than that number) are being re-examined and a couple of new witnesses will be heard. The prosecution is asking for a stiffer sentence, as it feels the first court was too lenient in sentencing Knox to 26 years and Sollecito to 25.

2010 was also the year in which I got back into yoga for real. It started on my birthday, as a gift to myself, and now feels like something necessary and good.

And finally, 2010 was a year of graduate study in French at the University of Washington. One class at a time, since I also have a full-time job. I feel blessed to be doing this at my age. And I have a 4.0 GPA so far, with one incomplete. I hope to write a paper next summer to fulfill the requirement that will erase the incomplete.

On the work front, the impact of the global financial crisis on my profession, financial translation, has been significant and is probably permanent. There are fewer transactions; financial services firms, banks and start-ups are less willing to spend money on translations, etc. This is an endlessly repeated cycle, but this time around the trough is longer and deeper. No matter. I feel blessed to still have work with clients I have had the pleasure of knowing for more than a decade; I feel even more blessed that they decided to stay with me when I moved back to the US. Sometimes I get kind of cranky, like when I have to work on the weekend or late at night. But on the whole, I feel blessed because I am self-employed, which offers a tremendous amount of liberty and autonomy, and also because I do work that allows me to use a rare skill and more than 50% of my brain. Even at its most boring, repetitive and stressful, translation remains a challenge; and I still take genuine pride in the finished product.

I'm not really one to make New Year's resolutions. But maybe it would be fun to try.

To be continued...

The Coen Brothers nail it with True Grit

As we left the movie theater the other night after seeing the Coen Brothers' rendition of True Grit (I am not going to call it a remake, so there), I was feeling the happy buzz one gets when one has no particular expectations and they are wildly surpassed. It isn't that I expected the Coen Brothers to do a bad job, they never do, or that I was worried their True Grit would not be as good as the first movie version, the John Wayne vehicle made in 1969. In fact, I never much liked the 1969 movie, perhaps because I never much liked John Wayne. It seemed he was always in the boring movies that played at the Burien Theater, the ones that dominated the Saturday matinée line-up. You know, like The Sands of Iwo Jima. I never liked his voice much or his looks. Somewhere, I once saw a photo of him wearing short shorts. I think it had to do with rumors about his sexual orientation. I have been unable to locate the photo since, but I found a website forum devoted to a discussion of his manhood in which a poster refers to this famous photo. He couldn't relocate it either.
The forum is hilarious, by the way. Lots of trite statements such as "He was a man's man" on one side and "Of course he was gay" on the other.
I didn't hate the first attempt to bring True Grit to the screen, and it was Wayne's best role, in my opinion. He played a bit against type and he was getting old. But Kim Darby as Mattie Ross just did not work. For one thing, she was too old at 21 to play a 14-year old. And Mattie Ross's wisdom beyond her youth is central to the story. She has true grit and she eventually brings it out in the other two.
So back to the present. We were leaving the movie theater and Walt said, with disappointment, "that was good but it wasn't so much about Rooster Cogburn." He said this just as I was thinking, with elation, "that was good because it wasn't about Rooster Cogburn." What makes the Coen Brothers' rendition so winning is that they have stayed truer to the story and made it about Mattie, told from her point of view. And after looking at more than 15,000 aspiring Mattie Rosses, they cast Hailee Steinfeld in the role. She is 14. And she gives a commanding performance. Her partners, Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, are outstanding as well. And to their credit, they treat her as an equal acting partner and not a child. It shows through in the resulting film.
Whenever a Coen Brothers movie comes out, people debate over whether it is a "major" or a "minor" Coen Brothers. I don't get involved too much in these debates. I have liked almost everything they have done, even Intolerable Cruelty. No matter what story they are telling, they know how to write dialogue and shape plot and they film beautifully. Their movies are beautiful to look at. In addition, the casting for the minor roles is always perfect, with some great faces and voices. The opening scene of True Grit is beautiful to look at. Just the camera pointed at a boarding house in the dark, with the voiceover of the mature Mattie Ross. It isn't until the end that the eye is drawn to a dead body lying on the ground below the steps. It's a small thing, but a beautiful thing. And the scene near the end, where Rooster carries the injured Mattie to safety on the back of her horse Blackie, is almost like an animated fairy tale. The night, the prairie, the little house in the woods. Beautiful.
It's major Coen Brothers.

Maureen Dowd meets Patti Smith

I have nothing to add to what she said.
Walt and I saw Patti read from her book in Seattle last year. She is magical; she is mystical; she is ageless and full of grace. She's what I want to be when I get older.

Livraison avant Noël

A Elisabeth, maman de Mathilde, ainsi qu'à toute sa famille, nous vous souhaitons un Joyeux Noël! On vous a envoyé un paquet cadeau ce matin à midi. Le paquet est parti en bon état et nous espérons qu'il vous arrivera en pleine forme! Le voici hier soir avec son nouveau tapis de yoga. Namaste!

Mon jardin d'hiver

C'est pas triste, ça?

Demain, c'est la nuit la plus longue de l'année. Après, les nuits se raccourcissent petit à petit... Décembre, le mois le plus redouté (et redoutable?) de l'année. Il fait froid, le manque de soleil est pesant et cruel. La grisaille quoi. Les grises mines. Les âmes grises aussi. Tout le monde semble avoir le cafard, ce mélange néfaste de tristesse et de déprime. On a envie de ne rien faire, de tout faire mais ailleurs. Bon, c'est mieux que la pluie de novembre. Demain, c'est aussi la pleine lune. C'est rare de voir coïncider la pleine lune et le solstice d'hiver. Soyons joyeux! Plus rarissime encore, l'alignement terre/lune/soleil qui produit les éclipes est également prévu pour demain, le 21 décembre 2010.

Calendrier de l'Avent

Le nôtre est rempli de petites friandises.
Maintenant, il ne nous reste plus que 23 jours d'attente!
Avec une chanson pour chaque jour (il faut cliquer sur le titre).

Noir Désir n'est plus

After Téléphone, Noir Désir was France's most popular rock group. Its musical career was abruptly cut short when lead singer Bertrand Cantat "accidentally" killed his then companion, actrice Marie Trintingant, in Vilnius (Lithuania), where she was shooting a made-for-television film. He only wanted to shake her up a bit, according to Cantat, but unfortunately her head came into contact with the heavy metal radiator in their hotel room and she died, presumably while Cantat slept.




This happened in July 2003 and Cantat was tried, found guilty and sentenced in Lithuania to eight years of prison, from which he was conditionally released in late 2007. Marie Tritingant's parents, devastated by her death and what they considered to be overly lenient punishment for Cantat, were not happy when Cantat was let out early for good behavior. Since then, he has quietly pursued his interrupted musical career. But the band's recent "retour sur scène" did not sit well with some observers (myself included). I was not really surprised to hear that the guitarist Serge Teyssot-Gay had decided to leave the group, citing "la situation d'indécence qui caractérise la situation du groupe depuis plusieurs années" in addition to musical, emotional and human discord with Cantat. Ouf! I'm glad someone said it! This statement was followed a day or two later by one from the drummer, who said he was speaking for two other members of the group, announcing the end of Noir Désir.

Did I mention that Bernard Cantat was actually married to or living long term with another woman when he met Marie Tritingnant? Her name was Kristina Rady. In January of this year, she hung herself while Bertrand Cantat slept upstairs in the house they were apparently sharing. She was found by one of the couple's children. If I remember correctly, she stood by her man throughout the aftermath of Marie Tritingnant's death, and even went so far as to state that he had never, ever been phsycially violent with her, though others contested this, insisting that she had complained of physical violence in the past.




The whole thing is incredibly sordid and sad. I don't feel pity for Bertrand Cantat, but I do wonder where one goes from here. How does a person continue on from such a dark place? Is there any possibility of redemption? What kind of Act Three would not be indécent?

Où sont les neiges d'antan?

Ici, apparemment.
This is the world we woke up to today. White rooftops, tiny flakes, cold temperatures. Can chestnuts roasting on an open fire be far behind?

An office that is messier than mine

This is the office of novelist and Bainbridge Island resident Jonathan Evison. Jonathan (we are on a first name basis now) was kind enough to come and talk to a group of about 20 people in West Seattle, most of whom had read his first published novel All About Lulu. Jonathan would probably not be happy to know that I found touches of John Irving in All About Lulu. I say this because he made an offhand comment about Irving getting into trouble sometimes, because he has too many people and too many coincidences cluttering his stories. I think this is a bit harsh; Irving is a great storyteller and, like Evison, focuses on the traditional stuff of fiction: a good story, interesting people, unfortunate events, tragedy even, told with a touch of humor.
Jonathan Evison has a new novel coming out in February 2011 called West of Here. Consider this a plug. It sounds promising: sweeping, tons of complex characters, set on the Olympic Peninsula, 41 different narrative voices, the story weaves in and out of the 19th century and our own time.
I recommend this author, so shut up and read.

Le bruit qui court...

In France, the firing of three employees for writing derogatory comments about their bosses and the HR manager on Facebook has just been upheld in a labor court (industrial tribunal) decision.

This whole Facebook thing has me troubled. I de-activated my account some time ago, after a cyber-friend got upset (freaked out) when I friended one of her cyber-enemies. Having written horrible things about this cyber-enemy, the cyber-friend was afraid that the cyber-enemy would see photos of her grandchild and come after her in the dead of night. I'm not kidding. I was in trouble for friending someone without consulting every other existing friend to see if anyone had a problem with me friending the cyber-enemy. I decided the whole thing was too ridiculous to spend time on and shut down my account altogether.

And you know what? Betty White was right: What a time suck facebook is! Goodbye Facebook, hello 90-minute flow yoga class at 8 Limbs. Goodbye Facebook, hello longer walk with Neko at Lincoln Park. Goodbye Facebook, hello an extra chapter of A la recherche du temps perdu... tiens, tiens. A post-modern meaning of the title of Proust's book has just hit me in the Face! Goodbye Facebook, hello real books!

And tonight, at the Columbia Tower Club, I'll be tasting the 2010 Beaujolais nouveau at a fancy party put on by the French American Chamber of Commerce in Seattle. I know it is all just a marketing ploy and blah blah blah, but you can't beat the top of the tower and a delicious buffet! Who needs Facebook friends?

Magical Thinking

One of the smartest people ever. And certainly one of America's best writers ever. Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Miami. Play it as it Lays. The Year of Magical Thinking, of course. A Book of Common Prayer.

She once described herself as the perpetual outsider. A shy, bookish child. Devoted to her craft.

Mourning in America?

In the silver lining department, here are a couple of things to be thankful for:

1. Tea Party darling Christine O'Donnell was defeated.

Give me some time, folks. I'll find some more...

Okay, here's another one:

2. Jerry Brown is back. Does anyone remember him? He was governor of California from 1975 to 1983 (something like that). He was then the youngest elected governor of California and dated cool people like Linda Ronstadt. Now he is the oldest ever and, in the meantime, has gotten married. California always has cool governors. At least some things never change.

What else?

3. The Democrats have shown themselves to be more cooperative than the Republicans, so perhaps politics will become a shade less divisive. Actually, while I believe the first part of the equation, I know the second part is just wishful thinking.

The fact is, the vast majority of Americans do not take the time to consider the issues and weigh the consequences of their voting decisions. We get the governance we deserve. People are upset about the economy but not interested in getting mired down in thinking about the causes. They just want it to be fixed. Those who have been relatively spared are more desperate than ever to hang onto what they have. Incidentally, it was not a good time to ask voters in the State of Washington to think rationally and responsibly about taxation. The results -- disastrous for our state -- are fairly predictable. I live in a state where, apparently, it is okay with the majority to have everyone either home-schooled or wealthy enough to go to private schools. No one seems to think that the public schools deserve any funding at all. And, apparently, we have no qualms about taking an important source of funding away from our state government because it is more important to be able to buy booze at 3 pm and at 3 am from all-night convenience stores. I can't wait to share the road with these people. And forget about replacing that source of revenue with another; the voters have decided to make it even more difficult to raise taxes. What a fun state we live in! I love potholes, by the way, which is a really good thing because there are bound to be more and more of them.

The irony of the image at the top is that without public funding, effective law enforcement becomes impossible. I guess we are headed towards privatizing that too.

Fall hues

It was a perfect day to visit Seattle's Sculpture Park. The autumn chill was unmistakeable in spite of the sun. We also managed to get the yard and deck ready to hunker down for fall/winter. And our candy bowl is filled with treats for the costumed; we may have to take it to the streets again this year. Nobody comes our way because we live on a steep hill. Walt's grandson stopped by for a treat yesterday, but he wasn't wearing his lumberjack costume. However, I think what he was wearing is indistinghuishable from it.

A little bit of Picasso visits Seattle

The Musée Picasso in Paris is closed for renovation and expansion. Il était temps! That splendid museum, which is actually a converted 17th century townhouse in the Marais, could only display 300 of Picasso's works at a time (out of the 5,000 in its possession!), faute de place.

Some 150 of these works have made their way to Seattle, and other works have been packaged and shipped elsewhere, for public viewing while the work is carried out on the museum.

We got to go last night as part of a special evening sponsored by Alliance française. Our visit included wine, cheese and a brief but very informative pre-tour talk by SAM's Chiyo Ichikawa. Is it worth seeing Picasso in Seattle? Yes, I think so. The selection made available to SAM gives viewers a sense of the breadth and diversity of Picasso's long and protean career as an artist. And it is always exciting to see actual paintings and sculptures as opposed to photos of them in books. Like the work of any great artist, Picasso's needs to be viewed the flesh to be fully appreciated, I think.

Everyone will find something to like. Personally, I enjoyed watching a couple of Robert Picault's black and white videos of Picasso at work in the studio circa 1950. I also liked some of the photos, including a couple of self-portraits.



It was strange to see Picasso exhibited in Seattle, out of his element somehow. Maybe this is because I associate Picasso with the Musée Picasso in Paris, which I lived very close to for a couple of years during my Marais period. My apartment was on Rue Saint Antoine, which is near St Paul, La Bastille and La Place des Vosges. I used to walk by the Picasso museum on my way to visit a friend who -- get this -- was living in the magnificent Paris townhouse owned by the Farah Diba, wife of the deposed Shah of Iran. I won't get into why or how my friend ended up there, or even where it was located exactly. But it was an incredible place by anyone's standards. My friend was the daughter of an ex "political analyst for the State Department" (wink, wink). National security prevents me from saying another word about her or the Farah's townhouse. I value my ongoing existence.

Dysfunctional family

Yesterday I dropped a teeny tiny little thing behind the sofa (I was trying to move a huge and heavy painting 2 millimeters to the right), which meant pulling out the sofa to find it. Yikes! If anyone out there is missing anything, chances are Pushy has hidden it under our sofa. I could not believe the stash. Too bad I have forgotten to recharge my camera batteries for a week now, or I would have photographic evidence that my non-disabled cat, in addition to being evil, is a hoarder.
Nothing is too small or insignificant for her. She apparently loves wine corks and beer bottle caps. There were dozens of them. Straws too (we had a six-year old living in our basement for three months recently), not to mention paper clips, pens and pencils (many chewed on by Neko), dog toys, cat toys, chunks of dog and cat food, half eaten dog treats, balls of dust and hair (I'm not sure Pushy is to blame for this stash), several of Neko's cherished bones, money (spare change mostly), Jimmy Hoffa's dead body.... You name it, it was under the sofa.
But that's not the worst of it. In addition to living with a hoarder, we live with a bulimic. Neko, who has been particularly cunning of late in her never-ending quest to sneak a bite of cat poop as soon as our backs are turned, immediately began trying to eat the huge pile of gross, greasy, dusty stash that was under the sofa. She's bulimic! Except that she only binges, never purges. At least she doesn't eat her own poop. That would be really gross.
On that cheery note, I'm outta here for some yoga. Namaste y'all!