Thanks for all my jpg-formatted birthday presents yesterday, gang! You're too kind. Did... did you all get jpg-formatted gift receipts for those, by any chance?

Man, my birthday was awesome: I woke up to a pumpkin muffin, then caught up with old colleagues in Philly, then killed a couple hours in Philly doing lots of shopping, and then went out for really great sushi with Steve and Trish, and then we went to the Bates Motel haunted house and hayride and drank hot chocolate afterward. That's basically everything I want out of America all in one day.

Today is my 33rd birthday! If you have a minute to kill, I would like to ask each of you to Google Image Search something you'd like to give me for my birthday and post the image in a comment on this post. Incidentally I arrived in America last night and I'm having a swell time so far. My internet access is a bit limited while I'm in town so I might not receive e-mails (or LJ comments) very quickly, but I also have my old US phone on me (646 et cetera) so you can call if you need to get in touch. Okay, I'm off to explore America. I hear Thomas Jefferson said there might be mastodons out West. Like, Conshohocken, maybe.

It's been my real birthday for twenty-one minutes now (France time) and Lada and Megan and I are celebrating with chocolate and champagne and watching Lawrence Welk and Hard Gay videos on YouTube.

You can really see in my reaction here that no one in the history of human civilization has ever been more excited to see a cake.

( One more )

Lots more party photos by Megan here.

And I only took this one picture, of Alexis and Lada and me:

It's been about three weeks since I arrived in Paris, and my French is already a thousand times better than when I last left France! However, a thousand times zero is still zero, and my French is still really terrible. Or as the French say, terrible.

Anyway, I'm making big improvements, and the key is really living with a French guy (and a non-French lady who speaks impeccable French) and speaking French all the time at home. The three of us have been watching some tv and movies together, which I never really did in my previous stint in France, and it's still too hard for me to understand what's being said onscreen most of the time, other than little phrases here and there. Yesterday afternoon, Alexis put on a dvd of this old crappy horror movie about Nazi zombies, called Shock Waves, dubbed in French and re-titled Commando des Morts Vivants (Commando of the Living Dead!). I couldn't understand much, mostly just the short, simple phrases, and the general idea of longer conversations, but not the specifics. We joked that the groaning of zombies is the universal language, but unfortunately, these zombies were completely silent for the whole film.

But then last night the tv was on while I was working on website stuff in the living room, and an episode of the old Planet of the Apes tv show was on, which I'd never seen before in any language. Amazingly, I could understand everything the apes were saying, for the duration of the entire episode! I asked Alexis in my bad French, "Are these apes speaking in a way which is rather stupid? Because I can understand everything they are saying."

Alexis answered me in English: "Hey, maybe you speak monkey French."

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Tonight my roommates are throwing a birthday party for me, and you're all invited! Sorry about the late notice, you 99% of my friends who are in North America. The party starts around 9pm, and that's 3pm EST, which means you'd better start packing. (It also means I'll be drunk before most of you leave the office today — and hey, maybe you'll be too, what the hell do I know? It's really none of my business.) My actual birthday is on Tuesday, and I'll be thirty-two. Holy shit. Lada is in the kitchen right now and I can hear the sound of a mixer, and I'm pretty sure she's secretly making me a cake, which is completely adorable.

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abinka is visiting! She's in Paris to see her friends' rock n' roll band play some gigs. She's asleep in my room right now. When she arrived this morning, I was just on my way out to a meeting, and when I got home a couple hours later, I sat down in the living room to check e-mail, and then my LiveJournal friends page, and I scrolled down and saw a picture of my bedroom. That's a pretty crazy feeling.