My religion: Every morning, think of the tie I want to wear, reach into a dark closet to the rack of fifty(-ish) ties, and pull one out. If it's the one I wanted, it is an Awesome Day and I am the Chosen One. Today is an Awesome Day. Black with gray flowers. Amen.

It's difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that in a household of four (two humans and two rabbits), I am at best the second most fabulous, and at worst, in instances like the above, the third.

As many of you know, I grew up in New Jersey. A tremendous amount of folks in NJ make it a priority to spend at least part of every summer at the shore, and most of us have our favorite shore towns we visit more often than others. I spent a huge amount of time during my teens and twenties in Wildwood, which is by far the trashiest of the south Jersey shore towns, and definitely my favorite. I still try to go every summer whenever I'm in the States. Anyway, I just ran across this delightful compilation of clips from a 1994 documentary about Wildwood, shot on my beloved boardwalk the year I graduated highschool...

Man, Marjorie and I can't wait for our trip to the States next month! I just spent the last couple days teaching her about the words "douchebag" and "guido."

Text message from Alexis last night:

"Want to be in the video for The Dead Sexy Inc. - The Simple Things - tomorrow night? You must look dandy rock. Let me know."

Is this a rhetorical question?! I'm bleaching my roots and picking out clothes now.

Hey, neat, one of Marjorie's colleagues just gave her this picture of us from the Diesel 30th anniversary party back in October. I really like it! I sort of can't believe my head is that huge, but I think that every time I see a picture of me next to anybody. And Marjorie and I are exactly the same height! I must be proportioned like a Tootsie Pop.

Narcissist + unexpected wintertime trip to tropical island in three weeks = many hundreds of frantic pushups and crunches a day.

P.S. I bought some linen pants! They're not bad!

Oh man, Marjorie and I just bought tickets to visit her parents on l'île de la Réunion in a few weeks! La Réunion is a tiny French island in the Indian Ocean, in the neighborhood of Mauritius and Madagascar. It's nothing but beaches and palm trees and volcanoes, and I'm going to play like I'm on Lost the whole time I'm there; we're going to spend all our time swimming and hiking and being shaken to death by a pillar of black smoke. I'm ridiculously excited about all of this; I seriously can't afford the trip right now but we've been trying to arrange it for a long time and this week we decided to just dive in and get the tickets and make it work. There's just one catch: I've been informed that it's so ungodly hot on the island that I absolutely cannot wear tight black pants and dress shoes (as I do all summer in France and/or the States), and that I'm going to have to buy some shorts and flip-flops. This is going to be a problem. There has even been talk of a hat.

Anyway, a little background: Marjorie was born in the South of France, and her family moved to la Réunion when she was a little kid. She lived there up until she came to Paris for university, and subsequently, work. She and her two sisters have lived in Paris for years now, and although they're thoroughly Parisian, when they're goofing around they still speak a little bit of the créole that's spoken on the island; I've even learned a couple phrases myself. I met the parents when they came to visit back in September, and they're extremely kind and warm and laid back; island people are clearly the polar opposite of typical Parisians. I've been reading up a lot about la Réunion online and stuff, and among the most important things I've learned is that nothing is open at night, there are periodic cyclones, and the natives eat dishes made of porcupine and also wasps' nests (not together, of course! don't be silly). Marjorie's mom called the other night to recount that she'd found a 10-centimeter scorpion in the bathtub. This oughtta be good.

Holy cats, why on Earth do I not have a skull ring USB drive?!



Aha! Because it costs $200! Mystery solved.

Here are a few (stolen) pictures from Megan (abinka)'s New Year's party, the first of two parties we attended that night.


Me, Marjorie, Lady P, Lord Whimsy (lord_whimsy)



Me, Marjorie, Megan (abinka), Jon

You'll notice I was accidentally dressed as my website/LJ icon for the party. We drank good wine and engaged in scintillating conversation, and I should mention that Lady P had made a scrumptious pumpkin-orange bread specifically with me in mind, being aware of my long battle with pumpkin addiction, and I wish I'd had room for the whole thing; it was perhaps the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. I say this without hyperbole. But I digress...

So, Megan's place was the classy party, and just after these photos were taken, M and I hopped into a cab with Steve (fluidbeauty) and Trish to try to make it to our friends Marques and Karen's party for the somewhat-opposite-of-classy-but-equally-awesome party, hopefully before midnight. Our cab driver was a friendly guy named Dave with an indistinct Eastern European accent, and from the backseat I overheard a little of his conversation with Steve (who was riding shotgun), about buying a refurbished Mac. When one of us noted the time and mentioned that it looked like we'd miss the New Year's countdown at Marques and Karen's place up in Fishtown, Dave started driving crazy fast and running red lights trying to get us there, even though we hadn't asked him to and it totally wasn't his fault that we were running a little late. A roadblock down the street from our destination thwarted our chances of being on time by mere seconds; we had Dave drop us off around the corner and the four of us walked/ran through the cold toward Marques and Karen's house. Just before we got there, we heard the countdown and subsequent celebration through the walls of every house on their street, and a few neighbors were coming out into the street with noisemakers and pots and pans exactly as we arrived at the party. We banged on the door and were let in, and before we could properly say hello or begin to take our coats off, champagne glasses (actually, champagne served in old jelly jars) were thrust into our hands by Marques while someone else backed up the Tivo of the Times Square celebration so we could do a second countdown and toast, less than a minute after the real New Year. It was fun imagining what the neighbors made of that, since they certainly heard us the second time through the thin (broken, stripped) walls. We stuck around for an hour or two and then got a ride back into Center City to try to find a cab that would be willing to take us home to Steve and Trish's house in Collingswood, New Jersey.

I don't remember much of the short car ride into Center City, but everything became crystal clear when we stepped out into the freezing cold just around the corner from City Hall, and we all started frantically trying to hail cabs, knowing that A) most of them would be occupied because it was such a busy night, B) some cabbies wouldn't be willing to drive over to Jersey with so many easy fares in Center City. After maybe a dozen cabs went by in quick succession, one pulled over for us. IT WAS DAVE. The same cabbie from earlier that night! He was as excited about the coincidence as we were, and although I didn't hear much of his conversation with Steve, Steve told me later that Dave had said he normally wouldn't have been willing to drive to Jersey, but he made an exception for us because the coincidence was so cool. In the back seat, Trish and I pondered how many cabs would be out that night in Philly; she guessed 300, I guessed 500. Later, Steve told us that Dave said he knew for a fact that there were 1,500 cabs out that night. I don't know anything about statistics, but when you take those 1,500 cabs, and the fact that we found Dave when his car was unoccuppied on New Year's Eve and the fact that we were in a totally different part of town the second time around, the odds seem pretty small that we'd run into him twice in the same night. I dunno, it was super exciting at the time, probably enhanced by the fact that we were drunk and already in a great mood from the parties and the New Year. Dave got us home, we threw a bunch of money at him, and that was that. We got home around 2 or 3am and played drunken Guitar Hero band mode 'til 5am (I mostly played drums) and that was that. A good start to what will certainly be a great year.

This just ended up on Facebook.


Safety Patrol — photo stolen from Matt A.
Guess which 12-year-old is sporting a white blazer and a fistful of hair product? This was the last day of school in sixth grade, an optional dress-up day, which is basically what I lived for then (and still kind of do). That's my friend Matt next to me and John behind him; my two best friends in gradeschool. Matt and I drew a lot of ninjas together and John and I played a lot of Nintendo. Right after this, I was off to middle school, where I'd trade in dandy style for Cure t-shirts and second-hand combat boots. This would continue for several years until I regained my senses.

Saturday night I went to Diesel clothing's huge 30th birthday party in Paris. Marjorie's been a buyer for Diesel since about the time we met, and I was excited to be invited along to the party at the last minute. They event was enormous and extravagant; they rented out a convention-type room in a stadium on the edge of Paris and turned it into a giant nightclub for three thousand people (and then invited eight thousand). Many of the other Diesel headquarters all over the world celebrated at the same time, with huge video screens on the wall flipping from party to party every couple minutes; Tokyo, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Athens, et cetera. There were DJs and crazy lights and weird dancers in weird costumes and a gigantic open bar serving the tiniest drinks in human history. (I weigh 135 pounds and I had eight shots of vodka over the course of a few hours and failed to get even a little bit drunk, if that tells you anything. It's not like I have any kind of tolerance for alcohol; last night I had one generous glass of red wine and felt completely woozy and wanted to tell everybody I loved them.) We were a little bit disappointed and jealous to see that a lot of the other parties had live rock bands, while Paris only had DJs and techno music, but this goes along with my opinion that France is among the least-rocking countries in Europe, and they do love their techno. However, Paris made up for being the un-rocking-est party by also being the party with gorgeous and mostly-naked dancers, which is what they do best. Vive la France. Incidentally, the theme of the party was "XXX," taken from the fact that it was Diesel's 30th birthday and warped into an excuse to use porno chic as the aesthetic for the event (and entirely unrelated to the Vin Diesel film XXX, haha). You may or may not want to check out the hilarious but not-at-all-safe-for-work video invitation, which uses tons of porno clips with crappy cartoon animation mixed in to creatively cover up all the nudity and sex.


The party was open to employees of Diesel, their guests, and a few thousand winners of free tickets. I've never been amongst such a group of beautiful, exquisitely-dressed people in my life. Marjorie and I were both freaking out the day before and the day of the party about what to wear, and I told her I was actually grateful she invited me at the last minute because if I'd known about the party for a couple weeks I'd have been stressed out the whole time. I've been rocking suits (or least a jacket and tie) every day for a very long time now, and I wasn't exactly casual before then, and all of that makes it much harder to feel more dressed up than usual when there's a special occasion. I wanted Marjorie to tell me what to wear since it was her event at her relatively new job and I wanted to impress her boss and colleagues exactly as she'd want me to. She, of course, told me to wear whatever I wanted and stressed that I should think rock n' roll, which told me this wasn't a suit kind of affair. So I wore a t-shirt for the first time in ages, and my stupid black and white striped pants and black and white polka dot scarf and white alligator shoes. Parisians, while typically much better-dressed than Americans, are also generally much more conservative in their style, and I stood out a bit more than I expected to. Over the course of the night, I got photographed by the staff photographers a zillion times, ended up on the big screen once or twice, and at least five different strangers asked if they could take pictures of/with me. These were the folks you could tell had won the free tickets; they were wide-eyed and excited and seemed a little bit out of their element and I'm absolutely sure they had heard there would be stars at the party and wanted to take my picture just in case so they could show their friends later and ask them if this jerkoff was famous or not. Incidentally, I'm barely familiar with any French celebrities so I have no idea if I saw or even talked to any French stars, but I did hear afterward that Sarkozy's son had been in attendance, woo-hoo, blah.

The party started out not crowded enough to feel like a party, which is normal (and you can see this in the photos below) and then when it finally did pick up and get crowded and hot and loud, there was still something missing; it's possible the room was simply too big to feel like a club and not a tradeshow, and the line at the bar was so long and the drinks were so small, nobody could get drunk enough to forget they were mingling with work people. So we cut out relatively early, maybe about 2am, and took a taxi back to the Marais. Then we went out for crepes in the neighborhood and went to sleep, amazed that it was Saturday night and we'd been at out a huge party but were not drunk or exhausted and the sun wasn't up yet. It was actually a pleasant change. I wonder how many Parisians' Flickr pages I'm on now? (Answer: ha ha ha, good Googling, zantimisfit! There's a great gallery of somebody's party photos here.)

( A few more pictures from Marjorie's iPhone... )

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Wear the blingy spinning Euro belt that your roommates bought you in Italy.
Put on a pair of orange pants. Any of your orange pants will do.
Stand in front of a wall of bones; whatever wall of bones you're in front of right now is fine.
Include these instructions.


(Animated gif optional)
Lada and Alexis bought me this belt while they were on vacation in Italy. Lada wrote on the wrapping paper, "Manning, to be a real French pimp you just need one more thing." It really does spin around beautifully like rims on a car. I'd been meaning to take a picture of myself wearing the thing for weeks now, and then when tawdryjones was here last week and we decided to visit the catacombs, I realized it was the perfect opportunity to wear the belt get a picture (and then put it away and never ever wear it again ever; I'd like to state in my own defense that I kept my jacket closed all day before and after this moment).


Mo Euros Mo Problems

Hooboy, I already know I'm going to fail to express this idea properly... I am sometimes freaked out by the permanence, or realness, of physical objects. This frequently becomes acute when I'm bouncing back and forth between France and the United Snakes all the time. In my mind, the things in my France life are here, completely separate from the things back in my America life; they don't touch, they don't overlap; like two separate worlds, or like the difference between being awake and dreaming. From time to time an item crosses over from one of those worlds into the other, and it freaks me out, like waking up from a dream and finding a souvenir from the dream in your hand. (Or, I guess, like waking up from a dream about eating a giant marshmallow and finding that your pillow is gone! Goodness gracious!)

In Wildwood NJ a few weeks ago I was riding in littlewashu's car and playing with her collection of absurd sunglasses. I distributed sunglasses to the three other people in the car and selected Washu's heart-shaped Lolita glasses for myself. I wore them for about twenty minutes and then absent-mindedly put them in my jacket pocket. Later at a diner with the whole gang, I found the Lolita glasses in my pocket and I made Ben wear them so I could take a picture (with Hayce wearing my normal sunglasses). The picture is in this post I made about the whole Wildwood trip, about halfway down. In the post, I apologized to Washu for accidentally stealing her glasses and promised to return them when I saw her again a few days later.

Back in France, my roommate Lada read my blog and fired off this urgent e-mail to me:

Subject: miss you
From: Lada

Mannnniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!!!

We miss you.
The house misses you.
I miss you.

I saw your Forêtsauvage [That's Wildwood, get it? -MLK] pictures. Man... come back soon to a non-plastic world.

Ben is so sweet in all the pictures with his stupid face. [Oh snap! Ha! -MLK]
I want, I need these glasses. Don't give them back to Washu.

Let us know when are you getting back to see if we can come to pick you up.

Lovelovelove,

xxxladaxxx

When I saw Washu again at Ben and Corri's barbecue, I jokingly mentioned Lada's e-mail, and Washu generously offered to let me give the glasses to Lada. (I'd actually already looked for them in about a dozen stores in Philly, to no avail.) I wrapped them up safely and brought them back to Paris with me and presented them to Lada, and she was delighted. She asked me immediately to thank Washu. Then yesterday while I was in my bedroom Lada sent me this e-mail from the living room:

Subject: Heart shaped glasses
From: Lada

To thank your friend for the present!

LADA

Ha! Man, I know this is silly but I can't believe those are the same glasses that were on Washu's dashboard that she presumably wore at some point and then I wore while we were driving around and then they were in my jacket pocket and then they got passed around at a diner in Wildwood and Ben (and Hayce) wore them and then they were in my bags and on a plane and now Lada has them and has gone out on the town in Paris wearing them and looking hot. I bet a ton of Washu's friends wore them before I ever saw the things, and they'll probably never know a Bosnian-Italian woman in France is wearing them now. Why does it seem so impossible to me that they're the same glasses? It's like I woke up from my New Jersey dream to my real life in Paris and the glasses were sitting there winking at me. I'm gonna have a headache every time I see them around the apartment now; I'm too dumb to wrap my head around this stuff. But I'm happy to have the fun memory/story anyway.

I was souvenir shopping in Philly yesterday for my friends back home, and I found myself on a side street near my old part of town just off South Street. A ways down the street ahead of me, I saw a gang of five teenage black butch lesbians coming my way; polo shirts, baseball caps, baggy jeans, boobs bound, trying real hard to look tough and not doing half bad. I was wearing a skinny white button-down shirt, super skinny black pants, and ridiculous white faux alligator shoes, and of course my usual stupid hair and piercings and sunglasses. I can always see it a mile away when someone's going to either give me a hard time about my style or compliment me on it (this happens almost daily when I'm in America; earlier in the afternoon an old lady in Macy's told me she liked my hair, and the night before I was followed down the street by a guy singing Billy Idol songs at me), and I knew one or the other was definitely coming. As soon as they saw me they started yelling.

First one: Day-amn!
The rest, in unison: Day-ammmmmn!
Dude is out! Dude is OUT!
Can I hang witchu, pops?

I smiled the tiniest smile at them and continued on my way.

Pops?

Last night while my roommates were being recruited by Kiss, I prepared for my trip to the States that's coming up way too fast (tomorrow). I always back up my computer before I fly, you know, so if Air India flight 191 crashes in the ocean and I'm eaten by sharks, at least my clients will still be able to track down their Photoshop files on my external drive in Paris. Anyway, whilst computering, I remembered I had a stack of poorly-labeled cds I'd been meaning to sort through and figure out, and I discovered that one of them was a huge collection of photos from my friend Frederick. Frederick is my colleague in Philly; we worked in the office together for about five years and nowadays I see him whenever I'm in town, since he still works at the same company and they're now my biggest freelance client. Frederick is one of those guys who always has his digital camera in hand and is always snapping photos of everything all the time. Since he and I went to lunch together most days, I ended up in hundreds of his pictures, and I'd asked him to burn me a cd of them one time when I was back in Philly recently, and I guess I forgot he actually did that and gave it to me; I never realized I had the thing 'til last night. So I went through all of the photos while my computer was backing (that ass) up, and some of them are great and some of them are hilarious.


First, interestingly, I ran across this photo (above) of me in Rittenhouse Square in the snow in 2004. It's the same photo that was later printed out and hung up at my going away party at the office in 2005, which is the photo I ran across on another colleague's Facebook gallery a few days ago.



Then I found this photo (above) that was taken a few months later in the same park; we worked literally across the street from the park and cut through there every day on our way to lunch. Those of you who knew me at the time will probably remember I came down chickenpox that spring, and this photo must have been taken right after I returned to work, because you can see one of my last remaining spots on my cheek there. I have a small, smooth white scar there now, one of about five left on my body by that terrible week of chickenpox. I swear I didn't scratch!

I bought those horrible women's sunglasses at a vintage shop in New Orleans and wore the heck out of 'em. I was devastated when they broke a couple years later.


( A bunch more riduculous photos, all out of order and stuff... )

If you've done anything extremely good lately, you deserve to listen to Adam Ant rap while he frolics in a suit of armor. You've earned it.

If you've done anything extremely bad lately, you deserve to listen to Adam Ant rap while he frolics in a suit of armor. It's time to face the music.

Believe me, this hurts or delights me more than it hurts or delights you. This is... maybe the worst song ever recorded.

For a few years now, I've had a feature on the About Me page of my website where random photos of me are displayed each time the page is loaded. (It's the ghetto-est web wizardry of all time; I just name the images numerically and have a couple lines of javascript that call a random number from 1 to x and tack ".jpg" on the end.) I started out with maybe twenty pictures, and I add a few more from time to time whenever someone (usually me!) takes an especially flattering or glamorous or interesting or funny picture of me. It's really indefensibly vain of me, but it's fun.

Today I added the 100th picture of me to the random rotation. Balloons with my  face  abs on them fell out of the ceiling and everything.

I keep a hidden page with all the pictures together on it, just to keep track all of them. It's a weird walk down vanity lane, mostly chronomologicamable, sometimes not, with many changing hairstyles and hair colors, questionable fashion statements, exotic locales, inexplicable circumstances and behaviors, et cetera. For me it's mostly just a heartbreaking look at all the sunglasses I've lost or broken over the years. Anyway, the page with all one hundred pictures together is here, if you'd like to see. Like that weepy Hindenburg announcer guy said, "Oh, the huge vanity..."

I've been going running in hilly Montmartre every other day or so for a few weeks now. I hadn't been running at all since last summer in New Jersey when I hurt my knee so bad I had to stop for a few months (which turned into all of autumn and winter). The weather in Paris is finally absolutely amazing, and I love being outside and feeling like I'm not being lazy and old and fat.

The only thing I hate about going running is wearing normal-people clothes.


Here's me stretching before running, with no product in my hair and sporting the least-terrible of all the terrible sneakers and terrible gym clothes available down the street at Tati (basically France's K-Mart). Not shown: tiny orange iPod chock full of Marilyn Manson and Iggy Pop. You can see how the dead animals on the wall are so disgusted with my attire they can't even ( look at me. ) This is my price for being in shape.


And here are a couple pictures I took in my Metro station the other day ( that didn't come out great but so what... )

This is how we barbecue in France.

My roommate Lada knocked on my bedroom door Saturday morning to invite me a barbecue outside Paris in the not-quite-countryside, not-quite-suburbs, at the beautiful summer home of our friend Lisa...

( A feast for the eyes; vanity, food, and the Loch Ness Monster... )