I ordered Marjorie some fancy-schmancy shoes from England a few weeks ago, and they're a bit late getting here, so when we received a note in our mailbox telling us we had a package to pick up at La Poste, she was delighted!

Man is she ever going to be a lot less delighted when she gets home from work and finds out it's just a bunch of Halloween stuff from Calamity Jon (calamityjon) and Kate (superdaintykate)! Haha! No, hey, she's going to flip over this stuff too.


Since I was expecting to receive the shoes, imagine my confusion at the post office when the guy handed me a box adorned with Calamity Jon artwork! Those footnotes read "Belated" and "Sucker." The nerve of those shoe people!

( What's in the baaaahx... )

Last night at our Epiphanie get-together I was crowned for my second consecutive year as le roi de la fève. If you're not familiar with the King Cake tradition it's fun to read about; you and your family/friends each eat a slice of cake and one of you finds the "fève" inside and becomes king. I first learned about it in highschool French class and I can't believe it's a relatively normal once-a-year part of my life in France now. Anyway, behold the glorious hunk of gold-colored metal I could have easily broken my teeth/choked to death on; my first day as king and I'm already thwarting assassination attempts. Last year it was a tiny ceramic butterfly; perfect for shattering and cutting me to ribbons from the inside. Hey, nobody ever said being the king was easy.

I came home from my friend Laura's going away party late last night to find an adorable note in my bed from my adorable roommate Lada, saying:

Hey my dear! Alexis is leaving you bananas & nuts* ...
I'm leaving you Bosnian sweets ...
What's better, my dear Manning-boy?
♥ Love ♥ Lada ♥

And next to the note was a plate with two slices of delicious homemade coconut cake. I should have taken a picture, but it was late and I was too drunk and too tired and too hungry. Those poor slices of cake, they never knew what hit 'em.


* referring to this (and sort of this)

I didn't see Alexis all day yesterday; we were both out and about for work, errands, et cetera. Sometime during the evening I sent him a text message to say "merci pour les cadeaux dans mon lit hier soir" — thanks for the presents in my bed last night. Then I came home around 2am and Alexis was already asleep, and I found this in my bed:



I imagine Alexis picked up these candy bars for free at a big shoot he was working on yesterday. I was kind of baffled when I first saw the stuff, but now I'm realizing all of these products contain nuts (indeed, one of them is called Nuts), so the joke continues. I will always remember that it was specifically in Sarajevo in August of 2006 that I taught Alexis all about the use of the word nuts in American slang; it doesn't directly translate in French slang, I was surprised to learn. But I'm happy to see it was a valuable lesson and he's retained some useful English, even if he only gets to use it to play jokes on me.

One fine summer evening in Philadelphia, probably around July of 2007, Steve and I were walking down Broad Street and talking about monsters, which is seriously just about the only thing we ever talk about. We were talking specifically about zombies this time, and the main topic of the conversation was how most zombie movies start out normal and quiet, and then when the zombie menace first becomes apparent to the audience, it's not yet apparent to the extras in the movie, so you've invariably got some poor slob who sees a guy limping/staggering and says, "Gee, mister, are you okay?" and approaches him to help him, and of course the zombie turns and reveals his rotting face and proceeds to eat the guy's brains out. Steve and I were talking about how, as jaded horror film fans, we would never be so foolish, and when the zombie apocalypse finally happens, we'd be ready; we'd be able to recognize that first zombie for what it was, from a distance, well before all hell breaks loose, and immediately formulate a plan to get to safety in plenty of time. There's no way we'd be those suckers in the beginning of the movie.

The next part of the story is almost too good to be true. We'd moved over to 15th Street so Steve could go to this little mini-mart near Spruce Street in order to use the ATM. As we walked and talked (we'd moved on from zombies to some other topic by this point, probably werewolves), we were suddenly slowed down considerably, stuck behind a tall, old, shabbily-dressed man who was walking at a snail's pace and somehow taking up the whole sidewalk. He was trudging along with some difficulty, with a sort of twitching motion to his gait, and holding his shoulders at odd angles, all of this probably due to some malady, or maybe just due to being really, really old. We weren't in a hurry, so we slowed down and strolled along behind the guy for a minute, continuing our conversation about whatever. But then Steve suddenly interrupted himself and very quietly said to me, trying to sound casual, "Uh, is this, err, do you think this is that situation we were talking about a minute ago?" And then we were both like HOLY SHIT. We continued to pace the guy, but backed off a little and watched him very carefully as we walked. Finally we were nearing the mini-mart and I figured we'd part ways with the guy there, but no! He turned and went into the mini-mart ahead of us! I asked Steve if he was still going to go in to use the ATM. He said yes, but his trepidation was tangible. I told him he was insane and that there was no way in hell I was going in there. So I waited out front and kept an eye on the big glass panes of the storefront, but the store was crowded with people and cluttered with big displays of merchandise, and I lost sight of both Steve and the maybe-zombie. I watched and waited, expecting to see huge splatters of blood appear on the glass and panicked people smashing their faces and bodies against the windows, trying to flee like wild animals. I hated the idea of having to kill Steve once he was infected, but I knew he'd want me to.

A very, very long minute passed, and I was startled by my phone vibrating in my pocket. It was a text message from Steve, from inside the store! I anxiously flipped open the clamshell and read the message:

"do they like oreos?"

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:

One interesting side effect of this whole no-sweets experiment is that regular ol' red grapes now taste like heroin-flavored Jolly Ranchers dispensed from an angel's vagina.

Sometime in late May, I stopped eating chocolate, desserts, cookies, donuts, Tastykakes, and any other snacks that are treat-like or have added sugar in them. The big problem that I didn't consider at the time is that my favorite things in the world are chocolate, desserts, cookies, donuts, Tastykakes, and any other snacks that are treat-like or have added sugar in them, and my life is completely joyless without them. It's been maybe seven weeks now, and I'd gotten kind of numb to the pain of not having sugar in great quantities every day, to the point where I'm (amazingly) not even constantly reminded of this self-imposed restriction anymore. This morning as I waited for my bagel and tea at the coffee shop across the street, I half-noticed by the register right in front of me a little tray of samples of chocolate cake, cut into one-inch cubes. Without even thinking about it, I stupidly grabbed one and popped it into my mouth. My first real sugar in ages. The sensation that followed was one of such intense pleasure and surprise that I can scarcely describe it. Actually, it was a lot like the first time I ate a McGriddle.


Excerpt from True Porn: Volume 2 — Menage-à-Duh!
Cherubs and everything. Of course I realized my error instantaneously, and even considered spitting the cake out, but man, the coffee shop was full of people and that would've been really gross. So I ate the thing, and hey, I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I'm not really denying myself these things for any real reason; it's just a good exercise of discipline. So I'm now officially back on the wagon until... fuck, I forgot to declare an end date for this thing. Oops.

Figure 1. Sostinės.

Tami and I had two guests from Hospitality Club over the weekend; a Lithuanian lady and a Finnish guy. The Lithuanian brought us Lithuanian chocolate! (See figure 1, at right.) I'm pretty sure the gesture being portrayed there on the label is how Lithuanian gangbangers greet one another on the mean streets of Vilnius.

The chocolate tastes like Easter, somehow.

The most amazing part of meeting these folks was that, in talking about all our respective travels, we discovered that the Lithuanian lady worked on the Wildwood boardwalk last summer, meaning Tami and I and the rest of our gang were in town at the same time as her! Ah, South Jersey, my glorious homeland. The lady seemed pretty shocked to learn that this weird guy in France grew up not too far from the one little part of huge-ass America that she knew pretty well. Anyway, the employees of the amusement piers and boardwalk shops and pizza joints and everything at the Jersey shore are a very international bunch, as lots of kids from all over Europe and Canada come to work for the summer, and it's very possible that any of our friends could've interacted with this lady who was sitting in our living room talking about hitchhiking in Germany and stuff like that. Small, small world. I can't get enough of that stuff. The same goes for chocolate.