newness

I’m live from my apartment, where I sit at my table with a hacking cough that has plagued me since the weekend; brain matter that seems to slither through my fingers – held firm only from a potent cocktail of American-grade cold medicines; and an ever-accumulating pile of tissues from the mucus factory in the middle of my face, which has temporarily replaced my nose. 

It’s been three weeks since I’ve returned from Los Angeles, a trip that served as a denouement of sorts to a 9-month period of soul-searching and occasional crisis.  For the first time in as long as I can remember, I left L.A. heartbroken: wanting just a few more hours or days in that familiar chaos to bathe in the unfettered sunshine, revel in the friendships that have endured oceans, explore some uncomplicated romances. 

But things are starting to get back to normal.  Classes have started after their long hiatus, and I’ve returned to Sciences Po with a basket of newness on the crook of my arm, which I hope can last till springtime: new projects, new stories, a newfound volition to learn and consume and discover. 

I was walking on Boulevard Raspail last Thursday, on my way to work from an appointment at the Foreign Press Center, right off the Champs-Élysées – where the view from Pont Alexandre and the sight of Paris shrouded in grey made me stop for a second and marvel – when I was approached by a man in a motorcycle helmet, who interrupted his concentrated tapping of an entry code to get into an apartment building to stop me on the street and say, “Excuse me, can I ask you a question?”

Since this very phrase has birthed many a misadventure, I of course said yes, prompting him to say:

“Tell me something, if someone came up to you and asked you, ‘what is one thing you want in life?’ what would you say?”

A bit flabbergasted, although mostly relieved it wasn’t anything obscene, I told him that, frankly, it wasn’t the question I was expecting and, well, come to think of it, I didn’t really know. 

“Well I ask you this because this happened to a friend of mine the other day – this guy came up to her and asked her what she wanted, and, like you, not expecting a question of this kind, said she didn’t know either.  But the guy said, ‘Come on, everyone wants something, just think it over a bit.’

And so, she thought about it for a second and said, ‘You know, I’d like a new pair of boots.’

‘Okay,’ the guy said.  ‘Let’s go to Le Bon Marché and I’ll get you a pair.’”

Mind you, the helmeted gentleman and I had been standing on the street for a few minutes at this point – me in a state of quiet disbelief: half at the story this guy was recounting, with a sneaking suspicion I knew where it was going, half at the fact that he had not acknowledged the extent to which this conversation was a bizarre thing for two complete strangers to be having. 

“What do you do?” He then asked, in efforts to help me figure out what it was that I wanted. 

“Well, I’m a student and a journalist,” I said. 

“Okay, so what do you want – anything, if someone asked you what do you want, what would you say?”

I kept saying “I don’t know,” to his insistence that I think about it and give him a concrete answer, so I said, “money.”  He then said, “No, a thing,” as if by virtue of us having this conversation I was contractually obligated to respond to his inquiries in a satisfactory manner, after which I would be released back into free society. 

“It’s not easy, is it!”  He exclaimed.  “Okay so let me tell you what happened next – my girlfriend died of laughter when she heard this.

Okay so my friend was suspicious, naturally, and at first told the man, ‘No thank you,’ but he insisted.  He said, ‘Don’t worry, I don’t need your name, your number or anything.  I just need one thing from you.’  ‘What do you need?’ she said.  ‘I just need you to go into Monoprix and buy me some plastic cups.’”

This is getting weird, I thought to myself.  I tried to interrupt him and say that I was kind of in a hurry and I really had to go, but he grabbed my arm in an amiable enough manner – as if to say, ‘Come on, this is fun, just hear me out,’ that I let him go on.

“So what would you do – if someone offered to buy you new boots, and all you had to go was get some plastic cups at Monoprix?”  He asked, terribly amused with the inquiry. 

“I probably wouldn’t do it.”  I said, then reconsidered, “Or maybe I would, I don’t know, it would make for a funny story.  Did she end up doing it?”

“She did!  And you know what, he bought her the boots and didn’t even ask for her name – no number, anything – and just walked away.  So what do you want, mademoiselle?”

“Oh what the hell, I want an iPad.”

“Okay, I’ll buy one for you!  Have a good day!”

We smiled at each other and walked away, and I laughed out loud all through the rest of the walk back to work.  There’s newness around every corner, I thought to myself, you just have to keep rolling with the pavement to stumble upon it. 

my best excuse for recent inactivity, in the most grandiose of terms (also i’m very tired & busy these days)

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. – E. B. White

i am in an unfortunate period of creative barrenness, turning to the bottle, so here is what i’m posting

“As for now, Foran holds ambivalent feelings about her seemingly bright future.”

-Gem of a line from my high school newspaper, in a May 2010 article entitled, “Foran ’07 works as USA Today reporter”

this is me trying to give you an idea of what it feels like to go crazy

There are certain things I became really good at as a result of my unusual childhood: my parents divorced when I was Very Young, and accordingly, I underwent years and years of mandatory psychotherapy with a variety of specialists with diverse degrees of competency, as the legal professionals involved figured the ensuing custody ordeal would Probably Really Mess Us Up. 

 Because of this, I’m very efficient at Talking About My Feelings: interrogating their origins, describing various colors and moods associated with them, linking them back to pertinent events and Conversations That Struck Me.  I can do this with the simple precision of, “Show-me-where-the-bad-man-touched-you,” albeit substituting the proverbial doll for my morass of emotions and neurosis, and ‘bad man’ for, well, the universe and its infinite unpredictability. 

I believe in feelings – perhaps too much – and the Abstract, whatever that is, and however much I use it to mask my fear of Properly Figuring Out How Things Work.  Even thinking about science makes me nervous, which is ironic given that everyone in my family is somehow affiliated with it – from cardiology to nursing to marine biology – except for me, the writer-person-creative-type black sheep. 

From what everyone around me who Knows What They’re Talking About says, and from what I understand from religiously google searching “human brain +mystery,” no one fully comprehends what the brain does.  We know it’s powerful, we know we only use a small part of it; we know that it’s not an entirely predictable organ.  I know that all of this scares me, and here’s why:

I had my first big panic attack in May 2009, which was when I was first confronted with the potency of the Brain, in addition to the profundity of Science’s lack of knowledge when it comes to understanding where feelings come from, and the mood-altering science behind Psychotropic Drugs. 

One minute I was sitting in a lecture at the top floor of one of Johns Hopkins University’s oldest brick buildings, my mind focused tranquilly on a historiographical analysis paper about Sartre’s Reflexions sur la question juive that was due in a week, and the next thing I know it felt like my brain was being squeezed through a cold tin pipe.  I became certain my body was shutting down – I had visions of my lungs collapsing into each other, the total disintegration of my heart like a handful of dirt – a flood of sweat released from my palms, and I excused myself so I could take my final breaths downstairs, slumped against a wall somewhere, undramatically, such that my impending death wouldn’t traumatize my unknowing classmates.

Luckily I ran into a friend on my way to my final resting place, to whom I tried explaining calmly that I was dying and needed medical assistance urgently.  He called the student paramedics – I don’t remember what it was he said was wrong with me – who arrived instantly and hooked me up to an oxygen tank, which I proceeded to breathe out of until I no longer felt on the brink of total collapse. 

This went on for about five months: I had panic attacks from a few times a day to once a week – with magnitudes of varying degrees, like earthquakes – that were prompted by markedly odd triggers, things my brain was apparently afraid of even though I wasn’t: shopping malls, artificial light, the sight of pavement at dusk, leather seats in school buses, the smell of parsley. 

Initially I tried to conceal my problem: at work I would take long toilet breaks when I could feel one coming on, in which I would stare at my reflection, look into my pores, and imagine everything that was alive about me.  But after a while the hiding became tedious – the subtle pulse-taking, the laborious breaths I took to combat my anxiety’s worst symptoms, while still trying to look like I wasn’t convinced I would be dead in ten minutes – especially since I knew exactly what was happening to me, or at least my own non-scientific version of it. 

I decided it was time to start figuring out how to fix what was obviously becoming detrimental to my sanity.

My therapist, Vernon, was recommended to me that October by a nurse from the university health clinic after I went in for a check-up, citing the predominant medical concern as, “something is terribly wrong with me.”  I had convinced myself somehow that I was suffering from a concussion after having slept at a weird angle the previous night, and as the fear masqueraded itself as reality in an increasingly compelling manner, I panicked, and demanded that she x-ray my brain to check for damage.  Fortunately she saw through my hysteria, told me, “we’re all afraid of something, dear,” gave me Vernon’s number, and told me to give him a call.  I’m glad I did. 

I could tell that Vernon liked me immediately because I was open with my feelings, and provided intricate, textured visuals of my anxiety.   He called me “psychologically sophisticated,” which I hesitated to take as a compliment; given the long, painful path it had taken me to arrive at the skill. 

We talked for one hour each week, during which time we discussed what could be causing the attacks: Vernon determined that I had dealt with all of my childhood traumas effectively from the ease and frankness with which I addressed them.  I had become accustomed to listing all of the unpleasant details of my personal history with the nonchalance of informing a physician of my allergies, notably in order to avoid comments like the one made from a psychiatrist I saw earlier, “It seems like your life is just a cycle of tragedies.” It remains the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me. 

Vernon and I did these exercises during our sessions where he asked me to close my eyes and wiggle my toes, telling me that the ground below my feet would never feel the same as it did in that moment.  

He gave me pamphlets about panic attacks and generalized anxiety, how the condition has to do with irregular serotonin levels and something I can’t remember about neurotransmitters: medical jargon that brought, for the first time, what seemed to be a self-constructed fable of wayward emotions – into the realm of the clinical, the diagnosable. 

On my own, I made up catchphrases as a form of meditation – which Vernon suggested I start doing – to coax my rogue neurotransmitters back from their frantic rampage on my psyche: I would repeat the word “everything, everything” to calm myself down during a panic attack, until that idea became too all-encompassing, so I thought, “nothing, nothing,” but that, too, became a watchword more daunting than the one that came before it.  I found a delicate medium with a recitation of, “happening,” or “the fact of your existence,” or just my name, “Rose Foran,” over and over, to remind myself that I was made of flesh and breathed air and I was born once, twenty years or so before that moment, even though I was too young to remember it when it happened.   

I told Vernon I was shit at meditating and we needed to start exploring other options. 

“Everyone has the right to happiness,” Vernon said.  “You need to live, and let-me-tell-you-something, you can’t live right like this.  I think you need to consider going on some form of anti-anxiety medication.”

A staple thing that mental health professionals will tell patients who are wary of taking psychotropic drugs is that whatever you have is a Real Disease, like cancer or something.  Even though someone trying to tell you you have a real imaginary disease seems like the last thing that would be comforting, it strangely is.  They tell you that mental health problems are heavily stigmatized, but they’re as real as anything else, and have real remedies that have been proven effective. 

“Let’s say you had diabetes, for instance,” he said with the confidence that the point he would soon be making would reassure me, “you wouldn’t refuse insulin, would you?  That would be depriving yourself of a cure.  It would be irrational.” 

And so, reluctantly, I took his advice and took my prescription to a Baltimore Rite-Aid – unsure of whether or not I found it sad or funny that it was the same drug my mother had been taking for years (whatever I have is hereditary) – and spent the interim waiting time for it to be filled at the adjacent nail salon, where I got a manicure and had a small panic attack.  I knew it was because of the weird lighting and smell of nail polish remover, in the frustrating way that a parent of a petulant child can identify the origins of a public tantrum, despite it sounding ridiculous out loud when someone else asks, “why is your daughter crying?”

As the sullen, obese pharmacy tech handed me my bag of pills – officially inducting me into the fraternity of children-of-divorce on mood-stabilizers, which I had previously vowed to avoid at all costs – I decided to make myself a deal.  I would keep with Vernon’s remedy, despite my fears that it would erase the very thing that made me who I was – that unidentifiable combination of elements that, under the right conditions, equaled Me. 

But I knew that my only way of beginning to understand what was happening would be through a painstaking personal analysis of the changes to my mind state: an inventory of everything as it once was, with constant monitoring of even the most subtle of changes.  I promised myself that I would gain control over what was happening to me by trying to understand it the only way I knew how, and the moment I arrived at conclusive evidence that I was Losing Myself, I would stop with the medication and find some other way to deal with my anxiety.

So I began to catalogue my feelings obsessively. 

I filled my notebook with doodles of what I imagined at the time to be the Human Brain – or at least My Brain – divided in different sections and quadrants, as if I was discovering anatomy for the first time, killing small animals and taking them apart, drawing diagrams of their insides.  I drew amateur models of my head, separating the different parts of where I thought my various emotions came from, so I could monitor how they would inevitably change as the drugs kicked in. 

I observed that when I was happy I saw grey and I felt it in my lips.  

I made myself narrate a panic attack as it was happening in a train station one Tuesday morning on my way to Washington DC:

“I was overwhelmed with feelings of my own mortality, and I think I was sad to know that they would, in a matter of days, fade slowly into the vast abyss of psychiatric remedy.

I felt, I felt, I felt.  I stood in crowds and felt my chest tighten while my insides nearly collapsed from tension.  I felt my consciousness evaporate as if my brain matter were dissolving.

I almost passed out.  My vision was blue-tinged, my knees weak.  I sat down to collect myself.”

A few weeks passed until I started to feel differently.  Vernon evaluated the changes through a serious of basic questions, in order to determine if I still needed to keep seeing him. 

— “Are you happier?”
— “I think so.” (*What is happiness if not feeling like you are reclining in your neuroses?)

— “And you still feel like yourself?  Like Rose?”
— “Yeah, I think so.” (*What am I without my darkness?)

As my panic attacks diminished significantly, and then disappeared altogether, so did my edge. 

I didn’t feel, at least not in the same way I was used to – the productive tugging kind of feelings that had pushed me to write as long as I could hold a pen; I just floated around between varying gradients of soft light.

But I hadn’t felt like my body would be reduced to rubble for just as long.  I could breathe easily for the first time in months; not worrying about one part of me being afraid of something another wasn’t: I could forget the ever-growing laundry list of things that triggered my subconscious into disaster-survival mode.  I felt at ease, finally, but troublingly so. 

I came up with a decoding system for what I was feeling – as if I was colorblind, intent on memorizing the Real alternative to the bastardized hue as it came filtered through my retina. 

“Is love heavy or is it light?” I wrote to myself, trying to remember.  Then I made this diagram in my notebook:

What I remember of love = essential heaviness, a type of grinding
What I remember of creativity = reclining in your warm agitation
What I remember of happiness = a kind of biting in my chest

What I feel now = unregulated bliss
What I feel now = everything is fine even though it is not fine
What I feel now = uncomfortable brightness, life through a straw, sunlight everywhere

Eventually there was too much of myself that I had to consciously grasp at to remember again. I determined that my mind wasn’t meant to dwell on this softer plane, even though it was easier, more pleasant.  Despite the fact that I was suddenly nicer to people and found it less of a struggle to be content and didn’t have the constant suspicion that death was right around the corner – it wasn’t me.  So I decided to take the leap back into my darker reality, and made the same promise to myself that once the anxiety started to erase who I was again, I would go back to see Vernon and devise a Plan B. 

There isn’t a real end to this story: I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t gone on medication, even for the relatively brief period it took to get me back on track. 

I like myself better for the fact that I sought help, and put trust in someone who had the skill set to know better than I did about the methods available for combating my condition.  More importantly, he trusted me to know my limits, my feelings, better than he did. 

I gained a new will to fight for who I am against the mountains of Crazy with which I am now occasionally confronted, especially when faced with the strange prospect of the alternative: my subdued alter ego, Rose Lite.  I learned that what I love most about myself is my imperfections, my atypical definitions of happiness, my ability to embrace my feelings as the script with which I write my present. 

And when I start to feel it again - the beyond-my-control, world-is-falling-apart-around-me kind of crazy - I’ll close my eyes and wiggle my toes and tell myself that the ground below me will never feel the same as it does in this moment.  For the briefest of instants, I’ll be assured that everything is fine.  And that is what I hold on to. 

coming to terms

She wakes up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off instinctively by now, just to prove to him that she’s a Morning Person – a trait he’s doubted for as long as they have been together, mostly because she requires silence in the delicate moments before the caffeine kicks in: a period she refers to as, ‘Coming To Terms With My Existence.’

‘I’ll convince him soon,’ she muses, as she prepares the coffee: pushing down the plunger on her French press with a force that might be to say, ‘This means you have to keep your promise.’

‘I like making you oatmeal,’ She thinks matter-of-factly to herself, while stirring the pot’s bubbling contents in accordance with the recipe she considers Her Own, as three minutes remain in his heavy slumber.  Accidently she emits, out-loud, “My favorite thing is making you breakfast.”  She is relieved it doesn’t wake him up. 

An image of a picnic they never had floats into her mind’s eye: of her wearing a sundress she would never have the guts to buy, knee-deep in a book she’d never have the time to read, playing with his hair as he rests in her lap.  ‘This would be better if it were set to jazz,’ she says to her internal projection. 

He doesn’t like jazz, her jazz, but whenever she listens to it – especially Miles Davis’ rendition of ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ – she puts her hand to her chest as if it’s the essential gesture that keeps her alive: as if the way it hits her, the reaction elicited from the trumpet’s visceral wails, is the very thing that makes her heart beat.

His alarm goes off.  She looks over to see his reluctant allowing of the sunlight to seep into the crease of his eyelids.  He hasn’t yet Come To Terms.  She brings him coffee, milk, and sets it on the tea-crate she uses as a bed-side table.  He rolls over.  She kisses him on his temple, the softest part of his face.  He smiles, then groans horribly as he springs himself out of bed into a deep stretch.  He stretches and yells, stretches and yells – each position more impossible, each grunt more ugly than the last. 

This is how he Comes To Terms With His Existence. 

“Want a clementine?” She says, her legs perched on the table as she reclines in her favorite chair, her gaze fixed on the pink-and-blue woven socks her best friend got her in Istanbul – a place she’s never been – while she begins to peel one, and a citrus mist-cloud bursts into the air.  “They’re in season.”

“No thanks,” he says, as he sits down in her second-favorite chair, grabs her right foot and begins to crack her toes, one-by-one.  “I’m good with coffee.”

After the last knuckle pops, she leans over to him, checks his pulse and asks, “Do you think we love each other?”

He puts the back of his hand on her forehead and replies, “For now I think it’s more of a deep state of like.”

ten-second love story

She wondered how he would speak to their children, if their table discussions would be a babelic patchwork, if the beings – made in her image – would respond to her one day in a phrase she did not understand, with gestures that were not her own.

the girls / the spill

put these on, i’ll show you how i want my onions chopped

i want to feed you; can i feed you? come over, just let me feed you.

urban survival tips for the modern woman

It’s a tough world out there, ladies.

And to help you navigate through whatever concrete jungle your dreams are made of, I have compiled a list of handy advice-nuggets ranging from personal safety, to avoiding the unwanted advances of a male stranger, to mitigating everyday instances of social awkwardness.  The following are tried and tested methods - take them with a grain of salt, however: I’m nobody’s Carrie Bradshaw and have a knack for getting myself in tricky situations, from the violent to the cripplingly uncomfortable. 

Here we go:

Life’s more fun if you only find yourself attractive on weekends.  Okay, so you might have great bone structure, or a nice rack, or long, shiny hair or whatever, and that’s been working out well for you so far, Miss Twenty-Something-Lady-Person.  Good job, good genes. Here’s the thing, though: from Monday to Friday afternoon that shouldn’t matter, and you should act as if the world is just one big ‘Bad Taste’-themed costume party.  Act silly, trip over things, bust a move on the street, wear weird clothes.  Do strange things just because you think it’s funny.  The world needs more women who aren’t afraid to make a fool of themselves in broad daylight.  TODAY YOU ARE THE WEIRDEST LOOKING PERSON IN THE WORLD AND THAT IS AWESOME.  Act accordingly. 

The secret to avoiding getting hit on in undesirable circumstances or bothered during your commute is all about facial expressions and body language. 

If you don’t feel safe on the metro at night because there’s a suspicious guy looking at you, salivating, as if you’re a rotisserie chicken, just fake a facial tick.  Blink a lot, shrug your shoulders ever few seconds, violently scratch your scalp, chew on your arm-hair.  Alternatively, blow your cheeks up with air and then gently slap your face until they deflate.  Either are equally unattractive and will effectively function as a social suit of armor. 

Also, you know those tough-looking guys who walk with their arms stretched out in a noticeable distance to their armpits, as if they have too much upper-body strength that their arms have stopped bending in the right ways?  If you’re ever by yourself at night in a dodgy area and don’t feel safe, walk like that.  Imagine you have a soda can under each armpit, and look really angry (or sad; that’s even more confusing).  You’ll either seem really jacked and no one will want to mess with you, or as if you have a problem with Armpit Chafing - which is very unattractive and possibly contagious.  So you’re good.

Lastly, I’ve observed that I’ve never been bothered while I’m eating on the go, so I usually carry an apple or a cracker in my jacket pocket.  I think it’s because I have a really primal, almost rabid, look on my face when I eat, so people know not to even go there. 

Learn what a drug deal looks like, and get over it.  There is always a time and place for shameless gawking; drug deals are not one of them, no matter how homesick for your college-town/crack-capital-of-the-world Baltimore, Maryland they make you.  If you find yourself by the Fontaine des Innocents in Les Halles at night, for instance, keep walking, use the armpit defense, and avoid making eye-contact with anyone wearing sports-gear. 

Alternatively, however - if you keep an appropriate distance and know the right moment to walk away - street fights (in well-lit areas!) can serve as a relatively safe alternative in the realm of urban street theater.  I was on a run by Place de Clichy once and saw a man and a woman (who were presumably on a date, as it was outside the big movie theater) get into a full-out brawl.  She threw the first punch, he retaliated, she came back with an even greater force.  A man tried to intercede, which changed the dynamics dramatically: while at first it seemed like this Kind Stranger would succeed in breaking up the fight, the former sparring partners then joined forces against the good Samaritan - deriding him for his well-meaning intervention - and started taking turns trying to beat him up, rather than each other.  It was kind of romantic in a weird way, and I had front-row seats, albeit from the other side of the street.

Make friends with the bouncer of at least one nightlife establishment. I don’t go out enough for this to ever happen to me and feel far too awkward when I do, but from what I observe from people much cooler than I, it seems like a very smart thing to do. 

Be nice to homeless people.  You never know when you’re going to get punched in the face. 

Never accidentally give your neighborhood kebab guy Israeli currency.  I did this last week.  He gave me a suspicious look, and when I realized my geopolitical faux pas I tried to cover it by saying, “Oh, ha-ha sorry I didn’t realize I still had my Japanese Yen in my wallet.  Tokyo.  Business…trip.  Technology?  Extra harissa on my fries s’il vous plaît….?” 

Never give your number out to anyone you meet in a bar.  Sure, he may be charming and well-dressed and have his scooter parked outside, but this is never a good idea.  I have only done this once, when I met this French-Moroccan guy we’ll just call “Pants,” at a bar during the World Cup Finale two summers ago.  He seemed cool enough: had a Lenny Kravitz vibe going on, with nice hair and caramel-colored skin, and was a couture tailor, specializing in pants.  After a summer of unprecedented success with men, I figured I was on a winning streak so one date with a stranger wouldn’t do any harm, and the whole pants angle would make for a good story.  I obliged his invitation to a picnic by the Seine with his co-workers - it laid-back and fun enough such that seeing him again seemed like a benign proposition.  However….

Our second date largely consisted of Pants telling me that he wanted to make me his Moroccan queen, coupled with unprompted outbursts of, “YOUR EYES! YOUR LIPS! YOUR HAIR!”  After that I stopped returning his (ten) phone calls and (fifteen) texts (a day), and when we crossed paths one Sunday afternoon in the Marais he tried to run me over on his Vespa. 

Once in a while I’ll meet someone interesting when I’m out with my friends, and he’ll seem attractive and have a nice smile and think my jokes are funny, but then I am taken back to the Pants ordeal, and see the fury in his eyes as he sped towards me on rue Vieille du Temple - falafel balls falling tragically on the ground as I tried to flee the scene - and I suddenly remember my fake boyfriend Jamal, who is a dentistry student in Ohio.  I put my phone away.  He’s a very jealous man.

Don’t shit where you eat.  This is the best advice anyone could ever give you, and it really does behoove you to heed it.  Believe me: I’m the expert on romantic endeavors gone awry, avoiding confrontation, and generally lacking social grace.  Think your co-worker or classmate or bartender at your favorite spot around the corner is cute?  Don’t.  Stop it.  Walk away.  Basta.  Seriously, just…just shut it down right now.  It’s not going to work out, you will embarrass yourself somehow in the aftermath, and then you’re going to have to quit your job or drop out of school or go out of the country if you ever want to get a drink again.  I have several examples from my personal life about such ill-fated entanglements but reliving them makes me want to rip my skin off and live in a white, noiseless box for the rest of my life so I’m just going to ask you to take my word for it. 

When in doubt, yawn.  If you ever don’t know what to say on an elevator or passing by someone you vaguely remember from a Social Event in the halls of your university, just smile and yawn.

They will say, “Oh, you must be tired,” or “Ha-ha, are you tired?” which opens up an opportunity to project yourself as either a Very Hard Worker or a Sociable Young Person - whatever impression you’d like to put forth.  You can reply with something like, “Oh yeah, late in the evening with the young people… last night… man, you know how that goes,” or, “Up late with that paper…exam… books and things.  Intellectual endeavors… Whew!  Smart.  Are you tired from anything?”  The choice is yours. 

That’s all I got for now, friends - it’s Saturday and I’m going to a Very Fancy Gala at the Musée d’Orsay as a Member Of The Press.  Follow me on my twitter for live updates.  I’m going sans-date, not knowing a soul, which means this should be interesting, champagne-fueled, possibly disastrous, and there will be lots to write about for later…

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