29 March 2009

The Obsession Continues...

I think I've become obsessed with dance in general since starting my class!

27 March 2009

He can womanize me any time he wants!



I'm kind of obsessed with this right now.

04 March 2009

23 February 2009

Your band's album cover


The Natural History of Selborne — "The Photo You Want"

"The Photo You Want" is TNHS's second release and builds on the moody, etherial sucess of thier debut. Sweet, foggy vocals drift though a uncompromising, reverb-drenched, atmospheric soundscape comprised of floaty guitars, orchestration and pianos. The opener "Euskara" is born aloft by la-las and handclaps, while "Oriental Darter" is uncharacteristically acoustic folk, intimate and a joy.

11 February 2009

06 February 2009

Dragostea din tei

.
♪♫♪Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma, nu ma iei!♫♪♪

I never knew that T.I. and Rihanna loved Romanian boy bands so much! Did you?


Another thing I didn't know was that turn-of-the-century Eurotrash videos could be just as good –or even better– than videos from the 80s. You learn something new every day.

03 February 2009

25 blah, blah, etc.

I’ve been tagged by several people for to do this and I caught wind that if I didn’t, I would be less cool. Since I am trying so hard to be regarded as 'cool' by my friends, here are the 25 random facts about me.

1. I can make a horrible first impression and many people have told me they thought I hated them when we met.

2. If I was a domestic animal, I would be a llama. If I was a wild animal, I would be a flamingo.

3. My biggest problem in relationships is that I tend to avoid talking about problems. (Which in turn causes more problems).

4. Clearly, there are vampires.

5. I’ve been collecting postcards since I was about eight and want to get one from every country in the world.

6. I don’t think people should travel to Burma and I secretly think less of anyone I meet who has.

7. I had a scary reoccurring dream as a child of being at sea in a storm on a pirate ship with Spiderman’s body in a coffin.

8. I think circumcision is bad and wrong and should be made illegal.

9. I am a nerd about the following things: capitals, flags, airlines, public transport, birds, languages, alphabets, Project Runway, French Indochina, postcards, Meso-American history, kanji, Thor Heyerdahl.

10. I don’t like driving and when I’m in charge, I will make private car ownership illegal and replace all roads with train tracks.

11. The beach is my favourite place in the whole world and if I could live there forever, I would.

12. My greatest fear is failure.

13. My dream is to travel around the world without leaving the ground.

14. If I could only watch Gong Li movies for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t really be so bad.

15. I spend too much money on clothes. I think I have a problem.

16. As much as I hated all the fishing and camping trips my father took me on when I was young, I appreciate them so incredibly much now. So many people have so little exposure to nature now.

17. The last time I cried was 12 January 2009.

18. I have always been incredibly, incredibly self-conscious about my taste in music. (See #24, for example).

19. I’m a leg man.

20. Although a staunch left-handist, I bowl with my right hand.

21. If someone offered me a free plane ticket tomorrow, I would have a hard time choosing between Toronto and Tahiti.

22. I think Couchsurfing.com is amazing and it’s basically changed my life.

23. I want to go to Nunavut so bad!

24. My first record (whoa – dating myself!) was Rick Astley’s “Whenever You Need Somebody”.

25. I didn’t learn to tie my shoes until I was eleven. My poor mother must have thought I was retarded.

28 January 2009

You're My Preset Number in Hawaii

Some things that I thought everyone had seen, but apparently not, so now I'm sharing them with you!

Goldfrapp — Number 1


The Presets — This Boy's In Love

The world definitely needs more videos of boys beating each other up in milk. Hawt!

The Ellen DeGeneres Show — Hawaii Chair

23 January 2009

Negativity

During my trip home, two different friends approached me to say they were concerned about me. They were worried what was going on with me because my attitude had become quite negative. —Never an easy thing to hear, but they were entirely right of course. Not an easy thing to talk to a friend about either, so I really have to thank them immensely for caring enough about me to do it.

To be perfectly honest, I do find Paris to be a negative place. I hadn't realised, however, how much the bad vibes had affected me since arriving here. While I'm generally a very happy, easy-going, independent person, it seems the trying times I've had here have secretly been taking their toll.

Enough with the boo-hoo woe-is-me excuses though! — It's time for some solutions. I present you with "Smiling in the Face of Adversity 101".

Step One: Think of one new positive thing every day.

Step Two: Focus on what I have rather than what I'm missing.

Step Three: Set realistic and achievable goals.

Step Four: Leave Paris more often.

20 January 2009

It's Official!

You Scored as KINSEY six
SIX: face it hon, you're as
gay as they come

KINSEY six
81%
KINSEY five
38%
KINSEY
two
38%
KINSEY one
38%
KINSEY four
31%
KINSEY three
13%
KINSEY zero
0%

15 January 2009

I'm a legal alien

Hurray! I got my student visa renewed today. Sure, it took four appointments, hours of waiting, thousands of documents and endless heartbreak, but I am no longer an illegal alien. My situation is no longer irrégulière, as they say. Yeay me!

31 December 2008

2008 Year In Review: Photo

Submit your votes in the 'Comments' section!

Travel
Fes El Djedid

Mont St-Michel

Barcelona

Chambord

Berlin

Prenzlauer Alle

Cam River


Portrait
Balcony

Riad El-Bartal

Centre Georges Pompidou


Auto-Portrait
Arc de Triumf

Daniel-san

Hallway


Moé p'y Toé
Michael & Me

Polish & Me at Amélie's supermarket

Jer, Katherine & Me


Best Dressed
WWII Cadet

Hat-Sweater

Fez Hat


What Was I Thinking?
Lion Attack

Ho ho ho!


Around Town
Hôtel des Invalides

Catherine de Médici

Musée des Arts et Métiers

La Tour Eiffle

Gare d'Austerlitz

Palais Royale

2008 Year In Review

Like sands through an hourglass, these are the days of our lives.

DOWN
¤...Trying andouillette sausage. Quite possibly the most foul and revolting thing ever to have been invented by mankind. Absolutely vile. (Post here).

¤...Stress from school, work and France turning my hair grey. After a long hiatus from the hairdresser whilst growing my hair, I was completely aghast to go a few weeks ago and see that fully one quarter of all the hair that was lying on the floor was grey! Grecian formula here I come!

¤...Failing a class by an eighth of a point (full story) and the horribleness of my school in general. I feel like I'm not really learning anything to which is added an impossible workload and a byzantine and incompetent administration. Justanotheryearandahalf, justanotheryearandahalf, justanotheryearandahalf. My new mantra.

¤...London gets a lot of flack for having bad weather, but the weather in Paris is equally as horrible all year long. Grey, wet, cold, windy, miserable. In December, there were eight hours of sunlight during the whole month! The very few sunny, hot days of summer were absolutely revolting: sweaty and humid without a lick of air conditioning, even in the subway (which is one place it is most desperately needed).

¤...Running myself into the ground with my insane work/school schedule this semester. Scurrying around the city from 9AM to 9PM most days of the week, scheduling homework time on the subway and collapsing, exhausted into bed at 2 in the morning, never managing to get everything done for the next day.

¤...It's hard to judge which was the singularly worst course in the thousand-year history of higher education: Théorie de la traduction taught by Mme Plassard or Mr Bruyère's Initiation au Droit (Intro to Law). Both classes were excruciatingly awful in their own way, but I think blatant xenophobia and racism on the part of Mr Bruyère might have made his class that extra slight bit worse. He did fail every single non-francophone in the class after all.

¤...Trying to renew my titre de séjour (my residence permit). Four appointments later and I still don't have the paperwork needed to get this taken care of. Every time I go an waste a day standing in line, they ask me for new documents which they haven't told me I needed to bring! After screaming and shouting my way through my most recent appointment, I left the immigration office in tears because I still don't have what I need, and now I'm an illegal alien!

¤...Michael moving back to Canada.

¤...About a solid month of bickering and fighting with my old lunatic roommate to get my deposit back. When I moved out, he insisted I pay for a professional to repaint my room to cover up two scratches on the wall. I, of course, thought this was preposterous and said I would do it myself. He said that was unacceptable. I said he was being unreasonable. And so on and so forth, etcetera, etcetera, until we were both so blue in the face that we gave up yelling and just sent hostile text messages and emails to each other. In the end we compromised, split the deposit 50/50 and neither one of us was happy.

¤...The worst week of my life. Already blogged about here. 'Nuff said.

UP

...Mika concert at Parc des Princes in June. Acrobats and juggling bears! Exotic girls, Fire-eaters! Muscle-men, contortionists! Intrigue, danger and romance! Electric lights, machinery, oh the electricity! — The best concert in the history of the Universe ever.

...Crazy roommate begone! Bye-bye smelly religious gay lawyer! Au revoir Sarajevo-style bathroom and washing machine in the middle of the kitchen! Adieu putrid cooking smells of rancid disgustingness (Sauerkraut + tinned brussel sprouts + fish heads in microwave)! Salut pastel patchwork shell-suit track pants that look like an Easter egg committed suicide. Good bloody riddance to any connexion I ever had to his sad, sorry, depressing and depressive life! I love my new apartment, my new neighbourhood and my new roommate. I couldn't be happier I moved.

...The simply amazing and wonderful people I've had the good fortune to meet. Michael, Cindy, Victoire, et al; you are wonderful and amazing people and I am truly blessed to have met you. Thank you for the many good times we shared over the past year (despite France's best efforts to ruin our lives).

...Champagne-soaked New Year's on the Champs Élysées with Polish and DN. A New Year's that actually lived up to the holiday hype for once!

...Feeling like the last person left on Earth, sitting on a rock next to a gurggling alpine waterfall, after hiking through the absolute remoteness of the Andorran Pyrenees.

...After being motivated by several seasons of So You Think You Can Dance, I finally joined a modern dance class in Paris. There is something fundamental about dance I totally love. You connect to something deeply 'inner' and carry it through you to the outside world. I'm begining to undertstand the deep emotional connexions people can have to dancing. —Plus, I'm not the worst person in the class.

...Escaping the tyrannical opulence and winter grey of Paris for some good ol' fashion QT with family and friends over Christmas. A year and a half is really far too long to be away.

... Cycling across the Pont de Sully in May. Life was good. Only five more months 'til I can do it all over again (or 151 days or 13,046,400 seconds, but who's counting?)

...Mum's visit. There's an old French saying that "Paris is not France." After two wonderful weeks exploring Normandy and the Loire, I couldn't agree more. The "real" France actually has chock-a-block charm with quaint little towns, wildflowers and smiling, friendly people. It was quite a revelation to me that I don't, in fact, hate France at all. It's just Paris that's a vacuum of ostentation and arrogance. Who knew?

...Travel. 2008 was rung in with a champagne hangover and trip to Rock the Casbah in Fes and wound up in the icy Jack Frost darkness of Canadiana winter. A fantastic travel year which included my first micro-state -the gorgeous mountains of Andorra-, punting down the Cam River in England, East-meets-West sauerkraut sensations in Berlin and rockin' round the clock during my Zürich layover.

New Year's Resolutions
As always, my New Year's Resolutions is to be more fabulous, which I hope to accomplish with the help of a snappy new suit and an increased champagne intake (I am living in France after all).

Another resolution for 2009 is to improve my French accent. My French accent was actually better before arriving in La France and has slowly degenerated into a mouth-full-of-marbles broad Anglo mess. It's time to faire des efforts as Gran-maman would say!

After 2008, the year of Lost In France, I think everything well on track for a fabuleux 2009.

Happy New Year!
Bonne Année !
¡Feliz Año Nuevo!
明けましておめでとうございます!
恭賀新禧!

15 December 2008

Take That — Do What U Like

Quite possibly the gayest, most homoerotic thing ever to have come out of Enland:

Do What U Like

I had to excuse myself after watching.

05 December 2008

La República Bananera de Canadá

Stephen Harper is a jerk-faced pig dog!

But tell me something I didn't already know...

How can he, in all honesty and with a straight face, say it is undemocratic for representatives of 62% of the population to form the country's government? –Seems pretty democratic to me. Then, when things look like they're not going his way, he has the Governor-General shut down Parliament. Uh, hello, what could be less democratic?!

Now that Harper has shut Parliament, what's next? Burning it down à la Nazi Reichstag? Honestly!

I thought I liked Michaëlle Jean. I thought she was the kind of person who would be bold enough to do something visionary and actually make this country a better place, run by MPs with the support of two-thirds of the population. I guess not. It's very unsettling to me that I haven't seen any newssource comment on her justifications for being a kowtow lackey to our new Toad King despot, Stephen Harper. I can only assume the worst.

Your Excellency, The Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, you are oh-so-clearly Dead to Me!

02 December 2008

Let's Groove!



Earth, Wind and Fire is definately my new favourite group of all time ever!

23 November 2008

Dancefloors, Breast Implants and Paradise

Nightclubs in Argentina are offering patrons the chance for a D cup

A hit telenovela is raising a storm of controversy on Latin American TV screens. Sin tetas no hay paraíso (Without Tits There Is No Paradise), is so popular that the title is fast turning into an everyday saying. The programme — about a young girl who believes breast implants will gain her a better life but lead her to a world of prostitution and drug dealers — has left many people talking about the show’s glamourisation of unequivocally-enhanced busts. But with contests, like ones in Argentine nightclubs where new breasts are given away as monthly door prizes, can the current public obsession with plastic surgery really be blamed on a single show?

“I want my tits!” scream contest hopefuls who pay between $5 to $20 to get into nightclubs for the chance of winning big. In a country where the minimum wage is $240, implants costing $2,800 are seen as an incredible jackpot. For Argentinean club owners, the women who come out to compete –and the men who follow– make for big business. The contests have become so ubiquitous in Argentina that locals are starting to refer to them as “dancing for your boobs” in reference the local version of Dancing with the Stars.

“People have gotten bored of cars and motorbikes as prizes. They want something new” defends local promoter Rodrigo Herrera. His club, located in La Rioja province in the north-west of the country, is just one of many across Argentina holding breast implant raffles.

Herrera says that people quickly tire of this kind of promotion at club events. Nevertheless, breast implant parties have become a goldmine. “People will never tire of sex” said famous British porn publisher, Paul Raymond.

Implants have become so common that getting a boob job is an everyday topic of conversation at any café or bar. There are TV shows about breast implants all day long and just by flipping through the Argentine channels, you end up knowing the advantages of gel implants over silicone, where the doctor should make the incision and whether it’s more or less painful to put the implant under the breast muscle rather than on top. Implants are so present that they’ve almost become an everyday consumer item. Subjected to constant advertising, many young girls are putting the surgery high on their wish list.

“You can’t raffle off breast implants as if they were a toaster-oven,” denounces Francisco Famá, spokesman for the Argentine Plastic Surgeons Association. That may be logical, but not everyone is paying attention. “Surgical tourists” are being enticed to Argentina on nip-and-tuck packages that cover not only the cost of the procedure, but also airfare, hotels and sightseeing trips.

With favourable exchange rates and highly-skilled surgeons, Argentina has quickly become one of the world leaders in plastic surgery, with more operations performed there than almost anywhere else.

15 November 2008

11 November 2008

The Teaches of Piggy



My new favourite thing!

28 October 2008

The Translation Project that Took Over my Life!

At the moment I am eat-sleep-breathing an enormous translation project for a friend of a friend. He's a photographer and he did an enthographic study of different endangered cultures for an exhibition at UNESCO. He asked me to translate the exhibtion guide. All fine and good. 26 pages by such-and-such a date; no problem. But then the pages were single-spaced, 8-point font... And they kept coming and coming and coming. More things to add or update or change everyday. The Never-Ending Story—only much, much longer!

I managed to farm out some of the work to friends, but it's still not enough. I haven't slept more than a few hours a night trying to get everything done. I just need it to be over, but instead I have more things in my inbox this morning

Here are some photos I took in the happy time when I still had a life.