Sunday, December 15, 2002

God, this blog has degenerated rapidly

I'm now talking about my actual life. Sheesh. I'm trying not to even remember right now my original plan when I started blogging. It seems so horribly pathetic now.

I'm only going to bla bla about actual life for a little while. Hey man, saving the 'good stuff' for later. Main real life bla bla for today: I don't have to shop for Christmas presents. Thank God! I hate shopping. I like buying things...but I hate shopping. Main problem with shopping: abundance freaks me out.

Massive abundance. I simply can't handle it. There are too many things in stores. If there is one small section of one store or a very, very small store...then I can shop there. Usually, though I feel this deep inner fatigue simply looking at all the things I might potentially look at, let alone buy. Just grocery shopping is a whole day affair (or whole night in my case).

My apartment is full of strange items. You might ask: How did I collect such a massive amount of stuff without shopping? Well...it was all sort of sitting on the sidewalk or in a weird market in some foreign country. That doesn't scare me like Macy's does.

The abundance of the internet is something I also find daunting. There are so so many peculiar links I have collected...There seem to be an infinite amount of absurd and pointless items. I have trouble resisting the completely useless and so it is best if I keep away from malls as much as possible.

The internet has the Borges library problem--not the Quentin Tarantino version I wrote about before. I thank God Borges didn't live long enough to hear about (since he couldn't see) the internet. He probably couldn't have handled it.

In other words, I am going to Paris for Christmas and so I don't have to shop at all.

This is all just a very long segue into a question I want to ask but cannot receive the answer to...which is: How fat are French people? I remember going to Paris and being very happy there were a lot of fat, badly dressed people there. I might have simply been on the lookout for them and not noticed any of the slim, chic people. We spent a lot of time at Tati and McDonald's during that trip and I probably forgot to go to the Champs Elysees.

(Boy, Switzerland was so nice. Basel is so full of white trash people who don't mow their lawns and were metaldeath rock t-shirts. Who would have thought? It was just like my hometown and very comforting.)

In other words, how out of place will I be if I don't look like Amelie? Do I have to brush my hair? Can I wear my dorm pants and 8 year old Nikes everywhere like I do now? (I wonder what French people thought of Amelie. It seemed so quaint--was it some kind of parody of Parisian culture?) Will people be mean to my loud and flamboyant (but relatively slender) parents? Will our screaming family fights get us kicked out of restaurants? Do people in Paris occasionally throw food at each others' heads? What about my father's plan to make all male members of our clan grow goatees for this trip? Will we be exposed to ridicule and derision? In spite of our incessant crudeness, we are really quite sensitive to criticism.

Plus, my father grows somewhat violent when people attempt to correct the behavior of his unruly children. I do not want my father to spend Christmas in a Parisian jail.

It's great to get out of shopping but as you can see, I'm a bit worried.

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