Lazy Sunday

My defense for wearing my Sunday worst today is that all of my other clothes needed to be washed. My only clean pair of pants was my sweatpants, which had been peacefully gathering dust since the Shakespeare seminar. As for my shirt, clearly you can’t go around wearing sweats and a dress shirt, so my only recourse was a free Stanford shirt. And since it would clearly be foolish to wear a blazer with this outfit—I’d be on my own worst dressed list—and since my other jacket needed washing, I went jacketless. Even after washing, I was too lazy to change, it was a Lazy Sunday.

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I heard some commentary about my laundromat today. It was not favorable—“I just want to avoid Boulevard Jourdan” (Boulevard Jourdan being the street we live on; I have no idea what the name of the laundromat is.)—and this mystified me, and I said so.

The laundry is pretty much exactly what I want from a laundromat. There’s always two washing machines open and there’s a friendly older man who always happens to be there at the same time I am—we exchange nods and have incredibly meaningful conversations about the nuances of doing laundry (Him: “I think you should use [insert laundry vocabulary here].” Me: “What?” Him, amazingly still in French, while pointing: [Laundry vocabulary.” Me: “Oh. Good idea.”). The downside is that the machine that accepts payment does not accept bills or five centime pieces, which of course I must always have a superfluous surplus of. Mitigating that downside is that the little old Asian lady who runs the place is always there at the same time as me, so she’ll always give you change. Also she gives away candy and cereal. Supposedly she complains if you try and put too many clothes in the washer, but I’ve brought some pretty big loads in and she’s never complained.

One good anecdote emerges per trip. Today, for example, a man (also in sweatpants with a track jacket—I feel we were one away from becoming a sociological curiosity) lost his five euro note. He needed the note to change so as to start the washer. He began calmly, rationally, methodically—he checked his pocket, his bag, and the rest. It was not in evidence. He then began to search the more strange places—on the table opposite him and his base of operations, asking people who had just come in. During the course of this search, he began to get agitated. “In-croy-able” (Unbelievable) became his catch phrase. I suggested that perhaps he had put it in the washer by accident. “No. Impossible.” Then he graduated to searching the likely places again with a manic rapidity. He laid out the other items in his pocket (pens, small change, wallet full of credit cards but empty of cash, cell phone) and organized them in neat rows on the table, as if their collective presence would conjure up the missing bill. He asked to see under my suitcase (I use it to transport my laundry). After searching those spaces proved futile, he searched some incredible places: his shoe, his armpit. He finally found it, but unfortunately when I glanced away. I can only assume it was in his ear.

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I spent most of my day writing, chained to the computer. This is what I claim. No recent invention has been more damaging to my writing productivity than WiFi. Whenever I feel writer’s block coming on, I can just check my e-mail (it happened during the middle of this sentence).

This phenomenon became particularly pronounced during the writing of a French essay. I mean, the part that I accomplished today shouldn’t have been particularly onerous—I was just recapping a short story. But writer’s block struck me quite often, and there you go.

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Orangina is a wonderful drink. Most French people seem to know this, as do many Americans. So you’d think they wouldn’t need to put up ridiculously odd advertisements, but an strange ad campaign has debuted recently, to perpetual wonderment.

I mean, it’s not often that you ask yourself, “Why is that giraffe in a red lingerie get-up drinking an Orangina and sitting on a melting ice cube?” when viewing an ad campaign. And this ad series has achieved that, a huge victory for its client—bestality porn sites of France. Besides the giraffe, there’s also a cactus in a cocktail dress, flowers in lingerie, and a deer in a binkini. And lest you think that the French are all about cheesecake, and don’t care about the considerable desire of women (and men!) to see some man-flesh, there’s also a ripped bear thrusting its pelvis (tastefully covered by a maple leaf. French commentary on Canada?) in the general direction of the camera. The tagline for the campaign is “naturellement pulpeuse” (naturally pulpy). Now I guess the rationale is that natural pulp is sexy and natural wild animals are also sexy (this is what the advertising world claims at least—I can only imagine the number of young giraffe teenagers starving themselves, vomiting even, to achieve that perfect body), and therefore they are a perfect match. I think this is it though.

Now, to be honest, these French aren’t the first to get all weird when the word ‘natural’ is mentioned. I remember an Aquafina commercial with a bear (always those bears!) complaining about how they didn’t want too natural or something like that. I remember it was notably incoherent. Anyway, something about the idea of ‘natural’ appears to send advertisers into a confused tizzy. Which is pretty strange to me, considering that the whole business is about naturalizing your desires (“Don’t worry, you really need this car.”)

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Pretend this is written by someone else: Geez, blue sweatpants? What is this red S? That is a tattered white shirt? Who is this? Listen, buddy, I don’t know what closet you stumbled out of, but we try and dress like we care here. You’re my worst dressed of the day.

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The RER was bothering a baby tonight. Understandable—it always teeters dangerously between Cité Universitaire and Denfert-Rochereau. But what was kind of interesting to see was the baby’s mom singing a lullaby. She cooed in a high pitched voice—and this was the clincher, I’m sure—and marched her fingers up her baby’s chest, until she pinched his ear, stretched out her face to comical proportions and buzzed at her, her tongue between her lips. The baby giggled and the mother continued and the rest of the trip was fine. No matter where you are, babies are the same—they love the same silly simple stuff.