it's a well-known mystery

Dinner with Liz again and another American with mindless aspirations for travel and books. We made lentils and talked for a while about European cities in the vaguest terms. Ohhh, let’s take EasyJet to Amsterdam! Meanwhile Manon sulkily skulked around the kitchen, licking the cap to her yogurt and staring into space. She has most recently accused me of eating her canned petits pois; nothing is more unlikely.

The most acute foreignness I experience here is in the unexpected inversions of the familiarly strange to the strangely familiar. The other day, rejected by the hardly welcoming Acceuil after arriving too early for work, I was browsing in the euro-fifty section of my local librairie when I stumbled across a volume that literally (à la lettre) and literally (literally!) had MAHMOODY emblazoned on the spine…of course it was nothing other than Jamais sans ma fille.

I’m tired all the time and can’t afford any antioxidants. I might be reduced to drinking the goji berry juice I brought as a novelty but that no one seems to find very interesting. It just sits there on my desk…the rainforest-tree-bark color of the bottle matches my Ikea.