Brorgiveness / Broflections

Sauce, you don't need to apologize to anyone for not updating the blog. Our schedules are chock full and we don't always have the time or energy to share every miniscule detail of our lives with our needy fans. They need to recognize. That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank Zach Schonfeld for boosting our hits; we seem to be still riding on the coattails of the October 6 Wesleying post that brought LVEB to national attention. Since then we have counted over 25,000 unique hits*! That's more viewers than Tom Anderson has on his Myspace page, yo! (This is probably true.)

So as I was walking home from Paris yesterday, I realized something: my tastes in music have barely changed in the last dozen years. I mean, sure, I've become slightly more discerning, and I got the Pitchfork logo branded on my left buttock, and I know how many people are in Bon Iver--one, right???--but, honestly, what did I listen to before that I would dislike now? Maybe I'm asking the wrong question--literally someone please tell me how many people are in Bon Iver--but it seems like I should be accumulating some kind of sophistication as I age and get exposed to more and more music, shedding embarrassing phases à la Christian Lalonde shedding weight grâce à his miserly host parents. The truth is, there will always be a place in my heart for Bro Strings Attached.

But also Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park's 2000 chef d'œuvre. For real, people, definition of a classic. Something about a guy named Chester belting out melodrama just gets to me. And I'm not even thinking about "In the End," (although I am thinking about it right now,) which, by the way, is the eighth track on the album! Can you believe that? What current band would have the cojones to stash their single in the back like that? Really, every song brings that angsty heat I still love; sometimes I catch myself chanting: "Forfeit the game/before somebody else takes you out of the frame/and puts your name to shame." It might be an oblique reference to World of Warcraft, but hell if I care; that's the word of God right there.

Anyway, the nostalgia for prepubescence passes and I am sitting on my bed trying to kill a mosquito. It is the middle of November and there is a mosquito all up in my shit. Now, I'm not a scientist (although this guy is), but how much more evidence do we need to prove that global warming is going to kill us all--or worse, let mosquitoes survive past early fall? It's pretty easy to see why the French aren't leading the race to combat the problem; they have like a billion different terms for it: réchauffement du monde, réchauffement climatique, réchauffement planétaire, réchauffement de la planète, etc. etc. etc. Really though, France, pick an adjective and admit that the crisis exists. Just because you people drive motorized rickshaws doesn't mean you are helping the world out. The cigarettes your country smokes daily are probably as bad for the environment as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also known as the World's Worst 4/20 Ever). Also, your dogs shit everywhere, indiscriminately and en masse. Clean that up. Christ, I feel like Marie Antoinette Poppins.

Par contre, I will be honest and say that the weather this weekend was divine, the perfect occasion for me and Swag to hit the City of Lights and remind our fellow collegians how to really party. This largely resulted in waking up in the afternoon, walking for a couple of hours, collapsing into food, and drinking ourselves into an extended hypnagogic state. For the record, I managed to take care of lotsa activities in my 50 hours: I hit the Jardin/Palais du Luxembourg, the Marais, the Canal St. Martin, the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Sacré Cœur, the Bastille, the Champ de Mars, Saint Germain, a Tibetan restaurant, and a desolate street corner off the Rue Oberkampf. Damn! And I didn't even mention Friday night, when a bunch of us diehard soccer fans went to see Uncle Sam vs. Le Coq Sportif at Stade de France, an event marked less by both teams' disappointing performances than by running into Sciences-Po-Nerd-In-Residence Faye "Chauncey Billups" Phillips, who regaled me with stories of Scandinavia, an affair she is having with the President of the Louvre, and some other equally banal things that I don't remember. We had an amazing pregame dinner--literally--at our friend Koko's mom's friend's apartment. I'm pretty sure she made those madeleines. Some other people chopped tomatoes or whatever, but all credit goes to Koko and her mother for the delicious spread, and également for putting up with our "well I would hate for this bottle of Jack Daniel's to go to waste!" and other antics.

I would like to stress that, though Paris has a reputation for being expensive as all get-up, I found love in a hopeless place some pretty good deals in the Bastille neighborhood, next to where my host for the weekend Jesse "Rick" Ross-Silverman lives. Ya'll know Jules? If not, get wise. I'm talking boots that neither confine my wardrobe to "longshoreman" nor cast me as a young Nancy Sinatra, 'bout 60 euro for them joints. Additionally, I copped a sharp oxford for 15 Eazy €s. Believe when I say that when I hit the club later that weekend, I left the other mecs in the dust. Except for that one guy who shoved me. He shoved me really far.

Actually, I got pretty lucky in terms of paying for food (although I made sure, conscientious tourist that I am, to compensate with libation) both nights. Saturday, the Sauce's parents, typically referred to as MomDad, treated me, ledit Sauce, and Christian "Don't Starve Me Bro" Lalonde to an exquis dinner near the Eiffel Tower, at a restaurant appropriately named FL. (Say it out loud, idiot.) The ambience was nice, the wine was great, and even though Jamie's dad called me "Jew Boy" (only once!) it was a lot of fun to hang out with the original Sauces. Papa Sauce is literally French and put me on some good words to repérer for the future: perdrix, for example, means "partridge." Thanks.

So, yeah. Other than this painful blister I received from hours of dancing in my new Jules, this weekend was nothing but awesome time after awesome time. I'm hoping to hit up P-town once more before the end of the semester, but I don't want to raise everyone's expectations, only to have them crushed by the weight of finals and the depressing prospect of spending another pair of three-hour train rides wedged in between fellow tardy passengers, stepped on by small children and battle-rapped at by obnoxious SNCF attendants.

Morocco might be in my future? Not before a torrent of papers and oral exams! Who will prevail in the battle between lazy and grade-conscious? Find out soon...in the mean time, let's just appreciate the awkwardly nice weather. Jew Boy out; take it away, Sawse.