Brovember

Happy belated halloween, escrocs! I hope everyone had a fantastic time out and about Monday, reveling in the only night of the year (with the possible exception of Passover) that people can pretend to be on the margins of society--whores, zombies, etc.--and yell at strangers until they are given desserts. When I think back, my all-time favorite Halloween has got to be 10/31/1998, the year I dressed up like Bill Clinton and, due to an understandable administrative mix-up, was called in to break things off permanently with Monica Lewinsky on the President's behalf. Trick got a treat all right.

Ever since then, Halloween has just not seemed real enough for me. I've been doing bigger and more intricate costumes, like in 2006 when I commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake by dressing up as one hundred earthquakes, but it always feels like I'm missing something. That's why this year I was SO excited when I figured out a totally amazing new way to celebrate Halloween: get sick! That's right, sick. While you guys were out parading your adorable, taking-Disney-to-a-whole-new-level-of-inappropriate getups, I was in bed, sweating and yet also freezing my balls off, fighting off delirium, sucking hot water through a tube, shaking violently as I tried to take one of those trusty French medications (this one I believe was called Feral Alien), only conscious enough to listen to Seinfeld episodes--which, I've realized, does not compromise the quality of the show in any way.

Soon enough, however, my body realized that everything would be fine if it just chilled out for a minute and let me go to sleep; and that is exactly what I did. TWELVE HOURS LATER, I woke up, no fever, no chills, no pain in the glavin, feeling like roughly 724,000 euros. The day after Halloween in France is a federal holiday, an unbelievably brilliant idea which America should adopt immediately if She wants to be taken seriously in this world. This jour férié, French for "Shabbat", is crucial for those of us who need to catch up on sleep, The Wire, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Up All Night, the original Office, crossword puzzles, the AFI Top 100, the IMDB Top 250, Wesleying, La Blogothèque, the Paul Rudd discography, reading, and other essentials.

Also, professional sports. What does that mean anymore? I've completely lost touch. Trying to get a football game on at a bar here is like asking Jesse Ross-Silverman who won the World Series: you feel stupid for even posing the question.

Jesse's cool with me saying that.* We caught up a lot when I tagged along with him, Ari "A-Fish Twin" Fishman, and Molly "My Dad Makes Lots of Things Have Sex with Each Other" Hanessian at Pitchfork last weekend. The festival capped off an outrageously fun five days I spent in Paris. I really did it all, you know, from climbing to the top of the Eiffel Tower, to stealing a stuffed elk from the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, to seeing Justin Vernon French kiss Lykke Li at the Grande Halle de la Villette, to shooting a mime off the Pont Alexandre III, to briefly curating the unbelievable Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, to finding a parking ticket that belonged to Jean-Paul Sartre at the Café Flor, to having a glass bottle broken on me so it could be used as a weapon against a homeless man on the ligne 8, to translating the new Clooney/Gosling movie The Ides of March to an entirely French audience, to looting a construction site with Jens Lekman off the Rue du Rivoli, to getting a 24-hour hallucination from a falafel/opium I got in the Marais, to delivering the 7,000,000,000th child at the Hôpital Saint-Vincent de Paul, to wearing the same pair of jeans every day of my entire vacation except Friday.**

Ah, memories. Well, it's time for me to face the music and give a presentation on the influence of William Shakespeare in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, which could either last 45 minutes or none at all because the professor said that she might also just not pick us to present so it's like, okay, great, I guess I will just do all this work for your class even though it is only worth 25% of the total comp lit course, but it's cool that I stayed up until 4am two weeks ago and did the fucking paper while you were "sick" in bed and didn't tell us we wouldn't have class until we were already at school, so that's

[Edited Thursday, 19h00: The presentation lasted two hours. That is not a typo.]

*This remains to be seen.

**Many of these things actually happened to me.*