So much for that resolution to keep this thing updated three times a week, huh? This is number two, and there won’t be a third by tomorrow, I’m sure. Hopefully, if you’ve missed me, you’ve been keeping up with the thirtying over at takingtigermountain.com, and caught Thursday’s column about aging and Danzig. If not, well, no excuses now.

Meanwhile, I may have failed to hit three updates this week, but check out my excuse- I was in paris.

No good reason for the trip, really, except that Kat and I hadn’t been before, and it was less than three hours of traveling to get there from the time we left our front door to the time we stepped out of the train at Gare Du Nord, and how do you turn that down? We got in on Tuesday afternoon, and left on Thursday night. Two nights in a particularly hostel-y hotel called perfect hotel (not l’hotel parfait, incidentally), which was a bit of a misnomer, but still fully acceptable for our purposes. It was cheap, anyway, and included, um, a bed. And a shower. And free continental breakfast, which was neat, as it was the first time I’d had a continental breakfast on the continent (as opposed to english breakfast, which consists of baked beans, steamed mushrooms and tomatoes, eggs, toast, sausages made from what must surely be the smelly feet of smelly pigs…), even if that really only means bread and hot chocolate. Well, what else do you really need?

It was fun, mostly, except when traveling in a country where they don’t speak English becomes stressful and all that it entails. But everyone treated us very nicely- no one smiled and said les americains sont cons real patronizingly and pretended that it was a compliment. We got mistaken for Germans once, which seemed like a victory of some sort, in terms of avoiding the ugly American-ness.

So, yeah- go to Paris, if you can. It had been a while since I wanted to live in every city I visited, but I had started to think about taking an apartment somewhere in St. Germain and joining a writer’s group on the second floor of Shakespeare & Co, improving my French and watching Kat charm the hell out of people who everyone told her would be rude and unpleasant almost out of spite. I took French in high school, and was surprised to see how much I still remember… Kat did better when speaking to people, though. I tended to panic and stammer and speak with a terrible accent- she managed to keep her accent subdued and speak clearly and calmly. We’re probably about equal in understanding the mechanics of the language, but she’s better at speaking it aloud, while I maybe have a better vocabulary… All in all, we can hardly communicate, but successfully coast through on charm alone.

And so much for that. Aren’t I cool? I ran off to paris!

Anyway. We went to a movie tonight- there will be blood. I liked it well enough, but found it impossible to take seriously. It’s tricky to watch a picture with no protagonist, and I found the best parts to be the funny ones, like when Daniel Day Lewis is slapping the kid from little miss sunshine around in the mud, or they make each other shout things just out of spite. Good movie, but couldn’t you almost picture Will Ferrell pulling off the Daniel Day Lewis role? i drink your milkshake! he yells to the preacher kid played by Paul Rudd, who whimpers comically, i drink it up!

Yeah. I’m rambling, because it’s late on Saturday night, or early on Sunday morning, and I’ve been spacey this week. We ended up at the movie tonight because we delayed booking tickets to the lord of the rings musical last night until midnight, and the seats I had found at seven o’clock were sold out by then. There’ll be other times to see the dancing hobbits, but in some ways, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest opus was a disappointment. Needed more singing ringwraiths.

This post ain’t a winner, but you know who is? Barack Obama. I think there’s a rule right now that I’m not allowed to write a blog entry without mentioning the guy, so I thought it best to get it in now. My predictions were a little off, but pretty close, regarding the margins for this week’s contests- I said 40/40/20 for DC/Maryland/Virginia, and it ended up 50/25/30, but nobody’s perfect. In Paris I ended up getting into a long discussion with some American reporters from 20/20 and the detroit free press on Clinton and Obama, and I thought it was interesting how different our perspectives were. None of them were expats, and I was younger than the youngest of them by three decades, and we saw things very differently. Which is useful to know, though they’re hardly representative of the American electorate, either. The free press writer, a woman in her early sixties, was a strong Clinton advocate and said that she considered Obama a child, couldn’t look at him without seeing his inexperienced face.

that’s what i like about him, I said. he doesn’t look like someone who’s been a part of the political landscape since before i was born.

you’re supposed to think like that, she said, you’re his target demographic.

and you’re hers, the 20/20 guy countered, which was the only sharp thing he said in the whole conversation; otherwise, he name-dropped the fact that he had spent a few hours with John Edwards earlier in the year and the fact that he worked at ABC about six times and parroted stuff I had read two days earlier on the daily kos.

All of which leads me to believe that talking about politics is boring right now. It’s fine, so long as it’s wonky sports-talk, but it’s not more useful at the moment than discussing whether the Bears will pick up Alan Faneca in the off-season. Speculation about nonsense, cuz there ain’t much happening.

Which is fine, really. I’ll be back on track next week for sure, and I have a book to finish. I quit a boring but inoffensive job to better accomplish these things, so I may as well hit it. Paris is in the rearview, at least right now.