Merde - n.- shit

I love Barnes & Noble – not because I’m huge into reading or anything… but because I’m big into knickknacks. And that store has so much stuff. Greeting cards, photo albums, board games, those cool little mini-kits and boxes of fun, and my favorite – empty journals. To me there’s something so beautiful, so inviting, about a blank page. My favorite is the leather ones; they even smell like writing. Every time I go I spend forever running my fingers over suede, leather, cardboard journals, wondering what adventures I could put inside of them, suddenly inspired to write my own book on those perfectly straight empty lines.

I also do love books. Since my experience of doing nothing in France, I’ve become an avid reader – breezing through novel after novel, bent on filling my brain with the intellect and/or hilarity of others. Kurt Vonnegut will always be my favorite author, but Harry Potter was fun to read – and Calvino and Sartre are defiantly intriguing. But that’s all beside the point.

While visiting a friend in Amherst, I spent a considerable amount of time browsing the Travel section of her local Barnes & Nobles. I had recently returned from France and I missed it. The books before me were shocking. Truth is, tons of people do what I did – pick up and go, make a life for themselves from scratch in other countries they have no clue about. Flipping through the pages of that section, I realized many move to France and loads specifically lost (and found) themselves in Provence, including all the tiny towns surrounding my Ramatuelle. As I sampled the pages of these novels I realized that these people wrote my book. My story is just like these.

Being a Gemini I quickly delved into two contradictory thoughts. First: these people wrote and published my story, which clearly means that I could easily compose my own version and it would sell too. Second: these people wrote and published my story, which clearly means that they beat me to it and therefore took up the market for books about young, foolish people moving to another part of the world. So what did I do? I bought one. The book I chose, A Year in the Merde, was written by a young man who moved to Paris and had to endure all the crazy stereotypes of the French that are, in fact, quite true. His first few pages caused me to literally laugh out loud right there in the middle of the store. I think my writing style is alike his… and he sold his story…

I bought a bookmark to match (a nice golden one with Emerson’s quote, “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you” inlaid in white) and jumped in. Of course, I’m now through chapter two and beginning to learn – through his eyes – what Paris is like in late November. The book’s really not that good. But it does take me back to a place I once was, not too long ago…


(sigh)