What's Being Advertised in the Metro This Week

Time for a new segment called: what's being advertised in the metro this week.

Apparently, Paris advertisers are now advertising the unadvertisable. Ads in the metro this week promote the convenience of ordering things online and then rather than having them delivered to your home, you get to go pick them up at the store. In a breathtaking customer service breakthrough, your purchases will be ready in the store for you to come get them only an hour after you buy them online. Talk about efficient.

This raises the question, why not just go to the store and buy it there immediately? But going to shops and actually shopping there is so 2008. And what, do you expect all stores to stock products you might want to buy all the time? Au contraire. Commercial retail space is très cher in the city of light.

The internet is also here for our convenience, hashtag obviously#. In previous online retail, you recieved your order in the mail at home.  But having it delivered to your home took so long, like an entire day. This is the online retail of the future. This way you get your product so much faster, in only an hour, at the store-- where you didn't go in the first place to buy what you wanted immediately.

French shopping has clearly reached dizzying new heights of consumer convenience. Oh la la, the French are simply souffrants from the vertige. The rest of the world often criticises France as not having an entrepreneurial spirit but this is inaccurate. Not only have they got one, but it is probably at the Darty store waiting for them to pick it up after ordering it online an hour ago.

So how do advertisers try to make what is in reality a useless and unnecessary step in your shopping experience sound appealing?

How they always do: they use sex. If you have a young coltish half-naked boy toy ready to do your bidding, send him down to pick up your online order. The ad says, She shops online, he goes to the store to pick up my order. Why stop there? Why not send your strapping young Adonis on other pointless errands, like to buy stamps for your email envelopes at the post office?






So now, it is clear. The sheer logic and convenience-defying nature of online retail that requires going to a real shop is the entire point and was in fact designed for sexual roleplaying power games. It is intended to help women assert their dominance over their teenage boyfriends (I'm not sure why anyone would use this service otherwise.) The product is punishment, à la 50 Shades of Grey applied to consumer goods.

I think more advertisers should use this product-as-punishment strategy. For example, to promote the new Thor movie-- you wanted something with clever dialogue and a compelling storyline? Behave better next time, naughty vixen! Or a high-heeled dominatrix saying, you eat revolting greasy chemical junk food from Burger King if I say you eat revolting greasy chemical junk food from Burger King. Perhaps focusing on how your product can be used as an instrument of torture (even in a sexy way) is about as close to truth in advertising as we'll ever get.

Words to Live By

In empty Paris where everyone has left on vacation, and the weather has finally cooled off from 95 degrees to bearable temperatures, I find myself at the end of 1 path and the beginning of another, both in terms of jobs and relationships.

This is in some ways a relief, an exciting new opportunity, and crushing and devastating all at the same time.

The basic tenet of my 30s so far is this:

You can't control what happens, but you can control your attitude towards it. How much will you let it bother you, define you or consume you?

What kind of person would you like to be and what are you willing to do to become that person?

While I've always found the Gandhi quote 'be the change you want to see' a little vague, I think it means this: working on changing your attitude towards a setback, heartbreak or a mistake until you can react to it the way you hope to be able to react to it.

Tour de France 2013

Cycling is a big deal in France and in Europe in general and all of France gets Tour de France fever. Depsite Lance Armstrong being American, even before his fall from grace,  I didn't really know anyone in the US who seemed to care that much about it.

I think the most interesting part of watching TdF on TV is seeing the different French towns they pedal through, but some people watch it for the cyclists, too. The uninteresting part for me is the cycling-- pedal pedal pedal in a giant peloton. Ooh, the drama. Sometimes a few break away, sometimes they don't, sometimes they go up hills, sometimes they go back down hills. As you can tell, I don't exactly find it riveting...

I do like when they need a quick bike repair or medical help and the support staff do impressive things like replace a dérailleur or give someone stitches for a deep cut out the car window while the guys are still cycling.

2013 was the year I started cycling, did 2 bike races- 80K and 95K respectively, and then decided never again to do any cycling competitions whatsoever because they were both so awful-- ugly poorly marked courses, potholes and dangerous oncoming traffic. I think this is also partly why I would rather clean my entire kitchen floor with a toothbrush than watch televised cycling.

However, I like doing triathlons and unfortunately, cycling is part of the deal. Short rides like 20-40 km are ok, but I don't think I will ever be convinced to go any farther than that.

But while watching the sport itself isn't that fascinating to me, I have nothing but the highest respect for real cyclists who can do the crazy long distances (especially without drugs!) and can go 40+km/hr. We cheered Froome and company on at Tuilleries last night where we saw the cyclists do several loops of the last stage of the competition, 7 km around Paris to end along the Champs Elysées by the Arc de Triomphe which was well decorated with an impressive light show. It was about a million degrees out, but everyone was in a good mood, chilled beverages abounded and  and we kept trying to imagine how the cyclists must feel on the last night of their epic 6-week tour about to ride down the Champs for the last time before the end of their race.

If We Shadows Have Offended: Shakespeare, Traditions and Ducks

One of my annual traditions is seeing the outdoor Shakespeare play every summer in the Shakespeare Garden. I like that woods in Paris have a Shakespeare Garden and lest the anglophone influence seem TOO strong, it's next to a fancy French restaurant catered by French gastro giant La Nôtre.

I come every year, rain or shine. Rain is often more likely, given terrible flip change rain-sunshine-rain again summer weather. One year they did Hamlet and during the scene when Claudius is trying to pray and repent for murdering Hamlet's father and failing, when he says, 'oh, all the rain in heaven couldn't wash my sins away,' there was a downpour. Everyone laughed, as we frantically dug out our umbrellas.

Last year they performed Macbeth and I found the witches slightly disappointing. This year, they did a comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is probably my favorite comedy and it was the best play I"ve seen in a long time. I laughed until I cried. I also really like this one because I was in a school production of it once, so I still know a lot of the lines. And the ridiculous acting troupe who perform the play within the play are just plain hilarious.

Confused lovers wandering through a forest-- it's kind of the human condition... The stage is a landscaped hill and part of the garden, so it was arguably the play that best used the natural decor to its advantage.

The play about the enchanted forest was really performed in a forest, the bois de boulogne just outside of Paris. This is the woods where I run around the lake and I love it. I find it a mildly transcendent place, in fact, on the days when I push myself and I've run some great races here. These woods are also the home of many an illicit tryst and lots of rough-looking prostitutes live in vans parked on the property.


Transcendent and squalid, fitting place for a Shakespeare play, then, largely about love, sex, fairies and manipulation...


After the play, we strolled about the garden and admired nature: we saw a mother with her baby ducks and everyone gathered around to ooh and ahh take pictures and admire the fluffy ducklings. Were they perhaps Shakespearean creatures of an enchanted forest? Or maybe they were only ducks.

Here are some of the more quotable lines from AMN'sD, from philisophical musings on the nature of man and love and the apology at the end.

The course of true love never did run smooth.--Lysander

Lord, what fools these mortals be!-- Puck/Robin Goodfellow

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended.
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear. --Puck/Robin Goodfellow

Ups and Downs, Highs and Lows

I don't have a lot to say, just that this week was a bit Dickensian in a very Best of Times, Worst of Times way. I couldn't really focus, spent a lot of time being miserable or pep talking myself out of the house in the morning and not enjoying being on vacation but mainly feeling like an unproductive and sometimes tearful bum. However, I also spent a lot of time seeing friends who really rallied around me and I'm so grateful to have them, training for a personal challenge: a competitive 10K (6 mi) run tomorrow, a new annual tradition for me which I started last year and making some important decisions about life, love and lodging (I'm moving to a way better apartment).

People disappointed me and amazed me this week. This week marked the end of a relationship that had delighted me up until about 3 weeks ago. Goodbye, long term plans with that specific person. Hello, long or short term personal goals instead that don't depend on anyone else...

So clearly, that accounts for the disappointment. The amazement is from the courage and self-awareness of a friend who just came out. My heart really bursts with happiness for him when I think how much more comfortable he’s becoming with himself and how honored I feel that he trusts me with a part of his life that was only deeply private until now.

I wrote about how hell was other people for Jean-Paul Sartre in a previous post. That's a little too simplistic. Heartbreak and joy are other people.

Last Tango in Paris with Mary Jane

Like Tom Petty once said, tired of myself, tired of this town. Tired, also, of the same existential crisis.

A Little Respect and Jean-Paul Sartre

Erasure once sang, "give a little respect to-oo-oo-oo me."

Sartre once said "Hell is other people."

I used to interpret that famous Sartre quote as describing the frustration of being trapped in a crowd in the metro where the foot traffic patterns seem purposely designed to be the least logical and efficient. Sometimes I took it to mean a mall food court and its crass greasy marketing and overweight American consumerism. I've also interpreted it as being trapped behind a wall of painfully slow walking people on a public sidewalk and being unable to step around them. I guess I instinctively applied it to other people en masse, more to crowds than individuals because public space in France is just so damn frustrating.

However, this week, I've changed my mind. Truer to the actual play that the quote comes from where a few people just torment each other for all eternity, I think "hell is other people" in fact describes the insult and anger of even just one or 2 individuals who show no respect for you rather than the annoyance of walking in a crowd. This attitude describes an awful lot of people I know at the moment and disappoints me. Life is just a set up for disappointment, Sartre would probably say and shrug and light a cigarette. Or turn up Erasure.