The last two weeks have felt like two years!
So the past fourteen days have gone as follows: 6 days work, 4 days in Paris, 4 days work.
Now i'm off today and tomorrow then back to it.
They gave me reserve (AGAIN) for October. I'm quitting at the end of Oct- i can't put myself through this anymore.
On the plus side, i did get to go to Europe last week. For the most part, Paris was really amazing. I left last Monday and arrived at De Gaulle (huge ass airport incidently) Tuesday morning. I somehow found this shuttle bus that takes you to the Champs Elyssee and i walked over the the Arc de Triomphe. Its centerd in the middle of a killer traffic circle (think National Lampoon's European Vacation) and you have to go underground to get into the Arc. To get to the top of the Arc you have to climb 284 stairs up this very windy spiral staircase (i didn't count- there was a sign). You have to be freaking Rocky Balboa to see the view up there. Its worth it though. It is absolutly breathtaking- you can see the entire city practically. After the Arc if found my way to the icon to end all icons- the Eiffel Tower. For an overexposed falic symbol, it has a definate majestic quality to it. Its like an eclipse or something, once its in sight you just can't take your eyes off it (luckily unlike an eclipse, it doesn't hurt your eyes.) I spent the rest of Tuesday just walking around aimlessly admiring the sights. I was exhausted though. I had woken up in Syracuse Monday morn at like 4 am and worked five flights then rushed around for a couple of hours before the flight and couldn't do anything more than rest my eyes on the eight hour flight there so come Tues evening (Paris time, which is seven hours later than Chicago time) i had been up for like two days and needed to sleep. I found this little hotel not terribly far from the Tower for like 77 Euros (1 euro is approx $1.30) andjust crashed. Wednesday i took the Metro for the first time. I think its funny how when i first got to Chicago i thought that was complicated. New York is much worse and Paris is even worse then that (if not for any other reason though that everything is in French.) Miraculously though i made it to the Louvre. The structure of the place is incredible but i wasn't too impressed with the art. I'm not an art person. I realized this a few months ago when i went to an art gallery in New Orleans but the Louvre, its just one of those awe inspiring places you're supposed to go to so i went. I saw the Mona Lisa- she looks exactly the same as in any reproduction of it you've ever seen. I did get some great pictures of stuff though. After the museum (before it got too late) i ventured out for a place that i was going to stay for the night. I had heard about youth hostiles but didn't know much about them. They're really good deals though. They're geared for people 18-25 but some don't have age limits. The one i found was within walking distance of the Louvre and as i found out later, many other things. It was 25 euros a night and i met alot of people. Its basically like a big dorm and the room i was in had four bunk beds. The girl in the bed above me was from Argentina, the girl across the room was from the Netherlands and then there was another girl from Seattle. They all turned out to be really cool.
Also on Wednesday i did Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame. Notre Dame's staircase has over 400 stairs. It is like the world's worst place to be drunk. All i kept thinking the whole way up was this one night my friend Candace and i were drunk at Pat O'Brien's in New Orleans and were trying to go upstairs to the bathroom and how it took us like ten minutes to go up twenty stairs. The view up there is even better than at the Arc though. It was so cool just seeing all the gargoyles and stuff too. Paris is the kind of city that you can just sit around basking in the ambiance for a while and so after my hike that's exactly what i did- sit on a bench eating crepes enjoying the weather. Well there was this guy standing several feet away who caught my eye. Next thing i knew he came over and we got to talking. His english was a little better than my french and so we were able to communicate a little. We ended up taking a walk which was really nice. Its such a romantic city that the fantasy of strolling along hand in hand with a cute stranger overshadowed any sense of reality that might pop into my head. I don't know if all French guys are this forward or if it was just this one particular guy but not ten minutes after we met, he was holding my hand and trying to kiss me and stuff. I guess he either thought American tourists are really easy or just plain stupid. In my case i think its the second option. Normally i wouldn't just make out with some dude i'd known for all of ten seconds but i got to thinking, when would i have the chance to French kiss a French guy in France? So i did and it was...horrible! I'm thinking this must be the exception and not the rule because these people invented the kiss for goodness sake! Figures i'd meet the one man in all of Paris who sucks at kissing.
Thursday i went to see Musee d'Orsay. Its slightly more modern than the Louvre- more impressionistic type stuff. Problem is there's some kind of temporary exhibit going on in Japan right now so alot of the good stuff is on loaner there. I went back to the hostile early that afternoon to find that my cell phone had been stolen out of my backpack! I was so pissed, at that moment all i wanted was to get out of that stupid country. But i put on my mp3 player (which they did not steal incidently for some reason) and out of 550 songs, the song that came up was "oh blah dee oh blah dah, life goes on" and so i marched out there and walked around aimlessless some more, soaking in Paris. That night my roomates came back and invited me to dinner. There was a guy and two girls from Seattle (which i totally want to go to now) and a girl from Argentina and me that all went. We had a ball. We went to this French restaurant ( i ordered Les Poisson because curtosy of "the Little Mermaid" i knew what that meant.) It was really nice to have people to hang out with. Not that i mind venturing off alone- its sort of liberating, but when you can be with others that's cool too. And it was nice to be able to speak English as well. Its amazing how your own language sticks out. You'll be in a crowded room of people dribbling on in French and somewhere across the room will be the soft murmur of the english language and you'll pick it up like radar. You come to really appreciate your own language.
Friday morning two of the Seattle people went with me to find the train that takes you to the airport. We ended up in this underground subdivision. There was a movie theatre, swimming pool, mall, train station...it was insane! I don't know if insane would be the word to describe Paris in general but it was really something. Coke is like four euros, wine is only like three; traffic seems to be completely sparatic- some roads don't have lines dividing lanes and even the ones that do are very narrow; most public toliets don't have seats on them, you just squat over a porcelien hole; McDonalds has Croque McMos (which are Croque Monsieurs- grilled ham and cheese sandwiches....although, in Maine when i was there, they have lobster rolls); people smoke everywhere it seems; and waitors don't have to be nice to you because their tip is already included.
As many places i've seen....nice place to visit, but i wouldn't want to live there.

C2...a gateway drug??
So I think that that low carb drink, C2 is like the marijuana of soft drinks. Perfectly adjusted coke drinkers will start on C2 and next thing you know....wham, diet coke all the way. Its very sad really...
Anyway, i got to try on my bridesmaid dress already...and in typical wedding fashion, its pink. Why is it that brides will insist upon dressing up supposedly their best friends, in outfits that invevitably make them look like the Pepto Fairy??
Ug, so my parents are stuck in Atlanta right now. They've recently discovered (unfortunately for them, two months before i'm quitting) that they can fly for dirt cheap. I have an aunt out in Atlanta and after having to buy a ticket for my sister (she had never flown before) they headed out there Sat morning. They got there ok but thing about flying standby is that you can get bumped. Labor Day is a pretty busy travel day so they couldn't get from Atlanta to Dallas (which is where they had to go through to get back to New Orleans) so they flew to St Louis. Well one of them could get on but the other couldn't. So right now my mom and sister (who had a paid ticket) are flying from St Louis to N.O. My dad though is possibly flying up to Chicago to fly back down to New Orleans. Its so retarded. But American Airlines ( i don't know about other airlines) only goes from base to outstation. St Louis, Dallas, Chicago, etc are bases so you have to go through one of those places to get any place else. Well at least now my dad can say he went to Chicago (even if it is over a week late and its not for a football game.)
I, personally, am so tired of Chicago. O'Hare is really boring first of all. Its the third largest airport in the country but the way its set up, it doesn't feel like. The United terminal is kinda cool, but the American terminal sucks. The airport that's cool is Pittsburgh. This last sequence i was on was a four day trip and then a two day trip. I had overnighted in Pittsburgh (it looks like a mall, there's just all kinds of stores and escalators and stuff...) and you have to take a train to get from the ticket counter to the terminal area (like in Orlando.) The next night i was in Nashville. That was cool though because the FO had a friend with a car who lived there so they three of us went driving around downtown. We got to see the Parthenon (Nashville has the only replica of the Parthenon- it was interesting) and then we went to Opryland. I'm not into country music or anything but its a nice area. There's a big mall and stuff. There's a store called Past and Presents that i've never seen in Louisiana but they have some other places. That is my favorite store. Its got all kinds of vintage movie/tv memorabilia. There's all kinds of other stores too that have all these decorations i want. I have to keep reminding myself that i don't live anywhere and therefore can't decorate anything. Well i can decorate my suitcase, but stickers and ribbons only go so far.
Actually i kind of have my own apartment now. I am a horrible person. I am a trespasser. We had to move out of the orphanage and i couldn't find a new crashpad so...Llyod (my friend from training who i lived with in May and June) quit (he moved back to Hawaii) and i still have a key to his place so i've been kind of living there the last few days. I really like it. Only problems are a)he doesn't know i'm there (which aside from being incredibly disrepsectful also might be considered breaking and entering) and b) i don't think he paid his rent for september much less utility bills so i'm thinking any day now the power will be shut off and the locks changed. I would pay the rent myself but its $900 and i don't have that kind of money. I need to try to just keep getting layovers. The only other two i had this week were Louisville and Cleveland and they were both boring. One of the captains that i flew with was from New Orleans though and went to my high school (well i went to his high school- he graduated in 1975). It was funny though because we had the same drivers ed teacher. Kinda scary to know that Mr Handly has been at De La Salle that long.
Saturday was what's called a "seven day conflict" for me. I had been scheduled too many days on in a row so i had to have that day off. I was gonna go see a show downtown but i had lost my wallet (i've since found it) so ended up hanging out at "my" imaginary apartment watching "the surreal life". That, incidently, is my new favorite show (well besides "Scrubs"...oh, and the "king of queens" for some reason.) "The surreal life" is absolutely retarded. Even among reality shows, its bad but that's why i like it, its meant to be stupid. It comes on VH1 and there are three different seasons apparently. They put six or seven random washed up celebrities in a house and they "live". The one i was watching was Ron Jeremy, Tammy Faye Baker, Vanilla Ice, this chick from one of the "Real World"s, a Baywatch girl, and Eric Estrada from Chips. It is phenomenal (in a horrible, stupid way.)
Yesterday i had ready reserve at the airport. My shift was from 5:30 am til 1:30 pm. They didn't even use me though so i sat around the crew room all day (til almost 3:30 actually because i just flew home afterwards.) Its a very interesting dynamic that occurs in the crew rooms at the airport. There's this episode of "Friends" where Joey goes to work with Ross and sees in the break room that the doctors and the tour guides, etc don't associate together. That's kind of how it is with us. Pilots and Flight Attendants are kind of separate but then gate agents are in a separate room, and rampers/caterer/etc are in completely different areas downstairs. Its not a hiarchy exactly but it is very segregated. Maybe someday a Martin Luther King type will come in and change all that..."I have a dream, that pilots will sit down with mechanics in a lunch room and peace will be in the world..."
So, now i'm back home again. I've been going out what seems like a lot anyway, lately. Last weekend i drove up to Baton Rouge with a few friends of mine to meet up with a couple other people. It would have been fine except a)we were supposed to be going to see the Molly Ringwalds but we couldn't get tickets and b)i made the infamous mistake of trying to mix friends. I actually have this really great group of friends that i've known for practically my entire life (including the girl who's wedding i'm going to be in.) Every time i've tried to introduce some of those friends to people i know from college and post college, it always turns badly. That's exactly what happened with Kristin. Kristin is my oldest friend in the world (she's the one i go see Tom Cruise movies with). Unfortunately our love for tom cruise movies is one of the few things we really have in common. I convinced her to go to BR and she was miserable the whole time so we ended up driving back like an hour or two after we got there. I was pissed. Last night was much better. I woke up at 4 am yesterday morning (to sit reserve for 5:30) but after being up all day went down to the Quarter with Mickey and his friend Daniel (who i'm friends with too.) It was Southern Decadence weekend though (something that i don't know how it could have escaped my mind)- for anyone reading this who isn't from new orelans and/or isn't homosexual, Decadence is a big gay pride festival held on Bourbon Street. It was kinda crazy down there but we went down anyway. It turned out pretty cool (i'm usually against Bourbon anyway though just because its so touristy and just smells like beer and pee all the time). We went to Pat O'Briens and drank hurricanes. Boy did we drink hurricanes. And dance...ah, did i dance...and sing. There's a piano bar in there and my friend Daniel and i hung out in there most of the night dancing and singing and drinking. I went to bed at like 5am (having then been up for 25 hours which doesn't sound like that big a deal but...i was exhausted.) Then i couldn't even sleep in this morning because my parents kept calling from Atlanta telling me they were getting bumped off the flights- what did they expect me to do about it??
Whatever, its all good....i tried teaching my sister how to drive recently. She's 14 and there's no way my parents are ever going to teach her so we took a cruise around a parking lot. Next lesson- using the gas pedal.
And, last but not least.....I am going to Paris next week!! I've got this stupid passport i had to get but i've yet to be able to use it- here is my chance. Laissez les bonne temps roulez!