Not a Medical Doctor

Me: I've been a little stressed. It's better now, though. I'm fine.

Cousin Kyle Who Just Had a Baby: Angel, you need to come back to the Bay. And when you come, I want you to do something. I want you to spend a few days with us, and just... just allow the baby to work his magic on you.

Me: Are you seriously talking about your weeb like he's a dream vacation? Like, a few days barefoot on the beach and I'll relax, except 'the beach' is the baby smell wafting from his tiny skull?

CKWJHaB: YES! No regrets. You're gonna see. You'll see for yourself. Also, when we get off the phone, I'll send pictures of the cartoon face he made while taking HIS FIRST BATH.

(He really did. It was a cartoony face. My cousin is high on the best drug in the universe—the drug of progeny. I love it, partly because I love him, but also sociologically.)

Compliments Between Grown Women

Me: You're so good with herbs and pickling and experimenting with all kinds of culinary things. You would make the best witch.

Her: You would make the best witch! I would only be part of your coven.

Me: I know nothing about herbs! I'd make a horrible witch.

Her: You would work with electricity. I see it. I feel it.

Destiny's Traps

Him: Would you go to Mars if asked?

Me: Yes.

Him: You couldn’t come back.

Me: I guess it depends when in my life...

Him: Tomorrow. You have to leave tomorrow.

Me: Yes. Still yes.

Him: So you’d leave me. For Mars.

Me: No! You could come!

Him: No, I don’t have an invitation.

Me: Then of course I would stay for you.

Him: No. No, you wouldn’t.

Me: Why would you entrap me like this?!! Where is this even coming from?

Him: It doesn’t matter. But now I know you’d leave me from one day to the next for something dumb. 

Scenes from MIPCOM

Me: "So the new formats weren't so fun?"

Stuart: "No. Although I guess I liked the idea of the men who've secretly admired a woman for a long time going on a date with that woman dressed as a rabbit. Oh, there's also the one where you try to stop a bull by grabbing it by the horns."

Meanwhile, on Twitter: "If you see the half-naked Wiccans pitching the sex cooking show we recently got pitched, DO let us know."

On Meditation

No worries, wee monk, you'll get there.

I have a client who's gone away to meditate for a month in one of those countryside meditation places. To make conversation, I not-jokingly said, "I tried meditating last week, but I'm not sure if I did it right because I think I fell asleep."

He gave me a smile of uncondescending sympathy and said, "The problem is, today, we're just tired all the time. When you go away on a meditation retreat you basically spend the first week falling asleep. Then you get to the point where you're actually rested. And that's when you can really start working on stuff."

I liked this and have been thinking about it ever since. It's silly to say, but it never occurs to me that everyone else is just as tired as I am, that this is an epidemic, and that falling asleep while trying to meditate isn't some expression of your inability to attain inner attunedness, it's an expression of how goddamn dragged-across-the-cobblestones we feel all the livelong day.

Isn't that reassuring? And doesn't that make you want to get to the place where you're rested, if only to see what you're like once you arrive?

Awkward Smoking Co-Worker Talk.

Him: Salut. Have a good weekend?

Me: Yeah. You? Do anything special?

Him: Not really, I just relaxed.

Me: Yeah, me too.

Pause.

Him: If you really want to know, I planted tulips.

Me: Ooh. Yeah, I guess the weather was good for gardening.

Him: Not really, the weather was horrible. We just brought some bulbs back from a trip and I planted them.

Me: Oh.

Pause.

Me: So, plans to start the next Tulipomania?

Him: What?

Me: Never mind.

Awkward Gift Time

Kito, who is paying Europe a visit: So Angela. Do you have any feelings about Ghirardelli chocolate?

Me: I guess I like the peppermint kind.

Kito: Do you ever have overwhelming urges to eat it? Are you ever like, "God, I could kill for some Ghiradelli chocolate right now"?

Me: Not really. Why?

Kito: Oh. Because here is a pack of Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate that I brought as a present for you. Don't worry though, they were on sale and I got some for my ex-girlfriend too.

Thanks again, Keet. Image credit: Hungeree.

They Never Ask Enough Questions.

Him: ...so R said he saw you on the street the other day. He said he thinks you got skinnier.

Me: Good skinny or bad skinny?

Him: ...what?

Me: Like, "wow, she got skinny" or "my God, she's so skinny"?

Him: I don't know. I didn't ask. Do you think you lost weight?

Me: Why didn't you ask clarifying questions? What did he mean?

Him: I don't know! I don't think it was good or bad. His tone was just neutral. Like me, speaking now.

Me: THERE IS NO NEUTRAL.

Him: Should I ask...?

Me: No! It's too late.

Image: mugley.

Friends with Whom You Can Share All Things

The little bastards.

Me, 3 days post wisdom-teeth removal: I'm really sick of food I can't chew. Gazpacho, purées, pudding. It's not even really food. What is my poo going to look like?

Her, after a long and thoughtful pause: Angela ... your poo will be beautiful.

Willy + Smutley Have Been 'Round the Block

The French are privy to the best AIDS awareness ads in the whole wide world. (Consider. And. And!) Work for Aides by Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Here's another from the same campaign: I give you Smutley the promiscuous cat!


When I first decided to visit France in 2006 (a kind of scouting vacation), my dad invited me to dinner. We didn't talk much, but toward the end, he suddenly went, "One of my co-workers had a daughter a lot like you: smart, pretty. Whole world going for her. She went to France on vacation and fell in love. Then she got AIDS, and now she's dead. Have a good trip."
And on that somber note, he ushered me out the door and on my merry way.

Oh, of Course

Ariel, another compulsive owner of gadgets. (And gizmos.)

Me: Chéri, I really think I need to have this.

Him: Of course! It's not even that expensive. We should also get one of these.

Me: We're like those sad gadget people.

Him: We're nothing like those people. All our gadgets are useful.

What Television, Even Torrented Television, Can Do

Him: ...so I told them, let me think about it. I don't know. This whole idea of a contract doesn't appeal to me.*

Me: Are you Don Draper now?

Him: People want what they can't have.** I'm just saying.

Humor me ››

Proof that My Commitment to Evolving Communications Technology Has Changed Lives, Broadened Experiences...

So I recently found -- and finally read -- the email you sent about the launch of that one site. It was when I was redoing Riz's bathroom. So I would leave it open while chipping away at her wall - shirtless, you know? ...Because it's sweaty work. And every once in awhile I'd turn around and there'd be some random guy just sitting there. Watching me. Wanking off.

- Kito, New Years, reminiscing about ChatRoulette.

Freelancers

Me: "Where did you put the drill? I want to put those new hooks in."

Him: "It's too late now for the drill. You'll wake the neighbours."

Me. "It's 5 PM on a Friday. Who am I going to wake?"

Him: "Can't you see I'm working?! YOU CAN'T HAVE THE DRILL."

The Truth of Life

I often feel like Anna Karina in this scene, particularly at conferences, where the goal is to network for some vague but promising outcome.

To find an opportunity and be able to pounce on it while clutching watery vodka at a homogenised two-hour mixer is indeed a talent, but I'm little interested in "advancing long-term corporate objectives."

I am looking for people willing to answer immense questions with no answers. The responses sound so sure, so right and somehow still so varied: you're apt to marvel at what we think about that we're never invited to say out loud. This is one of my favourite things to do (and probably the reason why no one ever wants to sit with me).

Last week at a couscous restaurant in Paris, a beautiful retired woman told me to believe in destiny, that life never truly becomes fixed or definitive, and that after 30 years of marriage there is usually no love left. Her husband left her for someone he loved when he was 20 years old, and she is happy.

"Are you going to tell your daughters this?" I asked. They're both slightly older than me.

"Of course not." She laughed that cool, distant laugh of untouchable people in very old movies. "It's good to have delusions in youth. And if my husband had never left me, I would never have met my friend Boris." She motioned to the orderly, grinning man across the table. He used to be a professional water skier, and he let me look at all his ski licenses.

Two days ago in Switzerland, another woman told me that the best way to raise your children is not to make sacrifices for them. "Don't neglect them, certainly, but no one is grateful for a martyr, and it isn't right to be one," she said. She and her husband of twenty years raised the twin girls she had with her previous husband.

Asked whether she believes people can be "sure" they've met The One when they've met them, she nodded but doesn't believe there's stock to it. "I was sure of my first husband," she said. "I felt all the things I'd never felt before: the need to love and be loved, to have children. And the moment I was pregnant and we had to make decisions together, I realised I made a terrible mistake. Love takes maturity, and true friendship at its core. We weren't friends."

The current husband is a freelance director, and they travel together to work on projects. Her previous husband found someone else and had another set of twins: boys this time.

And last night over dinner, a thirty-three year-old man with youthful eyes and an azure blue tie leaned in and suggested we may be extraterrestrials, that what we perceive to be reality - this waking life outside our dreams - may not be objective reality at all. I laughed because he hasn't seen Inception yet.

We spent most of the night discussing God and serial killers.

A Lesson on Not Jumping the Gun

The internet claims this is Surcouf, prior to his incarnation as a sort of Gallic Best Buy.

Him (leaping through doorway): I'm going out! Are you coming with me?!

Me: Where are you going?

Him: Chez Surcouf!

Me: What is Surcouf?

Him: A French pirate, very well-known----

Humor me ››

Conversations on Quitting the Cancer Stick

In advertising, we pick up a lot of habits - "creative" habits, mostly - that we occasionally are and aren't proud of, depending on our mood and who's looking. The Cannes Lions becomes a magnifier of all those habits: there, trapped in paradise for a week, people don't just drink until 5 in the morning; they often smoke as if all the weight of the world depends on it.

"Last night I knew it was time to go home because I started chainsmoking," complained Shannon Stephaniuk of Glossy. "I hate smoking more than anything else in the world!"

I suppose I believe her. I've never seen Shannon pick up a cigarette, not once, and I smoke a great deal, which usually outs the casual smokers in party atmospheres.

Anyway, this Cannes phenomenon leads to a lot of semi-casual conversation about why we all started smoking in the first place, which naturally drifts over to quitting and efforts to get there.

This is why I started smoking (in earnest, not counting the flirtation I had in college when my best friend gave me a pack of Vanilla Dreams for my 18th birthday): to eke a promotion out of a boss who only discussed "the future" with his subordinates during smoke breaks. I was 19, maybe 20.

"You know what Gabriel Garcia Marquez did to quit?" began Draftfcb ECD Mark Fiddes, rather grandly, at a beachside luncheon for production firm Mad Cow. "Gabriel Garcia Marquez buried his last packet of cigarettes. Big mound. It was something he could walk by and look at every day."

Humor me ››

Lost in Translation

Him: You are one of the funniest girls in the world.

Me: Really?

Him: Yes. You, and Dita von Teese.

Trust

Him: I need something to organize my spending and show where all the money goes.

Me: I use Mint. It's magic!

Him: What is that, a website?

Me: Yes! The interface is beautiful, it links to all your accounts and credit cards, everything is updated automatically and organized by expense type...

Him: You gave a WEBSITE all your financial account details?

Me: Well ... yeah. When you think about it, public sites are more incentivized than private persons to maintain security--

Him: I'm not like you. I can't just trust the internet.

Image credit: kloniwotski.

Dirty Truths

Me: I wish I had a friend brave enough to tell me--

Him: That you don't know how to put your makeup on?

Me: No! Wait ... what?

Him: Nothing, chérie, laisse tomber.

Image credit: Aihibed.