Paris, Trois

Since my last post I've...

--Almost seen Gregorian chanting with Lizz
--Seen Lizz!! (Her hair was braided and she wore African dresses every day!)
--Smelled 300-year old pee at Versailles
--Gotten rope burns from learning to the trapeze
--Chatted with circus performers
--Walked on meter-high stilts
--Had maybe the best meal of my life at Super Nature
--Had the best macaroons in Paris at Laduree
--Visited the Catacombs, Pere Lachaise Cemetary and the Garden of Childhood Fears all in one day
--Celebrated the birthday of the only male in our group by ordering a Jack and Coke to his Cosmo
--Been one of the "very rare cases" to burn myself on Ace laundry detergent
--Celebrated the Fourth of July by waiting an hour and a half for overpriced, mediocre American food at the Hard Rock Cafe

See you all soonish!

Paris deux

Things I've done since my last post:

-Reprised the audition for Sleeping Beauty by getting to act like wind
-Feted la musique with all of France on June 21st, the Fete de la Musique
-Arrived in Rouen, the site of Joan of Arc's burning
-Seen some really great street theatre
-Gotten attacked
-Seen some really bad street theatre
-Drunk hard cider on the site where Joan was burnt
-Read aloud from a book called "The Secrets of the Model Dorm"

Yeah.

Paris.

Things I have done since I've gotten here:

--Eaten raw steak
--Fallen in love with Jean-Paul Gaultier
--Convinced a Swedish model that I'm a professional face painter
--Seen a man eat a balloon animal balloon
--Drunk wine out of a baby bottle
--Sung "Santaria" in front of a crowd on the steps of Sacre Coeur
--Had a rainy picnic beneath the Eiffel Tower
--Ribbon dancing

Oh yeah.

My dad thinks I am a master of the French language. I am just about to call a French businessman to try to arrange a time for an American businessman to call him. I guess. I don't even really know. All I know is that this phone call will take place in a French that I definitely don't speak--business French. Also, in my nervousness about this conversation, I have completely forgotten English and can't tell if I've spelled business correctly despite Spell Check's insistence that I have. OH GOD SAVE ME FROM MYSELF!

I just did it. If this company dies, it is so not my fault.

Master Baker?

Sometime in the recent past I ate a delicious Seven-Layer Bar at a bake sale and scavenged my mother's cook books for the recipe, to no avail. It was a heavenly mix of graham crackers, chocolate, peanut butter and coconut... but that was only four layers. So yesterday I went into Whole Foods when I was much too hungry to be doing any sort of food shopping and proceeded to buy the ingredients necessary for my own recipe of Seven-Layer Bars. I wanted a graham cracker crust, a layer of peanut butter and a layer of brownie, sprinkled with coconut and walnuts.

I go back to Kevyn's where I have the house to myself...perfect time for kitchen experiments. Preheat the oven. Melt a bar of butter. Crumble up some graham crackers. This is very tedious and trying for the fingers. After I feel like I've got enough crumbs, I stick the mix in the pan. There are some bare patches, but I carry on. I begin to refer to them as the Heart Attack Bar as I've already used an entire stick off butter and this is only Layer One. Next I melt a bag of peanut butter chips and spread them on top of the graham cracker crust. Of course, Kevyn doesn't have a spatula or any sort of real spreading tool, so I use the back of a spoon. Inefficient. The graham cracker crust keeps coming up and mixing with the peanut butter. Next I mix the brownie batter. I have planned to only do half, but then I'm thinking that actual brownies might be too heavy, so I decide to eliminate the egg to make them gooier. So I throw in half the mix, add some water (a little too much, I realize, a little too late) then some vegetable oil, mix that all up, pour it onto the peanut butter layer. I start crumbling walnuts, but this, too, is trying on the fingers and I give up when I have enough for only half the pan. I decide to say that I did that on purpose. A Nut side and a No Nut side. Then comes the coconut. Oil is already seeping up from the bottom.

I stick it in the oven for 15 minutes and start to wash the many dishes I've used. 15 minutes later I pull it out of the oven, knowing that it won't have fully cooked, but I was not expecting it to have melted. It is a gooey, gross looking mess. I stick in in for another 20 minutes. When I come back, the edges look cooked, but the inside is still very gooey. So gooey, in fact, it's like lava. So much like lava, in fact, it's boiling. That was disquieting. I stick in back in the oven for another 20 minutes. After that is over, I pull it out. The inside is still gooey, but I realize that if it's boiling, it will continue to cook itself without the help of the oven. The amount of oil that is bubbling over the surface is disgusting. I try to sop some up with a paper towel. I'm actually pretty successful, and once a lot of the oil is removed, the concoction looks done.

Kevyn comes home after it's cooled a little so I decide to cut us some pieces to see if it's edible. The graham cracker crust has to be scooped onto our plates with a spoon, but it's definitely edible. Sort of delicious even. After we had dinner, Kevyn even went back for another square, a la mode this time.

I begin to realize something. I've always thought that I was better at baking than cooking. When you cook, everything is To Taste. Throw in as much as you want of whatever you want and it'll come out more or less fine. Baking is not like that. Baking requires precision and exact measurements. I realized that I cook like I'm baking--seeking specificity and rules--and that I bake like I'm cooking. I didn't measure how much water and oil I put into the brownie mix. I just threw it in, knowing that there needed to be more oil. I've decided that after Kevyn and I finish this batch of Heart Attack Bars and we both have recovered from our double bypass surgeries, I will try again. This time with a lot more forethought and measuring.

Purchases I Made Today in Desperation

--Bottle of orange juice and Sarah Lee corn muffin
--Luna bar and banana
--Study Abroad: Paris; Frommer's Irreverent Guide to Paris; 25 Ultimate Experiences: France; Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Krauss
--The French Chef Cookbook by Julia Child; a set of three Moleskine journals, unlined
--Mustard colored dress from Forever 21

Do you ever find yourself pulled over on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike with a cracked windshield, tying the hood of a car down with shoelaces?

If not, you've never been me.

THE STORY:

So on Thursday Kevyn came to the V to help me move out. Hours before I had called my dad to see if he could do the job in case it rained, because I did not, under any circumstances, want a repeat of last year's disaster. This year, instead, became its own. However, driving home with my dad would mean missing The Office (which I did anyway) and Kevyn is more fun than Baffles. So Kevyn arrives after having gotten gas and changed his oil in Brooklyn. This is important because it leads to the first instance of hood problems. Kevyn drove from this Brooklyn gas station to the V with his hood not properly latched down. When I greeted him, he asked me if I had any string, and of course I did not. Something had happened to the hood latch so that when he tried to shut it, nothing happened. So we packed up my room and finally were ready to leave an hour after I should have been gone. Oops. During this time, Kevyn has found a shoe in his backseat and threaded the shoelace around the latch and the front of his car to hold the hood.
And we're off. We breeze through the Lincoln Tunnel, bypassing the busy 47th street entrance, opting instead for the secret one at 30th. As we get into New Jersey we're discussing the hood problem, and how we should pull over whenever we can to check that it is tied down well. Kevyn brings up the scene in Tommy Boy when the hood pops up. We both agree that we're not sure whether that's really possible. We pull over at the first rest stop: the string seems to be holding up well and my stuff is all safe in the back. Burger King isn't that appetizing so we decide to pull over at the next rest stop to eat and to find another string to add to the first.
And we're off, again. We pass IKEA and I'm thinking about how much fun that store is when there is a very loud bang and the entire windshield is obstructed by the hood that has just popped up. The windshield begins to crack. My breathing ceases entirely. We start freaking out because this just had to happen right near an on-ramp where people are zooming onto the highway and leaving us no room to pull over. All I can think about is the possibility that the windshield is going to explode on us and we will be stopped in a car in the middle of the Turnpike covered in lacerations and glass shards. Finally we pull over and Kevyn gets the hood back down. There is, of course, a humongous dent in it. Kevyn starts cursing and I suggest that we call someone. The police? AAA? He calls his dad. His dad is basically deaf. His dad is in Maryland. His dad is also drunk. His dad is no help. So Kevyn rips the shoelaces out of the shoes he's wearing and begins to lace up the front of the car again. All I can think about is how this would not have happened had I had my dad pick me up. But back to the problem at hand. Because I have all my worldly possessions in the back of his truck, I begin pulling the laces out of several pairs of my own shoes and hand them to Kevyn. He takes them and tells me to get in the car. The order is well intentioned--it's fucking freezing out--but I don't want to be sitting in the car with the cracked windshield.
Kevyn is satisfied with the job he has done, and we are off. Again. Warning lights on, we drive agonizingly slowly. I am now petrified of this drive. Finally we find the next rest stop. We pull over, park, and get out to get some much needed food. We order more Popeyes chicken and mashed potatoes than we can possibly eat. We realize that, in nearly three years, this may be our first Fast Food Date. We decide that that's enough. I call my mom. She offers to come get us if something happens again, and luckily it doesn't. The rest of the journey goes rather smoothly--I bought some small bungee cords in the gas station to secure our shoelace job. However, it's only once we're in the car and back on the highway that we realize we left all my worldly possessions in the open back of Kevyn's truck for nearly an hour. At this point, I could care less whether anyone took anything. I just want to be home.
I realize that my life may not contain tons of crazy adventures with foreign strangers, but it does seem to contain a lot of car accidents. I'm not sure I like this realization.
But we did spend most of the day yesterday making chess pieces out of clay. Oh life.