Foggy Friday

The sky is gray, I am anything but.

I am pleased to announce that I will be spending the spring in France!
Despite my resistance, I have succumb to my inevitable fate of being a 4evergreen grad.

Yes, that's right, I'm moving home and going to Evergreen. One might think I was joking.

I found a perfect program called, "Forbidden Metaphors: Rewriting the Real in 20th Century France". The past week I've been exhaustively finagling connections and contacts in a desperate last-minute attempt to get into this program. And I just received word that I'm in!

Here's a link to the course description:
http://www.evergreen.edu/catalog/2011-12/program s /forbiddenmetaphorsrewritingtherealin20thcenturyfrance-1407

Technically, I'm participating in an exchange program through my current college. This way, I can return to Western in a year if I so choose.

I'm over the moon with delight and excitement. Judith Jones and Julia Child loved Paris, and so will I.

I'm meeting my best friend Rachel in the summer of 2012. We will connect on the tail end of her year-long trek in Africa. We will be picnic-ing in Paris for the summer. Feel free to join.

My mother, my pal, finally arrived yesterday afternoon. After she exercised several outfit changes to get the right look, (light purple converse, mother?) we crossed the park, traversing Broadway for dinner. We settled into the cozy restaurant atop Fairway Market. If you've never been, I highly recommend it. Mom couldn't help but watch the old, bearded man behind us, eating solo, and neatly fastening a napkin bib to his shirt. In fact, many diners ate as alone. It was fabulous. They hardly looked lonely, accompanied by misted cold glasses of white wine, and finger-food appetizers, dates enough in my opinion.

My mom and I ordered two glasses of Pinot. We shared a butter lettuce salad dressed in lemon vinaigrette, with wafer thin slices of smoked salmon, pink like lox. Smoky, but delicate. The salad came with slices of pumpernickel bread and butter. We fashioned perfect-bite sandwiches with the bread, lettuce, salmon, an haricot vert or two for crunch, and plenty of pepper. We also shared two crab cakes. For dessert, a tangy Pinkberry ice cream with blueberries, strawberries, mangoes and raspberries.

We walked home in sweltering heat, arm-in-arm, past ruckus taverns and bars on Amsterdam. Delirious with happiness, I felt I could have skated across the purple water of the Central Park Reservoir.

Day or night, New York is my city.



"Sometimes when I'm with you, I feel I could burst," my mom lovingly said to me at dinner.