The Yom Kippur Challenge

Sass, Ben and I have a friend who isn't a mutant. (None of our friends are mutants - are you surprised? We discriminate.) Anyway, this non-mutant friend is of particular note because she hasn't been on a proper date in literally years. In this case, however, it's totally for lack of trying, so we don't feel too bad for her. It's just that somewhere along the line, she started to ask herself that question made famous in The 40 Year-Old Virgin: "Is it true that if you don't use it, you lose it?" Well, our friend is neither 40, nor a virgin, but she definitely lost whatever she may have only questionably had in the first case, by which of course I mean a modicum of suave in the dating department. Our friend, bless her heart, is the epitome of awkward when it comes to men. I keep telling her, "It's endearing! Someone is going to find that incredibly cute some day!" But someday hasn't happened yet, and this is where the Yom Kippur Challenge comes in.

The Yom Kippur Challenge: 10 blind dates set up by 10 friends between now and next Yom Kippur. This was our friend's idea, and she was kind enough to let La Classe track her progress, under the sole condition that she remain anonymous. Here and there, we will be unable to avoid dropping certain hints; For example, a Yom Kippur Challenge is probably not a goy's idea, but this only eliminates the two non-Jew friends that we have at La Classe ('Sup, Livvy. 'Sup, Lauren Thomas).

The Rules, as dictated by our friend:

1. a date is defined as one-on-one time that exceeds an hour in a public space with person whom you've never met previously (and who didn't attend ******** College)

2. one person can only fulfill one date (however, addendum: if you decide to only date one person continuously and a relationship emerges, you've actually WON the yom kippur challenge. congratulations.)

3. contrary to popular belief, eating full cartons of ice cream alone on a couch by yourself (this is a purely hypothetical scenario) is not a celebratory act. ice cream may be consumed in this manner following a horrific date. it may also be consumed next yom kippur following failure to complete the challenge.)

4 and 5. emoticons are objectively uncool. however, exceptions will be made for international dates.

We are so excited for the Yom Kippur Challenge. It's already off to an incredibly gauche and cringe-worthy start. So please check in often for updates. We are also currently accepting referrals and applications.

Circle, circle, dot, dot.

"The finder of lost… property does not acquire title to that property," my property case book explains, "contrary to the saying 'Finders keepers, losers weepers.'" Thanks, law school. Spare me the prevailing jurisprudence on "calling it."

But as silly as that passage sounded in my head when I read it, I realized that a few of my classes have added nuance to, or even controverted, certain axioms of fairness that we take for granted as true -- even the ones we've known since we were little. Law school, you see, is a lot like moral philosophy. When doing moral philosophy, you try out certain basic principles (like "don't ever lie" or "finders keepers"), and you apply them to more and more ridiculous hypotheticals until they break -- that is, until they produce a ridiculous result. For example, strict utilitarianism looks pretty good until it weighs in on organ donation. (Namely because utilitarians want your organs before the car accident.)

Law does the same kind of work. Laws -- or principles, where laws don't exist yet -- are applied to lots of different cases until the results they produce seem intuitively unjust. Only, unlike moral philosophy, courts have been around long enough to have done these "experiments" on actual cases with human beings. The most ridiculous conflicts that a moral philosopher could make up… have happened. The sayings we take to be true and fair have been tested to the limit and honed by centuries of application, line drawing, and the occasional mistake.

Here's what I've learned so far:

"First come, first served." This is actually on pretty solid legal ground.Things that no one owns can be claimed by the first person to possess them. This is the principle behind hunting, and is also related to another fairly solid truism: "possession is nine tenths of the law" (if only a quarter of my reading).

"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Maybe so, but you can still sue someone if they act like they're going to hurt you. That's assault.

"Finders keepers, losers weepers." As I say above, not so. People who misplace property are entitled to its return. Transfers of ownership -- not always, but generally -- have to be on purpose.

"No backsies." This really speaks to contract law. In contracts, "no backsies" only applies when neither party has his fingers crossed at the time of the deal, provided it's not Opposite Day. Kidding. Actually, the essence of contracts law is that there are not, in fact, any backsies. If you make a deal with someone and then renege, most of the time you will be responsible for putting the "non-breaching party" into as good a position she would have been in had you been less, you know, of an asshole.*

*Not necessary if the other party has cooties.

Of course, there's still a lot to learn, a few schoolyard maxims left to untangle. I'm unclear on whether I can sue someone who stands me up for damages like "bus fare" and "a kiss goodnight," and I may never know. But I'll definitely post again if I learn exactly how much liability applies to that most sacred childhood culprit: "he who smelt it."

You Would Be Rude Too

In 1951, Paris celebrated its two thousand year anniversary. An immense and elaborate fete was thrown, with concerts and art expositions held all over the city.

This summer, New York celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson stumbling upon what is now known as the Hudson River. "Celebrated" is the wrong word, though, because nobody really knew, and even if they had, they wouldn't have cared - and rightfully so. Compared to the rest of the world, four hundred years is just lame. And that's when it kind of hit me - if the Parisians are stuck up (they are), with a culture over two thousand years in the making, they have every right to be.

As I explained this epiphany to Sass, she immediately made a connection to the way seniors feel about incoming freshmen. Exactly one year ago, before Sass and I had descended into the fetid bowels of the real world, we were the smirking seniors, chuckling and looking down on the freshmen as they flirted and preened precociously. How cute, we said amongst each other. They think they're so old. It was at once amusing and irritating, though ultimately just irritating because they truly were newer, more freshfaced and thus infinitely more interesting to study and gossip about - despite their stupidity and immaturity.

So yeah, if New York were two thousand years old, we'd probably be assholes, too. Being half Greek, I can see where these Parisians are coming from. Are you kidding, I often think to myself. My ancestors invented democracy. They built the fucking Acropolis. (Side note: The Acropolis is almost 2500 years old - suck it, Paris.)

Two thousand years of history is also, I believe, one of the reasons Paris can feel so lonely. It is a city that is so very much defined by its history and visual beauty. The habits and traditions of Parisians are well-engrained - their routines radiate out of their homes and into the very soul of the city, and as a result, there is little room for change. And so Paris' heart beats at a constant rate. Even the strikes, demanding change, are predictable, normal, absorbed without fuss into the steady rate of things. Everyone knows when the next train will arrive.

Parisians live amongst their buildings, between them. New York is still constructing theirs - still deciding what the history of the city will be. There is a sense of possibility there that is so distinctly lacking here. New Yorkers never know when the next train will come, and although they might bitch about it, curse the MTA to high heavens, it's a tiny relief to know when you get on the platform, that the moment of the train's arrival is, like much of our lives, unknown.

Anyway, that was a tangent. Now for fun, I'm going to show you Sass' notes for this blog post:

France --> Why so stuck up? They've been around forever. How do seniors feel about freshmen? Like... Are you joking walking around up in here like you own this shit?

We've been doing this longer than you've been alive. US is so young and yet so owning. We saved their asses.. they were so bitter! They got served by babies... get your shit together, FRANCE!

And that, Class, is how a blog post is born. I didn't include the war stuff because we all know the French always surrender.

Tonight's Menu

Now that we're poor, we've had to cook more. Hopefully the menus will get more intricate, but for now we're pretty much at Level 1: Pasta and pre-made tomato sauce. Tonight we've stepped it up to Level 2: Omelettes. Voilà le menu:

First course:

Tomato and avocado salad with a drizzle of olive oil and a fuckload of salt

Second course:

Onion and whatever-else-we-find omelette (+ salt)

Third and final course:

Baguette with goat cheese for me, and nutella for Sass.

We're going to top that all off with some jasmine tea and maybe some fruit if we're feeling nutritious (we won't be.) Bon appetit, class!

Hiatus adjourned

So Sass and I have brought La Classe Americaine to La Belle France, literally, not figuratively. Headquarters are now in Paris, but we're not trying to be those cool American girls. Quite the opposite, because that would be too easy. A lot of effort here is spent simply trying to fit in and appear French. No one wants to be immediately pegged as an American (which we were the first night I arrived here. Upon walking into a bar: "What would you ladies care to drink?" How the fuck did he know?)

Now, one would think that mastery of the language is all you need. Nope. Sass and I speak pretty impeccable French, and it's simply not enough. Clothes here speak almost as loudly as a bad accent, so the wardrobe must be reworked, muted, at once dumbed down and refined. A scarf is key, but not enough, and whatever you do, don't wear rainboots. Apparently it's like a crime against nature here and just generally beyond grisly and indecent. Really wish I'd known that before purchasing a pair before I left. My mom and I had several serious discussions about whether or not they were worn here. We ultimately came to the conclusion that rainboots are really practical, the French are practical and yes, they are made entirely of rubber, but if they're Burberry, who cares? And now if the weather is inclement when my parents come to visit me in November - and according to Murphy's Law, it will be - then my mother will make me wear the boots, and I will die of shame.

But even with the clothes and the accent, we still weren't passing and couldn't understand why the hell not, until I had this epiphany. Background: Recently Sass and I met up with an American chick and her latest French lover. The unspoken rule in these situations is that the interaction will be conducted in whichever nationality has the majority of participants, and so we started chatting in English, only pausing once to ask this dude if he was following okay. He responded that no, he wasn't understanding the words very well, but that he got the gist because Americans are so expressive when they talk; their faces play a large role in telling the story.

And that's when it all became pretty clear: I can't assimilate into this culture because I can't control my face. This is true of most Americans, but is especially (often embarrassingly) true of me, and for the past two weeks I've been walking the streets of Paris smiling, sometimes laughing to myself, generally always wide-eyed at the spectacular views on every street corner, or glowering thinking about all the French bureaucracy I have to deal with on a daily basis.

Now, I will allow that French people might have feelings, but if they do, they're not going to show them to a goddamn stranger on the street. Their faces are exercises in stoicism. They are unreadable and untouchable. (This is especially true of French women.) The only expressions that they cannot seem to master are bafflement and disdain - that face you make when you can't believe someone could be so stupid as to ask such a goddamn stupid question. I am often on the receiving end of this one.

So with regard to weaving myself seamlessly into the French fabric, it would appear that I am now le fucked, because even if I could learn to control my face (impossible), I wouldn't want to. I came to France because I like what the French are all about, which in a word, is living. Love, food, sex, pleasure in all forms - I think these things are valued here in a way that is healthy and entirely different from America. So I will wear a scarf and shun my rainboots if it allows me to participate more fully in the French tradition. However, the little tics, habits, styles of a nation are what make up its culture, and while I find the American ethos frightening at times, I think there is something equally as unpleasant in a culture that encourages, or at least cultivates in its citizens this tradition of heavily veiled (repressed?) emotion.

That being said, I'm loving it here. We're having a great time. We missed you though, class. Now that we're all settled in, we'll tell you all about it.

I'm not one to say I told you so

(Fact: I am one to say I told you so.)

In April, I argued that the most important parts of Twitter were its mobility, its ability to connect people to opinions of people they didn't already know (not just their friends'), and its real-time search feature. My point was that mobility encourages sharing in the moment, not just later when it's "easier," and that Twitter therefore makes available to everyone in the world a totally new and awesome kind of information: real-time opinions.

Well, Twitter has re-designed its homepage to emphasize search and access to real-time info (and to distance itself, I bet, from its image of meaningless statuses shared only among friends). In the words of Twitter founder Biz Stone:

"[D]emonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?”

Read more about the new homepage

(Nota bene: "discovery engine" is a way cooler catchphrase than "decision engine," IMO.)

T.S. Eliot Tuesdays?

This is how I'm feeling recently. Eliot says it better. Written originally (allegedly) about the disillusion and hopelessness after WWI, the poem is pretty long, so here's just the fifth section.  The last stanza has been stuck in my head for years. 
The Hollow Men

A penny for the Old Guy

 

V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

 

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

 

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the shadow

Life is very long

 

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

 

For Thine is

Life is

For thine is the

 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.