The bad news is I am not writing this from a sidewalk café with a barret tilted just-so on my head and a baguette under my hairy armpit while drinking very strong coffee out of an impossibly small cup, smoking a cigarette, holding onto a poodle’s leash with one hand and typing with the other. The good news is I type a lot faster with both hands. Oh, and I’m still going to France; I’m just not going the day before yesterday (Pascal will have to test that time machine he designed another day). My new plan is to leave for the birthplace of so many clichés and stereotypes--the start of this post gave you a mere taste--on Thursday September 29th.

My delayed departure will allow me to have some additional tests done so I can figure out how to get my mojo back and if not, well I’m going anyway. It turns out that the mother-of-all-sinus-infections might never have been an infection after all... according to the ENT it certainly wasn’t when he saw me or when I had a CT scan, so I guess all those antibiotics were just so I could do my part to support the struggling pharmaceutical industry. Now I’m supporting the little dears by buying oodles of allergy drugs instead. To be honest, the drugs aren’t helping as much as I would have hoped, but this just fuels my desire to get out of this damn valley since it’s notorious for its allergens, particularly during the almond harvest.

But enough about that and back to stereotypes and clichés! I hope to offer an alternative view for my many loyal readers... Apparently there are four of you reading my blog now, all immediate family except for a particular high school English teacher whose boredom in teaching a remedial class based on a computer program is so profound that he has turned to my blog for enlightenment. And enlightenment you shall find, dear chap, as I offer up a totally subjective and quasi-anthropological view of French culture. So, enlightenment, but with my own colored filter on the light. I’m rather partial to the color red, but then my readers would be seeing red and, well, we wouldn’t want that now would we?

In fact, when I went to France for the first (and only) time about five years ago, one of my friends did see red upon reading an email I wrote about my experience with French food. Referred to by everyone at Worland High School as “French Emilie”, she was a Rotary exchange student from Paris, France and one of my best friends my senior year of high school. In a way, we were both outsiders since I had also just moved to that small town in the middle of Wyoming. At any rate, my email--plus a whole lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding--spurred a horrible falling-out, and Emilie and I haven’t spoken since. However, thanks to a small but vivacious anthropology department at Willamette University, I have since discovered something wonderful and life-altering [cue trumpets, angels, and Guatemalans playing the marimba]...

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

I look forward to making good use of this concept and many others I learned during four years of overpriced (but totally worth it) education!