I "heart" F.N.Y.

Today, the packing boxes arrived, along with a suitably excessive amount of packing tape and about 35 miles of bubble wrap. The bubble wrap comes in its own dispenser and is perforated every 12 inches, like a giant roll of highly ineffective toilet paper.

The bubble wrap is what finally made it all hit home - we're actually moving. If you have industrial quantities of bubble wrap in your house, you're either moving, or you've got a serious psychiatric problem. In our case, both apply. But the moving thing is new.

Having lived in our current apartment for two years and nine months, it's the longest I've ever lived anywhere since moving out of my parents' house at age 17. Like most of us in New York, I've moved often and hastily, as if running away from a Dark Past.

In this town, grown adults in their 20s, 30s and 80s continue to live like college students, shuffling from one unbelieveably crappy apartment to another. But in Manhattan, an apartment the size of my freshman dorm room is called a "FLEX 3-BDRM only $4400!!! WOW!!! Call NOW!!! Won't Last!!!!!" The only difference is that the "Phish" posters have been replaced by wall sconces from Crate and Barrel, which is arguably not an improvement.

But by New York standards, this most recent apartment has been great. Well, except for the vomiting bathtub, and the 10 minutes of hot water alotted daily by the quaint "Pre-war!" water heater, or the time we got locked in our bedroom for so long we had to pee in the litterbox (don't ask....). But still.

The Linda Blair plumbing, like a lot of other "quirks" (a.k.a. Building Code violations) can be overlooked when you're half a block from Central Park. There are high ceilings and beautiful hardwood floors that only occasionally cause Paul to fall and break his arm in 3 places, requiring major reconstructive surgery. And, if you stick your head out the window and strain your neck a bit, in the summertime you can almost - almost - see a real-live tree.

Our New York friends tend to be impressed with the good deal we have. However, our out-of-town guests are typically underwhelmed.

"You pay how much for this place?" they ask. We tell them; they laugh nervously.

"Uh, you know, that's three time more than the morgage on our 5-bedroom house with an indoor swimming pool! But of course, keeping up the stables in the backyard is expensive. Really. Be glad you don't have room for horses! "

Then I throw up a little in my mouth.

Still, it's hard to imagine life anywhere other than New York, even though life in New York is not always easy, or even tolerable. It's absolutely nothing like on Friends or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Matlock. Not that Matlock took place in New York. But it might as well have.

Don't get me wrong - I liked shows like Sex and the City as much as the next person, but you'd might as well be watching a Harry Potter movie. I mean, really - who could walk around Manhattan in 5-inch Jimmy Choos without calling on the powers of darkness? But gravity doesn't work the same on T.V., and I'm not just talking about boobs. In the New York shows, it's always Amnesia Season - one of the two or three weeks of the year when you can wear a halter top, in that alternate reality where they never seem tacky.

Fictional New York (FNY) is the urban Lake Wobegone -- a place where the women all wear miniskirts and 4-inch heels to work (as, say, a cardiologist); where the straight men are always fashionably dressed; and the poor black children are always adopted by kindly old white dudes.

In FNY, every 20 or 30-something somehow has a rent controlled (not just rent stablized) apartment, even though they aren't named Bertha or Elmer. There are a lot of high-speed car chases in FNY, but the bad guy is always bad, and not just the wrong color. And he always makes a full, uncoerced confession by the end of the episode.

I don't think I'm going to miss New York as much as I'm going to miss the idea of it; how it looks from a distance when you're on the bridge in a taxi at night, coming in from JFK.

I'm talking about the autumnal New York of Annie Hall, in the version of things where Woody Allen's character actually ends up with the eponymous Annie, and they live happily ever after (or at least with the consolation of shared neuroses). But even in the movie, you know it's not in the fabric of things. The real world is less perfect. In the real world, the "happy ending" is something you get for $50 extra at a seedy massage parlor, and Woody Allen marries his ex-stepdaughter, something that even the French find creepy (we all knew there had to be something).

In Fictional New York it's always early October, when the leaves are changing. It's not too hot, not too cold. People spend their immense free time strolling around, making pithy, yet humorous (if not necessarily "ha-ha" funny) observations before heading back to their phat pads.

Sigh.

Now that I'm moving away, I can pretend that I once lived there, too.

The Premier Douche of France

Ah. Back from France.

It was a good trip. Total friggin' awesomeness. Did I mention we were in a chateau with a ping-pong table?

In French, one might say, Ce fut une expérience inoubliable. Which roughly translates into Amercian English as, "A++++++++Great ebayer!!!1!!! Will buy again!!!!"

Now comes the hard part of any vacation, which is the part where you're not on vacation any more. And the part where you only have 2 weeks before moving to Seattle.

Oh, yeah, we're moving to Seattle.

Why?

Well, there are a variety of reasons, which include a dream involving a talking salmon (always a sound basis for making important Life Decisions) and a cast of characters that includes, however improbably, the Headmistress of Mrs. Frigidbottom's School for Insufferable Young Ladies of Means, which is our next-door neighbor. Anyway, Mrs. Frigidbottom's -- a school with a tuition of approximately $30,000 per year (not unusual in NYC) ---recently purchased our building and is kicking us out, along with everyone else in our building, to make way for an new addition to the school. It would seem that the Insufferable Young Ladies require a new wing in which to learn to distinguish among the various shades of beige (lest one should confuse Taupe and Eggshell), or to understand the subtle textural differences between Beluga and Iranian Caviar.

Basically, it's the Hogwarts for future Ladies Who Lunch.

The name of the school in question has been changed to protect nobody in particular; in reality, it's called The Nightingale Bamford School. They're already taking legal action against all of us who have committed the egregious crime of living here legally, so I really don't care about being sued by them, as, in a manner of speaking, we already are. However, I still contend that the fictional name more accurately represents the ethos of the place ....

But I digress. Where was I? Talking about our vacation?

Something like that. Oh, and I was going to explain my recent extended abscence from the blog-o-sphere (ASIDE: why is it sphere? Why not a decahedron? Or a rhombus?)

To answer your question, Chris, I wish I could say the time was well-spent; that I was adding the final flourishes to my epic (yet poignant) 900-page novel that will singlehandedly revive the picaresque genre in American literature.

Sadly, I cannot say that this. Well, I can say it, but it would be untrue, at least from a certain perspective, which is to say, the one in "reality." Or, as the White House press office would contend, the fact that I have not written a 900-page picaresque novel is simply "a malicious rumor started by the Liberal-Leaning Media."

In "reality" (which, of course, is relative and open to constant revision - a good thing for us slackers) I spent the past six months feeling sorry for myself and moping about. Because, of course, it's hard out there for a white, happily married Young Urban Professional living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where it's notoriously difficult to find a good laundry service.

And every time I sat down to write anything, it just came out all maudlin and annoying, and I'd rather just spare you, dear reader. And myself.

As you can imagine, I felt rather ridiculous for being in this Vast Pit of Despair, but without any good reason. Or even a massively contrived excuse. Nor even a scapegoat.
But now I've decided, as they say in the psychoanalytic literature, to "get over myself." Which is really, like, 32 years overdue.

Anyway, about the trip. The photo at the top of this post is of Uzès, the small town in in the South of France near the chateau with the ping-pong table. The town of Uzès has a rich history dates back to the medieval period, a time when everyone was apparently very into Ren. Fair. The town motto is "le Premier Duché de la France," which might be translated by Babelfish.com as "the Leading Douchebag of France."

In fact, it means "the first duchy of France," but that isn't much better. You see, in the 13th century, the feudal lords of the region took part in various wars that benefitted the kings (e.g., Childobert the Flatulant, or the lesser-known Georges Clovis Bush de Halliburton) and a few of their cronies, but pretty much nobody else. The feudal title of Duke, not unlike the modern-day title of "Head of FEMA", was handed out to the lords who were exceptionally loyal to the king. These men were the kind of gentried landowners who enjoyed nothing more - with the possible exception of quail hunting - than pillaging visgoths at the expense of the peasantry (think: Dick Cheney in velvet pantaloons).

In other words, they were .... well, the leading douchebags of France.

Maybe Babelfish is on to something....

Les liasons bourgeouises

As I write this, I'm looking out over the French countryside in an 18th-century chateau. It's just like in Dangerous Liasons. That is, except for the Internet access and the hot tub and the Sub-Zero fridge. And without the extramarital romantic intrigue or the period costumes.

So, really, nothing at all like Dangerous Liasons. But I'll take reliable plumbing and a plasma TV over epistlary titilations, any day. Which is why people with cable tend to skip the whole "writing tortured and torturing love letters and driving young women to suicide" thing. Why bother, when you could spend your time watching Kojak dubbed in Turkish, or the French home shopping channel?

We're spending the week at Paul's uncle's winter home near Uzès, a medieval village just outside of Provence. Nobody else is here (it being one of the 10 months the place is empty) except for the Grizzled Caretaker, a gruff older man with arms covered in prison-style tattoos. The only time he even comes close to smiling is in proximity to his dog, a fluffy, yet crotchety little shiit-zu (sp?) named Pralinée. A taciturn man, the caretaker is someone you feel like you've met before, if only in fiction - kind of a combination of Jean Valjean and the old man on Scooby Doo who's always foiled by "those meddling kids!" Apparently, he's a raging alcoholic, which seems like part of the job description.

"Whatever you do -- DO NOT leave any alchohol lying around in plain sight," Paul's uncle warned. But as long as we don't feed him after midnight, I guess we'll be fine.

It's kind of like having our own private Club Med, complete with a pool and tennis courts and le ping-pong. Not that I play ping pong, but it's strangely comforting to know that I could if I wanted to.

(DEEP THOUGHT DU JOUR: Maybe that's the definition of power - having the option to do something you don't even want to do in the first place. Like taking a breeding pair of long-haired dachshunds on a hot air ballon trip across Bhuthan. Or opening a Virgin Megastore in space.)

Here at the Mas de Grézac (an old French term roughly translated as Le Phat Cribb), there's even a young French maid named -- you guessed it --Fanny. Fanny is one of those names kind of like Jeeves; when you put that on your kid's birth certificate, she's going to end up cleaning a chateau. To Paul's great disappointment, she doesn't wear a maid costume, which defeats the purpose of a French maid in his book.

I, for one, could get used to having someone clean up after me. Dear lord, does this mean I have to go register as a Republican?

Excuse me, but I have to go drink some Chateauneuf du Pape to console my liberal guilt ...