Captive on the carousel of time
Each year, the mayor pulls out extra carousels and plops them all over Paris for the kiddies to ride during the Christmas season.
The other day they started hauling the carousels back on the trucks. A kid stood outside a truck screaming his head off. He screamed with such passion that even our local homeless guy, The Spaniard, stopped fighting with his invisible friend to watch the meltdown. The parents stood by, waiting it out, while the sullen carousel worker loaded the horses into the truck, visibly distressed over the toddler's fiasco.
The dark side of the charming life in Paris.
I've been on a carousel myself:
UP: I had a nice write up over at Business Insider the other day.
DOWN: I had to describe the massive centipede I met in the bathroom to Christophe using charades. We both didn't know the word in French. You can imagine THAT scene.
UP: Flare Magazine calls PARIS LETTERS ""Charming ... How memorist Janice MacLeod rewrote her life story, one gorgeously illustrated letter at a time."
DOWN: Dealing with weird charges on my bank account... in FRENCH.
UP: I finally deleted email messages from 2010.
DOWN: Updated my operating system and now understand why everyone freaked out months ago when the update was released.
UP: Answered fan mail, which is amazing because I'm getting some.
DOWN: Ignored mean comments. I'm getting some of those, too. Someone actually thought I married for money. Christophe would LOVE if that were the case because that would mean he HAD money.
UP: I married for love. Sorry to disappoint.
DOWN: Faced with the new version of Microsoft Word for Mac. Too many bells and whistles.
UP: Cleared out the Christmas decor. Now my apartment is a more spacious, which is saying something as I can walk from end to end in six large steps.
I net out at UP. As they say in France, pas mal. Not bad.
And the seasons they go 'round and 'round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and roundIn the circle game
-- Joni Mitchell, The Circle Game
