À côté d'un étang à la Place de la Concorde

The mallard drakes have purple heads. A pigeon (black) strode up to me. Its feet were red. The water's green. It's all a bit Marc Chagall-y.

There. For you! Two couplets in iambic quadrameter, with a unifying theme that I didn't even have to fabricate. Paris is truly that beautiful, and that surreal.

I think that's why Paris occupies its mythic place in the American psyche. It is a world capital, but intimate. It is foreign, but you know all the names of all the places. It is a city, and it is not a city by any reckoning we're familiar with, us Americans, with our ethos of high-rise blocks and cement and the scrapping and wreckage of entire buildings when it becomes possible to build something more conducive to the God of Progress. Paris does not play such games with its structure and infrastructure. Les pâves portent lâche? Alors, ons remplacons avec les mêmes. Thus a timelessness endures. The Paris you see is the Paris from the movies, just in color.

I've not been to every city, but Paris seems a likely candidate for "most amenable to lounging about." Existentialism was birthed here, et bien, c'est pas un miracle. My desire for constant stimulation is ebbing, and with it my expenditures. On average, I'm spending about seven Euros per day, mostly on the metro and a pastry. It's enough to just be somewhere, with or without a book, letting the mind settle and clarify as the detritus sinks. Serenity is not the word; serenity implies vacuousness. Les mots, hé monsieur Sartre?

In other news, I've been entered into a Twitter groupchat that discusses critical theory in the context of modern Life. Every now and then I take a look at what they're saying, and I begin to understand that theory is not such a foreign beast after all. It's just a rigorous way to express your shower thoughts. I don't think I'll have much to fear from it when I finally start reading the type of books that the plucky heroine always rattles off in lists in a less studied children's adventure novel.

My hosts are great. Family life is nice. The arrangement is pleasant: I cook, I teach the children English, and I draw seven-year-old Timothée's attention for precious micromoments, wherein his parents accomplish the rest of their lives. In exchange, I get life with a charming family, a room, and free breakfasts and dinners (good ones too, if I do say so myself).

I like the French attitude toward breakfast. In America the attitude is "breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Eat as much Protein McEggPeanut as you possibly can. Sure you want to puke. You owe that to yourself. Now get out there and bE a CoG iN tHe SoCiEtAl MaChInE." In France, it's more: "You've just woken up. You're sleepy. You're discombobulated. You haven't even finished your first pack of unfiltered cigarettes. We understand if you can only manage a piece of bread with the best jam you've ever tasted, and a glass of orange juice that the local market presses fresh in a machine that would've made Rube Goldberg hand in his drawing board. There's time for food later. You can have a delicious, protein-rich salad with First Wine, at 09:47." Instead of groaning, replete and sluggish, off to your morning of gazing in a stupor, you're given just enough to keep you ticking, and a refreshing emptiness that runs like a cool current inside you, imparting the alertness that keeps the pickpockets at bay.

I'm having a lot of fun.