I look up at the cliffside. So this is Mercury.

For some reason I always thought that I would go to the Moon first. "Is this what it would be like to walk on the Moon?" I wonder, thinking of the Apollo astronauts who went before. But it doesn't matter now. I'm walking on Mercury.

The outcrop is made of massive gray bedrock. It towers over me, and spreads out to either side, impassable. All along the cliff I can see the sparkling of different kinds of beautiful minerals. Rubies, sapphires, amethyst, lepidolite, topaz, calcite, all in gorgeous perfect crystals a least a foot long. One after the next I place them carefully into a black plastic garbage bag. I look up. The other astronauts. "Hey, what's up, are you ready to start looking at the outcrop now?"

I hide the plastic bag full of beautiful minerals behind my back.

"What's that there, have you already collected some cool stuff?"

I sigh heavily and bring them all carefully out of the bag again to show my colleagues. Each one is a glittering beauty, a perfect type specimen of all of the most beautiful minerals known. Better yet, the appearance of each one in the outcrop revolutionizes our understanding of the planet Mercury.




Sometimes I wish I could just stay asleep forever.
#twasbutadream

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And then there is the question of Henry.

Henry and I have been friends since March of 2007. We travel in the same circles, we tend to do similar things. He went to UCLA, I went to Pomona. He went to Yale, I went to Brown. We've both lived in Bremen, Germany. We've both traveled to Antarctica. Henry's friends look just like my friends.

Only I have no idea who Henry is.

The only way that I know that I am friends with Henry is that Facebook tells me that it is so. We have no mutual friends. We were both in Bremen but not at the same time. We were both in Antarctica but not at the same time, or for the same reason. We are both scientists but he studies marine ecology.

Who are you, Henry?

I waste a good half-an-hour looking through photographs of Henry to try to determine where he fits into my life. There are any number of ways that I could know him, but nearly all of these should have left a trail of "mutual friends" from which I could devise our mysterious association. How did I know you, Henry? And why did I forget you?

Henry has a beautiful girlfriend. She looks like a model. She's an excellent photographer, and Henry's facebook photos benefit dramatically from the fact that she's in love with him. Many of the photos have that hipster, instagram feel to them, making them look like old pictures of somebody's parents when they were young.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Henry were my father. What if he died right before I was born, and these facebook photos and my mom's memories were the only thing I had remaining of him? There he was, scuba diving in the Antarctic. There he is, catching giant cod up north. There he is dressed like a hippie, drinking a cocktail in an empty open-air tropical bar. Diving into waterfalls, wearing silly hats, presenting marine biology studies to the UN, preparing to eat raw eels, juggling coconuts. Wearing aviators and smiling a mega-watt smile, his muscled and tanned arm around my beautiful mother. Would he have inspired me to go to Yale? Would I have inherited from him a love for the sea?

I never knew him. My whole life had been defined by his absence. You could cut him out of that picture with my mother and if you pasted me in I'd never be big enough to fill up the hole that he'd left behind.

I came out of my imagination. How the hell did I know Henry? I didn't do anything in March of 2007!

I asked my old roommate if she'd ever heard of him. Nope. I tried to explain my fun game of redefining my relationship to someone in my head and then seeing how that would change my emotional reaction to their facebook photos. She didn't really say anything, but I could tell that she thought I was crazy. Oh well. Maybe games like that should stay in my head. I wonder what Henry Sr. would have thought?

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So I'm back in La Frawnce.

Houston was filled with amazing things, including my friends, my colleagues, and so much BBQ and honey mustard sauce I almost died from pleasure. Teriyaki sauce, too, cannot be overlooked.

After Houston I went to Florida to visit Sharkboy, where we naturally fished for sharks:


What I didn't previously appreciate about sharks is how adorable they are.

Little sharkshark. Lil' sharky sharkster. Aw.

Upon my return, I saw a weird french movie starring Chris Rock (!) and I ate a bucket o' mussels, a french onion soup, and some beef bourguignon.

I'm on the path towards learning everything there is to know about sulfur (for my job) but I've been very distracted by 1. The principles of American democracy 2. Capitalism vs. Socialism 3. Colonial India 4. China's One Child policy 5. Overpopulation 6. Bawdy Limericks 7. 9gag.

Not necessarily in that order.

Luckily I bought myself a very expensive library card and I am now free to enable all of my distractions to consume me.

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Going to Texas, baby.



See ya stateside.

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Sometimes I say wild and crazy things.

Sometimes I say things that he doesn't like or agree with.

Sometimes I go into excruciating detail about an incredibly boring and technical problem that I am dealing with at work.

Sometimes I talk about things I feel so passionate about that I can't speak.

Sometimes I don't have much to say at all.

For some unknown reason he always wants to talk to me again tomorrow.

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Making friends with the Canadian took a lot of careful planning.

Making friends with Emi was effortless.

I think Emi and I were friends before we even met, and when we met we were just picking up wherever it was that we'd left off.

Emi is from Nigeria. Her family moved to the UK when she was young. Emi is a lawyer practicing English common law in Paris. Apparently it's a thing. They have international clients. Sometimes she wants to quit her job and move to Berlin to study art. Her whole life she has followed a responsible path and now she wants to do something unpredictable and reckless. Naturally she wants to do it in a responsible way, so that she can pay her rent and so that there won't be a hole in her resume. She is also writing a novel, but for now her novel is still inside her head. We're going to start getting together once a week to write. She says that some day they'll write a biography about us and they'll talk about the fateful day we met and how it changed the literary landscape forever. Maybe in the documentary version they'll pan around the hallways in Les Invalides where we first hatched the plan for our writing partnership. We like to stroll around Paris and talk about the world's problems and then not do anything about them. And cupcakes. We eat cupcakes.

---

In unrelated news, a conversation with les frenchies:
On whether or not we ask cops for directions:
French L: We were walking around San Francisco and I really wanted some Dunkin' Donuts because I had them in Boston. J saw a policeman and so he asked him if he knew where the doughnut shop was.
Me: You asked a COP where the DOUGHNUT SHOP was??
French L: Uh, yes, why?
Me: What did he say?
French L: Well, he told us that not all cops eat doughnuts. He showed us that he was eating a salad. And then he looked up where the doughnut shop was on his smart phone for us.
Me: You're lucky you're french.
French L: But J has such a good accent, you think he knew we were french?
Me: Hahaha. He definitely knew you were french.

Apparently the equivalent phrase in french is, "Hey cop, go eat some chicken."

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is magical. Wine runs in the street, the Eiffel Tower sparkles, and people in 20s-era motor cars roll up to whisk you into time-traveling adventures.

[if by magical I mean sketchy. If by wine, I mean piss. If by sparkles, I mean is turned off, and if by 20s-era motor cars I mean giant night buses that whisk you away to prostitution. If by midnight I mean 2 am.]

I have been having a very french week. I went to my friend's house on Thursday where we ate chicken normandaise and prosciutto and artisan breads. They had red wine, but I did not drink it, because red wine tastes terrible and it does not agree with me. I managed to side-step the issue by bringing a bottle of champagne. We had home-made macaroons for dessert.

Funny quote of the evening: "I saw your blind friend in the metro the other day. I don't think he saw me, though..."

Tonight I went to a cheese party. My friend had a raclette set, which allows us to take every kind of cheese you can imagine and melt it into liquid cheese and pour it all over our potatoes and bread and mushrooms. This takes at least five hours and requires at least 3.5 stomachs. It also requires red wine, because, according to the french, drinking water causes the cheese to congeal in your stomach, and only red wine is acidic enough to stop this from happening. The french at the table would not confirm this rumor with scientific theory, they only pointed out that the only times they had declined to drink wine at the table they had gotten unexpectedly ill. There was a Singaporean, an Australian, and a Canadian at the table, besides the three french. At the game of "who-is-most-gullible", the Canadian and the Singaporean lost. We managed to convince them of the existence of slope-chickens, jackalopes, and drop-bears, which was quite a feat as we revealed that each one was false before we "were reminded" of the next one. Anthropological Note: Gullibility in Singaporeans and Canadians seems to be a cultural trait. I practiced my party-trick, which is to speak French in a "Texas accent", and we spoke a bit of german before the french told us to stop being Nazis. [Ok, so I guess we're not the only ones who make jokes like that]. As usual I affirmed my everlasting love for Australians, and it was 1:15 before we stopped to look at the time. The metro was closed (by 1:45!), so I said adieu to mes amis and took the night bus to Notre Dame. They had turned the lights off. I've never seen it dark before. Despite the best efforts of Paris to shut everything down by midnight, the bars were in full swing and the streets were filled with guys wearing sketchy black leather jackets and expensive shoes and smoking Gauloises. I arrived at my apartment without incident. The Eiffel Tower was switched off. I can still see it against the background sky, black and looming like an alien space-craft.

Quote of the evening:
Singaporean: "Can you send cheese in the mail in France?"
French: "Uh.... duh... of course you can. That question is ridiculous."
Australian: "But it will go bad!"
French: "Cheese doesn't go bad, it just becomes more 'cheese'."

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