If you stand that close to Carrie...

You're bound to get your picture taken! Laurel and I decided to make a Sex in the City foursome with Jamie Cat Callan, author of French Women Don't Sleep Alone. Thanks to all who came to grab a cocktail and fill up on multicutural chatter at the Sex and the City Cafe on Friday. There were even ice-cubes. Very NYC.

I was up late reading Laurel's book, Sorbonne Confidential - alternating between fascination and horror at her experiences of the most prestegious French teaching exam - which has nothing to do with teaching - and everything to do with the mental formatting of the French elite. I'm glad Augustin will be sticking to the building blocks for a while. I'm not sure I'm ready to handle my son being told that Joseph Conrad (who was born in Poland) could have been a great French writer, but for reasons passing understanding, he chose to write in English instead...

Lunch in Paris was part of a really interesting article on travel memoirs in the New York Times - a new breed of travel writers who focus on staying, rather than just get-up-and-going.

I've been trying to tone down the sugar this month - in preparation for bikini season. So of course, for the last 24 hours, all I can think about is cake! I'm debating between my classic yogurt cake and an olive oil cake recipe given to me by my friend Jen. That's her homemade rhubarb compote as well. Maybe I'll put olive oil in the yogurt cake...

Thanksgiving at Tiffany’s

As I might have mentioned in an earlier post, Pillsbury Vanilla Frosting was the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll of my adolescence. Never having smoked a cigarette, dropped acid or overturned a golf cart, my feeble attempt at teenage rebellion was to study for my pre-calculus finals hopped up on icing mainlined with a plastic spoon.

When I need a fix I go to Thanksgiving. This shop in the Marais sells outrageously priced American imports to homesick ex-pats. An 8oz. package of Philadelphia cream cheese is $6. (Apologies for the lack of original photography below, but the shots I found on paris.unlike seemed to frame the Fruitloops much better than mine.)

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When you enter Thanksgiving, there’s always greeting in French and English, along with rows of familiar boxes. I'm like Audrey Hepburn in Tiffany's, running my hands along the shelves of Poptarts and Raspberry Fluff. I stop to read the ingredients - something I never do in the States - drinking in the comforting, possibly carcinogenic, polysyllabic beauty of it all.

Strangely enough, I’ve never bought a can of icing in Paris. It would be like eating Pho in Minsk – ne’er the twain shall meet. There are too many wonderful things to eat in Paris to get stuck in my childhood obsession with partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

That being said, I do occasionally indulge in cupcake porn – the oogling of icing online. Surely this picture of a “frosting shot” (God Bless America) should come with a rating of some kind. Thank you to Cupcakes Takes the Cake for, well...being, and to The Girl Who Ate Everything for the oh so delectable photo.

It’s always odd to wake up on the morning of an important American holiday in Paris – and find it’s just business as usual. G. goes to work, and there’s radio silence on my email from New York. So a girl has time to think. For me, 2009 has been a year full of things to be thankful for. I have a happy, healthy baby boy, a husband I love more every day, a family who cheers me on in my crazy life projects, friends who challenge and comfort me, and a professional project that makes me pinch myself. I’m also thankful for being in Paris – because it’s Paris that taught me how to appreciate all this. Raised as a type-A control freak American, it was my reflex – and I fight it still – to quickly abandon all pleasures, all accomplishments in favor of the road ahead – the next item on my interminable to-do list. Paris has taught me how to take a moment. Even if it’s not a day off here, I now know how to pause and be grateful for what I have. It’s only when I moved to Paris that I truly learned how to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Happy Holiday Everyone!