Toilettage

I don't care how many times I come across this expression in my research, but reading about a woman "à sa toilette" will always summon the wrong image.

Speaking of, French vs. American approaches to beauty, on the voyeuristically-spectacular Into The Gloss, the blog that tells you what glamorous women keep in their medicine cabinets. Count me as Team America on this one - it's a bit frightening what an unlimited budget and access to the Parisian parapharmacie amounts to. I mean, the French actress whose stuff it is looks lovely, as she no doubt would with or without ten thousand clear solutions that only allude to purported benefits - you will look "fresher," more "luminous." AKA, you will have spent 15-20 euros on water that smells vaguely like soap. (Confession: after a summer-plus-semester of temptation, I gave in, and if I indeed wore eyeliner to dissertate, walk Bisou, dissertate, socialize with scientists, I'd have some fine La Roche-Posay to remove it with.)

But Katie Gallagher - a fashion designer I once saw on the street in New York - looks amazing (the ITG photo doesn't do her justice), and has the right idea - choose a strange-yet-beautiful hair color, make sure eyeliner is visible but not raccoon-like, keep any kind of makeup that's about painting skin to look like skin to a minimum, and the world does not end if you fall asleep with your makeup on.

Meanwhile, my own toilette is somewhat lacking, because of course the day there's a Dinner is also the day the hot water went off at 9am. While I was plenty awake well before that, I'd been so busy with Bisou's toilette-in-the-modern-sense that I'd forgotten about the water until it was trop tard. If it doesn't go back on soon, I must follow Gallagher's lead re: hair-washing, despite myself. I am officially not brilliant enough to bathe.

Silly French word of the day

Lepénisation: the influence of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. Sounds just as silly in French as in English, or would, if it didn't mean the resurgence of quasi-fascism. Although I suppose the double-entendre works in the sense of France being screwed when this man gains power, and less so when he does not.

First world problems: My Japanese food is too authentic

For some grad students it's ramen. For me it's pasta. The overabundance of pasta in my diet makes me especially picky about the occasional meals out. Especially Japanese food, which tends to have quite the dollar-to-calorie ratio. So I was really looking forward to an $8 (four-plus boxes of pasta) tuna sashimi and rice bowl, only to have it arrive completely drenched in a mix of grated yam and quail egg. I know that's what it is, because I've been unpleasantly surprised before. The texture is a bit like natto, which I actually like, but much, much stickier. Sticky is a problem for the finicky eater, because try as you might to push it aside or onto a plate you're no longer using (and, as an aside, thank god this was not on a first date) doesn't work, it just keeps oozing back, and has, it will soon become clear, already coated every single grain of rice, and every piece of otherwise perfect tuna.

The ridiculousness of the situation was made all the more so by the fact that this was the first time in a year I'd convinced my boyfriend to try Japanese food... and he liked all his dishes. Granted I steered him towards some more fully-cooked items, but still, I was the one who left wishing we'd gone with Belgian.