The Election

I spent the day with Gladys at her beauty school.  For the first two hours, a girl in her aesthetician program used me as a test subject for her first gel nail manicure.  Obviously gel manicures are nothing new, but I'd never gotten one before, so it was interesting for me to see how she crafted each faux nail with a gummy substance and then filed it into a nail-looking shape.  It wasn't the most pleasant experience ever, though, as during the ordeal the student filed through my skin a couple times, and she didn't tell me my fingernails would burn whilst under the tiny heater, and after the first hour of the process, I was like, "Maybe we should just pull them all off and call it a day."  

But the end result isn't bad.  Her teacher had to correct some stuff, but I have a lovely French (true French!) manicure with streaks of gold.  Quite lovely.  The rest of the day was nice; I alternated between writing in the meeting room and helping Gladys organize her little beauty products shop downstairs.  The days pass quickly here, probably because I'm so busy.  The sun seems to set far too soon every day.

For dinner we got some takeout sushi, and though I didn't eat the raw salmon kind, the rest was quite good, especially alongside generous dollops of wasabi.  I like to cry a little when I eat my food, I guess.  

By the way, the French really love Obama.  I'm pretty sure that if we hadn't wanted him, they would have been happy to take him.  Today there were montages of Obama looking suave all over the television, to the point where I don't think any actual French news was covered today.  It's amazing to me that the French care so much about our politics when our news broadcasts seem to only address other countries when there's a bombing or a typhoon.  There were actually polls featured on television yesterday which talked about what percentage of the French population was rooting for which American presidential candidate.  I'm bad at keeping up on politics in general, but I didn't even know the French had moved on from Sarkozy, much less who the new guy was running against.  

I would say I should watch the news more when I come home, but honestly most news broadcasts are 60% previews of what stories they're going to cover later in the program.  Maybe I should just get French cable or something.