Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Saturday, Aug. 16, 2003 - 2:03 a.m.

# of nosy Katie Doyle googlers the last 48 hours: 78
# of searchers googling naked Katie Doyle: 1

Dear Katie:
Are you the Katie Doyle whos [sic] a porn star?

Uh, no.

But thank you for asking.

My question is is this a new thing, or did the planets all just suddenly align so that I got a letter asking if I'm the naked Katie Doyle porn star while at the same time, suddenly everyone wants to know about Katie Doyle? Because it would explain why all searches ending here have been strictly Katie Doyle for the last few days - or at least, the two days I checked, which were one apart, I think. Oh - and the two hale Golfzilla searchers. Hail, Golfzilla fans; how goes it? I wonder how my buddy Bri is up to? I should drop him a line and see...

I still have the flu, and it's pissing me off. I am tired of coughing. I am tired of not being able to breathe and of sniffing and snorting all the time. I am tired of blowing my nose to no avail. I am tired of dead, flaky skin around my nose that makes it look like I have serious hygiene problems. And more than anything else, I am tired of the gigantic ball of goo that has come to a rest right above and behind my throat, a glob of glop so thick that no amount of swallowing, hacking, gagging, coughing, or ingesting soda, water, juice or anything else will evict it. Imagine, if you will, a Nerf golfball stuck in your throat, just above and behind the point where you can feel it when you swallow. This pita Nerfball is pressing on your esophagus just enough to make you feel like you really, REALLY have to swallow and that you might just go insane and suffocate any second now. And every time you swallow, all that happens is the little fucker lifts up a tiny nanometer until you finish, and then settles right back where it was. Now imagine putting up with that constantly for weeks on end. Imagine it wakes you up at night, choking.

I swear to you people, I am going to hold up an ENT's office and do something drastic if this doesn't go away and fast. I live with it to a certain degree much of the time, thanks to my friggin' allergies, but since the last few weeks in Paris, and especially now that I'm sick, it is about the most god-awful fucking thing I can think of, and I am going to S-N-A-P pdq. If anyone knows how to deal with this sort of thing, please, I BEG OF YOU, PLEASE tell me what to do. I will love you forever and bear your 3-headed love child. Unless you're a girl, in which case I will just love you forever. Not that there would be anything wrong with bearing your 3-headed love child if you were a girl and all, but somehow I think that might prove problematic, us both bein' girls an' all.

I'm just sayin'.

So, anyway, Paris.

Katie's Adventures in Paris, Part the First
I will skip over the part about planes, because pretty much there was nothing all that interesting to say about it. It's all been said before, and by pithier folks than myself. What I will say is that one of the movies going over there was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and it was a pretty cute flick. I think I recommend, but then, the plane was loud, and there were interruptions for food and drink and trash collection, so I can't vouch for it 100% at this time. But what I saw was pretty cute and enjoyable.

So I got to Paris in one piece, thanks to Pete the Awesome Battle Bear, who never lets the plane crash or anything else really nasty go down, and that was all very well and good. MP said it was a lot hotter than usual and that I must've brought the heat with me. And it was pretty hot, but that really turned out to be nothing, considering...more on that later. I was pretty damn tired, because I didn't sleep at all the night before I left, and I wasn't able to sleep on the plane. I got there at like 9am or something Paris time the next day, which was midnight the day I left, so you know I was a tired girl. But I was in Paris and game for anything, so MP and I took a cruise along the Seine on the Bateaux-Mouches, which is a fancy word basically for river cruise boats, and that was pretty keen. I would recommend it, because you get to see all the monuments in one fell swoop, without having to trek all over half of Paris for them, and you can pretty much go "okay, I want to go to that one," and "I've already seen the big old famous department store now, so cross that baby off the list." Plus you can get some good pictures, especially of the little Statue of Liberty duplicate and the Eiffel Tower. We walked all the way there from some Metro station that seemed an ungodly long way away, but I probably just thought that because I was tired. Before that, we went to Notre Dame, which was nice but failed to impress my exhausted self. From the Bateaux-Mouches, we went to Ile-St-Louis and had ice cream at Berthillon, which my guidebook says is the best ice cream in Paris. I would have to agree. I had the pink grapefruit and currant glaces, and they were damn good. That's pamplemousse and groseilles, for those of you keeping score in the french. The only problem with Berthillon is that they close up the shop from mid-July until the first week of September. So right about the time you are really wanting a nice icy scoop of pamplemousse, you are just dumb out of luck. One has to marvel at that whole devil-may-care, "to hell with you, I am going on vacation" stance, because the French have embraced it about as whole-heartedly as you can embrace anything. One week you can get that great loaf of baguette at the bakery 7 blocks out of the way, or a sandwich down on the corner, or even a scoop of pamplemousse at Berthillon, and the next, you are doing without. That's life in French summer, my friends. Suck it up and deal.

I did more that first day, but it's really a big blur, because after ice cream, all I remember is lying down on the tiled floor in MP's living room, because it was nice and cool, and falling asleep. That, and I walked up about 5 million flights of stairs. The french don't believe in elevators.

The next day, we drove out to Vaux le Vicomte, about an hour outside of Paris. Vaux is also referred to as "little Versailles," because the same landscape designer (Andre Le Notre) designed both. Vaux was owned by Nicholas Fouquet, who was Finance Minister under Louis the XIV. Now, Louis had been under the guidance of Cardinal Mazarin, and while that was going on, he was a pretty nice, self-effacing guy who never gave much crap to anybody. But once Mazarin died, Louis opened up a whole huge, #10 size canna egotisitical whupass on anybody who got in his way. Well, Fouquet wasn't used to that little schtick, and he had been building his home at Vaux, anyway, and dealing with this little weasle named Colbert, who wanted Fouquet's job, so sadly for him, the change went unnoticed, other than to register that Colbert was sucking up and he was falling bit by bit into the doghouse with Louis. Fouquet was actually an excellent Finance Minister, having dug France out of major debt and built up a good sum of money in the country's coffers. Mazarin loved him. He was also a patron of the arts, and by all accounts, a pretty nice guy without much penchant for screwing over his fellow human beings. So he was basically trying to deal with Colbert's crap and didn't realize how much Louis, who had by now taken to calling himself "the Sun King," had changed with the death of Mazarin. Now that his mentor was gone, Louis fully converted to the egotistical and jealous schmuck he had apparently truly been all his life, so when Fouquet, who was trying to score brownie points and get back in Louis' good graces, threw this really great party in his honor, all the king could see was how many friends the guy had, that he threw swell parties and was getting a lot more attention than Louis thought one of his underlings should get. So he allowed Colbert to cook up this bs story about how Fouquet had done all this bad stuff, and he arrested the poor clueless geek a few weeks later, seized Vaux le Vicomte, and hired Le Notre to design the gardens at Versailles. Poor Fouquet managed to acquit himself of the drummed up charges, even though the judges were all bribed against him, and was only banned from Paris instead of separated from his head. But Louis, unsatisfied with that solution, instead claimed that Fouquet was in possession of certain state secrets and had him thrown into prison, where he died 19 years later. There's some speculation as to him being the man in the iron mask, but I don't buy it. I think that was the king's brother or another heir to the throne. But anyway, there's the story.

I was pretty up in arms listening to my little audio tour, because Fouquet really got reamed, and not the nice way. But the gardens are pretty cool, and the house is nice, and the food is actually quite good there. The only mishap was when the faulty disk in my digital camera ate all the totally awesome fountain pictures I'd taken, 5 minutes before they were turned off, and the whole reason we'd gone that day was because that was the day the fountains ran, for 2 hours only. I was pretty pissed off, but we resolved to return in two weeks and waste a day to take more. We will cover that little journey in another post. So we walked all over the grounds, which is more than a few miles, and climbed up the 86 stairs (seriously) to the top of the dome to look down, where I took some totally bitchin' pictures that the camera ate like 10 minutes later, and then we found out there was a candlelight thingie that night, where they played music and lit like thousands of candles in the house windows and all over the grounds, so we decided to stay for that, which was pretty neat, and then we went home, and that was the end of Day 2. :)

More later.

Peace out,
Katie

0 comments so far

"What did you do in Paris?"
"Stairs."

*HUGS* TOTAL! give katiedoyle more *HUGS*
Get hugs of your own

Yesterday's News - Next Stop

In which Katie shares sad news - Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2015
In which Katie returns after a very long absence - Monday, Jun. 25, 2012
In which Katie pokes her head in and brushes some of the cobwebs away - Thursday, May. 06, 2010
In which Katie asks you to write your congressman again. - Monday, Jun. 02, 2008
In which Katie asks you to please click the link and send the message to protect the rights of artists - Wednesday, May. 21, 2008