Tomorrow at 6 pm, I am leaving for Paris with my friend Yulia. I will be gone until March 29th. Expect intermittent blog posts from me and huge collections of photos afterwards. Any recommendations would be most helpful, and I will be checking my email and my texts.

See you all soon. I’m off!

Today a customer told me that “[I am] very beautiful but have a bad temperament.”

This is most likely true, and it is not despite this but because of this that I am a happy person.

But I cannot fathom what made him think he had the right to tell him this. This is the man who asked me for a printer with “five tanks” and then shown the 5 smaller cartriges, exclaimed that they were too small. It was the kind of customer who wants a 10 inch Macbook Pro with a 256 video card, 3.0 GHZ processor, 2 Gigs of Ram and a 200 gig 7200 RPM hard drive and wants to pay 1200 for it and cannot understand why such a thing does not exist and why if it did exist it would cost about 3400 (kabillion) dollars.

I hate being told I am pretty by customers. It’s as if they know I am captive and have to smile and be nice to them and they can treat me like a piece of meat as a result. He tilted his head and looked me up and down and then I really did stop being nice to him. Don’t mistake expertise for condescension, and once condescended to, don’t mistake it for ignorance. I’m not your valet.

Today I went with Erin to the Blogger event at the Tank. It was mostly there to support Amanda Marcotte. There was a panel for an hour and a half and then it formed into talking. I distinguished myself by speaking about linguistics ( I think the demonization of profanity is really a strong weapon by conservatives considering that the definition of what’s profane has really changed and will continue to change over the years). Later on, I basically wedged myself into a conversation Amanda was having and ended up talking to her and this chick from the ACLU for like 20 minutes. It was really great.

I have this strange celebrity thing where I think that even speaking to people who are well-known is an invasion of their privacy. But I overcame that, and I am glad I did, because Amanda was excellent, and there were people from Feministing and Feministe there as well. I didn’t talk to Jessica and zuzu and the girl from MagicThighs, but it’s cool to see how real they are, you know.

Amanda and I spoke about Atheism and how its viewed in america and ended up talking about religion in general. It was a genuinely rewarding experience. In the end, I dorkily gave Amanda my apple business card. Cause I’m a dork.

I’ll probably blog more about my views on religion and atheism shortly.

I’d like to triumphantly announce Epicuring, a food blog brought to you by yours truly as well as three other fabulous foodies you may or may not know: Roxy, Clarice, and Linnea.

We’ll be covering restaurants, recipes and general tomfoolery. Read it. tell your friends.