Life List Inspiration from Go Mighty

How’s your summer coming? Pretty good, by the looks of it:

  • Liz Stiverson has a morbid plan, inspired by one of my morbid plans. (Speaking of which, I’m visiting the Catacombs this morning. Creepy girls, unite.)
  • Here’s to Nathalie Robertson, who is celebrating the grand opening of RedFish BlueFish in Toronto! Go Mighty is lousy with entrepreneurs, so we feel an extra tug of happiness when someone makes a big push toward their business goals. Success, profit, and satisfaction for you Nathalie.

 

All those Go Summer folks are entered for a chance to win a ticket to Camp Mighty. If you haven’t made your own Summer Resolutions yet, consider it. Because they are fun. And because Camp Mighty has a poolside lounge chair with your name on it.

July, you’re really coming along.

Photo from Bonnie Chan’s Gorgeous post about visiting the Sierras.

American Theme Party in Paris

I finally make it home from Paris Bastille Day celebrations at 3 a.m., having been trapped in a huge crowd at the Eiffel tower.

I’m woken at 10 a.m. by vuvuzelas. The American bar across the street from my apartment is hosting an American theme party. I watch them out the window as they arrive and laugh at each other’s costumes. There’s a small group of men in overalls with no shirts, one of them is wearing a new Giants baseball cap — my home team. There is a single black man, he has a pick lodged in his hair. They scream and honk when cars drive by, the cars honk back. Everyone cheers. More men arrive in Hawaiian shirts and straw hats.

The women show up wearing workout sneakers, low-cut T-shirts and shorts, or shirts with slogans printed on them. They have fake tattoos drawn on their upper arms, large flower fascinators in their hair. All of them are carrying things — multiple plastic bags, huge purses, messenger bags with the straps worn cross body, and an inexplicable giant SpongeBob doll. Two more women arrive with huge cameras around their necks and begin snapping, so the Parisians gamely pose by removing cell phones from their bags and taking selfies.

Another car drives by and honks. They cheer.

A few hours later, the men begin to do push ups in the alley, sitting on each other’s backs. Then one of them overturns a keg and tries to run on top of it like it’s a barrel. While his friends hold him up on either side, they shout traditional American sayings like:

AH, fuck me!
That game was RIGGED!

They also imitate American tourists imitating French people:

VIVE LA FRANCE! VIVE LA FRANCE!

There’s a detail out of place of course — every one of them is smoking. And smoking. And then having a cigarette afterward. I watch their increasingly athletic efforts until someone arrives with a bull horn. The noise grows frantic, and a man’s voice shouts “THREE, TWO, ONE!” The whole group takes off on a sprint around the block, kegs hefted over their heads.

It has been quite a while and they haven’t returned. I would assume they surrendered the effort, but that would be tasteless.

Viva la France.

Go Travel: 10 Things To Do in Napa Valley

10 Things You Should Do in Napa Valley

10 Things You Should Do in Napa Valley

My dear friend Helen Jane was one of the first professional bloggers. She designed the web site right here, and she’s been living in Napa for nearly a decade. I’m always asking her where to go and what to do when friends are in town, so she wrote up a Go Travel for us on Napa Valley, California. Go have a look.

More From Go Travel:

See Brooklyn Like a Local
10 Things You Should Do In Jamaica
10 Things To Do In Chicago
10 Things To Do In San Francisco
10 Things To Experience In Los Angeles

Life List: Squeeze all the juice out of Summer.

Most years, my summer goes like this, “It’s Summer! It’s Summer! It’s… Fall.”

Summer looks so easy from the outside, filled with simple pleasures like barbecues, road trips, watermelon on ice. Unfortunately, it’s even easier to put those things off in favor of napping in a cool place. (I love you, napping. Come here, let’s cuddle.)

Much like the holidays, there are things I need to do every Summer or it doesn’t feel like I really got a Summer. And all of us know what I do in these situations. I make a list:

My Summer resolutions for 2013.

And! If you’d like to make your own list of fun ideas for Summer, Team Mighty is giving away Camp Mighty tickets to members of the Go Mighty community. To be eligible, tag your summer plans and goals, and any stories about your progress, with #gosummer.

We’ll be giving away the first of six tickets next Friday. Hooray! Here’s hoping we get to meet up for a little more summer in Palm Springs this October.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

A few of you told me to read this when I mentioned my affection for The Sun Also Rises. You were right.

As you may have noticed, I’m in Paris right now (I have eaten so much cheese.), so this book is a lovely accompaniment to the trip. I’m hoping to visit the Shakespeare and Company bookshop before I go, it still exists and looks comforting.

There were so many simple, perfect moments in this book. I underlined something on nearly every page about the truths of being a writer, the small pleasures of loving someone, the usually subconscious observations that form our impressions of people around us. Read it, you’ll see what I mean.

Some of the best parts of A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway:

Work could cure almost anything, I believed then and I believe now.

“But she does talk a lot of rot sometimes.”
“I never hear her,” my wife said. “I’m a wife. It’s her friend who talks to me.”

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Then you would hear someone say, “Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write in a cafe?”
Your luck had run out and you shut the notebook. This was the worst thing that could happen. If you could keep your temper it would be better but I was not good at keeping mine then and said, “You rotten son of a bitch what are you doing in here off your filthy beat?”

She was a difficult woman, over-plump, with brassy hair, and I thanked her.

For a poet, he threw a very accurate milk bottle.

I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life I was leading, and already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.

“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

Life List Inspiration from Go Mighty

Sara Lando! Get on this, stat.. And then the rest of us will have to do it too.

Sara McNally is making things. So satisfying.

Brittany Gibbons is in the zone right now, doing makeovers for curvy intellectuals and pitching her TV show.

Oh c’mon. One of you has to want these.

If you’re not a member of Go Mighty yet, come have a look. Invitations go out within about 24 hours after your initial request, so don’t be shy.

Je Ne Regrette Rien

Oh. Oh, no. I’m afraid of Paris, where I will be for long enough that I would starve if I tried to stay in my apartment without communicating in French. Oh, French people. Je suis désolé that my French is so terrible.

But! Maybe you’ve been to France. Have you? Tell me where I should go to test my sub-par linguistic skills.

Merci. Je suis tellement faim.

*Photo from Oh Happy Day where Jordan has the Paris Scoop.