The other day I was thinking to myself, “This blog is beginning to sound like I’m getting my shit together. Graduating and not falling in gutters? This girl is like a real person!”
This is obviously false. I’m not sure what being a real adult actually looks like, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include wondering if one is trapped in a 90’s television show. (For real adults this is more of an aspirational thing — “I wish I were trapped in a 90’s television show, instead of being a super boring contributing member of society.”)
On Thursday I went to the Marais with my sister to get some delicious felafel and walk around a bit. We went to a thrift store to try on ridiculous outfits and marvel at the combinations of sequins, feathers, and leather that would make any good drag queen proud. I was carelessly handling my jacket, whose pocket held my key. Past-and-never-again tense. Permanent past tense — is that a thing?
This very same jacket pocket caused me to lose a key (obviously the jacket’s fault, not mine) in a bar my junior year of college. I should have learned my lesson. But no, that was one of far too many times that I lost my key that year and I had a concierge to hook me up with a spare key when it fell out of my pocket or I dropped it down the elevator shaft (probably the highlight of my key-losing).
After some more wandering around, we took the bus home and it was only as we walked up to my building that I realized that my key was no longer in my possession. We walked up the street to my landlord’s shop to see if he had a spare. He’s not there. He is, apparently, in Morocco again! (Moving in was a project and a half because my landlord was MIA when I returned from Morocco and then he returned and my move-in had been pushed back and blah blah blah shit show whatever.)
I could call him, though. Except, apparently not, because my pay-as-you-go minutes have just expired. Success! It’s also 9:30 PM at this point, so the thrift store is definitely closed, and I can’t call anyone. Good stuff.
But! My apartment is on the first floor. Or the American second floor. That’s a thing for another day. There is also a little roof type deal right by my window and the whole thing can only be adequately explained by showing it to you:
And, in a miracle of my own forgetfulness (all right, no, that is not a miracle) I forgot to close the window.
We pushed a trash can over for the lion to climb. I had to lean over it so she could step on my shoulders to get all the way up, but she got up and in with little effort. Unfortunately, you need the key to unlock the door from either side, so I was going to have to get through the window too.
She’s tinier than I am, and I was holding the trash can in place for her because it was empty and has wheels on it.
I managed to find something to push over to the trash can to hold it steady and help me get up to it, but once I was there, I couldn’t get myself the rest of the way up because I was wearing obnoxious skinny jeans that were seriously restricting the range of motion in my legs.
After about ten minutes of me struggling to haul my chubby ass up to that window and promising to try to do pull-ups when this was all over (LOLZ JK) I was climbing back down to look for something else to stack on the trash can when, of course, my pants split.
At this point I am locked out of my apartment with a giant crotch hole in one of the only pairs of pants I still have with me in Paris (because I keep sending things home with visiting family). Meanwhile the lion is, of course, hanging out the window laughing at me.
I finally managed to add another couple inches to the top of the trash-tower, but it’s clear that the wrong pant leg split because I could do it if my legs would just, you know, bend. I get the lion to toss me down a pair of yoga pants and I hide behind a shed to change.
We have been entirely alone but for sixty seconds of the twenty-ish minutes that we have now been screwing around with this. So naturally, when I am pantsless, someone appears. It’s just a basic law of nature. You can be alone for pretty much forever, but strangers will appear when your pants come off. There’s science behind this, I’m sure of it.
This nice old man goes upstairs to try to use the spare key that he has (I’m assuming that he was summoned by the man who appeared in the aforementioned sixty seconds, whom we had entirely forgotten about) while I scrambled to put some pants on and toss the other pair through the window.
His key, of course, is broken. He was incredibly sweet and apologized for his key not working (making him even more adorable) and then left us. He said he would return, but that never happened. I am not sure what became of him, now that I think about it.
We just hung out for about ten minutes, waiting for him to return. We were going to watch a movie, so we had bought snacks and now seemed like the opportune moment to eat said snacks.
Finally I decided I was sick of feeling useless, so I found a better place to change and switched pants. For some reason, the pants changing was followed by about ten minutes of us taking pictures of me pretending to run up the wall. It was all thoroughly entertaining at the time.
Eventually we tired of this and I was able to get myself into the window pretty much no problem now that I was in proper pants. (Oh, and shoes. Sometime before the pants I acquired better shoes too. It was a whole process.)
Just to recap: I was locked out of my apartment for an hour, I split my pants, I ran out of cell phone minutes, and best of all, someone walked up while I had my pants down standing behind a shed and a trash can. It was an all-around classy evening.
Followed by a morning in which I had to leave through the window as well, repost an assignment, and then voyage out to the thrift store to explain that I am a hot mess and hope that they had my key somewhere. (They did! Yay!) I am currently wearing an over-sized denim shirt because I felt that dressing like I belong on Clarissa Explains It All was an appropriate life choice today.
Oh, also on today’s to-do list? I have to swing by the bank to get my ATM card, because the machine ate it two days ago after I entered the wrong pin three times and I had to wait 48 hours to get it back.
Pantsless behind the shed kind of made falling into a gutter sound like the activity of a fully functioning adult. Clearly I am teaching my little sister only good things about how to transition into adulthood.