Boulôt I

Sometime in December a really nice lady agreed to take me in as an intern for six months at her communications firm. A few suspenseful (but Nordieful!) months later, I got my visa and got to work. It's a small, hip office in the third arrondissement (zip code 75003). We're on the corner of our building, which is on a street that runs just behind the Centre Pompidou, through the Marais district. From the windows that line our second-floor office, you can see all kinds of things! Examples:

• Good Friday parade with lots of Catholics singing a prayer and hauling an actual-size crucifix
  
• Little school children holding hands and marching in two straight lines down the sidewalk after school
• A cop writing up some guy for parking badly
• One really cool window pane painted neon green way up on the top floor of an apartment building across the street
• BAGS VILLE, the neato cheap purse store on the our side of the street across an alley. They're having a sale!

This probably doesn't have to be said, but I didn't have much work the first day or two. Since then it has gotten very stressful and busy, because the receptionist is a student who's only in the office three days per week. I'm now honorary receptionist and helper to all. I also posed for a mock-up of a poster for BIC recently, which entailed holding a blank sheet of cardboard above my head and smiling like a goof. To my surprise, the head of the project at BIC called in to ask if they could use me for the real poster! They liked my glasses and thought I'd cost less than it would to find and hire a model. The shoot's on Wednesday.

There are plenty of characters among the 10 people who work at this place, but the Assistant Director has stood out from the rest for now. He is, for starters, the only man who comes to the office everyday- the others are either freelancers or work primarily from home. He sits in the far corner of the office and hums little tunes most of the day. On Tuesday when we all returned from the long Easter weekend, we started the day with a little meeting. He showed up in his usual leather jacket and jeans, but also sporting a gauzey eyepatch taped over his right eye. Apparently while trying to potty-train his daughter, he got a pencil jammed in his eye. Mid-sentence, the head director paused to ridicule his doodling habit, steal his notebook, and flip through it to show me pages and pages of neat little doodles. They were all shapes and sizes, some shaded and some outlined, but all were five-petaled, 6th grade girl status FLOWERS. Today I turned around to see him wearing a pair of sweet shades to keep his eyepatch on. Or to look mysterious...? Both, probably.