I was hoping to meet some nice, normal, eligible young gentlemen/gentlewomen, and I was told that the public library of the Centre Pompidou museum is a hot spot to pick up people in Paris. So I stood outside for twenty minutes in the queue, amazed that people actually stand in line for admittance into a library.

Once in the reading room, I seated myself across from the fetching young man whom I had noticed as the only hot prospect in the waiting line outside. He had an anguished-French-philosophy-student-trying-not-to-be-bourgeois look to him, and he was drinking a Coca Light, which made him even more bourgeois. But he never looked up from his ’serious literary work’ to meet my glances.

Eventually I exited the library, brain-dead from dealing with the inefficient wireless connection. An overly solicitous security guard shooed me towards his younger co-worker in a deranged attempt to set us up on a date. When he realized that I was from The States, he asked, “Where? Texas? Oklahoma? Idaho?” I had never felt like less of a failure at being a discreetly camouflaged American in Paris.

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