So what's up with naming your blog after a seventh grade math term?

Back in April 1994, my junior year of high school, I was sixteen years old and a complete asshole, 'asshole' in this particular context meaning I was a smart-mouthed know-it-all with both an upper-middle-class entitlement complex and a finely tuned sense of grunge-era disenfranchisement and ennui.

My parents, who said they were doing it to give me cultural exposure but I'm sure were also eager to be rid of me for a week, sent me on a school-sponsored trip to Paris. Three of my friends also went (including Straight Girl Slumming It) and the whole trip is documented in my journal, which features a little bit about what we saw and did each day and a LOT of sarcasm and cutting down of everyone and everything we encountered, including people on the plane, the hotel, our chaperones, Parisians, Paris, and France in general. In our defense, however, how do you NOT make fun of your chaperone when he goes around in a T-shirt that says, "I KISS MY CAT ON THE MOUTH"?

The hotel we stayed in was located on the outskirts of the city, in Neuilly, which we purposely mispronounced 'Nully.' It was a decent place, but having never been to Europe and knowing nothing about the lodging standard differential, we thought it sucked. As I wrote:

The Null Hotel is whacked. The walls are all ceiling plaster, except for the fabric-covered curtain wall, and the ceiling is wall material. I'm surprised the floor isn't glass like a window. The beds move halfway across the room if you touch them and the window is a big huge trapdoor. The shower is like a shower o' knives. At night it's 22 o'clock. Breakfast is baby food, bread, hot chocolate with slugs in it, and rind in distilled, unhomogenized H2O.

And the hotel didn't seem to have a name or anyone staying there but us. There were no signs, no insignia on the stationery, and even the ashtray I stole from the room just says HOTEL - PARIS, NEUILLY. My journal continues,

There's nobody here. The stairs don't go anywhere, nobody eats in the restaurant, nothing. Is this unreasonable facsimile of a hotel really here?

So we started saying that Hotel Nully existed in the null set, and describing everything as null, and blaming anything strange that happened on Null Set Syndrome. And you know that jerky thing teenagers do, where they won't let anyone else in on their private jokes so that others feel confused and left out? We did that the whole time, snickering to ourselves and talking in null set code-speak.

Every night I would write about our day's adventures and then the others would gather round for the Dramatic Reading of the Latest Entry. Some of what I wrote still makes me laugh, and reminds me yet again what a damn ungrateful teenager I was:

"The lady at the Eiffel Tower gift shop told us to keep our paws off the stash. That was uncalled for. Then we had lunch. Mine and [Effie's] carbon cubes came with an abundance of herbal annoyance on top."

"Then we hit the Hard Rock Cafe, which was cool (editor's note: HA!), but the freaks shot it all down by being there."

"Lucky, lucky me lost my gate to eyesight. I'm an aveugle (editor's note: French for blind person). We went to Pere Lachaise cemetery and saw Jim Morrison's headstone. His head wasn't even on it. It was this blocklike granite geometrical figure and there was a guard. I, in all my shithead aveugle glory, took a picture of the wrong stone."

"We got our pictures drawn by some street artists. After sitting for like half of eternity, the finished products were brought out. Ta da... Tori Spelling x2 and Gidget! Sha, like I'm really going to pay a crazy old commie 250F for a picture of some crazy mismatched collection of features. Ditching the temperamental artists was not an easy task. I mean, dude, they turned into mutant flippoids from the planet ROWR!"

"Today we went to the Hotel des Invalides. [Spewey] was a walking invalide. She spewed. Then we came to find out that Spewey's mom, Spewball, is up to some no-good spewance. Hence the stench of room 3110."

"We went to Versailles today. In a nutshell, it sucked. The benches were the coolest part. Plus we got dust-crap on us."

"The weirdness never stops. {Effie] was cornered by a hair-braiding, Israeli, curly-haired, accent-having, tourist-soliciting, palm reading freak who told her she was the champion of the game of night. EWWW!"

"The Giverny gardens were cool. The flowers kicked ass and so did the river, except for the slop man in his slop boat slopping slop."

"So we go to the Metro, and I'm getting on the train, and there's this little rat-girl there - some gypsy urchin like that little demon-faced, Ancient Prophecies, freaky-staring girl. I could feel my pocketbook being fucked around with, and I looked down, and the little shit had unzippered my bag! Jesus! So I yelled, 'HEY!' and pushed her away and she gave me the Stone Cold Death Stare. Then she tried to escape through the doors, and the damn things skeeshed her in it! She stood there like a shithead, crushed in the doors, till someone yanked her out."

"Then we saw the Paris Opera house. It was all chairs and chandeliers and marble stairs that Phineas fell down."

"Then [Effie] and [Nat] go drinking. One beer each, but hey, they did. And they got busted. Egghead was tres pissed off; it was sadly amusing how silly she looked in her green and white striped pajamas looking for the two hooligans."

"I'm on the plane now and we're flying home. This is so sad, I can't believe we're leaving the null set. I feel null. I love the null set."

Then, in my aftermath to the Trip o' Nullance, I write:

Upon returning to school we all became Public Enemies 1 through 5. [Egghead] hates us, [Giggle Geek], I think, is still nursing the wounds sustained by his cat-kissing inner stepchild, and [Spewball, a.k.a. L'Homme de Moustache] thinks she can, like, talk to us. [Egghead] called [Effie] an alcoholic and beat her with a bag full o' Centrum Silver. [Giggle Geek] probably wishes I didn't sit directly in front of him in Latin (as do I, the way he steals my books and spits on my desk and all).

God, you THINK?