don't walk. don't walk.

so i'm sort of embarrassed to admit it took me so long to notice this difference, but here i am admitting away. in the states, or at least in new york, there's no "red man" and "green man" (as dad likes to put it), but instead, the red words don't walk and the white ones walk on the stoplights. in between walk and don't walk, there's what could be called the yellow light for pedestrians, or the flashing don't walk, which my mom used to say danny interpreted as run.

cute anecdotes aside, it never occured to me why the stoplights here in paris are so much shorter than they are in the states. when marielle and rachel came they'd say "red man = dead man", and even then i didn't catch the significance of it all. however, i finally realized that red man does not equal dead man, because the french don't have the flashing don't walk signs. i don't know why this hadn't occured to me earlier, especially considering the fact that it fits in perfectly with the french way. you see, there is the official right and wrong way (as in walk on green man, don't walk on red man), but like so many other things here in paris, no one follows the rules, which is in itself a generally accepted rule (which it's true, leads to other paradoxes), so that you can take the first 15 seconds of the red man as a flashing don't walk sign.

so really, marielle and rachel's little line needs to be edited to something like "depending on the amount of time for which the red man has been present, red man may or may not equal dead man". parisians. they make everything confusing.