Archives for category: Just me yakkin'
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

A wet and webby week

December 12, 10 //
1

December is sucky in general because of the weather and nostalgia and because it seems to come around so much quicker than it used to.

But I had an unsucky week. This week was filled with youth and passion and swifts and lunches and red wine and a pink latex dress and a purple rubber ducky and a snowman and cowboy boots among other things.

Three days of events around and including LeWeb, Europe’s largest tech conference, which I’ve had a press pass to for three years running since I write about the Internet for tech blogs in the US. I look forward to it all year, as much as I ever did to Christmas as a kid. The conference is an orgiastic encounter of curious and creative minds, and basking in the youthful idealism and optimism and energy of startup founders who want to create some kind of beauty is as good as sunbathing, but without the risk of skin cancer. (The Internet is the fountain of youth, folks.) Here’s Olivier Desmoulin of SuperMarmite, a site that hooks people up with home-cooked meals, one of three winners of the startup competition this year.

I came home with my favorite piece of conference swag ever. Did Yahoo! know before coming to Paris that French designer Sonia Rykiel makes a rubber ducky vibrator? If they didn’t, they found out soon enough. The first thing my French friend Myriam asked the Yahoo rep hosting the Official Blogger lounge was if it vibrated… I took one for my step-daughter (14) and one for me. (It only squeaks, by the way.)

Alas, the orgy ended and regular life resumed. Dog walking in winter is no fun, except when it is. Two days after the huge Paris snowstorm that made international news, Wiley spied a snowman. He gave him a wide berth and slowly circled in close enough to sniff his face, which he did for a long time, because, of course, the sniffing provided no insight into the nature of this creature. I just stood there enjoying the show.

Another dog walk, this one at night in the dark. The only shop open in a tiny side street near my house looked so warm and welcoming, but that could have been the not-so-subliminal suggestion of the sign, the fact that it was in my own language, and what was inside. I felt like the little match girl standing out there looking in at the delicious boots. Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d paused before this shop, but it was the first time I’d seen it open at night. In fact, I just discovered yesterday that Paris is killing my red cowboy boots, the ones I thought would last forever (and would have in California). The leather on the vamp is cracked through from the wetness and probably nasty chemicals in the rainwater. I was obviously not diligent enough about my mink oiling… This is Go West Boots, in the 5th. Let me know if you want the address (you can’t find it on their site).

I arranged to meet an online acquaintance, a blogger whose voice and views I enjoy, who was in Paris for the week, not for LeWeb (though she’s covered it before), but for LeVin, a big wine conference. I don’t often bring people from my online life into my real life, but my instincts were good, as usual. She’s originally from South Africa, lives in Italy, is my age, and (also) has a lust for life. We connected on many levels and talked about things that, in the old days, you wouldn’t get to till some time had passed but, for better or worse, our ways of being have changed because the Internet has broken down so many barriers. We ate lunch, drank wine, watched swifts flying frenetically around outside her window, and went and tried on wild clothes at Phyléa for dessert.

The party’s over (or at least it’s getting a little late)

November 22, 10 //
4

So there I was a year and a half ago with a brand-new (used) dog, a circumstance that came about in part due to my desire to drag my ass away from my computer a few times a day and stave off full-body atrophy. You know.

But after three months of glorious, invigorating walks with my new little buddy on the oh-so-picturesque and lumpy-as-hell cobblestones of Paris, I found myself in the doctor’s office because my right foot didn’t bend anymore and it hurt so much I couldn’t stand the weight of my blanket on it. I got x-rays and a diagnosis:

I’ve limped along in denial on considerably less vigorous dog walks for the last year or so and watched helplessly as my favorite shoes and boots, two by two, gradually wound up in the no fucking way pile… I can’t tell you how much this sucks.

It all really hit me last month when there was this fancy conference (attended mostly by women, mostly in high to very high heels, from half the Fortune 500 and all of the CAC 40, the French equivalent), where I worked as a conference reporter. The dress code was “business/creative casual,” and I had to go buy shoes because all my hot business/dress shoes are in the NFW pile. I ended up with this shoe more or less, but with a leather button instead of the silver thingy. The least frumpy I could find and wear with relatively little pain:

The brand name of these shoes? Dorking. Yeah, I know, salt in the wound. But I kinda like their logo… And I can do the sexy schoolmarm thing.

Have I mentioned I live in Paris where if you wear tennis shoes (other than the decorative kind) eyebrows rise and nostrils flare as you pass? Have I mentioned I really, really don’t like flats? Ballet flats, the Parisian ingénue standard, are fine for the 30-and-under, which I’m obviously not, or I wouldn’t be having this particular conversation with myself.

Dorky shoe shopping was the straw that got me to the podiatrist this week, where I got the final answer: “You’ll never wear high heels again, honey” (only in French). I honestly teared up. Seriously.

She said this condition was either the result of a foot trauma (nope) or a number of “micro-traumas.” Since I have it in both feet, I’m thinking every hour (and there were thousands) between the age of 16 and 20 when I stood, walked and danced on five- or six-inch stilettos, micro-traumas were occurring. I asked her if there was a brand of shoes that was even a little sexy that I could still wear. She said she had no particular brand to recommend, sexy or otherwise, though she did have a Mephisto catalog on her desk (frumpalicious). When she recommended thick soles, I suddenly felt myself aging at the rate of hundreds of years per second, like Katherine Deneuve at the end of The Hunger. Then my podiatrist described a surgery (last resort, I’m not there yet) where they fuse that nasty painful joint (at a slight angle, not flat, so you can pretend your foot still bends) when the pain gets unbearable and can’t be treated with painkillers and having some goo injected into the joint. She just looked confused when I asked her if they could fuse my joint at a Barbie-foot angle…

About now the feminist outrage, if you have any, has probably bubbled to the surface and you can’t wait to get to the end of this so you can leave a comment about how we’ve all been screwed over. Trust me, I’m with you. I know all the things you want to say and agree and understand — intellectually. And I am now painfully aware of what heels did to me, and I suppose I should blame society for making me think I look hot in high heels. But I do. Did. I’m the product of my conditioning. So shoot me. I’m fighting other battles, but if this is one of yours, Bad Shoes and the Women Who Love Them looks like a good read. I may get it myself, though I’m beyond salvation. This book is what I found when I googled the keywords sexy shoes bad feet.

If you’re in Paris and a size 8.5 (39), I’ll invite you over to pillage the NFW pile. But I’m having those black suede pumps I got in 1987 (and have kept practically pristine because they are perfection) bronzed. Too many good memories…

At least I can still wear my red cowboy boots.

Homeless

November 4, 10 //
3

For the first time since I got here over four years ago, I waited 15 months before going home back to California for a visit. It was too long; a year’s about my limit, I discovered. Living in France can be exhausting after a while. It’s like attending an interminable lecture on some abstruse topic, while living in America is more like watching a Gilligan’s Island rerun…

Sometimes I need a break, and I crave the relative — and objective — simplicity of America, that all-American “That sucks, let’s get a beer, you like my new Spiderman t-shirt?” way of being. (The French version is “That sucks, let’s discuss what every philosopher in history has said on the subject and what happened in WWII and why capitalism is the root of all evil.”)

Plus I was really homesick. The homesickness starts to kick in around November, of course, and I usually plan my trip for February or March, when I’ve had just about all I can take of winter and Mexican food deprivation, and I can’t go without seeing my family, especially my son, any longer.

Every year I go there expecting my homesickness to be assuaged. My annual pilgrimage did the trick at first, but with time the treatment has become less and less effective. I would find myself coming back to France still homesick, thinking it was because I hadn’t stayed in California long enough. This year, though, standing outside, alone and barefooted in the California sun, I was astonished to realize that I was feeling homesick even though I was “home.”

Which is when I figured out what was wrong.

What I’ve taken for homesickness is actually nostalgia. (I know, duh, but sometimes the obvious escapes you.) And that can’t be treated. I’m homesick not for a place, but for states of mind I’ll never be in again. I’ve changed. I’ve been looking at America from the outside in for too long. That home is gone. When you leave, the place you knew ceases to exist.

I was ragging about France in some post a while ago and a (francophile) friend said in the comments “No whining allowed, you live in Paris!” This is the Paris he meant, of course, a place as mythical to him as California has become to me, the Paris I moved to over four years ago:

Of course, Paris doesn’t look quite like this to me anymore either… That’s gone forever too. When you go somewhere, the place you imagined ceases to exist. And I don’t know if Paris will ever feel like home the way home once felt. I got here late in life. Bizarre. I guess that makes me homeless. A little scary.

While in California I ate tacos, had a decent margarita (no better, unfortunately), hit my old shopping spots for cheaper Levis and things I can’t get here, hugged my people over and over. That was good.

I needed hand lotion. By chance (or more likely driven by my unconscious), I grabbed a tiny tube of Jergen’s at a giant American pharmacy. It was about the only lotion in America when I was a kid, and I hadn’t used it in decades. I remember hoping, as I reached for it, that they hadn’t changed the scent: my mother smelled like Jergens my entire early childhood. Back at her place, I rubbed it all over my arms and buried my nose in the crook of my elbow. It smelled the same to me, as far as I could tell. That moment was about as close as I got to feeling like I was home. It was a primal thing. Maybe I’ll just have to carry some Jergen’s around with me for the rest of my life…

So I don’t know what home is. Maybe I’ll just make my physical home a shrine to the feel and feelings of my concept of home. It’ll look something like this, but more specifically Mexico and France and Hawaii and California flavored. Ultimately, I guess, if  home exists, it’s in me and I am it.

…my house will speak for me. My house will tell them I am warm and rich. The house will tell them inside of me there are these rooms of flesh and Chinese lacquer, sea greens to walk through, inside of me there are lighted candles, live fires, shadows, spaces, open doors, shelters and air currents. Inside of me there is color and warmth.

My house will speak for me.

Anaïs Nin, Children of the Albatross

Fish out of water

October 15, 10 //
4

If I didn’t live a block from the Seine, I sometimes wonder if I’d still be in Paris. I’ve spent most of my life next to or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you see, and I can’t live long without a body of water nearby. Even the dirty brown streak of the Seine, a sad, sad substitute for the Pacific, an icky little skid mark in comparison, satisfies that criterion.

The fact that I’m a Pisces has nothing to do with anything at all, but it’s a pretty coincidence.

I’m not complaining about the murky strip of river that is standing in for my ocean, really I’m not. I walk my dog along it every day and it’s water and even though I can only look at it, not that I’d want to get in it, yuck, it gets me as close as I can get for the moment to Madison when she dumps the bottle of Morton’s in the tub and unfurls her tail.

This post is brought to you today by the letter W because it’s Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers all over the world publish posts on the same socially or environmentally conscious theme and this year’s theme is “water.” (Last year it was “poverty,” and I wrote about it here on frogblog.)

I put on my drama queen costume and say I would die without water but, every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 really do die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.

We don’t have problems like that in the West.

(Mini-mermaid maintenance in Indiana, while Dad was at Purdue.)

For a time, I lived “on the shores of Gitche Gumee,” a formidable body of water, not an ocean, but big enough that I couldn’t see to the opposite shore and badass enough to swallow the Edmund Fitzgerald. It served as a Pacific surrogate for a short time. Much later, the almost three years I lived an hour from Death Valley nearly killed me, though the thunderstorms were magnificent and flash floods made temporary baby-beaches of the dunes. By the time I escaped and moved back to the ocean I was like one of those fish in Africa that live in ephemeral ponds and dehydrate into crispy fishcakes in the dry season and then come back to life with the spring rains.

I don’t feel like getting on a soapbox today. Sorry. I feel like selfishly daydreaming. I don’t rant as much as I used to on this blog anyway. Maybe all the people in my building tossing cat litter into the recycling bin and plastic bottles into the trash bin and American morons voting for Tea Party morons and fucking Sarko rounding up and deporting a vulnerable and disadvantaged ethnic group to pander to the far right are slowly draining the fight out of me. At least today I don’t have much fight in me.

Sometimes I just want to say to the world what my mother said after a dozen years of watching my little brother and me knock each other around, from her spot on the couch where she was drinking white wine as was her wont in the years immediately following her divorce: “Go ahead and kill each other. Just don’t knock over the Christmas tree.”

Anyway. Do me a favor and go here and scroll down to “Suggested Post Ideas” to get some compelling factoids about the state and use of water on our poor abused and declining planet. And then please sign this petition. And then maybe donate some money to Blue Planet Network or a charity of your choice (preferably one that doesn’t shove religion down throats along with spoonfuls of mush) so I can keep on dreaming of warm salt water on this fall day in Paris without feeling guilty about not having done my duty. I’ll be grateful to you. Besides, I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do; I donated to Worldreader.org last month. (I guess I am still fighting after all.)

My darling husband knows the Seine is not a permanent solution, so he dangles this carrot in front of me on gloomy days. We’re toying with the idea of going there “next,” when and if next happens. Rents there are less than half what they are in Paris and you get an ocean too.

I have not lived on the Atlantic, but something tells me it will do just fine. I should be able to stick my toes in it at least a few times a year. And I’m sure it looks and smells right, and I’m sure it sounds right. Like an ocean.

Clean water for millions

September 29, 10 //
0

Watching a digital native bloom

September 5, 10 //
2

Long ago, during the very brief period (about a year) during which I was a desperate housewife, I took a Photoshop class. Since then, it’s been my favorite toy; when I’m bored, I fire it up and try to make art. My best work is rather… personal… so I won’t share. It would be indecorous. (I did have it on an anonymous erotica blog for a while, but I took the blog down because it was associated with one of my gmail addresses and I was afraid one day they’d announce to all my professional contacts through some new “service” that it was mine.)

I have a 12-year-old niece who just discovered Photoshop a couple of months ago, when she was still 11. This niece also happens to have a huge crush on her geeky, artistic, Apple fan (not quite fanboy) uncle Vincent. Nothing odd about that; I had uncle crushes too. One turned out to be schizophrenic and the other would feel right at home at a Tea Party… Oh well. But the schizo one looked like Marlon Brando and Paul Newman combined, and the other one had a fabulous nose (always had a thing for noses) and was much less uptight back in the 70s, when he drank a lot of beer.

Anyway. So as soon as my little niece got the hang of Photoshop, which appears to have taken something like two days, she started sending her uncle gifts. These are some of my favorites:

Now, let me add that my niece’s parents are both stage actors, and her dad’s a playwright too. Her mom is a total technophobe. Her dad is not, but he’s no geek. He just got an iPhone the other day, and my niece e-mailed her uncle Vincent to commiserate with him because she’d spent the entire day showing her dad how to use it (she is a wiz with her iPod touch).

Until now, this is the kind of art project my niece has traditionally done (probably since birth) with her outdoorsy, Earth Mother mother:

They do a lot of this kind of stuff. (She’s one of those mothers who always make you feel inadequate because you don’t spend all your free time with your kids making dolls out of flowers and gingerbread houses and shit.) But there’s something to be said for that kind of dedication. It undoubtedly contributed to my niece’s creativity and aesthetic sensibility.

Not only is she a budding geekette, but she’s also a budding Apple fangirl:

Now, this work is truly impressive, but what inspired it is even more interesting.

Her uncle’s Apple love and her desire to please him certainly come into play. But more than that, it’s the products themselves.

They’re purty. Delicate. Sleek. Shiny. (These images say a lot about how this little girl perceives the products.) There’s a refinement to Apple products that jumps the gender gap (and creates a healthy aftermarket for butch iPhone cases for those who aren’t real comfy with their feminine side, or “How to make your Apple product look more like a Hummer”).

Getting the girls on board is no small feat for tech companies (laptop bag manufacturers haven’t figured it out yet). What GameBoy would have given to have girls go for GameGirls the way they have for Apple stuff!

In couples, women make most of the purchasing decisions. And for a long time now, single girls have been buying their own diamonds, if you get my drift. Apple, with its aesthetically delectible toys, has managed to achieve the Woman Acceptance Factor, starting very young, without alienating the boys.

Maybe the reason they haven’t come out with the red (or maybe pink, depending on my mood) iPhone I want yet is because they don’t want to scare the boys away… Or maybe it’s just a classiness thing. I guess wanting a pink iPhone makes me less classy, but I’m OK with that.

In past generations, we’d look at kids and think “they’re the future,” and buy them hula hoops to keep them occupied till they grew up and became a factor. But this generation is decidedly the present as well as the future. So watch closely. It’s fascinating.

In any case, Steve, I think you should look at my niece’s work. It might give you some ideas for your next ad campaign. Just e-mail me and I’ll tell you where to send the check.

Ten days in Normandy

July 31, 10 //
3

I told my brother we were going to the middle of rural Normandy for 10 days and that we planned to do nothing but read. He laughed! I guess that’s not his idea of a good vacation. Then we had a conversation about how his vacations are all about entertaining the kids. I sympathized and told him it wouldn’t always be that way.

Sitting around in chaises longues outside a cottage in the sticks (even French sticks) may not be everybody’s idea of a perfect vacation. But it worked for us. We didn’t only read, but we didn’t do anything mentally or physically stressful (that’s the point, right?), which is not to say we did nothing strenuous. A novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald is not something you just read, after all. It’ll take your breath away and leave you dizzy. Like exercise, but entertaining, edifying, elevating…

So what did I do on my summer vacation besides read?

Saw a 13th-century church in the village of Rugles on a gray (but not cold) day. You get those in Normandy, in the summer.

Contemplated seedpods that fascinated me (their wings) and delighted me (their color scheme, which I promptly decided I would do my dream living room in).

And in this little field, I imagined a tiny house next to this solitary tree, which looks as if it’s had some hard knocks in its short life, to hold that living room. The barbed wire will keep all the people away. Oh! Right! There are no people…

Pitted cherries. A tree planted by Vincent’s dad about 20 years ago bore fruit for the first time this year. The best cherries I’ve ever had in my life, easily 20 years’ worth of stockpiled cherry flavor in ‘em. Can’t you see it? We made a cobbler. There are no words.

Geek tip: If you have an image whose colors make you salivate, and if you have Photoshop, you can break the image down into a color palette you can use for web design, or home décor, or putting an outfit together, or whatever! Choose the Filter menu, then Pixelate, then Mosaic. Make the squares big till you get a workable palette.

Welcome to my living room in the little house in the little field by the little tree. This is all I have so far, but it’ll do. I don’t really need much.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »