Portillo's, Persephone, and Pomegranate Juice (Just skip this one, it's long and there is a lot of complaining)

I saw my mother a week ago Saturday. As visits with my mother go it was pretty good. Her only open criticism of me was that she hates my hair colour and style. She did spend a good bit of time bragging to me about how great her friend's daughter is doing which is her attempt at a parental parable to inform me that I am not. For an eight hour visit with her that was getting off pretty easy.

On the way home we stopped at Portillo's. He-weasel had just recently discovered that the Chicago legend had opened an outlet in Merino Valley, California. When we lived in Lake Bluff, Illinois, He-weasel liked to go there at least a couple of times a month. He would always get the Chicago dogs and I got the strawberry spinach salad. At first I was really excited to see a Portillo's in California. It was when I tried to order the strawberry spinach salad that things went wrong. I was told that they had it the first week they were open and that they got rid of it because it is an Illinois thing and that Californians didn't like it. I know that one shouldn't cry over not getting a strawberry and spinach salad but I did. I feel pretty sure that the guy taking my order was stunned by my level of disappointment, I know I was.

I have been feeling the "I want to go home" feeling in the worst way. Why, you so kindly ask? Well, it has been a year since I have last been in Chicago and it has been a year that we have been living in L.A. It is just a week away from the Fourth of July which makes me miss our home in Lake Bluff more than usual and it will soon be the one year anniversary since we lost Monsieur Inkey.

When driving on the freeway away from my mother my mind went to the day that we moved away from L.A. to Chicago. He-weasel had gone to Chicago two weeks before I did. I was left to deal with the movers. My last night in L.A. I spent with my mother. I remember the sense of glee I felt driving away from my mothers house to the airport; I was free. I was leaving L.A. and I never had to come back except for occasional visits.

Well, here we are. We are back. I feel like the Sisyphus of Southern California or perhaps I am more like the perpetual Persephone. I am in a hot Hades that I hate and I can't get out of and I seem stuck in a cycle. Perhaps, I drank the pomegranate juice and those six little sips damned me to a cycle as old as Greek mythology. I want to go home so badly only I don't know where that is. Home is not our place in Valencia. It is not our old house in Lake Bluff. It is not my mother's house. I feel as if I have phantom limb syndrome. I am aching for something I once had and no longer do.

Igor seems to think the reason I am feeling so crap this week, and I am, is that I spent too much time with my mother( eight hours is a long time to be with her) and that I had nothing there to ground me (my mother is not one for keeping food in her refrigerator and/or pantries; nurturing of self or others is not her strong suit) and that there was nothing to sustain me emotionally or even nutritionally, not even a strawberry spinach salad. He believes that when I am with my mother I take on her depression and her sense that everything is bad. Being with her I start to feel like I want to be swallowed up by the earth and just be done with it.

Usually after a visit with my mother I can't feel my heart for several days. Something about being with her makes me feel like I am not able to love or feel love. This time that didn't happen. Instead something unusual happened, for the last week I didn't look depressed. If you saw me you would have never thought I was the slightest bit blue( other than my new Jackie J Crew navy cardigan). I could get up and get dressed and I didn't moan at all about feeling sad. I worked,. I wrote. I took Lily for walks and easily did things I can't usually do when the black dog is visiting. But, underneath the persona of 'everything is alright' I was feeling like total crap. I think that until Friday I fooled He-weasel that I was happy. I told Igor that I could have even fooled him if I had wanted to.
He asked, "But, why would you want to?"
"I know. There is no point. But I could have,"I explained.
"Maybe for a session or two. No longer than that," Igor countered.
"I think I could have," I insisted.
"Don't give yourself too much credit," he joked.
We sat in silence as I imagined what I could have said to assure him that I was happy, happy, happy and as he imagined how he could have seen past my felicitous and false facade.

On my way to Igor's there was a car with an Illinois licence plate. I found myself filled with the desire to roll down my window and ask the driver what made him come here. Why would someone leave Chicago for Beverly Hills? I could not come up with an answer that made sense to me. When I drove down Rodeo it looked even more sterile and devoid of beauty than usual. I saw crowds of summer tourists taking photographs of stores.

"What are they thinking?", I asked Igor in a state of outrage. "They are on vacation and they chose to come here. These are just stores! What are they thinking?" I pleaded.

"They are hypnotised", Igor explained, "This is Beverly Hills. They are hypnotised by that."
Igor went into story telling mode, "You know the Star Tours that drives around showing the tourists the stars homes?"

"I do", I had seen the double decker bus filled with touri with their heads turned towards the heavens of the Hollywood sign just last week.

"Well, the other day when I was on my way home, in my car, the driver of a Star Tours bus asked me to roll down my window. I did. He asked me if I was an actor. I said no. He asked me if I was a director and I said no and that was when he drove away."

"That", I told Igor, "is the danger of being a beautiful person." I looked at Igor with fresh eyes and I could see how someone might think he is an actor. There is a distinguished air about him that makes John Forsythe look like a regular Joe.

"I should have told him that I was so as to keep them in their hypnosis." He laughed.

"Why are you here?" I laughed and yet I wondered what the real reason was. Even though he looks like an actor I know no one who seems less impressed by all that glitters.

"I come here because I get to see you." Igor offered.

"Poor you, " I laughed, as it seemed an inadequate reason to be in L.A, then quickly changed the subject.

"I just want to go home." I said, my voice filled with emotion and my fingers grabbed for two tissues.

"I am so tired of being in limbo. During the infertility treatment I had to deal with so much uncertainty. I am not a person who likes uncertainty. I hate the expression 'play it by ear' and 'let's wait and see'. I am tired of ambiguity and uncertainty. I just want to go home ." I said the last phrase like an overtired child.

I don't know what Igor said after that. I couldn't take in his words. He seemed to keep bringing it back to my mother and wondering what happened that my mother was the kind of negative and sinking feminine that could blind me to the good in my life. I interrupted him, " I just don't think I can force myself to get on the freeway. I can't do it. I can't make myself go back to Valencia. But, then where would I go?" I asked Igor half hoping he had an answer. He didn't.

In less than a week our lease is up and we are no closer to having a new home. Truth be told we quit looking. It was just too hard. Looking for a house wasn't just looking for a house it was looking for a life, a long term plan, a future and a commitment. Every time we looked I felt a new compassion for confirmed bachelors and how they must feel when on dates. Each house I have looked at has brought fear, terror and profound feelings of "I am just not that into you." Every viewing has been a one night stand that has brought me no closer to wanting to commit. I take the numbers, I show false interest, I make empty promises and then I never call. Realtors call me like a gal who has never read "The Rules".

We are in a state of denial and limbo. The denial is that if we don't talk to the leasing office we will not have to hear that our rent is going to go way up if we chose to stay month to month and /or that month to month is not an option and that we have to sign another lease. The limbo is that what we really want is for another position like He-weasel's to open up in another part of the country and we keep hoping and waiting to see if anything has opened up. As of today the only places where openings for his position are in Florida, Texas and New Jersey which is why we are still here. When I told Igor about the three states with openings he laughed, "So, there are places worse than here?"
"I wouldn't say worse."

I left the session unsure where to go. I couldn't go back to Valencia. So I went to the mall and tried to buy somethings to make myself feel better. I bought another Jackie cardigan and tank. I walked around J Crew for 30 minutes desperate to find something else to buy. I moved onto Bloomingdales and bought the Jo Malone Orange Blossom body cream. Neither purchase helped in the least and so I quit trying to buy my way into happiness. I managed to get on the freeway and head back to Valencia even as everything in me was telling me to go home, wherever that is.

Gone in zero seconds or the definitive prenatal vitamin FAQ

Statcounter is not my friend. Really, I think Statcounter lies to me and hates me and wishes me ill. I do understand that Statcounter is not a living and breathing entity capable of conniving and maliciousness and yet I am unsure that Statcounter hasn't been programmed to create inaccurate readings in order to torment those silly enough to obsessively check their stats.

According to Statcounter the bulk of my visitors spend zero seconds on my blog. I just find it hard to believe that everyday hundreds of people get to my blog and in zero seconds they are immediately so put off my my blog that they don't stay for even a second. It couldn't be something I said as I can't say much in a second. I can't even say hello in a second. And, really, even if you are a speed reader it is unlikely you could get through one of my posts in less than 15 seconds. As I can't say much in 250 words and that, according to many, is the perfect length for a blog post, it might even take you 25 seconds to figure out you don't want to spend even one second on my blog.

Maybe it is my blogs looks that put you off, zero reader? Is is the dame on the couch on my header? Are you afraid that I am a narcoleptic? Do you have an unnatural aversion to Freudian couches? Or did you see the name Belette Rouge and imagine I would be a French can-can dancer from Pig Alley keeping a diary of my shocking exploits on and off the stage and once you arrived you could immediately tell that I was instead a whining American woman who can not-not dance.

The second variety of reader I have most frequently, according to Statcounter, is the kind of reader that upon arriving stays a heroic and highly admirable 23 hours and 14 minutes and 8 seconds. You marathon readers are my favorite kind. I like you much better than the zero second readers. Yes, I understand that likely that means you fell asleep when reading my blog or didn't turn your computer off once done reading my posts but it still feels good to see the number even if it doesn't indicate actual reading time.

Statcounter, I believe is an all or nothing kind of counter. Only black or white. Zero or 19 hours 52 minutes and three seconds. Statcounter do you have an aversion to the middle ground? Have you heard of grey? There has to be a few more readers that stay for seven minutes and 19 seconds. I know your there. I just know it. I can feel you.

Perhaps, Zero reader, you are one of the hundreds of readers hoping that my blog is all about prenatal vitamins. Sadly, it is not. If it was I might be as popular as Dooce or I Can Has Cheezburger. I get at least 20 hits a day in which people are looking for answers about prenatal vitamins. So let me answer all your questions here and now in this completely unreasoned and scientifically inaccurate prenatal FAQ in my lame attempt to reduce my bounce rate.

1. "If I don't take prenatal vitamins will something bad happen?"
Maybe. Can you clarify when you say "something"?

2. "My boyfriend took prenatal vitamins, what will happen?"
He will grow a uterus and ovaries and will start talking to you about shoes and makeup and asking you if he looks fat.

3."I didn't take prenatal vitamins until the eighth month. Is that bad?"
Yes. And to you who asked about months 4,5,6,7, and 9, the same answer applies. Take the damn vitamins. Watch out, bitter is coming: I took shots in the ass three and four times a day in order to get pregnant and I did this for years and I never got pregnant. You are pregnant and you can't take a stinking vitamin. I need a drink. Make that a double.

4. "I took a prenatal vitamin and a birth control pill. Does that mean I will get pregnant?"
That question is just like asking "If I drink a diet coke with a cheeseburger will I get skinny?".

5. "Will prenatal vitamins makes(sic) my breasts bigger?"
No. Plastic surgery will. Being pregnant will. Taking a little folic acid and less vitamin A has no measurable impact on mammary tissue development. I suppose you could fill your bra with prenatal vitamins and that might increase the size.

6. "I am ( pick one: depressed, anxious, tired, sneezing, dreaming, not dreaming, craving pickles, anorgasmic, orgasmic, or hate my husband) is it the prenatal vitamin's fault?"
No.

7. "Will I get pregnant if I take prenatal vitamins?"
I have answered this question before but you left in one second and couldn't read my answer in previous posts, no, prenatal vitamins will not get you pregnant.

Now that I have written this FAQ I am hoping that some of you, zero readers, will stick around long enough to realize that it takes much longer than zero seconds to realize that you are not where you want to be.

If you really want to know about prenatal vitamins go here.

Writing in Valencia: Part Fourteen

I so wanted to call this post "The Dale Carnegie Asylum for aspiring writers". I got that title from Carolyn See's chapter "Do Some Magic" in her wonderful book, "Making a Literary Life"(which I cannot recommend enough if you are trying to make a literary life), however as it is part of the W.I.V series I felt obliged to stick to the established brand name. But, just so you know as you read this post that is what I am calling this post when I refer to it.

I thought as I have lately been dreaming of the Magic Kingdom and Magic Mountain that it might be a good time to get out my rabbits, scarves, sequins and top hat and do a little David Copperfield/Doug Henning magic. That said the only thing I can make disappear is a cookie and I can't do a card trick... gosh, I can't even shuffle cards. So instead I turned to Carolyn's chapter,"Do Some Magic" in which she suggests many a magical suggestion for making a literary life that require neither scarves or rabbits.

Carolyn's #1 magical suggestion for making literary magic is to do affirmations. As this is only suggestion one and I already have a bad attitude about her suggestions I am wondering if I should skip this chapter and move onto the next chapter, "Make rejection a process". Nah, that title makes magic and affirmations sound like a day at the beach( keep in mind I hate going to the beach unless it is cold and rainy and overcast).

The only person I know who did affirmations every day of their life was my father. Every morning upon rising he would look into the mirror and say "You handsome devil." The affirmations seemed to work for him. He stayed handsome and even when his looks faded people responded to him( when I say people read that as woman) as if he was Cary Grant and George Clooney rapped in a package of devilish goodness. Well, he did include the devil thing in the affirmation and I assure you that he had bad behavior down to a science. If there is a hell for selfishness, rakishness, philandering and bad parenting I assure you my father is the activity director in that department.

Other than my father I know no one who has successfully used affirmations. I do think I remember reading that it was a French psychologist, Émile Coué de Châtaigneraie, who was the founder of affirmations or what he called optimistic autosuggestion. It was a big shocking to learn that the Father of Positive Thinking is French. Are there others besides me who find this oozing optimism to seem just un-French? Sartre, Camus, existentialism, despair, and ennui or Barthes, Ponty, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida, Focault, Lyotard and structuralism, post-modernism and post-structuralism---these are the French philosophers and philosophies I know and love.

"The Coué method" according to Wikipedia, "centers on a routine repetition of this particular expression according to a specified ritual, in a given physical state, and in the absence of any sort of allied mental imagery, at the beginning and at the end of each day. Unlike a common held belief that a strong conscious will constitutes the best path to success, Coué maintained that curing some of our troubles requires a change in our unconscious thought, which can only be achieved by using our imagination. Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué claimed to have effected organic changes through autosuggestion."

The affirmation that Emile suggested for his patients was "Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux". In French it sounds cool. Well, to me everything sounds cool and glamorous in French even the most banal and boring things like "passez-moi la moutarde" sounds like an erotic and sensual invitation, that said I do enjoy a good mustard. However, in English, Coué's mantra means "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better". Well, that just sounds plain cheesy to me and I don't mean a lovely aged French cheese packed with delicious protein crystals but much more like an overly processed Velveeta. A French affirmation I might enjoy along with a glass of hearty Burgundy and a crusty bread is "Every day, in every way, I am getting closer and closer to death so I might as well enjoy life as much as I can and have some more wine and cheese and sex and cigarettes because I am going to be dead before I know it and then it will be too late."

My literary life adviser, Carolyn See, makes a very good argument in her book for the need for affirmations. When you enter the literary world you will hear all kinds of personal attacks about how your writing isn't good enough or it isn't what they are looking for. You will also hear more globalized generalizations, such as:
" No one is publishing memoir"
"It is easier to get struck by lightning than it is to get a publishing deal in this economy."
"Books are dead. You should just write a screenplay."

Carolyn suggests using affirmations to counter all the stinking thinking that exists about the literary world. "It's nice to reassure your timid, frightened brain that you deserve the very best and now it is the time for it." A few of the affirmations she uses to do so are:

"I am a powerful, loving and creative being, and I can handle it, and I can have anything I want." Part one I will agree with. Part two is true. Part three is a little much for me to take. Anything? If only it were true.

"I deserve the very best, and now is the time for it." Ooh, deserve. That is a word I could write a 3000 word post on. But, if the best is coming now would be a really good time for it to arrive.

"My ideas come faster than I can write them and they are all good." That is a nice one. I do have a lot of ideas and I do think they are pretty good(even if I am the only one who thinks so). Happily, I can write them all down so I don't think I need this affirmation.

"Everything turns out for me more exquisitely than I ever planned." No, no, no. Not so true for me. I am pleased as punch that this is true for Carolyn but it is not true for me.

There are several affirmations that Carolyn has in the book that are particularly for writers that do not seem as challenging for my inner skeptic to take. For example, "Up until now, I couldn't do dialogue, but now I love it! I can't wait to type quotation marks and see what my characters have to say" or "Up until now, I had some trouble with plot, but now it is my greatest strength. I'm a fiend for plot!" Even though I never see myself writing fiction I do like the idea of autosuggesting my way into getting good at dialogue.

Let me admit here and now that I am not much for magical thinking. I am sure I could benefit from taking Carolyn's advice on this subject. She, after all, is a very successful writer and I am not, so who am I to scoff at a magical suggestion that has worked for her. But, I am just too much of a realist to believe that affirmations can do much more than self sooth. And, if they are too big and too optimistic like "My income increases daily whether I'm working, playing or sleeping" I just can't do anything but laugh at them and then my mind immediately starts to freak out and brings forth all the evidence how that isn't true and how I better get off my a** and get to work.

Carolyn does offer this important disclaimer: "Does this magic "work"? Again, I don't know. I do know it takes you out of this world and into the mystical one, where life is fun and anything can happen; where, when you drive your car, you can say out loud,"I feel like a success; I am a success." and see what will happen next, wait for your life to unfold with a sense of pleasure and surprise." Next time I am in my car I will take Carolyn's advice and see where it takes me.

And, if I was going to move into the mystical world( no packing is required, just a huge leap of faith and an abandonment of my core beliefs) my affirmation would be: "Everyday I make huge piles of money for writing my blog and everyday I am discovered by a big literary agent who loves me and my writing and, everyday and every way, huge publishing houses offer me huge amounts of money to publish my book and, everyday and every way, my book is a huge best seller and it is sold for huge amounts of money to be turned into a huge and wildly successful film and, everyday and every way, I can eat all the cheese, chocolate and bread I want and it just makes me skinnier, prettier and younger." Or, if you prefer it in French, it goes a little something like this( blame Babelfish if the translation makes no sense): Journalier je fais les piles de l'argent énormes pour écrire mon blog et journalier je suis découvert par un grand agent littéraire qui m'aime et mon écriture et maisons énormes journalières et de chaque édition de manière m'offrent des montants considérables d'argent pour éditer mon livre et journalier et chaque manière mon livre est un best-seller énorme et il est vendu pour des montants considérables d'argent à transformer en énorme et d'une manière extravagante film et journalier réussi et je peux manger de tous les fromage, chocolat et pain que je veux et il me rend juste plus maigre, plus joli et plus jeune.

I admit that my father's affirmation was more succinct than mine and Carolyn's are slightly more modest but if "I am a powerful, loving and creative being...and I can have anything I want" then this affirmation ought to work just fine. I'll let you know how it works out.

p.s. Carolyn See's daughter is Lisa See. Lisa's latest book, Shanghai Girls: A Novel is the 45th most popular book at Amazon.com. I wonder what affirmations she did?

I am a Mickey Mouse Mormon Mason

I have long had an interest in the secret, the hidden and the mysterious. Not the woo-woo supernatural mysteries kind but more the secret amongst us kind. It is not an uncommon motif; I am not the only one who finds secrets and secret societies intriguing. There are web sites filled with the secrets of the Mormons and the Masons( of which I have spent a fair amount of time attempting to discover). I have watched every History Channel show on the secrets of the Mormons and the Masons, of which there are many, and was left wanting more Mason mysteries. I tuned into specials on the Discovery channel, intrigued to discover secrets I didn't already know about Joseph Smith and his special glasses.

Growing up in L.A. means I spent a lot of time at the Magic Kingdom. We went to Disneyland every time a friend or relative came to visit. I went for birthdays, Christmas and Easter Holidays and, of course, for Grad Nite. As long as I have visited Disneyland I have been intrigued by their secrets. When I was little I wanted to know who was under the Mickey Mouse costume and wondered whether they were hot, sweaty and miserable. As I got older I was curious what the secrets behind the shiny-happy exterior of Mickey-land was really like. I wanted to see the imperfections of the park. There had to be a place in the park where tired employees sit and complain about being thrown up on by a child who had a toxic mix of too much cotton candy and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

When I got older still I learned that that there was a secret place in Disneyland meant for just a select few. A doorway hidden among the rides, tee shirt shops and churro stands that I could not enter. This place was called Club33. Club 33 is a private club in the Magic Kingdom in which you can drink alcohol. Now, I enjoy a good cocktail every now and then but not enough to pay $10,450 for that privilege and an annual fee of $3,275. Even if I was ready to pony up, or should I say Pluto up, that kind of cash, there is a 10-20 year wait list for membership. Right now there is such a long wait list that the Mouse of all media isn't even accepting letters of interest let alone membership applications. Only 487 memberships are ever available and a membership only becomes available when someone dies( as memberships are not transferable).

For years I have longed entry into this place just to see it, just as I have dreamed of somehow sneaking into a Mormon temple to see what I can't see and then to hightail it out as soon as my curiosity was satisfied and I understood once and for all what the purpose of the magic underwear is. Since I haven't sent of a letter of intent to get on the decade long waiting list and I know no one who is a member I may never see the inside of Club 33.

However, the other night I dreamt of Club 33. I was there with my husband( only it wasn't He-weasel, in dreams you can by bigamous without any legal ramifications) and another couple( I think they were my sister, that I don't really have, and her husband). We went to the door of Club 33 to get a membership. I had a bag of stickers that said Club 33 on them and I had a Club 33 dog collar. This, in the dream, was given to me by another of my sister's and was proof of my eligibility to join the club. I showed it to the girl at the desk. She went away and came back. She said that my husband and I were eligible and that for $75 we could be members( which is almost $13,000 off the regular price). I explained to the woman that my sister was also a member of the church(it felt as if I was saying she was a Mormon. which in the dream I seemed to be). All four of us pulled out our credit cards to pay for entry. We were all delighted that for such a small price we could be members of this exclusive club.

Well, this e-ticket of a dream was too good not to take to Igor. First of all Igor was intrigued that I had dreamt of both Six Flags Magic Mountain and Disneyland in the course of a single week. Both places are for amusement and both are places that promise "Magic".

Igor strongly believes that this dream has to do with publishing, as publishing would be the happiest place on earth for me, and oh, sweet Mickey Mouse, do I hope he is right. Publishing is a secret society of which only the select few gain admission and the price for admission is steep and even if you are willing to pay it one might have to wait for many years to gain entry to the club of the published because it is a "Small publishing world after all."

He also thinks that it is not so much being in Club 33 or getting into a Mormon temple but rather getting past the threshold of those who cannot enter and he equates this with publishing. See, he believes that the important part of publishing for me is to be accepted by the authorities and not so much what comes after that. As, I don't really care about staying at Club 33, I just want to get in and see what it's like. I don't have much fantasy of what will happen after I publish I just want to get in the club.

What gets me into this club, in the dream? I have been given a dog collar and stickers by my sister. What the heck does that mean? Well since I really have no Mormon sister who is a member of Club 33, I think the dream is trying to say that the way I will gain access to the place I have always wanted to go is through feminine relatedness, something very close to me and it is not through money but through identification that I will get in. The dog collar is worn for identification. The stickers show belonging. I gain entry into a place that has a very high price of entry and I have to pay a low price to enter it. Pretty nice. I only hope the dream is right.

Now, let me get all conspiracy theory on you. Disneyland's Club 33....33...well, the highest order of the Masons is the 33 degree initiation. Christ died when he was 33. Harry Truman was the 33rd President of the United States and he was from Missouri. Walt Disney was from Missouri ( or as I like to call it, Mouse-souri) and many people believe Disney was a 33rd degree Mason. Many claim that Joseph Smith got the rituals for the Mormon Church from the Masons. I am just saying....

*** I am away from home until Tuesday night. I am not sure if I will have access to the internet. If you don't see me here or on your blog, please understand why. Thanks!***

Counting on therapy

When I am nervous or anxious or bored, I sometimes count words. I count out how many letters the word has in it. So, if the word is 'therapy' that would mean I start counting on my left hand pinkie finger and run out of fingers on my right hand by 'a' so I have to move over to my right hand thumb finger and then I use up two fingers for 'p' and 'y'. But, then the problem is that means there are three fingers left and I can't quit counting with three fingers left. I need to find a three letter word or if the word is longer than that I have to keep going until I have managed to use up all fingers on both hands. If I used the word 'car' I would be done; the three remaining fingers would be used up and I would be free to stop counting. However, if the next word I thought was 'traffic' then I would have six remaining fingers before I could finish counting.

When I started seeing Igor I couldn't stand to think about driving all the way from Valencia to Beverly Hills. It felt too much, too long and too far. I needed to break up my drive into segments. For example, segment one was from the door to the hallway. Segment two was from the hallway to the car. During one and two I would almost always brim with energy and hope and optimism which I often lose by section five.

Driving from my parking space to the exit of my building is section three. It is in this section that I often realize I forgot to take my medicine, or bring my phone or do something else of great consequence that I should have done before I left the house. It is also in three that I curse neighbors for driving too fast or too slow in the parking structure. It is in this segment of the trip in which I am most likely to call someone a f*ck*ing a** hole from the protected safety of my rolled up windows that mute my expletive.

Section four is the road from my building to the freeway. This is the last section I can safely check my cell phone for messages or fiddle with my Ipod. Here I am both in a hurry to get to the freeway and yet if there is a new email I want the light to turn red so I can read it. I feel a mix of stop and go that registers in my body as energy, a feeling that is far too infrequent.

Section five is from the freeway on ramp unto Highway 14. This section and #10 are the places where accidents are most likely to happen. If it happened here it would be better as I wouldn't be so far from home. Usually by here my optimism and hope and fun in the sun feeling starts to fade. There are trucks, carrying produce and products from Sacramento and Fresno, that I fear can't see me and there are merging cars that want to be where I am and by this time I usually hate what is playing on my Ipod and wish for traffic so I could stop it for a minute and change the song.

Section six is from Highway 14 until the on-ramp of the 405 freeway. It is here that will determine if the ride is going to be easy or the kind of drive that makes me hate this place. If there is no traffic this portion seems completely without consequence, like the easy part on a difficult exam.

Sections seven, eight, and nine are all on the 405 freeway. Seven and eight I am fine in unless there is traffic. It is nine where if I am feeling particularly horrible about being in L.A. that the grief, shock and tears will hit me. It happens less and less lately. But when I first started going to Igor's it used to happen almost every week. From nine on I have stories for each and every off ramp. I have memories for that exit and the next one and that is the one going to Andrea's house. That is the exit I took to the museum for the Freud exhibition. That is the road I took to see that doctor after I had the car accident in 83. It is even worse when there is traffic because then I have to sit and stew in my memories. That is when I feel like I am trapped in a MRI machine and I can't get out and I can't breath and I wonder what would happen if I jut got out of my car and left it and let the anxiety swallow me.

Section ten is where I get off of the 405 freeway. When I am off the off-ramp and on the street this is when I feel that I have arrived even though I haven't. I am now in the west side and that means I made it and I can relax as I am here and it also means that I am someplace other than I was. I am no longer going through someplace but I am now in someplace different. The cars are different, the drivers are different... it all feels a mix of leased luxury, practiced ease, and auras of "I could be famous" mingling with the cardboard requests of homeless men, "I could work for food" and fruit vendors selling cherries from their concrete islands.

I pass the federal building and my mind takes a tour of the many times I have waited in lines for passports. Once I have traveled past that memory I see everyone getting over to the left like a migration of geese or salmon or some other creature with a driving biological imperative that has to make a left at the next stop light or it will die and fail to live its genetic destiny.

Section eleven is all through the high rise area of west L.A. Something about the height of the high rises makes the memories feel contained and that they will go no further. 30 story buildings with their circular driveways, valet parking and marbled lobbies stand like fierce fortresses against far reaching memories that are only blocks away.

I pass the temple that the family of a man I once loved attended. They would go to that temple on Fridays and pray that their son would come to their senses and marry a nice Jewish girl. To the right is the high rise Farrah Fawcett lives in. I wonder if she is okay. When one day she dies will she sit on the top of the building like an angel in a Wim Winder film? On the left is the church we almost got married in. A little further down is the Beverly Hills sign where tourists stand in front of to pose and prove their time in 90210 and then there's where Robinson's department store used to be. That is where I bought the Chanel Tempting Taffeta blush. Each memory sticks to the ground like tulle fog and prevents any further memories from flooding in.

It is here in the eleven that I invariably say to myself, "You have waited all week for this and in an hour it will be over and you will be going home." The truth of this reminder always makes the drive and all of it seem a bit futile. Then another part of myself says things about how there are all kinds of things in life you have to repeat over and over and that doesn't mean you don't do them. I start to count them.

Section twelve is on Santa Monica Blvd. This part of the ride always feels light, bright, quick and animated. It almost feels like sections one only the optimism is more external and less internal. If there was music for this section it would be something by Sheryl Crow.

Section thirteen is on Rodeo drive which I am on for only a few blocks. While in section thirteen I look for people who could be characters in my book. I watch for clichés, tourists, celebrities and bad plastic surgery while I maintain an aura of calculated indifference which no one notices as no one is looking at me.

Section fourteen is the nameless street I turn onto to get to the parking structure ( it has a name only I don't know it. I never remember to look. I am not there long enough). This section is often marked by subtle anxiety, acausal frustration and the slightest fear that I won't find a space this time( it has never happened and yet the fear remains). I could, I think, remember each parking space I have ever parked in, in this structure, and I could, if pressed, tell you something about that session in which my car was in the third spot from the elevator.

Section fifteen is the walk I take from my car to the parking lot elevator. It is often here that the outfit I am wearing, that I liked when I left, has turned into something ugly and unattractive. It can be made worse if a gorgeous stick woman in the elevator has shoes and a handbag on that costs more than I earned in 2003.

Section sixteen is the walk from the elevator to the security guard who works at at shoe store who every week tells me to have a nice day. Each week I wonder if he remembers me from week to week or if I forever seem like someone he has never seen before. I put my sunglasses on after I walk by him and I go into a zone of my own. I check my email and do a walk not unlike a walk one would do in NYC.

Section seventeen goes from the greeting of the security guard into a quiet and peopleless place into Igor's building and through the lobby. It is the most quiet section of the trip. I can hear my own breath and the clomping of my heels on the lobby floor. If one were to count: my steps taken are 25. The number of floors I climb are four and the amount of doors I pass before Igor's are three.

Section eighteen begins in the elevator and continues after I arrive on the fourth floor and walk to his door. I look in the mirror in his elevator to see if I was right in section one or section fifteen. Most often I stick with my self assessment that I gave in the elevator in the parking structure in section fifteen. I wonder each week if I will see someone in the hallway of this old office building and if I do the other person and I will politely pretend not to see each other.

Section nineteen is the waiting room where I sit and wait for Igor. Depending on how sections six through nine were determines how long I sit in nineteen.

Igor's office is section number twenty. I count the minutes, waiting for him to open the door and then I count: 'Twenty' has 1-2-3-4-5-6 letters and 'Igor', Igor has 1-2-3-4. Ten letters, that means I can quit counting.

10 things I am loving today

1. Movies that don't seem like musicals that have musical moments. I just watched Dans Paris for the umpteenth time. Every time I see this scene it makes me cry.


Here is another moment in Magnolia that makes me sniff.


2. My new Jo Malone Orange Blossom cologne. If only the fragrance lasted longer than three minutes. Maybe if I got the Orange Blossom Body Creme.

3. Getting new books in the mail earlier than I expected them. I just got: Are you there Vodka? It's me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler; Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski; and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.

4. My new Boatneck Microstripe Long-Sleeve Tee (item #16863), which retails for $29.50. It is available in this white and navy microstripe pattern, as well as a white and light grey microstripe from JCrew. It is going to be my most worn tee of the summer.

5. Seeing Lily run the obstacle course at her puppy class. I wish I had video to show you of this adorableness. She jumps the gate like she is an Alpo dog in a commercial. Sooooo cute!!!!!

6. Huell Howser's staff emailed me and asked me for my phone number. I now live in hope that I will get a phone call from Huell. I have a song for you, Huell.

7. The Ficarre clip that lovely Leah told me about. This is the best hair clip ever. I did a French twist at 9 a.m. yesterday and it stayed in perfect place until I took it down. I got mine at Nordstroms. I am going to order one from the Lilly collection for obvious reasons. You can get 15% off if you order directly from Ficarre and use the code, SPRING09.

8. For the last week it hasn't been hot in L.A. I fear my week free of complaining about L.A. may soon be coming to an end as the weather begins to warm.

9. I just caught up on all of the New Yorker's Fiction Podcast. I love this series. I love that it is free and I love hearing which stories writers love. My two favorite stories of the series, so far, are, surprisingly, the one by John Updike, Playing with Dynamite and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Be prepared to be freaked out should you listen to "The Lottery".

10. We watched Last Chance Harvey and I LOVED it. When I watched it I heard my say out loud, "I love a happy ending." I didn't know that about myself until I said it. But, it has to be a certain kind of happy ending and this movie has it.

Writers in Valencia

In Stevenson Ranch, a suburb of Valencia not a half mile from my house, there is an area called "The Arts". It was not surprising to me that builders in this area would decide to borrow some of the cache of the famous school down the street, the California Institute of the Arts. Because, really, as art colleges goes this is up there with Yale and the Rhode Island School of Design for being a top tear art school. I assure you, me who worships at the alter of post modern contemporary conceptual art am impressed every time I pass the school. I say things to myself like "Judy Chicago has taken that road" and "I might see John Baladassari at the Whole Foods" or "perhaps Roy Lichtenstein once got gas at this Shell station". As cheesy and white bread as Valencia is, and it is, it also is home to a college that is too cool for Valencia. Cal Arts seems like it would be more at home in NYC, rather in the town with the largest number of master planned communities in the United States. But thanks to Walt Disney who built and funded the college it is here, in Valencia.

When I heard about "The Arts" area I was sure that the streets would be named for famous visual artists. Maybe famous Cal Arts professors like John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Krueger, Roy Lichtenstein or Judy Chicago would have a street named for them or maybe famous artist alums such as David Salle,Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley might merit a mention. And, if not visual artists then at least some of Cal Arts famous graduates like Tim Burton, Sofia Coppola, John Lassater or Pee Wee Herman. I was so excited that He-weasel and I decided to take a look at "The Arts" area because even if it meant we would be living in a Master Planned community we might be able to find a house on Laurie Anderson Lane, Tim Burton Blvd. or Pee Way Way.

Alas, no such streets are to be found. Instead of being luminaries from Cal Arts the streets in "The Arts" area are named for the household names of the cannon of literature. The main two streets in the "Arts"area are Hemingway and Steinbeck. It seems that the city planners have decided these two deserve the big streets( I feel sure if Shakespeare was alive he would have had something to say about that as would Faulkner). I can, it turns out, get my clothes dry cleaned at Hemingway Cleaners on Hemingway Avenue. If I do will when I wear those clothes feel inspired to write about bulls, broads and battles? To get to Lily's vet I must travel with her on the road of the author of "Travels with Charlie."

Other streets in this literary who's-who of housing include: Faulkner, Webster, Shaw, Wilde, Dickens, Burns, Frost, London, Poe, Irving, Keats, Coleridge, Emerson, Fitzgerald, Longfellow, Elliot, Blake, Carroll, Twain, Dickens, Durant, Shakespeare and Tennyson.

Sadly there are only a few streets named for famous women writers in "The Arts" neighborhood yet even those streets are marked by identity confusion. Is Bronte Street named for either or both Charlotte and/or Emily? Is Browning named for Robert or Elizabeth Barrett and which Shelley is the intended namesake? I was most sorry to see that Thomas Wolfe got a street and Virginia Woolf did not. Perhaps the builders would feel a moral obligation to create rooms of one's own in houses on Woolf Way and the budget wouldn't allow it so Woolf was replaced by the author of "You can't go home again." I wonder if that means the road is always blocked off?

There are other writer's who are not included who seem natural namesakes for residential roads: Edith Wharton and her house of mirth; Hawthorne and his house of seven gables; Irving and his cider house; Ibsen and his doll's house; Dostoevsky and his house of the dead( which I suppose is a little too depressing to attract home buyers) as is Styron's burning house which would have been best located near the fire station. I suppose that E.M. Forester Road was edited out because most of the homes in these developments are lacking views.

The homes in this neighborhood are nice enough but are certainly not worthy of the kind of inspired genius of the literary icons the roads are named for. I see these homes more at home on Jan Karon Court, Harold Robbins Row, Dean Koontz Drive, Sidney Sheldon Street and Robert Ludlum Lane. However, there are few streets I would consider for their names alone. I would LOVE to be a highly talented litigious recluse on Salinger Lane. And, Burroughs Way? What a trip that would be!! I do prefer a road less traveled which makes Frost Lane a very good option for me. However, can a home that requires membership to a Home Owner's Association, that limits which colours you can paint your house and what trees you plant, really be a road less traveled?

At first I was a bit perturbed that Stevenson Ranch eschewed the famous names of Cal Arts Alums and instead chose to name the streets for writers and then I thought to myself, "Self, what the heck are you thinking? This means that you are not the only writer in Valencia and that you are in pretty good company and if you keep at it and someday manage to get a book or two published you might even get your own street." Maybe a Belette Blvd. or a Rouge Road? I would even settle for an alley in a bad part of town. It would seem only right that it be a street that no one would want to live on as that has been my feelings about Valencia ever since we arrived. Probably better to stick to dead writers who have never been here and didn't have such open antipathy. That said, I feel sure if Dickens had ever had the chance to visit Valencia he might have written a sequel to "Bleak House", "Bleak Master Planned Community".

In my dreams I went to Igor's house

I didn't give Igor time to ask me how I was. I jumped right in. I had things to discuss and only 50 minutes to do it in.

"I dreamt about you last night," I told him as if I was telling him I had a present for him.
"It's about time," he laughed gleefully.
"I knew you'd love it that I dreamt about you. "
He laughed his Igor laugh.
"And, even when I don't dream about you somehow you make it all about you. Maybe, because this one is about you, you will say it is really about my mother." I said jokingly even as I knew that he has read "Wit and the unconscious" by Freud and that meant he knew there was truth to my joke.
"Go ahead", he instructed me.

"I am driving around Valencia. I am on the back side of Magic Mountain. It is a side that I have never seen before. I didn't even know it existed. I drive up to your house, to the back of the house. I go into an apartment attached to the house, a big white two-story house. I walk into the apartment and I go out through the front door down the stairs. From the stairs I can see you through a window. You are building a wooden weight bench. There is wood all over the office. It is a mess. I see you lying on the wooden bench, so as to test it. I laugh. Something about this strikes me funny. It doesn't seem like you, woodworking and weightlifting. I realize that my session is soon and I wonder how you will clean it all up before my session begins.

I enter your home, where your office is. I lie on a couch in your office. This couch is right up against a wall made of windows. Your in a chair right behind me, you are so close. There is no evidence of the weight bench or the mess or the wood that had cluttered your office just moments ago as this is a different room. You tell me in a curt way to never go through the apartment again. You tell me that it was your office but you had given it to your wife for a photographic studio(I got an image in my mind that your wife looks like Shohreh Aghdashloo who played the wife of Ben Kinsley in the House of Sand and Fog). I got upset by the way you said that to me. It seems parental and sharp."

"I got up and walked out of your office. I leave expecting you will walk after me and try and stop me. But you don't. I stand in an anteroom and look at papers on a desk. I see a condolence card laying on top of a stack of papers. I think that this means that a professor that we both know has died. I go into a waiting room and put on my white Converse tennis shoes on my bare feet and I wait for you to come and get me. I see you walk into the room where you had been constructing the weight bench. You come out of the room and stand in the anteroom. You say to me "I am not a behavioral therapist. I cannot deal with your behavior."

He loved the "I am not a behavioral therapist. I cannot deal with your behavior" line.
"I am funny in your dream." Igor said.
"I made you that way." I explained so as to remind him that it was my psyche and not his that made the joke.

Igor said excitedly, "You are quite intuitive. "
I wondered what I got right. Is he really married to Shoreh?
"I used to be very into weight lifting when I was young. It was my hobby."
"Oh", I answered unimpressed by my intuition.

"And, wood, you like wood very much. Don't you?" Igor asked.
"Yeah, trees. I love trees. To be at home I have to have trees."
"Trees and space and room to create" he paused as if he was trying to make sense of it but it instead sounded like poetry.
Finally finishing the sentence, "... these are the things you want", he asked.
"I do." I answered

"So, what do you see in this dream? Igor asked me mining for more material.
"I see that I have gotten to a new place. I am on the other side of where I was. I have made a new discovery. I am in a place that I didn't even know existed."
"Magic Mountain" Igor laughed. "You know, I have been there. It hasn't been for a lot of years. But I have been there. There are some terrifying rides there."
I create a picture in my head of Igor in his black turtleneck, wool trousers and Gucci loafers standing in line to ride the Colossus. It is an image even more humorous than imagining him as a young gym rat.

"There is a lot about closeness and distance in this dream. In the dream I am now close to you. You no longer have to drive to Beverly Hills. I have come to you. I am where you live."
He said it in such a way that it seemed the symbolism of this ought to be obvious only I didn't get it.

"And you are close to me in the office. Extremely close to me. Everything feels close in this office. The window, the couch, the chair and you." I said as a means of amplifying the closeness theme.
"At first I am very close to you and then I say something wrong and the closeness is lost and then there is distance between us," he reiterated.

My mind wandered, "I go through the apartment and you are in the house and you don't want me in the apartment. Jeeze, I wonder what that is about? You want me in a house, where the roots are; where the wood is. You want me to be in a permanent place."
"It is not the house I want for you. What I want for you is to be free of the ideal that one place exists that is going to be without challenges, grief, and loss " he explained.
I uh-huhed him. I wanted to get back to the dream and away from previously discussed material, the clock was ticking.

We both quietly searched our minds for more meaning. The more we worked at it the more confused I found myself.
"And," Igor reminded me, "you call it an apartment not a guest house. An apartment is something temporary, transitory, something you are going through and yet it is a longer stay than a guest house. Then, after you go through the "apartment" you come down to where I am in the house....you have quickly gone through the transitional into the rooted."
He could see in my avoidance of eye contact that I had nothing to add to that.

"The house has two stories. What are the stories of the house?" Igor asked.
Again I had no answer. It was only while driving home that the "two stories" of the house came to mind. The two stories are: my infertility story and my mother story and the attached apartment is "Thursday's with Igor." The attached apartment is the studio where I am developing, editing, working on creating something new. It is not a place to stay. It is a place where I spend 50 minutes a week working and then I leave.

My mind moved to the homonym of the dream, "There is the weight room and the waiting room. You are in the weight room. You are where the heavy lifting happens. You are building a place where that can happen. I am waiting for you to come get me."
Igor answered, "But, I don't. Rather I come from the weight room into the waiting room and reproach you when it is you who should have reproached me."
I am not sure what he means. Why should I have reproached him? For making me wait?

Igor offered,"It seems to me that this dream is indicating a movement towards a very positive masculine. This is a balanced masculine. And, the wife, tell me about her?"
"She is really beautiful. Have you seen "the House of Sand and Fog?" I ask.
"No."
"You should. It is a beautiful film and it is loaded with stuff about the significance of house on identity. I think you'd like it. " I suggest.
"Anyways, the woman who plays Ben Kinsley's wife is really beautiful and in the dream she is your wife. Well done, you." I congratulate him.
"There is space for both my "wife" and I to create in this house. Often in a marriage there isn't enough space for what is required to be truly creative. But, this inner masculine and feminine have room to create."
"They do."
Hearing this I realize how I have so much space in my life here in Valencia for writing. I have never had as much space for it. Even when I had my Virgina Wolf room of my own in Lake Bluff I did not have the emotional space or creative energy I have had since living here. I hated to admit it so I didn't.

"And, the death of the professor?" he asked.
"Well, in the dream, I assume the condolences card is about him as he has been so sick. You know, this professor, he wouldn't know me if he saw me but when I heard he was sick I was truly sad. He is this great mix of intellect and feeling. So often one is lost at the expense of another."
"....a kind of death?" Igor asked.
"I guess." It seemed like a bit if a reach but I could see what he was saying.

"How about the shoes?"
"Um, uh......well, they are Converse, they are shoes I would never wear to see you. They feel too casual. I would never wear them here. And, if I was barefoot I guess the shoes were making it possible for me to go outside."
I imagined myself trying to get those shoes on. I always have a hard time getting them on and they are not very comfortable. I didn't share those associations with him. I wondered why not.
Perhaps I am willing to show him a part of myself that up until now didn't feel good enough.

"This" Igor said, "Has been a very illuminating dream."
I was happy to hear that he thought so only I still felt a bit in the dark.

As I drove home I wondered how you get to the other side of the mountain and what was there. There has to be another side. There is another side to everything. I looked it up on a map and it seems that there is nothing on the other side of the Magic Mountain. Isn't there a song about a bear and a mountain and how there was nothing there on the other side? Maybe I should tell Igor about there being nothing there and about the bear song. But as he seems to know very little about popular culture I would likely have to sing him the whole song and letting him hear my voice would be worse than letting him see my Converse. Oh, "converse", now I get it.

Converse(1):
intr. verb:

1. To engage in a spoken exchange of thoughts, ideas, or feelings; talk.
2. Archaic. To be familiar; associate.

noun:

1. Spoken interchange of thoughts and feelings; conversation.
2. Obsolete. Social interaction.

Converse (2)

adjective:

1. Reversed in order, relation, or action.

noun:

1. Something that has been reversed; an opposite.
2. Logic. A proposition obtained by conversion.

Find Belette

Editor, the author and creator of Up and Down Town which is one of my favorite fashion blogs, was kind enough to do a piece starring the two of us. So, are you up to Editor's challenge to "Find Belette"? Once you have found me please go over to Editor's blog and find her.

Writing in Valencia: Part Thirteen

It has been along time since I have done a “Writing in Valencia” post. I am guessing you know why and have been too kind to say. It means that I haven’t been writing the novel. I suppose I could have done another “not writing in Valencia” post only I felt a little shame at failing to stick to my novel writing plan and I wasn’t ready to admit defeat to you even though I had admitted it to myself weeks ago.

Let me sum up in a few words what I learned from my attempt at novel writing:I really don’t want to write a novel. I wish it were otherwise. I still and always will believe that novel writing takes more creativity than personal essay, creative non-fiction and/or memoir. I suppose I believe that because it comes easier for me to write non-fiction and what is hard has to be better (must remember to talk to Igor about that ). The strange thing about my idealization of fiction is that almost all I read is non-fiction and I have to literally force myself to read a novel. Forcing is always involved in the writing and the reading.

So, I am back and I am not only writing but I am starting to put together a query letter and sample chapters for my memoir, “Thursdays with Igor.” I am excited and simultaneously terrified to enter the world of queries, agents and rejection again. This time I am approaching it with an entirely different attitude. My new attitude did not come from the misery of me trying and failing to write a novel but rather thanks to my endlessly supportive and encouraging friend, Kirie, who suggested I read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Outliers”.

“Outliers” is a fascinating book and definitely worth a read if you are interested in the science of success. However, if you would prefer the extreme Cliff notes of what I got from his book it is that, according to Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours to be a genius at anything. He uses for examples of his argument the Beatles and Bill Gates. He shows how both of these household names had opportunities to put in more time and practice hours than others in their field. This may be true or not, I have neither the inclination or the time to assess his research. I prefer to assume it is true for the sake of my sanity and self-esteem.

I imagine that I have spent about 5000 hours writing. It is my conservative estimate that I am now spending about 30 hours a week writing for the blog and for my memoir. That means in a year I will spend 1560 hours writing and, according to Gladwell, in just 3.21 years I will be a writing genius. Now, no need to warn me that this may not be true. I don’t care. I care that this idea frees me to think I don’t have to publish this year. It gives me the freedom to keep writing, come what may, for the next 35 months. In 35 months, if I keep this up, my writing will be better. I know that to be true. I know that in writing a blog for almost two years that my writing has improved,a lot. Just go back to the first six months of this blog to see for yourself. On second thought, don’t; just trust me.

I hope that it doesn’t take 10,000 hours to learn to write a great query letter or 10,000 more hours to find an agent. For today I am not going to worry about that. Today all I really care about is accruing hours and writing my way to better writing. Today I clocked six hours. Only 4994 hours to go.

This is not a francophile blog

For most of my life I was not really sure what I liked and what I disliked. Upon that realization I worked hard to discover my authentic preferences and where they came from. Was it me that hated okra or was it my best friend from fourth grade, Mira Jane, who made a face each time the "o" word was said and, so, in an act of solidarity I eschewed the slimy southern vegetable? Did I like jazz because it was the soundtrack to my parents life or did I really love Ella and Billy? Was my love of mythology born out of my own interest or was it because of a certain adolescent Adonis that Eros was ignited for Olympus?

It was during my "Do I really like this?" phase when I first saw the film Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. I loved the film for many reasons but what I loved most about it was its unapologetic celebration of idiosyncrasies and specificity. We learn who the characters are via their likes and dislikes:"Raphael Poulain likes peeling large strips of wallpaper;lining up and shining his shoes; emptying his toolbox, cleaning it out and putting everything back." "Amandine Poulain is a school mistress who has always had shaky nerves. She dislikes puckered fingers in the bath, having her hand touched by strangers, pillow marks on her cheek in the morning. She likes figure skaters' costumes on TV, polishing the parquet, emptying her hand bag, cleaning it out and putting everything back in."

The literary device of "turn-ons and turn-offs" as a means of knowing characters became one that impacted not only my writing but also my philosophy. I started to seek out specificity (, i.e. what makes you, you and what makes me, me and what those specific preferences say about us). I found that people who would have previously frightened me with their passionate love of LEGOS, Star Trek, and Civil War reenactment to have become newly interesting. "So, what is it that makes you love Dungeons and Dragons?", I would ask rapt with interest.

I had lectured on the film "Amelie" just days before I began my blog. In doing research on "Amelie", I found a short film by Jean Pierre Jeunet, which he made years before, entitled Foutaises: catalogue nostalgique des plaisirs de la vie . I loved this film. It was a short film about nothing but preferences and it was a major motivating factor for me starting my blog. I decided that my blog would be a catalogue of the pleasures and displeasures of my life.

Another inspiration for my blog came from, of all people, Gore Vidal. I remembered seeing an interview with him years ago on the Charlie Rose show. I don't know if Gore was on to talk about one of his books, his life or to give insight into his distant cousin. What I do remember is him talking about how in language and writing we have a tendency to modify. We use modifiers in language as a means of not owning our thoughts, feelings and arguments. Gore's point stuck with me over the years as I had been a big time modifier. I modified my likes, dislikes, thoughts and feelings so if you disagreed with me I could say, "well, I only sort of like it" and that way there wouldn't be an unbridgeable chasm created between the two of us.

I wanted my blog to be a place where I could have the courage to say what I love and what I detest without modifiers or qualifiers. I didn't want to have to apologize for my preferences and I assumed I would never have to as I was sure no one would ever show up to read my blog.

For some reason, I decided that I would keep the focus of my blog to French things I love and loathe. I thought I could keep myself secret, hidden and a distant "vous" and never slip into the familiar "tu" form. It worked at first as I do love Paris and am most certainly a francophile. I thought by writing about the French things I loved and detested I could keep a safe distance and never reveal too much about myself. What I didn't realize was that in revealing what I love and what I detest I was revealing everything about me.

In January 2008 this became a blog about me even though I never-ever intended it to. I had failed to become pregnant after years of infertility treatment and I couldn't get myself to write about anything but my pain. The loss was so large that it demanded my full focus and it eclipsed my interest in writing about Paris or things French. As the grief subsided my life remained the focus of my writing and the francophile focus fell further and further away.

I am sorry if you came here looking for a francophile blog. I have a whole list of wonderful francophile blogs on the left hand column of my blog, if that is what you are looking for click on over and visit them. It's not that I don't love Paris, I do. It's just that there are other things I love and detest and there are other things I want to write about. I may or may not ever write about Paris again. It is likely I will but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. It could be a long time.

My writing and I may not be your cup of cafe creme. I can be bitter, viscous, strong and on occasion leave a bad taste in your mouth. If my blog isn't for you that's fine. I will not modify. I will not pretend to like what I don't and I will not modify my feelings about what I detest. I am going to keep writing about my life, loves, and hates and part of that is my grief, depression, loss, whining and whinging. I do try to make the whinging funny and entertaining, but it if you don't find it so isn't then there are many other blogs to read. My feelings won't be hurt if you'd rather read about Paris than me prattling on about my life. I get it. Really, if I had a choice between Paris and me I would choose Paris every time. As I don't have that choice I will stay here and keep writing about the specificity of my life. If this is au revoir for us I thank you for stopping by. It is my sincere hope that you be true to your likes and dislikes; I will continue to attempt to be true to mine.

Things other than my blog that you need to read

1. Please go see Wendy B's fantastic new blog Francis: The Blog. Let me have Wendy explain it: "I’ve created this blog for my designing friend Christian Francis Roth and his Francis clothing line. But it won’t be all clothes all the time. I’ll also take you behind the scenes at the studio and out on the town. It will be just like the fly-on-the-wall Valentino documentary, but online and without the savage tan. (Didn’t see the movie? Do it! It’s great.)"

2. If like me you dream of having an agent and publishing and you fear it may never happen for you please go and read Shelli at Market My Word's incredibly inspiring success story and congratulate her, she got an agent!! I have read her success story three times and I will reread it again and again when I once again give up hope that it will ever happen for me. Congratulations, Shelli, and thank you for the inspiration!

3. The first chapter of my favorite book of the moment, "On Moving" by Louise DeSalvo. I cannot recommend this book enough even if you aren't planning to move anytime soon.

4. Not to toot my own horn ( toot-toot) but the nice people at GazeboNews: News and Stuff About Lake Forest and Lake Bluff have written a post called, "California Dreamin" about one ex-Lake Bluff resident. Any idea who they are talking about? Thanks to them I now have readers from Forest and Bluff. Please, don't be shy, Forest and Bluffers, leave a comment and say hello.

Igor on June 4, 2009

As I can't keep a secret from Igor I told him everything I told you yesterday about last week and how I mad I was. I told him how I had wanted to get in my car and drive and runaway and leave L.A. and never come back.

"What about He-weasel?" he asked trying to assess the seriousness of my plan.

"Now you are implying that my plan was logical and well though out and that is a big mistake."
I explained how my reaction was adolescent and angry and not at all logical. "I was just angry."

"What about?" he asked.

As soon as he asked I couldn't remember why I was so mad. That happens to me all the time, I will be in the middle of a fight with He-weasel and I will all of a sudden completely forget why I am mad but I know I am mad and so I move into a mild attack of vague generalities that could be true if I was mad at him if he had forgot to go to the grocery store on his way home or if his crime had been of a more serious nature like turning the channel when I was watching something. I am not mature enough to admit my memory lapse and use that moment to drop my anger and make nice.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply and hoped that the specifics of my anger would return to me given enough time. "Um, uh, I, uh.......that you couldn't see that it could be just that I hate this place."

"I can understand you not liking L.A." he adjusted his posture so as to get a better sense of my position "but hating it is pretty strong. It seems likely some personal stuff is mixed in with your antipathy.What exactly is it you hate about L.A.?"

I shot my answers back at him like bullets. I was and always armed and ready to explain my L.A. loathing.
* The weather
* The traffic
* The narcissism
* The lack of emphasis on intellect
* The values of appearance over content
* The architecture or lack of architecture
* The lack of trees
* My mother is here
* The cost of housing
* The emphasis on new and improved over historical and enduring
* The lack of beauty

"I mean, here we are in Beverly Hills and people all over the world idealize this place as this glamorous and beautiful ideal and truthfully it is shockingly blah."
"Aesthetically?" he asked.
"Yes." I said feeling a wee bit bad about insulting the city in which he works.
"I agree with you and I think anyone who works here would agree with you that Beverly Hills is not aesthetically beautiful. Neither is Los Angeles. You just have to land at LAX to see this town is gray, bland, and not beautiful."
I was shocked by his admission and it made me like him and trust him even more.
He continued, "It is not the aesthetics of L.A. that people love, it is the weather. That is why people come here."
I moaned. I hate the weather here almost as much as I hate the lack of trees.

I told him my theory why people love L.A. weather. "I believe people who love this endless sunshine are people who can't tolerate suffering. I believe that it takes character to endure bad weather. People who need it to always be 72 degrees and sunny are in a manic defense against depression."
Igor laughed, " I don't know anyone who wants to suffer."
"Seriously? And you call yourself a therapist?" I said only half jokingly, "Have you heard of masochism?"

When Igor failed to respond to my non-rhetorical question I continued my diatribe of dissatisfaction, "And, really, the lack of valuing of intellect really irks me."

Igor once again surprised me, "Yes, this is not an intellectual center. But, New York suffers from an intellectualizing narcissism and London can feel cold and distant and it can be very difficult to connect with people and Chicago...what does Chicago suffer from?"

This time I chose to ignore his non-rhetorical question as I had no answer.

"I agree, each city has its shadow side. It is just a matter of which shadow bothers you the least. L.A.'s bothers me the most," I explained.

"I'll see you next week" which is the way he ends each session.
I got up to walk out the door and I heard him say to my back "don't run away this week."
" I won't" and as soon as I said it I realized it was more of a reflexive response than a promise.

As I shut his office door behind me I saw a gal, maybe 25, in jeans, a sweater, a hoodie and tall Ugg boots walk into his lobby door. I don't remember the specifics of her face. I think she had brown hair and was likely pretty enough but I couldn't see any of that.

I knew she was going to sit in the chair that I wait for Igor in and she would sit there and read the magazines that I read and she would turn off her cell phone. Igor would come out for her and bring her into his office. She would sit on the couch where I sit. But I feel sure that is where our similarities ended. I felt confident that she wouldn't make him laugh the way I do and that she wasn't as smart as I am. There was something about her... I could tell in seeing her for just a moment that he didn't enjoy his hour with her as much as he enjoys his sessions with me. I bet she never threatened to throw a pillow at him like I have. I found myself hating myself for being a cliche only-child and being unable to share.

I took the elevator down to the lobby and began to feel a sinking feeling as the flatness that had been with me all week started to fade. It wasn't the anger that had followed me home last week. No, this was different. I turned to look at myself in the mirror and that is when I saw it. It was a sadness and it was not only in my face but in my chest, my arms, and even on my clothes. I don't think I would have recognized the sadness unless I had seen it with my own eyes. It was the kind of sadness that came not from hurt or pain or even grief. Rather it was the sadness of futility and that meant there was nothing I could do but feel it. I emerged from the elevator with sadness continuing to push the down button.

As I walked towards the parking lot and saw the women with their shopping bags, the tourists with their cameras and the men in their suits and their cell phones I felt even more an outsider than I did on the way in. I tried to ignore my surroundings and instead sift for insights from the session. The weight of the sadness made insights seem as far away as my old life in Chicago.

Since Igor said my attempt to get us kicked out of L.A. by trying to find things to like about it wasn't going to work I stopped looking for the good and instead I began to track all that I didn't like: I don't like the way I feel in this place.....and the lack of trees and the buildings, okay, I like that one building. Or the man screaming on his cell phone as I wait for the stoplight. I don't want to hear about his deal or how much money he made. I don't like the woman who gave me the up and down,who is silently judging me and deciding how she is better than me. I don't like that I have walked two blocks and I see no beauty except things that can be bought. I don't like the way I feel. I drove for 20 miles naming all that I didn't like and then I got it, maybe if I really hate this place, throw myself into it fully and give it my all, maybe then I can make the death cycle come more quickly and then we can get out of here and life can begin again.

A house made of Kleenex

First I need to tell you that when I say I am mad, irritated or otherwise perturbed with Igor, my psychoanalyst, it is often code for me telling you that he has brought unconscious material up to consciousness that I would have been very happy to have locked away in the back in the part of my mind that I can't reach without his assistance. With that said, last week I was mad, irritated and annoyed with Igor.

The session started out well, I think, and after we got through some stuff of not much consequence he asked me if we had been looking at any houses. My first impulse was to tell him to do something which some might consider a highly pleasurable act that involves another and may or may not involve cigarettes afterwards. I resisted my impulse and instead told him about how we had seen house one and two and why neither of them were right and how I had really not liked our realtor and how we needed to find another one and how hard it is. Then, in an ode to Sybil, my personality changed and I turned into a whiny teenager. "But, I don't want to look for a house. I don't want to live here. Have I mentioned to you how much I hate L.A.?" He laughed. I assure you that if you heard the way I said it you would have laughed both at and with me. I wouldn't blame you and I don't blame him.

I then shared with him my plan. My plan de jour, as you may know, is to find 365 things to like about L.A. and that once I get to a tipping point of liking things about L.A. it is my belief that we will get kicked out of here. So, I am trying to speed up the process and find a lot of things to like as quick as I can. My scheme was too much for him to grasp. He began his response with "Let me get this straight" and then he spoke as slowly and clearly as he can with his Omar Sharif accent "You are saying that if you like it here you will be kicked out?"

"Yep, and I think it will work." I, for a delusional moment, thought I had convinced him of the merits of my magical thinking.

"It won't work because you are not really liking things here."

"No," I interrupted, "I really do like the Getty."

"The Getty is not enough," he said unironically, "What you are trying to do is rush through the life and death cycle that exists in everything. You are looking for things to like, not to be in life and or to live it but, rather, so your grief will end and you can get to a place where you will never know loss again."

"Uh-huh" I grunted at him like an adolescent with her arms crossed just moments away from rolling my eyes and hitting him with a wounding 'whatever'.

"We liked Chicago. Maybe I liked it too much. I said everyday how much I liked it. I said it out loud. Maybe if I hadn't done that we wouldn't have been kicked out."

"No, you didn't make it happen. It just happened that your belief system and your outer circumstances happened to meet up," Igor explained.

I ignored his answer, "It was like I was punished for liking it. I was punished for being happy somewhere. "

"By whom?"he asked.

"By a deity that I don't believe in", I offered weakly.

Igor said nothing. I didn't give him time."It's not fair" I said continuing my adolescent whine that turned 'fair' into a four syllable word. "You don't get kicked out." I accused him, not expecting he would defend himself "You want to be here and you are here and you aren't being kicked out. You get to be where you want."

Igor laughed, "That's not true. I am kicked out all the time. Just this morning the roads were blocked and I couldn't get to my office. I get kicked out all the time. The difference between you and me is that I don't believe that there is someplace that exists that will be free of that and you do." Again I was wanting to recommend that he do something that the birds and bees and even educated fleas do. I also wanted to explain to him that his being late for work was not the same thing as having your husband's work bring you back to the one place you never wanted to return to.

"You believe," he said, "that if you like something it will be taken from you and that is the real issue, not the house buying in L.A. You will have this issue wherever you go and now you are here so lets deal with it here."

My petulance continued, only I sounded even younger and more whiny, "I don't want to. I don't want to buy a house. If we have a house I will be trapped."

"You think a house is like this." Igor grabbed a tissue and put it over his hand. He pulled the tissue tight around his hand until he couldn't move it. I could feel myself constrict and my breath tighten as I looked at my two-ply makeshift metaphor of a home.

He continued, "This is like your mother. If you connect with her you have no space and you feel stuck and you can't move and you can't breath. Mother equals home, hence home equals trapped."

He was right.

I tried to hide any hint of affect on my face that I agreed with him so I could stick with my story. "Can't it be that I just hate L.A.? People do hate places. It is done. Can't it just be about that?"

I was in a total snit and I was mad and I was feeling stuck....really stuck. I was filled with an "I'll show you"attitude that I hadn't had felt so strongly since the dark days when I was dating Danny, donning Dittos, eating Dorritos and discovering that if I waited until my mother passed out I could sneak out my bedroom window. I wanted to leave Igor's office and go straight to the airport and buy a ticket and go somewhere and call him at our appointment time next week and tell him that I am not there and that I don't have to be and that I left and that I got out and that I would never-ever-ever come back again ever, only I didn't.

It is a week later and I am still here and we have another realtor and we looked at another house that we don't want and we found another house that we might have liked if it hadn't been sold out from under us. The funny thing is that I don't want to tell Igor any of this. I don't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that we looked. What I want to do is tell him that I don't want him to ask me about houses anymore. Even if I managed it and even if he agreed, the damn Kleenex would be there sitting between us and silently reminding me.

Vexiologist should mean a person who studies annoyances, not flags

We live within walking distance of Six Flags Magic Mountain theme park, or as I like to call it, as a way to tolerate the intolerable, "Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain". I have never been to Magic Mountain and will likely never go unless they open a "Death in Venice canal ride" or a "It's a small sanatorium after all allegorical log ride of awareness that we are all dying and aging and there is nothing we can do about it", no matter how many coupons for $20 off they send me. Six Flags is filled with roller coasters and rides that people pay money in order to experience fear, terror and a sense of aliveness that only can come when facing death. I don't need to ride the Colossus to feel existential dread. I can do it all from the discomfort of our 750 square foot apartment.

The apartment building we live in has at least six flags around its large grounds. While I am no vexiologist or marketing guru it is my hunch that these flags are intended to be archetypal and evocative and make you want to live here. There is a word on each flag and an image intended to illustrate and infer that this experience can actually be achieved in this building and the cumulative narrative of the flags is meant to imply that all your dreams can come true in, what D.H. Lawrence might call, a"domestic Eden."

These are the kind of flags that surround my "domestic Eden"( only slightly exaggerated for your reading pleasure and to make my point):

Dine A perfect couple, or as I like to call them, Adam and Eve, sit in front of a haute cuisine plate. Eve has lifted a fork to Adam's waiting mouth. What, no apple?
Shop Bags from high end shops fill the flag. Fig leafs, after all, do not grow on trees.
Rest Eve lounges on a beach chair soaking up the sun by the Edenic pool and adjoining jacuzzi as she struggles with the philosophical weight of good and evil.
Live Adam and Eve enjoy the gym, making their bodies even more tempting.
Love A&E embrace shamelessly. As it's not like anyone is watching.
Entertain A&E and their friends enjoy the lobby/rec center as they laugh, dine and drink apple martinis.
Walk A&E walk the streets, hand in hand, enjoying the cool of the gardens that surround the gated and secure Eden, which is tended weekly by exterminators so as no pests, vermin or snakes will intrude on their romantic strolls.
Restore Eve strikes a yoga pose in attempt to awaken her inner yogic serpent and/or lower her percentage of body fat.

Very often these flags are knocked over. They must not be anchored well. Every time I see one on its side I laugh. It seems symbolically appropriate that the messages on the flags aren't true or real and because of that they will not stand and have been expelled from the earth. I have some suggestions for new archetypal words and images to place on the flags that might be more appropriate and might stay upright as they, in my mind, feel more accurate for what to me is an anti-Eden.

Here are my flag suggestions:

Isolation A man and woman trapped in a tiny apartment, as if in a prison, desperate to escape.
Ennui A woman surrendered to her feelings of melancholy on a fainting couch grasping a bottle of Vitamin W in one hand and a volume of Kierkegaard in the other.
Corporate consumerism Forever 21, Macy's, Gap, and all the usual suspects that fill every mall in America have crammed their logos on the flag. False gods offering golden cows that crumble more easily than Mrs. Field's cookies and that cannot be returned without a receipt.
Debt Bills pour out of a tiny mailbox, refreshed each day like Manna from Heaven.
Indifference Faceless neighbors walk by each other purposefully avoiding eye contact.
Theft A distraught woman makes a police report. Her order from Neiman Marcus was stolen by her neighbors.
Greed Property owner who looks like a character out of a Charles Dickens morality tale laughs smugly as he pockets overpriced rent checks.
Sloth A man and woman too tired from the demands of everyday life to take the elevator all the way down to the gym sit instead on their Crate and Barrel couch and channel surf.
Despair Dehumanized individual in "The Scream" position looks out at an unfettered view of a sea of retail where the sun never sets and the stores never close from the comfort of his spacious 5x5 patio.

Now I get that my flags would not attract many new tenants so why not go all the way and drop the subtlety and go straight for the subtext of the flags intended to attract residents.

How about these flags? No image required. The text says it all.

If you live here you will have lots of sex.
If you live here you will be wildly successful and rich.
If you live here you will be better than everyone else.
If you live here you will be beautiful and thin and will never age or die.
If you live here all your relationships will be perfect.
If you live here nothing bad will ever happen to you.
If you live here all your dreams will come true.

And, really, if they could offer all that they could easily triple the rent.

The many faces of move

Saturday night it seems I talked in my sleep. I said only one word.

He-weasel asked me, when I woke, "where would you like me to move?".

"Huh?" I asked dreamily.

"You said, "move"."

"Move? When did I say move?"

"When you were sleeping."

"Did I say it like I was angry?"

"No."

"Did I say it like an order?"

"Uh-uh."

"How did I say it?"

"You just said "move"....Were you dreaming?"

"No. At least I don't think so." I scoured my memory for some dream or nightmare or story to pin the word to. For reasons unclear, I wanted 'move' to belong to something or someone and not to be a verbal orphan.

The word 'move' started quietly enough when He-weasel initially said it. Move. I had said 'move' as I slept. No other word. Just move. But then this simple words power amplified and began to grow and move and gain steam and power until it was running and circling and surrounding. It was like a room full of children who had eaten too much birthday cake and candy and drank too much punch. Move would not be told to sit quietly in a chair with its hands on its lap. It was 'move' as a verb, meaning to set or keep in motion and that is what this word was doing.

Even though I was awake 'move' impacted me like an alarm clock only not the high pitch whiny insistent kind but rather like a Chinese gong being hit over and over, building and building until nothing but the noise could be noticed. The kind of gong they hit in a Kundalini class I used to go to where I overheard a new class member's overreaction "It's like the gong is raping my ears." "Move: provoke, incite, raise, stirr (up), whip (up),set off, trigger, inflame, and rouse" with no option of a snooze button.

And as the little word became a BIG word that would not be ignored it filled me with a dread and 'move' moved into another meaning. Move became more of an internal movement as I saw it happen I began to fidget, jiggle, squirm, twitch, wiggle, and writhe. Even as it seemed I was sitting still I was moved by move.

But then the meaning moved into a noun and it took form and shape and it was a thing and not a suggestion, instruction or an imperative and while a noun cannot move without a verb it can just sit there unmoving, unyielding and demanding to be seen. When move became a noun is when I felt the most miserable. "Move (noun): a change of residence or location."

It seems my subconscious is more aware of the calendar than I am. Tomorrow is the first of June and that means in 30 days are lease is up and we can move.