Janice MacLeod's Blog, page 17

Renoir’s Birthday

I have been in love with my new painting journal. It’s a great way to organize random tidbits about Paris. I might just have to do a page for every day of the year. Or maybe I’ll have to do a Paris Sketch series in addition to the Paris Letters series. All the art sans les mot. Hmmm. The possibilities.

Speaking of…

We’ve had, I kid you not, beaver issues. One big hungry beaver took down three trees. This was the subject of the latest Painted Letter (formally the Café Letter series, but that took too much explaining. This one is just a painted letter about life these days. No Trumps included.)

Oh Canada’s national rodent is having quite a par-tay in my backyard. BTW, have you heard the song Silver Beaver? All the Canadian readers are giggling right now. And imagine me having to explain to Christophe in English why Silver Beaver is a funny song. Oh my stars. The first time I heard this song was a drive from Toronto to Tillsonburg, Ontario. It was the first time I decided to adult and rent a car to drive home rather than arrange a ride. And just when I decide to grow up, a trio of seniors sing me a song about their private parts. How deliciously juvenile.

Love, Paris style

Surprises galore with my new project of sending Valentine Paris Letters for people:

Some people want me to send them the Valentine. Other people are having it sent to friends, sisters, and parents. I expected a bunch of mushy mushy romantic people buying it for their lovers, and there is that, too, but those wanting one for themselves or for friends has outweighed the romantics by far. If you want me to send the Valentine’s Paris Letter shown above, get it over at the shop.

And in the other shop…

Because I have two shops now that I discovered it was a scrolling nightmare to have everything in the same shop, I listed a few romantic photos of Paris. Sigh with me now… quelle romantique.

He wants to consume her. She wants a nap.

Someone is in love. I wonder if the painter is in love with the patina on the door, the marriage between this vintage blue and bright red, or with someone who lives in an apartment beyond the door.

This guy has love on his mind, too…

Modern love. And old love at the same time.

Then there is this one…

I took this photo in one of those wonderful Paris cemeteries… Montparnasse I think. She looks like she’s longing for love, longing at the loss of love, longing, longing, longing. And while she longs, moss begins to grow on her lap. Perhaps trying to bring her back to life. We all know someone who has suffered great loss of love, and for a time, they seem like they are living in between the world of the living and the dead. I think that moss is trying to bring her back to the land of the living.

Valentine’s Day mail… I’ve got this covered

Sometimes the best ideas happen when writing journal pages. I highly recommend it, as you likely already know. Today, whilst sipping tea over my pages, I came up with the the idea of sending out Valentine’s Paris Letters for people who either don’t have the time, or know someone who loves Paris and would love a Valentine about Paris.

Sweet Mary.

I listed it pronto:

You buy it. I’ll send it. No need to find a stamp. I’ve got plenty. Inside the painted letter, I will include a little card that explains your gift and can include a personal message from you.

Don’t say anything that will make me blush.

Why on earth haven’t I sent out Valentine’s mail before?  It’s fun to get fun mail, especially when you’re not expecting it. Find it over at the shop.

This Valentine Paris Letter is from the archive. It’s about life in Paris on Valentine’s Day. Le jour d’amour.

In other shop news, the colouring books are gone and done. It was a delight while it lasted. I still have the digital colouring book up there. It’s a much better value. You only have to pay for it once, print out copies for all your friends, take it over to the copy shop to get it bound (or not):

And colour at will. Here are my beloved copy shop guys from Paris:

And here they are being sexy…

I should send them a Valentine. Humina humina.

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching. Order your letters now so they can arrive in time for the big day and you look like a romantic rock star for remembering.

Swimming in Paris

Most people think Parisians sit in cafés all day long, that they never exercise and they are thin because of something they eat. Likely the cheese and wine that makes their gut bacteria that perfect solution that makes you lose weight with no effort.

All true.

And also…

Paris is a giant jungle gym for adults. You can’t take care of your daily life without going up and down stairs, and up and down streets. Plus, Paris has a gazillion swimming pools that are always full.

So somebody is working off the comté.

But I still think DNA is at play because my Canadian body stayed pretty much the same in Paris. A little less or more the same. Quelle dommage. And near the end, a little more of the more because I felt I had to eat one of everything before I left.

“The only reason I work out is to live longer so I can eat more cheese and drink more wine.” —Ricky Gervais

But I walked up and down those stairs and I ate all the things they ate. So who knows.

What I do know is this:

They don’t go on about body issues like it’s a pillar of their value system.

They don’t buy into dietainment. (That’s a link to a commercial about dietainment… good to watch.)

They don’t berate themselves whenever they eat something delicious.

Even when I’m in Paris, I don’t have the same problems I have when I live in North America. And my body isn’t better or worse for it. It’s astoundingly the same. The only time I talk about it in Paris is when a friend from North America is visiting and brings it up. And then I think, “Oh yeah, my body issues. I forgot about them.”

But the Parisians do exercise, not so much to be skinny, but because it’s a pleasure, like when they slowly swim up and down the length of the pool. No one slips into the pool with the Make-It-Count mind that races body issues to the end of the pool.

Anyway, I didn’t expect this sermon on the “mound,” so to speak. I just wanted to show you my January Paris Letter about life in the pool in Paris.

And also to show you some ideas for what Paris might do with their 11 ghost stations. These are Métro stations that were closed some time ago because of remapping the system or whatever else. One idea is a pool:

Another is a night club:

And it wouldn’t be Paris without adding a garden in there:

Read more about the proposed projects here, and if you’d like the January Paris Letter, get it over at my shop. Mention the January letter in the Notes section and I’ll send  you something extra for fun.

Paris Artist: January

I’m a bit of a magpie with my Paris art. A few watercolors, a slew of photos, a mishmash of phrases, a handful of quotes. Beautiful clutter. Nice to look at but still has the anxiousness that accompanies clutter.

Something must be done.

I found a gorgeous Lett’s 2016 diary at the bookstore inside Le Bon Marché department store in Paris (24 Rue de Sèvres). Inspired, I began sorting and making collages of my collection.

So fun!

We forget to add fun items on our New Year’s resolution lists.

Shame on nous.

A few of the January pages…

In other news, my Etsy shop was a complete mess, so I cleaned it up. Remember that 2015 goal I had of getting to 500 items? Turns out, more is not better… and honestly, most people want fun mail so I’m just going to stick with letters in 2016.

Plus it’s winter and I’m writing le sequel to Paris Letters, and having another Research & Development year isn’t going to get the next book written. I’ll offer the last of the coloring books until they are gone. Then that’s that. I feel like we’ve arrived at the winter of that project anyway.

I just finished reading Paris Keys by Juliet Blackwell. She has gorgeous little gems sprinkled throughout, like this quote about the gargoyles of Notre Dame:

Making the visual diary of Paris has already taught me so much about how my brain works.

When I’m writing le sequel, and I get stuck, I move over to the glue, tape, paint and photos. As I’m literally piecing a collage together, I am piecing together the ideas for the book in my head. How odd and enlightening.

Perhaps the right side of my brain works best when bouncing against the left side, and vice versa, or side by each as they say in the east.

I can just imagine the day of the lady in red. She walked over to the café to have her morning brew and read some of her book about the letters of Vincent van Gogh, then hopped on the Métro to meet a friend for lemon gelato. Or maybe that was me.

I brought home some of the famous Angelina’s hot chocolate in a jar to indulge in on a day when I really needed it. The seal must have popped somewhere along the way because it was rancid and dégueulasse when I opened it. Tragique.

Alright. Enough fooling around. Back to the manuscript. Or perhaps first just a few minutes on Pinterest. No! Focus. FOCUS!

Or maybe just one more collage…

The addiction to keeping score

Two weeks into the new year. How are the measurements going? The weighing in on just how much we should berate or congratulate? How much self-inflicted weight have you put on your shoulders since New Year’s?

Hello, I’m Janice and I’m addicted to keeping score.

I give myself little stars on my calendar to measure how much I exercise, how much I study, how many words I write, how much I did or didn’t do of whatever I’m trying to do more or less of. I even keep score on how many pages I’ve read in a book.

Studying languages. That gets gold stars.

I lay in bed at night and rethink the day and the stars I did or didn’t earn. Then I hinge my mood on the score. Up or down. Happy or sad. Self-loathing and failure or elation and self-congratulations. The positive feelings don’t last though. They are soon replaced by fear that progress will vanish. Like how you look into someone’s eyes and you feel intense love, then imagine them dying in a tragic accident.

Parents. I know you know what I’m talking about.

What parent or aunt or uncle or grandparent hasn’t imagined a thousand deaths of the dear children in their lives. It’s madness! Shake it off, we say, which we can do with the tragedies imagined, because deep down we know we can’t prepare for those anyhow, but those things over which we can act. Those are tougher to shake off.

My point here is that we are all insane.

Caissie St.Onge wrote this beautiful piece about Oprah and weight loss and Weight Watchers. One gorgeous paragraph stood out and helped me release myself from (some of) my score-keeping insanity:

“Oprah is arguably the most accomplished, admired, able person in the world. She creates magic for other people and herself on the regular. So, if Oprah can’t do permanent lifelong weight loss, maybe it can’t be done. Oprah is also crazy rich. If Oprah can’t buy permanent lifelong weight loss, maybe it can’t be bought. And that sucks. But it is also incredibly freeing if you, like me, have thought about your weight so many times throughout every day of your life that it becomes as maddening and distracting as if you’d stowed a beating tell-tale heart beneath your floorboards.”

Brilliant.

So I’ll try to simmer down the insanity and you try to do the same. Deal? Deal.

In other news, I sent off the letters for the month. Gold star for me.

Get ’em over at my shop.

 

The ultimate New Year’s resolution

Oh I know you want to move the numbers. You want the numbers in the bank account to go up and those on the scale to go down. To make this happen you’re going to eliminate all the things in your life you feel guilty about. Shopping, eating, drinking, gambling, et cetera.

All the et ceteras will be eliminated starting TODAY.

And we may or may not remember our good intentions in a month.

The only resolution, and I mean the ONLY resolution that ever worked for me was the resolution from January 1, 2010, to write in my journal every day. I like to think of it as a workbook. Janice’s workbook of things to do, work through, measure, rejig, reconfigure, reinvent, et cetera… It led to quitting my job, packing bags, moving to Paris, falling in love, getting married, starting a successful letter writing business, writing Paris Letters" target="_blank">a New York Times best seller, traveling and landing in Western Canada. Five years. Only five years. That’s a lot of resolution success that happened as a side effect of writing in my journal every day.

BTW, Paris Letters" target="_blank">Paris Letters is still $1.99 and the Kindle store but I don’t know for how long… not up to me… and it’s still #1 and #2 in three categories, so thanks for that dear reader.

" rel="attachment wp-att-7554">Paris Letters is the kind of book you buy for yourself if you want to learn about New Year’s Resolution success. It’s like the KonMari book but instead of cleaning up your house, you clean up your life.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing" rel="attachment wp-att-7559">Julia Cameron refers to this daily writing as writing Morning Pages in her book The Artist’s Way. I rarely do the pages in the morning. She insists they be three pages long. Me? Sometimes I write the date and a list and that seems to do the trick. I don’t get mad at myself if I don’t make it to the end of three pages in a day.

All these rules harsh my mellow.

But the daily writing works. I think the DAILINESS of it is what works best. What time of day and for how long? Meh. I don’t know about all that. My advice is to open a journal each day, grab a pen, write the date and then see what happens after that. No need to be too precious about it. Personally, I’ve never had success with leather-bound books or anything heavy. Now, when I buy a purse, I have to make sure my journal will fit inside because I write on the go.

That’s what cafés are for.

A daily writing/doodling/list making practice will help you sort out life. It will make you more proactive in your day rather than just reacting to whatever comes along.

We are humans. We fill up our days. That’s what we do.

If you don’t plan and fill your day, someone else will do it for you. Then resentment starts to bubble up and a whole mess of unpleasantness ensues.

You don’t have to be a writer. Or an artist.

You just have to show up at the page and trust that something will reveal itself when you do. I do a lot of sketches, a lot of lists, a lot of calculations, a lot of bullet points of my day. In fact, when writing Paris Letters, most of that started as a detailed bullet point list in my journal. Then I smoothed it out from there. And every painted letter I write starts off looking something like this in my journal:

This is a Travel Letter about Rome. Can’t you tell? It was either going to be a girl on a bike or a rooftop view with the Vatican in the background. Obviously. Then I kept working at it and came up with this:

This is a story about the stove top coffee maker I bought when I was in Rome. Again, obviously. But it eventually turned into this:

(BTW, you can find this and the other letters over at my shop.)

Here’s the bottom line…

You may want to increase the wealth and decrease the weight in 2016. How you can make that happen is by planning out how in your journal each day.

For me, my resolution is the same as it was in 2010. And from inside the pages, I’ll see what else I can conjure up for the next five years.

Happy New Year beautiful reader.

La Grande Épicerie and the power of three

La Grande Épicerie in Paris is the ultimate food court. Imagine Whole Foods at the Ritz. That’s La Grande Épicerie. It’s choked full of delightful treats for lunch and dinner, it includes a very detailed International Foods department (Including Reese’s peanut butter and Orville Redenbacher popcorn from the USA), and an eye-popping candy section that will make you buy too many things to ship home in your bag.

Those at La Grande Épicerie are masters at display and use the power of three to woo and delight and to hypnotize you into buying entire collections of goodies.

 

And just when you think you’re done, when your cart can’t hold anymore goodies, they bring out the carolers to woo you further into staying longer.

Like other grand department stores in Paris, they offer you a delightful collection of catalogs to take with you when you go so you’ll be enticed to return soon.

Where you’ll discover a famous butter, so you’ll have to turn around and come back.

More about Le Beurre Bordier here.

Salted churned butter for that Orville Redenbacher popcorn you bought the first time.

Churned butter with espelette chili… so good you’ll want to eat it like you would a cheese ball.

Vanilla-infused butter for your pancakes. I mean, c’mon. Why did THAT take so long?

In totally, I went to La Grande Épicerie thrice over December. It’s like Hotel California. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Christmas ornaments of Paris

The entire city of Paris is like one giant Christmas tree ornament in December. You’ll find lights strewn across streets…

Monumental Christmas trees sprouting up in front of monuments…

La Defense

And department store windows a-glow with animatronic wonder.

The intergalactic theme at Galleries Lafayette.

The always pretty windows of Printemps.

Inside those and other department stores you’ll find the loveliest and strangest collection of ornaments.

First up, our Fabergé egg collection:

All hand painted, bien sur.

Second, our aquatic collection:

This chameleon is in camouflage.

Third, our ballerina collection:

All these inspired the Paris Letter for this month.

All new letter subscription orders for the month of December will include a vintage postcard fridge magnet.

Joyeux Noël!

A spontaneous trip to Paris

Yep. We did it. We hit CONFIRM on our purchase, packed our bags and four days later we were in Paris.

This is why you save, people.

So you can pull off these kinds of shenanigans on occasion.

We missed our friends, we wanted to support them, and we just plain ol’ missed Paris.

The flight was uneventful except for me bawling my head off during the movie Inside Out. Someone should warn you about the tender beauty of this film. I was glad I watched it with the lights off. I was a MESS. We’re talking Steel Magnolias kind of mess.

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First, right off the train, we ran into the lady who did all the paperwork for our wedding. Second, we ran into a handful of Christophe’s old clients. And this was while we were walking with our suitcases to our apartment. Once we dropped them off, we skipped down to rue Mouffetard where Christophe shook hands with people up and down the street as if he was the mayor.

It was all rather surreal.

Because we’ve been gone but it was as if we were just returning from a vacation. Everyone was still there. Everyone looked the same. Mostly. There was one guy who aged startlingly quickly. The last time I saw him he was zigzagging down the street in that zone after drunk and before passed out. He’d quit drinking, and by the colour of his whiskers, I realized it was a challenge. The fish monger also aged, which you do when you’re a fish monger because that’s the hardest job on the street. But everything else was the same.

Except of course for the security people. More of those.

Army trucks filled with soldiers drove by, the gendarmerie sauntered up and down streets in groups of three, security guards stood outside the Métro and outside of many shops looking in bags and asking you to open your jacket.

So that was new. Yet understandable.

My mother was displeased with our spontaneous trip. Also understandable. But we figured Paris was likely safer now than it’s ever been and if something happened, well, that’s the end of this particular story. As they say in France, C’est la vie.

We met friends for drinks and dinners and cocktail parties. They all told their story of that night. As I listened I knew why I was there. I was there to help them offload some trauma. When something happens to us and we replay it in our mind over and over, that’s trauma, and one of the best ways to pull it out of your psyche is to talk about it.

So I sat and listened. Then we got on to other subjects, then we veered back. Then off again. Then on again. And that’s how it goes until you forget to talk about it.

People are going about their business but they are on edge.

A woman saw a mouse on the street and screamed. Everyone turned. Realizing it was just a mouse, everyone turned back to her and scoffed. You don’t get to scream about that right now. An argument at the airport had entire gates of people turning to see if it was really just an argument or something more. You don’t get to argue in public right now. It’s too soon. Everyone has to be kind. Everyone has to be on alert. Even on the Métro, the mecca of phone gazing, more people kept their phones in their pockets and looked around at each other. Suspiciously. Even as I sat there on the Métro I wondered how they would do it. The next time. Speaking of, I ran into Monique, who *may* have been a spy during the war. She’s a complete mess. “It’s just the beginning. It’s just the beginning.” she muttered, and handed me a printout of an article about just that. She had a whole bag of printouts.

The pigeons are still cruising for crumbs. The guys at my copy place are still making copies. And my postal gang are still handing out stamps one at a time.

Same same yet different.