C’est la vie.

In my first post I talked about adjusting to life here. Back then I thought this blog would be about life in Paris. But it wasn’t, much.

I’m not the same person I was then, and this blog belongs to that other me.

I took my ninth and final November picture yesterday, while strolling through the Jardin des plantes. The morning sunlight on the smoked-glass windows of the greenhouses there turns them a glorious purple. Like an orchid. Or a bruise. Delectable against that bright November blue I love so much. You can see that some creeper has escaped its cozy confines. Those tentative tendrils probably won’t survive the winter. That’s what happens when you leave your hothouse.

Before I came to Paris in 2006 I wrote a poem about a greenhouse that was really about the love that brought me here in the first place and how safe and fulfilled it made me feel:

*****

she takes cover
under glass
stares at the sun
the sky cannot fall
in her hothouse

she turns to
smooth blooms
languid above
cool wet roots
lingers dazzling

look through windows
clouded with
velvet sweat
see her petals
in a translucent embrace

honey moonlight
waxes within
rising on the mist
she feels like
raw perfume

*****

I made a one-page book with this poem, which you can download and make.

Click the pic for a bigger version. See you around.

Links to previous years’ November photos below. More poetry and photos on my other blog, which is not dead yet. And other places you can find me on the web.

2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006

Unlike last year, this year’s November has been filled with that crispy brightness that is unique to this month in Paris.

So I walked the dog along the Seine today, and I saw the light. The Seine was high. Took the pic with my iPhone, of course. The Île Saint Louis seen from the Rive Gauche, where I’ve lived for over seven years. No filters this year. No energy, and no need.

Click for a larger version. List of November pics 2006-2012 below.

2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006

My mother’s all-purpose wisdom is “This too shall pass.” (It has come in very handy, thanks Mom.)

Mine was (when my son was 3): “No blood, no Band-Aid.” Later (11-ish): “Mandatory fun.” Later (13-ish): “Deal with it.” Later (16-ish): ”You’re in charge of your own reality.” Later (18-ish): “Follow your bliss.” (Thanks Mr. Campbell.) Later (23-ish): “Life is a bowl of empty that some things fill better than others, and trying to fill your bowl with stuff you buy won’t work at all. Oh, and, you’ll never fill it; you’ll always feel like there’s something missing, but that’s normal. It’s what keeps us trying.”

I was a good mother, as you can see. Anyway, he survived (now 28).

So. “It’s all a process.” Of course it is! I had somehow forgotten The Process, and it only came back to me during that conversation. Forget the goal (not so easy with my American cultural conditioning). There is only the process, and it is all that matters. (Poor Sisyphus. If he’d known this, he might have hated rolling that boulder less.)

(Granted, that’s probably not what my friend’s mom means when she says that, but it’s what I needed to hear.)

I’ve known this forever, but then you get your life in a wad and forget the fundamental things. You do. It happens.

Think about it. Who among you ever wanted the cake as desperately once your mom had let you lick the bowl? (Which mine did, until salmonella became a household word in the 70s, at which point I was no longer allowed to lick the bowl (raw eggs) or have pet turtles anymore.) Maybe you’re younger than me and salmonella was already a thing. Maybe you never licked the bowl! If so, I’m very sorry for you.

The cake was nice, yeah, but nothing like the anticipation, hanging out with Mom while she mixed and beat that batter, smelling it all the while and, at long last, the fingersful of that sweet, (usually) chocolatey and oddly crunchy slime that you were licking off your own arm up to your elbow…

The process was the best part. Because then she stuck it in the oven and told you not to slam any doors and you ran outside to play and forgot about it.

Ben & Jerry, wise, wise men, knew it was never about the cookies…

(I will never, ever, forgive them for burying Peanut Butter Cookie Dough, by the way.)

So here I am having a life experience of my own, and it looks like it’s gonna be another one of those life experiences. Yet, even at my advanced age, and despite all my wisdom, motherly and otherwise, and after having been through so many similar life experiences that some of my friends are starting to call me Liz, I actually let myself believe I was eating the cake.

Silly me.

I had completely forgotten that, in life, the cake simply does not ever happen. There is nothing but the making of the cake. And that is enough, and even better.

So I’ve been raging, grieving, mourning a cake that never was, not going at all gently into that good night without my damn cake.

But after the little conversation my friend and I had, I’m feeling better.

Whatever it was, it was not The Cake. It could never have been The Cake, because there is no such thing as The Cake. But it was a damn good bowl of sweet and oddly crunchy…stuff.

Back to the kitchen now.

You see, the Americanest of brands decided to have TBWA create its new line-up of Happy Meal characters. Not just any ad agency. The #3 agency in France. Despite the fact that it came up with this horror for a major French insurance company:

As a (somewhat) bi-cultural person, I’m gonna tell you what I think happened here.

Maybe, just maybe, because France is McDonald’s’ #2 market in the world (yes, the shame!), Corporate got it in its head that the French have some kind of magic touch. Or maybe their proposal was just the cheapest. Or maybe the Decider is a francophile. Or maybe they thought they were thinking outside the box by choosing France (which is just a different box, and certainly not a better one in this case). Dunno.

Whatever the reason, I see a roomful of frogs at this ad agency brainstorming about Americana while drinking their itsy bitsy coffees. (A sad and hilarious visual.)

Problem is, that’d be just like you trying to brainstorm about Frenchiness while sipping at your Big Gulps. Y’all would come up with the fleur-de-lis (very bad move, symbol of royalty, anti-République Française, majorly frowned upon) and a beret and striped shirt wearing short guy with a mustache carrying a baguette on a bicycle with a cigarette in his mouth and a bottle of wine and bouquet of flowers in the (straw) basket of his bike and the Eiffel Tower in the background. Sound about right?

Do you feel competent to choose images that would resonate with French people? With little French kids?

Me neither. And I’m more plugged in to Frenchiness than most Americans.

And so the ad frogs came up with cowboys and indians, the circus, magic shows, and musical instruments, because that’s us in a nutshell. Wouldn’t you say so?

Let’s start with cowboys and indians. The French love our Wild Wild West the way American francophiles love their Marie Antoinette and all that. And the frogs throw our cowboys and indians around like they own ‘em, as you can see from this French car ad I wrote about a few years ago. Completely oblivious to the oppression, racism and genocide that we are all acutely conscious of since it’s our culture and history, not theirs.

Blame it on Lucky Luke, an iconic Belgian comic book series that’s been around since the 40s:

Obviously these ad agency frogs assumed that we love cowboys and indians too, since we invented them. (<< This is irony, people, don’t get all bent out of shape.)

But it’s been a loooong time since “playing cowboys and indians” was a thing kids did in America. (My kid, born in 1985, played Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters.) Pixar touched a nostalgic nerve with Woody in Toy Story (1995), but even 20 years ago it was a nod to the past! Kids were into that stuff when cowboy and indian TV shows and movies were the rage. More than half a century ago. They stopped being the rage for obvious reasons. But the frogs don’t know that because it’s our culture and not theirs…

So not only are these characters archaic, and therefore unlikely to resonate with today’s kids, they’re just wrong. Every character’s body is red because the Happy Meal box is red. But it makes me cringe with the chief character.

The other one is a bad guy. OK, so the Hamburglar was too, but at least he stole hamburgers. This one will obviously steal your pet goldfish (wtf?) and your money (with a fake currency symbol that suggests a Yen with a chromosome disorder). He doesn’t want your crap McBurger.

And these ad frogs should have pulled in at least one native English speaker. “Happy Funny Bandit” no eez eengleesh. But grammar is irrelevant, obviously. And what, putting “happy funny” before “bandit” makes him benign and unthreatening? Besides which he looks neither happy nor funny.

Moving on. Circus. Also archaic. More so than the cowboys. As for clowns, I have one word for you (my emphasis below): coulrophobia:

A study conducted by the University of Sheffield found that the children did not like clown décor in the hospital or physicians’ office settings. The survey was about children’s opinions on décor for an upcoming hospital redesign. Dr Penny Curtis, a researcher, stated “We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found the clown images to be quite frightening and unknowable.”

Oops.

Human cannonballs? Probably not since my grandmother’s time (born in 1920). Maybe a few still flying around in my mom’s time (born in 1940). Kids are not even going to know what the fuck that thing is and, furthermore, they’ll wonder why somebody is holding a flame to the string in its butt and if that’s why it’s making such a weird face. Play with matches kids, light each other’s butts on fire.

And can you find the human in this picture…?

Next. Magic shows. Except the frogs don’t use the word “magician,” even though that’s the right word. (Again, native speakers can occasionally be useful.)

Anecdote alert: After my parents’ divorce, my dad remarried a woman who found God and got godly to the point of throwing away her daughter’s Disney stories because they had sorcery in them.

A sorcerer is a wizard. Pointy hat. Wand. Et cetera. And with “sorcerer,” McDonald’s will probably lose the entire Bible Belt. What you have in the left picture is a magician. Plus, most Americans associate the words “sorcerer” and “apprentice” when they occur together to this or this. At the very least, the froggy ad people should have googled the names of their characters to see what came up, dontcha think? Or they could have asked a native speaker.

And guess what else? An illusionist is the same thing as a magician! It’s just what they call themselves when they want to charge more for the tickets. And every little kid in America knows the words “illusionist” and “apprentice” too, for that matter. At least maybe the frogs’ll teach ‘em a couple of good words. Just with the wrong meanings…

And a saw, and a body cut in half. Brilliant.

Last but not least, the musical instruments… I just don’t even know what to say here. Anthropomorphizing musical instruments. How exciting does it get? Kids adore instruments! They’re so cute and cuddly, just like Pokémons… And I loved practicing piano when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13… Don’t your kids? Unfortunately, for those kids whose parents don’t have the money to give them music lessons (because they don’t offer them to every American kid in school for free like they do here in France), there might be a slight disconnect. And “Ludwig Van” will have meaning for one American kid out of 100,000, I betcha. Probably most parents in America wouldn’t know how to pronounce it. (Do you know who you’re dealing with froggies?)

And, finally, my dear ad frogs, a drum major is not a drum. It is not even a guy holding a drum. It is a dude in a stupid costume waving a stick around. Shoulda googled it.

Speaking of Pokémons, McDonald’s would probably have been much better off going with a Japanese agency… With kids’ trends and tastes being so heavily influenced by Asian culture these days, they would have stood a better chance of getting something kids might actually think was cool.

I just wish I’d seen the brief McD’s gave the agency… Did a bunch of old fogey Deciders at Corporate ask for something that they would have liked in their Happy Meals in 1953? Sure as hell what it seems like.

On the bright side, maybe these awful creatures will scare kids away and ultimately reduce child obesity in America, which can only be a good thing. But they’ll probably just go to Burger King instead.

What do you think? Did I miss anything?

OH. And no female characters.

See bigger versions of the pics on Design Taxi, which is where I saw them.

I’ve fallen out of love with my first startup. It was a taker. (You know how unhealthy those relationships are.) I gave and gave and gave. And when I asked for something, just a little thing, in return… Nothing.

I lived in denial for a year (2010). I kept plugging along as if nothing had changed. Then I got sick for a year (2011), so it was easy to pretend that that was why the flame was burning low. Then I got healthy again (2012). And, finally, this year, I had to face the fact that I’d lost that lovin’ feeling for good.

Because of that (and some other shit I won’t go into), I’ve been a bit lost for most of this year. Depressed. Feeling like a failure. Feeling too old and tired to start again. Like ya do. I moped around and was a cranky bitch for months. (My poor husband.) When my strength, energy and stamina all came back this fall, I realized I was all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Which made me mad.

I whined to my husband that I needed a new project. I said it over and over. Out loud to him. Silently to myself. To my girlfriends over coffee. To my girlfriends over beer.

Apparently, my brain heard me. (You gotta love the human brain.)

One night in October I was lying in bed wishing I could fall asleep, “thinking” (overheating brain thinking, you know, hundreds of thoughts at once, all tangled up and ricocheting off each other), when suddenly there was a perfect storm in my head.

Bored and disenchanted with the web for a couple years, not blogging much about it, wondering if my tech blogging days were over and what would become of me, but wait, the web is boring me to tears but I’m getting a pretty big kick out of mobile apps these days, and I wish more of my friends used them, they don’t know what they’re missing, but I can’t write about them on any of those big tech blogs I write for, not what they’re looking for.

Just back from three weeks in California, could still smell the wild wild west on me, feel it running through my veins, clinging to it hard, harder than usual. I’ve lost my mojo, need to get my sass back, nothing makes me feel sassier than my red cowboy boots…

At which point the quaint and kitschy expression “Cowgirl Up!” came to mind.

And then it all just gelled.

I would put on my sass, get back in the saddle, create a place to write about apps, and call it “Cowgirl App!”.

I thought the domain name could not possibly be available, considering the wide use of the expression in cowgirly parts of the US. I was sure some geekette in Austin had it. So I didn’t check for a day or two, postponing the inevitable disappointment. But when I did, it was there and then it was mine. And so was the Twitter handle. And so was the gmail…

So for a week or two I let the concept coalesce in the background while I went about my business. As soon as it started to crystallize, I knew I needed a co-cowgirl and exactly who it had to be. Sent her an e-mail pitch to which she responded immediately and enthusiastically (“FUCK YES!”).

Nothing like love at first sight.

Ladies and gents, meet Cowgirl App!

So it’s November 28th, and I got the picture today. I helped it along with a little photo editing app I love, which I’ll soon be talking about on my new app review site, Cowgirl App!.

I took lots of other photos this month. But this is the picture that captures my seventh November, which at first glance seemed drab and utterly lacking in promise, but turned out to be full of little miracles and big possibilities.

Click for a bigger version. Previous years’ photos below.

2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006

In case you subscribe to this blog, which apparently some people do (thank you!), the old RSS feed will go the way of the pterodactyl in October 2012, when Google shuts down Feedburner just because they can if they want to and screw everybody, especially people who don’t follow tech news and may never even find out because it’s not as if Google took out a full-page ad in the NYT or anything, not that the Feedburner user base necessarily corresponds to the NYT reader base… It certainly seems like they’re being kind of sneaky about it. Maybe they’re ashamed, and well they should be, just yanking the rug out from under people like that.

So here is a new RSS feed address for you.

Cheers!

And then I felt slightly guilty too because most of my communications are electronic now, like everybody else’s, and maybe that’s why the PO is in a bind. Not that I was ever a huge letter writer, but you know.

I abandoned Christmas cards years ago, though I held out longer than most I think. I did have a real-mail correspondence with my high school French teacher that lasted about 30 years. We sent each other Christmas cards and letters every year, and sometimes we exchanged notes in between. Maggie. An extraordinary woman. She saved my life, I loved her, and I wanted to keep thanking her forever.

In the year or two after I got to Paris I sent my nephew in California things like castles made of card stock that he could put together and knights on horses and a foam Eiffel Tower to build, but then the novelty of Paris wore off and he was getting too old for that kind of thing anyway.

I’ve been trying to send my 92 year-old grandmother more mail. I’ve sent her notes and printouts of my Instagram pictures, a couple clippings from glossy European fashion and decorating magazines that showed a scarf and a rug made of granny squares so my grandmother, the crochet queen, who can no longer crochet because of arthritis, would know they’d made a comeback in sophisticated circles, which of course meant she was very hip.

I will mail her something today. (Thanks for reminding me.) I’ll send my mom something too. I mail her a postcard every time I go to a museum or exhibit because she gets sole credit for teaching me to appreciate culture from a young age. I’ll send my mother-in-law something too. She very recently lost her husband and is having a rough go of it.

Reach out and touch someone, right?

So the post office is dying and we should mail people more things in order to save Saturday delivery and jobs and because sending people notes and things is a nice thing to do. Of course, mail isn’t very environmentally correct. But some things, like letters to Grandma, are important. So cancel a few of your catalogs and magazines and offset your carbon. Question of priorities.

I’m writing this because this week, a literary magazine I follow on Twitter launched this great project, Letters for Kids, in which well-known authors of children’s fiction mail a monthly letter to kids. I thought I might sign my nephew up.

And then I got to thinking, because of Maggie and my grandmother, and my mom and my mother-in-law, that there should be something like this for seniors. I thought for 15 seconds about organizing it myself. Then I thought others would be in a better position to do it. It should be done in any case. I will give it some more thought.

And that brought me to HOOT, the “mini” literary magazine I went bonkers for this year and wrote about in a HuffPo article in which I recount the sad story of my first chain letter experience. I subscribed immediately and also chided the editors for not having a better order form that would let me buy gift subscriptions for multiple people at once.

And that made me think of Postagram, which I mentioned in my HuffPo article, but had never used. I just downloaded the iPhone app and in a matter of minutes sent postcards of some of my Instagram pics to a bunch of people (including myself, to see the product). First five were free. Bonus! Not terribly personal, you might say, but more so than many of the tools we use to reach out today. What’s really cool is that the pictures pop out of the postcards. Anyway, I’m sold.

In early 2010, I got a fat envelope in the mail, the kind of thing that usually comes as a pleasant surprise. But it was from Maggie’s daughter, Gina, whom I didn’t know, and it contained a letter letting me know Maggie had passed away. With it were copies of the eulogy and a poem Gina and her brother and sister had written and read at the memorial, the program, some pictures… And a puka shell necklace that had belonged to Maggie in Hawaii in the 70s, when she was my teacher, when she saved me, when puka shells were all the rage.

In the letter, Gina told me that Maggie had kept all the letters and cards I’d ever sent to her in a folder labeled “Sunshine.”

So go ahead and grab those pretty cards and envelopes next time.

So I have a suggestion for you. To lift your spirits, celebrate Mother’s Day, and give your kids the priceless, lasting gift of eco-consciousness and civic responsibility…

Why not take a trip to the Zoo La Boissière du Doré for a special event to raise awareness about orphaned orangutans? The zoo is right outside of Nantes. (OK, so it’s a four-hour drive from Paris, but I’m from California, so… road trip! It’s only about two hours to Nantes by train.)

Need a moment to think about it?

How about this moment? This is one of the orphans at the Nyaru Menteng reintroduction center. He didn’t want to go back to the center for his nap after “forest school.”

(Image copyright Orangutan Outreach! Click the picture to go to their Pinterest page and see a bigger version.)

Orangutan Outreach helps support the Nyaru Menteng center (managed by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation), where our little buddy above lives, and the Ketapang Rescue Center (managed by International Animal Rescue). If you’re still not convinced, watch the Orangutan Outreach mom and baby orangutan video that melted our hearts.

Missing Orangutan Mothers (MOM)

This year, on Mother’s Day (May 13th), the Zoo La Boissière du Doré is hosting the annual Orangutan Outreach MOM (Missing Orangutan Mothers) event, which raises awareness about the plight of orphaned orangutans:

Every year on Mothers Day, Orangutan Outreach celebrates orangutan mothers in zoos around the world. We take this special day to bring attention to the hundreds of orphaned orangutans being cared for in rescue centers in Borneo and Sumatra.

The orangutan keeper at the zoo, Dr. Marylise Pompignac Poisson, is a child psychiatrist, psychology educator, and specialist in early psychosocial development of primates — both human and non-human.

The program she has put together for the MOM event includes:

• a talk about orangutans during which she will also discuss findings of her research on the importance of early interaction in the cognitive and emotional development of infant orangutans,
• a fact sheet/quiz for visitors,
• coloring pages for the little ones.

She will be available to chat with visitors and answer questions, her book Les Orangs-outangs de la Boissière nous livrent leurs secrets will be available to buy, and you’ll be able to make donations on the spot. All proceeds will go to the EAZA Southeast Asia campaign (see below).

By now you should be highly motivated to go to the MOM event at the zoo! (But if you can’t, scroll past the details for other ways to help.)

Event details

Date: May 13
Time: 13:00
Location: the orangutan enclosure, of course.
Hotels near the zoo

Map of the zoo (click for a downloadable PDF):

The orangutans desperately need our help

The MOM event is being co-sponsored by the nonprofit org Le Jardin d’Athéna, founded and run by Dr. Pompignac Poisson, and EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquaria).

This year, EAZA is running a campaign to support endangered animals in Southeast Asia. Large animals in this region are in serious danger of being completely wiped out in the near future (the Sumatran orangutan is critically endangered, the Bornean orangutan is endangered). This is largely because their rainforest habitat is being razed to make room for palm oil plantations. It’s all about greed.

• Donate to the EAZA Southeast Asia campaign.
• Donate to Orangutan Outreach.
• Learn about the palm oil problem and take action.
• Adopt an orangutan for Mother’s Day!

For professionals

If you or anyone you know are a pediatric, veterinary, or other professional interested in early primate development, Dr. Pompignac Poisson is offering a training program on the topic: Stage d’observation en primatologie.

Dr. Pompignac Poisson is also a member of the Société Française pour l’Etude du Comportement Animal, and will be presenting her research at their meeting May 9-11.

I have a special place in my heart for orangutans. One day I was at the zoo with my son when he was in his early teens, standing on the observation platform above the orangutan exhibit. Looked kind of like the one below (click for bigger), but with a wooden wall instead of a net wall. You could watch them from the platform, or you could go under the platform and look at them at eye level through very thick glass. They are notorious escape artists. Can’t blame them. They’re too smart to be enclosed. But I guess it’s better than being butchered and having your babies sold as pets, or being burned out of your home for palm oil plantations…

That day, there was an adult orangutan chilling out on a rock below the platform, just staring up at the few people up there, about like this. I waved at her and said some stuff.

She was bored as hell, no doubt. She looked around her and grabbed a clod of dried dirt with dried grass sticking out of it. Then she looked up at me and gently, lackadaisically, tossed it up onto the platform, where it landed off to my right a little. I picked it up and tossed it back down to the ground beside her. She picked it up and threw it back to me. I was clapping and talking to her and laughing the whole time. We played catch for a few minutes. It was glorious. I don’t remember how or why it ended. She probably got tired of the game before I did, though.

That’s the whole story. Disappointed? You wouldn’t be if it had been you.

The other day I discovered Orangutan Outreach when Vincent saw a tweet about their Apps for Apes program. We watched one of their videos and pretty much decided on the spot we’d sell everything and go live in the jungle and hold baby orangutans for the rest of our lives. I’m crazy enough to do it. My body may not cooperate, though, unfortunately.

In any case, I’ve decided to devote most, if not all of my do-good energies to the plight of the orangutan. I think it will be good for my mental health if I focus.

You see, with social media, and all the information delivery platforms out there, I find myself overwhelmed. My bleeding heart is running out of blood. I’m losing hope and have compassion fatigue. Petition fatigue. War and disaster and hunger and racism and hate and corruption and cruelty and injustice fatigue. I constantly feel pulled in a million directions to do something. I know you know what I mean.

I’ve done only little things for Orangutan Outreach so far. Put a link to their site on my about.me page, retweeted @redapes (their Twitter handle) tweets, read up on orangutans, connected with the OO founder on LinkedIn and gave some suggestions for promoting the organization, voted for their rescue boat. Working on figuring out some expenses we can cut in order to divert that money to OO. I even managed to get orangutans on Francophilia! I’ll do what I can with what I have.

I’m just getting started. But you have to start somewhere. You have to start. {:(|}

• Donate to Orangutan Outreach
• Adopt an orangutan
• Leave a legacy to Orangutan Outreach
• Orangutan Outreach shop
• Projects for kids and schools
• Oranguteens
• Action packs
• Volunteer (Maybe we’ll see you in the jungle…)