Hidden In France

Happy things

It's SO springtime.  75 degrees ya'all. Roses in full bloom (i should take pictures), I exercised every day this week!  I'm trying to do healthy things for myself.  I'm trying --really hard-- to get back to healthy and happy.  Happy is my natural state, I've decided.  No sense letting  things over which i have no control, such as the oil spill catastrophe, the insanity in Arizona,  or my son's grade in math get the best out of me

.... oooo moan...... just mentioning this and i feel the corner of my mouth droop.  But I musn't.  Happy, springy, happy!!!!

     

Pretty birds, make me happy.  Especially the kind that doesn't steal all the grass seeds.  Oh, and a close look reveals blue elephants thrown in the mix.  Blue elephants make me happy, always.

rie larsen
 
 
A rose-painted floor and see-through chairs, definitely make me happy. Via ada and darcy. 

and this little marvel of poetic stitching from 39 squares .  How adorable.  Happy weekend to all of you.

Hate on Facebook

Did you hear?  Did you read?  Chilling. There is a facebook page for people who pray for the death of my darling President, so far counting over a million members?  The Huffington Post has an an article about it today.  

I'm not too good at praying, it scares me, somehow. Nevertheless, I have a quasi-superstitious belief in the power of prayer, and this is WAY too much people-power at work.

I'm not even going to start pondering about the macabre irony of praying for someone's death,  but I am going to encourage anyone who will listen to join this facebook group, which calls for the removal of the hate-filled Facebook group.

But even if the facebook page is removed, those people will still be praying away, right?  What we need is a Pray for Obama page.  Is there one yet?  The man needs it. It might cancel the other one out.

And here:  found this on a comment to Huffington post and thought it was cool:

 

The six-foot flame dancing on top of my head

After my time of the month (which is turning more and more into a bimonthly time of the month) I take iron for anemia, and excedrin for headaches.  The combo gives me night-time heartburns.  Ulcer! I think. But ulcer for what?  Ulcer because I am frantic and not accomplishing enough? Or worse yet: I could be the first person ever to develop an ulcer caused by a lack of entitlement to an ulcer.  THOSE ARE NOT REAL PROBLEMS, I tell myself, so shut your trap and relax. 

My husband is much sweeter about it.  He holds me in his arms, even in the middle of the night when he feels me toss and turn and tells me. Relaax... everything is Okayyy, everything is Gooood.  Once he tells me this i feel better, because i believe him more than i believe the voices in my head. 

But I don't want to mess with his sleep, so most nights are crippled with dread and powerless and feeling every ounce of the weight of that powerlessness.  I do crazy things at night, such as walking into my teenage son's room and feeling for his body in bed because I did not hear him come home. When I realize he is home, I get the most beathtaking sense of relief, because the possibility of having lost him suddenly seemed so possible. Everything terrible seems more likely at night. Have you been there? in the dark, at night, freaking out?

Last night, it was three in the morning and I woke up in dread and fright, sweaty, anguished, panicked and with heartburn flare ups so bad you'd think I'd had a nightcap of equal parts of draino and 409. I searched far and wide for reasons I should feel this way.  Money?  Schools? Health? Turning 45 in a week? Career? World Hunger? Those few books on end of the world i've been reading? I tip toed to my computer and started reading the blog of Zen Buddhist Priest Karen maezen Miller.

And I suddenly saw things for that they were:  There are no reasons for my dread.  Sure I can squint and look and give you a thousand reasons for it, but the reason for my dread is that there is a six-foot flame dancing on top of my head. 

Here is a quote from the book hand wash cold. by Karen maezen Miller: 

"We might be drawn to meditation because we want more out of life and ourselves. We might want to be more centered, for example. More peaceful. More focused. More balanced. More patient. More mellow. More wise. More like my ex-boyfriend who liked to meditate.

These may be all the reasons we are drawn to meditation, but they are not the reasons we meditate. We meditate because there is a six-foot flame dancing on top of our heads. It has made us mighty uncomfortable for quite some time up there. We try to pretend otherwise, but have you noticed? We have a fire on our heads! It keeps crossing the containment lines! The temperature shoots up and we prance about, panicked, frantic, holding our breath lest we stoke the inferno, but it rages anyway. About the time our eyebrows singe, we might heed the call of rescue."

So here is what i did last night: I wrapped myself in a blanket, sat on the couch in the dark, and started breathing, slowly in and out of my nose, counting my breaths.

what is Itkupilli saying?

I don't know!  I want to know! She a Finnish designer and used to have a decor shop in Finland.  Now she's in L.A., practically my neighbor.  I am in love with her style, her pictures, her color and her light.  Here is her blog, lucky for you if you can read the language, here is her online shop, and here is a preview of her home:

 

 

 

 

Have a great week end.  I'm going to see my little nephew Jacques this Sunday, and i'm so very happy about that.  

The girl with the dragon breath

That would be me. 

Yesterday's  small blogging crisis  had to do with something-rather (i'll never understand what) and seems fixed for now.  The blog looked quite martian for a while, and in its own surrealist way, better.

Today I feel legless, headless, muscle-less, yellow-tongued, foul-smelling. PMS it is, then?

Or maybe losing access to basic body functions has to do with my chauffering five teenage boys to and from Coachella and going to bed at 2 am three days in a row... or maybe it's the dreadful weather, because it is cold and grey and sucky here in LA.  Or maybe it's writer's block. (I haven't written a line since spring break started--self-loathing ensues.) Or maybe it's that everyone around me seems more productive, more successful and thinner (my dieting is a big FAT joke, thanks for asking, girls) than i am.

Basically, i'm in a funk.  Fuming.  In a bad mood. Whatever.

 

Did you see the girl with a dragon tattoo?  I look and feel just like she does right now, except you can't see my ribs.  Boy was that movie intense.  But good.  I did have to walk out during that one terrible scene, you know the one in the beginning.  I couldn't take it and wondered  about all the elderly people in the movie theater (this was in Palm Springs) who were joyfully munching their popcorn as she was being... in the most shocking of ways.  I guess sadism is something you end up getting used to if you live long enough. I walked out of the room and waited for the screaming to stop.  Unfortunately, i had seen enough to destroy me for a few days.

I'll get back to you when I feel like this again:

 

effed-up blog!

hmmm... who else can see a pagination problem here?  Such the entire blog fitting on a 2 inch wide column, for example? Maybe the gods of blogging are telling me that I am wasting my time with this egocentric enterprise.  I'll see if I can fix it but if i can't it will be the end of Hidden in France. Will keep you posted.

Pink Princess: that's SO totally me!

I'd love to have a house just like this one, but how to reconcile this drastic pink, red and white color scheme with my addiction to turquoise?  And orange?  

Several houses it must be then....Via the always thrilling wabi sabi and Bolig. 

 

 
  

 
 

Sweet Pomplamoose

Remember that catchy tune but pretty vile video?

May i suggest an alternative?

I've fallen for the duo Pomplamoose (not a typo.) Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte perform, edit videos and sell their music. I love her voice and the way he throws himself into playing the drum. I heard this NPR boradcast about them the other day and was smitten.  I hope you like them too. Other favorites of mine include their version of 'a few of my favorite things' and 'la vie en rose'.  Just adorable.

Kauai mon amour

Six months ago my husband said he wanted to go to Hawaii for spring break, and I shrugged 'maybe'.   

The flight was booked that instant. 

I had missed another baffling subtlety of the English language: maybe is yes when it comes to him wanting to do something. I was furious . He tried to appease me by saying that chocolate flows in rivers there.  Yeah, right.

This gave me six months to worry about the trip.  I am a terrible pre-travel worrier.  Had he told me about the trip the day before I would have thrown a fit, yes, but at least I would have saved myself all the useless anxious thinking.   

Worries ranged from an irrational fear of under-packing combined with a compulsion to over-pack (I literally packed in my head for sixth months, it was horrible), to being physically incapable to settle on a place to stay, to skin cancer, to being mistaken for a humpback whale while on the beach -- it can happen--, to checking our reservations again, and again, never remembering the airline, time and airport.   

Oh but put me on a beach and all is forgotten.  

No one can appreciate sitting in shallow, crystal-clear ocean water the way I do.  We hiked, we let the waves bobble us up and down, we walked miles on deserted beaches.  Whoever said Hawaii is crowded has never been to Kauai in the spring.  The quality of the air there is incomparable, it's rich and warm and it caresses all the pores of your skin at once, and it so fragrant, a mix of ocean richness and tuberose. I could live there.  And I could definitely blog there.

 

This was a sensory experience, a respite from being cooped up inside my head.  The apartment was five steps away from miles of deserted beach. I had tragically over-packed, and so what. I may have looked like a whale but no one tried to harpoon me. 

I loved all the trekking, the discoveries, the hidden beaches at the end of secret trails.

I loved being sandy, salty, wet, then sandy and salty again.  I did not mind my butt eating my bathing suit constantly. I loved seeing nothing but green and blue.  I loved the wind and I loved the fishies, the chicken and roosters everywhere, the palm trees loaded up with coconuts.

Nothing that usually mattered immensely mattered at all.  Just the four of us in Paradise.

 This is a taro field.  Locals grow taro to make something called poi. I wonder if it tastes as good at it looks.  It was never served at any of the restaurants we visited.

And you know what?  On Kauai, chocolate does flow in rivers: I'll be.

 

fear of happiness?

We've gone over this.  Blogging is much easier when things are not going my way (please see previous 500 or so posts.)

 So our family is off to Kauai, and we're thrilled (minus my seventeen-year-old who's in a state of shock that we would dare do this to him.) The hardest thing for me is not packing and getting all the details organized.  The hard part is to allow myself to be happy about it. 

Tomorrow I will be luxuriating in the warm, moist, (hopefully not too moist) tropical air of Kauia.  I'm happy.  I'm blessed.  Everything in my life is wonderful. Also: I feel ashamed to be happy. I have done nothing to deserve the life I have. I am too lucky. It's bad karma to be happy. I apologize to everyone for existing.

There is something, perhaps in my upbringing, that has made it very difficult to look forward to things.  There is a nasty little goblin on my shoulder, spitting in my ears that looking forward to things can only lead to massive disappointment. 

Shut the effe up goblin, I tell him.  The lunacy, I realize now --- and it's very hard to change this state of mind-- is the belief that disappointment will be unbearable, the belief that by not looking forward to things at all, life will be, if not better, at least potentially less painful.

But in fact, it's the opposite that occurs.  Disappointments are surprisingly manageable.  Real pain lies is refusing to enjoy the ride of hoping, of trying, of taking risks and looking forward to things. 

But you already knew that.

 

Have a great Easter.  Warning: chocolate can make you fat, but it can also make you happy.