Janice MacLeod's Blog, page 17

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.

 

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 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.

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!

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.