It’s school vacation time in France, probably in a lot of places, and I’m on the top level of a high speed train careening south at 280 km per hour. That’s 173 miles per hour, by the way. At first it totally blew my mind that you could do an eight hour drive in four on the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse). And even though the TGV, as of mid-2011, was the fastest conventional train operating in the world, I’ve become almost as jaded as the French people around me while riding. Though I admit that I am still impressed by the sucking whoomp sound that occurs when another high-speed train whizzes by in the opposite direction. When I lived in New York, I took the Amtrak to Boston from time to time, but before South Station was rebuilt, it was a lot easier to take the bus all the way to Maine. First you took the Peter Pan Boston Express, where they’d sometimes play a Kung Fu movie with the sound piped over the PA system, and then onto Concord Trailways, a small bus line with service in northern New England, where the bus drivers have magnificent accents that make you feel like you’re home, even if nobody in your family actually speaks that way. The only time I tried the Acela, a supposedly high speed train run by Amtrak, through the north east corridor, it was a total disaster. We were delayed six hours on the tracks, tracks that were shared by the low-speed trains. By the time we got to South Station, it was 1:00 am, and closed, and my parents had to drive 2 hours to come pick me up. In my opinion, that would never happen in Europe. But...

I would like to use this week’s post to give you some advice. If you haven’t already committed and shacked up, don’t marry a guy with kids. Don’t get me wrong; the kids aren’t the problem. Once you get over the initial horror of taking a rectal temperature or helping a little boy wipe himself, the trials of co-parenting become manageable, and after time the benefits outweigh the work. But if you’re going to wait until your mid-thirties to tie the knot, and you end up with a divorcé, I do suggest that you try to pre-screen the ex-wife. Ha! Like that’s even possible. It’s frustrating. I’ve been a part of this family for almost three years and I’ve hardly ever spoken to the ex directly. We exchange information through the kids. On the speakerphone, she asks them something, they ask me, I respond and they tell their mom. She never acknowledges I’m there. I think she tries to pretend I don’t play a role in their lives, that I’m no more than one of their forgettable afternoon babysitters, but I’d like to think I play a bigger role and I wish there could be more cooperation between us. Why are we buying two sets of sneakers for kids who are going to outgrow them in four months? When we signed them up for activities last fall, we had to go in on the assumption that they’d only be able to go every other week, and even now I’m the one who brings my step-daughter to her dance class every Friday, even when she’s sleeping at her Mom’s house. I’ve never asked the ex to communicate with me, I’ve given the woman space, hoping that through a kind tone and cooperative attitude, she would...

I have such a terrible case of writer’s block right now that it’s all I can do to write this sentence. It started a week ago, on the reception of some bad news, coupled with a small health issue requiring me to “take it easy” this week. Since then, I’ve (unreasonably) given myself permission to do absolutely no writing. It’s not just writer’s block, it’s wallowing in non-productiveness just for the sake of wallowing. It’s so comfortable in my state of unease that I actually prefer to be miserable rather than to put in the effort to improve things. It’s certainly easier than trying. So it’s been a week of television and movie watching, fluff reading, nap taking… and it’s starting to eat at my soul. I’m grumpy. I’m not sleeping well. I doubt myself, my talent, my entire existence on this planet. I haven’t been able to bear sitting at my computer for more than a few minutes a day. But knowing I had to write this column, a war started to rage in my head. The fight between wanting to blow off my Sunday night deadline (that way I could feel even worse about myself, giving me even more reason to wallow for a few more days), and knowing that if I just forced myself to type for 10 minutes, my brain might start to wake up. Now that I’m in the third paragraph, the resistance is breaking down. Still, the thought of returning to my current writing project fills me with helpless dread. Isn’t there something I could watch on TV instead? No, no more. A week is long enough. Tomorrow, I will throw myself at the project. I will take little steps. I will open my folder of notes and reread...

Last night I forced M to watch Stand by Me. I say forced because, it was already 10 pm, and we’d just watched Pirates of the Caribbean, At World’s End, full of squid-faced special effects and swashbucklery. But after that I wanted something, I don’t know, familiar? If I had been in the states, I would have been happy to turn on the TV and sit through a rerun of Law and Order, but in France, I went to my pile of DVDs from the library. Knowing nothing about the film but what he read on the DVD jacket (1959, four boys go on a camping trip to find a dead body in the woods), M wrinkled his nose and said “Okay, but don’t be mad if I fall asleep.” I said we only had to watch half of it, I was just craving something familiar. Stand by Me, directed by Rob Reiner, tells the tale of four, twelve year old, small town boys who walk 20 miles on train tracks to see the body of a dead boy in the woods. It came to theaters when I was twelve years old myself. It was especially popular among twelve year old girls for its casting: Will Wheaton as the thoughtful future writer boy, River Phoenix as the misunderstood hoodlum with a heart of gold, Corey Feldman as the war obsessed son of a crazy WWII vet and Jerry O’Connell as the wimpy, fat kid who knows the location of the dead body. A young, hot, Keifer Sutherland is their nemesis, and Richard Dreyfuss’s gravelly voice narrates the thing. The issues these boys were struggling with were far beyond anything I would ever know, but I still cried with them, and there is enough suspense...

Before I got to Paris, I was never much of a purse person. I liked something with good pockets and a nice shape, and the most I remember spending on a purse was $50 for a marked down Nine West at Macy’s. In Paris, I made a friend who had a beautiful purse collection, and I got bored with the Nine West. Mandarina Duck was the only cool company I knew of, so I bought my first semi expensive (i.e. more than 100 euros) purse from them. It was functional with good pockets and enough leather to look a little bit fancy. It made me feel like a grown up. We were happy together. But then… I don’t know. The little swath of suede became polished and small rips appeared in the fabric. The purse was letting itself go, and my eye started to wander. Gerard Darel, I thought. It’s what all the ‘it’ girls have, and I’m an it girl, right? Well, no, but once I got the Gerard Darel 24 hour bag under my skin, it wouldn’t let go. I could be working through a perfectly normal Tuesday afternoon and then find myself staring at the Gerard Darel website without knowing how I got there. I would spend hours examining the colors and prices, even though they never changed. This went on for months, but the bag cost twice the amount of Mandarina Duck. Not expensive for a designer leather purse, but not cheap either. We finally met and had coffee, me and the Gerard Darel 24 hour bag, but it turned out we didn’t click. The blue looked better online and the bag didn’t close at the top. I would have been settling. To console me, my friend introduced me to...

Maybe you’ve been saying it ever since you studied French in high school. Maybe it’s a New Years Resolution, or you’re prepping for a trip to Tunisia. Maybe you’re looking for an activity to keep your brain sharp and you’re sick of doing crosswords. Whatever the reason is for wanting to brush up your French, I understand. Even as a resident of France, I kick myself every day for not trying harder. It’s true that I’m in an immersion situation, but it’s only immersion when there are French people around me, and as I work at home right now, I spend a lot of time in an English speaking bubble. So, I’ve compiled a list of affordable in-home French study aids, most of which can be acquired and used without ever leaving the comforting glow of your computer screen. You need to do four things to learn a language: Learn the Grammar, Listen, Read, and Speak. Let’s start with Grammar. Tex’s French Grammar is a great website, recommended to me by a French teacher in the US. All aspects of French grammar are taught here, and there are interactive exercises so you can quiz yourself on what you’ve learned. The explanations for the grammar and such are written in English, for whatever it’s worth. Some people prefer that, some don’t. If you’re into workbooks, we’ve got workbooks. Les 500 Exercises de Grammaire is a strict book of grammar exercises used at the Sorbonne (a Parisien University that has a highly respected French as a foreign language program), and the slightly lighter Alter Ego textbooks are used at the Alliance Française here in Paris. You can buy both of these on Amazon.com (in the US — I checked!). The third book is a Cahier de...

You can learn a lot about a place from its supermarket, and when I first got to France I was overwhelmed by the sprawling, two story store that sold not just a narrow selection of food, but televisions, computers, appliances, clothing, DVDs, car tires, and toys. The selection of food, in my opinion, is rather limited. This is for several reasons, I believe. First, the produce section mainly concerns itself with products that are in season. Most of our citrus comes from Spain, for two weeks in September we were overrun with grapes, and right now litchis are the hot item, coming in by the boatload from Madagascar. But for the most part, the products are pretty run of the mill. For France. I was surprised when I noticed that a package of a dozen QUAIL EGGS were a regular item. These are about half the size of medium chicken eggs. For now, just enjoy how pretty they are, and look for a future installment where I figure out what to do with Quail Eggs. It seems so undignified to sell prepared French dishes in a can, but they do. Especially Cassoulet, which is a slow cooked casserole from the south of France that’s made with white beans, some form of meat (goose confit in the photo) and pig skin. Confit means that the, most likely, legs of the goose have been cooked in goosefat, and then left to cool and preserved in the same fat. There are more cans of marinated mackerel filets than tuna in the canned fish aisle, and an equivalent number of sardine products.  Do you put it on salad? My grandmother served me tripe once in my life and I will never, ever get over it. Walking by packages...

France took the Christ out of Christmas long, long ago. The word Noël comes from the middle French nael, which comes from the latin natalis [dies] which means [day] of birth. To wish someone a Merry Christmas, one would say Joyeux Noël. There is no all-inclusive “Happy Holidays” greeting in France, but in keeping with the French (at least the French I talk to) denial of any religious connection to their many religiously scheduled and named school vacations and national holidays (All-Saints, Easter), wishing someone a Joyeux Noël is merely wishing them a good vacation. In that way, it can be said to anyone whether they celebrate or not. This year, I scoured Paris for something Christmas-y to write about, but beyond a lot of blue and white lights (I know, counter-intuitive, right?), it seems the best things we have going here are the display windows at the big department stores, and they are a little scary. Then I realized that what I was looking for was all happening in my back yard. I live in a somewhat boring suburb of Paris, but the powers that be are good with community events, and every year there is an adorable Christmas Market. Maybe this is what you expect a market “in the old country” to look like? With chickens and rabbits (bottom right) and a veritable cornucopia all spread out on hay. Well sorry, this is just a display. The bananas are plastic.But the geese are real. There were lots of animals in attendance, professional show offs: geese, goats, sheep, cows, even a donkey. Seeing all these agricultural animals gives you a sense of plenty and makes everything feel more, I don’t know, wholesome… Lots of vendors sold the traditional foods you would buy at...

The weather is finally starting to get cool here, average days in the 40s, which means winter is a-coming. What’s the best part about winter in France? The combination of damp cold and hibernation mode makes it acceptable to eat the many cheese-heavy dishes one would normally only indulge in during a ski trip to the Alps. One of these dishes is called Tartiflette. If you can find reblochon cheese (this might be hard because it’s a raw cow’s milk cheese, but according to some guy on Chowhound, it’s now packaged as Fromage de Savoie, and other people have talked about buying it at Whole Foods), you can easily make it in the United States. After a cold, snowy morning, by eating this dish you could pretend you’ve just skied the Alps, instead of shoveled out your driveway. Tartiflette, a main course dish that is essentially a very special potato gratin, was invented by the “Reblochon cheese council” (that’s what we’d call it in the U.S. anyway) in the 1980s, to sell more cheese. What it lacks in history, it makes up for in yumminess. Here is the recipe for one of the ultimate French comfort foods: Ingredients 4 pounds of potatoes 8 oz lardons (very thick bacon cut into strips) 2 onions 1 cup white wine 1 cup creme fraiche (or sour cream) 1 (450 gram/1 pound) Reblochon or Fromage de Savoie To start, peel and set your potatoes to boil. While the potatoes are cooking, fry the lardons (bacon). This is what French lardons look like:Essentially, they are strips of 1/4 inch thick bacon, smoked or not. “Bacon” in France is thin, round slices of smokey meat, and if you want “American bacon” you have to ask the butcher to slice up some...

Hey everybody, after a somewhat longer than intended leave of absence, I’ve come back to Fierce and Nerdy. Upon my return, I was both pleased and worried to learn that my first column in months would be for Book Week. Pleased because, well, who doesn’t like books? And worried because I haven’t finished a book in a while. By ‘finished,’ I mean finished reading, because I’ve been so busy finishing the fifth draft of the novel I’m writing, the one I started two years ago, and writing (or trying to write) the one, two, and four page synopses, the hook, the tagline, the elevator pitch, the back cover copy, the query letters (god help me), and rewrite over and over the first page, the first three pages, and the first chapter, that I haven’t had much time. This is a particularly lame excuse for not reading, I know, because one primary requirement of any aspiring writer is to read, read, and read! Actually, it’s not that I’m not reading, I’m just not finishing. I’m currently in the middle of two books about kids and death. The first is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It’s lovely and dark and I’m always a fan, but for some reason Gaiman’s voice in this one seems particularly stuffy and maybe my internal word centers have become too ‘Frenchified’, but I’m having a hard time cutting through the British. The other is Damned by Chuck Palahniuk, who I adore, and it’s interesting in that it’s about a 13-year-old in hell. The setting and geography are wonderfully inventive, and I’ve always loved the way he tells a story, but at 33%, I’m still not sure what this one’s about. So I’ll talk about a book I read a while...

For my Fierce ReRun, I’d like to remind myself what to do when I’m slipping into a funk, because now that my job is over and I’m bumbling around the house, I feel one coming on. Best to nip it in the bud. Originally published 11/04/10 Has anyone ever told you to take care of yourself? You know they’re saying it because you’re not at your best. You’re stressed, depressed, overworked, or tired. Personally, I’m in a funk right now. I don’t feel like doing anything but what I absolutely have to, and I’ve forgotten all the things I have to do. I’ve been through this many times before, and if I were to take care of myself, I would try to do one or all of the following: 1. exercise It may take time away from other stuff I think I should be doing, but the benefits are great: the sense of accomplishment for taking care of my body, the satisfying thigh ache the next day, stress reduction, oxygen to the brain makes it fire faster, endorphins lift my mood… you know all of this stuff already. 2. cut back on TV Sure, Mike and Molly has made me laugh out loud, but I often watch TV to tune out and get away from myself. Using those 22 minutes to actively engage in life will put me in a better state of mind, one that I won’t seek to avoid by watching more TV. If you really need distraction, start a new book. 3. stop eating junk Even if it takes extra energy to prepare a salad instead of eating the kids’ sugary cereal for lunch, I always feel better when I get my greens and my grains. There are studies linking caloric...

As I fly away from a picturesque New England town where American flags are already hung from porches in preparation for Memorial Day weekend, I’m feeling reminiscent. Reminiscent of the  time when I rued the fact I was American, my teenage years. Back then I thought that America had no culture, America was nothing. Just a baby country, a mixed up group of different peoples who abandoned or were taken from their “motherlands” to come live in America to form a group of immigrants with no central focus. I don’t feel that way anymore, something has pulled us together in my mind, and seeing how i am different from my new French surroundings makes me realize that we Americans have a very clear culture. You can see it everywhere, in big ways, and in small. As escargot and baguettes are are part of what make France, France. And there are also things that make the great motherland of America who she is. Especially through the eyes of someone who now lives in France. on the streets Big yellow school busses. Highly organized, uniformed and fleeted delivery services Where I live, there are two or three delivery services that bring packages to your house. One of them is part of la poste (the postal service of France), the others are private. In and around Paris, the mail people, in a uniform vest, ride marked bicycles or push three wheeled carts to bring your mail. But in my town, if you receive s larger package, it gets a little skeevy. Usually a guy in regular clothes rings your doorbell. He has a scanning device, so at least you know he’s legit, but then he opens an unmarked white van and searches for your package which is on...

As English speaking voices tend to do, a woman’s voice carries from 20 feet away. She’s sharing personal details about her son with a couple of strangers. It’s ten a.m. and the woman in the couple drinks from a 1.5 liter bottle of (not diet) Pepsi. The man is that kind of  fat that makes him look like a too high pile of rocks with a little head balanced on top. The slightly horrifying people around me have large stomachs, seem too white, and speak with twangy accents that I’m no longer used to. But even so, it’s nice to be around North Americans again. In 11 hours I’ll see my own people in Maine. I’m going home for two weeks. Two weeks of English. Two weeks of forgetting to wonder whether what I just said was comprehensible or even grammatically correct. Two weeks of my brain not fussing about gender and direct object placement every time I open my mouth. My French language skills get better and better, but as always, the more I know, the more I know I have to learn. In my opinion, people who think they know everything are ignorant. In this case, I mean to define ignorant as just plain stupid. You know, if you say j’ignore (I ignore) in French, it means you don’t know about it. You’re not aware, instead of the more American definition where you purposely make yourself unaware by not paying attention, like one might do with one’s annoying little brother. There are a lot of words like this. The French call them faux amis (false friends) and they’re a pain in the butt when you’re learning French as an anglophone, or English as a francophone. They are words that exist in both...

Break out the confetti and noisemakers — I have officially lived in France for two years! May 2nd was my anniversary. Before I even left the states, I told myself that the next two years of my life would probably suck, and therefore I wouldn’t be allowed to make any rash decisions based on my feelings (like, “I can’t take it anymore, I’m going home”) until the breaking in period had passed. I knew I had a lot to deal with, I knew it would be hard to move to any place where I didn’t have a support network. I knew cultural difference alone would be a huge hurdle to claw my way over. And I was right. It was rough. There were many moments when I did consider going home. When I hated it here. Hated French people. Hated the country. Hated my life. I started to look forward to May 2, 2011 as the day when all my troubles would be over. The day when I knew I had made the right choice. Well here I am and things have definitely improved. I’m starting to even like it here. Having a job has been a huge boon to my habituation process on pretty much every level. And in my working life, I’ve also reached an important milestone. Tomorrow, on the two year anniversary of coming here, I will go to the unemployment office and sign up for the working status intermittent de spectacle (spectacle meaning, like “show” or “performance”). This is an employment status for people working in the living arts (film, animation, theater, singing, etc.) whose jobs are often short term and sporadic. Basically, having the status of intermittent de spectacle works like this: first, you have to work 507 hours...

When I was young, my godmother lived right next door and my best friend lived across the street. These relationships were created by my parents. They forged an instant friendship with the neighbors across the street, who had a little girl my age. It was only practical. Then they appointed the neighbor my godmother. The woman on the other side of us had a nice dog named Sam, and the boy around the corner was in the same orchestra as me. We carpooled. Now, most of these relationships are broken, but I remember enjoying the knowledge of who lived where, who did what, where there were kids, and where kids were not allowed. It was a neighborhood. After I left home, I lived through a series of apartments and apartment buildings where I knew a few of my neighbors but never felt very comfortable hanging out with them.  If I happened to be hanging out with a neighbor, say the girl on 7th and D, I usually sat there wondering why I was putting myself through such an awkward situation when I could be sitting comfy on the other side of the wall watching TV in peace. One time I moved into a building where friends occupied two other apartments. The moment my best friend moved in on the top floor was the beginning of the end. Our friendship went into default. It lasted about a year, and I still can’t tell you why it happened. I now call it ‘the falling out’ and we both do whatever necessary to avoid its recurrence. And what would that be? Avoid being neighbors? In California I hardly knew my neighbors beyond niceties in the hallway, signing for packages, and telling each other we left our head...

After recently learning that the French term for brass knuckles is “an american fist,” I decided it was time to share my growing list of objects and ideas that involve the word américain. When you think about it, there are a good many American terms that involve the word french. The door swings both ways. There’s also the apparently derogatory term “to be american” which means you spend lots of money. For example, I worked in a production house where a supervisor walked around saying “we are american” to a new guy who was impressed that they had actually bought the special computer set-up including fancy 3D monitor you need to digitally put video into 3D (the kind with the glasses). When I first heard it, I interpreted it as “we are well equipped to do the job properly” which I would consider a good thing, rather than “we spend copious amounts of money, we over-buy” which is a bad thing. I guess that’s just the americaine in me. Does anyone know of any other French terms involving the word American? How about in other...

Lately, I’ve been working on lists, that could lead to fun blogumns, like “Words in French For Which There Are No English Equivalents,” or “Things That Are Different in France.” So far I have, defenestration (the act of jumping or falling out a window) and “dairy creamers in France are made with evaporated milk instead of half-and-half.” But I think defenestration might actually be an English word that I’m not smart enough to know, and who really cares about dairy creamers anyway? I think the problem is I can’t find other things to add to these lists. When I first arrived here, it was pretty easy to answer when people asked me what was different in France. But the longer I stay, the harder it gets to identify these details. I wonder if it’s because I’ve gotten used to the ‘French stereotype’, beautifully defined in Stephen Clarke’s book Talk to the Snail, Ten Commandments for Understanding the French. When I first started visiting France, dealing with the French bureaucracy and getting to know random French people, I was constantly reminded of the book. Oh my god, I would say, Stephen Clarke was right. Again. People do bring baguettes home after work every day. And ride bicycles in cute skirts and striped shirts. They smoke cigarettes and drink tiny coffees in sidewalk cafes and they are constantly kissing each other. It’s just, normal. When the novelty wore off, I searched for other stereotypes. Back when I still took French classes, I developed a theory that French people’s mouths were shaped differently because of the contortion required to create the “eu” sound that is so crucial to good French pronunciation. I postulated that francophones’ lip muscles were overdeveloped at the corners, creating a tight line there...

The other day I found myself extrapolating the metaphor of jumping from the roof of one building, across a trash filled alley to the roof of another building. You see it all the time in movies. The hero runs from the bad guy. The hero jumps from roof to roof, up a few feet, down a few feet, then when she is faced with the long jump over the alley, she doesn’t slow down, doesn’t even think about it, she just does it like she knew she would make it all along. Which she does, landing in a graceful, Matrix-style foot/knee/hand squat on the other side. The pursuer comes screaming to a halt. He looks over the edge to the crummy alley below, judges the distance from one roof to another, and wonders if there is enough room to build the required momentum for a running leap. He never should have stopped. But he jumps, just not as well. Problem is, he has to land again. Maybe he catches the edge of a crumbling facade. Better have strong fingers. Maybe he goes clattering to the fire escape one floor down, ends up battered and bruised. Maybe he doesn’t make it at all. Sometimes I imagine this leap like the one I took nearly two years ago when I moved to France. It’s pretty clear that I’m not the hero who soared through the sky and stuck a perfect landing (as I’d rather hoped when gearing up for the jump), but instead I’m the one who dove across clumsily, and scrambled to keep from falling. I’m still scrambling, I suppose. Still, I cleared the  alley, right? Paris is the third city I’ve lived in since leaving home for college. I started in New York. Thought...

You know those days at work when nothing goes right? Your boss looks at you and shakes his head, but you can’t fix it, because you’ve suddenly forgotten how to do whatever it is you’ve been hired to do. You are a failure. Not only at work, but you realize that it’s been going on for years. You attended, and are still paying for, countless years of expensive education to get to the point you’re at now. What a huge waste of time. Why didn’t anyone tell you how much you sucked? You should have just worked your way up to manager at McDonald’s, or maybe stuck with data entry. Thay way, you would never have to worry about any of this merde. Well, this was how I felt last Tuesday. I had a bad day at work. A really bad day. After everything that happened, I figured my best option was to give up art altogether, move to the mountains and live off the land, and so on. So I left work a few minutes early to go home and lick my wounds. At 7:30 pm, I was already off the train, had walked by the duck pond, and was nearly at my house, listening to a Savage Love podcast to quiet my worrying brain. Thirty feet from the front gate, footsteps scuffled up behind me. Our sidewalks are narrow, and I stepped out of the way to let the guy pass, but he didn’t. Instead he grabbed my left arm and pulled on it. My earphones ripped from my ears, and I clung desperately to my iPhone and housekeys, both in my left hand. Instinctually, I resisted, though it wasn’t clear what he wanted. He just pulled, and I pulled back. He...

Nine a.m. Leave the house and walk one block while detangling your white iPhone earbuds. Blast uplifting American music in ears before you hear anyone speaking French around you. Try not to inhale copious cigarette smoke on the sidewalk while wondering when French will realize that smoking is passé. On the suburban commuter train platform, listen only to the English version of the loudspeaker announcement suggesting that people work together to notify train employees of any unclaimed bags noticed on the trains or platforms. Ignore the French and German versions. Once on train, dig Kindle or Moleskin from purse, and either read or write something, in English, for 18-25 minutes. Arriving in Paris, transfer to the Métro line 2 at Nation. Remember how it reminds you of the L train in New York because you’re getting on at the terminus. Once you’re on the train, continue reading or frantically writing. Perhaps you never really stopped reading or writing while riding escalators and walking down tunnels from your first train. Note that no one else is trying to read or write and walk, and feel proud of your American multi-tasking skills. At Métro Colonel Fabian, reinsert earbuds and stuff reading/writing device back in purse. Climb cement stairs to street. Ignore the irony that the headquarters of the French Communist Party is located in your building (or rather your workplace is located in their building, and they don’t seem evil at all), and upon entering, turn loud American music in headphones down just enough to give a volume appropriate “bonjour” to the woman at the front desk. Once on your floor, appreciate the fact that the lcd display on the fingerprint scanner which controls your office door is in English, and silently gloat at how much...

I have always been attracted to foreigners. In second grade I was intrigued by the influx of southeast Asian refugees who showed up at my school. I had never heard of Cambodia or Laos before, but I was ready to be friends with their strange food-eating nationals the moment they arrived. One summer, I became fast friends with a girl from Puerto Rico (exotic to a Mainer) and my BFF in eighth grade was Vietnamese. Maybe knowing these people reminded me there was a world beyond my town. Maybe my parents taught me to be culturally curious. I had to know these people, where they were from, why they were here. What it was about them that made them different from me. And when it was time for college, I absolutely had to go to “the melting pot,” New York City. My career would probably be in much better shape now, had I gone to Rhode Island instead, but I couldn’t bear the thought of four more years in New England. These cultural urges sent me to Africa when my friends were buying Eurorail passes, and because of them I’m not at all surprised to find myself living in a foreign country now. A lot of other people tell me the same thing: it’s fitting that I ended up in France. Maybe all this time I wanted to be the foreigner. Now that I have a job and a group of people that I see every day, that’s exactly what I am. The American girl. The one who doesn’t understand everything you say and will probably add something irrelevant to the conversation because she thinks you’re talking about something else. The one you have to stop and listen to because she speaks slowly, with...

I am pleased to say that after two years of writing for Fierce and Nerdy, I finally have enough material to write about one of my favorite preoccupations. My butt. After eighteen months of very sporadic freelance work, I finally have a regular job here in France. AYA, a popular graphic novel (its sixth volume was just released) about a group of girlfriends living in the Ivory Coast in the 1970s is being made into a feature film. I am a member of the animation team for AYA the movie. I’ve been working nearly a month now, and it’s great. At the beginning, I had so much trouble getting the butt right in my posing that my supervisor, the illustrator of the books (whose name I will not mention lest he should Google himself and have this butt-focused blog come up in the search results) gave me a lecture on the difference between European and African butts, complete with diagrams, which I will also not publish here, though they are cute. I’m a girl with ample junk in her own trunk, an artist who has been to Africa (a continent teeming with African butts) a few times, and I’ve always loved studying human anatomy. I should and do understand how butts work. Chalk it up to first week jitters. The point was made even clearer to me with a recent purchase of some straight leg jeans. When you don’t have a job and your dollar has become a euro, which is worth more than a dollar yet has the same buying power (the MacBook Air: $999 in the U.S., €999—aka $1329—in France), it’s hard to drop money on designer jeans that are fitted for curvy butts. So I got them on sale. Some of...

Maybe I’m not as smart as other people, or maybe I just get bored reading about normal people’s lives, but I’ve always had a preference for young adult fiction. I suppose it brings me back to that blissful time when I thought I could do anything, be anyone, the world was at my feet, waiting for me to take it over. All I had to do was choose which path to take. Now as I edge into my late 30s, doors are starting to close. I mean, not really, there’s that character on House who went to medical school in his forties, right? But in reality, my options are dwindling. The occasional, “I bet I would have really enjoyed studying biology,” thoughts are pretty much nixed now. I’ve chosen my path, meandering as it is, and now I have to see it through. And it’s not like I chose a path that makes me miserable. I get to create, write stories, draw pictures, and sometimes get paid for it. Maybe the fact that I’m in a constant state of creation is what attracts me to the characters in young adult books. These unfinished people, these kids who are figuring out what they’re good at in the midst of chaos. Young adult/middle grade fiction is unhindered by bad life decisions. By people hating their jobs, or facing a personal, unchangeable flaw that makes them miserable. There is no “Leaving Las Vegas” in young adult fiction, no watching someone who’s run out of options drink themself to death. The stories I like to read are about adolescent and teenage heros, saving the world from some really, really terrible doom to which they are personally connected. These kids never expected to be heros. They don’t want to...

In reaction to Tall Drink of Nerd’s post, I’m going to write about the fact that I’m NOT doing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. I did it last year, and I was the only person I knew doing it. This year, I feel like everyone I know is doing it. Not entirely true, but I can name at least four people all wrapped up in their daily word counts and getting to that magical 50,000 mark. The thing is, NaNoWriMo changed my life. A year ago I was settling in for my first winter in France. M and I got married on October 31, and I knew I would be authorized to work shortly thereafter. I looked for work, but didn’t have much luck, and when I realized that I wouldn’t actually have a job the day I got my working papers in early November, I decided it was safe to commit to the big challenge. In October, I signed up for NaNoWriMo and built my little profile page. But what with wedding preparations, I couldn’t do much more than read the inspirational emails coming from San Francisco, and try to keep up with the France chapter’s message board. No outlines, no research, all I had was the figment of an idea from something I’d heard on a French radio show. I didn’t come up with the story until November 3, and I didn’t start writing until M and I got back from our mini-honeymoon on November 5. If you do the math, 50,000 words is about 200 pages, which is pretty short for a novel, and it was really important for me to write the ending in November, or else I knew I would never finish it. This is why I...

I’m the wrong person to ask about the strikes and civil unrest happening here in France. I’m not paying much attention. I never paid much attention to politics in the U.S., unless there was an important election or debate, and here I am the same way. Wherever you go, there you are. But, as someone who isn’t taking part or even watching the news, here’s how the strikes have affected me: —The stepkids have missed 2 days of school since the beginning of September, and one afternoon of day care because their teachers and day care workers went on strike. —If I want to go into Paris, I have to check the métro website before leaving the house to see how often the trains are running. It usually says something like “one train on two” is running, which means, every other train. On strike days, it takes an extra half hour to go places, and then you have to rush home before 8pm, in case the trains drop down to one per hour or worse. —M couldn’t get gas on Sunday night, my FIL is trying to conserve gas, there are traffic jams caused by the lines that form at the gas stations that do have gas and if you’re in one of those lines you have to wait at least 20 minutes to fill up. What struck me most about the gas issue was that M didn’t even mention it until it became a discussion topic at a family dinner. One time there was a strike in LA that affected the bread delivery to Trader Joes. I bitched and moaned for weeks. They’re used to it here. It’s tradition. It used to be worse. Now, there are laws in place that prevent the...

Several years ago my three favorite girlfriends and I were being pulled in different directions. We were starting to grow up and settle down. We knew we couldn’t let our friendship die, so, over several bottles of wine, we made a pact and signed a napkin. To reunite on October 10, 2010. TenTenTen. That’s in three days. Come hell or high water. With babies, or husbands, it doesn’t matter, we’ll make it happen. TenTenTen. Ever since I moved to France in 2009, I knew I would go to the west coast on TenTenTen. But here we are, and I haven’t bought any plane tickets. One of us has a three-week old, and another is organizing, of all things, a polo match for the very same day. I really wanted the TenTenTen thing to work. To maintain some sort of continuity. To honor our agreement. It would be like a reunion of sorts, for a group of women who only vaguely knew each other in New York, and bonded once we all moved to California. But how do friends, once they’ve been separated by boundaries and families, stay together? I’m very out of touch with people I thought I would know my whole life. I realized the other day that I can’t remember the names of half of the people I worked or studied with in New York, even if we had been friends. What with relocating and growing up, it becomes harder and harder to stay in touch. Once babies are thrown into the equation, forget it. Everything changes. We need things like reunions and planned get-togethers. My mother recently got together with her friends from college, some of them she hadn’t seen in 40 years and she was thrilled. they plan to make it...

I’ve always found it hard to explain why exactly I experienced culture shock upon moving to France. It’s the little things,” I would say, when people asked what was different. So here is a little list of little things that are a little bit different, in France: My cat’s breath smells like 10 different languages. Which is really cool, while at the same time it reminds me how close my borders are. French is hard enough, if I want to venture farther I’ll have yet another language to contend with. Soft drinks are often equivalent in price to, or more expensive than wine or beer. No 99¢ two liter bottles of Coke here. “American food” is hamburgers. There are two major middle price “American” restaurant chains here with mildly racist “Old West” decor. Buffalo Grill and Indiana’s. If someone tells you they know of a really good American restaurant, it will still be a burger joint. By the way, in the last 16 months I have been blown away by exactly one French restaurant. But maybe I don’t get out enough. Marshmallows are different here. They come in strawberry and plain flavors, aren’t as fluffy as in the U.S. and are coated with sugar. But, I am happy to report, that they roast very well. They fluff up, get gooey in the middle and the sugar caramelizes so instead of turning black the marshmallow turns a pleasant creme brulé brown. You have to pay for the free toy at McDonald’s. In kindergarten and elementary school (until you have more than one teacher), the teacher is referred to Mistress or Master. Kids start learning how to write cursive letters in kindergarten. Everybody wears perfume (one of M’s strong recollections of the day we met was...

In August, I set myself a firm deadline to finish the rewrite of my novel, Annie’s Fish, by the end of the month. The first draft was so rough that it wasn’t so much a rewrite, where you take your chapters and rework them, as a write-the-whole-thing-again-almost-from-scratch because the first version is too far from where it needs to be. I lost a week in the middle of August because of family vacation, and in the last two weeks I really had to put my nose to the grindstone. By the last week, I was writing, actually writing, for four or five hours a day. When I wanted to stop, I said, no, this is your job, and you don’t get to stop. A few times, my body actually stood up and walked away from the computer, without asking permission. I had to scold myself, like a child: “That’s not how we do things. We don’t just get up and look for something else to do when it gets hard, we keep working. So sit down and pound on your forehead until you figure out what sentence to write next.” It was fantastic. I felt like I was really onto something. Writing like a professional. Using my time well. But I still didn’t make my deadline. When I told a friend this she said, “So what’s your new deadline?” I was like, oh, I can do that? I haven’t failed, I’m just a day or two behind. I used to have the mentality that if I blew a self-imposed deadline, it was proof that I wasn’t committed enough to do the project, or even be the writer or artist I claimed to be. The whole project was a failure, and I would never succeed at...

. a favorite blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach Gudrun Says: I decided to rerun The Loulou Edition because now, nearly a year later, it’s good for me to see how things have changed. I’ve come a long way in my French step-mothering, and I have a long way to go. I may not have the patience that comes with being a biological mom, but I can communicate better, I am more confident, and I am becoming very, very attached to these two now five-and-three-quarter-year-olds. From September 24, 2009 In France, loulou means … well I guess it means kid, as in: eh les loulous [hey kids, listen up], or gros bisous aux loulous [big kiss to the kids]. M happens to have 2 loulous, who are twins, a boy and a girl, one month shy of their 5th birthday. In spite of my age I have not had much experience with children, and when I first arrived on the scene as the part-time-sort-of-step-mom, I had no idea what I was doing. I have had to make a lot of changes. The first one was to accept that I was now, unavoidably, a grown-up, and kids depend on grown-ups for everything. Not only to feed, bathe, and protect them, but to zip jackets, to remember where they put their toys, to explain ‘why’, to kiss their booboos (it actually works), and to read them stories at night. Up until a few months ago, all the caretaking I had done consisted of pouring out kibble, changing water, and cleaning litter boxes. I was afraid that if M went out for more than 15 minutes the loulous would kill each other then burn down the house. When they cried I didn’t know how to help them, and when...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach Just to warn you, I’m in a very bad mood. I’m in one of those places where life sucks and I don’t have the energy to do anything about it. I’m also quite sure that it’s a geography thing. Being in France, that is. Sure, it’s great to live in (near) Paris, the city of lights, it’s so beautiful and the way of life is so evolved, but yeah, no, not all the time. I binged on American television all afternoon, in hopes that seeing Don Draper and Restaurant Wars might ease my homesickness, but it didn’t work. Part of the problem is, it’s August. August in France, means everything comes screaming to a halt and people leave. Offices, restaurants, and bakeries close down. If you’re looking for a job, or waiting for an overdue check in the mail, forget it. Our neighbor’s house has been shuttered up for weeks. Parisians go to the coasts and the countryside, to their summer homes and the homes of their friends. Their void is filled with American picture-snapping tourists, and no it does not comfort me to go to the Champs-Elysee and listen to their accents. This year, our family is unable to take an August vacation, in fact, M has been working twice as hard for all of August, which leaves me feeling quite isolated. When I was invited to spend a few days in Deauville, a little beach town on the coast of Normandy, I jumped at the chance. The only problem is, now that I’m back, I’m even more bummed out than when I left. The friend I went to see is a fellow American-married-to-a-Frenchman. She’s been here for eight years, as opposed to my one, and we...

I used to be the biggest coward. I was terrified of standing up in front of other people. Of having the class stare at me when we had to do speeches in 7th grade. Of playing in violin recitals. But music was easier, I played in a youth orchestra and I loved being on stage with a hundred other kids, I was a small part of a bigger organism. If it was just me, standing there, a room or theater full of people waiting to hear what will happen: yech. Terrifying. At the same time, a secret part of me wanted to be a theater person. I joined the drama club in ninth grade because all my friends were doing it. Every day we did theater exercises, games like freeze, where a few people acted out a scene, and you were supposed to yell “freeze” and jump into the scene and change it to something else. In a whole year I jumped in once. In our end-of-the-year play, I had a non-speaking role that walked onto the stage one time. And I was terrified. After that, no more theater, even though I sometimes looked longingly into the room where they rehearsed and built their sets. The idea of auditioning, and then acting for the world to see scared the pants off me, and I always wondered if I was missing out. One day in grad school, our beloved drawing teacher brought in an improv coach for the day. He’s the kind of guy an office manager would hire to build teamwork skills amongst the employees. I had arrived early, as usual, and was able to tell the teacher and the acting coach that I had crippling stage fright and would just be watching. But...

I didn’t cry when my great grandmother died. It freaked me out that death had come, leaving her empty body in the laz-y-boy, smelling like old lady and old clothes. The air that lingered in her mouth would have been cold and dry and sour. That’s what bothered me. But a few days later, I walked across our navy blue carpet in the den to find Dad plugging in a 19-inch color television. He had bought it with his inheritance, all of his inheritance I believe. It had a knob that you pulled out to turn it on, then you turned it clockwise to increase the volume. There were two larger knobs, one that went from two to thirteen, incorporating our three local stations: six, eight and thirteen, plus Maine Public Television on channel ten, and New Hampshire on eleven. The other knob, UHF or VHF, I never understood what that was for.I remember impatiently dialing numbers on rotary phones. If you went too fast, you’d have to start over because the original number wouldn’t dial all the way up. Then you had to wait for the little disk to spin back to its starting place before you could put in the next number. What a relief it was when the phone company started providing push-button phones. They were so fast, and you could make music with them. Sometimes I just punched numbers to listen to the noises, and occasionally the line would start ringing. No one appreciated it when random little kids called them. But back then you could call anyone without getting caught. You could call a boy and listen as his mother got annoyed, “Who is this?” Boys never answered the phone. One time (after the first Pee Wee Herman movie...

Fête de la Musique is a now international music festival that started in France 28 years ago. The idea is to celebrate and make music, and  amateur and professional musicians are invited to play concerts anywhere and everywhere that they can. Orchestras play in parks, concert halls open their doors, and restaurants provide amps and lighting to local bands. I missed La Fête last year, so this time I was excited to hear what I could hear. For a Monday night, Paris was hopping. I started in the 5th arrondisement near Place Monge (across the street from Hemingway’s old flat, in fact), where there are so many bars and restaurants clustered on narrow intertwining streets that you could hear two or three different bands playing at the same time, and not all of them were in key. When M was released from his first day in the new coal mines, we railed it over to another city block in the 18th arrondisement to see our favorite up-and-coming local band Famille Grendy. The party was already started on the métro. Trains were packed with couples and groups of friends young and old, chatting away, bubbling with a slightly drunken, music loving enthusiasm. At one station, a couple of Adidas-clad urban dancer types piled into the train then danced in confined synchronicity to hip hop beats thumping from a plastic shoulder bag that looked like (and apparently was) a mini-boom box. We got off at Pigalle, and walked behind three wobbly teenagers in the midst of a heated debate about how they would get their next bottle of wine, even though the half bottle of rosé they still had would probably have done them in. After several hundred meters of sex shops and strip joints, we turned...

“I was happy enough doing my rebellious, nerdy, arty thing, but resented the popular kids, I guess because I wasn’t one of them.” From arty rebel to awesome expat, click on the pic to read the rest of Gudrun’s THEN and NOW story at...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach It is ironic that I should start reading the restored edition of A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, the unfinished, posthumously (originally published in 1965, annotated, rearranged and republished in 2009) published account of his early years spent in Paris during the 1920s the same week that Ernessa should declare this “Book Week” on Fierce and Nerdy. What better book for an expat writer living in Paris to review than the memoir of an expat writer living in Paris? I am not a huge reader of Hemingway, in fact I have always believed, and I don’t even know specifically why, that as a woman I would not like his work or might be offended by it. But I found this first hand account of his early years as a writer extremely interesting and well written, and packed with useful nuggets of advice. A Moveable Feast covers the five years Ernest Hemingway spent in Paris from 1921 to 1926. It was post-war, pre-war, and he was a WWI veteran in his own early twenties. He speaks a lot on his identity as a young writer, his practice of the craft and what he can learn from other writers. I read this because my mother was coming to visit and she wanted to know more about literary Paris. I knew there had been times when great artists socialized together, gathered around the same bars and restaurants and frequented the posh apartment of one art enthusiast named Gertrude Stein. I didn’t know much more beyond that, and I still don’t know why Paris in the 20s was the place to be for said young writers and artists. That will take a few more memoirs and biographies. This book discusses neighborhoods I...

I’m in the final days of a very long three week period of solitude. M has been working in Montreal, taking part in the filming of a special-effects laden movie you’ll hopefully go see next year. I’ve spent many years of my life living alone and loving it, but now that I’m married, three weeks sans hubby is an awfully long time. And it’s not just that I don’t see him, we’re 6 hours apart and he’s working 17 hour days with no internet on set. So it’s very tricky to time talking to him, and our conversations have been reduced to a five minute gmail chat between his morning shower and the continental breakfast at his hotel. If he doesn’t oversleep. Suffice to say, I have a lot of time to myself. Which I normally love. When M left, I made myself a big list of things to do around the house. Like hanging picture frames, cleaning out the messy corner of the yard, etc. But one must be careful what one does when one is alone. The day after M left, I set to mowing the lawn for the first time this year. The side of our house had been overrun with thigh-high weeds that I thought would be too much for our mower. So I went at it, grabbing each weed cluster at its base and pulling with my legs until the ground gave way to a 6 inch root. But then something bit me. Seriously, teeth and all, bit. That’s what it felt like anyway. I searched for a little creature with sharp teeth, perhaps a Potter-esque garden gnome, but no dice. There was one very angry looking plant, with jagged leaves. It had to be the culprit. I stared...

Three years ago, before I had even submitted my film to the animation festival in France where I met my husband, I lived in Los Angeles. I had finished grad school, and I felt old. I listened to a lot of NPR. I know it’s not the coolest way to discover a band, but one day Terry Gross interviewed Eugene Hutz, the lead singer and founder of Gogol Bordello. Gogol Bordello are a group of immigrants living in New York City, and their music is self-described as gypsy punk, with chipper melodies and driving rhythms. At the time, a very good friend and I were working full time as a small animation team on a mostly live action film. I’ll call her my “school-friend,” because we met at CalArts. She hailed from one of those Asian countries so well represented in artsy American cities, and we started listening to Gogol Bordello every day at work. Truly addictive, energizing and inspiring music, and so sing-a-long-able even if some of the lyrics are in Russian or Spanish. I discovered they were coming to town and we bought tickets, two months in advance. We were so excited. But at the time, my heart was floundering: I was recovering from a long-term-relationship breakup, working two freelance jobs outside of my full time job, and my BFF of 16 years was about to leave town forever. I was having trouble acting normal, and my school-friend/coworker and I stopped getting along. I don’t remember the catalyst, but we stopped talking, which was bad because our desks faced each other, so we spent 40 hours a week feeling awkward and tense. We didn’t laugh anymore, we misunderstood each others’ intentions. I don’t remember all of the details, but it was simply,...

When job hunting, once I actually resort to desperate measures, something often comes along. Two or three times I have found work the day after signing up with a temp agency. This time, feeling hopeless about ever finding a job to get me out of the house, I commit to paying the 100 euro annual dues to use the American Library in Paris. Having a place to go where I can sit at a desk, plug in my computer and stay for hours on end without anyone scowling at me is something I sorely need. I go, I pay, I set up at a round wooden table in the reading area. Then my phone rings. It’s a call about a freelance job that’ll start the next day. My first French work. Of course I say yes. For the rest of the day, I self-immerse. I listen to, read, and watch everything I can find in French because nobody’s going to speak English to me at the office. The first day on the job, I do okay. As long as people speak clearly and directly, I understand them. But people don’t always speak that way.I do my work, but I’m frustrated that my job performance is being influenced by something I can’t control. Language comprehension. I ask questions, I re-say things to make sure I’ve understood, but there are still mishaps, miscommunications, whatnot.I feel guilty. Who am I to walk in and ask people to treat me differently, just because I want to live in their glorious country? I become quiet and fearful, and long for the day when French will be easy. But it gets easier, and I stop fretting as much. I survive three days on the job, then the project is done....

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach M’s work sent him on a last minute business trip to Montreal. He managed to work it into the bargain that I get to go. too. Montreal is a five hour drive from my hometown of Portland, Maine. And it happens to be the week that my cousin is coming back from California for a baby shower, celebrating the first great-grandchild born on our side of the family. So after a few days exploring Montreal, a truly bilingual city that is the perfect place for an American/French couple to visit, I am pulling up to the U.S. border in a lime green Hyundai with Quebec plates. I hand the border officer my American passport and a California driver’s license, and have my French carte de séjour handy just in case he wants more ID. He says, “Where do you live?” “France.” He looks at my documents. “Where are you going?” “Portland, Maine. I’m from there.” “You have a California driver’s licence.” “Yeah. I used to—” “Uh, okay… Where are you coming from?” “Montreal. My husband was sent there on a business trip and I…” Please don’t tell me to pull over so you can search my car. “You’re just all confused aren’t you?” “I guess so.” Don’t tell me to pull over, or I’ll miss the 6:00 pm dinner with my nonagenarian grandfather. “Where do you work?” “I don’t work yet, I’ve only been in France a year.” I know this is no excuse. He says, “It’s probably a good thing that you don’t work. You’re all confused anyway.” I heartily agree. “Okay,” he says, and hands me my documents. “Okay?” He gives me a little salute and wishes me a nice day. As I pull away, I...

I have just returned from a trip to the annual Bologna Children’s Book Fair. The fair is set up so publishers from all over the world can and show off their new titles, hoping to sell the rights to publishers in other countries, as I understand it. It was kind of like Comicon, in that there were rooms the size of airplane hangars filled with tables and booths of pretty books, but I only saw one person in costume (a big plush dog), and it really wasn’t for the fans. So why was I there? Every other year, The Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has an international conference in conjunction with the Bologna Book fair, and I am a member of SCBWI. SCBWI is based in Los Angeles, and now has outposts of English-writing writers all over the world. I joined the French chapter in November so I could attend a conference on picture book making, and then I signed up to go to Bologna. SCBWI covers all children’s literature, from board books for babies to young adult fiction, and their conference was very well rounded. Even though I am sometimes an illustrator, I attended as a writer, so when the group broke up into writers and illustrators, I stayed to hear the advice for writers. Our first speaker was young adult novelist Ellen Hopkins. Her titles include Crank, Glass, and Tricks, and yes, your first guess about their difficult subject matters is correct. The best thing I took away from Ellen’s talk was to not talk down to kids, and don’t be afraid to tackle tough subjects… or use the f-word. She shared several pieces of fan mail with us, missives from kids who are in the same boats as...

Whatta fierce and nerdy week! Here are my thoughts: 1. I just love that France requires a chest x-ray from its would-be citizens. I wonder why… 2. Poor Robin actually asked me if it was okay to self-promote on the blog, and I answered something along the lines of “Absolutely not, b/c I don’t believe in it — especially when it comes to my own projects.” Then she profusely apologized and rewrote her piece before I could tell her that I was just kidding. Luckily, she had the original saved, but I really do wish there was a a way to indicate sarcasm in email.  I think it would be cool to just be able to indicate sarcasm with a ~ mark after the sentence that you don’t really mean. What do you think? Anywho, if you have a second, use it to help Robin and her fiance get a free wedding from Crate & Barrel. 3. Monique’s piece on David Patterson got me to thinking about how so few of us have good back-up plans for anything b/c we just don’t think we’ll ever need them. I guess one good result of being cynical, morbid, and anxious is that I have (at the very least mental) back-up plans for just about everything. That’s the only way I can function day-to-day. 4. What’s funny is that Amy has never struck me as particularly shy. But then again, so many people, including my sister and BFF, have accused me of not being shy, even though I often proclaim that I am. My BFF is not shy and my sister is much shyer than I am. But I do wonder if we all just have a general inability to recognize shyness in others. I feel that...

After my marriage in October, I could finally request a carte de séjour, which is a sort of resident alien card. There are different levels, some are for students, some for retired people. As the wife of a French citizen, mine is familiale and gives me the right to work, but I still have to renew it every year for the next four before I can apply for something more permanent. To get your carte de séjour from the prefecture, you have to meet with the OFII [Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration – no need to translate there]. My convocation from the OFII (they’re really into convocations here, letters from official places telling you when to show up at other official places), came three months after they said it would, and instructed me to show up for a half day information session where I would learn about the requirements I have to fulfill in order to live here, be assigned an integration agent, and see the doctor. Whenever an arm of the government tells you to show up somewhere, it’s safe to assume it will be a hellish morning of lines and vending machines and hard plastic seats, but surprisingly, it wasn’t too bad. We had to sign a contract saying we promised to learn about the country, be law-abiding citizens, and obtain 4 attestations proving that we have completed day long courses on Life in France and Civics in France, as well as have met the French language requirement (the DILF, if you’re wondering), and do a skills assessment so we can look for work. M believes the contract (which has only been around since 2006) is a violation of personal rights, but I figure the government has the right to...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach To prepare myself for my own “middle grade” novel rewrite, I’ve been studying the genre. Middle grade is the level below young adult, and from what I’ve learned, it is a short-ish, chapter book that doesn’t have sex or bad violence in it, and it could feature talking animals. A child may read a middle grade novel alone, or have it read to them. Even during the years that I wasn’t a big fan of kids, I was always a big fan of fiction written for kids. I can’t say how many times I’ve read or listened to Harry Potter (it’s perfect background noise for long days of animation production when all I have to do is draw the same character over and over again). The same goes for the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (of which, The Golden Compass is book one). Both of these series start in a rather innocent place, I might say that the first 3 Harry Potter books are middle grade, then when people start dying and snogging, it moves into the young adult genre. The Pullman books are rather on the edge too, depending on how you feel about their content. Every time I visit my parents, I search the house for favorite books from my own youth. Off the top of my head, I remember adoring Stuart Little, and The Trumpet and the Swan, both by E.B. White, and The Cricket in Times Square, by George Selden. The latter of which I recently reread. The Cricket in Times Square was originally published in 1960, and my 1980 edition is  yellowed with a brittle binding. I had vaguely recalled that there were a few Chinese men in the story, but...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach Many indoor playgrounds in France, like the kind you find in MacDo (MacDonald’s) or Quick (a Belgian fast food place), are multi-leveled structures that are netted in, and everything inside and out is covered with soft padding. In the bottom there is often a ball bin, then there are holes in the floors to get to the second and third levels. There are firemen’s poles and ropes to slide down. The kids crawl around, crash into each other, scream at their parents to watch them, and never finish their Happy Meals. But someone invented something even better. We recently went to a 5-year-old’s birthday party at a place called Planète Filou. It was nothing but indoor playgrounds just like the ones in the fast food places, but enormous. One long wall, floor to 20 foot ceiling, was covered with a maze of padded recreation that included a small football area, inflatable houses, trampolines, and slides, and the biggest multi-level crawling around structure we had ever seen. In the center of the room there was a collection of round tables and metal chairs full of grumpy looking French parents wearing blue cloth booties over their shoes. If we hadn’t been surrounded by screaming children and primary colors, I would have said we were in a Parisian café. Everyone wore their usual somber tones, read  books with no pictures on the covers, and drank espresso out of tiny paper cups. Smoking was of course forbidden, but I’m sure many of them could have really used a cigarette. I know places like this exist in the U.S., but I don’t remember them being this great when I was little. I found the best thing about it (and perhaps the biggest difference)...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach What the heck is bechamel sauce anyway? A white sauce, I’m told. Does that mean it’s made of cream? What does it taste like? What do you use it for? Apparently, if you want my stepkids to eat cauliflower, you smother it in bechamel. As a new step-mom I’d been quietly resisting cooking anything too complicated. I’d seen their tantrums over vegetables in the wrong state (cooked, uncooked, too big), their panic and tears when presented a plate of shellfish. So I used a time-proven weekly menu of pastas, purées, and fish sticks that never fostered fussing. And the kids were getting bored. So, for Christmas, I received a le saucier. A glorious counter-top appliance consisting of a hot plate and a sauce pan with a plastic paddle perched in the middle of it. The paddle turns, scooping along the bottom of the pan, to insure your sauce never burns or gets lumpy. It has three buttons, and comes with a recipe book in French and German. Bechamel, listed under White Sauce, is made of butter, flour and milk. You put in the butter, it turns and melts. Then you add the flour. It turns and cooks. Then you add the milk and it turns and turns and turns until there is a thick white sauce in the pan. M told me they usually put some vinegar in at the end. How much? He didn’t know. So I made the sauce, and I added some cider vinegar, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. The kids didn’t like it. It was a bit bland. Seriously, white sauce on white cauliflower? Bland.But after tasting it, I realized that bechamel was the white sauce oozing out of the delicious lasagna sold by the...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach This will be my third Christmas (in my life) away from Maine. The first was in 1995, when, after spending a semester abroad in Madagascar I changed my plane ticket so I could stay in Kenya for a week with a friend. We spent Christmas Eve on safari, eating oxtail soup from a can and drinking Tusker beer to the sound of monkey chatter in the trees. It will be different this year. Not only is this my first Christmas in France, it is my first Christmas in a long time with little kids. Little kids who know that they need to be good so the Père Noël will leave them presents under the tree. Little kids who get so excited when Père Noël comes to visit their school, even if he does look much skinner and younger than when they saw him a few days before at the mall. We got a tree last week. It’s a big one, almost touching the ceiling, and its base is a halved log with a hole drilled into it. I must remember to pick up a Christmas tree stand when I’m in Maine for New Years. When the box of ornaments was opened up, I was surprised to see mound of blue garlands. Living in the U.S., I always associated the colors blue and white with Hanukah, but here in France they signify ice and snow and are used everywhere for Christmas decorating. France does know how to decorate. Most main streets are twinkling with white lights, and some people decorate their houses. One thing I’ve seen a number of times is an inflatable Santa Claus, excuse me, Père Noël, who is suspended to look like he’s climbing up the...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach I am now a step-mother to 5-year-old twins. As there are two of them, and one is a total clown, they are almost always “at play.” Meaning they are easily overcome by uncontrollable giggles that often lead to exhaustion and tears. I’m jealous. I remember the feeling of not being able to stop giggling with my childhood friend Becky. Sneaking around the house to annoy our parents and at success, running off screaming in laughter. I remember sweating from laughing so hard, not being able to calm down, and how unfair it seemed when our parents pulled rank. Once, in third grade, Mrs. MacVane had left our classroom with a shouted ultimatum of “One more sound, and there will be trouble.” But that wouldn’t be possible, because I had a pencil with a bright orange hair-ball and googlie eyes on the end of it. I just had to show my friend Jenny how, if I spun it, the hair would all stick out to the side. Because we were supposed to be quiet, our giggles came out hoarse and uncontrollable. Mrs. MacVane appeared mid-laugh and we were sent, no, dragged to my first grade teacher Mrs. Sullivan’s room, where we had to sit with the six-year-olds until we learned how to act our age. Though it was mortifying, we continued to snicker all the way through the punishment. I didn’t have any siblings to laugh with, but some of my best memories of my parents are moments where everybody got the giggles. Once at dinner, Dad said something astute (this was in the 80s) and the three of us simultaneously flopped out a hand and said “Totally.”  Then we laughed for about 5 minutes. It was the precision...

What an awesome week! Sami got her baby back on Days of Our Lives and Al Gore was on 30 Rock. Plus I’m in the middle of a really good book. Seriously could life be any better? HELLO FRIDAY re: FIERCE ANTICIPATION: November 13-15, in which Ryan Dixon dissed both 2012 and Cincinnati. Kyle: I just watched 2012 at midnight last night, and it was like 10,000 time better than I thought it would be, I actually kind of enjoyed it. Cincinnati has Graeter’s ice cream, and unless you have tried that you can’t really say anything bad about Cincinnati. I had to bribe a security guard at the school post office to brake in so that the ice cream my grandma send me would not melt… it was the best money I ever spent. PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY re: Tall Drink of Nerd: Bonding Over Board Games, in which Amy Robinson confessed that she hails from a family of cold-hearted trash talkers and solicited suggestions for more board games for them diss each other over. (Thought) Chuck: My brother turned me on to “Settlers of Catan” and that’s a really fun one – too bad it’s only good for 4 players (6 with the expansion set.) Another one we played this weekend which we enjoyed a lot was “Bang” – it’s a spaghetti western card game where outlaws and renegades try to shoot the sherrif and vice versa. We played with about 10 people and it was hysterical. We also played a farming strategy game called “Agricola” which was cute. Another fun one that is similar is “Guillotine” – a card game where you collect nobles from a line of people on their way to be executed. You can play cards that screw other players...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach When I spent a summer in Ghana, another young traveler told me it took 6 weeks to physically adapt to a place. I decided to run with that idea, and stopped purifying my drinking water, a choice I regretted for 3 months. See if you can identify the pun in there. Throw an ‘s’ on the word ‘run’ and add on ‘for three months’ and there you are. Yes, I know I was an idiot. Now I’ve been in France for six months, and a few weeks ago I married my Frenchman, M. I feel like, with all the hullaballoo of adjusting to a new culture, and of planning a marriage in a foreign country, six months must be some kind of adaptation milestone, right? According to my book “Culture Shock, A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette,” things should be balancing out pretty soon. After the three month dip into total sh*ttiness (I was a wreck in August, my language skills got worse, I was discouraged, whiny, depressed, tired and prone to sickness, just like the book said), small victories give hope, and eventually by month six, things start to feel normal. Or maybe I’m just embracing abnormality. The other day M and I were sitting in our local pizzeria, eating too-lemony turkey piccata. There were only a few other tables occupied, and a couple at another table was staring. “They’re staring,” I said. “Of course they are, you’re American,” M said. Now M is the one with spiky hair and a face full of piercings, but he’s probably right. You don’t hear many American accents in Noisy le Grand. African, Italian, Portuguese, but not American. And if I heard a French accent in a half empty...

I have taken a huge step in my slow march to habituation. I got a French cellphone. You were expecting something more profound? Until recently, I had been using my iPhone 2.0 with AT&T, which was useful when I could find free wifi, or for the occasional text message, but not good for much else but housing my music collection and making really expensive phone calls. Now I have another iPhone and an account with Orange, the mobile and internet branch of France Télécom. I pay the same amount I paid in the U.S. for a fraction of the service. Yup, a brand new iPhone, a really fast one, in white this time, with a clear protective shell. A 10-digit local phone number to help navigate my Parisian adventure. Youpi! Except on the inside, it’s exactly the same as the old one. The same little square icons, the same bookmarks and alarm clock function, the same downloaded applications. It doesn’t feel all that new. What made it worse was syncing my contacts to it. Sure, there are a few French people in there, but I also have the long list of acquaintances and contacts that have been in there for years. Names that I thought would be useful once, so I held on to them. A guy I went on one date with who wasn’t so bad, a woman at the L.A. Times who interviewed me for a job then lost the funding to hire me, a saxophone player who I freelanced with for one week in 2003, and whose band I kept meaning to go see. Old apartment building managers, former coworkers, my mechanic in L.A. And there are some names I don’t recognize at all. I wouldn’t call any of those people now,...

Is it just me or was this a really crazy week at (1-year) ole Fierce and Nerdy. We had placenta bears, religion, and cemeteries and it ain’t even Halloween yet! But here are the best of the best comments from the week. HELLO FRIDAY re: Guess the Random Lyric [Friday], in which guest lyric-giver CH tried to win the week with “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Joshua: Arg, I’m awful at these, so rather than simply try to guess it I’m going to, by process of elimination help the rest of you by saying with some hesitation that I’m RELATIVELY sure this song isn’t from Slayer :p PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY re: Fierce in Seattle: That Time of the Year, in which Kelli Bielema encouraged all women to get an annual mammogram — even if you’re under 40. All of the comments were great, but I chose this one, b/c she used the word “boobies.” Peg: very cool. I had a mammo b/c I was having pain in my boobies and they thought there may have been abnormalities so I had to have an MRI. It was very scary but everything came back ok. We kind of decided it was due to an increase in caffeine as I had just started drinking “water joe”. I don’t drink coffee or soda so I think my body was just freaking a bit.  Anyhoo, now I drink green tea and my boobs don’t hurt anymore but I’m still scared. OH, IT’S TUESDAY re: Book Simple: The Perfect Short Story for Office Drones, in which our newest blogger, Amy Brown admits she doesn’t like short stories, but then goes on to explain why Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” just might be the perfect short story for office workers everywhere. JWR:...

As a future inhabitant living in France on a tourist visa, I am often conflicted on which role to play when I visit one of Paris’s many touristic sites. This happened the other day when I went to Père Lachaise. Père Lachaise is a massive cemetery in the 20th arrondisement. It is where Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Emile Cohl, Gertrude Stein, Modigliani, Seurat, Delacroix, Marcel Proust, Édith Piaf, and Jim Morrison, among many, many others, are buried. Some say the most famous cemetery in the world, and for some reason, the presence of Jim Morrison it even more famous. At the map of famous graves, the people in front of me were pointing at his name, which made me really not want to go looking for it. That would be so touristy, I told myself, I am more sophisticated than that. I should search out the real contributors to our culture, the artists and writers, not some live-fast-die-young American rock star. Even if there was a movie made about him. But I did note Jim’s location and started walking. I didn’t realize just how big and tightly packed the cemetery would be. Chock-a-block graves and tombs often with only a foot of space between them. Nothing like the spacious American cemeteries I am used to with shady oak trees, manicured lawns, and one body to a grave. In Père Lachaise, there might be several families bunched together in one tomb, their remains stacked in coffins beneath it, and many of the older tombs were in disarray. Cobweb-strewn, doors hanging open on one hinge, silk flowers faded to gray. It is the living relatives’ responsibility to keep the tombs and graves in good condition, and sometimes families simply die off. Another gloomy...

Good Gawd, mama’s tired. Miss Betty is calling herself trying to cut a tooth, and she has been letting us know that she’s not happy about this situation at various times in the morning for like two nights now. Not cool, man. Not cool. But at least the comments did us right this weeked. Check ’em out! HELLO FRIDAY re: Fierce Anticipation: Sept. 18-20, in which Ryan Dixon rhapsodized about his love for Buffalo Wild Wings, which thankfully has opened a location in Burbank as of Monday, Sept. 21st. Ronnn: Ryan: I cannot believe that you like Buffalo Wild Wings over the awesome Quaker Steak & Lube Wings, or the huge Coney wings in downtown Indiana. PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY re: Three Line Lunch: Red Waits, in which Jeff Rogers waxes poetic about his dog, Red, who is nearly blind and deaf, but continues to wait for him by the door, even though he often can’t see or hear him come in. marsha: sniff. and smile. at the same time. thank you for this OH, IT’S TUESDAY re: Political Physics: Will the Christian Right Be the Death of the Republican Party?, in which Monique King-Viehland wonders if the Republican Party is getting eaten alive by its right-wing, Christian base. CH: I do wonder if the Goldwater Republicans and Blue dog Democrats shouldn’t start a third party that reflects [their] views? It seems like both of them are being marginalized by the current system. WOW, IT’S WEDNESDAY re: Wonderfully Awful: Kitty Poop Chronicles, in which Robin Rosenzweig chronicled her cat’s battle with diarrhea puddles, which he made all over the apartment. Good times. AmyQOTWF: When our cat KoE had her glands expressed, she had the worst diarrhea. She would be laying next to me and get that...

In France, loulou means … well I guess it means kid, as in: eh les loulous [hey kids, listen up], or gros bisous aux loulous [big kiss to the kids]. M happens to have 2 loulous, who are twins, a boy and a girl, one month shy of their 5th birthday. In spite of my age I have not had much experience with children, and when I first arrived on the scene as the part-time-sort-of-step-mom, I had no idea what I was doing. I have had to make a lot of changes. The first one was to accept that I was now, unavoidably, a grown-up, and kids depend on grown-ups for everything. Not only to feed, bathe, and protect them, but to zip jackets, to remember where they put their toys, to explain ‘why’, to kiss their booboos (it actually works), and to read them stories at night. Up until a few months ago, all the caretaking I had done consisted of pouring out kibble, changing water, and cleaning litter boxes. I was afraid that if M went out for more than 15 minutes the loulous would kill each other then burn down the house. When they cried I didn’t know how to help them, and when they were bad I didn’t know how to make them be good again. It can’t be that hard, I thought, kids look after other kids all the time. Hell I did it in high school. But as I plan to be a part of their lives for a long time, I can’t be the babysitter they coerce bonbons out of then ignore when I tell them to do something. And as I haven’t had the last almost 5 years of their lives to learn how to be a good grown...

I always felt that “Back-to-School” excitement when Labor Day approached. I used to think it was from spending so many years in school, but now I realize the feeling is universal. In France they call it la rentrée, which I translate as “the re-entry,” a term I associate with NASA’s space-craft burning through the Earth’s atmosphere to come back home. As most French people and businesses take a month off from work in the summer, la rentrée is fitting not just for the kids with their new notebooks and sneakers, but for everyone. Floating down from summer vacation, going back to the organized regimes of school and work, it is definitely a return to solid ground. For me it’s been a shift from 4 hours of fun, safe French classes every day to figuring out how to make my way in a foreign country. I’ve been studying French almost consistently since I got here in May, and now I’m no longer a student. Not because I’ve mastered the language, but because I want to master it. If I had come here as a low-income immigrant and spoke no French at all, I believe the government would have provided me with free, basic French classes that would enable me to buy bread and métro tickets, maybe work in a factory. But when you are at a more advanced level with the goal of fluency (the level I achieved this summer is called “threshhold” which means I can get by on my own, but I’m far from fluent), you have to go to the private language schools, and the classes cost a fortune. A fortune in both money and time, and I don’t have much of either to spare. I need the time to find a...

Greetings from Santa Fe! I’ve been road tripping all week, but lucky for us, your comments totally didn’t take a vacation. Check ’em out: HELLO FRIDAY re: Fierce OR Nerdy: Geek Love Memorial, in which slpc honored John Hughes in the best way possible — with a huge poll of his movies. If you haven’t put in your vote yet, pick your favorite Hughes movie now. Oh, and here’s a pretty convincing argument for The Breakfast Club. (Thought) Chuck: While I think FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF is an overall better movie structurally and story-wise, THE BREAKFAST CLUB is the quintessential John Hughes movie and an archetype for 1980’s misunderstanding & disillusionment, and therefore it gets my vote. Cue “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” from Simple Minds. It should also be noted that PRETTY IN PINK, though written by Hughes, was not directed by him – those honors went to Howard Deutch. All the more reason why THE BREAKFAST CLUB should be the winner. PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY If you have a chance the thoughtful comments on my mother-of-a-biracial-baby post which advises/rants against asking a woman holding a baby if that baby is hers are all worth a read. But I loved that we had our first sibling argument in the comments of Amy Robinson’s post, “Bad Cook,”  in which she put forth that her mother was a good baker but a really bad cook. Amy’s sister totally disagreed. janicpanny: LIAR!! Did we really grow up in the same house? I fondly remember Mom’s cooking as good ordinary comfort food. Perhaps your memory is skewed by the silly note your silly “friend” wrote? No gourmet food at house, and I hated liver & onions and all things veggie (which kept me at the dinner table for sometimes...

As most of you know, I’m living in (ok, near) Paris and trying my best to make like I’m a French girl. In the summer, particularly August, the Parisian thing to do is to leave Paris and head for the coast. The south of France is ideal of course, on the Mediterranean, but there is also the Atlantic Coast (Brittany) and the English Channel (the Normandy beaches are great for windsurfing). I suppose you could leave France too, but that’s not really done much. I am lucky enough to have wound up in St. Tropez, on the southern coast between Marseille and Nice, and since my brain is too sun-drenched to write anything meaningful this week, I thought I’d share some pics. The history of St. Tropez goes back to the Roman Empire, but in recent centuries it was primarily a fishing village and military port, until artists and writers started to visit in the 1890s. A second wave of people came in the 1920s, then it blew up into what it is now in the 1950s. Brigitte Bardot is said to be responsible for the last wave of popularity, as all eyes were on her, and she has a house in St. Tropez. She’s still here, I got to see the gate to her villa. Impressed? Now, St. Tropez is a well known tourist destination, though I’m pretty sure I first heard the name because of the tanning lotion. The streets are just wide enough for a bicycle to pass a Smart Car, and they’re packed with fancy restaurants, designer boutiques, and people dressed in as little as possible. St. Trop is especially accessible if you happen to be very rich. The taxis are Audis, Jaguars, and Mercedes, and the hotels (that look...

Just what is in Sauce Americaine and how should one properly spell “yay?” We’ve learned a lot this week at good ole Fierce and Nerdy. Check it out: HELLO FRIDAY re: Fierce Anticipation: July 24-26, in which Ryan Dixon told us the worst guinea pig story in the history of ever. Seriously, you’ve got to read it to believe it. Larry: Was that the original script to “G-Force”? Troma Films present…a Lloyd Kaufman film…”G-Force: The Carnage.” I’ll have to show this to my daughter when she grows up. Oh…and thanks for mention of my late mother’s breast. Classy! PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY re: Tall Drink of Nerd: Recession Recess, in which Amy Robinson gives us a bunch of great free, recession-ready workout tips, including monkey bar pull-ups. Her husband co-signed that check in the comments: Seen: Just to reinforce what Amy said, she does look ridiculous when she’s doing her exercises. (I’m just kidding, she looks sexy, but she’s too modest to say that), but it’s not about how you look, it’s about feeling better and I can tell you that nothing makes you feel better than getting out in the fresh air. Here’s a website and podcast to prove it. http://www.alleghenyfront.org/story.html?storyid=… OH, IT’S TUESDAY re: Political Physics: Dying for Reform, in which Monique King-Viehland put forth that self-serving, insurance-company pandering Democrats may be the biggest obstacle to getting healthcare reform passed. Donna: See this reminds me of the old saying……You Cannot Trust Anyone!! WOW, IT’S WEDNESDAY re: How Do You Spell “Yay!”, in which we wondered after the proper spell of this popular exclamation: is it yea, yay, or yeah? Final verdict: slpc: I’m usually a nice person, but not when it comes to people who write “Yea” for “yay.” It’s “Yay! I’m excited!” Like...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach Every person on this planet who knows what America is (including every American), has their own opinion about it what it means. There must be millions of American interpretations of what it means to be American in America, but as an American in France, I am living the paradox of being a minority representative of a pervasive majority culture. In my French classes, one technique used to get us talking is to ask what things are like in our own countries. My former teacher Tony tended to ignore me when we got to this point. I think he assumed everybody already knew (or didn’t care) what it was like in the U.S., because they already know it from T.V. When I switched from “extensive” to “intensive” general French, I gained 11 more hours of class a week, a new prof, and a smaller class. Four of us are American, and my teacher once lived in the U.S., so we get to talk more now. This week’s chapter is called “I Act,” and we are studying manifestations, social services, and NGOs. We listened to a song from the WWII French resistance. It was a call to arms, and that put us on the subject of national anthems. Prof Olivier, reminded us that The Star Spangled Banner is sung before all U.S. sporting events. He shuddered when he said this, like it gave him the heebie-jeebies, and then the grad student from Minnesota asked whether lavage de cerveau (brainwashing) meant the same thing in French as it did in English. It does. During this interchange I get annoyed that what I consider a rather charming tradition is being considered dangerous propaganda, so I have to jump in. Trying not to sound...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach My parents just spent a week visiting me here in France. With my little Lonely Planet Paris Encounter Guide, I became tour guide and host. It was a big change for me. In my first 6 weeks or so here, I had been a bit of a wimp about speaking to strangers. At restaurants I practiced in my head before placing orders and chose menu items that I knew were safe, if not my favorite, because I was afraid to ask questions. I went to the supermarket instead of the open-air market because you don’t have to talk to anyone at the supermarket. They even have those self-serve checkout dealies, but I avoided those too because half of the time they break and you have to ask for help. I always ordered the same baguette because I knew what it was called, even if the multi-grain in the other basket intrigued me more, and I avoided going into M’s favorite wine shop (Les Chevaliers du Vin = The Knights of Wine) because the guys who own it (the Knights) are very friendly, and I knew I would be an awkward failure at small talk. My parents’ presence yanked me out of my shell. I took my dad to the market and we asked about the fruit. We bought pastries at the bakery, too many times. Mom prefers Chardonnay, so I asked the Knights for a French equivalent (Bourgogne, if you’re curious, is nothing but Chardonnay). I even had the butcher cut four entrecôtes and put them in marinade, my biggest victory yet! I know, it’s pathetic. The big, terrifying fear that I always had about speaking French is that my interlocuteur would respond in English, proving that my...

Besides the whole language thing, the biggest challenge I’ve come across living in France is managing diet and exercise. In my first six weeks here, I gained 5 pounds, then in the following 3 weeks in Maine I gained another 2, eating the things I couldn’t find here (primarily pad thai, caesar salad, and tacos). I take no personal responsibility for my current predicament, and I blame France. Here are my reasons: First, it’s France! Second, it’s not the United States, where we put a nutritional value label on anything that can be swallowed. It may be overkill, like on vitamins and bottled water, but if those to-die-for Bonne Maman raspberry tartlettes declared exactly how many grams of fat they contained, maybe I would think twice before downing half a box. They do label most of their food, just, it seems, not the sweets. I suppose the idea is, if you’re eating the sweets, you don’t care that much about nutrition anyway. (But it’s France!) (OK I’ve just been informed that there are very strict nutritional labeling laws here in France, but I stand by my memory of not seeing them on the Bonne Maman cookies. Definitely not on the bag of caramels I bought at the same time…) Third, even if my relationship isn’t entirely new, living with M is, and eating habits change when two parties merge. Dinners out, desserts, cooking favorite meals, take out and pizza delivery so we can spend less time cooking and more time gazing into each other’s eyes, are all things that seem to happen when love is fresh. On top of that, it’s France. When my beloved offers to run to his favorite boulangerie to pick up a fresh baguette for breakfast, do I say no? And...

Oh, man, I’m leaving you in the more than capable hands of slpc next week, but I’m like already missing you guys super big time. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about all these awesome comments. HELLO FRIDAY re: Fierce Anticipation: June 12-14, in which Ryan Dixon puts forth the theory that you can predict how whether an Eddie Murphy movie will flop by looking at the movie poster — basically if it doesn’t feature children, animals, or a morbidly obese person along with red font, it will flop . He predicted that Imagine That would flop, according to his poster code theory, and lo and behold it only netted 5.2 million dollars its opening weekend. If Eddie ever gets work again, hopefully the marketing people will listen to Ryan this time. KaseyB: The Murphy Code…wow! I never noticed. Of course my disdain for children, grotesquely fat people, and red fonts have been keeping me away from Murphy films for years. PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY re: Fierce in Seattle: Indoorsy goes Outdoorsy, in which Kelli Bielema applies her black thumb to her back yard garden. Josh G: Use ladybugs for pest control, they eat many types of bugs, mostly aphids. Also if you have bug problems plant some marigolds and the bugs will eat them instead of everything else. We planted our first garden this year also and these seemed to help. OH, IT’S TUESDAY re: Political Physics: Are Hate Crimes a Form of Domestic Terrorism?, in which Monique King-Viehland argues that the answer to that question is yes. Yolanda: Yeah, they may have just developed the term “hate crimes” in the last few years but a lynching in 1960 was still a crime of hate. I haven’t looked at the statistics but I’m...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach The bald guy in row 5E of business class has folded his Le Monde and is now watching Ironman on his private video console. One row ahead of me, the 10-month old from ‘15-minutes-south-of-Miami’ sleeps on her Juicy Couture sweat-suited mother’s lap. Marly and Me fades to credits, and I wonder when the drink cart will come around again. I’m currently on my fourth return flight from France in one year. Since I decided to move there, I’ve gotten pretty good at this traveling thing. I always take the same two flights, Boston to Paris, it’s always a Boeing 767, and I always sit in the second of the four row deep economy section between business class and the giant cave of coach in the back. I feel less like a sheep in this little area and I have easier access to the bathroom. The food and drink trollies start at the row before mine, and the seat-picking app on the airline’s website says my seat is “priority”… for the life of me I don’t know why. But it makes me feel important. I like feeling important. And I can watch business class. As I do, I constantly wonder whether their wide-load super-reclining seats and glass glasses of free drinks merit the $5K they spent for 7 hours of not even spa-level pampering, but the serenity their exclusive flight attendants work so hard to achieve wafts back a few rows, and as I smell the scent of fresh baked cookies I can almost pretend that I’m there. Ok, not really. To fly business class you are either important or rich. I like to think the creative looking types in business are traveling for work, and I wonder what...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach I’ve been living in France a month now, riding a Six Flags-grade emotional roller coaster with extreme peaks and dips and all that good stuff that goes along with being in a brand new place where you don’t have a lot to hold on to. The last two times I moved to big cities, I had the built-in support network of an academic program: instant community and friends. Here it will take more time to find my place and my people, time that I don’t always have. For instance, this week, because of deadlines, I’m not “getting out there” at all, but working at the house. The house is in a sleepy but large suburb, a bit removed from the City of Lights. I can take a walk, pass a brasserie, and remember where I am, but alone in the house, discounting the French doors, tile floors, toilet in its own room, shower head on a hose, colossal heaps of cheese and yogurt in the fridge, and the lack of a clothes dryer, I have to turn on the radio or the télé to inject some French into my day, and our cable (or DSL, rather, that brings the fancy channels to the tube) has been out of commission for 3 weeks… leaving me with really bad French game shows (the worst is a French version of Family Feud — WHY?), and dubbed American TV shows I never, ever would have watched in English (i.e., Las Vegas, Walker Texas Ranger). Luckily there is more to watch around here than the télé. In explaining why there are so many French idioms involving livestock and food—for example, tomber dans les pommes, to faint, literally: “to fall in the apples”, or ça ne...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach Once at CalArts a fellow student asked me if I was European. It was during a 9 am class and I was sipping Irish Breakfast tea from the white porcelain mug I brought from home every day. I said “no, why?” And she said “well, you drink tea. And you have a very European sounding name. And I could have sworn I heard an accent.” Okay, in my experience, “Europeans” on the whole drink more coffee than tea, and though it might contain the occasional mispronounced word as a result of a New England upbringing, my accent is as flatly American as the next girl’s. But about the name, she had a point. I’ve spent my whole life explaining my name. My mother always said “you’re lucky we didn’t name you Rainbow, it was the 70s after all.” Rainbow would have been easier. People would have just accepted that I had a funny name without demanding to know my complete biography on first meeting. It’s really too much information for a cocktail party. I don’t know how many times I have said “my first name is Swedish but I’m American, I grew up in Maine, no my ancestry is not Swedish, yes my parents are American, yes my Grandparents are American, it comes from Women in Love, yes it’s also in a Wagner opera, there’s a Valkyrie…” I complain about it a lot, but I also appreciate that it makes me unique and perhaps casts a more interesting light on me than I actually deserve. I’m curious too and if I were to meet me at a cocktail party I would no doubt ask the same questions (after complimenting me on my good looks and pretty dress of...

I just spent 3 hours at the U.S. Embassy of Paris, to fill out and notarize one piece of paper. I waited one hour to get the piece of paper. The woman said “write everything in French and don’t make any mistakes,” so I did, but where it said “I come from the State of: _______” I wrote the state I was coming from, Maine, not the state I was born in, which is what they wanted. So I got another form, and another number and waited another 40 minutes to bring the paper to another counter. This time when I filled it out, I had started to write 1973 where I should have written 2007, and my hopeful attempt to turn the 1 into a 2 and the 9 into a 0 was rejected. So I got another piece of paper and another number. I put my French zip code after the city, instead of before, so I got another piece of paper. By this time almost everyone was gone, and they let me fill out the form at the window. I thought going to the U.S. Embassy would make me feel all patriotic and stuff, with clean cut marines at the gate and big portraits of Obama on the walls. Instead it was like going to the DMV, but a French DMV with embarrassingly tight security (you can’t even walk on the sidewalk in front of the building) run by people who don’t speak English. The US Embassy of Paris’s notarial services department is open during the exact hours of the French class I’m taking. I didn’t make it to class today, but I did my homework. It was a writing assignment where I present myself as a potential contestant on a...

So NEXT week, I’m doing another series, which will hopefully be fun. So far we’ve done Money and Kids, and the topic that will be dissected within an inch of it’s life next week is … Modern Love. The novel I’m working on right now is somewhat centered around dating in Los Angeles, so I admit that the topic has been on my mind lately. But before we get into next week, let’s revisit the past five days.   HELLO FRIDAY re: Fierce Foodie: Masala for a Rainy Day, in which Roya Hamadani extolls the virtues of a good Indian food buffet. This next comment really made me want to go to Tokyo: BabySmiling: I love mango lassi; my local Indian restaurant makes a nice version with ground pistachios and a definite hint of rosewter. I’m a mango fan anyway, but it’s also usually the only flavor available. I’ve only been to a few restaurants with flavors aside from plain or mango, and then it’s only one or two others. Except in Tokyo. The random Indian restaurant I went to had literally a dozen flavors of lassi — many were fruits that I’m pretty sure don’t exist in India. One of hundreds of surprises that Tokyo had for me. PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY re: Tall Drink of Nerd: Lappy Come Home, in which Amy Robinson laments not backing up her hard drive and therefore losing 8 months worth of pics and writing after thieves stole her laptop. crystal: I came across this article on new software and service that can track your gadget (laptops included) and then you know who has your laptop, iPhone, BlackBerry… wonder how well it really works? http://ca.tech.yahoo.com/experts/tedkritsonis/art… OH, IT’S TUESDAY re: The Order of Good News, in which we discussed the list and...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach My strongest memory of nursery school is of watching a movie. In the film, a little boy is friends with an old man he sees in the park. The old man feeds the pigeons. One day the little boy goes to the park and the old man isn’t there. His mother tells him the man died, and he would never come back. Cut to slow-motion pigeons strutting around in the setting sun, no one to feed them, fade out, credits. Death. Later, in hysterics, I asked my parents to please never die, never leave me alone, even if, as they said, I’d be all grown up with a family of my own before that ever possibly happened. They promised they would try. At the time, life expectancy in the U.S. was 72. In 7th grade my best friend’s father died at age 72. It sucked, but it made perfect sense. My grandparents were in their late 60s and my parents were in their late 30s. Therefore, I expected to lose my grandparents in college, and my parents in my early 40s. Boy did I get that wrong. In my mid-thirties, my parents are not going anywhere, and both of my grandfathers are thriving. The life expectancy in America is now around 78, and 65 (the age at which I thought people became too ‘tired’ to work anymore) doesn’t seem old at all. The barrier that I thought existed between youth and adulthood has broken down. When my mother was my age, I was 7. She wore skirts, and heels, got her hair permed, and directed an organization. I never imagined she could have felt as young as I do now, but I bet she did. I bet she...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach One question I’ve been asked repeatedly when discussing my move to France is: “are you bringing your cats?” The answer is, I think… “yes”? Sorry folks, I’ve resisted it for 13 Nerd Girls, but I have to break down and blog about the cats. I’ve had two girl cats since 2004. They are 5 years old and I adopted them from the Canyon Country cat rescue group. At the time, I was busy with grad school, so I got two. I didn’t want them to feel lonely when I was away, because I am, obviously, their world. Now, these are impressively annoying cats, as cats go. One of them is incapable of addressing a human being without licking it. You think it’s really sweet until you realize that she’s licking your fingers then rubbing her head on them. She’s using you to bathe, how violating! The other one is a talker, to put it mildly. My ex and I used to joke that in her howling rants, she detailed the horrible things one of us had done to her while the other had been out of the apartment: “…and then, she spun me around her head by my tail, and then she pulled all my claws out and beat me with a frying pan!” Ahh, you’ve been beating the cat again. Excellent, excellent. But I love them, of course, and I feel strange without a cat around. I was raised with four cats in the house at all times. Now that my mother has retired and found more time to volunteer with the local Portland cat rescue group, the feline population in the house has increased beyond four, to… many. When I moved in with my folks in...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach So, it’s official, I’m moving to France. I just bought 2 plane tickets, so I can go there for a month, come back for a visa, then return, hopefully forever. My credit card is still sizzling. I’m doing this not only because I want live in France, but because in the time that I have been falling for France, I’ve been falling for a particular person in France, and now that we are both deeply entrenched, being together is far more important than where we live. For now, we will live in France. I’m going off on an adventure and settling down all at the same time. When I was in my 20s and planning voyages to exotic developing countries, grown-ups nodded sagely and said it was good to travel now, because once I get married and start a family—awkward grimace—I won’t be able to do what I want anymore (somebody really did say it that way). I know this isn’t entirely true, those with super-wanderlust will build their lives to accommodate it, rugrats in tow or solo, but I think the average person with the average desire to see the world wishes they had done more of it before they settled down. Now I am at the age when many of my peers are doing just that, settling down. Getting married and pregnant. Buying houses in good school districts. Returning to the states they grew up in, so the grandparents can help with child care. People from my childhood are coming back to my hometown. We’ve gone on our post-collegiate adventures, lived in New York and/or California, and now we’re partnered up and looking for a nice place to live, and we realize (in spite of how...

I can’t decide whether I want to see or despise this upcoming animated, 3-D called Battle For Terra. Big ideas, which I like, but mayhap didactic execution, which I loathe. Hopefully our animation expert, Gudrun is reading. If so, please...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach It’s noon and it’s absolutely disgusting out. This morning the precipitation was snow, but now it’s rain. Cold, wet, rain. And it’s dark. I’m sitting next to the SAD light my mother ordered me to use. For those of you who don’t know, SAD is “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” which means you get, well, sad, in the winter, and this light is supposed to provide the cheering effects of the sun that are so desperately missed. Now, I realize I’ve done this to myself: hurling from sunny SoCal into a long New England winter, losing independence by moving in with my folks, working at home, living in limbo between one life and the next, and the simple fact that it’s March (which means we’ve already had 3 months of winter and now it’s going to rain until June) all combine to a sour case of the blues. I have been in the worst mood, snapping at people for breathing too loud, and hating my cat for snuggling up to me. Answering emails, making my lunch, and going to yoga have turned to tedium. I feel like everything (and everyone) is out to get me, and it’s just not fair! The uninitiated might ask, “what’s wrong, why are you grumpy?” The natural response to this is, of course, snapping “I don’t know! Don’t you think that, if I knew, I would be able to fix it!?” Then, because it’s been asked, my mind spins in the search for an answer. This makes me feel worse, because I think about how good things are, how I have a job, and a home, and people who love me. How in the grand scope of things, my life is lucky and very privileged...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach The other day, as I walked down a parking meter lined street, staring at the ground like a surly teenager, I saw a quarter on the sidewalk. Sometimes it pays to sulk. I thought about picking it up, but then reasoned that it would be good karma to leave it there for someone else to find. In that type of situation I feel it is my moral duty to figure out what is “best” to do, then do it. Walking away, I complimented myself for my 25 cent deposit into the karma bank. But then I stopped. The quarter was heads up. Doesn’t that mean it’s lucky? “All day long you’ll have good luck.” That’s 25 days of good luck! I have to look after myself, don’t I? Even if it is superstitious. Then I wondered, is it sillier to follow superstition or believe in karma? But then, some people might consider karma superstition. I mean, I don’t really believe in superstition, but I enjoy acting out some of the rituals: I don’t walk under ladders, I look people in the eye when I clink glasses, I never light a third match, I lift my feet when I drive over train tracks, I always knock on wood, and I throw salt over my left shoulder after a spill I don’t, however, have a problem with black cats, opening umbrellas inside, or broken mirrors, and I officially stopped holding my breath while passing cemeteries last year. Karma, on the other hand, is great. I’m not talking about the official spiritual karma, which I won’t pretend to know anything about, I’m talking about doing something nice because it’s “good karma,” or getting something unexpected and thinking it came to you...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach Secret Life of a Nerd Girl needs a revamp. The original idea: single girl in LA, with a splash of animation, doesn’t work anymore. But what to do with it? Ernessa suggested I talk about limbo. You could say a soul in limbo is a soul waiting for its life to begin. Or, maybe it’s the soul of a 35 year old woman waiting for the next stage of her life to start, a plastic flake twirling in the snow globe of space and time, preparing her things and her mind for the day, sometime in May, that she flies to France. On my 18th birthday, my uncle gave me 40,000 frequent flier miles, enough to go backpacking in Europe. I used them to fly to Ghana for a summer, then I did a semester in Madagascar. The few visits to Europe in my twenties proved my opinion that it was too expensive, too dusty, just one gray city after another full of old churches and museums. “I’ll do Europe later,” I thought, and then I forgot about it until last year, when I went to the French Alps for an animation festival. I am not a big fan of the Hollywood system and felt the European animation industry suited me better. A place where a group of people could believe in a small project and spend a reasonable (read: small) amount of money to create a work of art, like The Triplets of Belleville or my fave film from last year Les Trois Brigands, was the kind of place I wanted to be. I made some friends on that trip, and at other festivals, and with their help I have been working ever since to relocate to...

. a blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach At the time of this writing I have been living in Maine for 40 days. No floods but we did have an ice storm, and 14 inches of snow dumped on the first day of winter. Right now it’s 16 degrees outside, which means I probably won’t leave the house today, but that’s okay because I have nowhere to go, not yet. Before I came “home” to Maine, I was in Los Angeles for 6 years, and before that New York for 11. It’s amazing that it’s possible to explain away half my life with that sentence. The experiences, jobs, friends, high-points and low- are mine alone, and to others who don’t know me so well, what matters is the big brush strokes. New York City, art school, work, Los Angeles, grad school, work, activities, or boyfriends they might remember passing through my life. I know I do it too. I allow my knowledge of others to be reduced to a few facts and figures: “so and so is still in Arizona at veterinary school, her boyfriend moved in, but they had to get rid of the dog.” Ok, thank you, I feel fully informed. When I lived in other places I never referred to Maine as home. Wherever I was, that was home. I hated feeling like I was away from something I was supposed to go back to, it implied that my life had less value, or worse, hadn’t started yet, because I was in the wrong place. Mainiacs have a thing about leaving Maine: don’t do it. But I can’t deny that I grew up here, I move around this house on auto-pilot, dodging, without a thought, the corner of the dining room table, and...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach I’m no longer writing Nerd Girl from Los Angeles. I’m not ready to explain why, but I’ve decided to spend a few months in Portland, Maine, visiting family and arranging my ducks in neat little rows. Call it a transition period. I’m not 100% confident it’s the right thing to do, but if I were sure, as several friends have pointed out, I’d be crazy. On Thanksgiving Day my Dad and I climbed into a fully packed 10-foot truck and headed east. Then east, then north-east, then east, then mostly north(east), for five days. Now I’m struggling to fit my world into my parents’ landmarked colonial house, already full of the life they’ve created without me. I’ve been gone for 17 years. Literally and mentally I’m straining to adjust. Last Thursday I fell on my ass. Literally. It had been raining for two days, then it turned to freezing rain, meaning the drops became ice on contact. When my California-shod feet met the brick sidewalk in front of the house, my right foot slid then sailed into the air and the rest of me followed. Thank god nobody saw, the fall was so vaudevillian I’m sure they would have guffawed. I landed on my hip and elbow and was thankful to be young. Mentally, I’ve been searching for a local yoga teacher who can remotely compare to Adam at the Hollywood Y, and that night’s Ashtanga class had a small chance. So with much trepidation I pulled on stretchy pants and headed back out on foot. You know when you can’t pick up a wet ice cube that’s fallen on the floor? Imagine everything around you being like that. I wanted cleats and a pick, but all I...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach I recently flew from CDG to LAX. In the purgatory of timeless space between my vacation and my real world, I snap an aerial sunset pic from my window (I can never not do this), and sink into a contemplative mood. A mind so recently full of everything BUT reality teams with ideas, or more accurately, a chock-a-block to-do list. I reach for paper. First things are practical. The milk must have spoiled: Go to Trader Joes. And that check must have come in the mail: Go to bank. All of my lists start with “Trader Joes” and “Bank”. The list moves to artistic/career related matters: Remember to send film to Croatian animation festival that guy (Jacques?) at bar mentioned. Then self improvement: Finish reading The War of Art. Why exactly ARE you resisting Part III: Combating Resistance? If only I could get more done in a day, pretend I have an office and an inbox and people in surrounding cubicles depending on me. I’m afraid I sometimes regard my creative side as a minimum-wage-paying second job that I worked very hard to get and I don’t care much about keeping. I write DRAW MORE in capital letters and underline it. Then bullet point beneath it •Go to Sunday CalArts workshops Conflicting prior commitments pop into my mind and I debate whether I really want to burn the gas my 20 year old American clunker will require for the stretch between Silverlake and Santa Clarita? PRIORITIZE •Start next film? The idea is there, you just have to start, what’s the hold up? Ah ha. Time. When I work at home a trip to the post office can take all day. In an office, time stands still: when I...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach I am one of those people who, when it is possible, prefers to retain communication with an ex after we have broken up. I do it for a number of reasons, primarily because if I liked them well enough to spend the majority of my free time with them, thinking about them, or doodling our last names hyphenated together, then cutting off all communication seems to devalue the good part of our relationship. It wasn’t a total waste of time. Whatever hitch it was that unraveled us as a couple is secondary to what brought us together. But don’t get me wrong, I do have exes I am perfectly happy never seeing or hearing from again. I’m not that nuts. Oftentimes, a good romance is also a friendship, and as long as it’s consensual, why not continue that part of it? It can take time to get to a friendly point, and openness about what makes you comfortable (you may have to start with an I-don’t-want-to-know-who-you’re-dating-now rule) but it can be very nice. I truly value the friendship of “my good ex,” the fellow I was with for over four years in LA, who I didn’t stay with forever, even though it seemed we were headed that way. Obviously we were good together, and obviously something wasn’t right. But in LA he knows me better than anyone, and it’s nice to be able to talk to him about anything and everything from light gossip (“so-and-so are getting married”), to dating questions (“I fooled around with a girl at a party, and I’d like to see her again but I don’t want to sound like a letch”), to whether I’ve cleaned the grad-school figure drawings out of the trunk...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach An 84 year old woman recently told me the story of her marriage. She said, “we met in December, three months later we were engaged, three months later we were married, and 59 years later, here we are!” Awestruck by their simplicity and success, I said “wow, why can’t it be like that now?” She said, “that’s how we did it in those days. Now, people have to live together for 10 years to see if they get along.” What’s that about? How much analysis and deconstruction is required to determine the viability of a relationship? If you love someone, then what’s the problem? I have a friend who bought the engagement ring within a month of meeting his wife, then sat on it for over a year. Others struggle through breakups and make-ups to get past the minor relationship humps and glitches before taking the plunge. There is no clear cut map to the altar. Conversely, try asking someone in a recent breakup when they knew it wouldn’t work. I bet a lot of them would say some time early in the relationship. I know I have said of many dead affairs something like, “we were together 6 months, it should have been 1.” It may seem mysterious, but we know what we’re doing. Even if we don’t like it. I think there exists a belief that women, if for biological reasons alone, are more prepared for marriage than men. I know I believe it, but I’m not sure it’s true. Maybe the phenomenon of me caring so much for my creative career has created a psychological unprepared-ness within me for marriage. Even if I believe it’s what I want, maybe I’m not ready, and that’s what...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach Upon discovery that yet another ex-boyfriend was about to marry the girl he dated after me, a friend my mother’s age said in consolation, “don’t worry, you’ll hear from him again. All of my married exes called me in their late thirties. It’s what they do.” Why?” I asked. “To cheat?” “I think they miss the freedom that you somehow, by NOT being the girl they married, still represent. Your carefree relationship, your fun loving antics,” she replied. “Ha. Right. Carefree. We were a laugh a minute, that’s why we broke up, we were having too much fun.” But she insisted that while they change diapers and visit in-laws, their minds will wander to the other girls in their lives. The single girls. The girls who got away? Well, I’m not quite in my late thirties yet, and I look forward to knowing whether my friend will be right. But this idea has gotten me thinking, if I represent one thing to those exes who have successfully moved on, what else do I represent? When I started online dating a little over a year ago, I put in my preferences that I’d like to meet a fellow aged 35-45. I got a lot of replies from men aged 41 or older. They were ready to settle down. They wanted to start families. It wasn’t so much a case of them looking at my boobs instead of my eyes, but my uterus. The idea of searching in the early 40s range, for me, was to find a dapper James Purefoy or Jeremy Piven type, but apparently those types don’t online-date, so I reconfigured my preferences. Then, on some talk show that shall remain nameless (remember I’m freelance), I heard a woman...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach I have been single for while. For a recovering serial monogamist, 8 months is a while. I know, world’s tiniest violins from some of you, but I’m not complaining. When I’m not panicking about my childbearing years being frittered away on grad school and meaningless flings, I’m having the time of my life. I’ve met some interesting characters, and through my experience, I’ve come up with a list of suggestions for all potential Mr. Awesomes: CRITERIA Height: minimum 5’9”. Anything shorter and we will look like a hobbit couple. Body type: thick but not fat.  The taller you are the thinner you may be.  Do NOT have extra fat around your hips or ass.  But don’t be gaunt, unless it’s heroin chic. Don’t smoke. I quit 2 years ago and tar-tongue is nasty. If your hair line is receding it must be managed. Please do not attempt to conceal your thinning hair with an inch long Jew-fro. A 1/4 inch buzz cut is acceptable. I will help you with the back. Don’t wear a lot of shirts that say things on them, unless they are really, really funny. If you’re a performer I’ll probably do you. Thick arms are good, but small hands will worry me even though I know the correlation is a myth because my best friend’s former fuck-buddy had tiny feet and a giant dong.  A tiny dick is not a deal-killer but will always be a disappointment. Be able to pick me up and throw me. A sheltered suburban childhood is acceptable if your personality is dark enough to shadow it. If you laugh at therapy and think people “on prozac” are crazy losers while you yourself could benefit from some time on the...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach I’ve Been in LA Too Long I prepped for a trip to New York during the Hurricane Ike media frenzy. All I could envision was cold, cold rain, and I packed 3 sweaters, a fleece and a trench coat. It was 95° the day I arrived in Brooklyn. It was just a few days’ visit, and my priorities were art and food. I visited the 1st Annual Governor’s Island Art Fair, an impressive collection of 52 artists who gathered to showcase their work, organized by 4heads Collective. I highly recommend it, for the art and the free ferry ride. Personal favorites include Nicole Laemmle, Anya Huwe, and Leandro Maciel. Later, I was a rat in a freshly rearranged maze when I got lost in the back of the Met(ropolitan Museum of Art). It used to be my home, but this time I couldn’t even find the Temple of Dendur. It’s a freaking temple, inside a building. All was not lost though, I stumbled onto the J. M. W. Turner exhibit, which was to put it mildly, mind-blowing, and now I am itching to paint again. Tuesday night was the reason for the visit. Rooftop Films programmed my short One Skin to open for a feature doc called Trinidad. Trinidad is a town of 9,000 in Colorado, and the sex change capital of America. It was remarkable to see thematic parallels pulled from my self indulgent what-am-I-doing-with-my-life thesis film made it a perfectly sensible opening for a feature on genital-reassignment. I was psyched to be Trinidad’s cartoon, and super-psyched to be in a Rooftop screening. Then a little more food, a little more art, and I was on a train to New England. My memory for New York has...

. A blogumn by Gudrun Cram-Drach* An animate creature great and small Welcome to Secret Life of a Nerd Girl. I am said nerd girl and, today I’ll let you know where I’m coming from, and next time, perhaps, where I’m going. When I was 18, I moved to New York City for art school. After a decade-long fruitless pursuit of a career path (see my unpublished works), I decided it was ok to leave my beloved metropolis. I made the only lateral move you can make from New York: To LA. I’d always wanted to study animation (though before then, not as much as I’d wanted to live in New York) so within the year I relocated to Santa Clarita. I lived in a beige condo with a carport and a pool and drove my 1988 Ford everywhere. I only had eyes for my new school, CalArts. There is a rumor that CalArts alumnus Tim Burton based Edward Scissorhands on Santa Clarita. A world of gossiping faceless suburbo-bots with a magical house on the hill full of freakish wonder. The real story is, in 1960 Walt and Roy Disney had the idea to teach visual and performing arts under one roof. They merged the Chouinard Art Institute (the school that had trained some of Disney’s best draftsmen) and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, and by 1970, poof, the house on the hill. There are now two animation departments, Character Animation, created as a training farm for the studios, and the one with the fine arts approach, Experimental Animation. The way I’ve always understood it, Walt asked our founder Jules Engel (who was still there when I started in 2002 but has since passed away) to create the experimental department to siphon off...