De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

Results of a recent quiz I found online, after reading another daily dose of Le Meg a.k.a. Le Blagueur de Paris
Quel surprise! Not really.  The blog is called American Amelie after all.  Although I’m not really sure that this will ever be my reality, my thoughts are far from logical or realistic.  It’s finally summer and all I want do is dream, while I listlessly wait with impermeable and polite patience for les avocats   to tell me they need another week to get their records in order.   I’m not able to move forward or back…instead I spend my nights watching le chat noir, sit on a messy mound of dusty, notarized documents on the floor, passive-aggressively biting off the edges, because I won’t pay attention to her.  I just can’t force myself, into my familiar, organized New Yorker, alpha mode.  I pour myself another glass of red wine from Chateaudeneuf-de-Pape, and giggle. It could all go so terribly wrong, or right.  I have no control over what they do next.

You Belong in Paris!!

Stylish and expressive, you were meant for Paris.The art, the fashion, the wine!Whether you’re enjoying the cafe life or a beautiful park…You’ll love living in the most chic place on earth

What City Do You Belong In?

Listen to this podcast

This was certain one of the best compliments that I’ve been given so far by another blogger. One of the most sincere and thoughtful expats that I’ve encountered on my journey has just awarded me a thinking blog award. Thank you Barbara. Your personal touch to everything you do, is most certainly appreciated by this lost in NYC dreamer. Here’s to all of us, who are looking to connect across countries and oceans, with those of a true heart, and “thinking blogger’s” mind. Sorry couldn’t resist the pun.

I now have the tough choice of choosing five other thinking blogs of my own and giving you the reason why I believe they deserve this award. Should you choose to participate, please follow the rules listed at the bottom of this post, and “pay it forward” to five other deserving bloggers. (Note: there are those greats like “Le Monde de Titus” who are not on this list because I know that they have already been nominated)

1) Magic Moments Photo Blog:

A picture can say more than a thousand words, and with titles like “l’absence de vie” and “and the question is was I more alive then than I am now” this photo blog collective organized by Etolene, is a true expression of fine art, shared community, and creativity.

2) Les Mots Croises

Gaena has created an almost dream-like world in her blog, complete with music and video to compliment the mood of her posts. Another sensitive, inquisitive soul who must spend a lot of time thinking and feeling her way through the world.

3) Paris Breakfasts

Into each life there needs to be a bit of beauty to lift us out of the doldrums. Whenever I am missing Paris, I visit this colorful blog to remember what it felt like to use all five of my senses and to re-experience this place.

4) Les Minutes Celibataires

This writer puts me to shame. Her scripts are dramatised in an audio podcast about the single life en francais. Would love to produce content this polished. A girl can only dream.

5 ) Dare I admit that this blog holds a strange power over me? Slightly turbulent world of Fishturn.

So if any of the above mentioned blogger’s would like to continue with their thoughts. Please read on…

Here are the rules to the Thinking Blogger Award. It originated by a blog called ( what else ,) The Thinking Blog.

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,

2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,

3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).Here are the two badges available to cut & paste on your post, and your sidebar

You can chose the silver one or the gold :

And that is about it. Until next time…Amelie

Listen to this podcast

When did this happen to me? When did the dream change? When did a nineteenth century farm house, twenty-two miles north of Manhattan become my new dream?

I should have recognized the signs of dangerous domestication when I stood in Gracious Home on the Upper West Side yesterday and listened with rapture about joys of owning a dyson vacuum cleaner. I have to say those Europeans make quality home appliances. I recently purchased an eighty dollar iron made by Rowenta, and my clothes have never looked so pressed and polished.

This is my problem. My idea of what quality of life is to me, has changed. Alarm bells have been rung throughout my social circle. So far, I’ve had two close friends give me prolonged pep talks about why I must be feeling this weird urge to abandon the city. One subtlety threatened to never visit me in the suburbs, saying I’ll be all alone up there in a big house. The other said that although she would visit me, that she felt like one of the main themes I write about in my blog is feeling isolated, and that this would only be exasperated by moving out to a smaller town where I can’t get Chinese at 2 in the morning.

The problem is with this logic, is that I already do not go out of my apartment after nine p.m. I already feel isolated yet cramped living among 8 million people. Yes I do count on feeling some small inconveniences, like not being able to just walk to the corner deli to buy cat food, but for all the conveniences of my life, living next to ‘restaurant row’ and several bobo boutiques, I don’t really take advantage of them, anymore. I’ve done it. I’ve lived my twenties and early thirties as a free single woman, still don’t feel like it is the end all, be all, that it is suppose to be. I don’t know what the answer is, but this life, as I am living it, is not it.

I have been walking the same route for six years….still feeling, yes, alone and isolated. This morning I walked my dog to the specialty food store where I buy his food, and I listened to the woman ahead of me in line describe how happy she was about never having kids because her brother’s children have all been losers. “Well maybe if you have a kid you can break the cycle,” the kind store owner counseled her. “No, I have had several wonderful dogs.” She looked down on her puffy white poodle.

“I can’t possibly become this woman,” I thought to myself. So isolated in fact, from life…never allowing the upsets, and the deep family scars from loving someone other than a ten pound fur ball. Sometimes I think that the only reason my cat gives me attention is that I feed her. Is that love? I don’t think so.

The truth is that there was a time when the thoughts of having a family was too chaotic, and scary a prospect. I avoided it, out of fear that I would fall into some inevitable downward family cycle. I embraced my singledom, like my life depended on it. But I looked at this woman, probably in her early sixties, and saw everything that I now fear I will become, if I don’t shake this life up.

Many of us who live in the city are refugees; from our families, our former countries, our bad marriages, and limited prospects. The idea of commitment and closeness on this level had to be repugnant, so that we were able to release ourselves enough to take a chance in the Big Apple. We happily traded in our sadness and burdens for the excitement and possibilities of the city. Where anything could happen, and opportunity to reinvent ourselves became possible.

But a miracle has occurred in my life. Almost eight years since I stepped on that plane at JFK airport, I’ve settled into myself. Knock on wood, the day to day life seems to be holding it’s course. I’ve been…stable…I’ve become a proud grown up.

Maybe they are right, and I have watched Under the Tuscan Sun one too many times. I do have a romantic notion that decorating and fixing up an old home is like fixing up myself. Maybe I will be isolated. Or maybe like Diane Lane says,”The house protects the dreamer… and great things happen, even late in the game.”

Listen to this podcast

Our battle of feminine wills started almost fifteen years ago with a ring. Specifically my grandmother’s wedding ring. A ring that represented over 50 years of marriage. When she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, my grandfather made a special trip to see me, so that he could make sure that I had it in case he passed away just as unexpectedly. He didn’t want anyone else to inherit it.

To understand his reason, you should also know that I lived with them like a daughter, not just a grand-daughter for a good portion of my childhood. The summer before she passed away, I wrote my grandmother a letter and told her that I felt like she was more like my mother than my own biological mom. We are that close. I say that in the present tense because there have been moments when I have had dreams of her that are so real, that I felt as if she had made a special trip to visit me from the “great unknown.”

My relationship with my grandfather was a little more complicated. I believe now in hind-sight that he sincerely loved me, but there were times when I feared that his anger and judgements indicated otherwise. He was more F. Scott Fitzgerald than Hemingway. He was what you would call, a metro-sexual, a man who perfected himself and lived for “his public”. For example, when he did not have socks that matched his pants, he had wife #2, my late grandmother’s cousin by marriage, drive to town and pick up a new pair…or he refused to go outside. He had his nails manicured almost weekly, and kept his shoes stacked in a specially designed closet. Together, they made a pair.  She catered to his whims, and eccentricities, and he gave her love and security.

Where as my grandmother, four years his senior, spent most of her married life, treating him like a child, not caving into his moods, or slightly unrealistic expectations…wife #2, was artfully, not as vocal. I recognized it, because I too, had used this defense technique, to maintain their love. But with grandma gone, there was no one else, to say “no.”

Let’s put it this way, if grandpa got a bugger of an idea, he NOW refused to let it go. His first bugger was that he wanted grandma’s wedding ring back, so that he could make an impressive diamond bouquet for his new bride. I tried to refuse, but he insisted….and fearing that he would cut me out of his life like he did with the rest of the family, I relented.

Thanksgiving two years later. I visited him and wife # 2 in a condo they rented in Arizona. They were trying out the life of a “snow bird.” Fashionably well off seniors would live in Scottsdale during the winter to avoid the harsher climates of their home states. I was going to school in Tucson and looked forward to spending at least one holiday with him. Since he had moved he had suddenly become more harsh and remote. I didn’t understand the distance.  Was he just getting older and more cranky, or did he really not like me?
My grandpa, now almost eighty, did hate to drive. It brought up deep seeded issues. He had a life sized dummy complete with clothes and a baseball cap made. He put it in the back seat of his Cadillac, so that no car-jackers would be tempted to accost him. I sat side by side with the dummy as if he were my stronger, older brother.

He wouldn’t say so, but I think one of the major reasons why he moved back to a small town in the middle of a rural state was it meant that he did not have to drive on any of California’s major highways. But still, even after the move, the dummy stayed in the back seat, looking like the grandson he never had. I hated that dummy. They drove him around and dotted on him, giving him the approval, I couldn’t seem to earn. Nothing I did seemed right anymore.

At the end of my holiday visit, the idea of driving from Scottsdale to Phoenix must have terrified him. (the cities are less than fifteen miles away away…literally they’re really just one city). His plan to avoid the airport, was to have me flown from Scottsdale to the Phoenix airport. He seemed to be under the impression that I could hop out of a prop plane and hop on to my waiting 737. Imagine what a flight of no more than ten miles would have looked like. Taking off, and landing in like two minutes. Forget fastening your seat belt, you’re already there.

When I tried to gently get him to drop the idea, his anger and determination only intensified. We drove all around Scottsdale all afternoon looking for the local commuter airport. When he finally found the local heliport, he seemed stunned that they didn’t have regular flights from Scottsdale to the Phoenix airport. Wife #2 and I ended up finding a convenient shuttle service that drove me there on my own.

All in all, I think I blamed wife # 2 for a lot of strain I felt in my relationship with my grandfather, even though most likely, the strain we felt toward one another had nothing to do with her. I don’t think it was, in retrospect, all her fault. I think she was probably, just like my grandfather, guilty of “bad taste” with the ring incident. I think they were two older, elderly people who needed each other, neither of whom knew how to deal with their children.

How do you continue to blame someone when she has left you half of her assets, even though you parted on less than ideal terms after he died a year later in 1995. Didn’t she want everything for herself? Wasn’t she willing to do anything to get what she wanted? Didn’t she stab me in the back, when I wasn’t looking? I built her “evil intentions” up to mythic proportions. I even started a screenplay based on an elderly Anna Nicole Smith archetype who wanted to manipulate and kill, the angelic only daughter, of a Texas millionaire. But I never finished it. In the end, through some hysterical reversals of dogma and karma…I have ended up being the one who looks like the stuffed dummy.

Listen to this podcast

From my corner of Americana, I’ve seen a lot recently. Much more to come soon. Every time I start to write a new post, I find my thoughts are suspended mid-sentence when a new twist presents itself. It is almost as if the universe is saying, “So you think it is this way, do you? Well, what if you knew this or this, or maybe that. I fear my own dogma is karmically biting me in the ars right now.

Listen to this podcast

My schedule report is as late as my expense report. I didn’t really feel anything, until I came back from this job, and started to describe the experience to friends and family. Whenever there is any major news event, my Nana calls me to check in, half out of curiosity about what I know, and half out of concern that I’ll have the same reaction I had when I learned about the London subway terrorist attack. Thirty minutes later, I had a full blown panic attack in the NYC subway as I was going home from work. I ended up in Blackburg, VA, a day after the tragedy. My perspective of the event is pretty limited, but it was a part of my life’s experience that I wanted to record.

Monday 4/16/07 8:52a.m.: Sipping my morning coffee on my day off. It is one of those perks of my odd schedule. While most people are struggling to start their week, again, I sometimes get weekdays off, to do what I please. Then the phone rings. Supreme Scheduler wants to know where I am. I tell him that the Switcher of Switzerland has given me the next two days off. He groans. Tells me that it was a mistake. He needs me come into the studio right away. My call time is 10 a.m. I have an hour and 8 minutes to shower and take the 40 minute train ride into the city.

Monday 4/16/07, 10 am: Walk through the front door of the Broadcast Center at 9:56. Smugly think about what a dedicated employee I am, and pray that this will continue to provide job security in a very insecure field.

Monday 4/16/07, Noon: Finish my morning shift. Zen Budda arrives to relieve me of my duties. Go to Supreme Scheduler’s office to confirm my work schedule for the next week and to fill out my expense report. It seems like a fairly average news day: Pet food recall, Attorney General in the dog-house, a tragic shooting at a college campus, 8 people reported dead. I leave the Broadcast Center with several hours of daylight left to enjoy. Get on the train back to Brooklyn.

Monday 4/16/07, 12:45pm: My cell phone rings as the subway goes over the Manhattan Bridge. The Switcher of Switzerland says,”We need you to come back to do the Evening News. Zen Budda had to leave to catch a chartered flight to Blacksburg, VA.” When the train arrives at its first stop in Brooklyn, I dutifully cross over to the uptown platform and catch the next train back.

Monday 4/16/07, 2p.m.: I’m sitting back at my desk in the studio as Special Events; a group of writers, producers, and anchors, who go on air when unexpected news events occur, continue live, on air with their report. Over thirty students and professors are reported dead and several others are critically injured.

“This is the deadliest mass shooting in US history” the anchor reads the teleprompter on the camera. I look down at Zen Budda’s empty open backpack, underneath our desk. His emergency overnight bag is gone as well. He didn’t even have time to go home and say goodbye to his wife before he left.

Monday 4/16/07, 6:30pm. Evening news has special one hour show, that is co-anchored in New York and Virginia. I pull a twelve hour shift. I go home and prepare to turn around the next day to do it again.

Tuesday 4/16/07 11 am. Back at my desk when the Supreme Scheduler walks over, (does not call me on my cell), and asks me to fly down to Blacksburg. I leave from the studio for a flight to Virginia.

Tuesday 4/16/07 9p.m: My flight to Roanoke was delayed by two hours. I’m sharing it with a dozen local residents, two freelance photographers, and a German news crew. We stand impatiently at the gate waiting for those magic words, “We will begin boarding…”

To my right, a slight man stands with a modest carry on bag. I look down at the tag and notice it says,”Happy Tours…Seoul South Korea.” I over hear his cell phone conversation. He is talking to someone on his cell about not knowing how to get to Blacksburg from Roanoke. At this point, if you are trying to get to Blacksburg, it can only be for one reason. I think, could this be the shooter’s father, cousin, uncle? My imagination, can only assume. I know I am probably wrong. Maybe he’s a family member of a victim. We are all in the middle of the story right now.

The two hour flight lands. The Red Cross has set up triage of tables to help parents and friends navigate from the airport to Blacksburg.

Tuesday 4/16/07 almost midnight until Friday 4/19/07: I am driving in a rented car in the middle of the night in a state I’ve never been too. I’m exhausted, but this is the job I love and signed up to do. I listen to the radio stations, every song is dedicated to the students and victims of the shooting. The Christian Evangelists have already gotten into the action, and are soliciting G_d’s comfort on both television and radio. I get barely two hours of sleep before I drive to Blacksburg.

I will put in over thirty hours of overtime, and I will question my presence at the center of someone else’s grief and pain. I will watch one six foot, well respected anchor admit off camera that he broke down the night before in his hotel room because of this story.

I will avoid the students and the memorials. I will stay in my small “media city” of satellite trucks and tents to maintain my professional distance. I will without emotion listen to a friend who can’t believe that we the media are all wrapped up in this story while hundreds of people died in Iraq each day. I will think apples and oranges…someone else’s grief can’t be measured or compared with another person’s.

I will not have any emotion or reaction, even as I watch the President of Virginia Tech nearly fall off the stage after he announces that NBC was sent that now infamous tape . I will pick up the phone and warn the crew that the day will be just a little longer, because this is just my job.

Listen to this podcast

That familiar pain is pressing down on the middle of my chest. I opened my yahoo account to empty it of spam. I use this account whenever I have to put in an email address on a web page. It’s an oldie. I kept it out of sentimentality because the name referenced my first real job in New York. My first stab at independence and self reliance. Almost 100 spam messages and newsletters had filled it.

I started deleting, by selecting all messages on a page, and hitting delete. I got to the third page, when I saw it, a personal email message from someone I had been out of contact with for a few years, a business acquaintance, and a good listener. The email was short. “I was asked to forward this message to you. They’re looking for you. She’s passed away.”

For nearly ten years I’ve lived on my own terms…pass or fail…falling up…making mistakes, but doing so without the glare, insinuations, and back-handed half truths. For this precious time, the threads of shame have slowly unraveled themselves as I have been able make my own identity and forge my life, without this other piece overshadowing any accomplishments. I had fought the fight, even though it played on my self hatred and shame, and found small ways to love myself again. I lost many times, but ultimately, here in New York, I found a way to be…almost free.

There was a family story told to me by my grandparents. They had a very smart border collie who use to follow my aunt as she ate her apple and would grab secret bites from it, whenever she lowered her hand. My aunt would continue to walk around oblivious that someone else was eating her apple. Her head was in the clouds, “dans la lune”. The moral of the story was not how smart their dog was, but how many brain cells they thought my aunt, their daughter, lacked.  The person who died was not my aunt, but was someone who used stories like these as social leverage.  I was not proud of this story, but it has to be told, because it reflects a part of my history, a door I’ve been trying to shut ever since.

Unfortunately, when I think of small towns, I think of unfair judgements, and I think of her. I think that when certain people decide that you are “one thing”, they close their minds and their ears and they cease to love you unconditionally, that you can twist and turn in your own self hatred, or you break away and find it for yourself. It has been hard to separate myself, from the identity that was put upon me. I never thought I’d feel released from that self doubt.

But when I heard about her death, my own reaction surprised me. I wasn’t relieved. I felt pain and shock. The pressing anxiety in the middle of my chest is ever present. I was nearly sleepless last night. My dreams were fleeting pictures, not totally immersed REM visions, with depth and emotional, truthful subconscious meaning. I don’t know what lies ahead or how many questions will still remain unanswered. She was someone’s mother, even if she wasn’t perfect. Neither or us were.

Listen to this podcast