Happy New Year!

I sincerely hope you all have a wonderful 2010, and that it is a much better year than 2009!

Here's a great website featuring creative women, if you're interested: http://www.wherewomencreate.typepad.com

I've been reading Julia Child's book, My Life in France.  What a delight!  I can really relate to her in so many ways (maybe not quite as enthusiastically about learning to cook French food, but still...)  I loved her thoughts on how living in France expanded her mind and soul.  Moi aussi.  And her initial frustration/embarrassment in learning to speak French, "I loathed my gauche accent, my impoverished phraseology, my inability to communicate in any but the most rudimentary way."  But after living there five years, she became fluent!  Good for her.  I wish I could say I was fluent in French.  At one point in my life, I was fairly fluent, but not good enough, not by a long shot.  And what I knew way back when is now sorely gone or at least very rusty.  I want to get it back, and be even better than before.  Maybe this year?

Julia Child was a California girl (like me) and felt inadequate intellectually.  I remember feeling almost exactly like how she describes herself in France, "I was bothered by my lack of emotional and intellectual development.  I was not as quick and confident and verbally adept as I aspired to be......upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses:  I was confused (evidenced by a lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which caused me to back down from forcefully stated positions, and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, "scientific" thought.  I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was."

I laughed at Julia's description of her sister, "Dort" driving around the Place de la Concord, chasing an insensitive man who had rammed her back bumper, yelling out, "Ce merde-monsieur a justement crache dans ma derriere!"  (translation: This shit-man just spat out into my butt!)  Its easy to say really stupid things when you're learning a new language!  Funny.