Sometimes, you just want something sweet and sinful, or at least something sinful but without the consequences. (That’s always way more fun.)

You could have a decadent, outrageous dessert like a chocolate mud pie or a cherry pie dripping with warm sauce.

Or you could just have ice cream.

Or fruit bar. Just had a Whole Foods 365 Mango Frozen Fruit bar, and you could actually taste the mango. What a concept. And perfect on a 102 F day, or any day in which a heat advisory is part of the morning news. Truly delish.

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The most recent Poets & Writers magazine closes on the final page with an essay by Harryette Mullen, an American poet and recent winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize, which carries with it a $50,000 purse. The generous amount will allow the poet to carry on her work without having to worry about keeping body and soul together — as Somerset Maugham was fond of saying — at least for a year or two.

In the essay, she writes of a time long gone, when San Francisco was the center of the American poetry scene and poetry actually mattered. Back when the Beats were as well-known — or nearly so — as the Beatles and words were the currency of intelligent society.

In it, she writes, “Time was more important than money. Life was more important than poetry.”

I’m sitting in a trendy Dallas cafe as I write this, about to meet with fellow business owners in the time-honored ritual of “networking,” nurturing business relationships and friendships, partly because entrepreneurship can be a lonely business, and it’s nice to have fellow travelers in this lonely road with whom to commiserate, but also partly in the hope that the effort might turn into more business further along that lonely road. It’s how it works, and we all understand that.

I recall Ms. Mullen’s lines, though, which have been ringing in my head all night, echoing in my dreams. I wonder, “If time is more important than money, and life is more important than poetry, then who am I — a writer, a business owner, a poet in spirit if not in vocation — in a society there money is considered more important than anything?”

We Americans talk about the importance of family, of love, of friendships. We create films that “lift the human spirit” — to wield an overused phrase in the film criticism industry — and laugh knowingly as we watch or read satire that skewers our obsession with trivia and the emptiness of much of what passes for “culture” in our society.

Yet we talk of nothing but money. Our heroes are hungry entrepreneurs with the eight-figure incomes, titans of industry, filmmakers more well-known for how much they command per picture than what their films actually mean. I’m obsessed with the numbers on my balance sheets. My “books” aren’t the ones that line the cluttered shelves of my home — the Maughams, the Lawrences, the fiction and history and literature and even the occasional romance novel — but rather the thin, all-important sheets of paper my accountant keeps in his office. I measure my worth as a writer based on how much per word I command, how much I can charge a client by the hour to spin more froth about her product or service. In this world, words remain the currency, but in the literal, financial sense.

If time is more important than money, and life is more important than poetry, then who am I? If my time is spent pursuing money and forgetting poetry, then where does my spirit fall in a universe that couldn’t care less?

Photo credit: “tiny book,” by bookgrl on Flickr.

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I love Betty C. of La France Profonde. She’s been a friend and follower of My Inner French Girl almost since the day I launched the blog in 2007 and has seen it go through the ritual ups and downs that any personal blog inevitably must undergo. We’ve commiserated about the difficulties of blogging and maintaining one’s spirit when the writing juices just won’t flow, as well as the weird but very real ache we feel when we haven’t blogged in a while (I daresay it’s guilt, but guilt based on what, I’ve no clue).

She left a hilarious comment on my last post, in which I basically whined about working so hard and seeing my business grow so fast and so much in such a short period of time, blah blah blah. She very kindly and astutely wrote, “It would be a pity to change the sub-title of your blog to The Art of Working.”

I know she meant it both to be funny but also to be a cautious warning, but I have to admit, I thought to myself, “Well….why not?”

Now that I’m a couple of days removed from that post and am also back to being 100% healthy again, I can see that the delicate balance between the genuine frustration I often feel about the stressful hours and challenging work, and the equally genuine surprise underneath it all that, well, my work is actually paying off, didn’t come across very well in that little essay. The poor, gorgeous butterfly distracted me from the reality that is my life, and that is: it’s not as bad as it all seems, and in some ways much better than it has any right to be.

I don’t mean to sound as if I’ve no right to happiness. We women are often guilty of that, of feeling as if we’re somehow unworthy of any good thing that comes our way, or that we somehow don’t deserve whatever little snatches of joy that the universe decides to randomly dispense to us. And certainly I don’t mean to whine about it. I do understand that my life has been out of whack of late, that my not seeing my niece often enough, or the fact that I’m often at my computer until midnight trying to meet a critical deadline, or simply that I haven’t been able to run as much as I would like (which is killing me more than I care to admit!), means that I seriously need to reevaluate how I live that very life. Otherwise, I may end up waking up one day not even realizing until that moment that, hey, everyone took a different path than I, and here I am all alone in this one.

On the other hand, I have to say, kudos to me! I’ve spent countless hours and many years building up a business, the infrastructure of which even I admit I made up as I went along (and still am, in some ways!), and now I’m starting to see honest-to-goodness, pinch-me-I’m-dreaming results. Results, as in, people actually think highly enough of my services to pay me money. Good money! Since in some ways I sort of backed into this business, it’s still hard to believe that I’m actually doing it, and of course that also means that I must still work my derriere off in order to deliver on the promise of my dreams, but I guess I don’t often enough recognize my own accomplishments. I can complain with the best of them that I work too hard and don’t have a life–both of which are true–but I really need to learn to acknowledge in the same breath that, yes, I’m doing something good, something worthy, something that really stretches my imagination and my skills. That my life may be crazy right now, but it’s only because I’ve only just begun in this new path I’ve forged in my life, and I need to trust in myself and my ability to figure it all out. Eventually.

Maybe Betty was on to something there, even though she may not have realized it at the time she wrote that comment about changing my blog subtitle to The Art of Working. Working, after all, is a part of living, and a very important one at that. Even the laziest among us needs and wants something to occupy her time now and then, otherwise our muscles would literally atrophy. I’ve probably done a wee bit too much of it of late, but it’s not the fault of work itself but rather my approach to it. Art is work, but work can and should also be art, non? Even that intrepid goddess of all things Francophile, Mireille Guiliano, felt compelled to follow up her massive bestsellers about French women and eating with a book about–wait for it–work.

What “work as art” means, I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to view it from the perspective of an entrepreneur and writer. To a writer, work is art, but to a business owner? Something else entirely. What that is, I’ve no idea yet, but it should be quite informative to discover.

Photo by Thomas Hawk. “The Queen’s Fool,” on Flickr.com.

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The title of this post isn’t very SEO-friendly–and as an online marketing consultant, I should know better, but what the hey–but it came to me as I was driving through Dallas last night, on the way home from an event that one of my clients held to promote her business, and I idly noticed a little butterfly zip across my windshield as I came barreling down Oak Lawn Avenue in Dallas. I wondered briefly what happened to the fragile little creature, if she made it across the busy intersection, or if she met an untimely demise on her way there.

Most of us, of course, don’t spend that much time thinking about the odd animal or two that crosses our path, even if they’re skipping right across our windshield, but the moment, however fleeting, left a shadow in my memory banks. My life has been in crazy mode for the last 2-3 months, as my client list suddenly zoomed from 1 to 8. Or 9. I lost count. It’s a blessing, of course, and far be it for me to complain, especially in this recession. I’m thankful for the opportunity to make a living doing what I’m absolutely mad about, to get paid to be creative. How many of us can speak that lovely truth every day?

But I also know that the workload as it stands is untenable, that sleeping 5 hours a night is nuts, and that while balance is nearly impossible when you’re running a small business, no one can be all things all at once, and that something inevitably must give.

After working 80-hour weeks the last few months, I was stricken with a bad sinus infection that went undiagnosed for a few days while I pushed on with my work, convincing myself all the while that it’s only a prolonged bout of allergies, that this too shall pass. Uhm, that was a wee bit optimistic of me, but now, after a week of basically lying on my back being utterly useless, I’ve apparently forgotten all the promises I made to myself and to B. about eating better, getting more sleep, blah blah blah.

It’s interesting that the word “entrepreneur’ has French origin, because in English it has such powerful connotations. An entrepreneur in the American sense has tremendous drive, ambition and is almost a force of nature, thriving on challenges, numerous setbacks, and an unbelievable amount of hard, brutal work. Not quite the image we have of the laidback French, who almost pride themselves on their aversion to anything remotely resembling hard labor. That’s not to say that the French are lazy–although I know more than a few Europeans who would happily make that statement–and statistics have shown that while they enjoy fewer working hours than we do, their productivity rates actually nearly equal ours.

Still, the reality is that they do have several weeks of vacation and take every single day of it; they continue to fight tooth-and-nail for the sanctity of the 35-hour work week; they practically perfected the art and culture of cafe society. We, on the other hand, demand–and get–drive-thrus at even Starbucks; often give up even the vacation days we’re entitled to; and are happy if we work less than 50 hours a week.

The entrepreneur? Vacations don’t even exist. I didn’t even realize until lunchtime that today is Friday–Saturdays are often workdays for me, too, and the week flies by so quickly that I literally must check my smartphone calendar every few hours to make sure that I’m not missing any appointments because of the fleeting nature of time in an entrepreneur’s life.

I suppose that’s why my mind mentally drifted into such an unexpected place last night, following the imaginary trail of a butterfly whose life probably ceased sometime in the last 24 hours. The human mind can’t exist on such an abstract plane for too long. It evolved over thousands of years in a very grounded environment, learning and growing along with the rest of the universe, correcting its native impulses through action and interaction with nature. Sometimes, nature literally flies in your face, slapping you into the present and reminding you that life isn’t about counting–or, in my case, not counting–the days but living them.

Photo credit: Butterfly on windshield, by Ronaldo Lima, Jr.

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It’s not often that I meet another woman named Marjorie, but oddly enough, many of the Marjories I have met–or have known–have been writers. And my mother tells me that she named me after the author of a book she was reading at the time she was pregnant with me. Now, the book was actually a Lamaze instruction book, but I choose to ignore that part and hold fast to the belief that my destiny as a writer was set in stone when she lifted my name from the cover of a book.

But I digress…

You will love A Gift from Brittany: A Memoir of Love and Loss in the French Countryside, by artist and writer Marjorie Price. If you are a writer, an artist, a photographer, or any other creative woman struggling to reconcile a passion for art with the demands of modern life, you need this book. Even if you are none of these things and are simply a Francophile with a love of books about France and the women expats who are transformed by their life in it, you want this book.

I’ll have a fuller review of the book shortly, plus a giveaway to a lucky winner, but in the meantime, click here to listen to my interview with Ms. Price. And please do leave a comment if you like the podcast!

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As a former academic-to-be, I love books published by academic presses, especially those that seem so well-suited to a mainstream audience and yet don’t seem to get the appreciation they deserve by the general reading public. So many so-called “academic” books are so much better-written, better-developed and more fun to read than their mainstream counterparts on bookstore shelves that it’s a shame they don’t get more press.

A Parisienne in Chicago: Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Mary Beth Raycraft’s translation of an 1894 French book byMadame Leon Grandin, is one such book. Despite its roots in academia (Raycraft is senior lecturer in French at Vanderbilt, and the book was published by the University of Illinois Press), it reads like the insightful diary that it is, by a well-educated, middle-class Parisian woman who wanted to soak in all the big and tiny details of her life in late-19th-century Chicago and share them with her future readers.

Ms. Raycraft was kind enough to agree to an interview with me for My Inner French Girl, which you can immediately access by clicking here on on the link at the end of this post. We talked about how she came across the original source material, the unusual lens through which the author, Mme. Grandin, saw the United States in general and American women in particular, and how much/little has changed since the 1893 World Exposition that Madame describes in the book.

Stay tuned for a fuller book review and a giveaway as well!

Click here to listen to the interview with Mary Beth Raycraft.

Click here to visit the book’s official website.

And…click here to buy the book on Amazon.com.

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Sandra Gulland, author of international bestelling novel, "Mistress of the Sun"

I love doing podcasts, and yet for some reason I haven’t been doing enough of them. Hands down, the fun-nest ones are with writers, of course, and to a woman, all the ones I’ve interviewed for My Inner French Girl have been so kind, down-to-earth, funny, and sharp.

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Sandra Gulland, author of the international best-selling novel, Mistress of the Sun, now in paperback. My review of the book–hint: it’s positively riveting–will be published tomorrow, but in the meantime, click below for a podcast of the interview. It’s just over half an hour long, and anyone who loves French history, French women or are simply writers themselves who love to hear other writers discuss their work, will enjoy listening to a master of the craft.

Click here to be directed to the podcast interview with Sandra Gulland.

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One of the questions I get asked most often on this blog is, “How in the world do you get everything done?” I suppose it’s inevitable since I seem to be everywhere: this blog, Twitter, Facebook, my business, blah blah blah. But if only you could see how I miserably juggle everything and how incredibly imperfect my life is, you’d realize that like everyone else, I keep my head above water only barely, and sometimes not even then. I do occasionally have to dunk my head, hold my breath and hope that there aren’t any sharks in the vicinity.

Herewith, my secret to being impossibly, happily, sometimes unhappily imperfect as I juggle all the things that I do:

1. I don’t get enough sleep. Biologically and psychologically, I need at least nine hours, but I get that much only once every few weeks. Realistically I feel blessed if I can hit seven.
2. I don’t eat as well as I should. I would love to be able to follow Mireille Guiliano’s French-style diet to the letter, but I would say that half of our meals are already precooked (i.e., frozen) and come in a box or jar. We do most of our shopping at Whole Foods and choose primarily organic meals, of course, but processed is processed.
3. I spend most of my working hours in T-shirts, sweats and/or jeans. When I have meetings with clients or am attending networking events, yes, I don a suit, stockings, the works, but when I’m at my home office, it’s all about comfort and whatever the first thing is that I pull out of my dresser drawer.
4. I rarely wear makeup. The only time I do is–again–when I have meetings or networking events to attend. Otherwise, I don’t bother.
5. I rarely do anything with my hair but let it air-dry. Ditto with #4, i.e., only when I have important events to go to. Even then, I apply a leave-in conditioning creme (Garnier Fructis is the best), blow-dry it for five minutes, and voila! I have a very simple hairstyle that takes minutes to maintain when necessary.
6. I don’t have kids by choice. I have a dog that I treat like my baby half the time, but it’s easy enough to take him to a local daycare when I have a full day of work outside the home. Sometime B. and I may decide to have kids of our own, but we’re not in a big hurry.
7. Self-care is a priority, but not the top priority. I do want to work on this, especially since I do think that self-care should be a top priority (not the top, but certainly up there). Women business owners and executives in particular seem to be held to a higher standard than men when it comes to personal grooming, so showing up to a networking event in a golf shirt, blazer and Dockers pants is perfectly acceptable for a man but a definite no-no for a woman. I need and want to have manicures more often, especially with the beating I usually inflict on the digits as I type, work out and do housework, but lately it seems to happen only every few weeks. (Although I did finally get one today! My cuticles are eternally grateful!)
8. My novel has been sadly neglected the last few weeks. This, I definitely must change. I’ve four h
   

   Multi-tasking knows no age.

   undred-plus pages in the hopper that I refuse to abandon.

9. I haven’t seen my two-year-old niece in 3 weeks, and I don’t see my friends nearly as often as I’d like. In my defense, though, the few times I’ve tried to organize even just a coffee with friends, they never seem to be able to make it.
10. I don’t call my mom nearly as often as I’d like. Or as often as she’d like.
11. I eat way too many M&Ms for my own good. Apparently, there is such a thing as too many M&Ms.
12. My apartment, while neat, gets the bare minimum of cleaning. We keep up with our housekeeping, but by no means will we ever grace the pages of Real Simple.

This is why this blog is called My Inner French Girl, I suppose. My actual self deviates so much from the model of the impeccably dressed French woman with the neat, organized closet, perfect diet and even more perfect figure. I’m under no illusion that the two twains shall ever meet, but I must say, even just looking at a brilliantly composed photograph of, say, a cup of tea and a madeleine or macaron is enough to make me feel so much better about my life. Something about the ideal of the French woman’s world–and I say ideal because I’m aware that even most French women would be hard-pressed to admit that they themselves live that world–inspires, as unattainable as it may be. Simply knowing that such a world exists, somewhere, pacifies my stressed out mind.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardgiles/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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A lot of Francophiles become such partly because they’re fascinated and perhaps not a little envious at just how youthful many French women of A Certain Age are. I know I am, but not really because they look or act youthful; rather, I look to them because they more than just about anyone I know have taken the old adage about “aging gracefully” to heart and actually live that as their life’s overarching philosophy. They’re not tethered to treadmills, slathering copious amounts of face creams that cost more than a week’s salary, and spending even more amounts of money on questionable dermatological procedures that more often than not actually detract from our naturally pleasing appearances. After all, if someone like Madonna or Janice Dickinson–they with all the money at their disposal–can still fail to stop time from marching unceremoniously across their faces, then what little hope do we have of being able to accomplish that with our own relatively modest incomes?

A recent article in the Times of London titled, “Why French Women Don’t Get Old,” presents a laundry list of reasons of precisely why our Gallic sisters seem immune to the social lashing we Americans and our fellow Brits receive in the hands of our friends, family and even total strangers as we move forward in the chronology of our lives. It’s not that French women have necessarily smoother, tighter skin, but rather that their culture so reveres the older woman that youthfulness is basically beside the point. The journalist points to stellar examples such as Charlotte Rampling, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Birkin, and Juliette Binoche, not to mention non-celebrity types such as the politician and former presidential candidate Segolene Royal and writer/playwright Yasmina Reza, both of whom are fiftysomethings and would make any nubile Millennial look positively dull by comparison. We Americans love to mock every wrinkle, every crease, every extra pound of flesh on a mature woman’s body, while at the same time behave mercilessly towards the same woman should she decide to do something about it–plastic surgery, Juvaderm, turtlenecks–to stop our insulting yammering. The French, on the other hand? They practically fall all over themselves in wonder and amazement at the richness of experience and intelligence, not to mention the luminous glow of a life well-lived, of women well beyond the age at which we on this side of the Atlantic throw our female elders under the nearest senior bus.

I had a delightful birthday not two weeks ago–I turned 38–and had a party at which more than one person remarked on how young I look, how delightful it must be to not look one’s age. I suppose people thought I would feel complimented, and in some cases I do. I do take care of myself and buy the best skincare creams I can afford–Olay, Paula’s Choice, Porselene–and exercise and try to eat right (although yes, I have my Cheetos moments, especially when a deadline looms and I’ve yet to complete even half the assignment) but if I were to be completely honest, I don’t mind the aging at all. I mind the tasteless jokes about being over the hill, the crass cards that I’ll never forgive Hallmark for–you know, the ones with the cemeteries and the inexplicable comments about having one foot in the grave and AARP membership and all that–the idea that somehow my personal stock decreases in value with each passing year on the great social exchange of American culture.

I don’t, however, mind the hard-earned wisdom that comes from having traveled widely, eaten well, loved much, and been equally loved in return by some amazing people, both men and women. I don’t mind at all the knowledge that my twenties are well behind me. They were gorgeous years, full of energy and speed and painful lessons, and they’re over, thank God. They gave me much and did their job in molding the person I am today and have yet to become.

Perhaps if we accorded our elders–whether they’re forty or ninety–the respect they not only demand but rightfully deserve, we wouldn’t be in so much of the mess we’re in now, with healthcare such a crazy quilt of unworkable compromises and personal tragedies. We would care as much about our weaker but wiser members of our community as we do the younger and stronger ones. We would recognize that everyone has something to contribute, whether they were born in the 1990s or 1930s. The term “generational divide” would only refer to chronology rather than actual social tensions, and we would be all the greater because we not only would have history on our side but also as our teacher.

And maybe we can finally lay to rest forever all the awful, offensive and truly obnoxious jokes about old age. Aging is something to celebrate, a life process we should honor for the perspective it gives us about what’s truly important in life. I know of more than a few people who never had the privilege of experiencing it. It’s a shame that we should mock and be terrified of the one thing that they would have wanted more than anything to have.

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I just wanted to post a quick mention about my friend Cari Taylor’s stunning handmade silver jewelry, available for sale at Wired Originals. If you’re still wondering what to get your girlfriend, mom, best friend, sister, daughter, niece, or any special person in your life for Valentine’s Day, you must head over to Cari’s site and pick up an original piece or two. And bonus: Cari is offering a wonderful sale through February 7th of her entire inventory. You can find out more on her blog, or simply head over to her online store at Etsy and find out for yourself just how gifted an artist Cari is. And no, I get no commission out of this plug either. I just want to support my artist friends and their amazing work.

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