Celebrating 2 Months of Blogging!!!

Despite fattening up my blog with posts I imported from some older blogs that I never really did much with, today is the official 2 month anniversary of La Femme Flâneuse! So I thought to start I should at least say

and give you some fun behind the scenes facts about the blog.

The top ten countries who read LFF in June 2011:

1. United States (Thank you!)
2. France (Merci!)
3. Denmark (Tak!)
4. United Kingdom (Cheers!)
5. Germany (Danke!)
6. Austria (Danke Österreich!)
7. Singapore (Thank you!)
8. Italia (Grazie mille!)
9. Holland (Dank u wel!)
10. Hungary (I hope this is right because I had a very good Hungarian friend teach me once kur-sum-nurm?)

What really amazes me about my experience blogging these past two months is how patient you all are with my English! If you look at the Feedjit widget I added and see Paris, France that's probably me proofreading because I know I make so many mistakes and have yet to figure out how to tell the widget to stop recording my own page views. Blogger does have this feature, so once I have some patience I'm not saving up to use on some other time-consuming and tedious task I'll look into it. But, seriously, why isn't that just built right into the widget? Am I the only person who constantly re-reads their blog for errors?

There is a "trend" about what people like to read (that being literature), but even when I don't blog about something lit-related you still keep reading. It's rather nice knowing I can blab about anything and that short posts vs. longer posts doesn't seem to matter very much. Here are the most popular posts this month:

The Banquet Years of Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, He...
Amsterdam Day 8
The Letters of Hunter S. Thompson
Weighing In
The Things that Go Grunt in the Night
Paul Revere Warned the British They Weren't Going ...
The Droste Effect
Live Long and Make Music Videos
The Global War on Drugs
Lolitagation

So you like to read posts about writers (the crazier the better it seems), my travels (limited thus far to Amsterdam and London (but I try not to blog about work), but I tend to stroll around in the same fashion no matter where I go), talk about the "F" Trinity of food, France, or fashion (what F word did you think I was going to say?), when I make fun of Sarah Palin which is fantastic because there is so much to make fun of, and when I talk about my battle against the bulge (which is currently slightly uphill) (again there is so much material ).

I started a blog because it was my job about six years ago and I loved it. I was blogging most of the day even though blogging was supposed to be just to add money to The Shoe Fund, but at the same time I also owned my own consulting firm. I was constantly snapping pictures (with the phone/camera/mobile blogging device specified in my contract), making videos, jotting down addresses, and writing pretty long posts compared to most blogs. When my contract was over I thought I'd never blog again, but a few months later I was blogging professionally again - this time about Paris and France in general instead of fashion, but it wasn't at the same pace. Trust me when I say that when someone says fashion is constantly changing that it is.

But that blog wasn't personal. It had very little to do with me except I was quite snarky. I was ready to get out of the industry. Saint Laurent was gone and I knew even then Valentino would be the next to retire. The art I loved was dying a very slow death. So when the going was good, I got going.

This blog is personal. What you don't know is every morning I wake up, I try to see if I feel thinner (usually not), I brush my teeth, and it begins. I look at myself in the mirror and ask myself in my head if I think I'm going to write anything today. I pick on myself like a silent bully that still manages toimpressively taunt my dignity, my dreams, and my confidence.

Most of the time I feel like a jackass. The book I've been trying to write remains mostly unwritten. The best is when I find old Post-It notes that no longer stick to anything that read "Will finish book by September 2011". I suppose deep down I am an optimist of a sort.

I can point to all kinds of examples of people who didn't start writing until later in life - but I simply don't want to be one of those people. I want to write a book and soon. I told myself that if I didn't manage to write a book I was proud of by 2012 that I would give it up and do something else with my life, but there's nothing left to do really. I've been an engineer. I've worked in fashion. I work in the publishing industry. There is no excuse for my inadequacies.

So while this blog is one of favourite ways to procrastinate it's also done a lot of good. Maybe in another two months the forcing myself to write (i.e. blog) will pay off in the way Tom Wolfe and Stephen King say forcing yourself to write (even if it's about a brick wall as Wolfe says).

I suppose I should post this now and go back to snoozing on the sofa, dreaming about chocolate, and taking care of my cuticles to trying to write again. I just like to say thanks every now and then and I'm usually horrible about remembering the dates of anything (I'm the girl who never remembers my romantic anniversaries and can date a man for years and not remember what day his actual birthday is), but this time I remembered.