I’m taking a break from purging my closet to write this post. A girl needs a break, after all. Since I’ve spent roughly the last two hours purging, I have been reminded of a few things.
- I am an inveterate pack rat. This means not only that I keep things I really should throw out, but also that I keep things in the hopes that I’ll someday use them. Things that people bought me that I’ll never ever wear or use; or things like, um, socks or gloves that have lost their mates, or old T-shirts that I think that I’ll eventually turn into rags or donate to the local animal shelter or something. Freecycle has been a lifesaver, but…
- I am a panty-waist. I keep a lot of things around in the fear that I will eventually go looking for it and then suffer horrible pangs of guilt or sorrow that I gave the thing away. In reality, of course, there’s only one item that I really wish I’d kept in the years I have of giving things away or throwing them out, and that’s a little loden-green vest with suede edging that I got at Loehmann’s with my mom AGES ago. Fifteen years ago, maybe.
- Purging makes me nostalgic. I feel like I have to call up all of my long-lost friends and have a conversation of some sort.
- Purging results in a bigger mess before the benefits of a more orderly life can be reaped. You should see all of the handbags all over my effing floor. Horrible.
- Purging makes me think of the lifecycle of a product. I have socks and pantyhose from a good five years ago and they’re still all elastic and fine. I haven’t worked in an office for about that long, so what the hell am I doing with pantyhose? And what will happen if I throw them out? Can I depend on them actually degrading and not clogging up a landfill? This is terrible. I will have to see if there’s anything I can actually do with all of these textiles.
Okay. Back to it. Do I really have to throw out this enormous pile of single socks? So sad!!
Tags: cleaning, Freecycle, recycling
Category Life, The Weekend, Things I'm Working On |
..It’s midway through the semester, and I’ve not thought of much to say for this entry. I’m most excited about this new blog, which has made it easier for me to post, since I’m no longer tied to forcing myself to have photos for each post.
I still like photos. I just am no good at posting them, for some reason.
Here are things that are going on right now:
- Some work nonsense. Corporate-America stuff. Driving me a little batty.
- A discussion over at my Craft of Fiction class on Zadie Smith’s On Beauty that I’m seriously not excited at all about participating in.
- NaNoWriMo. Oh, my God, NaNoWriMo. Yes, I’m doing it. No, I don’t know what I’m writing about. Yes, this is a big problem, because it’s already day 1 and other people are doing things like starting character scrapbooks and other really motivational, inspirational bullsh*t. Agh!
- Training for a marathon. Yes, again. Gack.
- Looking forward to seeing two old friends Wednesday evening, both in from Chicago, separately, and serendipitously. Very good.
That’s all. There is a long list of things I have tried and failed at recently. Perhaps I will post those tomorrow. What motivation!
Oh. I must thank Ed for helping me to put up this terrific new blog. Really happy about the new color scheme. Now I will have to work harder at populating the book reviews, though! Never mind, I’ve been reading like crazy and have a bunch to post!
Anyway, here’s what fall looks like around here. I love the gradient quality of this tree. They stayed good and colorful for about a week this time. Warmer temperatures helped. But now it’s mid-forties out and most of the leaves have gone brown. Winter seems to be here!
Category Life, the weather |
Why do we have friends? Do we keep them around to prevent from being lonely? Do we have them because they make us laugh? Is it because they keep us sane? Because they bolster us?
I think all of my friends are incredible people. They’re all beautiful and they all have something great to offer, even if it is just something as basically vital as a voice on the other end of the line.
But in many ways, my friends are so vastly different from me. Like, my friend Kate is a really good literary agent, but that’s not something I’d ever want to try. And my friend Aileen is a die-hard classic New Yorker, but I don’t know how to be one of those, really, beyond loving the city and knowing it. My other friend Kate is a really good outdoors and travel journalist–something I always thought I wanted to do, but which proved not only outside of my ken, but outside of my area of interest, no matter how much I tried to force it.
So you see, I think of my friends as silos–perfect in their individual pursuits, which may not be for me.
Sport does bind us together. Jim and I have many friends that we’ve either followed into a race or friends we’ve tried to get into racing in some way, shape or form. But I was always more support crew or guide: “Here, you should try this sport. It’s super fun. Don’t worry, I’ll be the slowest on the course, so I’ll look out for you.”
Here’s proof:
Of the ten people in this photo (October 2001), only two did not race. I’m one of them.
Anyhow. I’m sure part of this is self-defense. I know I’m not willing to put in the time to train to the point where I can do a marathon in 3:30, or even 3:45. And I know I’m not a gifted enough athlete, although I did have some kind of competitive streak when I was younger. (Have you seen it lying around? I’d kind of like it back, please. Kind of.)
But last week, while I was mucking around in Surrey with Lara and Jody, I caught a flutter of feeling something new in my chest: aspiration.
It happened while I was chugging up a hill, chasing Lara and Jody. Jody’d just completed a fifty-mile race over the Grand Tetons. Lara is, in general, a conscientious and meticulous athlete. Both are stronger than I am by leaps and bounds, but both are generous with their abilities: they invite me places and whenever Jody comes to stay she invites me to run with her. When I went to visit her in North Carolina, where she lives, she encouraged me to “bring trail running shoes.”
Perhaps I should be more obvious: Jody is a four-time Ironman. Between her first Ironman and her second, she took an hour off her time. Her regular marathon time is well below four hours.
Lara’s first Ironman time was around 13 hours. She’s remarkably gifted on the bike, as far as I can tell, and manages her six-foot frame like grace incarnate. (Why, yes, your friendly local short and stubby over here is jealous. Thanks for asking.)
Anyhow. So there we were, mucking up this hill. Me, panting. I don’t know what Lara and Jody were doing because I could only just see them cresting the thing, and then waiting for me, ponytails mussed in the most chic of ways, pacing, looking not at all like running dorks, but rather like people who were inordinately comfortable in their own bodies, while I, overdressed and sweating up a storm, clomped and chugged like a pregnant sow waddling to the trough.
And then it hit me. I want to be up there, with my friends, where I belong. And where, apparently, they think I belong. although they’d never pressure me to be more than I want to be.
We did a 10-miler that weekend, a part-pavement part-trail race that had Lara elated and me and Jody muttering over the fact that we had to run over plowed farmlands.* I couldn’t help thinking, what a formidable set we’d have been, the three of us, if I could keep pace with them, egging each other on, running smoothly.
It used to be that I longed for a Girls’ Night Out group. It would be me and my girlfriends, walking swiftly down the street, an updated, better-looking female version of the Monkees.
Here we come/Walking down the street/Get the funniest looks from/Everyone we meet
And we’d get the funniest looks not because we were the Monkees, but because people could not believe how much fun we were having together. The looks would be looks of envy: Goodness, look at those girls. They can depend on each other. They are good friends. They are each others’ wingmen.
And then I had that for a brief shining year or two in New York, and it was beautiful and wonderful and everything I thought it’d be.
But I want more. I want to transfer my Monkees image to the race course, or at least to the training sessions.**
It occurs to me that this is why you have friends: They make you want to be better than you’ve been before, more than you’ve been before. I speak of this not only in sport terms; I speak of this in all walks of life: one of my friends has been through more this past year than can possibly be expected of a normal functioning human being, and yet, she’s worked through it, and moved on, with aplomb and good humor. This kind of attitude you just can’t buy. I don’t have it. I’m a moper; I wallow. Not for long, but I wallow.
And the other has a sh*t ton on her plate that I’m not sure I’d even know how to begin to handle. She looks at herself with a sharp, critical eye. She never sees her own skills, but that’s okay, because her friends do see them, and we remind her regularly, when she lets us.
Jody and Lara waited for me at the finish line of the 10-miler. Jody looked for me about a quarter mile before the end of the race course and ran me in, and I think it was then that I finally puzzled it out: My friends are my pack. As in any pack, there are alpha dogs and regular dogs. The difference in my pack is that all the big dogs want the regular dogs to grow up and be big, too.
*Jody did it with a stress fracture in her foot.
**The latter is somewhat plausible with these two. The former is nigh on impossible, but I’m okay with that.
Tags: England, friends, happy, Jody, Lara, The People in My Neighborhood
Category Life, Things I Wrote, Things I'm Working On, Training and General Outdoors Stuff |
Ricardo Pierre isn’t someone I’m likely to ever encounter again. I’ve only ever spent a couple of weeks in his company. I only have a few decent photos of him, and I had to poach one of those from someone else.
And yet, I’d trust him with my life. I know this because I did have to trust him with my life.
Ricardo has been one of our most consistent drivers and bodyguards in ShelterBox‘s nine months so far in Port-au-Prince. We hired him from the French Red Cross and just never gave him back. He is former detail for President Aristide, a father, a recreational boxer, a husband and the father to two boys. He is one of the nicest guys I have ever met. He is one year into law school and a damned fine electrician. Ricardo is also responsible for the caretaking of his elderly father and his younger sister.
- Working on a tent
On my last day in Haiti as team lead, I sat in the front seat of our car with Ricardo at U.N. logistics base, counting cash to pass on to the next team lead. Ricardo would have to keep the cash on him until the next lead could fly in, two days later.
I pulled my stash from various places in my pack and on my body, and counted out several thousand dollars. I handed each hundred to Ricardo to double-check the math, counted it all one last time, and stuffed two envelopes with it, so that Ricardo could carry it around better, more safely.
- With Steve, working on an interview
It wasn’t until Ricardo had both envelopes stuffed into his front pockets that I felt as if my tour was finally done, and then I thought about the curiosity of trusting someone you barely know with thousands of someone else’s dollars.
And then I reflected, briefly, on how absurd a world I was operating in at the moment: money was the smallest, least valuable thing I had trusted Ricardo with over the weeks I’d known him. When Ricardo said, “It’s not safe to go there today,” we trusted him. When Ricardo said he’d be back at the Deck (the bar and grill) to pick up me and my teammate no matter how late we stayed out celebrating a logistics partner’s birthday, we trusted him.
When he told us we were safe, I believed him. When he told us we needed to make a quick exit, we did it. When he stood by my shoulder and told me quietly to keep a sharp eye on the woman to my right, I did it, but I did it knowing that he was keeping an equally sharp eye on her–and the sketchy-looking blokes to my left. And when we needed him to run interference, I didn’t even need to think about it. He just did it.
Each day he told us he’d be by to pick us up, I trusted him. Each day we needed someone to back us up doing tent demonstrations, I trusted him to pass along the information accurately, and I could trust that after nine months in the field with our boxes, he knew the kit as well as anyone.
Finally, the day we took him and his family to an all-inclusive beach for a rare day off, when he looked at me and my teammate and told us how much it meant to them that he felt truly a part of the ShelterBox family, I believed it. Later that day, we all sang a noisy “Happy Birthday” in French to my brother over the phone, thousands of miles away in Los Angeles.
- Ricardo, middle, with two other ShelterBox Response Team members on a day off.
Each day we needed him to be a member of our team, he came through. It’s why he’ll always be a guardian in my book–and why, when I go to look for someone like Ricardo on my next deployment, I’ll be looking for these same qualities.
I should say that they were qualities that are present in the three drivers that we counted on the most there. They were all men who, when shown that they were expected to become a part of our team, took to that role as naturally as could be expected.
I should also say that working with these men hammered home a critical point for me: You get the most out of trust when you give it as freely as you’re capable of giving it. In this area more than others, the rewards are boundless. I’m not saying that you need to trust everyone around you with your life. I’m saying that there are a few who are worthy, and that you should return the favor when you can, whether someone trusts you with a secret, some insight, or something as small as a couple bucks. These things are weightier than we know.
- Ricardo with his son Eduardo at the beach.
Tags: friends, Haiti, happy, ShelterBox, The People in My Neighborhood, trust
Category Life, ShelterBox, Things I'm Working On |
It all comes down to left brain versus right brain.
I was shocked at just how exhausted I was coming back from my Master of Fine Arts residency at Whidbey Island. With some reservation, I noted that it might have actually been a more difficult recovery than those following deployment for ShelterBox, and I wondered why.
So I sat down and broke it down. (Okay, not really. What I did was to spend a couple of days mulling it over in my head, and then Gwen Bell posted something about writing 750 words a day for the month of September, so it’s September 1 and now I’m posting my thoughts. Because, you know, it’s useful to have external motivation, so on.)
When I come back from deployment I try and unpack, first thing. Who knows what creepy crawlies are lurking in my baggage? (My return from Taiwan yielded the largest squashed cockroach I’d ever seen in my life.) If I can’t be bothered to do the laundry I leave it all on the balcony.
Then I eat something incredibly indulgent. Ice cream, maybe, or potato chips. Something totally unreasonable to be carrying around in your pack. Soda pop is a good choice.
Then I turn on the boob tube. Typically it’s Turner Classic Movies. If I’m lucky I find some Rock Hudson/Doris Day flick, something I’ve seen before, and then I fall asleep on the couch. Eventually I crawl into bed and sleep for about 10 hours.
When I got back from Whidbey, it was almost all the same actions. Except my brain, my brain was on fricken fire. And that’s when I realized just how different the two events are, even if they share the concept of being on overload for 10 days.
Deployment is 100% action and logistics, all the time. You’re messing around, dealing with people, but not on any level other than cursory. There’s no room for emotion, no room for rumination. You think, you act, you fling tents and boxes and build stuff. Then you go home and crash, maybe process some stuff. That’s all left brain.
- Building something like this is all left brain.
Whidbey Island? Whidbey Island was all right brain. Writers get to be writers because we think we have something to say. You spend all nine days at Whidbey immersed in words, your own and others, trying to make your words fit what you’re learning. You meet people that fire up little neurons in your head that then spawn more thoughts. You spend all of your time thinking, thinking, thinking about stuff that might not be immediately connected to your actions of going to class and writing papers, but at some point, some of that stuff starts to sink in, and you get even more excited because you can immediately find some way to apply what you’ve learned to your work.
You spend a lot of time thinking about yourself, and not in a navel-gazing, “what am I about?” kind of way. It’s more like an excavation of the stuff you didn’t remember coming to surface; and then there’s the added layer of worrying those events over; how you can express them in a pleasing manner that leaves room for more thought.
Everyone around you gives you something to think about. Every word out of someone’s mouth has the potential to give you something to work with.
It’s a pretty special nine days.
That’s the other part of why recovery was so hard–that kind of energy is hard to come by. I’ve written about this kind of energy before, where everyone in the room cares about just one end point. It happens in group events, like the AIDS Ride, where it was the end goal to get everyone from point A to point B on any given day. To a lesser extent it happens on deployments, where the whole point of your existence is to make sure people get out of the elements and into shelter, but even in that there are smaller more personal investments at play.
At Whidbey, everyone wants everyone else to publish. At graduation, the chairman of our board of directors said, “Your success is our success.” When only three people are graduating, and there are fewer than 50 people in the room, 35 of which are actual students, you know what? You believe that stuff. Whidbey has invested in you. Its future depends on your success. I believe it.
- "Our success depends on you having your nose buried in a book all the time." Uh, okay!!!
Funny, though–before this experience, I’d come to believe that true exhaustion came from hard physical activity. This is the first time I’ve ever been so pooped from just thinking, although I did put in four morning runs during my time at Whidbey.
I think, too, that it was truly an amazing experience to sit up both late and early talking about literature. If I’d had any doubts at all that working with words is what I want to do with the rest of my life, 10 days at Whidbey would have knocked them clear out of the park.
Tags: happy, Whidbey, Whidbey Island, writing
Category art, Book reviews, Life, ShelterBox, Things I Wrote, Things I'm Working On |
- My first indication that I'm not where I thought I was: a campaign sign on Whidbey Island
- Between 11:10 and 12:30 I took my books down to the rocky beach and did homework. If I turned to face away from the ocean, this was my view.
- And now, some up-close things I spotted on the beach. First, this cool infinity-shaped whorl on some driftwood.
- The beach is mostly rocky. Almost every clustering of rocks is a mini still-life.
- Sometimes I was reminded that there is life outside of reading, writing, new friends, and the rocky beach. This piece of driftwood was one such reminder.
- Sometimes I spotted other writing students on the beach. Here, Nancy and Steve, on a rock-hunting expedition.
- from the building that serves as our classrooms, you can see lots of ships going by. these huge cruise ships were a shock, though.
- Fort Casey was built in 1897. Obviously, some of the buildings have disappeared. Ripe for ghost stories!
- After my morning run, I met my roommate Cyn on our porch for coffee each morning. This is the view from our porch.
- At 7:25 or so Stefon would walk by on his way to breakfast. (Cyn and I opted out.)
- Sometimes Robert stopped by for coffee and a chat.
- Here's what it felt like.
- Some days it was too cold. Then we decamped to living room and pot-bellied stove fire.
- We were fed quite well at Whidbey. Dessert every night if we wanted it. I am a sucker for bread pudding. Stefon thinks this is funny.
- One evening we decided it would be a good idea to jump into Puget Sound. It must have been about 54 degrees in there. Not bad.
- One day, Merone, Cyn and I went into town for lunch. I was enjoying mussels when I looked up and spotted this. I think my first coherent thought was "Oh, gross. Moose drool."
- We took the ferry to get off of Whidbey and onto the mainland for the drive home. From left to right, Nancy, Stefon, Jackie, and Mandy. Until January, friends!
Tags: friends, happy, Whidbey, Whidbey Island, writing
Category art, Life, Things I'm Working On |
This is my right hand.
It has some curious features on it.
- A faded scar, shaped like a crescent moon
- An awful bump in the middle joint of my middle finger
- A healing scab
- A couple of moles
- An index fingernail that looks like all of the index fingernails on my mother’s side of the family
- Overgrown cuticles
- A tan line that only I can see on the ring finger
- A ring finger that bends back over towards the middle finger
All of these are a part of me. They are a part of my history: The moles are from being out in the sun. The scab is from a recent mosquito bite. The overgrown cuticles are because I rarely care for my nails. The ring finger bends back towards my middle finger because I used to write a lot by hand; and the bump on my middle finger is because I broke it inline skating to class one day in college.
The nail on my index finger reminds me of those in my genetic makeup. I am sharply reminded of this every time I look at the hands of my aunts and uncles and some of my cousins, and I always feel a little taken by the similarity.
Of all of these, the crescent-moon-shaped scar interests me the most.
I love my right hand. It’s written a lot of letters, a lot of thank-you notes, a lot of grocery lists and packing lists. It has written a lot of diary entries, starting with the little book with the kitten on it that “locked” with a standard key. My dad gave it to me when I was eight. I still remembering his encouraging me to write in it each night. I wrote some things and then the next morning I would find notes from my dad or my mom in the margins. (When did we lose the connection?)
I have kept nearly all of my journals. The one that is missing is red; it has a photo of a director’s chair on it, and it was stolen along with my backpack one night in the heady days of the late 90s, when I was out almost every night and felt bereft when I was home alone.
At the moment, my entire history seems bound in this hand and what it’s done: tomorrow I start study for my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and I’m keenly aware that I might discover some things about my writing that I didn’t know before, and some things that I might not want to know.
It’s my deepest hope that I will end the two years in the program having learned something about myself, and perhaps armed with the tools that will allow me to share what I’ve learned about people in general with everyone else. I’d like to share this knowledge in the form of a published book, but a girl must not hope too much.
I have written three manuscripts. This is perhaps my greatest shame, for none of these is published, and I don’t know if any of them will be. Think of it: three whole manuscripts! Nearly 900 pages! Just sitting there, gathering theoretical dust, whilst I dally about with everything but making an attempt to sell them.
What can be worse than knowing that your writing is somehow broken? Not much, but I know I will find out much more, in much more detail. The fact that my writing is broken seems tied to the fact that I must be broken, somehow, too; much as the fact that my right hand is tied to my writing.
These are the skeletons in my closet.
This is my right hand, the one that did all the writing, and the one with so much history to it. I want more for it; tomorrow I start that task.
Tags: MFA, Whidbey Island
Category Life, Things I'm Working On |
Here’s a list of the things that comprise everyday life in Haiti:
1. Phone calls from one Thermador Viragot: “Hello, Thermador. How are you? No, I still don’t have mattresses. We do tents. TENTS, Thermador. What? Okay, fine. Talk to you tomorrow, but I still won’t have mattresses.”
2. Misting fans at The Deck on the MINUSTAH base.
3. Helicopters as the daily backdrop to breakfast and lunch if we’re eating at The Deck.
4. Wild goose chases: One day we were sent to Customs HQ, DHL, our warehouse, and Petionville, only to be told at all four places that we didn’t need to be there anymore. This is normal.
5. Seeing lovely ShelterBox tents wherever we go and feeling proud that they are still standing after 7 months when everything else has gone to poo.
6. Communiques with press.
7. Trying to manage social media for a business in Philadelphia first thing in the morning, when my head and heart are 900 miles away.
8. Electricity outages.
9. Beer and rum each night.
10. Debrief and review of day (see #9, above)
It’s time for me to go home. I’m tired and cranky and I need to be around people I love, who can smooth down the ragged edges that have become a part of my makeup here.
Tags: Haiti
Category Life, ShelterBox, the weather |
Sometimes, you meet people in one capacity, and you never think that you’ll see them in other capacities. Sometimes our friends are silo’ed. They stay in their individual little places. We call them when we want specific things: I have friends I got out Drinking with; friends I Do Outdoors Stuff with; friends I Eat with, friends I Cook For. I have friends I Shop With, and Movie friends, and then there are the friends I Learn Stuff With.
I am squashily fond of the friends with whom I Chat Deep into the Night With Only a Bottle of Wine to Entertain Us.
My friend Peter the Planner is one of those, but he didn’t start out that. I met Peter in early July of 2002. i remember because this is the same weekend I got together with Jim. We were camping at Round Valley, mountain bike camping; and we packed in and packed out all of our stuff. We led a quick clinic on flats and cables and stuff, and then were off.
I know that Peter had said he was going to meet us somewhere en route. I’d never met the guy before. I was doing some pro bono media work for a non-profit racing association that we were both a part of. At some point on the trail a really sexy bike went by pedaled by a guy with impossibly long legs and perfect riding form–it looked as if his riding was effortless, and I was immediately annoyed–why couldn’t I ride like that?
Hello, Peter. Nice to meet you.
At some point after that we all went to see a movie together; and then we went out to celebrate Karen, Peter’s wife, on her birthday, at a vegetarian joint–was it VP2?–and then we went to a triathlon clinic together, and shortly after that we did a triathlon together, where we off-road people reveled in the three miles of trail run that broke up all of the awful asphalt; we had dinner together that night, and he came out a couple of times to meet me for drinks, and
Then
I
Moved.
To Chicago.
And I began to notice what happens when you leave the right people: They Call You.
And keep track of you. And when you come home, they make every effort to see you.
Peter and i haven’t done anything athletic together in years. But I know that if we wanted to, we could make it happen.
While I was gone, I learned a lot about Peter:
- His writing, when he does it, is remarkably evocative of whatever it is he’s feeling at the time. (If you think this is easy, you don’t know jack, and you need to read more.)
- His sense of organization is ridiculously good.
- He is a tangential thinker: His train of thought goes in different directions and then he actually connects the dots, and whatever he’s saying is almost always useful.
- He knows Stuff. Or knows where to find the answer.
- He is the right person to talk to when things look grey and confused. Peter will either add some color or sit with you until the cloud passes.
Peter is the planner not only because he works for a major urban-planning think tank, but also because when I am having problems organizing my incredibly disorganized brain and life, I know he can help, and that he will be vested.
I met Peter mountain biking, but our lives revolve around people now. Here is proof:
We go to movies. We go to museums. We have picnics on the High Line together. Sometimes Jim and I get to see Karen, and Peter and Karen’s hilarious and wonderful twins, John and Henry.
Isn’t it nice when someone you thought would only ever fit in one area of your life suddenly spills over into everything else?
Tags: friends, happy, New York stories, The People in My Neighborhood, triathlon, writing
Category art, Life, Things I'm Working On |
