First, let me call your attention to this spot, which ran during the Super Bowl. (You didn’t see if you live in the U.S.) It’s well worth its two minutes.

All right? Get your Kleenex? C’mon, blow your nose. I’ll wait.

This is a far cry from the beer commercials we’ve been subjected to in the past. There are no swiping remarks about how women age; there aren’t any animals being voiced over; there’s no bizarre new bottle or can design. (None of these has anything to do with beer, and none of these can improve on the taste of some of this beer.)

So what makes this spot work?

It’s the emotional core. The best commercials or advertisements tell a good story, but even most of those ignore the need for consumers to connect with the brand on an emotional level. The spot works because it tells a story everyone loves–an underdog story–and it gives viewers what they want: a happy ending.

Perhaps more important, it reminds us of a time when we, too, were underdogs, and when we, too, wanted to be cheered on. (What is that, like, every day?)

Most important, it locks the viewer into a time and place: a scruffy amateur hockey game isn’t the place for a high-falutin’ microbrew; it’s the place for communal cheer; for beer that everyone can afford and enjoy; for idiotic, non-cerebral joy. Budweiser has tapped into the whole point of a cheap beer: feel-good times, with your friends. This is what their brand is, and I wish they’d do more with it.

So that’s one half of narrative–getting to your emotional core. What’s the other half?

Let me tell you another story: Recently, Mr. Gooddirt and I went out to eat at a really amazing restaurant.

We’d never been there before, so why were we so sure this restaurant would be “amazing”? Well, we’re kind of sustainability nuts, so we liked that the restaurant uses only produce from one of its two farms in the northeast. We’ve also eaten at other dining establishments that use the tasting-menu concept, just like this one does, so we had high expectations that went along with the higher price points at this type of restaurant. (Once you add in the wine pairings, which we almost always do, you’re looking at a cool $300 per person.)

So in that way, the restaurant had its narrative lined up straight and true. We knew enough about it to already expect good things. We got there early, for drinks at the front of the house, and were pleased to meet a bartender whose knowledge  was absolutely in line with our expectations. He could tell us about the distilling and aging process of his whiskey, for instance.

photo: Gothamist

I anticipated an exceptional meal, and got one. Every single one of our eight courses was above and beyond what I expected; the flavors were complementary, if, in some places, totally unexpected; the quality of the food was unparalleled, without resorting to gimmick.

So what was missing? Service, service, service. We had one head waiter who depended on four or five rotating sub-waiters (?) to serve and explain the food. That’s appropriate for so many courses; but it quickly becomes an annoyance when none of the sub-waiters understands what they’re serving and has to defer to the head-waiter (who, in turn, looked harried and annoyed) for any questions.

There’s where the narrative broke down: This restaurant prides itself on the quality of its produce and its goods. They should expect that their customers will want to know more about their food and how it’s prepared (at one point, they brought out a wheat ale made from an ancient strain of wheat; and we wanted to know more). Towards that end, they should make sure that every staff person is well educated and cares as much about the stuff they’re selling as the head waiter or proprietor does.

Two final straws broke this camel’s back: First, our bill was wrong, in our favor, and we had to ask them to correct it. Second, when we got outside to our car, we found it there waiting, warm and toasty, with the seat heaters turned on. “Hunh! What a nice touch!” we said. And then we thought to check and see just how long they’d had the car idling for.

People. It’d been idling for AN HOUR AND TEN MINUTES. Complete and total breakdown of sustainability narrative. We lost it. I phoned the restaurant immediately and got an appropriately contrite young lady, and the following day I got a phone call from the operations director  and the outsourced valet service. So that was nice. But who’s going to pay for my $20 worth of gas?

I digress.

Here’s the thing, okay? Story is one thing. Have a good story, and you’re winning half the battle already. But honestly, if you–and I mean you as marketer, brand executive, novelist, copy-writer, restauranteur–don’t have your emotional core built into your narrative, you’re almost bound to build something forgettable.

Likewise, consistency is key. Make sure that everyone in your organization understands your emotional core and the point of your narrative. Make them buy into it. After our experience at the bar, we were sold on the bar–we were making lists of friends who needed to see the place and experience it. It was like that until about a quarter of the way through the dinner, when we realized that only the head waiter knew what he was talking about. And by the time we got to the problem with the valet, we were seriously questioning what we’d previously believed was a real need to get our friends to this restaurant ASAP.

Our restaurant? Great narrative and emotional core; total breakdown of consistency. Budweiser? Great narrative in this instance; game-changing recognition of emotional core that I wish would happen more frequently with them.

The lesson? Find your story. Be true to it. Be consistent. You can’t go wrong that way.

I love this flight for this reason. Red eyes are not my favorite, but this one gives me solid time to be alone for awhile, listen to some music (Coleman Hawkins at the moment), and try to make sense of it all.

It was by far the best residency ever. Not only do I feel settled in as a student, now (it’s my last full semester, if I can get my thesis pulled off), we had an incredible list of writers, editors, and agents come trooping through our doors to offer us lots of good nuggets of useful information that I can put to use in my work soon.

Among these were, in order of appearance:

Alan Rinzler. Alan is the editor of such writers as Joseph Hellerman, Norman Mailor, Toni Morrison, Claude Brown…eurgh. The list goes on. He is a gentle soul of infinite proportions and equal wisdom. I have a lot to learn from him, and I’m looking forward to continued correspondence, even if via such far-away venues as his ‘blog, on which he posts great editorial tips and tricks–and, occassionally weighs in on things like social marketing for writers. Lovely.

My colleague Charlotte Morganti spent an hour with Alan distilling some of what he taught us. Her interview is up at her blog.

Deb Lund. Deb is appearing early in this list even if she was one of our very last presenters. This is because Deb cared enough to show up early in the week and get to know us. It’s true, she does live on Whidbey Island, and so it was “easy” for her, but she was kind and lovely and she became a part of our campus very easily.

Deb is the author of some fun fun fun fun! picture books, but she is also the originator of some really effective writing tricks for writers, including those of us not working on picture books. The last day of residency is always a critical day because we have had nine days of lectures and we are up to the gills with information and learning. Still, she managed to keep us all excited and writing, and creating even when we thought it’d be impossible. Fantastic.

Lauri McLean. Laurie is an agent at Larsen-Pomada, San Francisco’s oldest literary agency. (I think.) More important, she truly understands writers. Even more important, she is of the same mind as me when we think of marketing. In fact, I asked Laurie within minutes of meeting her to sit in on the class I held at Whidbey this residency. What a treat. We have some upcoming things going on together, so I am assured I’ll get to see her again–this makes me very, very happy. It’s so nice to meet someone of like mind! I’ll never get tired of it.

Melissa Manlove. Melissa is a children’s book editor. I’ve yet to meet one I don’t like. But this one…this one…well. let’s put it this way: Randomly, Stefon and I broke out into the theme song from the Muppets over lunch. Melissa pitched right in. And she knew all the words. This was right after Stefon, Chels, Melissa and I finished drafting the storyboard for our soon-to-be-award-winning children’s picture book, Are You My Hostage? It is a charming coming-of-age story about a bumbling bank robber who must find his way in the complicated world of larceny. Along the way, he discovers his hostage’s favorite food; that he really mustn’t bring his laundry to a robbery, and other truths.

Hunh! Oh, and the editing thing: Melissa is a really, really good editor. She understands stories. She had good ways to get to the heart of them. She makes me want to get to know my characters better.

Cheston Knapp. It is so rare that one gets to invite the managing editor of a fine literary magazine over for Scotch. Rarer still that he stays until 1AM, talking about everything from floppy hair to glossy crackers that only look inedible. There is talk about books and work and general happiness and suddenly the entire bottle of Scotch is gone, and it is time for bed. Lovely, especially in the company of other smart writers, who also happen to be friends.

–

And that doesn’t even include my regular faculty, or any of the other fantastic writers studying with me.

Often when I return I am incapable of much of anything. Tomorrow I will return home to an empty apartment, and I will be lonely, at least until Jim comes home at 5 or so, but I will snap on the TV and watch some classic films and talk myself off the ledge of wanting to dedicate my entire life to being a crazed solitary writer, if only because a girl must eat and a girl likes to be social.

But sitting here, alone but not alone, it is easy to think that I can take what I learned from this past residency and eat from it and only it until I pop, and I’d probably have some fine, fine work when I was done, and that that would be enough to sustain me for a very, very long time.

*Yawn.* I’m going to read something new now.

1. I am scheduled to do a half-marathon on trail October 2. That’s this weekend, and I have been looking forward to it for a long time now.

2. I have been plagued by injury.

3. Now we are less than a week before the race, and although I know I won’t have a problem completing the race, I’m now in a position where I don’t feel like I can log in anymore miles because I’m terrified of hurting myself before the race. (This is because the last injury was two weeks ago, when I pulled a heretofore-unknown muscle in my pelvis during a routine speed workout.)

4. Therefore, although I’ve been undertaking normal activities, and some not so normal, like tottering around in 3.5-inch heels to and from dinner and a Baptism and walking around Manhattan in a pair of not-smart sandals that obviously hve lost their cushioning, I have not been working out, and my body is PISSED.

5. Therefore, I am pissed. But still cautious about hurting myself before the race.

This is a ridiculous, self-fulfilling prophecy. So I am ignoring it, and trying to alleviate The Cranky.

Today I want to talk to you about art. This past weekend we had some friends in town from Chicago, and we visited both the Neue Galerie and The Met, and the following day we walked over the Hudson River on the Walkway and then went to the FDR Presidential Home and Library. Then we had dinner at the Culinary Institute of America, from which Jim’s father graduated.  If that seems like a lot of culture, it was, but it was also full of art in all its aspects: natural, historical, visual, and culinary.

I did not have my camera with me, and my Blackberry has decided it Does Not Want to Take Photos anymore, so I had to rely on others for those. (This, incidentally, is another reason for The Cranky.) But this is a good opportunity for me to share with you my latest endeavor, which is to be a better recorder of life through not only words and type, but also visual arts.

Some of you may remember that I took some art lessons awhile back. This is me and my art instructor, Jan Cianflone:

We are on her porch, the last day of my art lesson, just before I went to Whidbey. Towards the end our lessons took place en plein air.

Jan ran me through several different media. We started with pencil and charcoal and spherical objects. Here’s a photo of some eggs:

And here’s the chiaroscuro charcoal I did of those same eggs:

We also did some gesture drawings, which I really enjoyed, from magazine pages. Fashion magazines are good for these, since the models tend to be lanky and long and the shoots tend to be of exaggerated poses. I wish I still had the actual page this came from. This is a 3-minute gesture drawing.

From there we moved into pencil washes. I really enjoyed working with the more suggestive lines of these, as opposed to the more definitive lines of plain pencil.

and then we moved into pen-and-ink, which I really loved, but only in this one case, because, as it turns out, you can’t mix color as well in these big markers as you can in something like watercolor. Although, I did love the broad stroke of the pens…

We did some drawing from life of my favorite hairy subject. (I call this the Grandma-Moses Sprocket.)

And from there, I was on my own. It was a remarkable six weeks, and although I’m still experimenting and learning, here are some of the results:

The Whidbey dock. I’m not happy with this drawing. I love the loose evocation of the trees at the top of the drawing, but I’ve really done a hack job on the dock, which looks cartoony and stiff. I know a lot of this is me learning my own style, but it’s definitely frustrating to see something like this.

I drew it from life, but, for comparison, at an obviously different time of day, here’s a photo.

Later on in the week, I did this drawing, which is of a house that sits on the lagoon near where we had our afternoon classes. I got really lost in the grasses near the bottom of the drawing and just didn’t have the energies or the know-how or the artistic balls to try and complete the suggestion of river that ran along the lawn of the house.

On my way home from Whidbey, I tried to do a marker-and-ink drawing of an airplane at its gate. When I looked up again, the airplane had disappeared. Sigh.

Here’s my most recent drawing:

Personally, it’s my favorite. For comparison, here’s the photo:

I want to get to a point where I can suggest things better and allow the viewer to make their own interpretations. But i guess a girl has to start someplace.

There are many more drawings I want to do. I still haven’t covered my beloved city, or the lovely impressionistic photos of Seattle I took at night, when the iPad camera will only suggest light and glimmer. I think those will be next.

Ultimately, I hope the drawing will inform my writing. It’s only just now occurred to me, actually, that the protagonist in the novel I’m writing for my thesis is an artist. Lately, she and I haven’t been communicating very well, and my adviser has suggested that I spend the day in her shoes, so I’m doubly glad that I took lessons with Jan.

It’s always nice to have another way of seeing things.

When I met him, I was a fairly good way through my short-lived freelance editorial career, and, arguably, at the peak of it. I was a contributing editor for Hooked on the Outdoors magazine, about a half-year away from getting hired on to work in advertising sales, and I was loving every minute of it.

It was early fall of 2000, and I pitched a story to the now-defunct Hooked about the surfing scene in New Jersey. I called it “Surfing the Right Coast.” My editor John liked it enough that he sent me to cover it as a feature and assigned an up-and-coming photographer named Chris Hondros to cover it with me. Chris was already working with Getty at the time, and I picked him up just outside of his Varick street offices. He was in a sueded brown blazer, jeans, and loafers, and I thought, “Oh boy, is this guy going to be okay?”

Chris was more than okay. He scooted here and there, huge lenses strapped all over, and ended up taking some awesome photos of the surfing competition that was taking place. Perhaps most important to me, he took some beautiful portraits that, when they appeared on the thick glossy stock that Hooked used, popped from the page and pinned down the wistful, evocative feel of a surfing competition that would always remain on the outskirts of the surf scene no matter how many top competitors it turned out, and no matter how much environmentalism was at heart.

Fluffy stuff, for sure, especially when compared to the conflicts that Chris would eventually go on to cover. Chris also shot some photos of me later, for a short essay I wrote on my fear of sharks and the surfing lesson that took place the same day as the surf competition. Of course I’ll treasure those. I remember seeing them in the magazine and thinking to myself, “That looks just like me, and it’s exactly the way I’d want a photo of me in a magazine to appear.”

That was Chris, in a nutshell. He was a student of individuals, and he captured them exactly as they were doing or saying the things that were their very essences.

We became friends that day, and saw each other quite a few times after we’d filed the story.

Last night, while I was struggling to find some peace with the fact that Chris has essentially been murdered (he was hit by an RPG while covering the Libyan conflict), I remembered something else: Chris was present at my 26th birthday party at the Half King. It was, in part, such a memorable event because of the photos Chris took that night with my rinky dinky point-and-shoot film Kodak, a cheap model I picked up at Rite Aid in Queens. I took a lot of pictures that year, and I took that stupid camera wherever I went. Chris was one of the first to arrive, and I remember him picking it up and turning it over in his hand, twice, looking bemused.

After he was done inspecting it, he held the thing above his head and shot ten, twelve good photos of the party from above, and then he got up on a stool, kneeling, and shot some more. They were wonderful photographs. Chris wasn’t an event photographer by any means. But I do remember getting those photos back, and loving almost every single one of them.

Of course, he’s not in any of them. But then again, that wasn’t what he was about, was it?

Later that year, my then-boyfriend and I went to celebrate New Year’s with Chris and his friends. At the time, Chris was living smack in the middle of Times Square, on 43rd street. We went up to the roof to celebrate. It’s the best vantage point I ever have had of Times Square, and the closest I ever want to get to the heaving mass of humanity that is the NYE celebration there. I’ve often thought of how wonderful it was to spend NYE in Chris’ company, and I wrote the scene of that party into my first novel attempt later.

We saw each other after that, well into the new year (2001, it would have been). We spent not a few evenings at bars in each others’ company, slugging back beer and the occasional whiskey, I think, although I may have fabricated the whiskey part of it.

These are my scraps of memory then: a few time-stamped photographs; some e-mails lost in the ether; memories of his voice over the line and across a couple of bar tables, the friendly brown eyes and raised eyebrows–”Tell Uncle Chris about it,” coquettishly–the constantly scruffy face, and that damned jacket he wore when I first met him, the one that made an appearance everywhere, it seemed.

My memories are nowhere near the events and images that made him famous later on. You won’t find our little article on his web page; and he probably didn’t think of me much over the past few years, nor did I think of him all that much, except for when I came across his byline, which was, okay, frequent, and always with the thrill that he’d gone from what we did together to this life. Always there was a frisson of worry and a silent wish that he’d stay safe.

These are the things I remember. I am honored to have shared a byline with him. Happy he graced my life. Infinitely sad that he won’t be around for me to look up when I get a wild hair, dial the number that lived in my Rolodex for years, gathering dust. Maybe I’d hear the warm voice again.

He was a good man, a good friend, whenever I called. My work is better because of his work. Here is Chris’ web site. I hear he has a son, a 3-year-old. Maybe one day I will bring by the clips, show little Hondros the faces his father captured before he his work launched him onto the world stage as an important voice in conflict photography.

Or maybe I’ll just keep it to myself. For now, here are the pages of our work together. I will miss you, Chris. Thank you for sharing the byline.

UPDATE:
In lieu of flowers, the loved ones of Chris Hondros kindly request donations be made to The Chris Hondros Fund. This fund will provide scholarships for aspiring photojournalists and raise awareness of issues surrounding conflict photography.
The Chris Hondros Fund
c/o Christina Piaia
50 Bridge Street #414
Brooklyn, New York 11201

About a month ago, I told you all that I was going to do five things for 30 days straight. So, what were the results?
Here:

1. Drink a glass of water every morning: 100%
2. Make our bed every morning: 100%*
3. Write a one-page diary entry longhand every day: 93%
4. Go to the gym or do something physically strenuous every day: 76%
5. Read at least the headlines of one entire section of the newspaper that arrives at my door each morning: 0%

So what now? Well, let’s look at why I picked these five items to begin with.

The water thing was about the fact that I woke up dehydrated every morning. That and the making-the-bed thing were also both about establishing a mini-routine that would help me to feel more organized in the morning. (Somehow, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and making coffee wasn’t enough of a routine.) And then, it’s kind of nice to walk by the bedroom and not see a rumpled mass of sheets and blankets every time I go past it.

Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are all about things I badly want in my life but hadn’t found the focus for previously. To be more specific, I’m more organized when I can take five or 10 minutes each night to jot down what happened during the day, and clear my mind of any extraneous garbage that might disturb my sleep, like pissiness over the way a meeting went, or the way a friend’s been treating me, or the way I’ve been treating a friend.

Working out every day was sort of a physical experiment. How long could I keep that up for without a break? And what would it do to my body?

Reading the newspaper was about being a better citizen of the world. And about cutting down on waste. Every day that I do read the newspaper, I find something I care about, something of interest.

So. Here are my conclusions.

1&2. I like starting the day with a little automatic movement and routine. I’ll keep these habits and probably build on them. In the last week of the experiment I started getting up at 6:30 with Jim and walking to the train station, where he catches his shuttle to work. Sprocket got an extra two miles–and I got an extra-early start to the day, which meant I could knock off earlier and not feel guilty if I was sitting in a beam of sunlight, reading, at 4PM.

3. I liked bookending my day with a focused task like this. It was nice to recap the day. There was a time when I wondered how people could fit everything they thought into one day, or even half a page.

really? merely a page for a day? yes, but not with restrictions like this. Photo: Levenger

But I could see how it would be soothing, to know that you only had to get to the end of the page and then you could stop or go on. And, unlike my previous practice of making lists for the next day each night, this freer form allowed me room to rant if I wanted to. I still like the night-before list. Good way to ensure that everything’s out of mind and safely on paper where you won’t forget it. But you can’t rant, or worry, or muse, on a list. You can with a nice blank sheet.

I used to do stuff like this all the time. What happened?

4. I have a love-hate affair with fitness. I’ve raced in countless events and even done Ironman. So what’s my block? I still don’t know, but I believe I am closer to solving the puzzle with these 30 days. I kept up the streak for 12 days straight. And then I had to travel one day, and that sort of screwed the pooch. But do you know what? I was so much stronger for the day off. I know, DUH, right?

Still, my experiment reinforced the need for balance. I love being outdoors, and often, a walk in the woods is so much more rejuvenating than a session on the Cybex. And then, friends also make everything so much better. Towards the end of my 30 days, some friends signed up for a June triathlon. I tagged along. Getting outside with friends reminded me how important it is to have people to train with, and folks to egg you on.

Linda, me and Jim on North County Trail

Then, too, it’s been very wintry here, so the days I was tempted to go outside were limited. I’m still not sure what I want to do with this, but now that it’s spring (although it’s snowed here for the past two days, or sleeted), my options will include many more outdoors miles. Either way, I’m stronger for this past month. In total I skipped seven days out of the 30, two of those for illness, two for travel, and three cos I was just plain lazy and couldn’t be arsed.

5. Oh, my newspaper. my beloved newspaper. I can’t give this up. I get so much out of it when I do sit down to it. But it almost never happens. Must approach this with renewed vigor. Maybe with looser parameters. But at which point do I abandon ship and just go to e-version? This would make me cry, by the way. I once had a nightmare about giving up the newspaper. Yes, really.

There are varying opinions on how long it takes a habit to form. One article I found said 21 days; another said 68! My take is that the habits you form are the ones that truly, deep down, do something for you.

I have a new challenge for myself. This one is just because I’m curious. Starting today, I will write down everything I eat each day. Will I calorie count? Maybe. I *am* curious.

Here’s the takeaway from my 30-day experiment.

*I don’t seem to be in danger of letting exercise either run my life or escape from it entirely. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.

*So, too, for the glass of water, the making of the bed, and the daily longhand diary.

*I’m giving the newspaper another crack. I’m just not willing to give up the feel of it.

And here’s what I’ve consumed today, so far:

(2) eggs in (1) tblsp corn oil + 1/2 c salsa

(2) cups coffee w (2) tabls half and half

(2) packets emergen-C w 16 oz. water.

Are you bored yet?

Photo: Lara

Photo: Lara

Photo: Alan

Photo: Nichole Donje

Photo: Scott Allinson

and then we went back to the Inn and put our feet up for a wee bit, and then there was a ceremony and some vows and then there was this:

Photo: Matt Siber

Photo: Scott Allinson

*these included some gift bags and an item of clothing which I will er, reflect on later.
**See? How awful is that? I’ve already started to forget! If someone out there is reading this and was there, could you remind me?
***Seriously, brain is for shit.
****It would have been so much easier if we had been together, so I could have just pounced on him and yelled, “MAKE IT STOP!” instead of doing it over the phone.

1. I will go the gym or do something physically strenuous every single day.
2. I will write a diary entry in longhand every day. It only has to be a page, but it can be more than that.
3. I will start each day with a glass of water.
4. I will make our bed each morning.
5. I will read at least the headlines of the first section of the newspaper that arrives each morning at my door and often goes straight to the recycling bin.

Okay, that’s my list. Now I’ve told you all, and I have no excuses, really. Some of these things are so simple! Who knows? Maybe this will be the start of something great.

Her recounting prompted me to recount my own wedding week, although I’m not one to air things like planning details and information on color choices and whatnot. After all, Jim and I have been together for so many years; it seemed almost a superfluous task, to tell everyone we know and love that we’re  together and committed. It’s hardly a newsflash.

But that’s another story, another argument, and the fact is, when we set out to plan this event, we did it with the full knowledge that what we were planning was an event to honor our friends and family, and the role they’ve played in our lives. What we got was so much more than that, and so quintessentially us, that I fear we’ll never be able to plan a better event.

The whole thing started, as do so many, with a sporting event. I’d run the Death Valley Marathon two years ago, and been rapidly enamoured of the place and of the event; it’s a low-key gig with no starting gun, no big finish banner, no TV coverage. The landscape is ridiculously gorgeous, the entire venue, indeed, perfect, and we wanted all of our nearest and dearest to experience it.

So we planned our wedding around the race and around the Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch.

Lemme tell you, there is something tangibly delicious about sharing something you love with people you know will appreciate it. As always, there was some worry, because Hello! Death Valley?? Even the name is off-putting. But whatever.

Wedding week started off with insanity. I didn’t know if I’d make my flight out because of a massive storm that was brewing and threatening to cancel a ton of flights, so I left twelve hours early. That was interesting in and of itself, and if I needed any more proof that Jim’s practice of making lists was the way to go, well, let’s just say that if I hadn’t made the list, I’d probably have forgotten everything that mattered. It turns out I didn’t forget anything–quite the reverse! I had so much stuff that we couldn’t find one or two things.

I got into Vegas, where Jim was already spending time with Scott, his best man, only three hours late. Not bad. Crashed into bed and slept for a whole three hours before I had to get up for a 7AM conference call; then went back to bed. Vegas was CHILLY. So not cool. I mean, cool, but not in the way I wanted.

Jim left the next morning to get to Death Valley, and I was left with a nice quiet day with which to wander around our hotel, get to know it, book appointments and hunt down various needs, and then, after an hour or two of work, Lara arrived. Oh, joy!! We’re in touch quite a bit via things like chat and Twitter, but we only get to see each other once a year, so it was nice nice to have her in person. Our suite at the Hard Rock had a wet bar and some nice stereo system, so we chilled with a beer, and then, just as Lara was needing to really get to sleep (it was 4 AM UK time), we went out for dinner.

There is something really heartbreaking about watching a friend fall asleep in her salad. We each had a margarita and then crashed into bed at around 9:15. Yes, yes, we did.

And if that doesn’t sound very Vegas to you, guess what we did the next morning? We ordered room service, admired the view of the parking lot from our hotel room, finally tottered off to our manicure appointments, and then spent the rest of the day in the strip malls looking for things like craft supplies and outlet malls.

We did, however, find a gorgeous dress for Lara and a really cool top for me, and then it was back to our suite for a quick change and a civilised glass of wine, and then off to see “O” at the Bellagio. Dinner later at Noodles, and then back to our suite again, where we sat up and chatted until midnight.

How lovely!

Do you want to know why there are no pictures of our brief time in Vegas? I’m convinced it’s because we were too busy taking advantage of the proximity of good friends. That, and the combination of too many things to do and the need, for me, at least, to preserve the memory in my head and heart rather than on film nullified the desire for photos.

We did room service yet again the next day, quite happy to be lolling about in our big fluffy beds with pillows all around and the weak February sunlight filtering through the screens, meandering from room to room when we felt like it. It was lovely. Really and truly lovely. And then, before we knew it, and after a lot of messy packing on my part, we had just enough time to scoot over to the Bodies exhibit at the Luxor.

So here’s what I’m saying about experience vs. photographic evidence. Obviously, photos are meant as memory aids. Some really skilled photographers can produce evocative evidence of the things that happened. But in some cases, the photo just can’t even come close to the actual experience, and it’s even depressing to think of how do try and capture, at least for a lumpily unskilled sort like me.

Case in point? The Bodies exhibit. Obviously we weren’t allowed to take photos in there. But I’ll never ever forget discovering it with Lara, each pointing out the sheer wonder of the things, and marveling at the beauty and work of some of it. I also will never forget me sniff-sniff-sniffing, faucet-head-o-rama, and Lara going, “Do you want a tissue?” I don’t know why. It was a particularly tender moment, only underscored by the fact that Lara didn’t, in fact, have a tissue to offer.

Eventually we went to go pick up Ms. Jody at the airport. And I’ll leave the rest of the trip for another post, because the rest of my day beckons.

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.