Category Archives: this n that

just effing whatever

2012 Resolutions In Review

Oh right, last year’s resolutions.

1. Running faster in at least two half marathons plus the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler.
Done. I PR’d in the Illinois half in April, taking 6:40 off my Detroit time. I missed a PR in the Monster Dash by 4 seconds. I also took 4:59 off my Cherry Blossom time.

2. Learn more about [my] DSLR.
Done. I took a DSLR workshop in May and feel like I have a somewhat better grasp on how my camera works – and then I broke my arm and couldn’t hold it properly for a few weeks, and then it started taking spirit photographs and spent 3 months in the shop. Whoops.

3. See [no] fewer than 12 movies in the theater.
Done. I saw: The Adventures of Tintin, My Week With Marilyn, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Artist, The Skin I Live In, Joy Division with Le voyage dans le lune, Shame, The Cabin in the Woods, Your Sister’s Sister, The Hunger Games, Shut Up and Play the Hits, Moonrise Kingdom, Skyfall (x3), and Django Unchained.

4. Write at least one [letter] per week.
Done. I wrote 169 letters and postcards in 2012.

5. Find a job in Chicago.
Done! I’ve been at my job nine months, and while it isn’t my dream job, that has less to do with the job and more to do with my dreams.

6. [Bake] one pie per month.
I baked zero pies in 2012.

7. Master at least one new cocktail at home per month.
I mastered two cocktails: the manhattan, and the French gimlet.

8. More travel.
I didn’t leave the country despite my best attempts to walk to Mexico. I did leave the state more than a few times, though.
January: Carlsbad/San Diego, CA plus lots of back and forth to Chicago
February: back and forth to Chicago
March: Champaign for LEEP weekend, DC for the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler
April: southern Illinois with the GSLIS ladies, Champaign for the Illinois I-Challenge
May: Overnight to Indiana
June: weekend in A2, Anaheim/Imperial Beach, CA
July: nowhere because I had a goddamned broken arm
August: weekend in A2
September: nowhere
October: two weekends in Champaign, Charlottesville, VA for a conference
November: DC, Champaign
December: San Francisco, CA, weekend in A2

9. Read at least two books per month.
Nope. I read 17 books, quit one book club, and started another.

10. Learn to do alterations.
Nope. Maybe this year.

11. More feats of strength! More push-ups. More miles on Orange. And maybe, just maybe, a pull-up.
Done, sort of. Angie and Soy and I started the 100 pushups training program, and I was happy as long as I stayed ahead of the husbands. We had a push-up competition on our girls’ weekend (I won). And then I broke my arm. My strength is coming back, but a pull-up is still a long ways off.

I did, however, put a lot of dang miles on Orange, though I didn’t hit my arbitrary and late-established goal of 1,000 miles.

12. More time connecting with the important people in my life.
Done, though this looks dramatically different than it did last year.

2013 Resolutions

No pants in public. Jenny asked how this counts as a resolution since I’m not inclined to wear pants in general. I said it’s like a social smoker quitting smoking for real. No pants in public except those required for specific fitness activities (yoga, running, biking, etc).*
One really big race: either the Chicago Marathon or a triathlon. Despite the adrenaline of finishing the former with Annette, I’m still unconvinced that I need to do it myself. The latter sounds hard but fun. Or “fun”. So maybe I do an Olympic/international tri, and then run Nat in from mile 18. All the adrenaline, none of the missing toenails.
Ride a goddamned motorcycle. This was on my list of things to do in my 25th year. I’m almost 33.
Get out of debt. I also want to build up my savings, but interest rates are higher on credit than on savings, so debt reduction it is.
Leave the country at least once.
Run 1,000 miles and bike 2,000 miles.**
Figure out this career stuff. I can’t be more specific at the moment, but I want to make this happen.
Keep living with my heart wide open.
Be more like Leslie. Always.

*I enjoy that I will not be wearing pants in public, while Jenny generally doesn’t wear pants in private. Opposite/same!
** Special dispensation will be given for this resolutions in case of injury.

Where do you belong? I have no idea.

Rob Brezsny’s Astrology Newsletter – September 18, 2012

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Where do you belong? Not where you used to belong and not where you will belong in the future, but where do you belong right now? The answer to that question might have been murky lately, but the time is ripe to get clear. To identify your right and proper power spot, do these things: First, decide what experiences you will need in order to feel loved and nurtured between now and your birthday. Second, determine the two goals that are most important for you to accomplish between now and your birthday. And third, summon a specific vision of how you can best express your generosity between now and your birthday.

This has been in my inbox for just under two months, and my birthday is in a little over two months, and I’m still far from forming answers to any of these questions. I also don’t know what I want to do for my birthday, and would welcome your thoughts on all of the above.

an aside

I’m on the east coast for a week – Charlottesville for work, then Harrisonburg, then DC. Hurricane Sandy blew the color off of the trees, but otherwise did very little where I am apart from lulling me to sleep with persistent rain last night.

And then, sometime in the middle of the night, between the storm breaking and the sun rising behind the clouds and the mist, I woke from a dream of my grandpa, a dream so vivid that when I woke from my dead sleep, it was with tears in my eyes and a sob caught in my throat. I don’t believe in ghosts, or in the interpretation of dreams, but this one was so real that I have tears in my eyes just remembering it.

I’m tired, drained of all enthusiasm, ready to hibernate for the winter, or at least until responsibility and obligation drag me out of my too comfortable bed in the sweet Airbnb space I’m renting. I wonder who will visit me in my sleep tonight.

no simmering life but a boiling one

1.
I woke up this morning sick as shit. I don’t know where it came from, but it felt a little like several essential parts of my body got together and decided to put me in time out. You’ve been doing too much, they said, and it’s time to stop. I ignored the message for a while, but when I looked in the mirror at work and didn’t really recognize myself, it was time to go home. I took photos with my phone to prove the point; when I checked just now, they’re not there.

2.
Last night Erin and I saw David Byrne and St Vincent at the Chicago Theater. We both had to temper our slight disappointment with the knowledge that this was David Byrne AND St Vincent, not Talking Heads. But the sound was fantastic and Chicago got on its feet and danced, and when they closed with Road to Nowhere, it was like something out of an old revival, hands in the air, voices united.

3.
I’ve fallen into that city-dwelling habit of eating out too often while observing evolution in action in my crisper. Every couple of weeks, I buy a bag of produce from Edible Alchemy and dream big dreams about what I’m going to make – and then I devour the fruit while letting the zucchinis go soft, the potatoes grow eyes, the onions shed their dusty skins.

4.
A week submerged in The Diaries of Anais Nin. I’m not sure that I can neatly summarize it. It’s been a complicated, emotional year, and so many of the things she described resonated with my experience while also being completely foreign to me. Perhaps this, from November 1933:

Allendy took pains to delineate my character, my true nature, my human attitudes, but it was by a process of oversimplification. The mold into which he tried to fit me came to a climax the day he suggested I should take love more lightly, give it less importance, to evade tragedy. That I should take a playful attitude towards it. It should be sweet and casual, easygoing and interchangeable…This was the natural conclusion to the formation of my human self, to normalcy; and if he was right about overcoming tragedy, par contre, he overlooked the deeper cravings of an artist, for whom deep full love is the only possible form, no simmering life but a boiling one, no small compromise with reality.

5.
Fall has arrived right on schedule. Last night the thermostat dipped low. It is 6:45pm in my living room, and my space is illuminated more by my laptop than by the waning sunlight. Laurie said that we’re losing 2 minutes of daylight each day. But still the ice cream truck sits on the corner, and I dream of swimming in the lake and of all of the summer things that didn’t happen amidst all that did.

6.
Six months in Chicago, and Jeremy said that it sounds like I’m home. Two and a half years in Ann Arbor. Two years in DC. A year each at MPub and Kresge, two years at Gelman. Five years in this goddamned profession. Six years in a relationship, seven months out. I love Chicago. Chicago exhausts me. I’m envious of friends who have recently moved to quieter places. I worry that my life here will burn me out. I don’t know.

“We’ll Eat You Up – We Love You So”

I’ve never really understood why we as a culture experience grief at the passing of celebrities. I had a conversation about this last week after observing the outpouring of sadness in various pockets of the Internet over the death of MCA – a person whose music was an integral part of formative periods of many of our (though not my) lives. To the best of my knowledge, no one that I know personally knew Adam Yauch, or will feel his absence in their day-to-day lives – and yet many were shedding tears over his death, just as many did over Steve Jobs a few months ago, or Michael Jackson a few years ago. I don’t get it.

That said, I gasped when I heard the news of Maurice Sendak’s passing this morning. Much has already been written about him, and in much more eloquent ways than I can manage, but that gasp of sadness seems justification enough for adding my words to the pile.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise that I was a bookish kid, or that books (and my thumb and blanket) were my truest friends from early childhood. This photo of my brother and I circa 1984 was taken at my aunt’s apartment in Iowa City, where I first remember encountering the stories and illustrations of Maurice Sendak. In fact, if you look closely, I think that the stack next to Mark includes one of the Little Bear books, illustrated by Sendak.

I remember reading The Nutshell Library with my aunt, the small books just the right size for a child’s hands. We read In the Night Kitchen – what a strange story – and I remember experiencing a thrill of the forbidden because Mickey is naked as he gets baked into the morning cake. And of course – Where the Wild Things Are. The story and illustrations figure large in the imagination of people my age – larger than the monsters who threaten to eat Max up because they don’t want him to go.

For a year, I lived in an apartment with the beginnings of murals on the walls of my living room. There was the Lorax, speaking for the trees, and Curious George, reaching for the hand of The Man in the Yellow Hat. And then, in the west and north corners of the room, a pair of Wild Things:

The Wild Things cemented my love for that apartment, and were the source of wonder for friends who visited, and confusion for those who woke up on the couch to a lovingly menacing face:

And I loved – and continue to love – his illustrations for The Animal Family, a small and magical book about a hunter, a mermaid, a bear, a lynx, and a child. That a war poet and a noted curmudgeon could create a world so intricate, sensitive, deliberate, and wonderful – it gives me chills.

“I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. … What I dread is the isolation. … There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

So today I am sad because this amazingly talented and insightful person is no longer in the world – that monsters, both real and imagined, will go undrawn. And I’m grateful for all the magic his work brought to the lives of so many children, young and old, for so many years.

The Return of the Friend Feature: Loretta G.

This NPR piece on Facebook and the ephemeral nature of online “friendships” has me motivated to resuscitate a project I started in early 2011. Inspired by my friend Loretta, and in an attempt to validate the friendships I was trying to foster online, I wrote a series of posts detailing my relationships with each of my Facebook friends. Or, rather, with two dozen of them.

Since the introduction of Timeline, the Notes app seems to be at least somewhat deprecated (can something be somewhat deprecated?). At best, previous notes are hard to find. At worst, they’re basically invisible. So instead of further shackling my content and my relationships to Facebook, I’ll be resuming the series here.

And, since she was the inspiration, I will start with Loretta.

Loretta is awesome. In fact, here is a video of Loretta being awesome:

I met Loretta when we were both PhD students at GSLIS and both ended up in Leigh Estabrook’s Preparing Future Faculty class. While I didn’t go on to become a faculty member, I took a tremendous about away from the course, especially the importance of keeping your personal stuff personal, and your professional stuff professional. I mention this because I think it’s a lesson more people could learn – and also because it is, in a roundabout way, something I really admire about Loretta.

I know she doesn’t always feel like it, but Loretta is a tremendous role model for those of us who aspire to have it all. She’s fiercely intelligent and passionate about her work. She’s articulate and funny, and along with her similarly intelligent and passionate husband is raising two daughters are also intelligent, articulate and funny. Oh, and she also used to be in a band.

I regret that I didn’t have more time with Loretta at GSLIS – that I didn’t meet her earlier, and that I left before we had much time to hang out. She and her family came to a party at my house once, and her girls – who couldn’t have been much more than three – were especially vigilant at keeping Basil inside despite his best attempts to escape. Loretta, if you’re reading this, I still have your Tupperware. From 2007. I promise I’ve washed it.

Essential friend data:
Met: LIS490TP at GSLIS
Years known: ~5

THIS.

Here’s what I’ve realized, and what I told Shana earlier:

When we were small, we were told we could have it all. And then at some point we came to believe that we couldn’t. Or someone told us that we couldn’t. Or we tried to have it all and it was too hard.

The fallacy doesn’t lie in believing that we can have it all. The fallacy lies in believing that having it all will be easy. Or that it is without opportunity costs. Or that having it all means the same thing for everyone.