Take Your Mark

Soooooooooooooooooooo.

The last couple weeks of life have been chaotic (but, really, when is life ever not chaotic?), hence the lack of posting. I feel as though I came back from vacation, packed up my life, and moved in the span of about two and a half weeks. Oh wait...that's exactly what happened.

Life is again a flurry of boxes and bubble wrap, only this time it's a more settled feeling. My new house is beautiful, the neighborhood is divine, and things are slowly but surely beginning to develop new patterns and routines. A week into the new house, and I can make my way from my room to the bathroom downstairs at night without the lights on. I call this progress.

Oh, and tomorrow I'm gonna run a half marathon. You know, no big deal.

Actually, wait; it is a big deal. I've been training for this thing for eleven weeks. And while I haven't had time to update the mileage to the right of this page, I know that I've put 175 miles on these feet since August in preparation for this.

Icing on the cake - my dad, my boyfriend, and Catalano are all running too. My lone hobby became a project for my boyfriend and me, and I will say that training with a partner was much, much easier than training alone. We did all of our long runs together, starting at 8 and working up to 12.5. We had difficult runs where we could barely pick our feet up off the ground, and runs where we finished before we realized. I have to say, I probably got the better end of the deal - training with someone who was a college athlete was a huge asset. I learned what to eat, how to stretch, when to rest, when to push. The best part: I had someone to rub my shins and shoulders and work the knots out of my calves.

What?! I cooked him dinner on many occasions!

So this half marathon will be a family-and-friend affair, and I couldn't be more excited. And a little nervous. I've been working towards this for the last few months, but also I feel as though I've been mentally prepping for this for the past year. Last year when I ran the relay, I knew this was something I wanted to do. The greatest physical challenge I've taken on thus far.

And one of those bucket list things: run a half marathon before you're thirty.

Shoot. I should probably make a list of all those things I was supposed to do before thirty. Because that's in like...7.5 months. Damn. I need to get busy figuring out world peace, writing a best-seller, and penning a Billboard top single.

But first...I think I'll unpack some more boxes. And run 13.1 miles.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

(I feel as though I may have already titled a blog post "Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes." But I'm too lazy to go back and look. Eh.)

Everything is changing.

The past year has sort of been a whirlwind of change. A flurry of engagements, marriages, big moves, career changes, babies, and a host of other milestones have been happening all around me. In the coming months, Lee and Hot Curry will move to Utah*, some friends are hoping to start families, others are facing big career changes.

In some stroke of extraordinary good luck, it took me five days to find a new place to live. Well, five days, infinite emails, phone calls, Craigslist lurkings, two properties falling through, and multiple sketchy potential roommates. Last Saturday, however, I got the call from a girl with whom I'd been looking for houses. She'd found it, THE house, gorgeous, in our price range, lots of space, three bedrooms and a third roommate already lined up. Ready to go October 1. She was standing in this gorgeous house holding an application, ready to sign and put down a deposit if I was in.

The catch: the house isn't in Federal Hill.

I have lived in the same 20-block radius of Federal Hill since 2007. Four and a half years. I've moved twice since I first arrived here from Florida, shaking the sand and dead lizards out of boxes. I know every crack in the sidewalk, every short cut, the hours of every liquor store, and where I can always, always find a parking space when I'm hard up. My friends all live here, my trivia is here, my vet/dentist/pharmacy/gym are here.

Now, granted, New House is geographically situated less than a mile away. But changing neighborhoods in Baltimore is akin to changing boroughs in New York. Not only that, it forces you to vastly recalibrate everything from your morning cup of coffee to where you can buy eggs at 10pm if you need to. WHICH SOMETIMES I DO.

So, I decided that this house needed to be nothing short of spectacular to make me give up the comfort of my daily routine. I went over to view the space, and my decision became more difficult, because it was. Spectacular, that is. Partially compared to where I'm living now, where the house is crumbling down around us, and partially compared to some of the spaces I'd seen previously. Nothing like a hovel that's outside of your price range to make you want to give up and live in a box. But this house...it's beautiful. It's large, it's open, it's full of light, it's on a pretty little street in an eclectic neighborhood with some of the best restaurants in the world. And it's in my price range. Well within, I might add.

You get stuck in your bubble, in your routines and habits, in the patterns that make up daily life. Moving to a new house disrupts this, but you adapt. Moving to a new neighborhood completely changes things. But I'll adapt.

And change, I've found, is not a bad thing. A new perspective, new habits and patterns. With the comfort of knowing I'm still a ten minute cab ride or half hour walk from my old 'hood.

So, I filled out an application and left a deposit. I picked up the keys and signed a lease a week later. And now...my life is filled with boxes and packing tape again, with changing addresses and begging my friends and family to come and help me - again - a mere six months after I previously moved.

And this time, it really is a move. A big change. Time to go forward, to adapt again, to begin again a little bit less than a mile away but in a different mind set and different physical orientation.

And, yes, high levels of stress. Moving makes me want to chew my own skin off. No lie. But from start to finish, it's been less than three weeks since I came back from vacation, discovered I needed to move, found a place, and will have everything done next weekend (I hope). At some point, I'll congratulate myself on this whirlwind of proactivity but, for the mean time, it's back to packing and purging. (The one good thing about moving being the sudden proclivity to throw all of one's crap away - less to move.)

And, also, it's not like I'm moving to Utah.

(*I need to include this fact because both were quite reticent to allow me to move out of Federal Hill, at which point we would no longer be neighbors of sorts. I reminded them, politely, that wherever I move in October, they are moving to UTAH in November. They told me I was being selfish and rude for leaving Federal Hill before them. How utterly insensitive of me.)

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

(photo: Uptown New Orleans, March 2010)

"The abject poverty revealed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exists in every urban area of the United States. It's poverty so severe that it kills people."
- Robert Edgar

"The past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it; all this shit matters. Like at the end of the book, ya' know, boats and tides and all. It's like you can change up, right, you can say you're somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. It don't matter that some fool say he different 'cause the things that make you different is what you really do, what you really go through."
- "D'Angelo Barksdale," The Wire, Season 2 Episode 6

My New Years' Resolution was distilled down to a bumper sticker slogan.

In grad school, I had a professor who celebrated the bumper sticker slogan school of thought. Every major theory, every complicated idea, everything that any philosopher or theorist or great thinker had ever thought of could be, somehow, distilled down to a bumper sticker slogan.

Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."

Hume: "A wise man proportions his belief to this evidence."

Hegel: "Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion."

The Life's Work of philosophers, some might say narrowed down or diluted. The details purged, the importance scoured to a sound bite.

But, in the end, the human brain will do this work anyway. We work in classifications, in categorization. Stereotypes exist because the human mind seeks to create order.

My New Years' resolution: finish what you start.

Initially, this was aimed towards creative projects and Jackal came on board as well. We made a promise to one another to practice "follow-through" in 2010. That was my entire resolution, based on the premise of "follow-through." Put your money where your mouth is.

Yesterday, I ran the Baltimore Women's Classic. My goal was simply to finish in an average time: I did better. Not only did I train, not only did I push, I set a new personal record. If you had told me, a year ago, that I would be running races, I wouldn't have believed it. I am not a runner.

Well, now I am.

I have another 5k in two weeks, and I intend to beat my new personal record.

I am signed up to run a leg of the Baltimore Marathon in October with a relay team.

Ultimately- I want to run a half-marathon. This is my ultimate goal.

And I'll do it.

And, in other news, Glitterati got a job.

A 9-5.

Yep.

Why?

Because I have to follow through.

In New Orleans, I made a promise to dedicate myself to social justice. I saw how poverty exists everywhere, and it took me flying so many thousand miles away to see it, first-hand, to realize that change starts in my own city. In my own neighborhood.

After months of job-searching, months of interviewing, I have landed a job with a non-profit that seeks to serve social justice. That provides choices and opportunities for the disadvantaged. I am returning to the 9-5 working world because I am following through on the promises I made to myself and my city to help in any way I can.

I've spent the last two years soul-searching, distilling, figuring out what is most important to me. I have held and abandoned many beliefs in that time, I have embraced and set free many ideas of who I am and who I want to be. And the only thing that sticks, like strands of finally-cooked spaghetti against a wall where I've been throwing raw ideas for two years now, is that I need to be contributing in some way to society. I chose non-profits, and I found a job in one that does significant good for the impoverished, disadvantaged, and beaten-down populations of the inner-city.

And, selfishly, I started running and lost ten pounds. The two are related in the sense of the follow-through, and I'm all for it.

New Orleans taught me a lot. About hard work, dedication, poverty, the complex issues of cities, natural disasters compounding all of this, and also a lot about my personal limits of what I can and cannot do. I was pushed. I responded. I followed through. Eventually, I ran a 5k and got a job that I hope will segue into a career.

For those of you who have stuck by this blog over the last two years, for those of you who have seen the seemingly impossible ups and downs, the "break-ups and breakthroughs," as Stephanie Klein calls them, and all of the many ridiculous moments I've had, take note: ultimate break-throughs require a great deal of personal confidence and pushing oneself very far beyond the limits of what you thought you could do. Knowing now that I can do these things is an immensely powerful thing. It opens up new questions, most notably: "Hmmm...what else can I do?" and, not to be ignored, "Hmmm...what can't I do?" The former is a bit more productive than the latter, but both are interesting perspectives to ponder.

So, Glitteratis, my advice to you is this: do it. Whatever it is you sort of have a vision of, do it. Tell everyone you know that you intend to do it (because making your desires public is one very sure way of putting a fire under your ass), and then follow the steps. Make a plan. Draw a calendar, and spend everyday doing one small thing toward this goal. Start by running one mile. Run it faster. Then run two. Then three. Get some new sneakers. Push yourself. When you're tired, when you're feeling beaten down, keep going. There's no room for tired here. Do the extra lap. Up your weights. Close your eyes and meditate for a moment and feel yourself doing it.

"I have an irrepressible desire to live life until I can be assured the world is a little better fo rmy having lived in it." -Abraham Lincoln

What's your bumper sticker resolution? Don't wait for a new year. Start now.

And finish what you start.

Who Are You Not To Be?

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.
We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?"

Actually, who are you not to be?
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

-Marianne Williamson

Sexy Spring

"You know what's almost here?" Jaunt said to me last Friday night. We were in our natural habitat (read: in a bar, drinks in hand), recovering from a very exciting moment where we energetically "cheersed" one another with such velocity that I cracked her pint glass. These things happen.

"What?" I asked, thinking "End of the school year" (as Jaunt is a teacher) or "birthday season" (as we have a lot of birthdays, hers and mine included, coming up.)

"Sexy Spring!" she squealed.

Oh, Sexy Spring. How we've missed you. Bare feet and swishy skirts, and mojitos made with mint from the backyard. Sitting on the patio in the evenings with books in hand, spicy food on plates, and white wines. I've already decided that my wine of choice this summer will be a pinot grigio. I spent all of last summer lapping up Albarinos and sauvignon blancs, but I recently felt my palate shift again and I'm craving something with a little more body.

Spring is my most favorite time of year. Things get done in the spring. I am at my best in the spring.

Despite the fact that the local meteorologists have warned of impending Days Upon Days of Rain, it's a beautiful morning and I can feel spring edging up through the scant piles of snow that are still desperately trying to melt.

And, in exciting news, Book Club now has a website thanks to our brilliant Joel. It's absolutely beautiful, and will at some point display all of the books we've read as we come upon our three-year anniversary this summer. So you can all see what we're reading, and Joel smartly included links to purchase the books on Amazon, because you should.

Also, a friend of mine sent me this link of ultimate multi-tasking. I've been searching for a way to combine working out with artistic creativity and, naturally, drinking. Search no more.

I'm slowly but surely getting my life together and ready to leave on Monday for New Orleans. The anxiety is slowly waning and excitement is beginning to edge in.

Stay tuned, Glitteratis. Sexy Spring is in the air, and I couldn't be happier.

One Week

July 17, 2009
I am always so homesick for a place that doesn't exist.

Leaving for New Orleans next week, and found myself smack in the middle of a sleepless night last night.

I couldn't tell you exactly what set the thoughts to percolating and spinning around (Maybe the Oscars? Sorely disappointed in the Martin-Baldwin pairing. Had expected so much more.) but I found myself staring at a re-run of Big Love at three am and thinking about things that happened years ago and wondering what it is that has me so anxious about this trip.

I think, mostly, I've come to view my week in New Orleans as the parenthetical end to a distinct period of my life that's been characterized by a lot of uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety. It caps off my 3-year mark in Baltimore, and I think back to the girl who swept the sand off of the doormats and unpacked boxes of Cuban seasonings and a shared DVD collection after the two-day drive in a U-Haul from Florida and I find great disjoint.

Not that this is a bad thing.

The thing that has set this period of my life apart from any other is my ready acceptance of the mantra "all I know is that I know nothing." Because, mostly, I knew everything before. I knew exactly where I was going, one foot in front of the other, one box checked and on to the next. Diplomas in hand, wedding plans sketched out. I knew what I would be eating for dinner each night, and made plans six months in advance. I followed all of the stepping stones thinking they were laid out for me and not realizing that they were laid out for others, and that I was just following along without ever questioning if there were alternatives.

And then, one by one, I strayed from the stones. First it was the job, then it was the long-term relationship, then it was every idea of who I was and who I wanted to be. I pierced my nose, cultivated a new identity, dated interesting people, and tried on one persona after another. I cobbled together a haphazard existence of vampire hours, exotic foods, fascinating hobbies, and enviable day trips. I don't regret a thing.

But, as I threw all of these ideas against the wall, one by one they began to slide and nothing seems to stick. There is nothing of permanence in the life I built and this was in direct re-action to the seemingly permanent life I'd previously thought I had.

I wouldn't even buy fresh produce because my dinner plans were so likely to change, most of it went bad before I got around to cooking it.

But, as these things tend to do, my priorities have shifted again and I find that my incessant seeking of new and interesting stimuli has me looking further into the future. What sort of identity do I wish to eke out that can encompass all of my interests and yet still have some semblance of stability and permanence? How can I find a way to take everything I like about both worlds and create a new one that will leave me creatively fulfilled, a little less selfish, a little more aware, and with a larger world view?

"I think you need to not look at this trip as the be-all, end-all," Snap cautioned me during one of our phone conversations (our heart-to-hearts now limited to digital voice transmission since she's relocated to San Fran.) "Just go." She's right- I do have a tendency to assign more meaning to things then is necessary, but I can't help but intuitively feel that everything has been culminating for some time and that, somehow, this trip is going to be a catalyst of some kind for figuring some shit out. I don't know how I could spend a week helping other people, listening, being present, and leaving all of my petty shit behind me and not come out of it with some different ideas or opinions.

That's not to say this will happen overnight. I need time to process, of course.

I stopped blogging awhile ago because, contrary to the idea that I no longer had anything to say, I now have a lot to say, but I also have a great deal of respect and sensitivity for my thoughts and feelings and do not wish to share them so readily. To embark on this trip, and to commit to sharing it with you via this blog again, is an act of courage that is also daunting for me. I'm opening myself up again, however briefly, and so felt the need to share these thoughts publicly to set the stage for the next couple of weeks.

I'm not saying that anything brilliant will emerge. It could be a very long and boring account of what I ate on the job site or the weather or a bunch of dry statistical facts. Who knows. But I'll be here, and I hope you will too.

Every time I think that I am stagnating again, I think back to the last few years of my life and see the violent twists and turns, upheavals and revolutions, radical changes of thought and ways of being and doing, and I realize that I'm still on the journey. Still on the road, on board the train, in the car, headed somewhere. I know not yet where, but somewhere other than here.

may I be I

may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong
ee cummings

Risk

Risk management: the effect of uncertainty on objectives (whether positive or negative.)

2010 was supposed to be a year of risk-taking.

Not like risk-taking in the past, which usually involved some sort of ill-conceived plan of mischief or giant leaps into abysses. I don't think there's anything wrong with a giant leap into an abyss every now and then. Good for the soul, especially when you have to climb your way up and out.

But 2010 was supposed to be a year of risk-taking that encompassed discovering new paths, new ways of thinking, and new life experiments. New Orleans will be a part of this; a week with strangers is far outside of my comfort zone, and I am not exactly a master carpenter. But I'll learn.

Stephanie Klein, for whom I still have a serious soft spot and a much greater tendency towards creating personal boundaries thanks to her homegrown and iron-clad brand of stating what you will and will not stand for in your life (you teach others how to treat you), recently wrote a blog post aimed at creating a new career mid-life. Specifically, it was about starting a writing career. I've started so many writing careers I can't keep track.

Her advice? Get the full-time job, and make it work for you. Find out how to get your employer to pay for extracurricular classes, use your vacation time to pursue your life's loves.

It isn't bad advice, certainly, but it sort of sails over my head because I've stalled out on that front: getting the full-time job. Apply, apply, apply, fill out more applications, talk to everyone you know, write your resume ten different ways in ten different fonts and scatter them to the winds. Searching for a job is a full-time job, and you're supposed to treat it as one.

Except it's the most thankless, exhausting, draining full-time job you could ever have.

Still, I read her blog post and realized that the thing that she was saying without really saying it had a whole lot to do with my ideas about risk: do what you gotta do, and find a way to make the doing a part of the greater process. Sometimes it doesn't look traditional, sometimes it's not exactly what you thought it might look like.

But you've gotta be doing something. And that's the risk. Inaction is laziness, it's safe, it's protecting, and it's also a very poisonous and stagnant way of being. Inaction leads to stultifying fear of taking a step in any one direction. I've found, in the last three or four years, that I'll be inactive for a great period of time before I'll finally just say, "Screw it," and jump. And the jumping is always somehow so much easier than I thought it would be. Mid-air, knowing not where I'll land, I somehow always find myself with this thought: "I should have done this a long time ago."

Whether it's a move, a career change, a new way of thinking- 2010 is the year of risk-taking, and it's time for me to get on that. I've been trying too hard for too long to do things the traditional way, and it's not working out. So let's approach it from a different angle. Find an internship. Volunteer. Get yourself in there, learn what you need to learn, and get out of this rut.

But, above all, make it work for you, not against you.

Not Content

for Spano

I'm not content to believe that this is all there is.

I'm not comfortable in the reality that my brain has stretched as far as it can go, that I have discovered all of the things I need to discover, or that the perspective of the world I currently hold is one I could sit peacefully with for a lifetime.

I'm not copacetic enough to believe that I've found anything even remotely like faith, except to say I have faith that someday I will have faith, in something. An idea, maybe, or a way of living. Most likely not a doctrine or any antiquated idea. But then, who knows?

I don't believe that I have yet found my calling, or my place in this world. I also don't believe that it will fit neatly into any predetermined square. I believe I will have to carve out a life for myself amongst the far stretches of what other people deem to be "normal" or "anticipated," and that I'll carry pieces of this life from far corners of reality to assemble my own reality.

I don't believe I have made peace with any of these things, so anxious am I to have all of the answers right now.

I don't believe that the best of me has yet surfaced. I don't know if it's hidden somewhere within, waiting to bubble up sometime around my thirty first birthday to surprise me just when I'd come to grips with the idea that all hope was lost. Or maybe it's out there, somewhere, and it will become my mission to find it, to coax it inside.

"What if all of our dreams had come true by 28? What, then, would we do to fill the next fifty years?"

I'm not content to believe this is all there is, but I am content to believe it isn't.

Write For Yourself

Better to write for yourself
and have no public
than to write for the public
and have no self.
-Cyril Connolly

Go Big Or Go Home

There is no passion to be found in playing small- in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.
-Nelson Mandela