From The Archives

Lovely, lovely birthday. Bike ride in the morning, beach during the day, beautiful weather, good food and drinks, lots of kind wishes and love, flowers delivered.
I went for the run in the evening last night before showering off the beach and found myself going past the house I rented with a bunch of friends for Beach Week ten years ago after graduating high school. I spent my eighteenth and now twenty eighth birthday here, at the beach, and I see this decade as parenthetical.
It was ten years' of experimentation, travel, good and bad choices, adventure, learning, growth, and a host of experiences that have left me with great anecdotes and what I see to be a very well-rounded outlook of the world. I fell in and out of infatuations, had my heart broken, did some very stupid and very cool things, lived all over, met great people, had ten thousand jobs.
And now I see myself closing that chapter and beginning to take the greater values and desires - the heavier elements that stick when everything else falls away - and beginning this next decade which I feel will set the course for the rest of my life.
-May, 2010

Take Initiative

#6 on the Happiness Project: Take Initiative at work.

How does this translate?

MERCURY RETROGRADE has me in a state of unease. I am disorganized, feeling sleepy and slightly panicked, and seriously self-doubting. Why do these things always go altogether like some jambling, horrible, off-key sonata? I constantly feel as though I am a step behind, or too far ahead, or somehow lacking crucial details. This is typical Mercury Retrograde, but also typical of what happens whenever I neglect to allot enough time for what I've come to term "White Space."

White Space is clean, clear, and under control. White Space is "I don't have to be anywhere at this moment but where I am." White Space is "STFU, turn the phone off, and no, I am not answering that email RIGHTTHISSECOND." White Space is an active passiveness, a stepping away.

I find excellent White Space in monotonous activities. Cooking, showering, on the treadmill at the gym. When my body is occupied and my mind is mine, all mine. But you can find White Space in a variety of environments and tasks.

Not driving. White Space requires a sense of relaxation, of not-constant vigilence. Maybe a long drive. Sunset in autumn, wide road, destination far off, no traffic, music blaring. That could be White Space.

White Space is undemanding, and requires nothing of you but the untangling of thought processes and the general resetting of one's state of being. Interruptions, false starts, or impatient stimuli disturb this.

So...how does this translate to taking initiative at work and happiness? Well, I define "work" as not simply what you do during business hours or how you make money, but any sort of project that you engage in that requires brain or brawn power. It could be errands, chores, To Do's, any of those things. Taking initiative and actively grabbing responsibility causes wheels to turn and things to get done.

All in the hope of creating more White Space for oneself.

White Space requires a silencing of all other demands, and most of the time the only way these demands in our lives can be silenced is if they are addressed. To pursue White Space means to clear up the clutter of your life, to tie up the loose ends and dot "i's" and cross "t's" and confirm, confirm, confirm. That way, nothing can creep in to White Space. Taking initiative to clear your own plate of responsibility not only makes you feel able and proactive, it also gives you a sense of completion and productivity that will come in handy when you're ready to wipe the slate clean and decompress.

It's sort of like lying on the couch. Lying on the couch, reading chick lit. How relaxing! But wait....did you remember to take out the trash? If it doesn't go out right now, you'll forget. And if you forget, the bins will be overflowing next week and you'll receive one of those ridiculously passive aggressive "friendly reminders" from your Neighborhood Association representative who--of course--has been keeping tabs on the state of your garbage disposal. And taking out the trash requires- crap- that you purchase new trash bags. Which means you have to put gas in your car.

Lying on the couch reading a chick lit book has suddenly become a Thursday evening nightmare of chores and To Do lists.

Taking initiative means keeping all of the little tick tocks of your life up-to-date, in working order, and at least halfway full with a note (physically written and placed strategically) to buy more. To avoid interruption of White Space. To cultivate a sense of completion and relaxation. Which leads to.....happiness. Oh the joy of chores done, clean house, phone calls made, wine glass full, new book to be read, and no where to be or anyone to answer to. Bliss!

I liken it to vacation. When I go on vacation, I want the house spotless, laundry done, bills paid, chores completed so that when I come back, I am walking into a clear space. Whilst on vacation, I'm not lying there obsessing over whether or not I remembered to buy cat litter. It's been done. I took care of it. Breathe sigh of relief. Nothing infiltrates White Space.

Take initiative. On the job, start to notice little loose ends that require tightening. Confirm, confirm, confirm.

(I cannot stress this point enough: CONFIRM!)

I wish you healthy productivity and rejuvenating White Space. Get cracking.

Mercury

photography courtesy katie wright
from our compilation project You Will Not Be Here Forever

I let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.
- Stephen Chbosky

Oh, Mercury retrograde.

Three or four times a year, you churn backwards across the charts and wreak havoc on everything. I feel stalled, stuck, enmeshed, and even the simplest of things becomes complicated under your influence ritard.

I was trying to explain a retrograde Mercury to someone this weekend and kept getting stuck on the idea of communication. Emails sent to the wrong people or not at all, phone calls dropped, texts not received, misunderstandings abound. Maps point in all the wrong directions. It seemed rightful that I was tripping over my explanation. I develop a stutter during Mercury retrograde. Or maybe that's just the new levels of exhaustion I found in the past couple weeks.

You learn something new nearly everyday. This week's lesson: I can mostly function on less than three hours' sleep a night.

Mostly.

Anyway, there are silver linings to Mercury in retrograde, one of them being the opportunity to drag skeletons out of closets, dust them off, and reintroduce yourself. Deal with them, face to face, as such.

This retrograde has found me purging and rearranging. I threw away bags of crap. Crap, I tell you. Boxes I hadn't unpacked since moving here from Florida three....and a half, GAH....years ago. Deleting old files on the compy. Backing up the hard drive. Sweeping, vaccumming, moving my desk two feet to the left and gazing in wonderment at how the entire energy of my little loft office has shifted to be oh-so-much more conducive to creativity and work. Putting papers where they should be, digging back through projects left unfinished and finally parting with things that no longer have any hold over me.

Mercury retrograde can be looked upon as a rather cathartic period of time. If you're willing to dig in and do the hard work. Apparently this time I was.

This MR has me going back to my New Years' mantra of finishing what I start, and this is going to manifest in me finally posting the little thingy I've been working on in recognition of Katrina's 5 year anniversary. So, yeah...that'll get posted. Yep...soon. Promise. Have to. MR says so.

Let the Glue Dry

for D and N

I've been feeling this burst of spring cleaning after weeks of being in knots (Mercury is coming out of retrograde!!), and have spent the past few days tying up loose ends and purging, purging, purging. I am suddenly finding much greater ease to toss away things that I felt were important to keep around but have now created a feeling of baggage in my life. I'm a terrible pack rat, someone who falls in love with a pretty bottle or an idea written on a napkin, and these objects accumulate in my life until I suffocate. I'm getting better about it, and while outsiders might look at my living space and think that at some point I'll wind up on "Hoarders: Buried Alive," I am beginning to see change and progress, slowly but surely. Crossing things off the old To Do list.

One of my biggest accomplishments- and those who know me will understand the brevity of this step forward- has been weeding out my book case and bagging up stacks of books to donate.

I have a lot of books.

A lot.

And I keep buying them. Which means maximum input, zero output in terms of volume. This cannot continue. I have to get over my emotional attachments to literature.

(A sidenote of crowning achievement: I am finally allowing myself to give away Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." I've carried that piece of crap around for years now, made multiple attempts at reading it, and never gotten through it. I am finally in acceptance of the fact that I do not like what I read so far, and that I am not going to force myself to read it just because contemporary critics hailed it as the best thing since Surrano's (*Thanks, Snap, for correcting me*) Piss Christ. Pulitzer nomination be damned, I DON'T LIKE IT, AND I DON'T WANT TO READ IT. SO THERE.)

In my madcap efforts to sweep a pile of books into a bag to be sent away, I accidentally knocked over a little figurine of a designer shoe my mom gave me several birthdays ago. (Sorry, Mom.) The crystals remained on the heel, the pointed toe survived, but the sling-back snapped off. Frustrated, I blobbed some glue on it and set it properly, then went back to my manic cleaning.

It fell off again.

I held the piece in place, blowing on the glue, willing it to dry. I gingerly let go, and it stayed in place. Perfect. I set the shoe down, and anxiously turned to continue my chores.

The back fell again.

Repeat process until it dawns on my genius self that I'm going to have to sit and hold the piece in place until the glue dries.

I was endlessly frustrated, feeling pulled away from my momentum of productivity to have to sit and hold little pieces of a broken figurine together. Every time I thought the glue might have dried a bit (and it was not any quick-drying glue, I'll say that), I would let go and the piece would fall again. Apply more glue, start over.

Being artsy and weird, a metaphor began to form.

Eventually, the only way I could fix the shoe was to sit, patiently and quietly, holding the piece in place. Movement weakened the glue. So I just had to sit, amongst the piles of books and trash to be thrown out, and take a moment out of my frenzy of work. I sat, and I held on quietly, and I waited for the glue to dry. Eventually, one of the cats came and curled up next to me, grateful for this strange stillness in the middle of the day.

I wish I could say that I fixed the shoe.

But only after long amounts of quiet sitting did I realize that the glue I was using wasn't strong enough to hold the pieces of the figurine together. I'm going to have to go buy some Krazy Glue, or something stronger, to fix it. It took awhile for me to figure this out. I thought I could quick-fix the situation, and I couldn't. I don't even have the proper materials to fix the situation; I will have to procure them.

The metaphor keeps growing.

When something is broken in your life, you can't be in a hurry to fix it. It takes time, it takes trial-and-error, and it sometimes takes a little stillness and quiet. And if you sit still long enough, and you're lucky, somebody might even come join you.

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

You Must Somehow Work On That

Do not expend too much courage or time to clarify your position to others. I know your career is difficult and I anticipated your complaint and knew it would come. Now that it has come, I cannot reassure you.
I can only advise you to think seriously about this: Are not all careers the same, filled with demands and people filled with animosity toward the individual, at the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty?
The situation that you are now obligated to tolerate is not burdened any heavier with conventions, prejudices, and errors than any other situation. If there are some who outwardly give the impression of granting more freedom, know that there really exists none that is related to the important things that make up real life.
The individual person who senses his aloneness, and only he, is like a thing subject to the deep laws, the cosmic laws.
If a person goes out into the dawn or gazes out into the evening filled with happenings, if he senses what happens there, then all situations fall away from him as from someone dead, even though he stands in the midst of life.
You must realize that you would have felt the same way in any existing career now.
[...] It is the same everywhere, but that is not a reason for fear or sadness.
If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you.
The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees and over many lands.
Amidst things and among animals are happenings in which you can participate.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters To A Young Poet: The Possibility of Being"

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

Spacefoot

Fur meine Schatzi, Snap.

I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things and much more frightening to contemplate them.
-Ted Simon

Changes In the New Year

(picture- July, 2000)

"The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past, you can't go on well in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches." - Anonymous.

Dear Readers, Friends, Characters, and Glitteratis,

As the New Year approaches, it brings with it some big changes, some metamorphoses, some new choices and decisions, and the cap on a period of growing, learning, spreading of wings, and sharing of these experiences. It's only been in the past two years that I've been sharing these things publicly in this blog, and the experience has been nothing less than rewarding. Your kind emails, comments, well-wishes, opportunities and encouragement have continued to support me in my journey as a twentysomething. I know, in my heart, that I am not alone in my struggles and triumphs, and I hope that, if anything, you have found a mirrored voice here.

At the same time, my life is moving in some new directions and, as such, the shape and content of this blog must naturally evolve. I appreciate your patience with this work-in-progress as Ye Olde Blog and I decide how we are going to peacefully co-exist. It's my wish to keep things alive and well, but also a realistic vision that it's time to put my energies into other areas of my life.

For the time being, my goal will be to rely on a new format while I make some necessary changes. I hope that you continue to visit me here, and promise to update you on my new adventures in return.

Thank you, endlessly, for checking in on me. For reading, for caring, for laughing, for sharing your own ups and downs, and to my dear, dear friends and family for so kindly allowing me to borrow their intelligence, wisdom, and hilarity to season my stories which would otherwise be bland without their presence. I promise not to desert you, Glitteratis, just to say that it's time for necessary change and to hope that you'll stick by me.

Cheers,
The New Glitterati