Words and Things

I am currently reading three books. This is not uncommon.

The first is the current Book Club book, which happens to be "Sweet Valley Confidential." Say what you will; those of us who grew up on Francine Pascal's fairytale stories of blonde twins in Southern California were chomping at the bit for this latest incarnation which sees both girls in their late twenties, Jessica already married and divorced, Elizabeth living in New York City and working as an off-Broadway reviewer. The writing is absolutely, undeniably horrible. Jessica prefaces every sentence with "Like," and Pascal seems to have schooled herself in the Harlequin School of Literature when it comes to cliches and descriptions. The story is predictable, the characters laughable. But it's perfect summer reading because it plays on nostalgia and, well, it's completely brainless. The kind of thing you can easily process after a three-martini happy hour.

The second is Junot Diaz's "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." And it is utterly fantastic; hands-down one of the best books I've read all year. This book has been following me around for years- literally. I was gifted a paperback copy, and it sat on my nightstand from 2008-2010. I finally donated it in a fit of ridding my life of things that made me feel like a failure: unread literature being chief among them. Almost immediately afterwards, Joel gifted me a second-hand hard copy of the book, and I decided that the Universe really wanted me to read it. It had come highly recommended, but for some reason it was just one of those books (like my copy of "A Moveable Feast" - another potential life failure on my part, unless I get cracking soon) that sat around and never got opened. Eschewed for a new Jane Green or the Book Club book I was supposed to begin three weeks ago.

The third is my lunch break book, "The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin. It's a delightful piece of nonfiction that I nibble away at in thirty-minute increments, when I don't have errands to run or have to work through lunch, that is. I embarked on my own Happiness Project a year or so ago, and now find clean delight in principles I'd come up with on my own that I see reflected in Rubin's research. Reading this book now is a reminder to return to the constant practice of those principals, for which I'm grateful. If I had tried to read this book in the past, I fear it would have struck me as preachy or, worse, unrealistic. But having carved my own path to some steady flow of happiness in my life has opened my mind to other peoples' journeys as well. Sure, I might have thought, Rubin has the resources to go about studying her own happiness: she's not a twenty-something bartender laid off from her freelance job due to the media outlet's pending bankruptcy. She probably even has luxuries like "health insurance" and a retirement plan. What audacious wealth! Those years are, blissfully, part of my past now. It's a little easier to contemplate happiness when you're involved in a job that brings you fulfillment, and living a lifestyle that blends much better with your personality.

I go back and forth on the subject of writing my own book. Part of me wholly believes that I lack the life skills and determination to come out with a solid body of work at this point, and part of me sees this as procrastination. The things I learned in my twenties could certainly fill a book, and a funny one at that, but humor requires a certain amount of distance from life experience. I am just now coming around to the idea that decisions I made at 22, 23, 24 are downright comical in how uninformed and dramatic they seem now. But to parse through all of that and come up with a solid plot line requires a little more tying together of loose ends; something that I'm still dealing with.

I will say, I am no fiction writer. Real life is too rich, too amazing, too eerily coincidental for me to make things up. Certainly, I see a definitive value in dressing up the truth as fiction (because, let's face it, I'm also a consummate over-exaggerator-slash-storyteller), and I have a feeling that at some point whatever work I come up with will be a curious blend of the two, if that's possible. I fiddle around with word choices, with story ideas, but nothing yet has compelled me to sit down and churn out a solid book.

I've been told multiple times to just compile all the emails I write for trivia and turn them into a book, but I fear that my audience would be...two hundred individuals living in or around Baltimore City. Which is nothing to sneeze at, but in terms of royalties...not ideal.

A Thanksgiving Toast

Wow.

How did we get here?

I feel like I was just at the beach, riding bikes down the Boardwalk. I'm not even sure where the fall went. There was running...there were a lot of Girl's Nights Out....some Book Club in there...I think I wrote a short story or two and about a thousand emails...

And now we're trying to plan New Year's Eve. The past year has been, well, full for lack of a better word. A little more pithy, I think then any of the years before it. And so, coming up on Thanksgiving Eve (truly on of the best nights of the year: like the ultimate Thursday Night as it combines all the fun and anticipation not only of the first official 4-day weekend of the entire year but of the holiday season in aggregate) I have a hell of a lot to be thankful for.

The foundational stuff- my family, my health, my general well-being. All of that, never to be taken for granted.

But this year, I owe a great deal of thanktitude to my friends. While they have always been everything to me, in the past year they have become even more than that. They have become second family, they have started to chart the course of my future, and there are some that have been woven in my fabric for so many years that their presence is just a part of who I am at this point.

So...cheers, friends. This year, I raise my glass(es; let's be forthcoming, here) to (and with) you. For all you are, all you do, and how many times I come dangerously close to leaking bodily fluids because of how hard you make me laugh.

I saw this toast written as part of a Grey Goose ad in my New Yorker last week, and found it very apt:

A Toast

to nearest

to dearest

to the crew

to cahoots

to the ones who've been there

to the ones who'll be there

to dropping everything

to saying anything

to no judgements

to no doubts

to loyalty

to trust

to favors

to lifelongs

to been too long

to nothing's changed

to having history

to having your back

to moving away

to never too far

to growing up

to settling down

to your second family

to friends.


Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Eat, drink, and be oh-so-thankfully merry.

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

Rebuilding Hope: A Mission Trip

Yet New Orleans didn't die, proof, perhaps, that cities are more than functional conveniences. They inspire affection, emotional ties and loyalty. It is now the fastest growing city in the United States, at 7-8% per year, even if, at about 340,000, it is still below pre-Katrina levels. If people persist in living in earthquake-prone Los Angeles and San Francisco, why would they not return to New Orleans? This renewal is despite, more than thanks to, the efforts of the city's government. New Orleans has suffered from what the New York Times called the "dysfunctional stalemate that has bogged down the city's recovery". The dysfunction is both between black and white populations and between city and federal government, and the consequence is that swathes of the place are still visibly ruined, and homeless rates remain high.

[in] the nearly five years since the storm, a "recovery plan" was drawn up, often reviewed, and barely implemented. The city, according to one involved in reconstruction, "has hundreds of millions of dollars committed but not spent". The recovery plan was created "without a drop of sense as to what was implementable".

Into the vacuum of action created by government, individuals and independent agencies have piled in. Self-organised groups that have grown up since 2005 have become significant forces of renewal.

Habitat for Humanity, an international charity, has built more than 1,300 "simple, decent, affordable homes" in the four states effected by Hurricane Katrina and her nasty little sister Rita, which followed shortly after.
The Observer
Sunday March 14, 2010

these days that you were waiting for
will come and go
like any day
just another day

there's never gonna be a moment of truth for you
while the world is watching
all you need is the thing you forgotten
and that's to learn to live with what you are

sometimes
everything you've ever wanted
floats above
sticking out his tongue and laughing
while everything
anyone can ever need
is down below
waiting for you
to know this

Learn to Live With What You Are
Ben Folds


I'm doing loads of laundry and only-slightly-ok-mostly-sort-of-absolutely freaking out about leaving tomorrow to spend a week in New Orleans helping to build houses with RHINO (Rebuilding Hope In New Orleans) and Habitat for Humanity.

I'm freaking out because I'm afraid I'll forget something vital, like protective eye wear or my journal, and I'm freaking out because I haven't done anything this before. In the ultimate paradigm shift, I am abandoning a lifestyle to which I've grown accustomed and complacent in the hopes of shifting my perspective enough to find some new stability in life. Which is really just a high-falutin' way of saying: "I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and devote a week of my life to helping others." The fact that I get to travel, and the fact that I get to travel to a kick-ass city, is sheer luck.

Mochi once told me her theory about listening to music, and how instead of separating you from reality it makes you hyper-aware. As though you're in a movie. The music creates a temporal space that forces you to focus on minute details. The wash of sun on your face, the stitching on the handbag of the woman standing next to you, the smell of a street vendor's fare. Your mind creates a cinematic landscape, flush with flashbacks and day dreams, and the music guides this little moment in time.

The same can be said for travel. A change of scenery, biologically, creates in us a hyper-aware sense. Constant vigilance is required, because there's no telling what might be a threat or potential food item. Evolution has done nothing to tamper with our natural instincts, despite our best efforts to numb them on a day to day basis.

I find myself dampening these instincts, tuning out, turning off, and focusing instead on the rhythms of everyday. Get up, go about the day, eat at prescribed times, and follow a routine and pattern so exacting that it's stultifying to suddenly realize how much time has gone by. I decided at the beginning of November to enact a radical life change for myself and set about trying to find what, exactly, that change might be. A new job, a new city, a new religion, a new career?

And then, suddenly, I fell back into the routine. Like a mechanical ticking, my days trickled through my hands, the hours gone and wasted. And it's March. And nearly five months has gone by since my "wake-up call."

What I did do, smartly, was to sign on for this trip in the height of that flurry of decision-making. Whatever it was I was planning to find for myself and do for myself, I committed to this trip and decided it would be the anchor. If everything else fell through, I would still have this thing that I had agreed to, worked for, and am now finally embarking upon.

A week in a different city with people I barely know, focusing on a cause that has always plucked at my heart strings and doing brute manual labor is certainly a cause for hyper-awareness. An appreciation for different sounds, smells, flavors.

One of the things I was always so amazed about when I moved to Florida was the change in light. A monstrous, flat sky with intense light that cut through everything for twelve hours a day. Nothing like the thin, milky light that comes and goes with the seasons in the north east. Florida is nothing but light and air and water, and for three years I never got used to the intensity of it.

This is what I mean by hyper-awareness. Who thinks about light, unless it's Daylight Savings time, or a shift in the seasons? You travel, you think about light. Your perception is skewed and acute.

I've never traveled without some evolution or revolution. I'm a thinker, and airports and buses and independence and time alone and away breeds new visions and hopes and choices. This is such a ripe moment of my life, with everything marinating and culminating and the past few years slowly beginning to slide away leaving only the meaningful and taking with it the petty, but insurmountably heavy, baggage and heart break and doubts and failures.

And so I take up my proverbial hammer, and I head to NOLA with hopes of transformation, transition, and making some small dent of a difference in the overwhelming mountain of need. I'm searching for some moment of truth, I know, but attempting to keep everything in perspective and let things happen organically.

Mostly, I'm there to rebuild. Houses, of course, but myself too. However selfish that sounds.

Stay the course with me, and we'll see what comes out of all this.

Arrivederci.

As We Are

(Canada, August 2001.)

We don't see things as they are.
We see things as we are.

-Anais Nin

2009

New Year's Resolution: Finish What You Start.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find all the ways in which you yourself have altered.

-Nelson Mandela

Man's main task is to give birth to himself.
-Erich Fromm

Below: excerpts from a mixed-media project I submitted with Snap earlier this fall. Alas, we did not win.
All photography copyright Katie Wright.