LaurieWrites

England Dan

England Dan Seals died yesterday of lymphoma at his home in Nashville. I purchased "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" (his hit with John Ford Coley, because "Nights Are Forever Without You" has always just bummed me out) in homage.

England Dan & John Ford Coley, I'm not even kidding, because if there's one thing about which I don't kid, it's the light rock. I've reviewed the Ambrosia situation before, (with a shoutout to England Dan & John Ford Coley, check it - who I seemingly cannot call by any fewer than their five given names.) And I have to tell you, there are some Ambrosia freaks out there, if my Google search tells me anything. I still harbor Rhiannon as my secret dream name if I ever had a daughter but I totally probably wouldn't call a female child Rhiannon. I can also sing all the harmony parts to Linda Ronstadt's "Love is a Rose" so basically do not fuck with me where the 70s are concerned at all. (Also, "Still the One"? It's Orleans. And Charlene has still never been to herself.)

"I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" and I go back a long way. When I was in high school, my best friend was trying to date this guy, and he gave her a poem he wrote. And she read it to me aloud, like, isn't this sweet?

"I'm not talkin' bout movin' in," he had copied on the page. "And I don't want to change your life...I won't ask for promises, so you won't have to lie. We've both played that game before, say I love ya and say goodbye."

First of all, we were 16. 16! Dude!

Because I could not allow England Dan and John Ford Coley to be so misrepresented, I had to be the buzzkill.

"He did not write that."

"Who did then?"

"England Dan & John Ford Coley."

"Who?"

"WASH-FM, okay? Just...WASH-FM! 'There's a warm wind blowin' and stars around'? Seriously, he did not write that."

Already a teacher, I guess, no one was plagiarizing on my watch, and also not ripping off the best five named, two-man light rock band ever.

So on behalf of the dudes from Firefall, and Player, and Steven Bishop and Orleans and Ambrosia - and that creepy Marie Osmond with whom you sang "Meet Me in Montana" - I wish you safe travels, England Dan. I'll admit it. I really, really love that song.

ZOMZombies!

Tweet it.

Fourth- Fruit, flowers and...appliances.

As of April 10 I will have been writing in this blog for four years. FOUR YEARS. This is just astounding to me for some reason.

Four year anniversaries call traditionally for fruit and flowers, which are quite nice, and in modern times, for appliances, so if anyone wants to pony up a high-end espresso machine in April? Well, thanks.

This has been an amazing, intense, difficult, depressing, exciting and very, very daily four years. I've had some awesome experiences and some really, really shitty ones. I've been down in some psychic - and one or two literal -holes for part of it and I've felt at times like the scene in front of me was never ever going to change.

Journalism graduate school really hurt this blog. It took the time I had to write and sliced it into less than half, and often times it jockeyed for time and space with other, graded or deadlined writing, and this was the first to go.

I went to an event last week that in positive and negative ways inspired me to try again. At the very least it motivated me to create again, to talk my way into whatever is supposed to come next. So for the next two weeks, I'm going to commit to writing every day. I may post more than once, I'm not sure. I'm going to go back to the beginning and unearth some things. I'm going to dig around in the dirt of why I started this in the first place and see what comes out on the other side.

It's appropriate. The spring equinox just occurred. The season's changing. My travels have stopped for a few weeks. I'm digging into work and teaching and writing and learning again. I'm aware of the need to be mindful and make plans.

So I hope, if you've been around for awhile (thank you) or if you're new, you'll understand what's going on as a process of excavation, and of setting out on a new path, an overdue one I think. Or maybe I'll just kind of recycle old new Facebook memes, because that 25 Things thing, that really had some juice left in it, I think.

#14 I really, really like espresso, and the lattes it produces when milk is involved. Thanks.

Why Am I Here?

There's so much to do before I die that this question is absurd. But ok.

Parent a child.
I don't know how, or whose, or when, but I have an intense desire to be a mother and I think it's important to my experience here to see if I can make it happen. I also think I'll be pretty damn good at it, and those are the things I like to try for sure.

Visit all 50 states.
I started traveling this country on my own three years ago and I'm constantly amazed by what I see and who I meet. I won't stop til I see the whole beautiful mess.

Own a home
I haven't, and I'd like to. I'm a roamer and a bit of a flake, it seems. I've tried on and discarded a few careers and a couple of towns. I think I'd just like to wake up quiet on a Saturday in my own house and work in the yard if I feel like it. It's not so complicated.

Fund a project that is of use to other people or animals
I'd like to move forward knowing I did something of value for someone or some greater good along the way.

Make a living primarily from writing and photography, but not a miserable, scraping one. One that allows me to live happily and stably and creatively all at once.
I believe in working. I've had a job since I was 18 years old and every day off since has been tinged with some kind of guilt, however slight, about what I'm not doing or ought to be doing.

I'll never starve for art because I think that's silly, but it would be nice to be compensated for my truest talents, even if it's not exactly what they're worth.

Have a season, just a season, of peace.
I'm tired of worry, of stress, of being sad and lonely and unfocused. With a season of contentment to possibly blend into the next and the next, who knows if the other problems would seem as bad?

I remembered that I lost you.

I'm at my most emotionally vulnerable on airplanes, it seems. I fly a lot, although it unfailingly scares me, because the thought of never seeing as much of the world as I can, which is pretty much all of it, scares me more. I have pretty significant crash paranoia and I'm just about the most satisfied when I land and get in the car that's statistically much more likely to kill me. Our brains are funny.

On the plane home from SXSW Interactive in Austin last week, I sat down in my usual aisle seat, close to the front, next to two jackass guys who had been at the conference too, talking about their iPhones and inappropriate texting with girls named Ashley while married, and pointedly ignoring me. I was exhausted.

I had spent five days in a bubble of weird, frenetic activity, learning a lot and seeing and hearing some very interesting things, but not for a minute of it feeling cool enough, or connected enough, or where-I-wanted-to-be-in-the-world enough. I struggled to focus, to repeatedly answer the "what do you you do?" question with some kind of solidity that stayed elusive.

I had been surrounded by nice people (who actually in a few amazing cases gave quite of a bit of a damn about me, as it turned out, and were very kind and generous.) and great ideas and good food and also a lot of bullshit, quite frankly. A lot of chatter. A lot of social and status whatever. Oh and I also broke my computer and my camera was long-dead, and as it turned out I still loved Shiner Bock and barbecue and was utterly hungover from both.

When I sank into my seat, I opened up my notebook to get some of the stuff out of my head, because time trapped on a plane is often some of the best for purging my brain. The notebook is the daily calendar/Moleskine variety, and I had marked January 2nd with a prayer card for that lady holding me in that baptism picture up there (that is imprinted on my heart such that I can see it when I close my eyes,) who died on that day this year. The card fell out on my lap. I picked it up, noted the date and was oddly shocked that it had only been two months and some change, mostly because I don't like to think of her as gone and never will and it's better if I don't think of the time that's passed since in such concrete terms.

Trapped on that plane, I left my sunglasses on and cried as inconspicuously as possible. I wrote some things down about her. I remembered for the countless time since she had her stroke 12 years ago how much this loss sucked.  In spite of my pretty serious grounding in reality, I believed it ought to never happen, that I didn't want a life without her somewhere in it, so basically I intended to skip over the whole mortality concept when it came to this person who was in and of herself so much of my backstory, who frequently gave me uncommon amounts of resolve when my own so dependably shattered, who at her frailest and weakest only gave a shit about how I was doing, who never, ever let me down. I thought about how I could explain where I'd been and what I'd been doing in Texas to her if I had the chance and how she wouldn't have understood it at all but would have only wished aloud that it was a good experience for me, and it must have been if I'd chosen to spend my time there, and that I likely was working too hard again, and where the hell had I gone again anyway?

I missed her again like knives through my chest and I realized that still, no matter how much I run, no matter how much I try awkwardly to get through this phase to the next, no matter how much I dress myself up and take myself out, at my core I am a 5 year old who wants the dog and the grandma back that the last year took away. (And were I not on an honesty kick I'd have erased that already but that's the way things are right now, and the way the writing may go for awhile too, to see if it will help.) And since neither of them are going to show back up anytime soon all I can do is keep moving through what is still a weird and unpredictable river of grief that I can't believe I had the audacity to think might be more manageable this time around, until I get to a more peaceful place that "she's in a better place" has never provided for me.

Death sucks. I hate it. And good grandmas, as I was lucky for a good number of years to learn firsthand, are magic.

SXSW Smiles and Photo Dreams - What's Yours?

Cross-posted at BlogHer, with a few additions here.

As a photographer and an adult with a cleft lip and palate who had a transformative experience shooting an Operation Smile dental mission in Vietnam a year ago this week, I was thrilled to see the SXSW Smiles project at the huge SXSW Interactive conference in the oh-so-awesome Austin.

Well, I didn't actually see it. I almost missed it entirely. I walked out of my last panel on the last day smack into a table that had piles of Operation Smile stickers and buttons on it (I was tired, and it turns out when you buy an iPhone you can spend a lot of stupid time looking at the ground.) It kind of hurt my knee, but it got my attention. And after a little bit of research into the project that brought a nonprofit organization like this one to a huge tech conference, I kicked myself harder than usual for not paying attention before. There's a lot to pay attention to at this conference, but this is one more thing that given my love for this organization's mission of providing surgical repair for facial differences - primarily cleft lips and/or palates - around the world, I feel like the universe should have put in my scattered, hurried path. (And the universe is like, "Hi, pay attention to the important stuff, thanks.") So I am now, and I hope you will too.

Renee Alexander Hamilton, Operation Smile's Social Media Strategist who represented the project at SXSW Interactive, tells the story on her blog, SXSW Smiles Journal.

-I told her about my new role and how now I am trying to do the same thing we do in Donor Relations online and in person at events. I explained that while in the past social networking tools like chat rooms were thought to divide people and keep them at home in a dark corner having "virtual relationships'. Now with Facebook and Twitter, these interactions are actually driving in-person meet-ups and beyond that they are inspiring ACTION.

So I guess you could say I'm in Austin for a little Smile Action!

SXSW Smiles set up shop outside the very cool Beacon Lounge for nonprofits and social change organizations in the Austin Convention Center, with the goal of enough donations for 10 new "smiles" - repair surgeries for kids with cleft lips and/or palates- each estimated at $240.

Directions were simple. First, pick up or download a "Make Me Smile" sign, and write whatever makes you smile on it. Upload a photo of yourself with the sign to Flickr with the "sxswsmiles" tag. Donate by texting "smile" to 90999, or dropping it off in the Beacon Lounge.

Check out the Operation Smile SXSW Flickr set here, hosted on Alexander aka Entropy Art's photostream. The answers are fun to read - "Bhangra," "our absurdly clingy dog", "hot salsa"- and you'll also get a peek at some of the folks roaming the halls of SXSW, if that's a draw. I would include them for you here, but "all rights reserved" is what it is.

The SXSWSmiles project is part of a larger $240 Smile Challenge March (aka Smile Month.) The cause's Facebook page says that $4203 has been donated so far and $3710 is still needed to reach their goal of providing 20 repair surgeries to children. Check it out.

While this is so much on my mind, Lenovo Microsoft is asking people to "Name Your Dream Assignment," asking "Where will your lens take you?" on a photo project for which they will give a prize of $50,000, a video camera, a blog and a computer to record it all. I haven't entered, but mine? To go on a mission - a surgical one this time, and to shoot it. I don't know when or how this will happen, but I believe that it will, and just as I felt in Vietnam, I think it'll be one of the most important things I ever witness.

And why? I'm as idealistic as I am hardcore about photography, and that's a lot. Photos can change lives, I will boldly, idealistically, perhaps overdramatically say - whether they're photos of people talking about what makes them smile or, maybe more importantly, photos taken before and after cleft lip and/or palate repair. No pictures exist of me prior to my lip repair at six weeks old. Hospitals didn't take photos of babies with facial differences then. I'm not sure what the deal was in my family, honestly - I do know my mother was never ashamed of me, in fact saw beyond my flaws as mothers most often do. Who knows what pressures existed on a 20-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man, in the days before cameras were omnipresent, everywhere, where images were immediately available.

But photos are essential and I wish there were some. I would love to see what I looked like before this repair, to see the reality of this situation that has affected my life like no other. And I like seeing the impact a simple repair surgery can make on a child who may otherwise walk around in their impoverished town or village with a gaping whole where there ought not to be one. Photos can inform and change perceptions and raise awareness just like, and sometimes even more than, words can. It can be difficult to see if you're unaccustomed, but just like with many things that present challenges that can't be easily solved, or aren't so pretty, or disturb on some level, they don't go away just because we don't pay attention.

When its in a picture in front of your face, it's hard to ignore, so may there always be pictures of important things in front of our faces.

Me, exhausted, at the end of a harrowing trip, happy nonetheless to be spending time with the very important kids at Hanoi Medical University, March, 2008. Many had just received their first dental exam. Photo kindly taken by their teacher. (The whole set is here. I love these pictures.)

And I can easily say that Operation Smile is my favorite new Twitter contact from SXSW Interactive.

Other photo dreamers for this and other causes:

Joanne Bamberger/PunditMom's dream assignment is to tell the stories of moms keeping their families afloat in tough economic times.

Katie Ring's Photography and Life blog with footage of Operation Smile patients in India and her photos of a mission there.

Audra, an American expat writing at Nicaragua: The Obandos accompanied her students from the American Nicaraguan School on an Operation Smile mission

Beth Kanter was a fixture in the Beacon Lounge and wrote prolifically about the nonprofit presence at SXSW and in social media communities. Her post on the Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam is a good place to start, but scroll around for lots more. <

A daylong bus trip is hell on earth enough.

The addition of an irritating talker - and the wide spectrum of images that conjures up - would send me over the edge, and conflict would surely ensue. I don't like conflict. I like nice things and puppies and love. I don't like hating other people, either, and at times when I've been trapped by someone else's narcissistic or nervous need to yammer on on any kind of public transportation, the hatred has reached occasionally unmanageable levels.

And I know 'hate' is a bad word and I'm not supposed to use it. This is catharsis, sorry.

I like to sit with quiet people, with people who can manage their impulse control to the point that they understand the stakes of being trapped in less-than-stellar unavoidable confinement. I like people who sleep, and who ignore me with the assistance of headphones. I like people who tacitly acknowledge where we are, who will kindly retrieve my crackers from the aisle and who don't freak out when I do my inevitable dance of dropping my shit - iPod, phone, book, apple, what have you, and who will - silently, kindly, in the spirit of Agape love - help me retrieve it.

I should add if you're new that I'm an unrepentant verbal processor, a true extrovert who can talk the paint off the walls. And if I can rein it in, so can anyone else in this whole wide world. Especially when we're leaving the driving to them.

So on buses - on trains, planes, and in some cases automobiles - shhhhh. Thank you.

Giving up Lent for Lent - or How It's Not the 40-day Shred

My friend on Ash Wednesday: My friend is an atheist and she said she was giving up sugar for Lent.
Me: Does she know what Lent is?
Friend: Yeah. I told her she was actually just going on a diet.

I try so hard, so very very hard every day, not to judge, but that is just silly. It's the silliest thing I've heard among a number of comments I've heard this past week about what thing to give up for Lent, whether it's the usual chocolate or swearing or something more of-the-moment like Facebook. (Sorry, I think giving up Facebook for Lent is silly too.)

I was raised Catholic, significantly, seriously so, and I don't practice anymore beyond the fact that I still own a rosary and use repetitive Hail Marys on occasion when I'm really freaked out or need comforting. Because I don't practice, I DON'T GIVE UP anything for Lent. I'm totally aware that it's happening, but I don't engage with it on a daily sacrificial level. Because guess what? It is not a fitness challenge or an internet meme - it's a religious observance and a spiritual practice, arguably the most serious in the Christian calendar. And while I don't practice Catholicism anymore, I have much respect for the genuinely faithful people who use this time as an attempt to better themselves either by giving something up (more traditionally) or working more mindfully on improving something about themselves.

My strong feelings about this are tied up in the deepest stuff of my life and my heart, namely my grandparents and how seriously they took Lent, among all the things they took seriously about living a committed Catholic life. My remaining attachments to the church - which are many and varied in my heart in spite of my political and ethical differences of opinion with the Vatican - have to do with them, for the most part, and the way they lived their lives in the most faithfully Catholic of ways, on a daily basis and in times of religious observance. One did not eat much on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, as they were fasting days, and certainly not any meat. There was no consuming meat on any Friday in their house, because when they were young you didn't eat meat on Friday, all year long. It was the night for little glass bowls of egg and tuna salad, for toast and soup and cottage cheese. It was a time to pray more and to go to church more. It was serious Jesus business, it was, and just reading this I cry because they were just that good, and that good to me. I cry a little bit because this memory makes me wish I still believed.

It was so not the life I have now, the life where I eat steak on Ash Wednesday.

The past I lived and the present I'm struggling through combined with my weird hybrid belief system make me cranky about people grabbing onto Lent as a time to shred with Jillian Michaels (Yes it's 40 days. No, it's not the same.) or to whine to their friends about how hard it is to give up some first world convenience or the other. I'm sorry. I'm a total Facebook crackhead like many of my brothers and sisters in Internet addiction, but giving it up is no kind of real sacrifice. It's irritating, sure, because who in the hell wants to miss out on 40 days of fake pokes and little green plants and wall posts going "Hey. What's up?" But a real, true sacrifice? I think not. Ask a kid in Darfur, loser.

I'm sorry I'm so rude about this, but I rarely rant anymore and this is just...GETTING TO ME. It's driving me to caps, because people just don't seem to get it. Lent is supposed to commemorate the spiritual crisis of the Christian MESSIAH and, oh, SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, undertaken as he wandered in the desert for 40 days. Call me crazy, but if I don't believe in that and I latch onto it as an excuse to lower my cholesterol or look better in a bridesmaid dress? That's just creepy. And yeah, in my lapsed Catholic way, maybe even a bit karmically frightening.And even if I do believe in Jesus and the benefit of a spiritual test, I have to wonder if giving up a social networking service is good enough.

I guess I look at it in a context of other religions and what I wouldn't do. I wouldn't borrow elements of Ramadan that might work for me, or Passover, because I don't know shit about either one of those important holidays and quite frankly, they're none of my business. They are not my cultural practices so until invited to participate I just need to observe.

There is so much I need to work on in my life, so much I need to improve and lose and gain, weight and attitude and brain cells and what have you. If I'm going to do it I need to to tie it to what makes sense for me and my life. If that isn't Christianity on a daily basis - which right now it's not - I need to keep my hands off the traditions associated with it, mind my business and head to therapy or Weight Watchers or the gym.

And in my peculiar, particular catechism, an atheist wanting to give up sugar needs to do it without any help from God, because - well - to attach it to Him, for them, just misses the point.