LaurieWrites

On Stilts and Fire and Walking Through It and On Them

Here I am with a man on stilts:

This is my last week at work forever, and I'm doing things like crying through a two-hour Glee doubleheader, so I've come to this as my visual touchstone.

(Thanks to Deb Rox for the photo of me and my pretend carny husband. All that background needs is a clown pushing a hoop with a stick and maybe a miserable elephant or two, to go with the seaside vehicle. Also, blown up bigger it looks like I'm in danger of snapping his stilts-twig leg, what with my stance there. Later on he made me almost eat fire in front of an entire beach lounge full of people, so maybe I did hurt him. CAH-RAFTY, CARNY MAN.

(Seriously? The guy on stilts was very nice. We were instant friends, in my mind, which is obvious because I look entirely comfortable with him, no?)

You know what, this story is freaking me out in the retelling. I am super not into being on fire and I was really close to his fire sticks and it appears almost happy about it from the pictures. (I go to Florida and lose my fool mind.)

Oh. My. God. I just said all of those things and they are true. HELLO NARNIA, I'M HOME.

Anyway, so yes, I quit my job in March, not with the stated goal of joining a resort carnival, but life is funny. Back then, it felt like May was forever away and would therefore never come, and I'd sit there in my sensible chair in my windowless office pondering the decision I'd made, lalala, I'm a decision maker, forever, looky here at me, but nothing will happen because la. 

Well, hello, calendar and reality-challenged people, i.e., me: May is here. Friday is almost here. Here is almost here. And I'm putting the talents I took to South Beach to use by posting photos of myself with stilts man, because how else would I remember that I almost ate fire unless I did this instead of other productive things?

I don't know what is going to happen, which in some ways I'm totally fine with and in others? Well, we do not want to talk to those others, because they are crazy banshees with snakes for hair who want my heart on a mismatched Pier One plate.

I'm ready to give something else to the space I occupy. I'm ready to let other, so much better, stuff in. If I could tell you, y'all, all that has happened to me within the past six months without boring you to tears and you charging me a co-pay? It's been a lot, inside and out. And it's weird and it's hard and it's making me cry what may seem to be an unhealthy amount at Glee because I think it's supposed to. Transformation that requires slashing through years of settling and rationalizing and denial with a cup of coffee and a keyboard and my own flawed interpersonal skills instead of with a sharp machete? Not easy.

 And yet I believe that all of it -- ALL OF THE ALL OF IT -- has happened in this way over the past two years to manifest what my meditation teacher used to say was the power I had that I refused to acknowledge, that I didn't know how to channel or let out of its size-14 cage. She used to make me put both my feet flat on the floor to try to feel it, not to fidget, to swing one leg up over the other and disconnect, which is my usual posture. She told me to feel it in a way that should have creeped me out but didn't. You are solid. You have to sit in it. You don't even know. Put your feet on the ground and feel it.

I couldn't manage it yet, because my brain is a complicated system of roadblocks and puffy clouds, so it had to show up in an ER this past December in the form of almost stroke-level scary vital signs, and a kind and directive nurse who along with an apparent solid grasp of needles and math told me that fear and stress that deep probably had come out in pressure that high. We can kill ourselves with our own minds, I believe this now.

It's not like I buy it all yet, or even most of it. Power looks very different to me than this way that I feel. I just finally came to a point where I knew I had to change, and so I've been putting one foot and one word in front of the other for six months like I have a plan, when really I'm just a walking, talking Mad Lib, with a sense of humor and a constant willingness to try new things as my fill-in-the-blanks.

This has been a particularly challenging week inside of my skull, as I let the ending of something big into my mind, as I go through the process of shutting it down (while trying not to starve the concurrent growing things, the good, the new.)

Old patterns, electrical currents in my emotional grid, are rising up from beneath my skin, and I'm pissed off about that. I haven't been my best self, at all, and I have felt badly about that in the way I always do when extra stressed, when instead of letting it just wash over me and out the door, as I'm learning, I've been gathering it in subconsciously, stoking it with worry, the ultimate waste of time.

But I can learn. I know what to do when I'm at the end of the particular rope. I had the good sense to talk through a lot of it with people I trust last night, and then I peeking at my shamrocks that I have somehow managed not to kill for more than a year now. Even when they're sleeping you can see a tiny one shooting up now that I've given them a much bigger pot and a space by the door with sun, and that thrilled me more than anything in recent memory. It's always a mystery, what you find to keep you going, what makes you feel competent, after years of telling yourself you kill every green thing you touch so don't bother.

I hate when metaphors happen accidentally. Like hammers to the head, they are.

 I still wonder who in the hell I think I am, walking into an unknown with a questionable net. But what I do know is that I have lived for three years in a state of constant panic, low-grade mostly, but still. I have spent days convinced that this was all there is, my performance declining, my attitude getting ever worse. 

It just  didn't work for me anymore, so it had to change. I wouldn't be sitting here without the patience of friends who have helped me see the other, less self-loathing side, that said maybe the space I was in wasn't working for me as much as I wasn't working for it. It's a lot simpler when you stop insisting it's so complicated.

And what's the worry? That I'll starve now? I have been starving for a long, long time. There are other ways to be broke. There are other ways to die. I didn't want the way it was happening to me to be the final story, for me. And I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't made that decision way back in March, and had what even I'll acknowledge took enormous courage to follow through on? I wouldn't have answered the query that took me on the trip to a place with a blazing sun and a super moon, where I totally almost ate fire.

I'm kind of glad I didn't miss this. I'm looking forward to the rest.

 

*Sarah or Deb took this picture on my camera. I don't remember which. Thanks for catching it, and me.

**Also! I don't want to forget to thank Honda for bringing the amazing -- and for me, life-changing, because this picture will hang on my office wall forever as a symbol of when everything changed for me -- white party to life.  I am a very happy CRV owner with a beloved Civic in my past. I really appreciate it when cool brands I can support without reservation support what we're doing as writers and photographers online to change our own worlds, and hopefully our larger one.

To sing my song.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski

************************************************

I drove the old roads yesterday, as I rarely do anymore unless someone died, as someone had. Turning instinctively on numbered streets -- that party there, that unfortunate conversation on that street corner, I knew the sounds and the smells of the neighborhoods, felt the grit of the pavement and the echoes of so many voices up through the undercarriage of a car I never could have afforded then, can barely afford now. 

Road miles, they carry us, somehow.

Monday was PG County and a dead body in a Hawaiian shirt, unbearable grief and chicken joints and that school I went to once. I forgot about D's corner lot house, the irritation of the left turn. The shortcut through the 7-11 that I made still-instinctively after 20 years away made me want to smoke more than usual, an urge staved off mostly by the almost seven dollar price for a pack that made me smile big.

It's all so much the same, it's crazy how it stays that way when it seems like it ought not to, when you've been away and looking at so much other stuff. It's just so much more expensive in all ways now.

 ************************************************

you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.

 ***********************************************

I am afraid, I admit it. I said some horrible things a few days ago, things that came from the worst place, the most unpleasant, the most fearful and preemptively abandoned. I felt as worthless and pointless as I have in months, as incapable of...I don't know? Anything. It was bad, and it was at the same time, regardless of immediate outcome, immediately productive. Watersheds are few and far between in a life, really.

I had needed it for years and never saw it coming really. Idealism is a certain circle of hell, I'm here to tell. 

Yesterday on the highway Ramble On came up in the mix and I cried and smiled, Page and Plant's mix of hubris and brilliance (the darkest depths of Mordor. MORDOR.) what it needed to be as it always is bumped up against the simple, crucial declarative that defines the song. So much, so much, so much. I looked up at the roof upholstery at a red light, wiping my stupid weeping eyes, grateful for the familiarity, for the music, for the construct. I knew anew what I had to do, as I had when my feet hit the floor behind a heavy curtain in Tennessee two days prior. 

Now's the time. The time is now. 

 ************************************************

I will never be easy. I will always be difficult, sometimes the most in the times that I'm trying the hardest not to be. This is genetic, some of this, a design that I fight with every bit of good that I know I possess from competing genes and nurture and the sheer instruction of living kindly. I don't count on the same companions for the long haul so much anymore, because it's almost too much to ask in larger than small doses. I'm conversely coming upon the truth, however, that some greater consistency in this regard may be some of what I need for the longer run, and whether I think it's really possible or not, I will keep wrecking the prospect of ever having it if I don't fix me for real. 

I have been broken for a long time, in a variety of small and large ways, despite my progress, despite longstanding white-knuckled efforts to the contrary. I have the softest, brightest comprehension now though that I don't think I'm going to be for very long anymore, and regardless, I will no longer break you, not even a little if I can help it, no matter who you are. Unacceptable harsh words finished that story. The main answer -- surrender, no knuckles -- was long overdue. The time for so many (good and gentle, fun and interesting) things, the time for the real second half, is now. 

You are here.

"You have struggled in the past, and perhaps you are still struggling; but is it necessary? No. Struggle is useless. Stop struggling." -- Thich Nhat Han

Sometime between midnight Saturday night and when I hoped to leave the house yesterday, I lost my glasses.

Yes, in my house. Yes, it is one level, a larger condo but an apartment-type place all the same.

It's not like this is uncommon. I lay them down a lot, when I go to sleep, when I take a bath, when my eyes hit that millisecond at night where they give up the day, when the capillaries call it quits. There's generally a not-quite-five-minute span of looking if I lay them down absentmindedly, not in their appointed place by the sink or on the nightstand or coffee table.

But I always find them, and yesterday it became clearer after half an hour of poking around the magazines and general detritus of pens and hair ties and spare earrings on my desk that these glasses were hiding worse than usual. And no I don't have a backup pair, because that pair broke and my prescription expired. And no I haven't bought replacement contacts from the cheap online place since I got the new prescription last month and NO I am not paying the optical shop prices.

I'm like that cranky Maxine on the Hallmark cards, or a flailing toddler, most days, depending.

After almost an hour of looking, this place was looking remarkably cleaner but I was going crazy, Gaslight crazy, half-blind since the 5th grade and not getting unblinder. I had dinner to finish making and the Grammys to watch, work to finish that is not finishing because I have some sort of psychological block on this particular project. I wasn't sure how I was going to do all of that much less drive my car to work in the morning, because, again, so hard to see.

I can see okay way up close, so I threw some food on my plate, pushed the comfy chair right up close to the television, and tried not to freak out. Visually-impaired or not, I had no more energy to give to that particular struggle at the given time. I couldn't do it anymore. I had to sit down and start thinking about something else.

************************************************

I like to get in the trenches, especially when it comes to my brain. I like to duke it out, I think, or at least I always have. That's the habitual behavior. An old friend calls it "laying down on the train tracks," I call it things like inoculating myself, or being a decent (if unpaid) investigative reporter.

I don't trust ease, have not had much occasion to embrace it, quite honestly. I will pursue the harder path, if need be. I'm not afraid of it entirely.

But lately I think it's getting old, this slapboxing approach to life, something I've admittedly come to think with some unwanted help from my body and my brain. There were the headaches that wouldn't quit for months, the body that wouldn't motivate, the brain that felt fuzzy and tired more often than not. Then there was, finally, that day somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas when I found myself in an emergency room bed, my heart literally pumping so hard it made my head pound and my chest skip. A nurse who felt like my personal angel Clarence looked at me over a clipboard.

"Why are you here?"

"Because my blood pressure is really high."

"I know that. I see your numbers. I mean, you're...40? It's Saturday afternoon. Why are you here? And how are you not going to come back?"

She gave me a lot of morphine and some painkillers and sent me home, with a general recommendation to examine my life and, much like Mr. Bender in the Breakfast Club, encouraged me to examine whether or not I'd care to return next Saturday.

I didn't, not so much, but I am a slow learner, and so it was in the latter part of January that I found myself back at my regular doctor's office, lying on a table head pounding again, with a nurse saying "stroke numbers" and telling me to lie down and finally a note in my hand that said I had orders not to go into work for a little while.

************************************************

I'm trying to listen. I'm taking the medicine, the kind in the bottle and the words that I read (because I'm reading inspirational shit again, as well as listening to people who do not sweet talk me entirely, who would have me know that this fall was no joke.

I listen to a cardiologist say "thickened heart muscle" and "it was elevated for a year" and "you have to make these changes or it won't get better." I have new appreciation for my limits, particularly the physical ones that beat up against my valves and walls, the confluence of my tendency to worry and obsess with a body that is saying, after many years, "Please stop." I am learning to sit quieter with anxiety and paranoia, with a disbelief in deserving good things, with being worthy of love.

It turns out that most of the time I'm interested in preserving this fragile, sometimes solitary existence for its own sweet sake and for the people who sometimes tell me they would like me to do that. It turns out that I still think there may be good things ahead, even though my current spot is a little dicey. It turns out that I still may think I have something to say.

You can't say anything if you're not here.

************************************************

This morning I woke up and I still couldn't find my damned glasses. I called and admitted this to someone who may have been expecting me early. I sucked up my remaining, blurry pride and called my mother, and told her that I'd thought about squinting to drive up to LensCrafters (not in any way the hell sponsored. In fact, with what I pay for vision crap, I'd be sponsored if someone would let me, I admit it.) but I was concerned about killing other people or hallucinating rainbows through my confused pupils so could she please take me?

And she did. She took me and she told me it was okay that I'd lost my glasses in my house. She bought me some contacts, even, and lunch, and dropped me at work.

I went into the bathroom and put the holdover lenses in, and after a month of staring through scratched eyeglasses that were giving up I could see really, really well. I saw that when I get myself ready to leave the house at way less than 20/20 vision, the results are not typical, so I had to fix my hair.

At any rate, I was able to finish my day clearly, so that was a bonus.

************************************************

My mother drove me home tonight after some tacos and dinner talk of an old friend who is really sick, a man who is like my father's brother, who always, in spite of anything else, has been kind and loved us, who has been one of our very closest people, who is our extended family. She gave me a coat she bought at a consignment shop. She told me to follow up on my appointments.

It feels good, sometimes, not to work so hard. It feels okay to relax into advice. It feels like a ministry to ourselves to share memories of people we're losing at various clips, of the things we do to keep the rest of us together -- never often enough, never what it could maybe be, but just what it is.

Tomorrow I'm invited to go somewhere where there is moonshine, to throw things into a fire, whatever I want, on a day meant for love. I have some things that would definitely work for such an occasion, not near as many as I used to, but I'm sure I could scare up a talisman or two, a relic of a card or an old printed out email. As into ritual as I can be, I'm not sure it's the right use of my time now, though. I've got my mind on a trip, on moving forward, on being right with today and where I'd like to take it maybe, not so much looking back at stuff that mattered once but doesn't except for what it continues to teach me.

I'm not into the burning up completely now as much as stoking what I've got going on inside. I'm thinking alchemy over immolation, interested in the catching fire, in transformation, but not so much the breaking down.

New year's day

I'm sitting at the base of a small mountain in a place I've never been.

I'm sitting at the base of small mountains all over the place.

I've been moving nonstop since August and haven't reported back. I'm going and going and going, knowing I need to make a move that for me is monumental, scared to death to do it, rolling over every possible (mostly horrible, obviously) potential outcome in my mind, worry stone synapses and rosary bead neurons.

When Mary Oliver asked what I was to do with my one wild and precious life, I doubt that this pattern of behavior would make it into the desired multiple choice options from A to ZZ. This is some nonsense right here. This is self-torture of an outstanding degree, my own personal lunatic fringe. If you were doing this, I would take you out for beers and tell you to run, run, run in the opposite direction from the insanity. I would tell you to go, consequences be damned, because wasting one more day on this was not advisable. I give excellent advice to other people.

*********************

My year began in water.

I stood in the cold shallows of an ocean I love for longer than seemed reasonable but I couldn't help it. I looked at the sky and couldn't stop crying, and thought in the cheesiest possible way but a way that my soul travels nonetheless that starting off this span of time here had to mean something good, right? It had to mean better? It was set up that way, anyway -- as a demarcation and an escape, a running to, not away, at all.

Seagulls are irksome birds but their cries among the waves are a peculiar kind of music, and I wanted to take that with me, too. I hear it in meditation when I finally get my mind to shut down, especially when I'm asked to visualize something that calms me, that makes me feel at home in myself.

When I'm particularly off my rocker I think that things like that -- sounds, pictures, words, signs -- can set me right. My burning bush is multimedia, I guess, and mostly invisible so far. It's a collection of minutiae that has answered no big question yet, and my signals are so crossed right now that even the ocean on a day that signifies the first of the next didn't make anything clear.

Normally when I walk down to the water to say a pitiful goodbye until the next time there is a second when I feel okay leaving that makes turning around possible, a natural end that did not occur this day. I had to force myself to go, to get in my car and go back into whatever was next. It didn't flow at all, which is typical lately.

There are oceans everywhere, the occasional mountain. I just wish sometimes the answers were clearer, that I could navigate these changes and questions and challenges with more grace and less hand-wringing, more quiet resolve than hysterical chatter and questions and reliance on the advice of my friends. It feels like, at 41, the path should be more obvious to the other side of things, especially things that aren't working, things that feel so difficult, that aren't on their surface life-threatening when I know that is the case for so many others. 

But I can't and it's not, and I guess that just means I haven't done all the work yet, inside or out, to make that possible. Or maybe I haven't learned to accept the fact that sometimes the hardest is the simplest, that I have to let it be that way for it to be that way. 

On the last plane I was on, I wrote "More joy" in my little red book, as an aspiration, I guess. I meant it. I don't know what it looks like, but I meant it when I said it. I dared to write it down. I think that is something of a start. 

Something New Under the Sun

I left my office today and won't go back until August, the exact whys of which I can't and won't explain but it's not very exciting anyway so it doesn't matter. It was more difficult than I thought it would be, beyond my genetic difficulty with clearing out spaces and recycling paper and dealing with the detritus of a couple of academic years. I am so bad at this. It is one of my least favorite things, how I hold on to places and people and things anyway - often way longer than I should, when I should take a break at least. I form attachments and have these feelings. It sucks.

Anyway, this has been a really hard year and I know the change is necessary and good even if it is weird and I don't like it even when I think I do. It is weird when my closest colleague, my non-biological brother and a notorious introvert who is not into displays of emotion, did the equivalent of whimpering outside of my door and said "I DON'T LIKE THIS."

Twice. Unheard of. Unnerving.

But then I left because eventually I got hungry and eventually you have to leave everywhere and there was melted cheese and chocolate and friends and wine where I was going, which wasn't a shabby incentive. On the way out, I got in my car and turned on this Courtyard Hounds cd, that as it turns out I love.

Here's where I out myself as a Dixie Chicks fan, if you haven't been paying attention for the past ten years. I am pretty much unfailingly rock and roll but that little bit that has always been country dies hard.

That is me in my car just before I left campus. Do I look like I'm going to throw up from nerves? Like I'm completely overwhelmed by options and alternatives and the threat of brokeness? No? I AM A FAKER. Total faker, I assure you.

Anyway, Emily and Martie have formed this side project. I have been a fan of the band for years but gained new respect for these two since since I saw Shut Up and Sing and realized that this enterprise, this living as musicians, this Dixie Chicks business? These sisters - gifted multi-instrumentalists and singer/songwriters - had taken their whole lives to build it. And those stupid country music fans who bulldozed their cds because of what Natalie Maines said could and would pry their career from their cold, dead hands.

And I say this as someone who has channeled Natalie Maines for confidence on more than a few occasions, which is a sort of strange story for another time.

The song that was on when I got in the car is called Something New Under the Sun and it was what I needed to hear just right then. It was clearly about a relationship, but I have no problem extrapolating and relating art to my own particular circumstance so it was enough for me.

Take a chance on me cause you know and I know we're on our way to something new under the sun.

Whatever is happening now is new, which sounds supremely stupid and obvious but it is and that's not always the case when routines go on and on for months that turn into years while it's like you weren't looking. I don't know what is going to happen at all but what I do know in these old intuitive bones is that whatever it is it is going to be better. As much as I'm nervous and afraid and all over the place, I know this for sure. As scary and financially unstable and bereft of any commitment to time and place as it is?

It is okay, and it is better. I'm sure I'll waver on this a frillion times a day, but for right now, I believe it. This is what I know -- or at least hope and pray -- to be true.

And if it's not may all of it not bite me in the ass too hard.

39

I have three minutes to post on my birthday and I'm going to do it, no matter how short it's going to be and how inadequate I might feel like it is. 

It was a great day. It was spent with people who matter the most to me, really - who get it and support me and for whom in return I'd pretty much do whatever they need. That's the way it works for me. 

I have high hopes for this year. 

38 was amazing and beautiful in some ways (I am so rich in friends and family it's ridiculous) but mostly it was really fucking hard. It was the worst phase, I hope, of the scab healing over, the caterpillar working extra hard to turn into the butterfly, pick your metaphor. I boxed with the universe for a lot of it. 

I ended it just kind of asking for guidance, from somewhere, for what I need to do next. 

I'm lucky in a lot of ways. This is the year I need to get brave. 

Wish me luck. 

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. <

It's all around me.

Gwen Bell is inspiring. I haven't read her for some reason but I went from link to link and finally settled in to find out that I love her writing.

It is the lovely Jen Lemen's birthday today. She wrote this post about turning 40 and all she plans to do to commemorate it this year. I read it this morning and my heart sang for her and for me because I'm totally stealing this idea.

I've been sitting in the bookstore today reading and writing, trying to step outside the lines that have been drawing themselves in tighter and tighter around me. It's been a good mental and physical break from a life that's moving too fast all of a sudden and still presenting me with some challenges.Two-and-a-half months to graduation and there are so many questions I have that have no answer and yet I find myself gravitating more and more towards trust where in recent months there has been such uncertainty.

Lunch with an old friend today restored something in me that I didn't know was in need of it, really. It helped me write something I needed to get out, which was good - so often lately I've felt blocked. It helped me see my way clear to forgiveness, to putting something positive and of actual value into the universe. Actually I'm rediscovering all of these people from all along the path of my life - from high school and other times where maybe we needed a break or didn't really need one but it happened anyway. Add that to some tremendous new people who have come into my life in the past year and I feel that for all the things I'm afraid I lack, I have an embarrassment of riches in friends, which is so wonderful to know. I really can't overstate it.

My dear old friend K and I sat down over beers this weekend after three years of a fractured relationship and it's so great to know that with some people you can just pick up wherever you - for whatever reason - left off.

Then today I looked at a woman I last knew as a 16 year old girl and even though it had been 20 years there was so much that we still inherently knew about each other and there was so little back story that needed to be explained. Turns out we've lived really close to each other for years and it just needed this kind of time to reconnect, I guess. Last night someone I never thought would own anything in common with me at all set up some dinner plans and that was really nice too.

I don't know what the confluence of all of this means at this point - and I don't think I'm going to think about it too deeply for awhile. I'm just going to enjoy it since there's so much of life not to enjoy and what I'm focusing on is connection with good people.

I'll just add that it might not be useful to knock the good stuff that Facebook can do for you until you've tried it - you know, if you want to.

The fall light and colors are inside of me as they are every year. It's an amazing time to be alive - somewhere on the edge of melancholy, but not quite there. I'm not dreading winter as I usually do so much. It'll just happen and I'll move through it as usual. If I didn't have to drive in bad weather I really don't think I'll care. My mother asked if I was going anywhere for graduation and the truth is probably not but maybe I ought to. 

Now I'm listening to Hem, and to a little bit of Wilco. I'm checking the totals and hoping people donate to the Life Through a Lens project. I figure if I had kids by now I'd have hit my family up for thousands of dollars in wrapping paper and school candy bars so maybe we can just cobble together this $800 for these kids and call it even. At least I hope so.

I feel good today. I feel inspired today. I feel like maybe things can sometimes be good and I feel slightly more capable of letting go of things that weight me down than usual, which is to say that I actually do feel capable. And that does feel good, I have to say.

Learning to fly

I always worry about my plane crashing. I used to be a pretty normal flyer - a few butterflies on takeoff, random worries about the things that go bump on the plane, as it were, gratitude when I was on solid ground again, annoyance that that woman with all the crap in the overhead bin just couldn't slide over just a LITTLE bit so as not to impede the progress of 100 people trying to get the hell off.

Sometime last year I became a super nervous flyer. My mind became a total jackass and turned me into that person who actually buys the little bottles of cheap red wine for MEDICINAL PURPOSES. I don't know why, but it made a (total of, with layovers) 20-hour trip to Hanoi an exercise in hell, and sets me on the edge of my seat for the bulk of every flight, unable to sleep.

My trip to San Francisco for BlogHer, I planned for this - planned ahead, that is, with a little bit of medicine for mama to take the edge off, I admit it. I wished I didn't have to, but I was not going to go through this hell again, leaving me uncoiling for the first day of an event of which I do not wish to miss a single minute. Crazy stuff: it worked. I made it everywhere in good form, arms and legs quite loose and brain not completely overwhelmed and just all warm and fuzzy and in love with the universe.

Still not a huge fan of the flying thing, but if pressed, I would say that the reason my plane didn't crash on the way here was so I could read last night in the Community Keynote.

I love this conference. It's my third year, and the haters can shut it, because not only is it not ONLY about the shoes (although, for me, it's a little bit about the wine, but that makes it no different than anywhere else in my world) it is about everything else. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my writing life, and it's up there in my personal life as well. I am an unashamed, unabashed supporter. And now my love is just off any chart in existence, because no other opportunity has arisen in my life - ever - to get up and read something incredibly deeply personal in front of almost 1,000 people, and - once I got out there, after much pre-reading angst - to look out and feel completely supported and at ease.

And afterwards? AFTERWARDS? I'm still amazed that several wonderful people took the time to seek me out - in the hotel lobby - on the way to the party - at the MightyHaus shindig later - to tell me how they felt about what I wrote. They told me their very personal and meaningful stories. They cried. They made me cry. They said things about me, about bravery, about...well, just a lot of things that I have trouble owning for myself a lot of the time, and have to say I don't always believe, but this has been a pretty big step in the right direction of shutting up the aforementioned jackass brain.

I'll write more about this later - my battery is dying and I have to go speak on a panel about blogging without kids (which, gotta say, after standing up alone in front of a ballroom full of people? let's just say I hope it isn't harder than I think it's going to be.) But because I know some new people are stopping by here today, thanks to the awesome Eden Kennedy, I just wanted to say that the experience was one of the best and most meaningful of my life. I'm really glad my plane didn't crash so I could do it, and I don't really know what happens next, ever, with anything, but this was pretty fucking awesome.

Cooking With Gas

One of the hugest disappointments of my life online is that wordsalad.com is not available. Suckers. Parked there for who knows what and for how long. I tried other combos of .infos and versions involving my name and whatnot, but none of them resonated, so I've stuck with the pedestrian, eponymous title that I gave my site on the day I set it up.

But to me, it's word salad. I don't like the definition that I learned in speech-language pathology classes (my undergraduate major) because it's pretty negative. I've always thought about it in a more fun, Alice in Wonderland jabberwocky sort of way, and I wanted it for my blog.

I wanted it for my blog because word salad....well, that's pretty much my life. Not a word cake or a word buffet or a word whatever else, but a word salad.

It keeps on going. The words keep on coming out. It continues.

So when I submitted my post to the BlogHer Community Keynote a month or so ago, I did it as a personal exercise, and it really worked. It was super helpful. It meant disclosure on a level I've rarely been comfortable with, as many words as I put out there on a daily basis.

And then? They picked me.

And now, oh holy hell, I am going to get up and read this post in front of 1,000 people, give or take. I'm setting it back to draft here because we're not supposed to share what post it was, but I know some of you who drop by here regularly have read it. It's really special to me, was as easy to write as it was difficult, contributes to a larger truth and conversation as much as it's myopically about my life, and for those reasons I'm pleased as much as I'm terrified. I'm going to get reacquainted with it in the next week...going to print it out and read it on planes and in bed, until I'm quite sure I can read it without crying.

And in spite of all of the pain and trauma that the past three years have held for me, I'm going to keep getting comfortable with the fact that there's been a bigger picture here that reveals itself in tiny snapshots day-by-day, not by any means a paint-by-number. It's been completely abstract. Some days, even recent ones, have been shitty ones that involved choices I didn't want to make and words - thousands of them - that I wasn't sure were right but I somehow knew needed to be shared. It's involved the despicable, necessary act of letting go of someone I thought I knew, someone whose choices confounded me but who I knew I had to accept or die.

Turns out she was me. Who knew?

So I've been cleaning up the place a little bit. And it's funny what happens, when you get right(er) with the world - not with God, necessarily, although I'm pretty actively engaging with some spiritual stuff too. Just right with the things that haven't felt right, the places in my heart and mind where I've felt akilter, where I've left things bad with other people or with myself. And that along with this keynote thing, and the other things that are happening, are strengthening my belief that this life is a circle. You come back around to the stuff you haven't learned until you learn it better, you make friends with old stuff that didn't get resolved, you make yourself face pain and depression and anxiety because it's the only way to let it move through you and away. You can't always medicate it. Sometimes you have to feel it to acknowledge it and move the hell on. I haven't felt this actively engaged with life - the good stuff and the deepest, grossest basement of it - in, well, I was going to say years, but really ever.

I don't really know what's happening right now, but I know that I'm open to whatever it is, and not just because I don't have a choice. I know there'll be good and bad days ahead, just as there have always been. But I am holding on tighter to a core of something, at the same time that I'm letting go. It gets easier with some practice.

And...and...I love this site, no matter what the name is. I almost shut it down a few months ago, sick of myself and the world and the garbage in my head. But something wouldn't let me do it, something told me that if I started over somewhere else with one of the multiple domains that I now own, that it wouldn't make any difference. Just like relocation doesn't always fix stuff - sometimes you have to hunker down and bloom where you're planted (hackbarfhack.) I love this site because it's my single-most dedicated activity of a weird, strange, random, horrible, beautiful period of my life. It's the fruit of something daily, the effort to make some sense of this nonsensical world and one life lived within it. It's at the same time nothing, and in the ways that it's connected me to so much goodness and opportunity, it's everything.