LaurieWrites

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.

Covered in roses

Today started with an excellent breakfast at Dottie's Bluebird Cafe (I think?) in downtown San Francisco with my BlogHer roommate Genie and the excellent Jen Zug who was a fellow reader at the Community keynote Friday night. We spent the hour wait in the gray damp morning talking about nothing and everything in between and decided it was worth it when the food came. Wow. Best breakfast, really, that I'd wait for again, which generally speaking isn't the case.

After breakfast Genie had taken off for the airport and I stuck around in the room to check my e-mail and try to arrange transportation to San Diego from San Francisco, a task I thought would be stunningly easy. Cue the Westin kicking me off the wireless when the BlogHer "FREE" bizness stopped almost exactly at noon. Then cue me trying desperately to cram two weeks' worth of crap into two suitcases, while the "what to keep" pile of stuff I was bringing home from the conference got smaller and smaller.

Suitcases closed, I arranged my camera and purse and whatever other detritus of my life stood between me and a life beyond the Westin walls, when a wave of horrible emptiness came over me and I began to weep. I'd had a dream about my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend (whom I do not know and will never, by the way? So, weird?) in the early morning hours. I felt suddenly, overwhelmingly sad. BlogHer was great and powerful like Oz for me this year, and it was over. I missed my family. I hadn't seen enough of the city. And most of all, I was oh so VERY all alone in this hotel room and thus it would ever be. I really really lost my shit there for a minute, and as a result had absolutely no idea what to do next.

What I did was somehow manage to pile all the junk into a set-up that I could stumble downstairs with, stopped crying after a few minutes, and went out to the elevators. And when the elevator doors opened up, there was my dear BlogHer co-editor Catherine Morgan and her mom, smiling big smiles and inviting me to run around the city with them to do some last-minute shopping and sea-lion watching and whatnot. Catherine and I connected at last year's conference and I'm in touch with a number of my BlogHer girls (as I call them in my head, where it is neither inappropriate nor reductive, by the way. ;)) every day. She stuck with me today as I realized that a $350 rental car return fee in San Diego wasn't going to cut it, and worked with my quiet hysteria while I tried to arrange alternative transportation. She and her sweet mom Frances listened to me babble on at lunch, and by the time I left them at the sea lions to go meet two other really great women who had stuck around, who I felt comfortable reaching out to for some company and support even though I didn't know them very well at all until tonight, I felt - if not completely settled with the weirdness of the day and every single conflicting emotion that seems to bookend everything for me these days - at least grateful that I'd had that time with people I liked and cared about. At least I wasn't crying anymore, In fact,  the crazy sea lion barking made me laugh out loud and that's definitely preferable to the weeping.

This kind of experience is what I really love the most about what BlogHer has brought to my life in the past three years and what makes me go all warm and fuzzy about it like I don't about many, many things, trust me. I'd call it out if it wasn't true and when parts of it don't work for me I do that too. But the stark truth is that very few things in my life have given me the chance to not only get better at the writing but also to connect with people in these really astounding ways. It's an experience that takes me up really really way high sometimes. It can have me stupid in the street at 4 a.m. with people I've just met. It makes me laugh and talk and eat and drink and think and cry when it's over.

Which it is. And I am finally getting the hell out of here.

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.

All-points Bulletin for the Universe:

I have had enough.

Seriously, where is the hidden camera?

I have had the worst year. THE WORST YEAR. It zigs when I zag. My words come out wrong and at inopportune times. I clasped my hands together yesterday and was horrified to realize that I lack any kind of supportive touch, for myself and for other people, that I maybe don't have the capacity for it right now.

I am in the most TERRIBLE headspace I have been in in years. I am not fun, not fun at all. I am not enjoying myself, and the effort to make the opposite be true is exhausting me. I am dredging up every possible thing I know of to make this not be true, including typing mantras on the cute little sticky note application on my macbook, and I am failing miserably.

I am, among many things, a fighter, a scrappy little girl, kind of like a chunkier Kristy Macnichol on Eight Is Enough. And what looks insane to others, i.e., the outside world, often makes perfect sense to me in my brain, such that I'm willing to go to the mat for it long past when its shelf life is expired. But right now I'm kind of slap fighting with myself and it is unattractive. It is sad and silly at the same time. I am on overdrive such that when I opened up my grades today and saw that I had earned a B for all of my troubles related to the trip to Vietnam, I couldn't even cry, although the whole experience at this point makes me want to sob, it was so awful (not the trip itself - the aftermath. Do not trust how you tell the story of your beautiful personal experiences to cold and unkind people, if you can help it.) I could not fire up an e-mail to my dean, detailing all of the ways in which I felt wronged, all of the ways in which my instructor's impressive credentials were wiped out for me on so many occasions, like when she commented on my "undies", maybe, but most of all on the last day I hopefully will ever see her, when she said, "Dental care isn't sexy. Not like facial repair surgery."

I have had both, a lot more than you ever will unless someone smart knocks your teeth out, lady. And I'm here to tell you that a doctor sewing up a tiny little face IS NOT SEXY. Especially when it's yours. Even if it's on the front page of the goddamned newspaper.

So there you have it. I am an unattractive, ravenous, morally outraged ANGRY WOMAN ON HER PERIOD. I have cramps that are currently ripping across my midsection, I am pissed off and I need a break. I need something SO GREAT to happen to me right now, and I don't think it will.

Also, I am mean and I don't want to help you (the universal you, so please whoever you are do not take this personally.)

I want the person who just found this blog by googling "if it flies, floats or fucks --- rent it, paul mccartney-heather mills divorce" to trip and fall, because you, sir or madam, are disturbed.

I want the democratic primary to end, so we can get on with the business of things and with our lives. It's proven two things: hatred of women and people of color is alive and well. And I'm afraid that the results of the general election will prove the same, with much more destructive results. May I be wrong.

I just got my financial aid refund, which means I've officially mortgaged my future, and I immediately bought a purse I've been coveting. Ergo, I have a shopping problem, and I don't care.

I do not want to meet my obligations this weekend. I want to clean my room. I want to lay in the yard, in the sun and the grass. I want to build this new site I've got on my mind and maybe even read a book that I feel like reading. I want to remember what it is that makes all of this bullshit worth it. I want to be able to talk to you if I feel like it, and not if I don't. I want a cheeseburger. I am not that hard to please, so I would like the other stuff to stop. Just to stop. I want to stop feeling disappointed and disappointing. I want to be a nice person again.

Yesterday I sent the last shred of good thoughts I had out into the universe via the United States Postal Service for someone I have cared about for a long time. Do not ask me if it was closure because if one more person asks me that I don't know what I will do but I wouldn't be the guinea pig there if I were you. I could not think it was pitiful because it was so long in coming that I had to do it, because I needed to honor something inside of me that was true and real for someone else, while I still could. I smiled a real smile after I handed the package over, because I knew it was beauty I was capable of at one point although I don't really think I ever will be again (I'll lie and tell you I do but I don't, not really, and I can't tell you the kind of fear that can instill in a full-to-bursting heart and soul.)

I had the hope of years in ink and paper in my hands and I handed it over. I gave it away to a short woman in a blue jacket, because I truly didn't want it anymore. I don't want it. I didn't care what the recipient would think of it, really, although I obviously care very much. I can't help how I feel. I did, however, want it gone, wanted it to fly away where it might finally have some positive benefit, no matter what, where it is in no way about me.

My blog friend Jen Lemen is in Rwanda right now. In an effort to neutralize this terrible, terrible feeling that I feel, what I sent to my old friend was a copy of her zine, "Let's Learn How to Help Ourselves and Others." I had read it over and over because I believe that what Jen has accomplished in a few short months is amazing, and it's the stuff like this that makes me think we can do something really great and useful with our time here. I sent it to him because he's one of the people I know who I believe to be most capable of taking creative efforts and using them to make a difference on a profound level, and I hope with all my heart that that happens. The book is meant to be passed forward, really. It's not supposed to stop with you, and I surely didn't want it to stay in these hands that are so struggling with what it is that they're meant to do, with where they're meant to go.

I do not want the lessons I've learned from what I've chosen to love and to devote my time to to stop at this bottleneck. I want the year to get better, sure, because it would make me much easier for other people to be around and make my nights a lot easier to get through, but if it can't I hope some good comes out of it. If it doesn't it makes an unsatisfying point.

Donations may be made to Jen and Odette's project at Jen's ChipIn site. Pitch in if you can, and even if you can't, certainly spread the word.
 

I am.

Have I said lately that I love Heather?

Laurie, you're a badassmotherfucka. Say it with me now, "I, Laurie White, am a BADASSMOTHAFUCKA and I will not be intimidated by little weenies with no social skills."

You totally need a friend like this, I swear.

Good People Day '08 For Real

Okay, I said I'd do this, so I will. Also, I'm up obscenely early even though the jet lag craziness is finally over (it took a long time! Way longer than I thought it would...)

The topic of "good people" is so broad and when I sit - or recline, as the case may be much more frequently these days - to write these kinds of posts I often get overwhelmed and then I stop and write some treatise about my hair or something. It's not because I'm shallow, honestly, quite the opposite unfortunately, but the bigger things are sometimes the hardest to write about. Especially when I'm strapped for time, which lately is every day. But I have been really thinking a lot lately about "good people", particularly as so many have touched my life and just my consciousness given that I consume a lot of information about a lot of things on a daily basis. (And also apparently now I write in broad strokes of generalities of nothingness. What the fuck is wrong with you, woman? Where are your details?)

Here's something specific: animal rescue people are angels. I've been searching for somewhere to place my grief and rack of assorted emotions about my dog and therefore I've been trolling through Petfinder. You say "masochist." I say "We all deal in our own peculiar way and a lot of times mine is very peculiar, but I'm also quite interesting on a good day." It's not as bad as when I first got online ELEVEN years ago (oh my word) My boyfriend at the time had basically moved into my house, which although he really got on my nerves from the beginning was okay because aside from providing me with certain perks, shall we say, he was a minor league techie who knew how to set up my computer and also assembled my workstation. Really, the writing was on the wall there about so many things, looking back.

Anyway, like everyone else at the time I got an AOL account, and immediately dissolved into the Internet, never to fully reemerge. I was obsessed from the gate. One night in particular stands out, when he woke up at 3 a.m. to me sobbing and looking at pet memorial pages, and forbade me (haha, whatever, that makes me laugh, which is why I'll die single) to ever go on one again. I don't frequent such sites anymore, but it's for self-preservation and an immediate need to scream whenever I hear the term "rainbow bridge".

That said, please say hello to Pappy. Oh my God, so cute, I can't stand it.  He's a senior dog who needs a home because of God knows what, someone died or some asshole got tired of him or someone had a baby and is lame and doesn't understand that a dog with any amount of Boston in him is the best babysitter ever, or whatever happens when animals get surrendered. If I had the space and the means (i.e., if I lived alone, which I don't) and the emotional bravery to take on another animal at this point I would, but I don't and don't know when I ever will. In my wealthy dreams I bankroll a spa for retired older lady Bostons who were used as breeders and treated like crap

The people who run the HART (Homeless Animal Rescue Team) shelter in Fairfax are taking care of him. They have a sponsorship program, so even if you can't take a dog or a cat or a rabbit or whatever, you can set up a PayPal donation plan. I did it last night - it was incredibly easy, and even though he won't be "my" dog, I feel good knowing I pitched some food or a blanket his way. I think this is the way I can be a supporter although not a direct caregiver/dog person.

That's my good people. I could really fill hours focusing on the positive, so there should be more here...but that's a good start.

Jazz Hands

My friend Celia asked me to read a poem at the coffeehouse event she threw at her church tonight, and I said I would, so I did. My mom had an emergency appendectomy yesterday, so clearly my wish for the '08 that there be no medical crises in my family or among my friends has already not been heeded and it's only January 16th. She got through it okay and I picked her up from the hospital this morning, and everything seemed stable enough for me to leave the house to be there by 7 tonight.

It was really good, although I haven't read in public for a really long time and I always get so nervous. Going back to the whole "create" goal for the year, though, I'm forcing myself to do some things that aren't my very most favorite. Like reading in public. On a stage. Feeling like one of the football player brothers from The Biggest Loser at this point.

My most beautiful and wonderful friend and colleague TK sang and played his guitar (he is fabulous, really. He could play out if he wanted to on a more regular basis.) and Celia asked me to read a poem in between his songs, so there was just no way I could turn this down. He is one of my favorite people in the whole world, another one who doesn't understand just how talented he is, and I thought that even sharing a stage with him once in my life had to bring some magic to my little world.

Several people from the church participated also, including one man in his 80s who, in what he called his soliloquy on growing older, included his prostate cancer treatment and a line in which he indicated (just BAM, like right out of the blue) that he would never "have an erection or an orgasm again." Al.....righty. What this also means is that if I'm going to be any religion ever again, Unitarian is probably it.

Choosing not to delve that deeply into my own medical or sexual experiences, past, present or future, I read a piece that I wrote for someone I loved, which seemed appropriate given the date and also because I was reading it between songs. I was kind of pleased with it when I wrote it, but it's funny how things you write change in meaning for you over time. I wrote it down on my wordsalad page once, but here it is again.

Jazz Hands

His hands wish for music -
strong and sturdy, beautiful,
willing magic chords out of silent strings.
The groove in his mind, like a session
with Miles at Birdland,
is worlds away from this practice room stool.
"Is it worth it? This hunger? This want?"
I ask, and in a voice like his eyes,
deep as the echoes of jazz,
he says, "Yes,
can't you hear it?"

- April, 2006

Afterwards we all went to Hard Times and it was nice to feel a part of some creative endeavor with people I like. It's been a while, and it's a buzz worth pursuing I think. School just doesn't cut it on that level. Maybe I'll try to write some more poems again. It's been awhile, but if there's one genre in which I fear devolving into mush, it's poetry. I'm just afraid of getting too clinical and journalistic, losing the edge, and that would be sad. Striking the balance is always the most difficult part, isn't it?

And I just still read way, way too fast. Get so nervous.

Eileen Korn

If you want a gorgeous new voice to ring in the new year, let it be Eileen Korn's. I met Eileen when I was writing a story that I pitched to the PG Sentinel about the only open mic I knew about in PG County, or at least in College Park. I ended up having a total conflict of interest because as much as I was just there to write about the event, I got sucked into the music. Eileen got there pretty early and didn't go on until close to the end, but when she sat down at the piano and started to sing, I was completely blown away, and so were the other people in the place with good sense. (Here's a terrible HTML cache version of the article, because the paper charges a subscription fee, but you should be able to get the idea here.) I really want to be a music writer. This was the most fun I had all semester.

She told me at the time that she didn't have a website and wasn't playing out, and came to the open mic at the Perk as much to hear other people as she did to play herself. So that means she's nice and oddly humble as well as completely and totally talented. Somebody talked some sense into her and she has a site up now, that I learned about through the wonders of Myspace and heather of ilyaimy. There's not a whole lot there yet but there are some songs from her demo that she's made available for download. (I think the recording of the third one is messed up but the other ones are fine.)

She'll be playing a show at the Perk with Heather tomorrow night and I highly recommend you go and listen to both of them if you're in the area and are in the mood for some good music and a decent cup of coffee. I interviewed Heather for the piece as well and she was a kick to talk and listen to.

Cindy Lee

My friend Erica called from San Diego last night to tell me that our friend Cindy died suddenly in the Barnes and Noble where we all used to work. She was 50 years old. I'll write the 75 words first, but then some, because...because.

"Sometimes we cut a wide swath, baby, and that's okay," she said at my goodbye party, as I worried over leaving everything that knit my Dayton life together. She hated bullshit and I loved that. I’ve repeated her words to myself many times since, a Cindy mantra that soothes me. I just knew even then the loss of leaving people like that, people who tell you the truth, who you stupidly lose sight of but never forget.

These are my extra words for her:

She let her husband Bill get another car once. He likes classic cars of some money-sucking sort that I can't remember now. She came into work after the decision had been made, and he called her during the shift to tell her, just in case she didn’t know it, that she was “so fucking cool.”  Cool because she didn't give him any shit about getting the car. Cool because she laughed and said some stuff like "that man" or "his toys" or whatever, and she just moved on from it. She knew he loved them, and because she handled the money, as I recall, she'd just make the thousand dollars or whatever it was happen, and she'd pull her car out around the extra vehicles in the yard. Because, she said, there was nothing she could really do about it but do it, because it made him happy and it was no big deal anyway. Another car, a few more dollars.

They were one of the great love stories I've ever met in person. No one wrote stories or made movies about them, but they just honest to God really loved each other, and loved their pets and house, and whatever it was that made their lives tick, and I find that one of the most underrated beauties of life, maybe because I don't hear about it or see it that much.

He came in to the store the other night, apparently, just to be there, to be where she really did love to work after escaping mindless shifts of “Hello, thank you for calling Hugo Boss fine leather goods, how may I help you?” Erica said he said he didn’t know what he was going to do without her. Sometimes it's hard to know, beyond just putting one foot in front of the other.

Cindy was always kind to me. She always made me laugh. She was one of the coolest women I've ever met. She rarely went out socially, and when she came to my goodbye dinner, it really, really touched me and made me feel pretty special too. She inspired in me absolute positive regard, something I'm ashamed to admit doesn't come along as often as it maybe should.

The photos below are from the summer of 1999, when I left for home and Vic moved to Seattle, and we had parties all season to say goodbye.

The top photo is Vic on the left, Cindy on the right. The next one is Cindy on the left, Erica on the right. I really, really love these women. It was such a good time for friends.

And yes, sometimes you do cut a really wide swath, and it just has to be okay.