LaurieWrites

Honest.

I was walking to my car today, leaving Home Goods without anything, because they didn't have what I wanted. I was wondering where I was going to go next that might, jingling my keys, digging the weather, because today was another gift of pretty that we've been getting so much of this spring that it almost makes me forget about the polar ice caps, regardless of the fact that I can't. 

A woman was walking towards me, I did notice that much. When I got about close enough to touch her if I'd wanted to, she stopped, and started talking. 

(This is odd in my area, mind you. Strangers generally do not address other strangers unless directly involved in a transaction or a resolution of some stupid slight, real or perceived.) 

"Can I ask you a question?" she said. "Because you look like an honest person." 

"Sure," I said, processing concurrently just how she'd have ascertained my level of integrity in the literal one second she'd been able to look into my face. 

I took in her physical presence, wondering if she was maybe in some kind of distress, if she was the type to flip out in a parking lot maybe and start asking questions to the air and hey, I was the lucky one who just happened to be there when she did. I'm telling you, people just do not talk to strangers around here, so it just comes to mind, and besides, after years as a counselor, I've learned to respond internally as if in crisis whenever anything out of the ordinary happens. She seemed fine to me, as far as that flawed judgment can go. Physically speaking, she was approximately five foot one inches tall, roundish, black, with closely cropped hair, perfect white teeth, and a gorgeous shade of coral lipstick that screamed "Hey world, I like lipstick, look at it." (This is a sentiment I share, so I am naturally drawn to ladies who also express it nonverbally.) 

"Well, I just got a job opportunity," she said. "It is good, and I got it. And I think I should take it, but my boss wants me to stay where I am. He is guilting me about leaving, 'It's a busy time, we need you,' he's saying. And I'm not sure what to do. "

I can tell you right now that I did not think about what I said at all, or whether or not I was going to say anything. I just said: 

"I say do you. Take it. You have to take your chances, and especially not NOT take them because someone else doesn't want you to or makes you feel badly about them." 

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you so much." 

And then she walked on, and so did I. And as I opened my car and got in and realized that I had just given solicited career advice to a stranger in a parking lot, I felt floored and giddy and drunk with some kind of weird universal connection that I cannot even tell you just about what or why. 

I told Twitter what happened, worrying that it sounded like I was advertising myself as some parking lot shaman who knew stuff about things, but I didn't care. I just...maybe I should have called my mom? One of my best friends? What was I supposed to say? 

"Hey, some lady in a parking lot thought I looked honest and asked for some career advice." 

Because yeah. That is what happened. And as I told Twitter, this person looked, upon further reflection, like a person who really just needed an answer right then and there, or at least needed someone to reflect something, anything back. 

And I guess I was there for that, which is cool. And I started wondering, what if we did that all of the time? What if we stepped outside of our comfort zones more? She didn't know me. I could have been a real jerk. I could have told her to go away. I could have said, no, I'm not comfortable answering your question. 

And hell, I could still be completely wrong. I didn't ask what her current job is or what the new gig is or why she wants to leave or what she's going to. She could be leaving a senator's office to work at a fruit stand, I don't know. But as a human being who has recently given up an incredibly stable position for the unknown, I don't think I'm thinking about that so much right now. I believe that we look for other things when the things we're in aren't cutting it. And people who want us to stay in those things either live in some kind of (not entirely unfounded, sure) fear for us or aren't usually clear on our worth. But I've also come to believe (because I am in some kind of crash course on change, not that I know anything, really, I swear) that even if the next new thing isn't the right one, there will be another thing, at least one, beyond the one you cut your losses for.

I just saw a worry and confusion in this lady's eyes that I've seen in myself a million times, that I've seen so much over the past year that I am sick to death of it, I knew it like I'd seen it in my mirror. Maybe she could spot it from across the parking lot. It's possible. 

I am so glad I did what for me was the correct thing. I'm glad I didn't give in to some kind of freak out fear that she needed something I wasn't prepared to give and shut her down, because I admit it I am not immune to that reaction. I'm glad I listened. I am amazed that she chose me. 

I told my mom that I felt badly, that I felt like maybe I ought to have offered up some kind of connection beyond, asked for an email or given one. But you know, I think maybe some connections are meant to be a minute long. Sometimes any longer and it's spoiled, I guess. I hope so much that her new job is dope. I feel grateful that someone could think for even one second in a parking lot that I'd be the one to answer a question, to tell the truth. That's the grace here. That's the thing I need to live up to. 

I am so grateful to -- and hopeful for -- her, for anybody who's ever felt the need to ask and didn't. I've been her, so many times. I'm so glad she did. 

After leap day.

I keep forgetting that I quit my job. I know intellectually of course that I did it, also because I blabbed it all over creation which is one of my ways of making something seem real. (Besides, you know, just looking at it and identifying it as real and making a sandwich or something. Obviously I am not one for economy of speech or action a lot of the time.) 

But I keep having these moments since I did my Leap Day thing where I realize that holy shit I quit, I did, I did oh my God, I did. And now what am I going to do? The fear monster lurches up and for what appears to be a maximum of thirty seconds I freak out and there is a valley in my sternum where all of my panic and anxiety have a timeshare, and then all of a sudden it is gone when I realize that yes, it is done. I shrink into myself in bed at night, hug myself even, staving off worry that comes most heavy in the dark. But then it passes, because it has to. The thing is done, finally, and there is some kind of basic relief in not having to think about it hypothetically anymore. I can rest in that feeling for a long time, turns out.  

These are called helicopters in certain circles. I will write a story about them someday too.

I have had to tell people, had to talk it through, the need-to-know-basis people as well as those who I'm just lucky enough to have around who care. And through that telling I'm feeling a certain level of figuring out what I think and feel about it, because that's the curse of the verbal processor. And yet I feel a remarkably lessened need to justify, to make it better for anyone else, beyond common courtesy to people who do have some kind of investment in my happiness and who are supports for me, and that is new and probably good. Laying your decisions on other people in that way isn't fair, and it does nothing to give me power. It just means I can say they didn't want it, they thought it was a bad idea, and that's a weak way out, really. Approval is so fleeting, anyway. It just was a necessary move for me, and although I wish I could entirely reassure myself that it will be an easy road to a new situation, minus major bumps and losses and fears and hangups, I can't. I have no idea. I know how I can sketch the outline in my mind, how I already am doing that with the personal imperative that I not get too far ahead of myself lest I wreck myself in that imaginary process, but you know as well as I do that the best laid plans for everything are just that. 

HYSTERIA OMG IT'S ALL GOING TO EXPLODE IN AN EXPLOSION. 

I don't really think so, though. I think, mostly, that I have to keep my wits about me, as birthday boy Seuss might say, "that's important to do/ for someone as fucked up yet witsy as you." (I made that up. Please do not sue me, Geisel estate. I love Yertle the Turtle the best. I repped him this week. Don't sue me.)

Apropos of all of this, when I was on the plane to Blissdom last week, a relatively short flight from Baltimore, I got out my iPad and I started typing. "Goals," I typed, while the little lady next to me gawked over my arm and her vodka at my digital ruled paper. (I let her look. Whatever.) Well technically first I typed "I'm free from Wednesday until Monday. That is enough for me," which was a dirty dirty lie, and "I was born with a hole in my heart/the size of my landlocked travels," which was a lyric in a favorite song I'd just listened to that turned out to have another shade of meaning too, I guess. And then I typed some goals for the vodka lady and me, taptaptap:

*To move through the world joyfully. 

*To feel strong, connected, and content. 

*To do work that reflects my gifts, interests, and values. 

*To build my own business. 

*To love and be loved. 

*To live in community. 

To move through the world joyfully? GET OUT, right? But really. I looked out the window and back at my screen and that was the first thing that came up, the top of a list of basics.

I've had some before, I have, a long time ago and recently. For instance that is a dog on my head, who may not have been sharing my joy, come to think of it. 

There were some more specific things besides these that still need some hothouse time in corners of my heart and mind, but the general stuff made sense. It's the stuff I've stood up in front of classrooms of teenagers seeking career direction and told them to prioritize, while I basically ignored it myself. It's the stuff I've told them that they get the luxury to consider at their ages, without so many constraints of finances or personal responsibilities to others (although they have those to, obviously. I've just learned a lot about the power of the reset and the experiment, and you just have more chances for that at 19 than 41, if I understand math at all, which is admittedly shaky ground.)

My advice turned inward, finally. I'd been talking to myself as much as them for all of these years, never really having the courage to step outside of that preaching spot of inaction, although I danced with it sometimes and went home alone. And whereas I have a bit more on the line at this point, it's really all relative. I had no idea on that Nashville plane that I was going to do what I did this week. Other things transpired to move it forward, to make the words more real, shifts in my heart and mind that made it possible, a sense that if not now, when, if not me, who, and all that jazz.

I don't know how it happened, exactly. I just know that the writing is opening up a little, and that's good. I'm feeling a little more conversational here than I have in a long time, and I'm going to go with that flow. I do know that I have received incredibly generous and supportive feedback from the internet this week, some from people I know well and some from strangers who connect with the concept of leaping, with taking a chance against all good sense and physical evidence. I'd like to share some of that here moving forward because I think in a time in the world where these is so much anger and confusion mixed with hope and raised voices (because far beyond me, this week has been about Rush Limbaugh daring to call someone else of any gender a slut, a Maryland vote for marriage equality and a likely referendum to put the issue to a popular vote that is stirring and scaring my homegirl soul on a very basic level, Kirk Cameron bitching about gay people and people inexplicably listening, a mean-spirited watch for Lindsay Lohan to fail on national television, and Santorum everywhere, the list goes on.) people are crying for chances and change and the potential to make whatever is into something better.  My tiny life is a part of that in some way, so many others are too. I'm grabbing ahold of that story, and maybe I'll find a way to tell some of it as the days go on. 

What I did learn this week is that true friends are essential, that I can have challenging conversations, tell and hear the truth and not die (I learn that anew every time, what?) and that some people will amazingly offer help and resources just because, especially if you cop to needing them in the first place. I found solace in my pictures and some music that I hadn't found in a long time, and in pre-spring cleaning, in rolling out the refrigerator and sweeping behind it, in deep cleaning the inside of it, because it's among my least favorite chores and it's satisfying to get it done well. I learned that an excellent meal and one really, really good vodka gimlet  with someone who fundamentally gets me and makes me laugh until I choke on that drink, is the best capper for a heavy week, is the best indicator of living right on some level.

There is something about big change that sends me back to the basics, to the things that will always be, as a gentle reminder, maybe. I am still more excited than scared, and I'm going to hold onto that for as long as I can, at least until the way clears out a little.  

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.

n. lacking courage; very fearful or timid

He told me last week that I was a coward. I said get it straight: I was a scarecrow, not a lion -- a fool, sure, but not a coward. Except I guess in some ways I am pathetically afraid, the person I am with him, anyway.

I still didn't like it. It still wasn't nice to hear.

People, through some fault of their own or none at all, mostly make you what you are to them, and also who you are in their orbit. The way they talk to you, you to them, how they hold or discard your heart, how they smell (this is important), what they ask of you and how they respond -- it makes you this being that you weren't the minute before you met them, the minute-before person who you will never be again, although if it's not right that's who you'll always be after going back to. It's freaky and uncomfortable. It's science. It's something else, isn't it?

We scrapped out this long, heartfelt, baffling road, he and I. A coward could never have survived it, would have dropped dead eleven months in, the first time she was made to feel unnecessary, inconsequential, distracting from the truly important stuff. And more than a decade later, it's never over, sometimes it feels like, except I think that calling me a coward ends the game, even if he's even partially right. It's not something I ever want anyone to say. It's not something I want someone to have even a partial hand in making me be. It's not something I want to be capable of on my own.

It is not who I am.

This is me a little while ago, in the summer time, my favorite. Flawed, absolutely. I have so much work to do, always, always, keep on moving, doing the work. Figure it out. Make the calls. Be so much better. Do the hard stuff because if you don't, who will? Try to achieve some semblance of what you're capable of before you die.

I still, after careful consideration of this assessment, don't think she is a coward, at least not in the ways that count the most around here.

 

It's better that we don't talk that much anymore. I don't think we bring out the best in each other.

Wednesday

People are living. People are dying. People are suffering in relationships and jobs and life situations all around me. People are falling in love. 

People are doing what they are terrified to do and people are stumbling through the monotony of a job they hate or are just merely accustomed to enough that they don't know it's killing them. People are accepting the status quo. People are getting a dollar menu baked potato from Wendy's and going back to work to clock other people's hours. People are living with people they don't like because they pay the bills. 

People are living. Dying. Suffering. Falling in love. 

(Walt Whitman did this better, I know. He heard America singing. I suggest you leave now and reference his work.) 

How we are not all in awe of the crazy power of what is happening to people all over the world, every second, next to us or thousands of miles away, is a testament to the power of our biologically-fueled function of denial, mostly, and also our hardwired need to put one foot in front of the other. To keep walking. To play our hand, to get what's ours -- to assure ourselves that June will be better than January. 

People are numbed out. 

People are pointlessly hashtagging stuff on the internet like our lives depend on it. 

People are telling you every second who they are and want to be and aren't yet and what they need from you and holy Christ they are so frustrated! 

People are settling. 

A good friend had a baby tonight. Another just stated a big truth publicly, necessarily. Yet another is receiving care from  hospice in her home. Another watched her shows and went to bed. Another is up way past her bedtime, not long before her kids get up, assembling a gift, a ministry from her hands so that a very sick friend will see tangible evidence of her contribution on earth -- the human collateral that says she has mattered in the way she absolutely has.

I just told a relatively distant relative a truth I needed to tell only her, because I know she will understand. I know she'd read a chapter of my story today or eventually and get it. I didn't feel like I had much today, but I had that, and all of a sudden that was enough. 

On other pages, people are complaining because a huge corporation did not invite them to an expensive party in an artificial princess world, and as ridiculous as that is, who can blame them, really? On others, people -- people I love, even, or at least like -- call me names because of my ideology, my purely-felt interest in humane treatment for others, for equity, for the right to live right, as I see it.  

Tell me this world is not an insane, complicated, beautiful, horrible, fever dream miracle. Go ahead. Tell me that tomorrow we'll do better and I won't believe you. Tell me that every day most of us try? I will. 

Life List 2011

Camp Mighty begins tomorrow night in Palm Springs, and I'm late with my life list. 

Oh hey! Here I am! Already here, just finishing this post now. (Actually this is last night, pre-space party, to which I went without a "costume" that met the theme. This spurred another list item. Please see below.) 

Of course I'm late. Water is wet, etc. 

And oh, here I am, again! Just now posting this, on Saturday, at 3:47 PST. 

Can you tell this exercise freaks me out a little? Well, it does, to tell the truth, and to top off my problem here, the list I drafted last week (sitting in a bar, impulsively, after Kris intelligently got in a cab to go home) is in a notebook that is way, way back in Maryland, in a purse I swapped out the other day. Change bags carefully, people. Sigh. 

Anyway, I just thought that since this is supposed to be a positive, aspirational thing most of all, I'd do it over again, stream of consciousness, here. And that also I would shut up and just start writing. So here we go. 

1. Shoot an Operation Smile surgical mission. 

2. Have Boston Terriers in my house again and work more actively with senior rescue. 

3. Have a yard. 

4. Pay off all student loan debt early. 

5. Embrace my most hated holiday: go to a Halloween-type event in a costume and not feel like a fool and also not complain about it. 

6. Hike the Grand Canyon. 

7. Finish the Ancestry.com family tree for both sides of my family. 

8. Travel the regions in Ireland and Germany where my relatives originated. 

9. Digitize as many of the White family photos as possible and share them with the whole family. 

10. Have an online presence that reflects my personality and my skills, and what I have accomplished so far in writing and photography -- a portfolio, a business site and a blog. Also, to help Draft Day Suit be the best that it can be, along with the other sites I write for. 

11. Have Washington Capitals season tickets. 

12. Have competent knife skills, and a really great set of kitchen knives. 

13. Have somewhere I can go to stay on a beach that is mine, anytime. 

14. Be self-supporting strictly through writing/photo/media work. 

15. Grow a hydrangea and a lilac bush. 

16. Print out and organize copies in books and frames of all of my images that move me or that I want to keep off of the computer. 

17. Find the courage to visit my grandmother's grave, at least once. 

18. Be able to hold crow, headstand, side crane, wheel and all other yoga poses that I currently cannot successfully hold. 

19. Visit the rest of the 50 states. 

20. Have a 41st birthday party, because I wasn't ready for 40. 

21. Have my grandmother's ring resized and made more stable so I can actually wear it. 

22. Go to a Super Bowl and a Stanley Cup championship game with Sarah. 

23. Grow a garden -- even just an herb garden or a few flowers -- without killing it. 

24. Get overall financial house in order so it is not a constant source of anxiety. 

25. Have a Christmas Eve tradition that brings me joy. 

26. See every country in Europe.

27. Go back to Vietnam, and to Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. 

28. Find a place called Dodge and get the hell out of it. 

29. Understand how to competently use Speedlite flash and studio lighting. 

30. Work in a darkroom again. 

31. Publish an article in a national magazine. 

32. Get my 200-hour yoga certification. 

33. Visit the White House, go into the Washington Monument, and other things I've never done because I live in the D.C. area. 

34. Actively support surgeries for at least five children per year through Operation Smile. 

35. Go on one silent weekend retreat per year. 

36. Drive cross-country. 

37. Find a way to give back to my parents in the significant way that they have given to me. 

38. Go to Michael's Virginia Tech graduation. 

39. Get another tattoo before I turn 41. 

40. Host a Thanksgiving dinner. 

41. Have a regular practice of having people over to my house for meals and conversation. 

42. Have a women's weekend in a pretty place by the water with some of my closest friends. 

43. Read every classic novel I feel I should read before I die. 

44. Purge all belongings that have no purpose in my life -- clothing, books, stuff -- and be at peace with the basics that remain. 

45. Spend some time with Elisa and Maria in the Bay area. 

46. Visit the Alamo. Remember it. 

47. Go back to Houston and see my remarkable group of women of the blogs who live there. 

48. Catalog and recognize all birthdays for all important people in my life. Send the damn cards. 

49. Finally -- finally! -- visit Vicky in Seattle. 

50. See Duran Duran in London. 

51. Take trips on all major Amtrak routes in the U.S. 

52. Do something hands-on and helpful in New Orleans.

53. Do the Edgar Allen Poe touristy stuff and other fun things I've never tried in Baltimore.

54. Throw a crab feast for my half-birthday.

55. Learn to pack a suitcase competently.

56.  Have Maryland basketball season tickets -- men and women. 

57. Publish a book. 

58. Understand New York  -- the subway system, visit all boroughs, know Manhattan like the back of my hand. 

59. Cultivate a competent slap shot.     

60. Learn to play the drums. 

61. Go to an Orioles-Nats game. 

61. Actually record a fun and ridiculous podcast with Sarah. 

62. Go to Ireland with my sister. 

63. See all the oceans. 

64. Buy myself a pair of diamond earrings. 

65. Have someone who knows what she is doing rewrite my resume to reflect my skills and experience. 

66. Photograph a birth. 

67. Drive on the other side of the road in England. 

68. Own a pair of ruby slippers. 

69. Pay someone's college tuition.

70. Have a photo site with Laurie.

71. Understand how to design a basic website in a variety of platforms.

72. Publish an op-ed. 

73. Visit Karen and Shannon in Ottawa. See the rest of Canada and all of my friends there, too. 

74. Throw a great 50th anniversary party for my parents. 

75. Take a food and wine trip to Italy. 

76. Spend a whole summer and a whole winter at the beach. 

77. Publish a piece in Salon, Slate, Washingtonpost.com, 

78. Understand wine, maybe at the sommelier level. 

79. Take my mom on a trip anywhere of her choosing, on me. 

80. Know how to give a basic haircut without ruining someone's life. 

81. Consistently practice receiving compliments with gratitude, not apologies or self-effacing comments. 

82. Hike a (smallish) mountain.

83. Sing backup in a band 

84. Volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. 

85. Complete my local Mental Health Association hotline training, finally, and volunteer there. 

86. Write a short story I don't hate. 

87. Become a doula. 

88. Learn American Sign Language. 

89. Own a core wardrobe of green dresses. 

90. Have a king-sized bed with really good sheets, an actual duvet, and pillows that don't drive me crazy. 

91. Create an annual tradition with my cousins. 

92. Perfect a variety of vinaigrettes. 

93. Become conversationally proficient in French again. 

94. Have a full Christmas tree of my own ornaments, and also a beachy, small tree with the ones I've bought on vacations. 

95. Go to Bonnaroo and the Virgin Festival in London (or at least see a show at Wembley Stadium.) 

96. Refinish and use an awesome antique writing desk. 

97. Outfit my whole kitchen with good small appliances and all gadgets I need to make me feel like I'm not in college anymore. 

98. See every artist live who is left on my list -- Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, and I know there are more. 

99. Drink coffee in a Parisian cafe.

100. To acknowledge the possibility of falling madly, yet sanely, in real, live adult love with an actual functional human being who feels the same way. Maybe let them live in my house. 

And most importantly: 

100. Be able to confidently say that I love what I do, that the structure of my daily life reflects what I care about, what I'm good at, and how I can best contribute in words and pictures. Oh, and that I love where and with whom I live, and that I am content in my life.  

I picked five big goals off of this list to share with my group, that I'm going to work on extra special over the next year. There are some that I know I can do more easily that I didn't put on my five-things list. I saved some tough stuff for that one. I'll share that later. 

And if you've ever thought this activity sounds lame or ridiculous or like something you shouldn't really have to do in an organized way? Well, I thought the same thing. I blew it off and shot it down as stupid for a long time. And at least in my case, I was totally and completely wrong. I just sat in a room with 20 strangers for three hours. I stood up and I said what I wanted, I acknowledged that I need help with some of it, and I listened to the rest of them do the same. It was one of the most powerful, uncomfortable, cool, inspiring, and sometimes just plain enjoyable things I've ever done. 

Thanks for hanging in there with me. I'll keep you posted. 

Additions: 

I keep thinking of new stuff. 

102. Go to the Olympics. 

103. Go to a Sox game with TwoBusy and ClumberKim. 

Credible Threat

There is a credible threat to our safety in the DC area this weekend -- as well as in New York, of course. It is specific and measurable, the news says, but no one knows what it is. 

It was weird and jarring news, as usual, but I felt more silly that I hadn't really tied the date to what was surely going to be a warning like this. 

Credible. Documented or just believable? Where is it? Don't know. Who is producing it? No idea. What to do about it? Meh. Will I die on the Metro if I take it into the city to meet my friends for brunch? Will a stadium or a museum blow up? Car bombs? More mass vehicular murder? Who knows? 

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

It's different to live here now, sure. The craziness started the day that Peter Jennings -- the person who I bizarrely came to look to over a period of years to narrate every event of note in my life, who is now, also, sadly, dead -- talked us through. We woke up early or were awoken with crazy news. We were there in that day and then it ended and nothing was ever the same.

The year after, we had weeks where we had to point out white trucks driven by killers, picking off our fellow citizens, one by one. We zig-zagged to the gas pumps and into grocery stores. 

We learned over and over what we should already know, I guess -- that life is precarious, that every minute you're alive and not dead is a miracle, really. That you never know. That you should hug your loved ones and tell them, for sure, that you love them, so much that it makes them sick.

Because what if it's them in that building or on that Metro train or walking down that street when the bomb goes off or the plane crashes or the gas asphyxiates? Did you say it enough? Can you say it enough without driving people crazy? (I say no. I say that what we know is enough, that it's part of us. That if it's shown? You don't so much need to go on and on and on. That it just is. People have told me they loved me and bailed. That's all. It isn't always what it seems, or sounds like.)  

The signs on the highway say "See something, say something." They tell me to report suspicious behavior. What in the hell am I looking for that's out of the ordinary on a suburban DC highway? A car afire? A person acting crazy? 

That's normal, here. That's normal pretty much anywhere. I'm 99.5 percent sure that I will never call that number. 

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

I wonder how many of us in this notoriously transient area have been here for more than a decade. I wonder where our roots are. I wonder what we saw on tv, who we knew, where we were, if we could see the smoke, what we did, if we learned to navigate the orange barriers then or more recently. 

I don't know what matters in this context. 

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

I knelt down in yoga after a week break last night. I let the feeling wash over me, the things that happened, my unwillingness to think about them, my sense of having no claim to grief, and yet a stark memory of blowing off a new job a decade ago after I woke up to screams that THE PENTAGON WAS ON FIRE AND SO WAS NEW YORK to sit on my parents' couch and watch planes fly into buildings over and over again, like a movie that wasn't a movie. 

I listened to commentators' voices break. I decided that the job I had signed up for wasn't for me, that if a plane flew into that building I would have definitely been in the wrong place. I went back to my bookstore. I missed the boy I loved who was gone who came back a few months later and then left again. I felt a teeny, tiny fraction of all that it was. I still know it was tiny, and yet it felt (still feels) like a lot.

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

The only comfort I ever found in George W. Bush came in the days after 9/11. The only sense I had of him as a leader was at that time, and the phrase I crazily clung to was to "go about my business." I did it. I spent my paltry dollars and walked the streets. But then again, what was the alternative? My city, in spite of the damage done to a critical spot where people gave their lives for all of us, essentially, was intact. Roads weren't closed. We weren't, probably thanks to Todd Beamer and the Let's Roll Crew, bless their souls, gutted on our edge or in our center, like New York. Thousands weren't lost, their papers and limbs and auras floating over the landscape. 

Not directly, anyway. It's not like we didn't feel them from a distance. 

The percentages and numbers suck. Incalculable, all of it. 

Everyone went about his or her business. There was no new normal. There was just new, and recycled, and the best anybody could do.

The people who died and who have died since deserved better. They deserve the best we can do. 

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

Tomorrow I have good things, in a previously attacked city. I have many friends to see, some of my favorite people in the world, and a drink or two waiting. I hear I'll see the sun shine. 

I hope that nothing bad happens to anyone in New York or D.C. or in any place around our country. I hope it's a day of reverence for everyone -- EVERYONE -- who has lost his or her life  for absolutely no reason. 

And although this is probably selfish, I really hope that no one condescends to tell me never to forget, because how could I? 

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

I think of our troops, dead and alive, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in New York, and at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, every day. I also think of every innocent civilian caught in the crossfire of these wars, thousands of miles away. None of it makes any sense to me, still, or at all. 

Story so far

When I told Karen a few years ago that I believed in creating my own story, I had no idea that I'd end up sitting weeping in the front row of an auditorium a few years later while she spoke, those words of mine projected on the screen. 

I knew I'd meant it when I said it, the morning I originally told her some fragments I could remember of what had brought me from all the places I'd been to that Chicago lobby. I thought it was true then. So maybe that made it even more upsetting when I saw it so big in front of me and knew that if this was the story I'd put myself in charge of creating, I wasn't sure I'd done that great of a job. 

That didn't feel very good. 

#######

Some of it I can't tell you. Some of it I'm not even that good at telling myself yet. I know whatever this is this time that it's big and impossible and existential, that it has to do with the roads I drive and the places I go every day, a life that doesn't feel like it fits that well at all, even though I've done the human dance of adaptability and forced myself into a barely functional mold to make it look like it does enough hours of the week to get by.

I know that it's hard to see families and compare them to my life of fractured time with lots of people, on the fringes of everywhere, never going home to anyone or waiting for them to come to me. That's sad, I know, but it's just true. I was telling a friend last week that I look around at other women my age and I feel like there was a point where something happened for everyone else (gross generalization, yes, and "everyone" is hyperbole) and that it did not for me, even though I tried.

And I know that even worse than that, even beyond the preemptive grief for babies I'll never have and maybe even any kind of family life, who knows, that I could tolerate this chasm of a feeling so much better if I felt a stronger drive to do anything, really. It would be nice to have some sense of mission or purpose beyond the grind of groceries and gym and social activity. 

I would like it if I liked what I did, for the most part. I would enjoy feeling competent again. It would be nice to be in a place where people actually came over, maybe. Community, that would be good. 

It would be useful if within the world of opportunities and possibilities I know exist, that I would have the capacity to choose one, a few maybe. That I would not constantly look even through my third eye and see nothing but a swirl of too much, and have no idea which way to go. This kind of confusion shorts out a brain quickly, it turns out. 

#######

I don't know what I ever dreamed, if I dreamed, because a lot of times I wasn't about big dreams in the way that I usually hear people talk about them. I more trusted that something good would happen, something basic and cool and maybe even worthy of comment. I never wanted too much, just enough, to be it, to have it, to exist within it. And whatever that was, I know it wasn't this, and I can't explain to you the chaotic, horrible, silent nature of that feeling. I know that I wasn't meant to spend so much time alone, or to live my life in its current structure. I wonder what I'm paying for, sometimes -- what gift I've wasted or god I've shamed. I wonder what wrong corner I turned, what debt I left unpaid besides all of the ones I know about. 

And yeah, I do think, shamefully, a lot of the time, that it's no fair. I think of good intentions and hours of brain-splitting work, of parking lots and pizza trays and faith and love and trust. I think of pointless hours on the elliptical and karma and time spent invested in other people's well-being, of people invested in me.

And then I know that's wrong, immediately. You can't count beans or dreams or people. It was all just what it was. 

I don't know how you put so many broken pieces back together. 

#######

I'm two weeks in to getting better, again. I'm two weeks in to taking the pills and walking the walk back from this place, because a month or so ago I crashed again and it's always ugly when it happens but it takes some time and trauma to wake up. 

I went to the doctor. I sat half-naked on the paper on the table and told a stranger who was looking at a laptop instead of me -- new computer system, damned thing, have to input everything as we go -- the bare minimum of what was wrong, and got bored advice about what to take, and none about who else to see. She didn't know. No leads. So I called a person I thought might be able to help me, using my own bush league clinician's brain to scan through lists of MDs and LPwhatevers on a website. And when I called, my office door shut, my mantras shut down, a bored receptionist told me that I might be able to get in in July. I repeated July back to her as a question, told her that wouldn't help me and hung up. 

I wondered, if I gave up after one call, what people did who didn't speak the language well? Who were even more fucked up than I was? Who were old or truly alone or permanently terrified, beyond my ability to snap into functional for the three minutes such a loathsome phone call takes. 

July. 

I went to my yoga studio again, instead, where the oms flow and so does a fountain, where I contort myself silly in 90-degree rooms and feel peace like I don't have anywhere else. I went to work. I shot a big job. I took the little pink pills, willing them to work faster, apologizing to myself again for quitting the last time, when I felt better, when I got my cyclical attitude about medication, my stubborn aversion to things that work, that seem just the slightest bit easy. And as I felt the chemistry start to right itself again inside my head I was able to do some other stuff, the things I find impossible when I'm in the bad place. 

It's mostly nothing big. I cleaned my refrigerator. I did laundry. I picked up most of the clothes off of the floor of my closet and hung them up, categorized by the part of the body they cover. It's still a wreck in here, mind you. Vegetables keep rotting faster than I can eat them. Blouses fall down wispy from the hangers. But I try to stay a step ahead. I even shut the computer down sometimes. 

I envy you, you know, the people who are able to do this without assistance, who can just...do this, all of the time. 

I haven't been writing though, because when I do I ramble. And I'm afraid of what it means to talk about this, and for me lately, this is all there is, pretty much. I'm afraid of what it means to talk about anything these days, honestly, but I'm not sure it matters so much if I do. I'm pretty sure it matters if I don't. 

It's not like this story hasn't been told ad nauseum, both explicitly and in millions of desperate, flailing words that dance around it, so many things said instead. The truth of this is tricky. And the thing is, if you run into me tomorrow, after I've forced myself to get out of my bed that I love and want to live in, made myself get dressed to go to somewhere that works for me on no level to do something I don't like, I'll be okay when we talk. It'll be the usual non sequiturs and wisecracks. I might even offend you, probably accidentally. 

I probably won't tell you then that this chemistry is a low-grade kind of hell, and that two weeks ago, again, I couldn't see my way out of it. And now, today, I can, just a little, the slightest bit of enough to think my way around the hypothetical failure of my story so far. 

Some of my best friends are mom bloggers

I met Laura Mayes a few years ago. It was probably because of Laurie Smithwick, who plucked me drunken from a curb (me, not her, obviously) in front of a Chicago hotel at BlogHer and said hey, we oughta know each others' phone numbers, because she is a take-charge kind of woman who has been nominated for a Grammy award and I am a name-dropping ass who likes to tell you how cool my much-cooler friends are like twice a year. 

 And then I ended up in a limo with the Kirtsy girls talking smack about mythical cameras and that was that. 

[This is the actual night of the curb and the number, etc. Photo unapologetically ripped from Sarah Goon Squad Sarah's Flickr. That's Sarah between two Lauries. There are worse fates, honestly. I love this picture so much. It makes me happy just looking at it. That was a kickass BlogHer and these are two of my favorite people in the world.] 

So that was how I met Laura Mayes. I think. But for all of the specifics that I don't know, what I can say from the first time I met her was that when Laura entered a room, any time, I felt better about things in general. She has this smile and all-around vibe and approach to things that makes me feel like "Hey world, check this out. This is all going to be okay." 

Or, as she herself is often prone to saying, "This is rad." Or, more to the point, it could be. It could be pretty fucking rad, if we let it. WHY ARE WE NOT LETTING IT BE RAD, EXCUSE ME? Except I say the eff word and maybe she doesn't. Bygones. 

So last year I pitched a panel to Laura for Mom 2.0 that I thought was weird but would totally work and she liked it. I remember talking to her about it while I drove from Virginia into North Carolina and the conversation meandered into good places and I probably cut her off about three times because AT&T on 95 is a nightmare plus there were state troopers everywhere and I couldn't remember the phone laws in the states I was in, but she'd just keep calling back. And so I went to Mom 2.0 in Houston and had a better time than I'd had in memory and that was that.

Weiner Mobiles. Taco trucks. Social media/writing learnin'. Pictures. Galleries. And then I got to go back this year and talk about cameras. 

Look, I am not a mom. I am not a mom at all awash in a beautiful sea of women who write on the internet who are moms, and I can't rightly explain how that happened either, except that I write on the internet and I'm a woman and the group of people I've found who do the same have generally produced or acquired a child, as women (especially) just shy of or at or past 40 are prone to doing. 

And that is a vague way of explaining why I go to to Mom 2.0. 

I think Mom 2.0 is one of the best events in the blogging world. I don't care where it is. It could be in a church basement in {insert name of city I don't want to offend} and it would kick all manner of ass, because you know what? French Quarter (I love you New Orleans) or downtown Houston or {HELL YEAH} Miami resort? Mom 2.0 attracts women and a few dudes who do some of the coolest things that are happening on the world wide internet web who also happen to be your girls who will walk back alleys with you and crack up laughing and drink and dance but are also determined to stay with you to make sure you find your damn phone that you drop on the floor of a bar and you're sure is gone but holy hell if the dj doesn't have it when you crawl back in shame to ask. (Thanks Amie. You really are one of the best there is.) 

We need to find these people.

We needed to find them when we were little girls and (god help us) when we were in high school and college and certainly now when we are supposed to be grown-ups with ideas and plans and certainties. We need friends and colleagues and mentors and associates, especially in a media/communications/writing world that is changing at lightning speed every minute.

We need people who give us benchmarks and opinions and places for our ideas to sit at tables and take shape. We need people to help us figure out our businesses and our relationships and where we are to meet for dinner. We need people who will tell us we are good at what we do when we are, and maybe (especially) when we're missing the mark so we can fix it. 

This event is still small enough for this to happen, I promise you. It's relaxed enough for it to  seem possible, and it's cool enough to give us the  venues in which to accomplish this while still feeling happily removed from our workaday circumstances. 

It's rad.  You should go next year. 

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

This year, the following people and experiences made my Mom2.0 experience especially rad: 

Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah, who makes everything more fun, who babysits me on planes when I honestly think I'm going to die every time, but especially this time if I don't get to sit with her because that has to be some kind of sign of impending death (flying anxiety is no joke, y'all), and without whom, well, you know I really just don't know. 

The Dads, particularly BetaDad, Whit Honea and the Muskrat, plus Yvonne and Miss Britt, with whom I tagged along on Thursday night in the Quarter, one of the most fun nights I've had in a very, very long time. 

(Extra special thanks to Whit, Sarah and BetaDad for the beauty of "I'm going to pull the fire alarm... DO IT NOW" plus beer at the keynote, because that was one of the best things of all conference time.) 

Janet. I love Janet. And the rest of those miscreants named above plus Faiqa who went on the awesome PBS Kids Jazz tour, which ended at Preservation Hall where I geeked out hard, and got a little crush on the bandleader who knew pretty much everything about jazz off the top of his head and managed to impart it in a manner in no way as annoying or pedantic as my ex-boyfriend. 

Maile, who is one of the kindest, most talented people I know, and with whom it was a privilege to lead our photo workshop. 

Deb, proprietress of Deb on the Rocks, who laughs at the stupid shit I say like she's not seven million times funnier. It spoils me to have her a hotel floor away, and to get to sit with her at lunch and soak up her words and ideas. 

Shannon, who is one of the best friends I've got who I've seen in person thrice, and with whom I finally got to watch a hockey game, at least on tv. 

Our blog reader and friend Marissa, who met Sarah and me uptown on Sunday and who is just lovely and kind. I'm so glad we got a chance to connect with you because that was a real highlight. 

Three Community Coffee travel mugs to bring home for me and my parents -- best trip gift ever that I didn't have to buy, and my parents are frequent New Orleans visitors who are in their coffee club, so I was ethical and everything! Thanks, Community Coffee. I will continue to drink you all of the time. 

Meeting people whose work I admire and who I've gotten to know on Twitter but never in person -- Marinka, Wendi Aarons, Stacy Morrison, Doug from Laid Off Dad (who will be bringing you Dad2.0 next year.) Seeing Kyran for just a few minutes and hearing her read from a book I first saw in very raw form and it was wonderful then, so I know it will be amazing when I finally get my hands on it now. The conversations with these people were very helpful to me this time out -- hearing what people are working on, what they're writing, how they're hoping to shape it. That was good for me. 

As far as programming, this may sound crazy, but the Oprah video at the end made me cry and think and question what the hell it is I'm doing in general and online -- what it's been and could be and what I need to do to make that happen. I'm not a wholesale fan of hers, really, and I'm not saying I co-sign everything she said, even in that clip. But as a woman without kids at a conference designed for moms, her statement about being a woman without her own children who nonetheless felt called to teach and lead carried a lot of weight with me. I did not make the conscious choice that she did to remain childless. My life has moved in different ways that have made that my reality, and in a lot of ways it's my central struggle, what my legacy can be besides that. What my purpose is, if it's not to be a mom and in a family structure, and it's my job to figure out how to manage that without going insane, to determine what to say, how, and for what purpose. 

And for some reason that video of Oprah talking about similar things put me in the right space to contemplate that. 

I love New Orleans. For all its crazy I love my blogging life and the people who are in it with me. So it was lovely to be in that place with some of my best friends and favorite new people, trying to figure all of this out for the next phase. I carried that away with me, flying out over Lake Ponchartrain into a life where I don't know at all what is going to happen next, except I did know for sure that I had a hell of a good time at Mom 2.0.

(It was, indeed, rad. Thanks, Laura. You're the best queso who ever queso'd.) 

This is stupid long and no one has to read it

How is everyone? 

I appear to be writing here again, an event I blame solely on last week's super moon, because I've been overrun with thoughts and the desire to type them out ever since.

I've launched back in with the usual love letters to my people and random other things, but I feel like I should say something more specific about what's going on with me lately.

"But I don't give a damn what you've been up to," you say. 

Fair enough, but bringing things into chronological order is just another of my compulsions. I'm on Twitter so much the virtual world is choking on my words, but that's different.

Let's see. Let's take this back to last fall, shall we? That's where I want to go. 

I went to Ojai for Creative Alliance, courtesy of Lee Vandeman and a team of awesome women who led me to a California canyon, one of the most truly beautiful places I've ever been.

We were filled up with good food and laughter and talk of creativity and business and late night readings of McSweeney's comedy that still make me cry. I got to stay in the coolest m/hotel, I got to see a part of California I hope that I can go back to so soon, and I made some friends I know that I never would have met otherwise. Everyone is listed here, so I don't forget anyone. (I love you, Ann, Jess and Kristen. You're everything good.) Plus I got to spend time with Deb and Sue and that is always so good for me. We spent a fun day at the end wandering Ojai then up Ventura Highway (in the suuuuuun-shiiiiiiiine) to see Sue's town and then on to visit Erin and her family before I went home. It was such a great trip, and I'm so glad I went. Ask me about the yurt sometime.

Hey, remember when I got that big ass sandwich last summer?

 Oh my God. I already told you about that a long time ago, but I was just going back through Sarah's pictures to try to find a shot or two of us in Asheville in September because I LOST MY MEMORY CARD ON THE WAY HOME from that trip, and I count on her to back me up in these tragic situations. And of course this is what I come across. 

I just realized I have some horn action going on there. The rock never stops, stupid sandwich or no. You want to get with this. Anyway, moving on.

This is the Biltmore, in Asheville. Sarah took this too. I loved my shots of that staircase so much that I can't really think about them or I get sad. Oh well. Also it's a good thing that I trust her not to push me down stairs. 

The Biltmore people were very nice and took us on a tour of which I have no photographs and let us sample sparkling wine that I tried to con the man into giving me more of but he wasn't down and there were gargoyles and that was that. Let's pretend that every shot I took on that whole trip sucked, because they're gone, okay? Thanks! 

Asheville is a great town with good restaurants and lots to see, so we had fun. I got to drink habanero margaritas (reminding myself to try to make them at home) with Laurie and Deb and Penny and other various blog friends. We drove by a huge guitar and a NASCAR track in Tennessee, and through relatively terrifying foggy mountain passes very early in the morning, and got to do the talky thing we do so terrifyingly well, which is always nice. A friend you can be trapped in a car for hours with and not get sick of...at all, ever? Dude. I strongly recommend acquiring this. We spent an excellent afternoon at the end of the trip in a brew pub with good beer and approximately 17 televisions with football games visible from every angle, something I know ranked as a highlight for at least one person in my party. 

The holidays were...eh. I deal worse with winter coming on every year. I hate hate hate cold weather, and last year's ridiculous snow totals in our underprepared area left me with some kind of strange winter PTSD and I apparently mentally resisted it coming back again as hard as I possibly could. I was supposed to move in November and then that fell apart due to sad circumstances beyond my control, and for the rest of 2010 I thought too much about how I was going to turn 40 in December.

I'm listening to this right now, by the way. You don't wish you were me at all, but just know that I rock exceedingly hard. 

We went to Pittsburgh on New Year's Day to watch the Caps play the Penguins in the Winter Classic. It was a quick, awesome trip and we had fun just being there, although I have to admit that the Caps win was a huge bonus. I love my hockey, oh do I love my hockey, and someone may have to wheel me into wherever they're playing when I'm old to see them finally win a Cup, but this was a nice second to that. We stayed with Kim, who is one of the greatest people I know, and was the reason we were able to get into the game in the first place. She is also very gracious when her team loses, and such a good friend in all ways having nothing to do with sports. She is also writing more, and you should read her blog. She's been saying since I met her that she's not a writer. I always knew it was bs, because anyone with that many stories and her prodigious brain has the ability, and I'm proud of her for committing to the practice. It sucks a lot of the time but when it brings joy it's among the realest out there, and...yeah. I can go on about that for a long time. 

We were also able to get in a little bit of time with Kelly and Andrea, which was so nice, in a pub with a bunch of soccer games on Sunday morning television. I like Pittsburgh. I could get used to it. 

We were kind of happy about the whole thing. 

We are so silly but whatever. Oh! We also went to a women's hockey event at the Capitals' practice facility in November, and I met Peter Bondra and he guided me through shooting a goal. Bondra is such a highlight of Caps hockey and this was truly a fun life highlight for me. Plus he's genuinely nice. And cute. This is our Christmas card. 

As you can tell from the relative absence of my eyes in that photo, I'd gained a lot of weight. By the time I turned 40 on December 27, I was at the highest weight I'd hit since college. I spent the week of Christmas and my birthday pouring Bailey's in my coffee and eating food I don't allow myself to have most of the time. I spent a wonderful actual birthday with my family and friends, and my sister gave me the sweetest book  full of words and photos from my friends from all over. It made me cry two pages in and was such a highlight of my year and my life. She and Sarah both got me hockey jerseys, and in general I felt very loved and that was nice.

But I felt like hell and I knew I looked it. Right after I got back from Pittsburgh, I started a 40-day yoga challenge, a process that included daily yoga practice of some sort, meditation, and more attention to clean eating. "Clean eating" is one of those phrases that makes me want to punch myself in the face, but it's the best description I've got of what I'm trying to do. I limit processed stuff and I do not keep junk in my house, for the most part. If I ever stop drinking beer and wine that would probably help, but I'm not interested in that now.

The 40-Day program was intense and I really felt I should write about it while it was happening, but it was such a heavy thing I just couldn't. I went to the yoga studio near my house and office almost every day between the second week in January and the third week in February. I've tried yoga before, even keeping it up for months in other times of my life, but this particular process was life-altering.

The Thrive studio is owned by people who have good attitudes about people in general and what they can get out of practicing yoga. I was also ready to physically challenge myself even when I feel stupid or weak, which is often. But all I know is that after 30 years of consciously hating my body, this experience has allowed me to step off of my usual track of measuring exercise value strictly in minutes of hell on this machine or that at the gym. My body and mind came together in a way that seems to make me a better and also healthier person, I think. I can also do Wheel pose now, for like 30 seconds. 

I don't look like that when I do it, but you can pretend I do if it makes you feel better. I just did it fully for the first time on Saturday, in a class that also had me bracing my feet halfway up a wall while I stood on my hands. No really. I did that. I lifted this weight on my hands, with my legs up the wall BEHIND ME in an "L" shape. For real. Multiple times. And as much as I'm horrified at the thought of people who know me seeing me in this configuration, a part of me still wishes they could look at a picture of it long enough to know that it's definitely me, so they can be all WHAT THE HELL? 

And no, it isn't very yogi-like to stroll around saying I CAN DO WHEEL I DO WHEEL NOW AND STAND ON MY HANDS WITH MY LEGS BEHIND ME UP THE WALL, pretty much because as soon as you do that successfully you'll bust your ass in a simple down dog, karma being what it is. But I admit that it feels pretty good to be in my body in this powerful way. I also really like my studio. I can have a terrible day and without fail, by the time I get there and do a class and leave, my head is fixed for a little while. I wish it were practical to spend three hours there a day, every day.  

I also started running, with the plan to run the Broad Street Run in Philadelphia on May 1. This is a huge deal for me. I've never run anywhere except after a plane or from pain and scandal in my 40 years. I was terrified to try it, especially at the size I was in January, but I did it. I'm up to a max of four miles at a time now, and I'm hoping I can be in good enough shape to at least finish out the race without dying. I visited my friend Greg, who sells running shoes, and got new ones Saturday, which I understand will imbue me with the powers of flight, or my money back. My next step is to actually run outside now that Maryland is deciding it really doesn't want to be winter anymore, a process that always takes its adolescent self about three weeks. He claims he is going to come and run with me, and I'm hoping he's not lying. 

Running is hard, man. It's the hardest thing I've ever had to physically do, but somehow I keep doing it. I really need some new playlists, though. I'm so sick of mine. Please send me new music, but know that mine jump from Cinderella to Kid Rock to Pink, Kenny Chesney and Christopher Cross.

No, I'm not kidding.  No I, will never be the same without you here. 

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I moved into a condo that I love. I really, really do. I have so much to do to get it fixed to the point where I'm really comfortable and it feels like home, but it's a good place for me to be, in an excellent location near a metro and the Beltway. I've had a little bit of trouble adjusting to the silence, but I'm relaxing into it and seeing where it takes me. 

What else did I miss? Elisa, who makes my world infinitely better, bought me a ticket to see Billie Joe Armstrong appear in American Idiot on Broadway, so I went to New York in a snowstorm to make that happen. This coincided with Renate, one of my best friends, moving there, so I drove up with her on that adventure. 

I could explain to you how I feel about Green Day, Elisa, New York and Renate, but that's its own post that should be written. It was amazing. Billie Joe is my boyfriend, we had an amazing time at the show, and on the moments when I realize that I'm a lucky girl, this is one of the experiences that makes that happen. 

Sarah and I went to Bon Jovi in February and had so much fun, I think.

This is what I'll remember forever from that night, and if they come back here, I'll make sure we go, because it was entirely fucking worth it for this.

I'll have us do this until we're old ladies. It's just how it should be. 

(I love my Sarah. You've got that, right? If you were me, with the experiences I've had and the way I came up through my life into now, you would too, I swear. You'd get it.)

I'm looking forward to spring so much. I'm going to New Orleans to do a photo workshop at the Mom2.0 conference in April, and I'll be so happy to see some of my good friends who live in the computer. The internet has been very good to me. Sometimes I can't even believe it. These people send me housewarming presents and look for me when I'm not around, so I like to go and visit them in person when I can. I can't wait to be back in the Quarter and show Sarah my favorite parts of Magazine and Rocky's house in the Garden District and and and...New Orleans is just, it's everything. It's my soul city. New York is my heart. New Orleans is my soul. New York is my soul. New Orleans is my heart. Interchangeable. 

My sister's wedding shower is in Philadelphia next weekend, and she gets married in June. I'm headed to BlogHer Food in Atlanta in May, and have a few other trips planned, some to places I've never been before. I think I see beaches in my future, too. Have I mentioned lately how much I like it when life warms up and we can all get outside again? 

I haven't been shooting enough, at all, and I hate that. I also have to get a website done for the photography and writing. There are lots of things I need to do. My only sources of sadness and upset are some things in my daily life and routine that only I can remedy, and I feel pretty sure that I can handle those too, this year. It's more difficult to figure that out than I was expecting, but I'm trying. 

It still makes me a little bit sad that I was in such a strange place on my birthday, and really didn't mark that time consciously in the way that I hoped to do. I'm not sure if it's a bullshit move to extend the celebration and do that now, or if that's something I have the license to do for the entire year. What do you think? If I throw myself a belated party, would people come?