December 24, 2014

I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.


Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
By Cheryl Strayed

I've been trying to post these last passages since December 20, the day I saw the movie. I wanted to wait until I knew how exactly to describe the experience of reading this book and watching the movie, both which I did by myself. It was much like the experience of reading Tiny Beautiful Things -- of feeling that you are understood and not alone. And also in some cases, that you are lucky. That you are OK. I identified with her intense, undying love for her mother. Her passion for words. Her desire for love, sex, purpose, and adventure. Curiosity mixed with enchantment of the natural world. Her insecurities. I mean, there was even Box of Rain! A song I often looked to for comfort in my earlier 20s. Wild is a story that's as heartbreaking as it is empowering, and the latter feeling more so by the time it ends. There are tons of great passages, including some funny ones involving the people she meets on the trail. They won't be here but they are great reminders that many of the people in the world are kind and trustworthy. I wonder if I'd be so lucky if I embarked on a similar journey. 

"There were so many other amazing things in this world.
They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.
I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.
(p. 233)

"It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That it was enough to trust what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life--like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be."
(p. 311)

It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make.


Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
By Cheryl Strayed

This falls into the category of "made me cry." (This also marks the second passage on this blog detailing a horse's death. Ugh.)
Tragic and beautiful.

"I whispered to Lady as I put her halter on, telling her how much I loved her as I led her out of her stall. Paul shut the gate behind us, trapping Roger inside so he couldn't follow. I led her across the icy snow, turning back to watch her walk one last time. She still moved with an unspeakable grace and power, striding with the long, grand high-stepping gait that always took my mother's breath away. I led her to a birch tree that Paul and I had chosen the previous afternoon and tied her to it by her lead rope. The tree was on the very edge of the pasture, beyond which the woods thickened in earnest, far enough away from the house that I hoped the coyotes would approach and take her body that night. I spoke to her and ran my hands over her chestnut coat, murmuring my love and sorrow, begging her forgiveness and understanding.
When I looked up, my brother was standing there with his rifle.
Paul took my arm and together we stumbled through the snow to stand behind Leif. We were only six feet away from Lady. Her warm breath was like a silk cloud. The frozen crust of the snow held us for a moment, then collapsed so we all sank up to our knees.
"Right between her eyes," I said to Leif, repeating yet again the words our grandfather had said to me. If we did that, he promised, we'd kill her in one clean shot.
Leif crouched, kneeling on one knee. Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun. The bullet hit Lady right between her eyes, in the middle of her white star, exactly where we hoped it would. She bolted so hard her leather halter snapped into pieces and fell away from her face, and then she stood unmoving, looking at us with a stunned expression.
"Shoot her again," I gasped, and immediately Leif did, firing three more bullets into her head in quick succession. She stumbled and jerked, but she didn't fall and she didn't run, though whew as no longer tied to the tree. Her eyes were wild upon us, shocked by what we'd done, her face a constellation of bloodless hole. In an instant I knew we'd done the wrong thing, not in killing her, but in thinking that we should be the ones to do it. I should have insisted Eddie do this one thing, or paid for the veterinarian to come out. I'd had the wrong idea of what it takes to kill an animal. There is no such thing as one clean shot.
"Shoot her! Shoot her!" I pleaded in a guttural wail I didn't know was mine.
"I'm out of bullets," Leif yelled.
"Lady!" I shrieked. Paul grabbed my shoulders to pull me toward him and I batted him away, panting and whimpering as if someone were beating me to death.
Lady took one wobbling step and then fell onto her front knees, her body tilting hideously forward as if she were a great ship slowly sinking into the sea. Her head swayed and she let out a deep moan. Blood gushed from her soft nostrils in sudden, great torrent, hitting the snow so hot it hissed. She coughed and coughed, tremendous buckets of blood coming each time, her back legs buckling in excruciating slow motion beneath her. She hovered there, struggling to stay grotesquely up, before she finally toppled over onto her side, where she kicked her legs and flailed and twisted her neck and fought to rise again.
"Lady!" I howled. "Lady!"
Leif grabbed me. "Look away!"he shouted, and together we turned away.
"LOOK AWAY!" he hollered to Paul, and Paul obeyed.
"Please come take her," Leif chanted, as tears streaked down his face. "Come take her. Come take her. Come take her."
When I turned, Lady had dropped her head to the ground at last, though her sides still heaved and her legs twitched. The three of us staggered closer, breaking through the snow's crust to sink miserably to our knees again. We watched as she breathed enormous slow breaths and then finally she sighed and her body went still.
Our mother's horse. Lady. Stonewall's Highland Nancy was dead.
Whether it had taken five minutes or an hour, I didn't know. My mittens and hat had fallen off, but I could not bring myself to retrieve them. My eyelashes had frozen into clumps. Strands of hair that had blown onto my tear- and snot-drenched face had frozen into icicles that clinked when I moved. I pushed them numbly away, unable even to register the cold. I knelt beside Lady's belly and ran my hands along her blood-speckled body one last time. She was still warm, just as my mother had been when I'd come into the room at the hospital and seen that she'd died without me. I looked at Leif and wondered if he was remembering the same thing. I crawled to her head and touched her cold ears, soft as velvet. I put my hands over the black bullet holes in her white star. The deep tunnels of blood that had burned through the snow around her were already beginning to freeze.
Paul and I watched as Leif took out his knife and cut bundles of reddish-blonde hair from Lady's mane and tail. He handed one to me.
"Mom can go to the other side now," he said, looking into my eyes as if it were only the two of us in the entire world. "That's what the Indians believe--that when a great warrior dies you've got to kill their horse so he can cross over to the other side of the river. It's a way of showing respect. Maybe Mom can ride away now."
I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady's strong back finally leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make. Not that my mother would ride back to me--though, of course, I wanted that--but that she and Lady would ride away together. That the worst thing I'd ever done had been a healing instead of a massacre."
(pp. 160-3)


December 06, 2014

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.


Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
By Cheryl Strayed

"I was her daughter, but more. I was Karen, Cheryl, Leif. Karen Cheryl Leif. KarenCherylLeif. Our names blurred into one in my mother's mouth all my life. She whispered it and hollered it, hissed it and crooned it. We were her kids, her comrades, the end of her and the beginning. We took turns riding shotgun with her in the car. "Do I love you this much?" she'd ask us, holding her hands six inches apart. "No," we'd say, with sly smiles. "Do I love you this much?" she'd ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching's universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve."
(p. 13)

"I scooted over the carpet and situated myself on my rump right in front of my pack, wove my arms through the shoulder straps, and clipped the sternum strap across my chest. I took a deep breath and began rocking back and forth to gain momentum, until finally I hurled myself forward with everything in me and got myself onto my hands and knees. My backpack was no longer on the floor. It was officially attached to me. It still seemed like a Volkswagen Beetle, only now it seemed like a Volkswagen Beetle that was parked on my back. I stayed there for a few moments, trying to get my balance. Slowly, I worked my feet beneath me while simultaneously scaling the metal cooling unit with my hands until I was vertical enough that I could do a dead lift. The frame of the pack squeaked as I rose, it too straining from the tremendous weight. By the time  I was standing--which is to say, hunching in a remotely upright position--I was holding the vented metal panel that I'd accidentally ripped loose from the cooling unit in my efforts.
I couldn't even begin to reattach it. The place it needed to go was only inches out of my reach, but those inches were entirely out of the question. I propped the panel against the wall, buckled my hip belt, and staggered and swayed around the room, my center of gravity pulled in any direction I so much as leaned. The weight dug painfully into the tops of my shoulders, so I cinched my hip belt tighter and tighter still, trying to balance the burden, squeezing my middle so tightly that my flesh ballooned out on either side. My pack rose up like a mantle behind me, towering several inches above my head, and gripped me like a vise all the way down to my tailbone. It felt pretty awful, and yet perhaps this was how it felt to be a backpacker.
I didn't know.
I only knew it was time to go, so I opened the door and stepped into the light."
(pp. 43-4)

"Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.
I was working too hard to be afraid."
(p. 51)

November 27, 2014

Read deeply. Stay open. Continue to wonder. Google it yo.

Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
By Austin Kleon

I remember the feeling of discovering Austin Kleon's newspaper blackout poetry a few years ago: excitement and awe - it was just so wonderfully creative, and how had no one else thought of it before? Why hadn't I? Poetry has comforted me many times, and sifting through Newspaper Blackout was especially comforting, moving, special. Austin's poetry art is the epitome of "creativity is subtraction."

I spotted this book on a trip to San Francisco in September, while visiting a good friend of mine who I've had the most open conversations with regarding the trajectory of my life -- what I want to do & who I want to be. This book resonated in that moment, and still does now, as I try to figure out what makes the most sense for me moving forward, how to shake the feeling I sometimes have of being stuck, how to pursue what makes me happy and the conflict that comes with making decisions that honor my happiness but are also logical and realistic. The decision I've come to most recently (which can change any second TBH), is that I like where I am now but, on the side, I have to start pursuing the interests and hobbies I let go by the wayside. Slowly but surely…

This is a short, fun book with the best of intentions and every page holds advice worthy of an excerpt. One of my favorites via pages 18-19 below. It reminds me of my childhood because I asked so many questions. We had a comprehensive A-Z collection of encyclopedias, and my dad would very often point me in the direction of them and say "Look it up" when I asked him for information. I think his response was due to equal parts exhaustion & him wanting to make me stop nagging, him not always knowing the answers, and him wanting me to learn on my own. It was so frustrating sometimes, but there is no denying the satisfaction of discovering the answers by myself trumped being told. Same sentiment here, but now we have Google:



November 24, 2014

I think if you can dance and be free and not embarrassed you can rule the world.



Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

LAST YES PLEASE POST. First, I must link to another excerpt I didn't post, instagrammed by my friend Mario. Super funny. I won't type it but here it is for me, for you, for future reference.

How I wish young girls' organizations like Rookie Magazine, Kind Campaign, and Smart Girls at the Party, existed when I was younger. That age range between 11 up to about 16, 17, 18 was rough. I might not have felt so crazy or alone. Or felt I had so much more to offer without knowing how. Or felt there must have been people like me out there in the world, reaching, but I didn't know how to find or connect with them. Often I desperately needed that little bit of empowerment, understanding, support from like-minded people and to feel my quirks were OK. I'm glad they exist for young girls today.

"2. We beat them at their own game. 
This theory was the impetus for Smart Girls at the Party, a Web series and website I created along with my friends Meredith Walker and Amy Miles. We wanted to build a brand that attempted to combat the deluge of shit young people see every day online. It actually all started with the idea of one simple show. It could be a Charlie Rose-type interview show for girls that ended in a spontaneous dance party. We wanted to celebrate the curious girl, the non famous, the everyday warrior. At first we only knew a few things: we wanted to make content we would have watched when we were younger, and we wanted to end our episodes with a dance party. Spontaneous dance parties are important in my life. I have one in the makeup trailer almost every afternoon on Parks and Recreation. Dancing is the great equalizer. It gets people out of their heads and into their bodies. I think if you can dance and be free and not embarrassed you can rule the world. Smart Girls is growing and changing, and Meredith and I have big plans to open up camps and create more content and connect with more and more young people. Our hope is to provide something for people who can't stand to look at another awful website highlighting some fame-obssessed garbage person."
(p. 325)

He recently asked if he could marry me and I said yes. I couldn't help it. I would marry him anytime.

Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

Most of Amy's book consists of memories and life lessons interlaced with comedy. A lot of it feels like a lengthened stand-up routine (not a bad thing). But when she starts to talk about her children, the tone changes, becomes more serious. She sounds like a different person. I loved those parts just as much:

"My boy Archie has eyes the color of blueberries. He has a solid sense of design and is only months away from his first cartwheel. When he was just two weeks old, his dad and I took a picture of him in his crib with the New York Times draped over him like a blanket. The headline read OBAMA: RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN DECISIVE VICTORY. He loves to run and strongly identifies with Luke Skywalker because they "have the same hair." He recently told me, "Mama, do you want to know something funny about me? I am afraid of little things and not afraid of big things." I think he was talking about bugs and elephants, but I understood what he meant in a very deep way. He deals primarily in poop and fart jokes, and insists these things will never fail to make him laugh. He is absolutely right. He is delighted when I laugh at him, but he is no ham. He is sensitive and stubborn, and as of this printing would like to be a police officer and a veterinarian and also Iron Man. He once asked me," Are you sad that you don't have a penis?" I told him that I was happy with the parts that I had. I then reminded him that girls have vaginas and everyone is different and each body is like a snowflake. He nodded in agreement and then looked up at me with a serious face and asked, "But did you once have a penis and break it?" I was tempted to make a joke that would screw him up for life. "Yes, my son. Your mother once had a penis but it broke because you didn't love her enough." The bond between mothers and sons is powerful stuff. I firmly believe that every boy needs his mom to love him and every girl needs her dad to pay attention to her. Archie needed to figure out if I had ever owned and operated a penis. I get it. His penis is important to him. Anyway, he starts college next year. Just kidding, he's six. He recently asked if he could marry me and I said yes. I couldn't help it. I would marry him anytime.

My boy Abel has eyes the color of a pine forest. He is a red monkey who named himself. I went to a psychic before he was born and she told me I was having "another big boy. He wants to be called Abel." We agreed. As he was born, the song "Young Turks" played on the radio and Rod Stewart sang, "Young hearts be free tonight / Time is on your side." Abel has chocolate chip freckles and hair like a copper penny. He loves to dance and sing and recently composed a song called "I'm a Genius." He is a big hugger. He doesn't mind when I stick my head into his neck and smell him. He smells like a love cookie. He recently told me he "really like[s] it when girls wear nice blouses." He has a deep laugh and thinks Darth Vader is funny. He cries big tears and sweats in his sleep. He makes friends on airplanes. He is four. The first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning is look for Archie. He loves his big brother so intensely. His big brother protects him and tortures him. Abel feels like the wisest and oldest member of our family. When he was just starting to talk he used to ask me if I was happy. He has dreams that he is a different little boy with black hair and one eye. My beautiful  Tibetan nanny, Dawa, believes he has been reincarnated many times."
(pp. 300-2)

Now playing:


November 23, 2014

They sit on the same bench I sat on and feel the same good feelings of family and home.

Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

""Relax is a tough one for me. Another tough one is "smile." "Smile" doesn't really work either. Telling me to relax or smile when I'm angry is like bringing a birthday cake into an ape sanctuary. You're just asking to get your nose and genitals bitten off."
(p. 236) YES

"The only thing we can depend on in life is that everything changes. The seasons, our partners, what we want and need. We hold hands with our high school friends and swear to never lose touch, and then we do. We scrape ice off our cars and feel like winter will never end, and it does. We stand in the bathroom and look at our face and say, "Stop getting old, face. I command you!" and it doesn't listen. Change is the only constant. Your ability to navigate and tolerate change and its painful uncomfortableness directly correlates to your happiness and general well-being. See what I just did there? I saved you thousands of dollars on self-help books. If you can surf your life rather than plant your feet, you will be happier. Maybe I should have called this book Surf Your Life. The cover could feature a picture of me on a giant wave wearing a wizard hat. I wonder if it's too late. I'll make a call."
(p. 280)

"I believe you can time-travel three different ways: with people, places and things."

I grew up with an organ & we threw it out when my family moved out of my childhood apartment while I was in college. Lately, I've missed the organ/piano so much & a part of me has always regretted quitting. I've been considering taking lessons again. For that reason and also a few others, I found this passage to be special:

"Places also help you time-travel. My grandfather Steve Milmore was a wonderful man. We called him Gunka and he was a Watertown, Massachusetts, firefighter and served as a machine gunner in World War II. He married my grandmother Helen and went overseas for five years until he came back and put his uniform in the attic and never spoke of his service again. He had three wonderful children, including my wonderful mother. He died of a heart attack on my front porch on July 4, 1982, when he was only sixty-five. I was ten. He was the first important person in my life to die, and when he did, it was the first time I realized that life is not fair or safe or even ours to own. I miss him.
Gunka had a Wurlitzer organ, and he loved to play. His grandchildren would sit on his lap and he would play Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole. Lots of Christmas tunes. He wrote songs for us when we had the chicken pox. He went through his songbook and put numbers over the notes and then made a corresponding chart on cardboard that he laid over the keys so we could play songs ourselves. For a while I thought I was a genius and could totally play the organ. The reality was that I was the luckiest girl in the world because I had a grandfather who was a magic maker.
Sitting on the organ bench was important. Now that I think of it, benches are cool. Sacred by design. Benches are often a place where something special happens and important talks take place. Look at Forrest Gump. Or Hoosiers. Or outside a brunch place. Brunch benches are where it all goes down. After my nana passed away in 2003, my family took Gunka's organ and put it in the basement of the house they shared. And it sat there for ten years, waiting for its chance to travel.
And now it lives in my apartment in New York City. My boys play it all the time. They sit on the same bench I sat on and feel the same good feelings of family and home. One night I was feeling lonely and stressed, and the organ started buzzing. I think Gunka was trying to talk to me. I sat on the bench and felt better. Inside the organ bench is old sheet music with my grandparents' handwriting. I also found a song that I wrote when I was seven. It is a poem that has numbers written above it, so it can be played the special way on my special organ. I wrote it in the past and put it in the sacred bench so I could pull it out at just the right time. Time is just time. Time travel, y'all."
(pp. 282-4)


November 20, 2014

Remember, your career is a bad boyfriend.


Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

"I once was having dinner with an old friend back when I was on SNLBaby Mama was coming out and I was in the middle of one of those weird press pushes where your face is on taxis and you are doing talk shows all the time. My friend, who was as funny and talented as me but chose not to be an actor, was talking about how he was seeing my face everywhere. He went on and on about how he was seeing my face everywhere. He pointed out that people were really starting to know my name and asked me if I "could believe it." "Yes," I said. I had worked for over a decade to get to this moment. I hadn't just dropped my script into someone's lap on a train. "Can you?" I asked him.
But I was lucky. Your career and your passions don't always match up. Plenty of talented people don't have the careers they want. Plenty of untalented people make millions and make movies. There is a difference between determination and talent. Hard work doesn't always matter. You can be the best at making contacts and going after jobs, but then suddenly you want it too much. Suddenly everybody feels how bad you want it and they don't want to give it to you. Even at six years old Archie is learning to stop paying attention to the toy he wants. He knows that if he lets on how bad he wants it his four-year-old brother will snatch that whizz up in a hot second. Pretending to not want something can work. Really not caring if you get it takes a lifetime of practice."
(p. 221-2)

"Creativity is connected to your passion, that light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. That small voice that tells you, "I like this. Do this again. You are good at it. Keep going." That is the juicy stuff that lubricates our lives and helps us feel less alone in the world. Your creativity is not a bad boyfriend. It is a really warm older Hispanic lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug. If you are even a little bit nice to her she will make you feel great and maybe cook you delicious food.
Career is different. Career is the stringing together of opportunities and jobs. Mix in public opinion and past regrets. Add a dash of future panic and a whole lot of financial uncertainty. Career is something that fools you into thinking you are in control and then takes pleasure in reminding you that you aren't. Career is the thing that will not fill you up and make you truly whole. Depending on your career is like eating cake for breakfast and wondering why you start crying an hour later."
(p. 222)

"You have to care about your work but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and how good you feel, but not about how good people think you are or how good people think you look. 
I realize this is extremely difficult. I am not saying I am particularly good at it. I'm like you. Or maybe you're better at this than I am. 
You will never climb Career Mountain and get to the top and shout, "I made it!" You will rarely feel done or complete or even successful. Most people I know struggle with that complicated soup of feeling slighted on one hand and like a total fraud on the other. Our ego is a monster that loves to sit at the head of the table and I have learned that my ego is just as rude and loud and hungry as everyone else's. It doesn't matter how much you get; you are left wanting more. Success is filled with MSG.
Ambivalence can help tame the beast. Remember, your career is a bad boyfriend. It likes it when you don't depend on it. It will reward you every time you don't act needy. It will chase you if you act like other things (passion, friendship, family, longevity) are more important to you. If your career is a bad boyfriend, it is healthy to remember you can always leave and go sleep with somebody else."
(p. 225)

Can you walk? Stop complaining.


Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

A good list, from page 103:

November 17, 2014

I am getting to a place right in the middle where I feel good about exactly how much I apologize.

Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

Bookends to an honest, beautiful chapter about apologizing & forgiveness:

"I say "sorry" a lot. When I am running late. When I am navigating the streets of New York. When I interrupt someone. I say, "Sorry, sorry, sorry," in one long stream. The sentence becomes "Sorrysorrysorry" and it's said really fast, as if even the act of apologizing is something to apologize for. But this doesn't mean I'm a pushover. It doesn't mean I'm afraid of conflict or don't know how to stand up for myself. I am getting to a place right in the middle where I feel good about exactly how much I apologize. It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for. It takes years to find your voice and seize your real estate."
(p. 65)

"Look at this woman. This beauty. What an act of grace. What a gift she gave me. Shame makes people abandon their children and drink themselves to death. It also keeps us from true happiness. An apology is a glorious release. Anastasia gave me a huge gift. That e-mail changed me. It rearranged my molecules. She has lived a life of struggle and decided not to pick up the armor. She teaches me about compassion. She makes her journey about open hearts. She is not ashamed.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou."
(p. 79)

November 09, 2014

People are their most beautiful when they are laughing, crying, dancing, playing, telling the truth, and being chased in a fun way.

Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

"Decide what your currency is early. Let go of what you will never have. People who do this are happier and sexier."
(p. 21)

"Improvisation and sketch comedy helped me find my currency. My plain face was a perfect canvas to be other people. There is nothing I like more than picking out wardrobe for a character. An SNL hairstylist once told me I had a great face for wigs. A Great Face for Wigs! What a compliment. (And also the title of my second book.) Looking silly can be very powerful. People who are committing and taking risks become the king and queen of my prom. People are their most beautiful when they are laughing, crying, dancing, playing, telling the truth, and being chased in a fun way."
(p. 21)

"Yes please" sounds powerful and concise. It's a response and a request.

Yes Please
By Amy Poehler

Every year I discover -- late -- a new comedy to fall in love with. I refer to it as my comfort comedy because I start to binge-watch it obsessively as a means to relieve any tension & to send me into bed & sleep with good feelings. The year after I graduated from college, that comedy was Friends. (Super late!) The year after that, it was Arrested Development. Earlier this year it was Parks and Recreation, which I think is safe to say is my favorite of the three.

When I learned Amy Poehler was publishing a memoir, I became so happy. I knew it'd be good. She is strong & successful & smart and I knew she'd write things I'd want to read, and that she'd write most of them in a funny way.  Corny, but: I am grateful to the show (and the amazing cast!) and to Amy for making me cry/laugh hysterically during moments I needed it most and for videos like this,  and this for making me feel like a better human.

"It's called Yes Please because it is the constant struggle and often the right answer. Can we figure out what we want, ask for it, and stop talking? Yes please. Is being vulnerable a power position? Yes please. Am I allowed to take up space? Yes please. Would you like to be left alone? Yes please.
I love saying "yes" and I love saying "please." Saying "yes" doesn't mean I don't know how to say no, and saying "please" doesn't mean I am waiting for permission. "Yes please" sounds powerful and concise. It's a response and a request. It is not about being a good girl; it is about being a real woman. It's also a title I can tell my kids. I like when they say "Yes please" because most people are rude and nice manners are the secret keys to the universe."
(p. xix)

October 30, 2014

Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon.

Madame Bovary
By Gustave Flaubert

"Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day…"

I have not read this book. But I did read Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl, and this was printed on the page before the table of contents and I thought MY GOD, why have I never seen this excerpt I so completely identify with before? I have felt that to be me so many times. And I'm glad someone has already expressed those feelings so beautifully.

As far as an excerpt from Lena's book, I have none at this moment. I marked a few things mentally, but didn't jot any page numbers down & now I'm too lazy to go back and find them. I thought her memoir was OK. There are moments when I feel, maybe because I'm still in my 20s, that yes, I can relate to that. I know how that feels & what that is like -- and I felt that a lot watching GIRLS, especially during season 1. And other times Lena's life and experiences seem so separate from mine. But I don't regret reading it.

I am now reading Amy Poehler's Yes Please which, 8 pages in, I'm already in love with! Excerpts soon.

October 19, 2014

And sometimes during my waking hours I think, wouldn't it be something if this life was just a dream too?

This Is Where I Leave You
By Jonathan Tropper

I was not expecting this book to be so, so funny & it's the first in a long while I enjoyed immensely throughout. The story is good, it's fine, but what made it great for me is the way in which it was told -- Jonathan Tropper is a great, funny writer using such expressions and metaphors to describe personal and intimate situations, anecdotes, family dynamics, in ways that made me literally laugh out loud. Given the circumstances of the family, especially the main character, Judd, it was a dark comedy of sorts.

The two following passages don't necessarily reflect the humor (this book is another case in which sometimes I was enjoying it too much to jot everything down) - but more the poignancy of the darker moments Judd experiences. Wish I could remember all the good lines! (Goodreads people captured many.)

"I have a recurring dream in which I'm walking down the street, all foot-loose and fancy-free, when I look down and realize that beneath my pants, one of my legs is actually a prosthesis, molded plastic and rubber with a steel core. And then I remember, with a sinking feeling, that my leg had been amputated from the knee down a few years back. I had simply forgotten. The way you can forget in dreams. The way you wish you could forget in real life, but, of course, can't. In real life, you don't get to choose what you forget. So I'm walking, usually out on Route 120 in Elmsbrook, past the crappy strip malls, the mini golf, the discount chains, and the themed restaurants, when I suddenly remember that I lost my leg a few years ago, maybe cancer, maybe a car accident, whatever. The point is, I have this fake leg clamped to my thigh, chafing at my knee where my calf used to descend. And when I remember that I'm an amputee, I experience this moment of abject horror when I realize that when I get home I will have to take off the leg to go to sleep and I can't remember ever having done that before, but I must do it  every night, and how do I pee, and who will ever want to have sex with me, and how the hell did this even happen anyway? And that's when I will myself awake, and I lie there in bed, sweaty and trembling, running my hands up and down both legs, just to make sure. Then when I get up to go to the bathroom, even if I don't have to, and the cold bathroom tiles against my feet are like finding fifty bucks in a jacket pocket from last fall. These are the rare moments when it actually still feels good to be me.
And sometimes during my waking hours I think, wouldn't it be something if this life was just a dream too? And somewhere there's a more complete and happy and slimmer version of me sleeping in his bed, next to a wife who still loves him, the linens twisted up around their feet from their recent lovemaking, the sounds of their children's light snoring filling the dimly lit hallway. And that me, the one dreaming of this version, is about to shake himself awake from the nightmare of my life. I can feel his relief like it's my own."
(pp. 83-4)

"…I am three years old and riding my red plastic motorcycle in the park. It's cold out, I'm wearing my navy blue ski hat, and my nose is running copiously into my scarf. The plastic wheels of the motorcycle clatter loudly against the cracked asphalt as I push off with my feet to propel myself around an Olympic-sized sandbox. I don't know if I'm going clockwise or counterclockwise. I'm three years old; I don't know from clocks. Suddenly, a kid appears in my path, tall and fat, two lines of snot running equilaterally down from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He holds a gray milk crate over his head like the Ten Commandments being brought down from Sinai. "The Hulk!" he screams at me. I don't know what he means. I'm years away from Marvel comics, and even once I discover them, The Incredible Hulk will never make sense to me. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? You're never really sure, and moral ambivalence has no place in childhood. I'm three years old, and I have never heard of The Incredible Hulk, but this kid clearly relates to him intimately. And maybe he's pretending the milk crate is a car, or a house, or a large boulder, or an archenemy, I don't know. Whatever it's supposed to be, it hurts like hell when it hits my face. And then I'm off the motorcycle, lying on my side, the grit of the cold asphalt biting into my cheek. My nose and mouth are bleeding, and I'm coughing and spitting and crying, gagging on my own blood.
And then I'm borne up into the air by powerful arms, lifted high above the fat kid and my plastic motorcycle and the earth, really, my face pressed into my savior's large shoulder, which is somehow hard and soft at the same time. I bleed into the fuzz of his peacoat as he rubs my back and says, "It's okay, bubbie. You're okay. Everything is fine." And then he stands me up on a bench and pulls out a handkerchief to softly wipe away my blood. "That little bastard really nailed you," he says, gently picking me up again. I don't know what a little bastard is, I don't know who the Hulk is, I don't remember what exactly happened, but my father is holding me safely above the fray, and I'm burrowed hard into his powerful chest, and I'm aware of the fat kid somewhere down below but I know the little bastard can't reach me up here."
(pp. 188-9)


October 10, 2014

"If you're scared of your hunger, you'll just be one more ninny like everyone else."

Olive Kitteridge
By Elizabeth Strout

"Oh, Winnie," Julie said. But she was squinting at her baby finger, and then she unscrewed the nail polish again. "You know what Mrs. Kitteridge said in class one day? Julie asked.
Winnie waited.
"I always remember she said one day, 'Don't be scared of your hunger. If you're scared of your hunger, you'll just be one more ninny like everyone else."
Winnie waited, watching Julie do her baby fingernail once more with the perfect pink polish. "Nobody knew what she meant," Julie said, holding her nail up, looking at it.
"What did she mean?" Winnie asked.
"Well, that's just it. At first I think most of us thought she was talking about food. I mean, we were just seventh graders--sorry, Doodle--but as time went by, I think I understand it more."
"She teaches math," Winnie said.
"I know that, dopey. But she'd say these weird things, very powerfully. That's partly why kids were scared of her. You don't have to be scared of her--if she's still teaching next year."
"I am, though. Scared of her."
Julie looked at her sideways. "Lot scarier stuff right here in this house."
(p. 195)

"And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light to change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been times when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes. ("Are you all right, Mrs. Kitteridge?" the dentist had said.)
(p. 224)

"She stepped into the room, put her handbag on the floor. He didn't sit up, just stayed there, lying on the bed, an old man, his stomach bulging like a sack of sunflower seeds. His blue eyes watched her as she walked to him, and the room was filled with the quietness of afternoon sunlight. It fell through the window, across the rocking chair, hit broadside the wallpaper with its brightness. The mahogany bed knobs shone. Through the curved-out window was the blue of the sky, the bayberry bush, the stone wall. The silence of this sunshine, of the world, seemed to fold over Olive with a shiver of ghastliness, as she stood feeling the sun on her bare wrist. She watched him, looked away, looked at him again. To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world."
(p. 269)

"Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude--and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet."
(p. 270)


October 08, 2014

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful?

Olive Kitteridge
By Elizabeth Strout

"There was a beauty to that autumn air, and the sweaty young bodies that had mud on their legs, strong young men who would throw themselves forward to have the ball smack against their foreheads; the cheering when a goal was scored, the goalie sinking to his knees. There were days--she could remember this--when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. Maybe it was the purest she had, those moments on the soccer field, because she had other memories that were not pure."
(p. 162)

She had forgotten how angelic he'd looked, like some creature newly hatched, as though he had not yet grown a skin and was all light and luminescence.

Olive Kitteridge
By Elizabeth Strout

I finished the book and I finished the miniseries. Both (IMO) very much worth reading and seeing. I'll post more excerpts over the next few days.

"One evening when she returned home, she looked through a drawer of old photographs. Her mother, plump and smiling, but still foreboding. Her father, tall, stoic; his silence in life seemed right there in the photo--he was, she thought, the biggest mystery of all. A picture of Henry as a small child. Huge-eyed and curly-haired, he was looking at the photographer (his mother?) with a child's fear and wonder. Another photo of him in the navy, tall and thin, just a kid, really, waiting for life to begin. You will marry a beast and love her, Olive thought. You will have a son and love him. You will be endlessly kind to townspeople as they come to you for medicine, tall in your white lab coat. You will end your days blind and mute in a wheelchair. That will be your life.
Olive slipped the picture back into the drawer, her eye catching a photo of Christopher, taken when he was not yet two. She had forgotten how angelic he'd looked, like some creature newly hatched, as though he had not yet grown a skin and was all light and luminescence. You will marry a beast and she will leave you, Olive thought. You will move across the country and break your mother's heart. She closed the drawer. But you will not stab a woman twenty-nine times."
(p. 161)

September 27, 2014

Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

Olive Kitteridge
By Elizabeth Strout

The adaptation of this book is coming to HBO as a four-part miniseries in November. I watched the first two parts this week and think it's quite lovely in a very sad way, and it affects me deeply getting this close-up look at how all of these characters cope and endure. It's a little strange, as if you shouldn't have so much access to a stranger's struggle. I agree with Lena Dunham, who said "it is the most beautiful, spiritual, funny thing." (And a reminder of why she's proud to work at HBO - my thoughts too.) I'm more often than not convinced most people are doing fine and maybe I'm the only one who's perpetually confused, and yearning, and hoping, and trying. But reading & watching makes me feel like -- maybe not. In any case, the experiences of the people in this small town are beautifully rendered.

"Hello, Angie." He wasn't a man you'd look twice at now. Probably back then he wasn't a man you'd have looked twice at, but that didn't matter the way people thought it did. It didn't matter how once he'd had an ugly brown leather jacket and thought it was cool. You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind." (pp. 56-7)

"She drank, with one hand, all the Irish coffee. And then she played all sorts of songs. She didn't know what she played, couldn't have said, but she was inside the music, and the lights on the Christmas tree were bright and seemed far away. Inside the music like this, she understood many things. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy, but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted to be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed." (p. 58)

September 21, 2014

But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers ... it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.



In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote

Chilling, sad, disturbing. People like Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith still exist today & always will -- that's the saddest, most disturbing part. That innocent, good people will still die at the hands of ruthless murderers. It's disheartening. I can see why this book was lauded, as it's an impressive in-depth account of the events leading up to the murders, and during and after. A bit of timeliness, too -- apparently a Florida detective wants to exhume their bodies because he believes Richard and Perry were connected to a similar Florida murder that happened around the same time. (Truman mentions this in the book, but states that at the time of publication the killers were still at large. It's a bit suspicious. Perry maintained that it was probably done by crazy people who saw what him and Richard did & wanted to copy. Even though they were both in Florida when the similar murder occurred.) Also, the governor at the time, a strong supporter of the death penalty for the two of them, recently died.

I identified with the following passage because this year I started doing what Nancy did. Maybe I see her in me a little.

"Before saying her prayers, she always recorded in a diary a few occurrences ("Summer here. Forever, I hope. Sue over and we rode Babe down to the river. Sue played her flute. Fireflies.") and an occasional outburst ("I love him, I do"). It was a five-year diary; in the four years of its existence she had never neglected to make an entry, though the splendor of several events (Eveanna's wedding, the birth of her nephew) and the drama of others (her "first REAL quarrel with Bobby" - a page literally tear-stained) had caused her to usurp space allotted to the future. A different-tinted ink identified each year: 1956 was green and 1957 a ribbon of red, replaced the following year by bright lavender, and now, in 1959, she had decided upon a dignified blue. But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily--as though she were asking, "Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that? Which is me? (Once Mrs. Riggs, her English teacher, had returned a theme with a scribbled comment: "Good. But why written in three styles of script?" To which Nancy had replied: "Because I'm not grown-up enough to be one person with one kind of signature." Still, she had progressed in recent months, and it was in a handwriting of emerging maturity that she wrote, "Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced with Roxie. Bobby here and we watched TV. Left at eleven."" (pp. 65-6)

"As long as the sun lasted, the day had been dry and warm--October weather in January. But when the sun descended, when the shadows of the square's giant shade trees met and combined, the coldness as well as darkness numbed the crowd. Numbed and pruned it; by six o'clock, fewer than three hundred persons remained. Newsmen, cursing the undue delay, stamped their feet and slapped frozen ears with ungloved, freezing hands. Suddenly, a murmuring arose on the south side of the square. The cars were coming.
Although none of the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped. The handcuffed men, white-faced and blinking blindly, glistened in the glare of flashbulbs and floodlights. The cameramen, pursuing the prisoners and the police into the courthouse and up three flights of stairs, photographed the door of the county jail slamming shut. No one lingered, neither the press corps nor any of the townspeople. Warm rooms and warm suppers beckoned them, and as they hurried away, leaving the cold square to the two gray cats, the miraculous autumn departed too; the year's first snow began to fall." (p. 286)

July 14, 2014

A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird.


Breakfast at Tiffany's
By Truman Capote

"That Monday in October, 1943. A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird."

"Unless it was Thursday, her Sing Sing day, or unless she'd gone horseback riding in the park, as she did occasionally, Holly was hardly up when I came home. Sometimes, stopping there, I shared her wake-up coffee while she dressed for the evening. She was forever on her way out, not always with Rusty Trawler, but usually, and usually, too, they were joined by Mag Wildwood and the handsome Brazilian, who's name was José Ybarra-Jaegar: his mother was German. As a quartet, they struck an unmusical note, primarily the fault of Ybarra-Jaegar, who seemed as out of place in their company as a violin in a jazz band. He was intelligent, he was presentable, he appeared to have a serious link with his work, which was obscurely governmental, vaguely important, and took him to Washington several days a week. How, then, could he survive night after night in La Rue, El Morocco, listening to the Wildwood ch-ch-chatter and staring into Rusty's raw baby-buttocks face? Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character. That would explain much; Holly's determination explains the rest." 

Re the New York Public Library! One of my absolute favorite NY institutions.
"I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence. In the end I did neither, but concealed myself some tables away from her in the general reading room, where she sat behind her dark glasses and a fortress of literature she'd gathered at the desk. She sped from one book to the next, intermittently lingering on a page, always with a frown, as if it were printed upside down. She had a pencil poised above paper -- nothing seemed to catch her fancy, still now and then, as though for the hell of it, she made laborious scribblings."

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

June 26, 2014

Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
By Cheryl Strayed

Letter of advice to twenty somethings:

"Stop worrying about whether you're fat. You're not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.
In the middle of the night in the middle of your twenties when your best woman friend crawls naked into your bed, straddles you, and says, You should run away from me before I devour you, believe her. You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart.
When that really sweet but fucked up gay couple invites you over to their cool apartment to do ecstasy with them, say no. There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
One evening you will be rolling around on the wooden floor of your apartment with a man who will tell you he doesn’t have a condom. You will smile in this spunky way that you think is hot and tell him to fuck you anyway. This will be a mistake for which you alone will pay.
Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.
You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else. Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.
Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.
When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you."
(pp. 349-53)

June 24, 2014

Your longing for love is only one part of you.


Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
By Cheryl Strayed

"I suggest you take that approach. It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are. Your longing for love is only one part of you. I know that it feels gigantic when you're all alone writing to me, or when you imagine going out on a first date with a woman you desire. But don't let your need be the only thing you show. It will scare people off. It will misrepresent how much you have to offer. We have to be whole people to find whole love, even if we have to make it up for a while."
(p. 221)

June 23, 2014

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
By Cheryl Strayed

"You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all."
(pp. 130-1)

"The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will."
(p. 132-3)

June 22, 2014

The fuck is your life. Answer it.


Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
By Cheryl Strayed

"Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here."

This book is breaking my sensitive heart over and over again in the best of ways. So thankful for this compilation of heartfelt letters and Dear Sugar's sweet, sweet words.

"She cast him as human: complicated, flawed, and capable of redemption. Which means, in spite of everything, she made it possible for me to love my father, this absent man who was half of me. When I was a child and asked her what made her fall in love with my dad, she thought of things to tell me, even if she couldn't rightly remember them anymore. When I was a teenager and we argued about her refusal to condemn my father, she told me that she was grateful for him because without him she wouldn't have had my siblings and me. When I was just barely becoming a woman and my mother knew she was going to die, she stroked my hair and told me it was okay if I wanted to reach out to my father again, that I should always be open to the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation and change, and that doing so was not a betrayal of her, but rather evidence of the woman she'd raised me to be."
(p. 47)

"I've tried to write about this experience several times over the years. It was an odd thing that happened to me during a sad and uncertain era of my life that I hoped would tell readers something deep about my ex-husband and me. About how in love we were and also how lost. About how we were like those kittens who'd been trapped and starving for weeks. Or maybe not about the kittens at all. Maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound, but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice.
I never found a way to write about it until I wrote this letter to you, Ruler, when I realized it was a story you needed to hear. Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out -- though surely there's something there too -- but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in."
(p. 86)

"The bird's suffering would've been unbearable for me to witness at any time, but it was particularly unbearable at that moment in my life because my mother had just died. And because she was dead I was pretty much dead too. I was dead but alive. And I had a baby bird in my palms that was dead but alive as well. I knew there was only one humane thing to do, though it took me the better part of an hour to work up the courage to do it: I put the baby bird in a paper bag and smothered it with my hands.
Nothing that has died in my life has ever died easily, and this bird was no exception. This bird did not go down without a fight. I could feel it through the paper bag, pulsing against my hand and rearing up, simultaneously flaccid and ferocious beneath its translucent sheen of skin, precisely as my grandfather's cock had been.
There it was! There it was again. Right there in the paper bag. The ghost of that old man's cock would always be in my hands. But I understood what I was doing this time. I understood that I had to press against it harder than I could bear. It had to die. Pressing harder was murder. It was mercy.
That's what the fuck it was. The fuck was mine.
And the fuck is yours too, WTF. That question does not apply to "everything every day." If it does, you're wasting your life. If it does, you're a lazy coward, and you are not a lazy coward.
Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it."
(p. 91)

May 29, 2014

I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.


The Ocean at the End of the Lane
By Neil Gaiman

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”

"I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me." (p. 143)

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy. The custard was sweet and creamy in my mouth, the dark swollen currants in the spotted dick were tangy in the cake-thick chewy blandness of the pudding, and perhaps I was going to die that night and perhaps I would never go home again, but it was a good dinner, and I had faith in Lettie Hempstock." (p. 149)

"Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. "What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything."" (p. 171)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is magic. Rich in remembering. And what is memory? It seems like my life recently -- its events,  the books I've read -- have unintentionally forced me to evaluate what memory means to me.

As I've transitioned into a new part of my life (to quote Kerouac, it does feel like I'm at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.) I've, in a way, had to evaluate what is worth remembering in very physical and non-physical ways. What I realized with having to move is that I really do have so much stuff. So many things I've insisted on holding onto. So I started there, with throwing things away. The act of looking through the hundreds of photographs we had, and choosing which of them to keep and which were unnecessary--which memories I should keep and which were unnecessary--was very therapeutic. Each photograph tossed to the garbage was like a piece of my past lifted off my shoulders and it felt good. I am hugely sentimental but there was empowerment in realizing that I didn't need to keep everything. The same goes with hundreds of letters I've saved over the years from friends who are no longer in my life now. Did I need to keep them all? No. (I kept a few, some were quite charming.) But I had one whole envelope filled with letters from a former best friend who is now just an acquaintance, if that. And there was no reason to hold on to them, I don't necessarily miss her. And old school assignments and projects -- I let some of those go too. So with photos, letters, projects: I just kept the ones that represented my best self and the parts of me I liked and released everything else.

So that's the great, funny thing about memory too. Over time, it changes -- often by our own doing. We humans have the ability to make our memories these mammoth monsters that weigh us down and maybe, in time, our memories resemble something much different than what they were in real time. My first memory and my saddest memory is one I'm ready to forget and that is something I really thought I'd never be able to do. But I think now, given all of the circumstances, it's OK to let it go. And it's OK to let a lot of other things go, too.

I wonder how my memory will represent my life today when I look back 25 years from now. Will it be accurate? Most of what drives Asterios Polyp, a recent read, is a man's memory. At one point it reads: "To remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place "now" the moment it's called up in the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience, because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback." I just want to live in the now, in this time, and live in as little memory as possible. I want to be present.

May 21, 2014

Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President


Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President
By Eli Saslow

Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President is an important, thorough, & honorable work, and I enjoyed it very much. Of the thousands he receives, President Obama reads ten letters each day, handpicked by his staff. If he decides to send a response, he always handwrites it. Eli Saslow ('Cuse alum!) follows up with ten Americans who wrote to President Obama and received a response. Each of the ten letters Saslow features is written by an "average" American expressing concerns about any of the biggest issues of our time: health care, war, unemployment, the economy, debt, education, immigration, [gay] marriage equality. The letter-writers range in gender, age, race and their stories are impactful. Though I've lived during this presidency & have been aware of the issues, this book still enlightened me to so much of what has happened. And while reading, I could see myself, my family, and people I know in these stories. If I couldn't, it greatly increased my empathy of them. The past three years were hard. My mom was laid off a few months after I graduated, and for a time it was a blessing -- she had deserved better for a long time, she sought something new, and losing a job could force you to pursue something better. (Until it forces you to pursue anything.) But after months of applying, taking a new class, and losing her unemployment benefits and food stamps, she still had no prospects --- and it got really scary. I was still unemployed, only having worked internships and freelance gigs. Then, slowly things started to turn. She found two part-time jobs, and I accepted my first full-time position, but still, it was hard for her to make ends meet. And my mom is a warrior, because I don't think, even to this day, I completely understand just how close we were to going under. And it's always been that way, because we've always struggled financially. But she made sure we still lived well. (Father too.) Anyway, she missed the deadline to apply for medical benefits under the Affordable Care Act, & a few days later she was offered a job (finally!) that offered her full benefits, full salary, and a move to Houston -- a completely new life. No one deserves it more than her. And not everyone is so lucky, I know, though it feels like it took an eternity & tons of hard work to get here. Still with hard work, not everyone is so lucky.

I know the life I am creating for myself is one of success and...security? Is that the appropriate word? "American dream," right? To echo the theme of one of the chapters: it gets better. My parents created opportunities for me to have a much better life than they've had, and in many ways I will. This may sound dramatic, but right now really feels like one of the great turning points of my life. Everything is changing for myself and for my family so, so quickly. My mom moved away. My brother went to live with my dad. I moved out to my first apartment. But I never want to forget what it was like for us to get to this point.

Good read.

May 10, 2014

He taught me how to read.

One week until my mom relocates to Houston and so I'm experiencing some serious nostalgia traveling down Memory Lane while I clean & unearth some gems we've kept for the past many years. Thought these were appropriate for this blog. (I've been achieving reading goals since 96!)



May 07, 2014

“I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George.”


Of Mice and Men
By John Steinbeck

“I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George.” 

I read this about a month ago for the first time and really liked it. In a way, the classic had always been on my to-read list, but when I saw it had a limited engagement on Broadway starring James Franco and Chris O'Dowd, it encouraged me to read it sooner. I saw it last night with friends and thought it was fantastic. Chris O'Dowd's performance as Lennie blew me away.