I was probably having more fun then, so here's a first draft. This is what's been lighting up my brain in new and pleasurable ways this past year. This is nothing planned, just playing amidst the flaws and some spin that I barely know what to do with. No music; added that later. This is my favorite fruit of being willing to be "bad" at something new.
It's too long, it's too early, it's inconvenient...but some days, nonetheless, I love my commute.
I was standing today with my coffee on a tree-lined street in my neighborhood, putting my phone back in my backpack, when a soft breeze picked up, bringing me the smell of evergreen needles and fallen leaves, and reminding me of a different day on a similar street.
___
Early August, I emerged from my apartment after six days spent entirely indoors, five days spent alone within the four walls of our bedroom.
Late afternoon, late summer light drifting through the full green treetops, and on a deserted stretch of sidewalk I took off my mask.
I walked slowly west for a block further before turning back, smiling without trying to no one but myself. I felt the air, smelled its gentle freshness, saw the sky still blue at five or six or so. I felt like I had been just born, or granted life again. I saw clearly, was certain - that nothing that had bothered me a week before had ever mattered much.
___
1. Winterkeep, by Kristin Cashore (2021)
This one disappointed me. I was interested to see a different type of fantasy society introduced in this world, but the tone felt very different from the previous books in the Graceling series. To be blunt, I found the tone immature and somehow fan fiction-y. Much less gravity than in the previous installments.
I read it in a day, so props for that, but it did not please or satisfy me. I won't read further books in this series, but I'll enjoy rereading Fire (my favorite of the series) sometimes this year, I think.
2. How to Be a Stoic, by Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius (2020)
Little anthology of writings by the above three Roman Stoics. Marcus Aurelius seemed the glummest and most opaque. A good taster. I like a lot of ideas from Stoicism. I'd like to read more from Epictetus and Seneca.
3. Bigger Than Tiny, Smaller Than Average, by Sheri Koones (2022)
I though this was going to be about decorating and organizing in small spaces, alas, it was about getting "small" houses custom-built or renovated. I only skimmed the text. I was amused by how many references there were to the triumph of good design helping moneyed homeowners cope in Such Small Spaces during pandemic lockdowns. (Ask me how many square feet I shared with how many other people for the first year of the pandemic!) (The answers are 500 and two, color me unimpressed!!!)
4. The Fox and the Star, by Coralie Bickford-Smith (2015)
This was visually interesting. The story did not grab me but I read it primarily so that I can someday buy the beautiful companion stationary without feeling like an ignoramus, so that's fine.
5. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh (2013)
Oh, Hyperbole and a Half. I remember my dorm neighbor friend sharing this blog during my last year of college. Some of this is so funny, as in I laughed out loud numerous times. Some of it is a bit too "unaware depressive mode" and made me feel concerned, e.g. the chapter where she makes an earnest, protracted, unconvincing argument about how shitty of a person she is.
6. Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina, by Georgina Pazcoguin (2021)
This did not start as a blog, unlike the above, but felt like a blog, and that's not a bad thing, just a specific kind of a non-writer memoir. Very conversational with lots of anecdotes.
7. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig (2021)
A collection of fabricated "untranslatable" type words, mostly for very specific emotional/psychological experiences. Some of these really hit the nail on the head. Mostly short (paragraph) definitions, interspersed with longer (a couple pages) ones. I felt the longer ones wandered from the point and got a little purple, and I had some linguistic beef with the etymologies and how the pronunciations were written.
But overall this was a nice read. I'll have to share some of the made-up words with you. Lastly, I have a vague recollection of stumbling across the website version of this, wayyy back when, on an old-school Blogger blog and all - anyone else?!
8. By the Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleischman (1963)
My fourth grade teacher read this one aloud to us and I thought it was the greatest. Reading it myself, I heard some parts in her voice still. Lots of fun for historical fiction and I would recommend it to a kid these days. I just wish there were a female character or two! That said, it is about the gold rush, so maybe that's less egregiously inaccurate that it could be.
9. First Test, by Tamora Pierce (1999)
Reread of an old favorite Still good. <3
• Lunch with a kindly work friend at the end of a stressful week
• Blogs seeming to be making a comeback (?)
• Cherry tomatoes so disturbingly delicious that I eat them raw in a day, one by one, not a thought for salad and certainly not for cooking
• Rainbow flags all up and down Market Street in SF for the month of June
• The generous leafy green summer shade of trees in my neighborhood
• Key lime almond milk yogurt
• Granola with yogurt, period (something I somehow forgot?)
• My talking cat, i.e. my cat using her communication buttons. Especially when she is just saying her name as if to announce herself, or one of our names repeatedly because we're not paying enough attention...it kills me in the best way.
• More snuggles than usual lately from said cat
• Getting no-longer-wanted things out of the apartment
• Finally getting a frame so I can enjoy a Yelena Bryksenkova print I got for Christmas
• Apartment tips from people who live in slightly smaller spaces than we do
• Daylight for my early commute days
• Trying a new-to-me aerial apparatus last week: dance trapeze. If you're curious what that is, here's a piece on this apparatus that mesmerizes me over and over (and which is no way representative of my own skill level!): "Embody," by Kate Hutchinson.
I thank you
for hurting, for
the warning
for letting me
get to sleep
against expectation
I thank you for the elegance
of shiny healing skin and the ripple
of blister beneath
for guarding
my fingerprint
despite it all
Like spice, the pollen, ripening grains
thicken the air. Wind has died
to a regular breathing
handed along like a secret
from branch to branch
This house stands in the middle of
thousands of miles of fields.
The lawn itself is wide
and flat as a plain. Only
the trees, planted at the edge,
make this space different,
the center of something
First
there is the west sky
where darkness folds down
crimson, vermilion, gently
as a skirt to the floor
Then fireflies, and the light
of moon falling wet
and yellow on the lawn
There is a hollow
where throat meets
shoulder. It holds
the heat of sunlight
Earth
falls away slowly here.
To every side the horizon
when it is day
- Carol J. Pierman
in The Naturalized Citizen
___
Happy summer solstice, friends.
Muir Woods - a deep pocket of green and old-growth beauty nestled in a cranny of a valley in Marin, just north of San Francisco. A place many Bay Area kids go on elementary field trips, and a place I try to take any out-of-town visitor. A place I've taken you before, in a manner of speaking.
This spring I went with my girlfriend for her first visit ever, and after a winter of torrential rains, it was the creek that particularly captivated my eye.
My insurance company sent me a letter yesterday that instantly woke up my anxious angry side.
In it, in cheery blue rows and columns, were some numbers that add up to them deciding they are not responsible to contribute any payment toward a minor medical procedure I needed recently.
Today as I thought about this, I heard in my mind some phrases I encountered in Thich Nhat Hanh's writing once, the beginning of what he called the Five Remembrances: I am of the nature to get old; I cannot escape old age. I am of the nature to get sick; I cannot escape sickness. I am of the nature to die; I cannot escape death...
And it made me think of how in Al-Anon, I have often heard and read people talking about re-tuning their expectations. For example, "I have stopped expecting an alcoholic to keep every promise." Coming to terms with reality and expecting what is probable, an alternative to being heartbroken or angered over and over by a predictable happening. Choosing to make peace when making a change is not within your power.
That type of emotionally tuned-in realism has been very hard but interesting for me to start adopting as a perspective on life. I have approached life very differently in the past, been a person who ran things into the ground out of excess will to keep them running, a person who ran herself into walls out of anger that they existed.
Someone in a different program (AA) wrote something about this that I also return to in my mind, because it felt so true for me when I read it:
"...I hold on. I fight. I resist. It doesn't even matter what I resist; there is simply something in me that tends to resist things as they are. I have been fighting since I was very small. And I believe that my addiction was a response, in some measure, to the fact that the fight was futile, and I could not tolerate the fact that I didn't control the world. I could not, or would not learn to accept it."
- Marya Hornbacher
Waiting
So all that comes down to: tomorrow I will call my insurance.
And: today I'm turning over the possibility that my insurance company is of the nature to be confusing. My insurance company may be of the nature to make unjust decisions or mistakes. My bus is of the nature to be late. My customers are of the nature to send me emails about errors my company made with their orders. My coworkers are of the nature to make errors.
(I imagine saying to myself, Ah, a complaint, right on schedule, instead of getting worked up.)
Expecting these things feels like turning a literal corner in my mind. It feels quite different from expecting perfection and being angry when something goes wrong. It feels like quite a relief.
"So remove your judgments whenever you wish and then there is calm - as the sailor rounding the cape finds smooth water and the welcome of a waveless bay."
- Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
1. Oona, by Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by Raissa Figueroa (2021)
A sweet and sweetly illustrated picture book. I love especially how the illustrator depicted Oona, our mermaid protagonist - like an actual little girl, wearing a summery tank top rather than one of those cursed shell bras, with the tail of a lion fish.
2. Oona and the Shark, by Kelly DiPucchio (2022)
Sequel. I liked the plot of this one more - the outgoing and stimulation-seeking Oona tries to win over a shy, quiet-loving shark! What a good tale for kids.
3. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling (1997)
A reread, of course.
4. Elmer and the Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett (1950)
I reread the first one, My Father's Dragon, recently for the first time in a very long time, and goodness, what a special series. I love the tone, the nonsense, the imaginativeness and especially the maps. A powerful throwback to the childhood road trip where my mom read these aloud to us (and completely captivated us for the duration).
5. Password to Larkspur Lane, by Carolyn Keene (1933)
Another little something I haven't really touched since childhood (apart from when I read an old edition of the first Nancy Drew in college and discovered the aggressive racism that had been edited out in later editions). It's quite silly how mysteries and clues and coincidences just land in Nancy's lap...also how often she gets conked on the head and knocked unconscious by baddies. I remember even as a child being somewhat concerned about her health. But still kind of fun, and very quick. Also quaint seeing all her 1930s ways of finding information, e.g. an injured carrier pigeon has landed in her yard with a mysterious message? Why, she'll send a telegram to the association of pigeon fanciers with its serial number!
6. Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS, by Azadeh Moaveni (2019)
This one has really lingered in my mind. The author is a journalist whose work I knew from her memoirs about living in Iran as an Iranian-American. She follows a number of individual young women involved with the Islamic State, mostly ones who traveled to join it (from Europe and North Africa) but a few Syrian women as well who found themselves living in an occupied homeland.
I learned quite a bit I didn't know about ISIS, about the global and regional contexts in which it arose (including the Syrian civil war, which I knew almost nothing about previously), and about the various contexts that lead women to choose to work for the group and live in its territory. Most haunting of all to me were the stories of four British schoolgirls who ran away as teenagers to live in a war zone they were told would be an Islamic utopia.
I continue to find my thoughts turning to the information and stories contained in this book, and I would recommend it for anyone looking for better understanding of the above topics. It's gripping, and though it is serious, it is not as grim or depressing as it may sound.
Humorous side note: my library had this shelved with the books on spousal bereavement.
7. Rosewater, by Liv Little (2023)
Like The L Word, but about black millennials in London, and more artsy in tone. Wasn't much of a fan of the main romance because I wasn't much of a fan of the love object, but it was an engaging read.
8. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J.K. Rowling (1999)
Enjoyed this one more on a reread than I remembered. So many little buried clues and allusions.
A thought that ran through my head yesterday. Like a species that won't take a hint, crawling back above ground after nuclear apocalypse, eventually I always find myself back in a dance studio.
(I'm not doing this right now, but the impulse has been occurring to me.)
Lately I find myself wanting to email my favorite ballet teacher from my teenage years, who also shepherded my mid-twenties comeback: Guess what, I'm obsessed with circus classes these days! I ponder whether I would send him a short video or not (a little brassy for my taste but could be a good idea so he knows what the f*ck, specifically, I am talking about)
I imagine saying, And guess what, ballet helps with that too! - even from underneath the years that bury it - even if not one smidge with the upper body strength - my feet chronically if imperfectly pointy, my eye sensitive to line, my preferences leaning towards the shapes that most closely echo an arabesque.
Let me get down to it: I think I am also the cockroach of bloggers. I've been using this very account, off and on, for nearly as long as I've been in and out of ballet classes. The impulse comes and goes but is hard to eradicate. Eventually, always, I find myself online again typing to friends and strangers. Here I am again, hello. I've missed you all.
