Acceptance

In the last year, I've had to accept many things I didn't want to accept.  The dissolve of my marriage, the end of old friendships, the inevitable march of age across my face and body, the sad fact that I cannot help students who will not help themselves.  So many things.


I fought accepting some of these things for a very long time.  For years, in one case, because I didn't want to be someone who had given up, given in, failed.  But now, at the end of another year, I am coming to realize that accepting the things that we cannot change--cliche as it may be--might be the only thing that separates us from the wild kingdom that, on instinct, fights change to the death.


Gretel Ehrlich wrote, "to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce."  This concept has been foreign to me until this year.  I used to think showing any vulnerability or fragility was akin to weakness and, in order to be taken seriously, I needed the world to see me as confident, capable, and without need of help.  My mom once said that I try so hard to make the world see me as strong when in reality I'm a pretty fragile girl.  She's right.  


I've been thinking a lot about what others think of me.  I try not to let the rest of the population define or influence who I am or how I feel about myself, but the end of the year is a time for reflection and, well, I guess that's where I am.  It occurred to me the other day that a large number of the people I've known throughout my life know two versions of me: snarky, loud, and opinionated or dramatically loud and opinionated.  It's an easy role to play when you don't want anyone to know how hurt or scared you really are.  But, I don't want to live in that costume anymore.  And this year, I've made a real concentrated effort to be my most authentic self as much as I can.


I'm telling the truth more, mostly to myself, and I'm admitting when I need help.  I'm accepting that the most honest fact of my life is that I am scared--often--of not having control, of things slipping out of my grasp, of being less than perfect, of not living up to  my own expectations, of disappointing myself.  I'm scared all the time, but the one emotion that always trumps that fear--these days--is joy.  I am happy in my career (about which I am passionate to a fault), I am blessed with a loving family and the most supportive and brilliant friends, my students inspire me everyday, and I believe love will find me again someday.  I am happy to be this self, this woman, this ongoing process and project.  I accept that I'm not complete, that I may never know what that means, and after years of fighting that, I'm at peace in a way I haven't been before.


If this blog post had a soundtrack, it'd probably be this song: 

Sing...Sing a Song...

In another life, I was a singer.  A number of people from my childhood know this about me, but most people I meet now have no idea.  I haven't been that girl in a very long time.  But, Sunday night, I channeled Henry Miller, and I sang in front of an audience by myself for the first time in over ten years for the 5th annual Love, Chloe Foundation Benefit at the Paramount Bar in Salina, KS.  

It was scary, it was nerve wracking, and it was immeasurably good for me.  In 2011, I'm going to keep scaring myself...it seems to be working for me.

Merry & Bright

There is no more perfect reminder of what Christmas is all about than a child.  This is my reminder.

Welcome to the Jungle

The title of this post comes from my favorite song to skate to at the skating rink--yes, you heard right.  A few months back, I got to skate to it for the first time since I was fourteen--that's 20 years, y'all--and it was a party. 

Here's Jason and I before the wheels hit the floor (thanks to Jamie for the picture :)

Simpler Days

I have always loved the holidays.  People seem to be nicer, somehow, this time of year.  I like the magic of soft lighting brought on by small white bulbs on the Christmas tree.  I like hot tea on cold days.  I like curling up with a blanket in the corner of the couch or in an oversized chair with a bad holiday movie or a really good book.  I like the crackle of my fireplace--even if it is a fake one on the wall.  And I like holding hands in the car while driving around to look at Christmas lights.  


I can manage most of those things on my own, but that last one, well...I don't know exactly how hard this Christmas will be for me.  I can tell you that the good man I married is now my friend, something we really weren't before we were a couple, but, even the right decisions have painful ripples, and this time of year I am feeling those waves pretty intently.


So, in an effort to combat those rolling tides, I'm trying to remind myself of simpler days, happier moments, the pure joy of Christmas I knew as a little girl.

My grandmother made my dress and my brother's shirt, pants, and vest.  How cute are we?  I think this is 1980, and the one below is, I think, 1982.  Note my mom's amazing feathered bangs.   

For Emily

Today, without warning, I was taught a lesson.  In a crowded art room, surrounded by supportive parents, friends, and faculty members, a student I have never actually had in a class presented her end of the semester review and, in that room, I was moved to tears by the things she had written, the art she had made, borne from a need, she said, to immerse herself in the process, to see the thing created.

Part of her work was tribute to a recently lost relative, part was catharsis over a recently ended relationship, and part--the most moving part--was a bare and honest capturing of the moments that she sees as defining for who she is, has been, and is on her way to becoming.

All of this at 18.

Emily is not the kind of girl you imagine cheering in the stands at a sporting event.  She wears black glasses, fabulous old jackets, a great collection of boots, and she has a soul wise not only beyond her chronological years but possibly wise beyond mine.  In her work and explanations, I heard the bravery of a self I have tried so hard to cultivate, I saw the same questions being asked and tentatively answered--who am I?--what does this all mean?--how do I matter?--where do I go from here? 

These are not question relegated to adolescence, but it occurs to me that, as adults, we often hide behind this mask of total capability, complete control, the illusion that we have all the answers, and that once you reach some arbitrary age, you can have them all, too.  It is so very sad, this lie that we perform under the guise of being a grown up, that somehow we are less afraid, less questioning than the people born after us.

I recently answered the Pivot questionnaire that James Lipton uses as the end of Inside the Actor's Studio. One question asks, "What is your least favorite word?" I knew my answer immediately.  Wait.  I hate all that that word implies.  I hate waiting on people from my years of food service, I hate the notion that women must to wait on men, but most of all I cannot stand the way adults tell children to "wait until you're older."  What a crock.  We often say "wait" because the question asked or situation presented is simply too difficult for us to navigate at the time, so we build an illusory world in which the answer or outcome will be more desirable if we simply...wait.  But believing things will change simply by waiting, or that answers will come or that understanding and acceptance or action will suddenly spring up from a void is silly and irresponsible.  [I'm not selling patience short, mind you.  There's something to be said for it, but not when patience is meant to yield an answer that action or conversation could achieve far more readily]

So, today, with a great deal of gratitude to Emily for her artwork and her fearlessness, I'd like to be brave enough to say that we, adults, have been lying to you, younger generation.  We know no more than you do, we've just had more experiences, and in a lot of ways, that greater depth of knowledge has scared us more and caused us to ask more questions.  But, and this is important so pay attention, not having all the answers is not only okay--for the really intelligent among us--it's a more exciting and invigorating way to live. 

What could I learn if I knew everything?  What would I ever find inspiring or beautiful or new? What amazing thing ever happened because someone was feeling particularly contented?

The biggest lie is that being afraid is a bad thing, that fear should be repressed or hidden.  It's not only okay to be scared, it's necessary if you have any hope of living an examined life.

So, I'm going to try to be more like Emily, to be brave enough to tell the truth, to show the world that while I may not yet know who I am, I'm okay with the process of finding out.

Home is Wherever I'm Alone With You

His tank top makes me cold, but everything else about this makes me warms and fuzzy.

Just Another Day in Dublin...

Outside some stores last Christmas Eve in Dublin, Glen Hansard, Bono, and Damie Rice decided to do a little busking--brilliant:

From Now On...

From now on, I should only be photographed beneath a drum light on a brick wall in old buildings.  The photographer must be my good friend and must have a knowledge of iphone camera filters.  Here's the proof:

I'm So Heavy (Heavy in Your Arms)

This song tears me up.  So so so so good.

It Is Time It Were Time

I have been feeling pretty low the last few days, trying to focus on what is good but still, inevitably, beaten back by the sadness of being alone this time of year.  Fitzgerald wasn't wrong when he wrote, "[S]o we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."  It is so easy to live there, in the past, when things weren't--most likely--better than they are now, but from this vantage point, they seemed to be.

Just as Jay and Daisy have glorified, idealized, and fetishized the love they once shared, during the holidays it is easy to slip into patterns that celebrate the good in the past without acknowledging what led to the present.

I don't want to dwell on how I got here.  It is not a new story or a particularly interesting one, but today, I am trying to live not in Fitzgerald's world, but in Paul Celan's.  He wrote:

It is time the stone made an effort to flower.

Time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

In an effort to honor his words, to look forward rather than back, to be hopeful rather than hurt, here's what I did today.  I can't seem to get the sideways ones turned around...maybe in the morning.

Thankful

Sometimes, I forget the myriad things for which I should be thankful.  Then the world slows, I breathe in and out more slowly, I look up, and there they are, smiling brightly, letting me notice them anew with the same joy and beauty that was always there, even when I couldn't see it for awhile.

I Believe

I awoke with a cold on my day off. The universe, I think, is suggesting that maybe this year, I need to be alone for the holidays. Unless this nastiness goes away, I'll be giving thanks in my bed strewn with Emily Dickinson poems and biographies. Because, when you're sick, there's nothing more appropriate than the life story of a reclusive woman who may never have known real love.

Even if she didn't experience it, Emily seems to have believed in it which I greatly appreciate. I believe in it, too, especially given the incredible way my dissolve turned out. I dislike the word divorce, it is cold and clinical and angry and that's not what happened to me. The man I was married to is kind, funny, smart, and a wonderful friend, but our hopes and dreams turned out to be incompatible. That doesn't mean there isn't love there any longer, we are trying to be and stay friends. There may be more love here than most people would realize: we loved each other enough to say, "go be happy," knowing that that happiness would, eventually, be with someone else.

Some of my adorable students have started suggesting they could 'hook [me] up' with their single fathers, uncles, older brothers, etc. One offer even came with the incentive that the young lady's father had 'just got his new teeth.' Be still my beating heart. Seriously, though, I believe real love exists. I believe in it as I believe in the sun coming up each day, the pull of the moon on the sea, the perfect joy in a child's surprised laughter. I've seen it when my brother looks at his beautiful wife and when my father, after 25 years of marriage, tells my mother how much he loves her.

This Thanksgiving, I'm praying we all get to find that same peace, joy, and happiness someday, and I'm praying we all have the patience to wait for it.

To that end, this is the song that woke me on my shuffling ipod alarm clock this morning. Enjoy.

Til Kingdom Come

Frontier Ruckus

Last spring, this band rolled through Lawrence and, on the recommendation of some pretty fantastic people, I went to see them.  Their music has been in pretty steady rotation ever since. 

Tomorrow night they're playing at the Bottleneck, and you can bet your sweet bippy I'll be there.  Here's the biography the band provided for the Bottleneck event page.


FRONTIER RUCKUS
We’ve memorized so thoroughly the worlds from which we come. With a lifelong obsession, we’ve catalogued and internalized the apparently permanent fixtures of a cherished locality until our bodies have in fact become either physical extensions or microcosmic containers of these landscapes: arms kinking in unbroken strip-mall chains, gaping mouths mimicking the enormous vacancy of an evacuated sports dome. The chief business of Frontier Ruckus is the collection and organization of these solid, unmoving markers. We spool the vast confusion and depth of existence around fast-food restaurants in anchoring tethers; we use the vacuous space of the abandoned 90s mall, now dead and tomb-like, as leaky reservoirs of overflowing memory. We turn to these devices to render memory and its innumerable landmarks somehow less crippling in their abundance—to seek some agency, some proprietorship over a world as heavy and unwieldy with contents of the past as a backyard filling with nightfall.

In the 1990s my mother worked at Summit Place Mall, on the borderline between Pontiac and Waterford, Michigan. So much met at that nexus. Day met dusk and a drive home. Now it is where memory meets the present tense and struggles to recognize it. My grandfather taught me how to stand a quarter on its side in the food court there. I studied the quarter intently. I noticed the thin black line, the feeble definition separating one thing from all other objects in the world. From that perception on, I broke free from those borders and blended my body into the entire landscape of my experience. A large part of me has lived in a world of its own rearrangements and lovely eternities ever since. What I’ve found in this expansive nighttime of blurred place, age, and pure memory is hopefully some of what Deadmalls and Nightfalls reflects.

It Gets Better

In the wake of a rash of teen suicides brought on by bullying, columnist Dan Savage began the It Gets Better campaign.  The project's pledge is to: Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I'll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I'll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that "It Gets Better."  


Many celebrities have contributed videos and written accounts in support for and struggles with bullying to show solidarity and lead by example.  Some celebrities have addressed the issue from another angle, challenging the kids who egg the bullies--in the hope of not being bullied themselves--to stand up for the kids being bullied.  


I've been discussing this issue a great deal lately, with high school students, colleagues, and friends.  Inevitably, the question comes up: "Were you ever bullied?"  Most say no, they weren't.  Some were too quiet to be noticed, some say they were the bullies, trying to hide their own insecurity by picking on people around them.  But me, well, yes.  I was bullied a lot, and not in a 'maybe she's just a little too sensitive sort of a way.'  Nope.  Honest to goodness, mean spirited, kids bent on making me feel bad kind of bullied.


I remember being chased on the playground and called fat by the boys in my second grade class, and the group of boys that jumped as though I'd made the earth move during a particularly bouncy cheerleading routine (a stint that was short-lived for so many reasons), or the time I ran for student council president.  When I walked to the podium to introduce myself, I was booed by an auditorium packed with every one of the two hundred and fifty students in my seventh grade class.  They all booed.  The couple of girls I called friends did nothing, no clapping, no booing, just...nothing. 


I've asked myself for years what made me a target.  I wasn't the heaviest, I wasn't the meanest, the quietest, the most anything...except for confident.  My parents instilled in me the belief that I was no better than anyone else, and that no one was better than me.  I never, for one second, felt inferior.  Never doubted my right to speak, to listen, to learn, to be heard.  Even when those things happened to me, they were painful in the moment, but I kept getting up in the morning, kept going to school, kept reading, kept breathing, kept wanting to learn.  I asked questions, I raised my hand, I talked to adults, I believed they were listening to me, I believed I was worth listening to.  My greatest crime was really liking myself.  And, well, I was mouthy, a trait that worked out well for me as an acerbic adult but made me no friends in the average American junior high school.  When kids were mean to me, I snapped back at them with a larger vocabulary larger and quicker wit than many of them ever cultivated in adulthood let alone at age nine.


I got lucky.  When I entered ninth grade, it was in a new town at a new high school.  All those terrible experiences from my past ceased to exist as soon as I left my sleepy hometown.  I'd love to say I never had another bad moment, but life doesn't work that way and there were a few rough spots, but I learned how to adapt, how to stand up for myself, and how to make it clear that I wasn't someone to be pushed around.


So, why write all of this now, here?  Well, I've been thinking a lot about why those things happened to me, and the best reason I can come up with is so that I can be this person, now, telling kids that in fact, it does get better.  The people who tear you down for being strong are the ones most likely to never know real strength.  Every cowardly insult about your clothes, your weight, your voice, your sexual orientation, your haircut, whatever thing they pick on, it's all in an attempt to mask their fear of you.  Of your strength, of your power, of your brilliance and beauty.  


You are valuable.  You are important.  You are beautiful, and you are the ones that make the world better, smarter, more compassionate, and worth living in.  


I promise.

Find the River

10/10/10

This morning, after years of not belonging to one, I officially joined a church.  


I spent a very long time wondering what God wanted of me, how S/He could exist when there was so very much pain in the world, how I, an educated woman who has read more in my 34 years than some people ever do in a lifetime, how could I believe in something I couldn't see, something I couldn't touch, something I couldn't photograph.


And then, I just knew.  Faith held the door open for me one Sunday morning in April, and I have been saying thank you for that gesture ever since.


I do not pretend to know what anyone else needs in this life, but today, I took steps towards ensuring I get what I need: a spiritual home, a loving community, and a truly accepting group of people who share my world view, a world view so eloquently stated in the church covenant:


In the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus, we unite for the worship of God and the service of all. We seek to know the will of God and to walk in God’s ways, made known or to be made known to us; to love one another, to proclaim the Gospel to all the world; to work and pray for the progress of knowledge, the promotion of justice, the reign of peace, and the realization of our shared humanity. And we look with faith for the triumph of righteousness and the gift of life eternal.


I'm not going to knock on doors or ask you to talk to me about your salvation--if we're friends, I probably already know your views and love you enough to know we'll talk if we need to, or we won't.  Today wasn't about you or what you need to do, world.  It was about me, and I think that's just fine.  You see, all day I have felt something miraculous should happen given the significance of today's calendar date: 10/10/10.  It occurs to me now, as the night comes on in and the cool evening air of fall perfumes my house, that joining my church this morning was my miracle, and I couldn't be more grateful.

Happiness...

...is a choice.


No matter what anyone tries to tell you to the contrary, they're wrong.  You can dwell on the things that are painful and difficult in your life, or you can choose to see the good that is coming, to believe that your dreams will come true, and to know--without a single hesitation--that you will someday be happy because you deserve to be, just like everyone else.


Just like everyone else. 


We all deserve to be happy, and we all have the power to choose to be.


I'm choosing to be; I hope you are, too.

How I Spent September