Saul Good and Co.

IDGAF, YDGAF

I have so many points to cram into this entry, I'm not sure if I will succeed in doing that, let alone find a way to knit them together and form a cohesive argument. Maybe if I just dump out the mess in my head, it'll be the first step. Maybe this is just where I build a thesis and clarity comes later, with this entry serving as a way to show my work. Whichever way, its all been on my mind. And so I begin.

Last week, Malik "Phife Dawg" Taylor died at 45. This was a punch in the gut for me, as his defunct hip hop group, A Tribe Called Quest, was hugely influential in my life, and they remain in my top 5 bands of all time. He was too young and it's a celebrity death that really touched me, touched way more people than I would have guessed. So RIP Phife, I will always and forever love you and the music you brought to the world. This isn't about him at all, though, it just stems from the aftermath of his death when I listened to ATCQ on the heaviest rotation since 1994. On the band's seminal Low End Theory album, Phife delivers a virtuoso performance on the song "Butter," a two-verse classic boast/diss track. It's a genius number with a singular delivery (by the by,"you get an E for effort, and T for nice try" is incredibly useful for the parent of a five-year-old). On it, Phife boasts about his prowess as a rapper and ladies' man, but then instead of dissing other MCs, he disses female fans who wouldn't give him the time of day before he was famous. And that's cool, I mean nobody likes a fame grabber. But the dissing takes a weird turn partway through the second verse:

Now tell me what's the reason, for dyin' your hair
Slum village gold still danglin in your ear
You barely have a neck but still sportin' a rope
Four-finger ring just so Phifer can scope
You looked in the mirror, didn't know what to do
Yesterday your eyes were brown but today they are blue
Your whole appearance is a lie and it could never be true
And if you really loved yourself then you would try and be you
If your hair and eyes were real, I wouldn't have dissed ya
But since it was bought, I had to dismiss ya
If you can't achieve it, then why not try and weave it
If you can't extend it then you might as well suspend it
If you can't braid it, best thing to do is fade it
I asked who did your hair and you tell me "Diane made it"
If you were you and just you, talk to you, maybe
But I can't stand, no bionic lady
Tryin' hard to look fly, but yo, you're lookin' dumber
If I wanted someone like you I woulda swung with Jamie Summers

To recap: ladies, here's a beauty standard for you to achieve. If you don't look this way naturally, fake it. BUT if I can tell you're faking it, that's worse. You're ugly AND a failure at making yourself a swan and you tried to pull a fast one on my ego so you are double punished. How dare you? And how dare you change your appearance and be capable of loving yourself?

Womenfolk: HOW CAN YOU WIN?

This is just an example, I don't mean to single out Phife, especially when he and his crew are historically at the least misogynistic end of the rap lyric spectrum. I also acknowledge that he's addressing the problematic rejection of racial and cultural identity in appearance, which I am in no way qualified to discuss. But overall it's an insidious, pervasive little message - he admires a groupie's hair until he finds out it's a weave, and reacts by shaming her for the anger and disappointment she caused. Basically, "girl, you were almost good enough, until you weren't, and I feel like a fool so you should feel worse." It rings in my ear because I've been thinking a lot about the movement that posits that taking and sharing selfies is a feminist act. I don't know about that, or that I could ever say that an act is inherently feminist or not, only using the logic that an act done by someone who identifies as a feminist makes it feminist. Ergo, when I take a selfie, I am a feminist taking a selfie and it's technically a feminist act. My actions only apply to me and don't represent all of feminism as a movement, if it is even only one thing.

 

Er, before I lose us all to semantics quicksand (if you are even interested in being pulled out at this point), here are my thoughts on selfies. Self-portraits are as old as time, it's just that the technology exists now that allows people to take and share them indiscriminately. That's not a bad or good thing in itself, it's just establishing the landscape. And when the act of living in a body subjects you to everyone's judgment every second of the day, if you want to put your image out there, you should feel confident in your power to control it, without justification or apology. If that means ten layers of filters, or a statement that you are not wearing makeup, or a full frontal nudie, who is anyone else so say? Everybody's got their thing. I don't actually care, if you are an adult and you own it, if you feel empowered by it, harness that power. It doesn't mean I will refrain from reacting to what I see with a, "Oh honey, no."  But I'm trying to curb that reaction. Because at the heart of it, it's the same. Even if I know what I'm seeing is fake. Even if I know it's a ploy for attention and validation. So what? What's really real anyway? Is it a crime to seek attention, good or bad, when you're given the message that it's only other people's opinion of your physical self that matters anyway? 

I'm not saying that's why I do it, or why anyone does it, if it's something they like to do. I know my own ever-shifting motivations, and I can think I know others', but I don't, not really.  On one hand, it doesn't matter why. On the other hand, it does matter, but the different "whys" are so complex I'd be following the trails to each problematic thought process until the cows came home, because society is society and the female body is the subject of scrutiny at all times, and girls internalize messages about their bodies from a very very young age, including the idea of ownership.

And there's the overarching message OF COURSE, that appearance is the most important thing. It shouldn't be and I don't want it to be and I don't want to play into it. And I do, I mean, for example, I like to watch Intervention. Enough people do to make it a successful reality series so I'm not alone in my pain voyeurism, but I am not actually sure what it does for me besides make me sad/extra grateful I've never had to deal with addiction. The other night I realized, as I was wondering if there is truly a correlation between female addicts and terrible eyebrows, that 1) I have too many opinions about strangers' eyebrows and 2) THIS is what I'm taking away from the show about seriously sick people? What kind of monster does that make me? I don't want to be that kind of monster.

 

I don't have any answers. I don't have a conclusion. It's all just... there. Hanging out there. Maybe, if nothing else, this starts a discussion with people whose opinions I really respect, or makes someone aware of the pressure to be a person whose experience is very different form theirs where they hadn't been before. I don't know. All I know is, I'm tired now. And I have no plans to stop taking selfies any time soon. A small reason is that if I don't photograph myself, who will? I am interested in seeing myself during different points in my history as I am in everyone else. But I also have the luxury of decent self-esteem, which I didn't always have, and I think that if this is when I was coming of age, I'd have a very different relationship with putting my image out there. 

 

 

Shadow of the Cross

Whole and reckless, we gather

Drunk on the lie of safety

 

Gorging on endless freedom,

Forever, granted. Who wouldn't

Assume the future? Talk of next time? 

Everything is sure

And strong as medieval root, shrugging off the sidewalk while the robin nests above

Everything is fragile as a sugar shell

Every blade of grass every poking purple crocus every breath

Temporary luck

 

Three days later is tomorrow. It it too much to hope for a miracle?

A mass resurrection?

An end to the ugly cycle of humanity, the acid nucleus hiding in the painted egg?

Another day in the park?

Sundown to Sunrise

This morning I had one of those moments. "Starry Eyed Surprise" by Paul Oakenfold came up on my playlist in the car, I know that that song is as old as dirt and is probably actually a musical tribute to molly, but it never fails to make me happy, and as I sang along and steered through Cambridge in the cold drizzle I was hit with that unmistakeable feeling, the prickles in my scalp of elevated joy. Music is often the conduit of my sudden bursts of emotion, and the catalyst, but the feelings it conjures are authentic. They were already there, lurking, waiting to be sonically tripped and brought into bright focus.

Snapshot, March 2016: My life is great. Work is about as good as it gets. I'm juiced on my writing. There are personal triumphs I share only with Mike, but they're there and adding to the upward trend. Things are going really, really well for many of my loved ones. HR is thriving and going through a particularly exciting time where all he wants to do is write and draw and tell stories, and I got to overhear one of his kindergarten pals talking to his twin brother, and telling him that "HR is one of the nicest kids in class." I unquestioningly trust five year old opinions. Not saying I take credit for my kid's likability, I try to positively reinforce when his behavior is pleasing to me but above that I think it's basic wiring. No matter my role in it (or lack thereof), I  unapologetically reap the reward of getting to parent him in this stage. He's a piece of work in a hundred other ways, but who isn't? He currently flies the colors of love and kindness, and I don't know that there's much I could wish for him that could top that. 

Put that one in the time capsule. The world is full of shit, but it always is. It's full of deep beauty as well. Always. And right now I'm just... full. Full up. Fulfilled, even, and about to overflow with other ideas I want to parse in writing, but they will keep for another day. The House of Loaves and Fishes is open for business this weekend, meaning we're going to cram in as many family members as want to show up for the Easter Hoo-hah. Embrace the chaos and pass the Cadbury eggs. 

Holy Ghosts

This is not a new story. I've written about this before. Definitely in my old online diary, possibly in the blog before this one. But I'll write about it again,  because it's something that stands out, a beacon in the landscape of my whole life's memories. It shines at me now, both as a reflex when world events make me want to think about what is most comforting, and as something topical as many people celebrate Holy Week. You know I don't do religion, but I was raised Catholic, went to parochial school, the whole nine. I considered myself devout, and maybe I was a true believer in those days, or maybe I was just drawn to the ritual of mass, the calm and order, the bombast followed by great gasps of reverent silence. And incense. Easter-time is when the priests get freshman dorm levels of liberal with the incense, and to this day I have positive associations with that distinctive blend. This is not about Catholicism, or religion at all, though, but the Catholic mass is how I arrived at a particularly cherished stretch of time in my youth, and helped shape me as an adult. 

The thing to know about me as a child, or fine, maybe even to this day, is that while I'm not a classic Type A personality, I've always had a compulsion to achieve at a certain level, both academically and in other areas. "Good enough" can sometimes be good enough, but it usually isn't, and I have to take things to the next level on my own terms. Enter: Lenten sacrifice. I had to be the Valedictorian of Lent, and this time in fourth grade I'm guessing I had heard a teacher insinuate that it was better or nobler or more difficult to do something over the Lenten period vs. giving up candy or something, so I decided to go BIG and commit to attending mass every day from Ash Wednesday through Easter. This meant rising while it was still dark to go sit in the freezing, cavernous and mostly empty church before putting in a full day of school. The idea seemed a glamorous challenge. Do-able, but requiring a certain oomph not shown by my peers (who were probably secretly eating candy anyway, those slacker heathens). I'm not proud of my pre-teen smugness, but it was definitely a motivating factor in my intention. My grandparents, who lived in the apartment downstairs, were going anyway, so at least I had a ride. And so it happened that for 40 days in a row I started my day, bundled up and yawning, in a pew with my Gram, Pup and Great-Aunt Laura.

This is what I remember about the actual church experience: dim lighting, few parishioners, the priest's economy with the service length and being the only one there under retirement age. Everything else I remember: that sweet, quiet alone time spent with my grandparents and great-aunt (who realistically was my third grandmother). Everyone else was still in bed, and the four of us sat around the breakfast table after church, sharing sections of the Sun Journal and eating thick slices of homemade bread (Gram's plain white bread for me, not Easter bread, that anise-kissed devil's loaf which the rest of them enjoyed through the season), buttered and sizzled crispy on one side under the broiler. Black coffee for them, hot chocolate for me. And really, honestly, you haven't lived until you've dunked buttered toast in hot chocolate. It is powerful nourishment. As is the private, unshared access to three of the most special people one's life. How could I have known then what a rare jewel, what a limited edition I had inadvertently set myself up to collect?

Pup is gone, now. Aunt Laura is gone. Gram is still here and still baking her bread, and may she for as long as she's feeling well. What remains is that my machinations to prove myself the Lord (or, let's be honest, to lock in my teacher's pet contender status, all the same to me in those days) set in motion the delivery of a more valuable and lasting gift. There is no way that I was cognizant of it at the time. I was ten at most, and that's not how still-forming elementary school brains work. But there was something happening there, a subconscious recognition of how cherished a time this would be decades later, even if it presented itself as small selfish joy in the moment. Some would say that that's evidence of how God works, and I don't mind if you say it, even if I don't necessarily believe it. What it feels like, to me, is that the experience in itself IS God. My kind of God. Not a deity, not the grantor of a blessing I've asked for or was shown, unbidden, for whatever mysterious reason. It's a feeling. An awareness and a pure jolt of gratitude. 

Unbeknownst to me, that Lent in the 1980s planted the seeds of my eventual peace, and the ability to look back and recognize what I've come to know as God along the way, occasionally even as it happens. But Easter bread, man: still nope forever. 

 

Textual Equivalent of Sorbet

My ideal year, weather wise, goes like this: spring, two weeks of summer, fall, two months of just-snowy-enough-to-be-pretty winter, then back to spring. I know I don't get a say, and it would behoove me to realistically brace myself for the eternal summer that's coming, but this non-winter we've had makes me think that I might be living part of the dream of that elusive, actual extra-long spring. We're a few days from the official change of seasons, of course, but my bones have relaxed into the spring vibe, and I'm comfortable making my proclamations regarding what I find so delightful this time of year. 

 Sprang 2016, you magnificent bastard. 

Full-time skirts with bare legs - so long for now, indispensable fleece-lined leggings. I will temporarily dispense of you in favor of freedom. 

Sunday sojourns with my boy - since he's gotten older and much better at mobilizing on his own, we can go on longer explores together on our Mama-and-HR days. I've got some ideas I've been saving up. 

Weddings - this season there are two, with great friends and not-too-far travels.  Plus an excuse for a deep closet-dive for attire. 

Dancing - can I pull together a dance night? Could this be my time? This will be a standing agenda item every season, whether or not it comes to fruition. 

New rain boots - I think it's time I got some. 

Setting physical goals: right now it's stick side-crow with the consistency I can currently do crow pose, and get into and hold headstand without a wall assist. (Below: half-assed portrait of side-crow in progress)

Maybe start running again. Maybe.

Open windows in the house. 

Easter candy.

A long, long overdue house-wide deep clean - I'm not looking forward to this as much as I am looking forward to having it done.

Full-time white wine (with the occasional rose) and and IPAs and lots of foods that feel light and springy to me, like peas and asparagus and angel hair pasta and various seafoods. 

Magnolias and lilacs and beech trees with their former glory restored (allergies bedamned!). 

Spending some of my free morning time writing outside. 

Planning a proper 6th birthday bash for my kid. 

Watching lots of musicals. I haven't gone down that particular escape chute in awhile. 

Potential for spontaneity and adventure. I have a lot of big plans here, but I need to leave room for the anything-can-happen. And may all that happens be on the positive tip.

 

 

 

 

 

You Think Marvelous

Compliments: do ya like 'em? Receiving them, I mean. Many people are uncomfortable, or at the very least have a complex relationship with being told nice things about themselves. I am at the point of my life where I have enough confidence to accept a compliment and not have to tack on a self-deprecating comment. For example, if someone says, "I like your dress," I don't automatically follow my "Thanks!" with something like, "I got it for $20 like 10 years ago!" For a long time I felt compelled to almost apologize for a receiving a nice comment, but not any more.  What is up with us and why do we do this? It's an effort to check that impulse, but the way I see it is that if someone thinks that a "thanks" alone makes me stuck up or conceited, it makes you question why they would say something in the first place.  It's not that I think I'm so great that I deserve people reinforcing this at every turn. It's just that when most people tell you something nice, it's a genuine expression for the sake of it, and not an expectations-fraught passive-aggressive game. I like to believe that when someone compliments me, they are one of the "most people." It's not an easy place at which to arrive, philosophically, especially if you are a woman. But if you're one of the people for whom taking compliments is difficult, think about why this might be. Nobody is unworthy of receiving kindness. Lovely humans of earth, accept compliments as they are given and hold your head high. If someone chooses to show you false kindness, that's not anything about you. It's all about the giver and his or her own issues. 

What's the best compliment you've ever received and why? I know what mine is, and I'm keeping it to myself, but I will say that it was pertaining to my character and not my appearance, and that's probably why I hold it so dear. Not that it's not nice to be complimented on how you look. I love to tell people that their hair looks cute, of they nailed their eyeliner, or those SHOES, my god! Even things like, you have such nice skin or what a great butt. It is so awesome that something about the way you look is pleasing enough to someone else that they want to tell you about it. I am not immune to that type of lovin'. But the thing is that unless the attribute in question is something you actively worked for (like toned biceps or a particularly cool outfit you put together), appearance is a roll of the dice. Genes. When you tell someone they are good looking, it's rarely something in their control. You're thanking biology, and biology does deserve our gratitude. But it's all part of a slippery slope of what is truly valuable in a person. To be given a compliment based on an achievement, even if it's just noticing aloud that someone did something kind or said something interesting, those feel so EARNED. One of my yoga teachers told me the other day that my "chaturanga was looking pristine" and it  was like she gave me a million dollars because she is a stickler for form and I was proud that she noticed that I had been working really hard on it. I also know that every practice sets me back to square one and that was a note on my performance for that day alone, but I dorkily celebrate it more than 100 people telling me they like my eyes because I was just born with those. But it still also feels great when someone says that they like my eyes. You know?  I think about this all the time, because I love to tell people (including little kids) that they look great in some way. But I don't want to be part of the culture that puts appearance above all. I don't want to stop doing it, because it feels good and fun to exchange pleasantries on that level. I love clothes and hairstyles and some people are just so dang adorable you can't keep your mouth shut about it. I love to make people feel good. But I need to work on actively seeking a way to balance out the message I'm sending. With my own kid it's easy, I tell him that I'm proud of him for character and behavior-based reasons 100 times a day, and almost never tell him he's the cutest, though I do think it. But I know I could be a lot better about the ways I choose to build up other people around me, and letting them know that I notice the beautiful things about them that aren't just about the way they look. 

What am I saying exactly? I don't know. You can never really go wrong saying something nice that you honestly feel. And any compliment can be just a nice and harmless compliment for it's own sake, well, until it isn't in the larger context. I don't believe in the "You Are Beautiful" sign movement that's popped up everywhere, but that's a discussion for another day. There's no conclusion beyond "be excellent to each other" as much as possible. It's just something that's been on my mind, that ever-churning cauldron.

Little Lightning

Last night I had an unexpectedly cool experience. I had a ticket to see Greg Dulli, which I did expect to be cool and it was, but it was the opening act who really took me by surprise. He was a poet, not a musician. He read from his work and riffed here and there he was funny and charismatic and unusual. I liked his style, even if I can't exactly describe it, but I enjoyed it, and the timing worked out neatly as I recently began publicly casting about for new poets. Partway through his set he talked about being chosen to support Dulli on his tour, and he said something that really inspired me, about being an artist and how you have to just keep making your art because you could be publishing a book even when you're 43 like he is. It's a rough paraphrasing of the sentiment, anyway. And it's not telling me anything that any successful artist doesn't live by, but something about approaching middle age and knowing that someone even just a bit older than you is just hitting his stride is a powerful motivator. For me, anyway. I was moved to speak to him after the show, something I never do, to let him know that he inspired me, and I bought his book which I am looking forward to diving into when I have a quiet moment. 

Rock n roll poetry, what a night. Of course, as always, GD was fantastic. It was a quieter, more stripped-down show than he usually puts on, and he premiered a new song among the old favorites. Basically, I was in heaven. It was a bummer that Mike wasn't able to accompany me, but aside from that I'm really grateful I got to go, even just to have the resources to be able to go and support artists on a whim, and to live where I live and have immediate access to all this beauty.  My life has really been firing on all cylinders lately, right? Not bad for an old lady. 

 

 

Hank Aaron Year

As part of an office restructuring initiative, i.e. making room for a new employee, I just cleaned the bejesus out of my workspace. It feels amazing, and also preposterous that it's been so long since the last time. But the blank slate I have now is inspiring. Also kind of weird, as I moved my computer to the middle of my desk and it's going to take some getting used to both physically and mentally. I'm digging the minimalist vibe though. I guess that Kondo bird's bestseller is no fluke.

Whatever to all that, though. I've recently come off a bang-up weekend with my favorite people, that is, my brother and sister and our SOs, and we had a fantastic time painting the town of Portland Maine. My darling parents watched HR and my tiny nephew, and we took advantage of their loving care to observe "Sibling Christmas" which is our annual tradition in lieu of buying each other holiday gifts. Not that we don't hang out all the time, but having a designated night to whoop it up and try new places is awesome. This year we had plenty to celebrate as well: birth of a baby, my sister's (relative) reclamation of her body, my brother's CD release, life. Back at the house, HR had a great time as well bonding with his newest cousin and being spoiled by his grandparents. I will always be a fun-time, family-time maximalist. Sometimes, usually, I can't believe how good I have it. Really.

Speaking of,  it's my old man's birthday today, and if you know him, you know what a truly excellent thing it is for the world that he was born. Happy birthday, babe! Go fondle your sweaters. 

Release Day

Point of order #1: in my exhaustive recounting of my illustrious blogging career, I somehow overlooked my most substantive blog, the experiment I launched as a grad school project that brought me the most intellectual satisfaction possibly of my life and made me some wonderful contacts in the world of contemporary young adult fiction, a place where I had a home for some time. I like to think I'm not done with that, not by a sight, but even though I'm on a YA-relevance hiatus, it's breathtaking to me that I could have relegated something so important to me to the mental vault. It's the mother-blog to this one, for crying out loud, its name is the address you type in to get here, which makes almost no sense unless you know that blog's origins. Super strange. But there we are. I loved my avengingsybil alter ego, and she still lurks within.

Point of order #2, and the more important point: today is the official release of my brother's band's CD. This is huge, it's the culmination of years of work and re-tooling and recruiting and starting over and playing around. Lots of fun, of course. It's been his opus, his labor of love. But mostly, when it comes down to it, really hard work. The thing about my brother, and why I really really think he's going to make it as a musician, is that he does the work. Of course he's talented, but talent is nothing without drive and discipline and focus. And at this time in his life, he's got it in spades. He is so inspiring to me, because while I LOVE to talk about the process and the work, making myself actually do the work is where I tend to stall out. He just does the work. We've had amazing discussions, but the difference is that he walks away from our talks and gets down to business. That sets him apart from most of the crowd. Add to it that he's got himself a great band and it's a stellar CD. I say as a music fan with only a slight bias. He deserves to make it in music, not just because he promised to take care of me in my old age, but because he loves it so much, and that is clear. He's always had a creative bent, as a kid he and his best friend wrote volumes of stories just for fun, and they started messing around with songwriting before they knew a single chord. His guitar chops are mostly self-taught, and that blows my mind. In HR's imaginative play, I can see many shades of my brother, and Mike and I are doing our best to nurture it without pushing. If he's meant to follow in his uncle's footsteps, he's got to have the same inner fire.

But back to the OG I was talking about. Here's to this guy, who we always knew was something special. Congratulations, Nick Perry's Brass Tax.

And we get to celebrate all weekend long! Damn I'm in the best mood right now.

P.S. YOU CAN BUY THE CD HERE FOOL! 

Confessions of a Blank Box, Blinking Cursor Addict

Or, a Long-Short History of Blogging

In honor of my 300th entry writing as Saul Good and Co., I thought I'd riff a little about how I came to blogging, what it's added to my life, and why I can't seem to stop. 

It all started in 2001 - on break from my first year of grad school, I was working full-time, but missing the creative rush from that insane first semester and wanted to keep my recently re-acquired brain muscles from atrophying over the summer. I knew someone who had started an anonymous, free-form diary online, something that to me was brand new and mindblowing. I decided to give it a go, but I didn't tell anyone but Mike about it, and I used it as a place to venture out, experiment a little. I didn't have a real sense of what I was getting into, nor did I expect a response or following from other writers, but I did get a surprisingly good-sized one, and over the years I became part of quite a community. It changed my life in more ways than I can count, and maintaining that space gained me the majority of my solid, long-term adult friendships. After awhile it inevitably got less anonymous, and I password-protected it for privacy reasons. I have no regrets about anything that I wrote, but there's plenty in there that most people in my life don't need to know about, so it is locked forever and ever (or until the service finally, finally disappears into the ether) and I'm the only one with the code. 

I'm not saying it's not chock full of embarrassing content, hack work, and TMI, but mostly I'm proud of it. And to have a record of an entire decade, to have evidence of that time in my life when I went through a million billion changes and so much happened in history and I grew as a writer and cemented myself as a person, it's personally valuable.  It seemed like a fitting, natural (if bittersweet) stopping point when I closed it after HR was born.

2010 - Turns out I missed it so much I started a new blog, Joyberrypie, after the baby was born and I went back to work. There was no plan going in, just another space to scratch my public writing itch, but it shaped itself into a chronicle of  new motherhood. It seems too soon to me still to revisit that blog incarnation, a lot of raw feelings, including the hard shock of my best friend's untimely death, but there's some good stuff in there. As my boy grew, though, I outgrew that space with relative speed, it didn't feel like home anymore. I needed fresh inspiration. And hence...

2013 - (until the internet ends/I get burned out again) - this right 'chere. I like it here. As a writing-person, I'm trying not to keep treading the same ground, dwelling in comfortable things. I want to challenge myself more, take some risks. That's why I don't write as much. It's not important to me any more to get something out there every single day as it is to feel like I've created something of substance, or just created something. Chronicling the details of my everyday life no longer holds interest for me. Not that those won't creep in, just that I am less inclined to do, say, weekend recaps which were a staple of my other blogs. I'm not a Kardashian. Nobody cares about my damn minutiae. But sometimes I have things to say, and I think they are things that other people might relate to or want to discuss and that's why I put them out there. Sometimes things fall flat. Sometimes I go back and cringe. But it's OK with me. 

Blogging, as a thing, peaked years ago. I know this. It's a dying ___ form. And I'm ok with that, because despite all my failed pitches to the HuffPo, I've never wanted to blog as a profession. Maybe an essayist. Maybe memoir. It's safe to say at this point that I'll never not need to write. But on my terms as much as possible. I've never wanted to be beholden to sponsors, or do giveaways, or do something staged just to earn my lettuce. It's not like I don't think that this is "real" writing, but I know it's not the same as having a deadline and going through an editorial process. If I can ever get that to happen, I'm all in for it. But what I do here, this is 100% for me. It's just my thing. I'm not much of a talker and writing about things and putting them out there helps me make sense of the world, of myself. After a lifetime of private paper journaling, which I still even do on occasion, the audience aspect has become something I crave. It holds me accountable. Even though I just talk about my feeeeeelings as much as I do in personal diary mode, I try really hard to give context to the feelings, shape them. I'm not trying to make them or myself relevant, exactly, it's just that I can't extricate all these feelings from my search for purpose and connection and universal truth. 

Not for nothing: of the thousands of times I've pressed that "publish" button, almost every single time, it's been from this seat right here. The room of my own I never realized I had. The great, unheralded perk of this job. It is totally weird and egregious that I've never properly appreciated that.

2008 (when I started taking pictures)

2016 (no end in sight)

In conclusion, please don't vote for Trump.