The Year of Magical Manifesting...

Out of thin air two writing opportunities came in to my life earlier this week.

I'm applying to Grubstreet's Novel Generator (fingers crossed) and I'm signed up for a writing group with a gaggle of women I've deemed new-age-Newton-moms.  They may or may not actually be Newton moms.  I only assume as much because the instructor suggested we find time to write 10 minutes a day "even if it's while waiting to pick up a kid after soccer practice" or something to that effect.

I loved my essay writing workshop earlier this year, so I'm pretty stoked for this group and excited about the prompts the organizer is coming to the table with especially after getting an email from her last night that included some inspiration from Joan Didion.  She sent us Joan's essay "Why I Write," in which Joan admits she stole the title from George Orwell in part because she just liked the way the words sounded strung along the way they are and that "there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space."

I am 100% guilty of being a secret bully.  Case in point: my relentless emails to the men in my life.

More on that tactic later.  For now, it delights me that Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (which I picked up on a Barnes & Noble detour one day three or four years ago between when I'd done the Artist's Way and when I'd moved to California) made it through my purge earlier this year.  It brings me joy - her writing about writing.

So does writing, so does identifying as a writer, so does associating with other writers, and so does trusting in the magic a year can possess. 

The World Clock

My uncle asked to talk to me a couple hours ago when he called my mom and I happened to be at my parents' house.

He was in LA for work last week, and his Iranian Uber driver told him to check out this site with The World Clock.  Checking it out reinforced the hunch my uncle's had for a while that it's time to invest in property... Maybe we'll go in to business together, start an LLC, get my other uncle to be the property manager for the multi family houses the first uncle, our godson, and I start buying and flipping and/or renting out.  We'll see...  The wheels are turning, and the point, my uncle said, is the population is ever growing.  His Iranian Uber driver was making the point that humans are most definitely going to devour the earth's resources at the rate we're operating.  Which is another concern altogether, but my uncle's conclusion is if there's one thing that's a given it's that people need places to live.  Investing in places people will want to live is the way to go.

My uncle's in sales, so naturally he had me hooked on the phone.  I was ready to buy in before even checking the site out.

And then I got home and had a minute or two to sit and watch the numbers tick, up in the births bubble, up in deaths bubble, up in the deforestation bubble.  As usual seeing the US National debt exposed to the dollar did the trick putting my own debt in perspective.

And as the icing on the cake of a day and week I'm having, I also felt a wave of relief wash up on the shore of anxiety I've had in recent weeks that I'm living in too small a corner of the world at the moment.  I'm not alone... I'm one of 7,456,193,445 and counting individuals occupying my own space in the world.  We're all mere sequins on the stage of this planet reflecting the spotlight of the sun.

Red Rover October

This is the second time in eight years I've spent two Octobers in a row with the same residence.

So not surprisingly, I was asked at a family function this afternoon if I'm "here to stay."

People have grown accustomed to hearing I'm here there and anywhere at any given point, and I've grown accustom to re-adjusting, recalibrating, relocating.

It's hard to say if I'm here to stay.  I'm here for now.  And I'm happy.  So there's that.  There's just still SO MUCH WORLD.

So it remains to be seen, where the wind will take me and whether my nomadic tendencies have truly subsided.

When I was little, I could never break through the linked arms of opposing red rover team members.  I was inevitably traded to the team who called me over.  Inevitably trapped until the next time I heard my name.

In a way, I guess I'm always still listening and ready to make a run for it.

All about the green

Just stumbled upon this interview with 4 Millennial Men with 4 Very Different Salaries.

How absolutely mind boggling a time this is.

Election season - of course.

But this era too.  Wherein one millennial can be making $2,489,000 more or less than the next.

How can anyone in the various circles I run with complain?  We are all so beyond #blessed.  We joke about #basic-ness.  We are doing more than great.  We have so much to be grateful for.

Training Runs

Three things have dramatically impacted my philosophy on life in the past ten years: proximity to untimely death, running the Boston Marathon, and jumping out of a plane.

The other night one of my girlfriends posited it's impossible to truly comprehend missing something like one's health or a loved one until you've lost it.

I think we all have our own ideas of what counts as a defining experience, our own framing constructs for how we can make sense of the parts of life that are too big and too beyond us to ever truly know inside and out.

Anyway, I'm writing... morning pages, a revision of "the book," these blog posts, emails for work, and I'm looking at the writing I'm doing as exercises.  An exercise in this or that... finding an arc, being concise, dialoguing in different voices.

It's a little bit aimless.

Less so when I sit down and type out a syllabus for myself - do this outline one week, edit that screenplay next month, write the book proposal by December, send out queries after the first of the year, and so on.

I just had this great aha moment though.  The impulse to add up the number of training runs I've done vs actual half marathon and marathon races...  The number of times I've run at least eight miles vs the number of times I've gotten medals for doing so.

10 halves, 1 Cherry Blossom 10 miler, 1 full.

12 medals, 5 times as many runs 8 miles or longer.

Gotta put the time in.

The Worst

I know... I've been missing my Sunday posts.

Wedding season will do that.

Speaking of wedding season (what else is there to touch upon at present?) I got this from one of my modmates earlier today:

http://the-toast.net/2013/08/01/bachelorette-party-emails/

Simply put, it's the WORST.   Mostly because it's not that funny.  I mean it's hilarious, but it's so on the nose.  It's not funny how accurate a representation of the process it is.

Surely people don't throw out unrealistic suggestions, disregard voiced opinions and concerns and, worst of all - JUST NOT RESPOND or else neglect to answer the questions an organizer has posed, right!?!

There must be an unspoken girl code in place about these things.

No!?!?

We must all have the bride's best interest at heart and one another's financial and social circumstances in mind when coming together to orchestrate shenanigans.

Mustn't we!?!?

I am eternally grateful to the point people who have organized my girlfriends' bachelorette parties of late.   They have gone above and beyond, and they have the patience of saints.

Bitches be crazy though.

Without fail.  We're all the worst in our own right.

Let's Talk About Trees For a Sec

My little cousin is visiting this week from Washington state.  We took her for lunch by the BC campus yesterday and she got such a kick out of the way people dress "on the east coast" / "in Boston" as she referred to it.  Way less hippy, way more preppy...  She's visiting her sister in DC for the weekend and going to a political event with her.  She's worried she doesn't have anything to wear, but I assured her after 5 years in our nation's capital, I'm sure her sis has prep and or conservative garb to spare.

I thought if we'd brought her to Cambridge she may see more of the aesthetic she's accustomed to, but I knew exactly the difference she meant between the way people dressed generally on one side of the country vs the other.

One of the main reasons I elected to go to BC was that on my tour there I noted there were countless kids going to class in University gear.  Hoodies, t-shirts, sweatpants...these kids wore their pride all across campus and not just when it was football season or spirit week.

One of the main reasons I told my dad I had no desire to attend UNH - despite having found its library utterly breathtaking - was that there were simply too many trees on the campus.

I've had time to ruminate on my aversion to forestry over the years, and I would like to say I've come to appreciate woodedness with age, but beyond the marveling I did at the tree tops I soared above while skydiving the other weekend, I've remained pretty impartial to everything from ferns to oaks and even apple trees.

I love them cause they give us life, but I simply don't need them near by.

I'll still take a jungle of pavement any day.