ImWithHer I'm just not sure where from

isidewith.com reinforced what I was confident about already.  HRC is my candidate of choice in this year's wild and crazy election.

My "loft" portion of our place on Taylor is my abode of choice at this point in the crazy adventure called life.

And I'm confident about residing here.  I think I'm doing good work, saving money, being creative, filling up my love tank, taking advantage of being conveniently located close to the majority of my favorite people in the world and only 20 minutes from an airport.

But I certainly wouldn't hate if someone came up with the sort of questionnaire they have you fill out on isidewith.com to validate a vast range of my life decisions. 

A girl can dream, can't she?

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.