The Pink Fleece

Before I moved from New York to LA, I made a point of ridding my closet of the majority of my black.  I kept some basics: pants, a cardigan, a mini skirt, a cami, and I left a handful of black long sleeve shirts and sweaters in a bin at my parents’ house in Boston, because I figured I’d be back for enough visits between Thanksgiving and the holidays to want to bust those out for family and work gatherings - less to pack for longer trips - but otherwise my goal was to go bright.  I stocked up on linens, white peasant blouses, turquoise and salmon tank tops, some nautical looking sweaters and neon work out garb.  When I walked in to my walk-in closet in Woodland Hills - I had a walk in closet for the first time in my life for the first year I spent out west! - I wanted to see and feel lighter and brighter than I’d ever been able to donning my New York uniform of black on black on black.  

If over the holidays I received gifts that were reminiscent of my east coast attire, I simply added to the collection in that bin at my parents’.  They’d be staples of my “home visiting” wardrobe… hats, scarves, turtlenecks, fleece-lined cold weather running gear.

My Nanny Janny (my mother’s mother) is infamous for the Christmas bags she doles out as gifts each year.  They typically contain an assortment of soaps from Marshalls, flannel pajama pants from Building 19 1/2, fuzzy socks from the Hallmark store sale section, and bright colored zip up fleeces from Ocean State Job Lot.  The fleeces were new to the lineup the first Christmas after I’d moved to LA, and the one that graced my gift bag was a putrid pink.  Just shy of neon that could have been considered trendy, too dark to be soft and becoming, close to the shade of magenta you can imagine being a kindergartener’s favorite crayola color, and sort of like a step sister of Pepto Bismol’s it was the kind of thing no New Yorker or Angelino would dare to be caught dead in.  

And yet… it found its way back in to the suitcase I packed to go home to Los Angeles with that Christmas, and it’s come back with me to Boston since I moved east again last summer.  It’s warm and it’s relentless in its ugliness.  I’ve worn it around the house more often than I am keen to admit.  Whenever the temperature has dropped below 60.  Pretty much any and every day I don’t have somewhere to be - any morning I’m waiting for my hair to dry or only running out to the drive through Starbucks a town over.  And every once in a while when I’m dropping by my parents’ where the bin no longer resides but my grandparents have moved in to an in-law apartment.  Whenever Nanny sees me in it, she beams.  

Check yourself...

Because I have some of the best friends in the world, I get birthday gifts from time to time even though all I really ever need to feel spoiled already is the gift of their presence in my life.

This year I got a book of story prompts and a couple years back I got two books with autobiographical prompts.  Prompts are my jam.  Prompts are all I need to be off and running my fingers over the keyboard or pen over paper.

And in honor of the new book I went back to look at one of the old ones... they were selling it at Paper Source's and stores like that in the fall of 2013 

Glorious, right?!  I had filled it cover to cover by mid January of 2014.  The other one I got



I have on my to-do list to complete when I'm approaching 35 (the age I'd be privy to becoming president if I were so inclined... ahhh how I love arbitrary rationalizations)!

Anyway, I thought I'd post two of the essays I wrote in late November/early December of 2013.  I thought maybe I wasn't posting much around then on here, but it looks like I did at least a handful of times.  Nevertheless, it's still pseudo noteworthy... here's my answer to the question "how would you describe yourself" as of this time of year three years ago...

"Is it a bad thing talking about myself comes so easily to me?  Self-aware - that's the way I'd start describing myself I guess.  Eternally if not relentlessly optimistic.  A glass half full kind of girl.  A type A person who wishes she could be a free spirit.  A "Yes" person with a high tolerance for bullshit.  Remarkably unobservant.  Pretty impressively patient in my personal opinion.  Loyal.  Loving.  Lovable I 'd like to think.  I love to laugh, love to learn, love to lean in when I feel like I have something worthwhile to bring to the table.  I'm a homebody who loves to travel and loves to make the world feel a little smaller with each new trip around it.  I'd say I'm a leader by nature most likely due to my eldest sibling role.  I'm a straight shooting sagittarius and a little slight of tact sometimes if I'm being honest.  I have high expectations of the people I love because I believe in them with every fiber of my being, but I'm pretty hard to disappoint because I'm pretty level-headed anreven keeled.  I'm not a very passionate person, but I love to do the things I say I'm going to, andI am great at committing for the long haul to projects that I either believe in or think are important.  I'm pretty maternal, but also self-serving.  Self motivated, easily excitable, always open to being newly inspired.  I'm open and accepting and always trying to stop my natural instincts to judge.  I'm Catholic with a little 'c.' The oldest of 5 kids. Irish/Catholic/Italian/French Canadian and a couple other things.  A boston girl at heart.  And way more of a city girl than country bumpkin."

This all still applies.

I'll add that I'm grateful.

Snarls

When I was little, my curls were unruly.  They had a mind of their own and a traffic pattern my mother, God love her, couldn't seem to navigate gracefully for the life of her.

She'd rake through my hair with a brush when I got out of the bath, and as my head was yanked backwards with each stroke, she'd relent, "you've got snarls in there..."

I haven't heard or even thought of that word in decades.  By the time my sisters were born there were detangling shampoos for kids and no-more-tangles sprays my mom would use on their manes to make the process more bearable.

These days I know how to work with my curls.  "People pay good money for curls like those," people used to say to me when I was little, and these days I pay good money to manicure mine.

I've been devoted to the devachan method for five years

The process is 100% worth the time it took to learn and master.

The point of this post though... I just realized, is that I will always have snarls, I have just acquired patience and tools necessary to smooth them.

There is so much to say about this mess of a week and the messy divide our country is raking through in the aftermath of the election.  For tonight I can rest resolved to be willing to figure out how to work through the snarls.

My first day as a Deva girl

Falling back

My issue with falling back is the falling part.

I love getting back the hour.  I will always take and maximize free time, bonus hours, minutes that are up for grabs.

But I can't help falling a little when the days get short.

The SAD in the air is contagious if not oppressive.

And I will find rays of sun shine like it's my job.  I will, I can, I have.

It's a fight though, and I hate fights.  I don't fight, in fact.  I say it often, "I don't fight, I win," but winning is exhausting, it's draining.  I don't know how Hillary's doing it.  I am positive the toll it will take on her.  She fights to win.  I wonder if she knew all along 2008 wasn't hers, and just made the bid to get people ready for this run....

Anyway, election talk gets so dark.  Now I'm doing this to myself.  It's awful.

I think a cop out's in order.  Here let me fall back on this:  Oh, Autumn in New York :)

It's relative - I spent the second half of this last week pounding the pavement and checking out my bff's new digs

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.