Roundabouts

Last night I did a bridge in yoga class, something I haven't done in literally years, and after the cracking and creaking I settled into it for just a few comfortable seconds before my arms gave up the fight. In high school, doing a front or back walkover was all I needed to stretch my body, and we'd turn them over like four-leaf clovers at any time of day -- on the track, in the gym, in the D-wing hallway after school, wearing jeans and flannels and Doc Martens. Even in college, long after I'd quit cheerleading and dance, on hazy spring nights we'd take to the grass and throw back handsprings and roundoffs and feel out our limberness. In retrospect it all feels very Dancing Shoes-like, when Hilary is learning "roundabouts" in the fields of the English countryside and Rachel is moodily reading some book. (I never know who I like better, by the way: sunny Hilary or scowling, thoughtful Rachel. Maybe Dulcie? Maybe they are each facets of the same?) (Read the book, it's the best.)

I didn't walk into class last night expecting to do a bridge, but I did one and today I'm not feeling so bad, not as sore as I expected, so there's that. What is the lesson, I can feel myself asking. What is the lesson that's not as obvious as the one we're all thinking?

Well, I don't know. I know this: tomorrow morning I'm flying to Charleston, NC, for some sightseeing and eating with my mom and sisters, and I can't wait to get out of New York, which has been bruising me far too often for my liking these days. (Of course, then she goes and delivers a 70-degree day like today, and even though I want to pout -- where is my winter?! -- it just feels glorious.)

Look-Backs, interrupted

Naturally, a day that comes around only once every four years is a day that gets people thinking about where they were in their life the last time this day came around. I've seen some great posts about it -- particularly this one from Mandy Hubbard, a must-read for writers (especially those of us on submission) -- but the funny thing is, I simply can't remember. Previous Leap Days seem to no longer be stored in my brain. I do Look-Backs a lot. I had a particularly vivid Cinqo de Mayo one year, and I remember marking the moment in my head that night and wondering where I'd be the next Cinqo de Mayo, how my life would be different; if. I have this compulsion to track progress, to say things like, "Here I am today, which is weird, because there I was at this time last week." Like this past Sunday at 7:15pm when I looked at the clock and noted to myself that it'd been exactly a week, to the minute, since I got mugged. "Remember those moments before it happened?" I thought. "Remember how different I was, just a week ago?" (The answer: not very.)

Anyway. The strange thing about today is that I can't do a Look-Back to last Leap Day. Because I don't remember marking it at all. In fact, I have no memories of any earlier Leap Days whatsoever.

So, to rectify that:

• I wore a new dress today, thinking I'd be at a luncheon that I ended up skipping. It's gray and smooth.
• I smiled a goodbye to my sleeping boyfriend this morning, who looked so intensely comfortable it made me hiccup.
• It's raining, and already feels like spring, and the corner bodega was selling small cartons of tulips in pastel foil wrappings, and it made me think of my mother.
• Tonight I have a girls' dinner with my favorites, and we'll huddle under a roof and toast ourselves.

There. Now I can remember this Leap Day for when the next one comes in 2016.

I was okay until...

Yesterday I flipped open a New Yorker essay by Jonathan Franzen about Edith Wharton and "her problem of sympathy," and I thought, How I love this magazine, and Edith, and this literary life. A moment later my attention was diverted by an American woman seated across from me, explaining the weekend subway changes en francais to some French tourists. "Oui, c'est parfait," she said to them, "c'est le train pour vous." They were grateful, with their "mercis" and their nodding. How I love this city, I thought. An hour later I was mugged. I wondered why it was me, not the French tourists, but then I felt glad it wasn't them, because what a way to ruin a vacation. This is a true story.

What to make of Franzen writing about Wharton, anyway? "You may be dismayed by the ongoing representation of women in the American canon," he wrote, and I chuckled, wondering if Jennifer Weiner put him up to this. Or if his publicist did.

In the article there's an image of Edith, black and white and appropriately garbed in early 20th century dress, and carrying a dog -- I forget the name of the breed, but it looks like the dog from "Frasier" -- and I studied it intensely. She's reading a book; there's sunlight filtering in through the greenery behind her.

I was okay with the F train running so slowly last night, because I got to read about Edith. I was okay, until I got punched in the face outside of it; until I had to cancel all my credit cards.

I imagine the French tourists would mutter, "C'est la vie dans la grande ville," if they knew this story. And really, c'est vrai.

Come to some stillness

The first down dog of each day is the hardest, of course, and I always have to ease my way into it; shuffle my legs and hips; pedal my knees; really work my way into it. After a few seconds, I always hear my yoga instructor's words in my head: "Now, come to some stillness." It is my favorite thing to hear -- it sounds so simple. Just stop moving. But it's so, so hard.

Somewhere along my way I lost my ability to push the world's mute button and just chill out inside my own bones, which used to be my proudest accomplishment. Last week as I took some post-surgery painkillers and tried not to move, I ended up basically exclusively moving. Little spasms in my toes. An itch on my shoulderblade I couldn't resist. It was like how when someone says "Don't think of a tree," you start seeing leaves falling from the ceiling, roots forming under your floorboards; your eyelids morph into tree trunk silhouettes and, of course, you fail. There is an entire forest in your mind in precisely the place you've told it not to be.

I had surgery last week. When I was coming out of the anesthesia and it was time to get dressed, I didn't know where to begin. The task felt beyond my capabilities. The recovery room nurse pulled a curtain around me and someone unearthed my bag (and it is just now occurring to me that I don't know how that happened, it had been in a locker and I'd had the key and now here it is, two weeks later, and I don't know.) and K. helped me up and into my yoga pants and favorite, paint-stained American Apparel v-neck. Something about having people in a waiting room for you, only there to see you through it, is too tender, too much, that between that and my bodily trauma I started to cry, that kind of tremble that starts in your chin, below your lower lip. The kind you're just completely powerless to stop. I was just getting dressed. I was fine. I didn't need to cry. I didn't know why I was.

"Yoga breaths," K. told me. So I pictured my studio, the fuzzy lights, the way my heart balloons up in there, and I stepped into my shoes and cardigan and just breathed.

Later in the car on the way home (the driver having been instructed to take the turns slowly and my goodness, it felt like hours but true to his words, I barely felt a jostle), the tremble came on again. I watched B. out the car window, walking to the subway station after saying goodbye for the night, and I saw a flicker of sympathy on the driver's face (the things they must see!) and I lost it.

"I don't know why I'm crying," I'd wailed, somewhere so deep on the east side I could probably hear the river if I'd cared to. I really didn't. I was fine. But my bed felt so far away, so many avenues and tunnels away, and I'd made everyone wait for me in a hospital, and I don't like to ask things of people, and I felt so desperate.

So I tried some yoga breaths, some more, and I tried to find some stillness, and now here I am, almost two weeks later, with stitches and scars and dead flowers and three new pretty vases to keep.

And I haven't done a down dog since before.

Image via

What is important is this:

Sometimes when I write a blog entry it feels like I am actually just writing certain people a letter, people who I know are reading this blog. Dear friends, I say, here is a spot of my day/week/month. Thought you would like to know. So here you go, my week in increments:

I found a penny in the corner of the bathroom counter this morning at work. It was tails up -- bad luck, so I didn't touch it. A few hours later, another penny had joined it. This one is heads up, which isn't important. What is important is this: is someone picking up pennies and putting them on the counter on purpose? Who would do such a thing? What does it all mean? [Edit from 5 minutes after posting this: NOW THERE IS A QUARTER ON THE COUNTER, WITH THE PENNIES. I am not kidding.]

Last night I had an amazing meal and an excellent time with some friends, and I caught myself falling down that rabbit hole of gratitude. (Surely helped by a dirty martini.) I got home too late to feel anything but indecent today, but I shall reward myself with an overdue reiki session this evening. My bones are calling out for it. I worry that I sometimes listen to my body too much, or not enough, but never just the right amount. My back hurts, I'll say. But maybe I just carry too much on my shoulders; maybe I just shouldn't have skipped my favorite yoga class this week. I need sleep, I'll think. But maybe it's just the weather, or the week, or the fact that when I'm home I like to watch the midnight episode of Friends before succumbing.

I am obsessed with Kate Christensen's blog, and if you aren't reading it, you should stop reading this right now and go here. And then cook me a meal from it.

Anyway, I think it is about to snow, and everyone here is kind of humming with it, like a perfume someone dropped over our block of SoHo. I am hoping it starts to feel like January.

Image via

Pearl Street love

• This summer I vacationed on Pearl Street in Beach Haven, my hometown, my heart.
• I have lately taken to wearing my deceased grandmother's ring; it's shiny and antique and makes me think of her, which is a strange, new feeling. We weren't close.
• One of my other grandmothers (this one) still lives in the Beach Haven house in which I grew up; it's an historic site on the island. (Literally.)
• In 1960, the Baldwin Hotel in Beach Haven, situated on the very same Pearl Street mentioned above, burned down.
• GHOSTS.

These are swimming in my head today. That's a picture of the Baldwin Hotel. Isn't it just gorgeous?

Image via

Goodbye, hello

I'm back in New York today, and it feels like an abandoned library, quiet and dusty, like someone forgot to put out the “closed until the New Year” sign on the bridges and tunnels. And I am okay with that. I love working the week between Christmas and New Year's. Really. I turn on some music and clean my office – physically and digitally – and try to shore things up and get new things started. So maybe this is the emo music Pandora is playing for me right now (live "Landslide" cover from the Dixie Chicks…live "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" cover from the Indigo Girls…you understand, surely), but I’m feeling…pensive? Contemplative? Moody and swoony at once?...as I try to nail down the feeling this time of year always brings.

Last week I finished something big, and am using this time to catch up on the rest of my life, on the books I can rarely ever read without guilt (I should always be doing Something Else with my time, after all), the shows I kept DVRing, which forced me to dodge spoilers on Twitter, the clothes I kept meaning to put away, the floors I kept meaning to sweep, the emails I kept meaning to write. This week, I shall do All the Things.

Meanwhile, I will wait for it to get cold. I want to see my breath puff out in the shape of my words. I want to wear my puffy coat. I want to start longing for warmth.

And meanwhile again, I will send a little thank you to the stars for making 2011 a year to remember, and I'll start suspecting that 2012 will be the best year yet, because they all seem to just be getting better.

Image via

The art of letters

As with most things in my life, I go through phases when it comes to writing Christmas letters. This year, I'm back on the horse, inspired by some beautiful cards I found at a shop in Hoboken, where three separate sales clerks asked me in a span of 75 seconds whether I needed any help (the answer all three times was no). I've spent the past few days choosing my list, choosing which card goes to whom, choosing my words. Choosing, at its most basic, whether I wanted to be sentimental or not; whether this was a time for saying I love you, I miss you, thanks for a great year, my life is complete because of you. I bought a silver pen, thick and fluid, which looks amazing against the red envelopes but a bit dim on the white ones. I am sorry to those of you for whom I chose the white cards over the red. You are missing out on some gorgeous ink.

There is something about writing things down on paper that feels more risky than it used to. Several times I started a message and then went to erase it before forgetting I couldn't. I am so used to writing on screens and deleting at will and never needing to commit to my words until I'm ready to hit the Send button that I froze; the meanings I meant to convey may have gotten muddled as a result. But the cards are stamped and sealed, and I don't even remember what I said in them, and there's now no way for me to check.

How did we all used to survive like this?

As I was scribbling them the other night, I told B. I wished I had been a Victorian lady so I could write letters all day, just spinning exhortations about missing friends and lovely years and taking turns around the garden, which I would surely have if I were a Victorian lady. After a beat, he burst into laughter and told me that was the most untrue statement I've ever made.

I think it was a compliment.

Image via

All the girls here are freezing cold

The lights moved over me but mostly, I was thankful for the darkness, the space to embrace some stillness. Next to me, T. was silent, a hand over her mouth, eyes straining to watch the French quartet, whose strings were plucked with something between precision and abandon. They were beautiful. We had just had an overdue conversation -- she's one of those friends we've dubbed "the extra Baden sister" -- that was cut short when the lights went down and the music started. I'm having trouble writing this post, and have stopped and re-started multiple times. I don't want to be dramatic. But it's hard not to be when I think about Tori Amos; my life with her. This weekend I saw both shows at The Beacon; I've lost count, but I think they were shows 41 and 42. (It's important to note my number is actually quite small in comparison to many other Tori fans; I remember talking to some people at a show during my college years who were on their 100th viewing, and that was 10 years ago.)

The thing is, Tori is a barometer for me. She is a photo album. When she sings "Beauty Queens" and leads right into "Horses," I cry, remembering being 16 and 17, sitting on the carpeted floor of my bedroom in front of my 7-disc CD changer; how I was a senior in high school, driving my first car and stalling out on a perfect Fall day, what that meant, who I thought I was. Then she pulls out a U2 cover, and then does a "God"/"Running Up That Hill" (Kate Bush) mash-up, and I think about being 15, or 22, and the same things happens -- a tide of memories.

I hope everyone has a musician, or something, they can mark their lives against the way I can with Tori.

My best girls either came to the shows with me or met up with us beforehand, or after, and it was like I felt the shift happen right under me: that, before, wasn't a memory, but this, here, now, is.

A rambling post about rain and attitude adjustments

I am suddenly fond of hoods on jackets, which is lucky, because last night it spitter-spattered harder than I anticipated on my walk home, a fine mist that steadily turned into a shower before disappearing altogether. I was just tucking my hair under my hood, marveling at how quiet the streets of SoHo were -- it felt like the neighborhood was all dressed up in holiday gear, with no place to go -- when I passed a mother and her pre-teen daughter. Arguing. "Adjust your attitude right now," the mother seethed. I couldn't help it -- I laughed. That line had been a favorite of my dad's when I was a kid.

My parents are fascinating parents. (Fascinating people, too, but that's a different story.) Without getting into too much detail, they both come from non-traditional (for the fifties and sixties) family homes -- one from a single-parent household, one from a twice-divorced household -- and now, as an adult, I glom on to those bits of their childhood, their life, whenever I can, because what they experienced is so incredibly different from the childhood they gave me. I honestly don't know if they made this decision consciously or not, but their mandate as parents has always been very clear: our children come first, and we will break the cycle; we will build a family of best friends.

It's amazing how well they succeeded. I sat at a long makeshift table last week, lined with 25-ish people, my favorites, my flesh, my heart. One of the centerpieces caught fire, and my former-fire-marshall father just laughed. And I thought about attitude adjustments, and how I felt loved and cherished and special just by simply being a part of them, and how that's the only attitude I really need.

Anyway, back to the angry mother-daughter pair in SoHo. Oh, darlings, I know your pain; I remember it well, the way I would pick and pick at my mother's scabs until she would snip at me or, worse, cry. (I am not proud.) It's funny, the way we can get so mad at the people we love most. Like loving them gives us the permission to also hate them, even for just a moment, simultaneously.

Image via

It's the most wonderful time of the year

I am sitting here researching pie recipes for Thanksgiving. The house across the street has twinkling lights strung up over its windows. This week I'll drive out to my sister's place in PA, which feels like such a holiday thing to say, where a big group of 20+ of us will enjoy each other's company (and, hopefully, enjoy some delicious pie) and toast our gratitude and shower kisses on the babies.

I am an autumnal, wintry lady, one who feels most like herself when the leaves have turned and begun falling; when frozen sparkles have formed on car windshields and my scarves have formed a messy burst of colors on the floor of my coat closet. (Or, perhaps I just need to clean out my coat closet.) So this week and next, this line between one holiday and another, one season and another, has always felt like it was meant for me. I float through it, hug everyone a little tighter, and hurt my cheeks from smiling so much.

I have a crazy amount of things to be thankful for. That has always been the case, but it feels even more true this year. Yesterday I was speaking at a conference for students and stumbled over my words for a moment as I tried not to say "Well, I'm just a lucky person" while explaining my career path. Because, while I believe that's true, there's also work involved, and an attitude, and a required perspective. K. likes to enforce the Thanksgiving rule of everyone announcing one thing they're thankful for this year before we break bread, and if we do that this year, I will have too much to say and will have to skip my turn.

Plus, it's always hard to top my cousin J.'s answer from 2006-ish. "What am I thankful for this year?" She said. "One Tree Hill. It was a great season."

Let's see what show she invokes this year.

Image via

Names

None of the women in my immediate family have middle names. (For context, the men do; my extended family does too, mostly.) It used to be a point of contention for me; I used to long for an extra word to call my own. One car ride nearly two decades ago, probably, I declared I'd take my twin sister's name as my middle, if she would take mine as hers. If you know K., you can probably guess that she declined the offer. (Of the two of us, she's usually the one who tried to stray from the idea of our twinship, at least moreso than me.) I dropped the idea.

When my older sister named her children, those two munchkins who light up my life in ways I couldn't have comprehended, so much so that I worry I may never love my own hypothetical future children as much as I love them, she gave them middle names. She gave them with thought, with weight; a history.

Somehow the subject of middle names came up last weekend -- a family joke-fight (you know the kind) where my mom and my aunt bet on how their mother, my grandmother, spelled her middle name. (For the record, my aunt won. Sorry mom.) But isn't that funny, that my grandmother's daughters didn't even know for sure? A call to the eldest sister in Florida, my other aunt, had to be placed. Documents were unearthed. And finally, someone just called up my mom-mom and she solved the riddle herself. (As is the family way, there's more to the story; it turns out, she gave her middle name to her eldest daughter as a middle name too, but changed the spelling, so the confusion on all sides was justified.)

The outcome is, middle names are weird, but also beautiful in a family-history-is-neat-and-important kind of way, and now I'm considering taking her middle name as mine. Morgan Mae.

Image via

Celebrating

One Thursday night, when I was in my mid-twenties and thought nothing of dancing in hotel bars until midnight, every night, while putting in 12-hour workdays, I watched a coworker of mine order a glass of champagne during happy hour. She liked champagne, she said. She wasn’t celebrating anything in particular; it was just a Thursday. I hadn’t known you could do that.

Now I wonder why we don't all do it more often. There is something to celebrate every day -- some new stone turned, some smile won, some baby born or trip planned or book finished or even just a day when the sun rose and set like usual, but spackled unimaginable colors across a hardwood floor.

I like to make occasions out of things. I always have a bottle of champagne on hand, just in case I come home one evening, reeling from an exciting email or phone call, or even just when I just feel that kind of breezy happiness that requires acknowledgement. When new or old friends come over, I like to set out cheese plates and fancy napkins; I make new playlists. It is important to solidify moments. And it doesn't always need to be with cameras. Sometimes the documentation in our bones, our minds, is enough.

After a completely excellent day yesterday, the kind where you wander, not at all lost, and end up in perfect places at perfect times, we finished out the evening in my family's favorite restaurant, and I ordered a sweet, bubbly Moscato. It reminded me of California and France and Ecuador and New York all at once, and I got caught up in counting my luck, at how much of the world I've seen and loved and the people I know and how good they are, which never ceases to amaze me, even though I get to live it every day, and I raised my glass.

Image via DIVA007

Macbeth in a hotel

I had a rushing, swooping swell of love for New York yesterday. It just hit me as I emerged from the subway, feeling sunshine on my cheekbones for the first time in days. After a few false starts, it's finally fall on the East Coast. That tumbling love feeling stayed with me all day, and then all night as I shuffled myself, behind a white mask, at the McKittrick Hotel for Sleep No More.

It is hard to explain the experience. (If you want to understand what it is, read this NYT review.) (Potential spoilers ahead.)

In a silent elevator, the conductor, with his Irish lilt, blocked me from leaving on the third floor, even though K, E, and S had already spilled out. The doors closed and I stifled a giggle; no one could see my smile when the conductor leaned into me and whispered, "I think you'll find luck tonight."

I did. The first room I discovered when I was finally let off had a single crib centered in a shaded room; bursting up above it were about 75 headless baby dolls, frozen in a choreographed routine. I stood there alone, taking it in; an actor appeared and performed a show around the crib, just for me. She left, and I stayed.

That was my favorite floor of Sleep No More -- children's bedrooms, filled with vintage books and strewn-about bedclothes. An office, with open drawers I could rifle through, letters half-written in old Smith-Coronas. A parlor, with chaises covered in white sheets; a turntable playing old jazz, the kind of haunting music I can't get out of my head. I went back to that floor twice, just to re-check on the bedrooms, to see if the same books were still open to the same pages; to see if the dolls had moved.

Eventually I made my way to the next floor, where I watched  a woman hanging laundry (it was actually wet -- a nice touch); then a bell rang, and she paused, shrugged on a jacket, and the crowd of about 30 rushed after her. She ended up walking through a wooded maze and meeting up with another nurse; they drew on the ground with chalk and kissed. They were in a tragic sort of love.

In the psychiatric ward I stood alone, surrounded by empty beds with diagnoses nailed to the walls and blood on the sheets. I waited for an actor or a dancer to appear -- there was so much potential in that room -- but when none showed, I reluctantly left, wandering until I found a woman trying to leave her husband, suitcase in hand; he threw her against a wall and left. You have to find your own show in Sleep No More.

Back in the lounge, I took off my mask and listened to French '30s music and relished my returned visibility; the mask had made me feel like a ghost, like a peeping Tom. For a second I forgot I didn't need to be scared anymore -- the game was over.

Today, in Things I Can't Get Enough Of: The Secret Circle, and season reads

"Planets are gathering at the key north, south, east, and west angles of your chart, and those are considered to be highly energetic points." Here is an excerpt from my horoscope this month. (Truly, read Susan Miller. She is amazing.)

I suppose it's because I don't have a religion -- there is much to say about that, and all of it positive -- but because I don't, I've always been intrigued by the universe. The first thing I do whenever I step outside after sunset is look for the moon. I have a cluster of stars tattooed on my inner left ankle. I believe in the power of the elements. I have energy shifts in my body, I have experiences that can't be explained. I try to be conscious of what I offer the world, and what I take.

I tend to read seasonally. In the autumn, I want crisp books, fresh starts, high school hallways, Homecoming dances. I want the turning of the leaves to breathe through my pages. I want sharp winds. I got all of that, plus a lesson in crystals and books of shadows, in The Secret Circle books.

I've talked about witches before, how I still half-expect that someday on an important birthday I'll wake up with powers, or will find myself tapping on tree roots, barefoot in a nightgown, after sleepwalking through a dream. (I don't know. There are no woods around me. I don't even wear nightgowns. And yet, this expectation persists.) Clearly, I'm not the only one with an affinity towards them, especially this time of year, my favorite.

The Secret Circle series is from the early 90s, and you can tell that's the case, and I mean that in the best way. They are vastly different from the television show that's on the CW this season. [I like the books better, but that's so boring to say; they're certainly darker and more dramatic -- but less melodramatic -- than the show, and much more thoughtful.] I read them intensely. I bought some (more) crystals. They did that thing where they seeped into my brain and I kept forgetting whether my memories were from the books or from real life.

I never plan it, but every year in October, I have a day where autumn in all its glory fully hits me. I'll find myself with a free afternoon, or an open weekend, when some cable channel I forgot I had is playing a creepy-movie marathon. I unearth my Halloween decorations and light some candles, and the evening paints itself around me as I get lost in some other world. This time, it was in an old high school in Massachusetts, with a 12-person-strong coven and a quilt tangled around my feet.

Thoughts from underground

I like sitting in an empty apartment with the windows open and my curtains wafting up and down and back and forth as waves of thunder move their way down my block. The cars make so much noise; there is always sound, and I'm reminded that there is much to love about city living -- the convenience, of course, but also the community, the way this place changes from hour to hour. I marvel at the sheer number of people who must live on my single block, how most of us migrate to the river to ride an underground train twice a day; how decades ago, someone decided that was a good idea, and people got to work building something once unimaginable, and so here we are. And yet. Then there is the beach, especially in winter, where the long streets are wide and quiet; the sand, unsifted and lonely. I have a special affinity for deserted resort towns; I imagine if I were a photographer that would be my project -- a global trek, in the off-season, to all the beaches of the world, snapping the extended shadows and peeling boardwalks and abandoned plastic buckets. But I'm not a photographer, and I have a job I love and people and tall buildings and sleek sidewalks I couldn't live without. So here I am, still always splitting my time between the two.

I suppose that's my solution, though it feels entirely too indulgent and yet, oddly, also within reach.

My deep confession is that I don't know where I want to live, so I just keep living here and there and the roads in between. The drive is always nice, at least.

The requisite post about banned books

I used to sneak into my big sister's room to steal two things: her Seventeen magazines and her VC Andrews books. I laugh now, really, at how different those two types of reading are, and yet at the time -- when I was 10 and 11 -- they seemed to represent the same thing to me: maturity. The answers to the secret questions I hadn't yet formed. What the world must look like beyond my little beach town in the woods.

I think there's an age range where a controversial book sails right over a kid's head; like when I read Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret in third grade and had NO IDEA what was going on, but was completely unconcerned by it. (I'm pretty sure I read it, shrugged my shoulders in confusion, and put it back on the bookshelf and grabbed another Baby-sitters Club.)

And then, of course, there's the age where controversial books TERRIFY you. And I am staunchly pro-books-that-terrify -- and of course, pro-books-that-make-you-question-everything-you-thought-you-believed.

I don't read VC Andrews today, and I'm sure I would probably find them overwrought and, well, kind of gross if I did, but that's okay. They are still important books, because they're books that partly formed (and informed) me. And I am grateful beyond belief that I had parents who encouraged all of my reading, no matter what kind or how inappropriate.

So thanks to them, and to my sister for her frankly uncreative hiding places.

Retreat dreams

I read a quote* the other day about how, if you leave someone or a group of people feeling anything less than stellar about yourself, or the world, or the future, or the past, you’re spending time with the wrong people. Tonight is my monthly girls’ dinner, which sounds like some sort of Sex and the City throwback or feminist coven or sorority meeting, and it sort of is all three of those, in a way, but mostly it’s just a set time in the calendar for me to catch up with some of my favorite people; people who leave me feeling like I’ve risen when we part.

I’ve had this overriding need for a “break” lately – from lots of things, but nothing I can really name, so it’s hard to explain – and today, as I crammed myself into a subway car, carrying heavy bags that leave ridges in my shoulders, trying to amp myself up for another long day, because aren’t they all just so long? Is it just me?, I let myself entertain the notion of escaping. And I mean really escaping – like, withdrawing from the known world for a month, retreating to a cabin in Montana with no internet access, and just decompressing and being and thinking and writing.

It’s a lovely daydream, but alas. I can’t. There is too much to do, always, and there is always a fine sheen of guilt for not getting it all done in the time or manner on which I had planned, and I am an adult, despite this hissy fit I seem to be having, who should be willing and able to handle her own baggage, and my problems are first world problems anyway, because as Louis C.K.’s standup goes, I could be someone who hasn’t had a glass of clean water in a decade, or someone whose daughter never came home, but instead I am an American, a thriving one, who has nothing to complain about (other than the crazy Tea Partiers and my eroding reproductive rights). And plus, I just really want to see these friends tonight, and every month, for our dinner, which I would not be able to do from a cabin in Montana.

*Okay, it was someone’s Facebook quote. But it was attributed to a real person. I just can’t remember who.

Image via

Processing time

I slipped out in between rain showers last night to unearth Freedom from my car, where it had been sitting since my beach evacuation, and turned in early to catch up on it. it had been so long -- nearly two weeks! -- since I'd last picked it up that I had to re-read some pages, finding the groove I'd been in.

It came quickly. And so I read, the weight of the pages, the binding, tiring out my arms. (I may be too used to ebooks these days. I've lost my reading muscles.)

Anyway, a few pages in I was reabsorbed, and after some time had passed I looked up at a sudden noise and was surprised to find I was at home instead of on the Pearl Street beach. There was no sun -- just my ceiling light. A trickle of sand rained down on my stomach, nearly landing on my bed, but it wasn't the same, of course. It couldn't be.

I spent some time in Sri Lanka one January, rebuilding houses washed away by the 2004 tsunami. Back then I wrote this about it on 100words.com:

Underneath a waning moon we sat on the ledge of the bar, silent. There is too much to think about tonight, this last night here. The fact that we are all here together; that this trip has changed us all; that we will never be as close as we are right now. So instead of thinking, I am watching: the look of triumph in Czech Peter's eyes. The smirk on Buraq's mouth. The thatched roofs and surfboards lining this bar, reminding me of LBI. I am taking it all in one last time, because I will never be here again.

I just remember sitting there, carving out the moment, knowing it would never be able to be recreated. And I suppose that's what everything is, most of the time: a moving memory. Things change so quickly that we can never relive the best times; they're never quite the same, despite identical staging and direction. The planets just never realign. Freedom is just not the same in my apartment as it was on the beach.

Sometimes I coast alongside work and life for weeks at a time, and then suddenly stop and gasp for air, for time to process. It can take minutes or hours for me to realize what's happened, where I've been, what it means. Even when it's mundane. It all just has to find its way into my bones. It has to become part of my story.

I did that last night, listening to the alternating silence and showers, like footfalls on the roof. And I'm doing it now, and this is my way of thanking you all for letting me.

How do you work?

This is a week between vacations, so I'm back at work but prepping to leave again -- this weird push/pull between settling back in and jetting off. (Tough life, right? Two vacations within three weeks? Also, my diamond shoes are too tight.) (+1,000 if you get the reference.) (I mean, not like Friends is this underground reference or anything.) (Yes, shuddup, I still love Friends.) I'm still reveling in last week, despite its harried ending. For example, my friend T. is a real treat, and I think last week was the most concentrated amount of time I've spent with her. She comes and goes as she pleases, generally; at the beach, this meant she would be her birdlike little self in the kitchen most mornings, mixing hummus and chopping vegetables and seeping some strange-smelling tea, before disappearing for hours on end. She doesn't text as a general rule, so we just had to trust she (and the second key -- and with a house full of nine people, that second key is critical) would come back before nightfall and join us for dinners. She always did. But that's a different story.

She had work to do on vacation -- a syllabus for a college class she teaches -- and I, needing to get some writing time in (#omgIamsoclosetofinishingthisbookbutnotreally), commiserated. One afternoon we left the beach early, closing the glorious day behind us to retreat into a quiet-for-once house. I made an Arnold Palmer (um, with vodka. It was vacation!) and settled myself into the kitchen table, earphones on, and pumped out 1,200 words. T., meanwhile, did not. As best I can tell, she cleaned (much appreciated), fluttered about, and stared at me a lot.

As it turns out, she is one of those "everything must be perfect and I must have a routine" kinds of workers/writers -- her hot chocolate must be made just so, her desk must be clean, her fingernails filed, and so on. As she put it later, she "must be ready for inspiration." She didn't understand how I, with my sandy feet and a house full of ladies coming and going and talking, Madonna playing in the background, could shut out the world and write for a while, right there in the center of the kitchen.

This is the thing one learns after being paid to write for years on end: you can't be precious about it.

A few years ago, I booked a "writing retreat" for myself. It was the off-season on my beloved island, and I escaped from the city, armed with my laptop and a driving need for solitude, and stayed on the deserted island for three days, intending to finish my first manuscript. It was awesome. It was helpful. It was productive. And I plan on never doing it again.

I love writing, but sitting down to actually do it is the hardest part of the process for me. And I needed to teach myself to be able to write anywhere and everywhere, no matter what's happening around me, whether there's some decaf brewing or not. And this applies to my professional writing as well as my personal. Because there are always deadlines to meet, and there's usually not always a chance to disappear for four days, in a silent hotel on an empty beach, to meet them.

Though, seriously, how incredible would it be if there were?

How do you work -- with a routine, or without?

Image via