a writer I’ve never read

Jane Austen.  Her books are classics.  There are only six, I think, but they are internationally known and make the English very proud.  Today Barbara and I went to Chawton to visit the house where she did the bulk of her writing (and revising), and I learned that her first books were published under the name “A Lady” and then “by the same author as Sense and Sensibility.”  Those Brits sure are proud of someone they initially tried to supress.  I suppose it was the early 1800s, after all.

They have a writer in residence at her house, and you can do workshops there (unfortunately none this month or the next, which I was bummed about).  She has a blog, too.

The thing that most surprised me about the house was the tiny table that she supposedly wrote at– smaler than an end table, a little low circular table you’d probably put a small lamp on, or a vase of flowers.

Jane Austen's writing table

When I write, I like to be spread out.  It’s hard to imagine being productive at such a small table.  Or without having access to a computer where you can store word documents with pages and pages of notes, or thoughts, and internet where you can look up pretty much anything about anything, any time you need to.  That might be an interesting exercise to do, having to write a complete work just sitting at one table.  I guess that’s how she acheieved her supposedly incredible imagery and attention to detail– she wrote about what she knew, and she knew it very well.

starts, finishes

While watching videos that Benny and Tori and Kim took at MMR, I started thinking about how my two summers there have sort of blended together, and how if I go again it will be distinct because it will not be a consecutive year, and this summer I won’t be going.  Then I realized it’s only winter and not next summer yet (although I’ve already decided that I’m not going back to MMR in 2010) and I have this completely distorted sense of time from not being in school for 7 months (and one more to go!) I guess I’m nearing the end of my self-proclaimed 8 month adventure.

What I can appreciate now about school is the structure of time it provides my life.  Now, time has floated and sped and drifted and shuffled by, randomly at times, and here I am, in December, Christmas, not recovering from finals, for the first time in years.  Which is nice.  But there’s something to be said for school, as it does give me something to constantly look forwards to, like the end of the semester, or graduation– there’s always a goal, and then a chance to start again (never completely, but at least in some way).  And there really isn’t much of that in adult life.  At HSC time just progressed, and the end in sight was December 11, the last day of my internship there.  But for those staff who were really adults and there for an indefinite amount of time, there was no end in sight, no completion to most projects they worked on, no boundaries really.  Not that they had nothing to work towards, because they did (the next newsletter, study circle, Changemaker conference), but adult life just seems so damn CONTINUOUS.

What is there to work towards? Saving for a vacation, or buying a house, or having kids.  But there seems to be so little time for personal journeys towards more skills or knowledge or understanding.  It’s just life, not school, or summer, or classes, or an internship.  That scares me.  I like things to look forwards to, boundaries, knowing that there is an end, or something big is coming to change the way things are.  I like working towards final papers, or dance performances, or finishing a story.  And I can do these things later, if I do write, and continue to dance (which I hope I will!) but it will be just me, not me and 6,000 other people also working towards the end of the semester.  Which is why, I guess, it will be nice to be with other people whose stuff becomes my stuff too, so I can be there when they get promoted, or move to my city, or have a shitty day, or have their own performances and things published and accomplishments.  Basically, I like community– this, I knew already.  I guess I just kind of remembered it tonight.  But I’m also realizing that being in a community allows for much more individual satisfaction too.  The whole benefits the individual, completes her.

reflections, (re)solutions

I was reflecting on the year, thinking about resolutions and all, since it’s almost time for that.  Not that I ever make resolutions really.  I was in Miami and listening to Reba who was a guest on 99.9 Kiss Country, and she said that this year her resolution was to not make a resolution, since she never really kept hers anyway.  Except one time, when she decided to take a picture every day.  And she did it til March, and still has all the pictures, but has never looked at them or shared them so what was the point, she thought.  The radio host said he’s like to see them and put them up on the Kiss Country website.

I know it’s Christmas Eve and not New Years, but I was thinking about things that happened this year, and thought it was much better to count up new things that happened this year rather than make (re)solutions for next year.

For instance, every Christmas Eve, my dad, whether he liked it or not, read me Twas the Night Before Christmas before I went to bed.  That won’t happen this year.  This will be the first year my family didn’t get a tree (no matter how last minute it is) and decorate it with the same ornaments and candy canes, and put up our other weird little decorations like the tissue paper wreath I made in some daycare or preschool class, and the handprint wreath on a piece of potato sack that we sometimes hang on a door.  This year I also didn’t get the opportunity to sneakily hang bells on doors of my house until my mom noticed and took them down.  There will be no shopping trips with my dad to the Clinique counter at Nordstrom to buy my mom makeup, and no stockings full of maple santas and little notebooks and nice things.  I didn’t get to light Chanukah candles with my mom and exchange small presents each night, and have Carolyn and Sara over to make latkes.  I missed out on Carolyn’s Christmas cookies, and getting to drive around in the Volvo to deliver them all around.  And I didn’t get to walk down 28th avenue to see the lights by St. Greg’s.

That said, I did a bunch of new things this Christmas.  I just got back from a Christmas Eve party at Barbara and Jennie’s friends’ house, and I’ve been shopping with them a couple of times.  I tried some sort of British food… something with bread pudding and beef in a pastry, dunno what it was called.  And tomorrow we’re going to Step by Step to cook and eat with the residents there, which should be rowdy and fun.  I also got to go get a tree with Don and his family at a farm where there was a reindeer, pigs, some really ugly turkeys, and a really cute puppy that Jennie wanted to steal and take home.  And I’ve eaten some delicious Christmas biscuits and chocolates which is always good.  The UK really has us topped on good sweets.  And in Florida I lit candles with my Grandma (for the first time I can remember) and we made latkes which were delish.  These are probably not new lasting traditions for me, but it is nice to see how other people celebrate holidays.

I have done lots of new things this year.  I went to Canada the first time, when a bunch of us went to Montreal and Bonnie came along and we had a fun time President’s day weekend going to bars and seeing Ben Gold’s friend at McGill.  And of course, the Biodome was amazing.  And on the drive back, me, Pank, Isabel, and Bonnie all walked across frozen lake Champlain in Burlington, and Pank fell in the ice a bit and cut her hand.

I also started playing Ultimate this year, which meant learning a whole new sport when the last time I had played a sport was probably softball in 6th grade.  I had a great time roughin it on Jibba Jabba, playing savage and learning the game.  Then I got to play on STD at UM which was a ton of fun!

This year I got to spend more time with family than I have maybe since I lived in New York, what with seeing my Grandma and TomSharon&Nina in Florida, then being with Barbara and Jennie here.  And I saw Grandpa Frank and Grandma Ginger for Thanksgiving, and all my third cousins and mom and Grandma’s cousins at Gordon’s wedding in Ogunquit in early September.

I learned how to drive a boat at camp…I spent last New Year in San Francisco with my friends…I learned how to cook a lot of new things…I had my first internship/office job…I drove a big white van, which was my first care (not that I owned it, but I did drive it every day)…I stayed up for over 24 hours (when I flew to England)…I navigated the subway system in NY…I saw Common and The Wailers in Miami…I tried Cuban food, Haitian food, ceviche, roe, proscuitto, and became a non-vegetarian once more…I became a lifeguard…and a safewalker…and took a linguistics class…performed at the Black Rep in downtown Prov…drummed in a play…went to New Orleans twice…swam in the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Tahoe…made a pumpkin pie from scratch…learned Mande dance traditions and almost went to Mali…almost went to Israel…lead Primalfest (twice)…and a backpacking trip…developed an affinity for country and bluegrass…spent my spring break playing ultimate in Georgia and partaking in ridiculous traditions at a beach house in North Carolina…played a little guitar…started a blog.

That’s a whole lotta things, and those are mostly the tangible ones.  Maybe I’ll conquer the intangibles in another post, but it’s 11:24 and I have to go to bed before Santa gets here!

And to all a good night…

10/14/09

Wrote this in my journal on 10/14/09.  Thought it was worth sharing.

What if I woke up each morning knowing all the things that would happen that day?  I could properly prepare for the whole day, knowing who I’d meet, what connections I’d make, and how the day would unfold.

Sometimes I try to live my days this way, mostly when I’m at Brown.  I look at my planner and see a full schedule of events—meetings, classes, lectures, lunch dates, coffee, rehearsal, frisbee practice, phone calls.  Days like this go by so fast and yet so slow.  I’m constantly thinking of the next thing on my agenda, how much time I have to get there, when I’ll eat, or pee, or drink some water.  And then something goes wrong.  I meet a friend, he tells me he heard that lecture was going to be terrible, or sold out, or there was a better once starting in half an hour across campus.  So I change plans.  And the schedule has to be shifted, I’m late to class, I consider skipping practice at the end of the day because I’m so wiped from hopping from spot to spot all day.

Are these days better than those for which the calendar is blank?  I’m not so sure.  If I had known in the morning that I’d meet that friend and see such a bomb lecture, I suppose I could have been excited in the morning when I woke up, and all day long after that.  But with the way the day unfolded, it was a surprise.

I’ve decided that it’s the surprises that make my days.  For a while now, my friend Scott has been telling me to be happy each day.  I finally realized that I didn’t quite understand, so I asked him what he meant.  Did he mean that I had to be happy all day, every day?  Or just have at least one happy moment each day?  He told me that what he really meant was for me to wake up happy, or at least content with where I was and what I’d be doing.  So then I thought, what happens on days when I wake up having nothing to look forward to?  That’s where the surprises come in  Knowing each day that something unexpected will happen is reassuring to me; like change, it is the only constant.

I think this all ties back to present time, a concept I was first exposed to when I did improv with HIT my senior year of high school.  Andy stressed present time as a crucial tool not only for improv, but for life too.  Acknowledging the percentage of our lives that are accounted for by surprises only reaffirms my interest in present time.  Living in the moment is the only thing that makes sense when I think about how much of what is to come simply cannot be known or planned for.  That’s not to say that I’m ignoring my future at large, but on a day to day, or really a moment to moment basis, if I want to be happy, there is no way to do so other than by focusing on and engaging in right here and now.

How often am I excited for the next five months?  Almost always. (ex. right now the next five months include Christmas, New Years, more time in England, Scotland, going back to Brown and living in a real house with Mark Katie and Ben, maybe BOLT leading, hopefully dance, definitely frisbee, writing, spring break ’10, hopefully Bonnie visiting, etc…) But how often am I excited for the next five minutes?  Rarely. And how often do I know what these minutes will hold?  Also rarely. The numbers don’t match up.  Surprises are exciting.  I’m trying not to forget that the contents of so many minutes in my day are actually unknown, and it’s refreshing to know that.

average price: 62.5¢

Went to the Miami Public Library Book Sale.  Amazing.  Here’s a list of the books I got, with their original prices (if known):

PLAYS

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee $6.99

CLASSICS

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne $3.99

NOVELS

• Native Son by Richard Wright (I feel like I remember Ms. Maniego, my HS junior year English teacher, mentioning this book.  We might have read Black Boy in her class) $12.95
• White Oleander by Janet Fitch (seen the movie… now I can read it) $7.99
• Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood (she came to Miami during the book fair but I forgot she was speaking and missed it!) $13.95
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Lori’s favorite book, she’s been telling me to read it) $12.00
• The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd (Lori also recommended this to me when we first met in the kitchen at HSC! I was so happy to find it) $14.00
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood $7.99
• The River by Gary Paulsen (going to give this to Nina, because she loved Hatchet and is looking for more books to read) $1.99
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (one of my favorite books, also read in Ms. Maniego’s class.  We also read parts of it as a study of writing in Lawrence Stanley’s class, and probably Meredith Steinbach’s too.  I already have it but now I can give it to somebody else) $14.95

OTHER

• The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton (he also wrote How Proust Can Change Your Life, the Brown class of 2011 freshman summer reading book) $13.00
• Miami by Joan Didion (had borrowed this from Cal for basically the entire time I was in Miami, read about 40 pages, and then returned it to him.  The next day I found this book at the book sale and am so excited that I now have it and can read later, esp since I never got around to reading the chapter about Overtown, which is the whole reason he lent me the book in the first place) $17.95
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (it’s about writing… pretty sure I saw and maybe bought this book in Half Moon Bay a few years ago, but the cover called out to me again so I bought it.  Maybe I’ll pass it on if it turns out I already have it) $12.95
• Maggie: Girl of the Streets and other short fiction by Stephen Crane (last semester I shopped a class called Reading New York, and the class had already read this story and was discussing it when I sat in on the class.  I ended up taking “The Arrangement of Words”: Liberating Fiction(s) instead, but was intrigued by the story) $4.95

Total should have been: upwards of $145.65

Total was: $10

It’s kind of like I just got two books for each night of Chanukah.  Happy holidays!

day

I realized that I rarely just write about what I do throughout the day.  Maybe that’s because it’s not that interesting. Let’s find out.

I woke up at 6:45. Yes it is Sunday, and this is a ridiculous time to have to get up ANY day of the week, esp Sunday.  When I came into the kitchen, Rob and Daniella looked very concerned and were like, “what are you doing?” which is understandable seeing as I usually wake up past 11 on Sundays.   Rob joked “We saw the light on under your door and thought, if Lindsay’s up, then we have to get up to! Something must be going on.”  Well, something was going on.  I had to get to the IM fields parking lot at UM at 7:55 to catch a ride to Landshark Stadium in North Miami (it is literally on the border with Broward County).  11 of us were scheduled to volunteer to raise money for frisbee.  We would be “beverage hawking,” which means carrying big cardboard boxes of beer through the stands and selling them the rowdy fans, all while wearing a hideous yellow patterned polo and a visor that Landshark was supposedly providing.  We were told to wear black shoes (not converse!), black pants (not jeans!), white Tshirts (tucked in!), and deodorant. Ha.  I found some black pants in the closet, they were men’s and smelled musty but hey, they worked.

Anyway we drove there and parked and were taken on a bus with the other employees and then waited outside until 10… mind you I had already been up for over 3 hours already.  After hearing what we would be doing, what with the cardboard beer boxes slung around our necks, and learning that we would only be making $70 each instead of the $100 we had been promised, we decided to peace out and drove back to Coral Gables to enjoy some bagels at Einstein Bros.

After this I went home by 11:30, and lay in my bed reading for a while.  And facebooking of course. Also decided to cook later, so I went to defrost some ground turkey that I would need to make chili, and check around the kitchen for various other ingredients.  Then I napped from approx 1:30-5:30.  Then I got up and facebooked some more, and showered.  Then it was chili time!

And while I cooked I listened to Billy Joel. And while the chili simmered I called my mom and did more facebooking (I have recently become obsessed with tagging old photos from my albums as far back as senior year of high school.  I love old pictures) and checked out my bank account and checked email.  And posted the chili recipe on my cooking blog. And then I came here and wrote on this blog.

Later I’ll probably go watch this movie “Songcatcher” about the Irish roots of Appalachian folk music. Lynne from my office lent it to me.

So that’s my day… I’m pretty sure this will be an incredibly boring post to read and I think in the future I’ll refrain from detailing my daily activities.

MAGNETIC or NOT?

In middle school, possibly in Ms. Ganim’s 7th grade Bio class, the one where we watched a video of a woman giving birth and Ms. Ganim couldn’t pronounce some word that we all made fun of her for, we watched an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy that has stuck with me to this day.  Please view below (youtube to the rescue!)

Woah– okay, while searching for an appropriate vid I happened upon a fantastic  drinking game all about Bill Nye the Science Guy!

Here’s the vid– the relevant section is from about 3:05-3:31

Wasn’t that great?  I sure thought so.

Anyway, the reason I thought of MAGNETIC or NOT? (although I do happen to think of it often for various reasons; it has obviously had a great impact on my life for at least 7 years) was because I found myself doing this thing in my head where I think about what I’m doing, and ask myself: PRODUCTIVE or NOT?  Sometimes I have trouble deciding the correct answer.  Sometimes I also have trouble convincing myself not to do this, because really, is it necessary for me to always be considering whether what I do is productive?

Well, let’s play the game.  Are the following activities PRODUCTIVE or NOT?

• tagging old photos on facebook (like, photos from high school)
• copy pasting guitar tabs from the internet into word documents and then manually re-spacing them when the spacing from the website isn’t retained properly
• finishing my book
• downloading free christmas music
• making shopping lists
• spending at least half an hour watching Bill Nye the Science Guy on youtube until I found the MAGNETIC or NOT episode

So… PRODUCTIVE or NOT? Only you can decide.