three-screen girl

Well, readers, it's happened. I've become a three-screen girl.

Back in college I used to marvel and, I admit, scoff at my friends who had elaborate double-screen desk set-ups with a laptop hooked up to a larger monitor, or a couple of desktop monitors wired together for gaming or programming or design purposes. (Note that I don't remember any of these being set up by girlfriends... just guys.)

But when I started working with social media I had about a week of working on a single screen before I had to dive into double-screen work. Another confession: I don't think I could get by without it. I got used to having, on average, 8 programs open at any given moment; several tabs open within each application; and completely different projects, or different parts of the same project, open on each of my screens (and sometimes multiple windows open side-by-side on one or both of the screens).

On Friday, my supervisor burst out, "That's it! I need a third screen!"

I immediately turned around and said, "I have been thinking the exact same thing for at least a week now."

And on Monday, we came in to find triple-screen set-ups on both of our desks.

And so far this week, I have been using all three. It's terrifyingly easy to get used to. I used my parents' desktop computer for something last week and found myself trying to drag browser tabs onto my nonexistent other screen. Believe it.

J. just got an iPhone last week and ever since then Siri has been the third guest at all of our activities. And just to illustrate how that affects our activities, here is an example of a conversation we might have A.S. (after Siri):

Me: What used to be the Pope's name before he was the pope?
J.: Siri, what was the Pope's name before he became pope?
Siri: I don't know what that is, "the popesname beef ole bee cane pope." Would you like me to search the web for it?

Then J. usually watches Siri search the web for the Pope's ex-name, and tells me the answer to my incredibly mundane question, by which time I have moved on to talking about another topic and am put off by being so rudely drawn back to something that is so five minutes ago.

"He's just excited," my friends tell me. "Give it a week."

To be fair, it's putting into perspective my own mobile use. I have caught myself on multiple occasions in the past grabbing my phone when we're out at a restaurant, saying, "Oh! That just reminded me, I need to text Jess about this thing we're doing on Friday. Do you mind?" And of course he always says, "It's okay, go for it, babe." But after I spend half a dinner sending texts I've been meaning to send all day but forgotten, I start feeling really guilty and put away my phone and vow never to send another text from the table ever again... And look up to see J. on his own phone across the table. So it may have been me who opened the door in the first place.

I've done the same thing at work in the past few weeks, and spent more than a few lunch breaks "talking" with my coworkers while really I was catching up frantically on the 7 games of Words With Friends I had going, and never had time within a WiFi-enabled area to actually play. At first I was so gung-ho about this game, because I love Scrabble but never have a chance to play it, and also because it put me in touch in a really cool way with some friends I don't talk to much under other circumstances. But if it takes me out of the moment, is it really worth it?

I LOVE not having cable and internet at home, and while I do switch on my 4G from time to time to check Facebook or email or my bank account or to look up directions to a place I'm going, I like being discouraged from getting stuck online instead of reading books, or going out somewhere, or sitting in the kitchen talking to my roomies. I like the fact that it's impossible for me to walk through the living room and glance at whatever show someone is watching and then look up again four hours later and realize I got completely sucked in to something I don't even remember. I like having to go to bars to watch sports. I like having an excuse not to watch the news, which is always so gory and sensationalist especially on TV. (ABC's 11:00 news is the worst.)

But then, on the other hand, Facebook keeps me in touch with some really good friends who no longer live up the hall. There are people I wouldn't know how to start talking to again, but I still feel connected to them through Instagram. I don't know what I (or all of you) would have done if I didn't write this blog, at least for the first couple of months out of school.

I've also met and stayed in touch with a decent amount of new friends here in Delaware through the internet. My friend Johnny and I primarily email each other, and we met at an event I found through a local writers' group on Facebook. Recently, I commented on a Facebook post of a friend who now works in St. Olaf's alumni office about Oles in Wilmington, and a day or two later got a message from one such Ole now living in Wilmington... Long story short, we've been hanging out at least every other week lately. How would we have found each other without the digital grapevine?

I hope I don't ever get so sucked into my job that I forget how to interact with people face-to-face. I hope I don't ever get so sucked into my smartphone that I forget how to unplug and have an actual conversation. I hope I don't ever lose my ability to leave my phone in my purse while I'm at dinner, and turn it off. I am working on myself first, before I start picketing Siri. I will draw a line between tech times and face time. (Ha, ha, see what I did there?)

But I can't in good faith say I want to cut this stuff out entirely. I hope it keeps getting easier to stay in touch with my farthest-flung friends and my respected classmates and colleagues. And when I say "stay in touch," I'm talking about maintaining meaningful connections. I feel like I'm doing fine on that front; so here's to my fourth and fifth screen of choice: your eyes, dear readers.

Thanks for reading! Now go outside and find someone to say hi to. If you're feeling really old-fashioned, you could even shake hands. Or hug.

cool your jets

In case anyone was wondering, posts with phrases like "most depressing ever" in the title get all-time low reads. Noted.

I am not on top of the world lately, as you might have noticed. I am having a few attitude problems; last night I fumed and muttered curses under my breath all the way to BodyCombat. I was late, despite my intentions of leaving half an hour early so I would have a few minutes to catch my breath and read and decompress. But there are not enough hours in the day. And then when I finally got into the parking lot with a minute to spare, I spent that minute plus one waiting in a long line of cars because someone at the front was waiting for one of the coveted close-to-the-building parking spaces to open up, and the vehicle leaving wasn't leaving as quickly as we all would have liked him to.

It never ceases to amaze/frustrate me when people cause this kind of mass disturbance only to snag a parking spot that will secure them a short walk from their car to the gym. Seriously?!

Anyway, as I pulled into a space (very far from the door) I realized: The only person who is feeling the heat of my generalized anger right now is me.

Which just made me more angry: if I could only get my shit together, none of this would have to be such a big deal and I could just be happy. But there are a few uncalibrated elements to my life right now.

A day or two after my last post, which I took as a "rock bottom" alert and the kick in the pants I needed to get back on the upswing, my horoscope hit the nail on the head:

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21). In some way, you are recovering your balance. Don't expect that this will happen just once. The dance of life requires you to be in a constant state of recovery.

You may recall my past post about homeostasis, with the sine curve diagram. I've just looked it up and I'm actually surprised to note that I wrote it almost exactly a year ago. Is this annual downswing a coincidence? Might there be some larger correlation between early- to mid-February and rock bottom alerts?

(I might also note that there is something circular in the fact that the aforementioned post mentions the recent engagement of a good friend, whom I have just recontacted to collaborate on a new post feature, coming Sunday. Stay tuned...!)

Last February what I was aching for was social connections. Girl time. Close friends and love to celebrate outside of my family. This year, as you might have noticed, I am starving for me-time. I pine, with a certain sense of le-grass-is-always-greener, for a lull in stimuli. I may be in the wrong career (public relations is famously fast-paced and high-stress), or in the wrong family (I come from a long line of crisis-finders), or just in the wrong body, for that matter; but a girl can dream, right?

My family spent a few days in Disney last week, so it fell to me to hang out with the cat. Now, many of you may assume this is not my dream come true, given the amount of time I spend tearing my hair out over the cats I live with in the Little Italy house; but somehow I adore my parents' cat, claws and all. She likes to play tag, and she's so soft, and she has a tiny, sweet meow, and she did curl up with me to watch a movie on a few occasions. I had the whole house to myself, and the whole weekend to myself, and I skipped four days of working out (unheard of!) and I went out to eat almost every day, and I didn't have to run into anybody if I didn't want to...

And yes, of course I am in the wrong body to completely slow down; of course I filled every moment with something to the point that Sunday night I nearly panicked when the sun went down; of course my to-do list is not and will never be a finite entity. But I realized this weekend that I need a vacation.

I need a day off, a day out of town, where I don't have to be anywhere and I don't have to do anything and I don't have to meet anyone.

If you're not one for these lofty lifestyle statements and deep psychoanalysis, I've got a great metaphor for you. (Ha ha, -phor for! ...Ahem.)

This week I also noticed J. throwing his car into neutral to cruise down a long hill, and probably overreacted on a grand scale. "It saves gas," he explained. "Well, not a ton... but still."

So I got the scoop, and as he talked me through it this whole new world opened up through my expanding consciousness. "Do you even understand what this means?!" (I might have been yelling a little...) "I would use this EVERY. DAY. on 48 on the way home from work! That lonnnnnggg hill..."

So the next day, I tried it. I glanced around like a crook, like I was sneaking snacks right as my mom called everyone for dinner.

I was not disappointed. Let me tell you: it was so oddly exhilarating. Just cruising in neutral.

I could still steer just fine; I could brake; I just couldn't accelerate. Any momentum I gained came solely from the results of some physics equation I never learned how to solve: the effect of gravity on the body of my little car, hurtling down the hill at 40...45...50 miles per hour. (The speed limit was 50, so cool your jets.) And I'd be willing to bet that I wouldn't suffer much from at least a temporary suspension of my ability to artificially accelerate. (Try coasting in neutral sometime, it's fun! Just don't forget to snap it back into drive before you put your foot back on the gas...)

I feel like I can say "cool your jets" to you guys because the universe has said it to me so many times this week. This is something that gives me hope, that gives me license to take a deep breath every once in awhile. First there was the horoscope. There were the two unusual invitations to go out and grab food with people I don't often go out and grab food with -- but great company, both of them. And then, another day or so later, when I was drinking tea like a fiend, looking for peace-- I got the same message twice on the tag of the Yogi tea bags. A gentle slap across one cheek and then the other. A mantra, not to follow dictatorially but to strive for. One of my now-and-then cosmic reminders to cool my jets.

 

and again i fail at not writing the most depressing posts ever

Happy almost-Valentine's day, readers! Also, happy Valentine's Eve and happy Galentine's day today; for tomorrow, happy Valentine's Day; and on Friday, happy Singles Awareness Day. I guess Monday is Presidents' Day too? Anyway, I hope you celebrate something this weekend.

I found this on my car today at work. Sometimes Jason leaves me windshield presents; sometimes I think I have a creepy stalker. I'm in a much better mood now than I have been for days, when I was pre-drafting this post in my head, but this really cute thing isn't a bad segue into my predetermined topic: gift-giving.

Sometimes when I'm writing a post I feel like my life is an episode of Seventh Heaven, where each episode is themed to a different life lesson and all the characters have individual encounters with the theme. It's really weird how things happen in sets; for example, this week I heard the following phrase twice from older male acquaintances: "I have a gift for you."

My first thought in both cases was, "Whoa." And quickly following that: "That's sad." Because in neither case did I really think there was anything implied in the gift; neither circumstance actually felt creepy. But I'm reminded of a post on my friend Liz's blog about the uncomfortable feeling of being objectified as an adult woman, which somehow feels far grosser and more threatening than being objectified as a college girl or even a teenager. What I got out of this post, at least, is that once you've been shamelessly ogled and drooled at by the last 9 guys you pass on the street, the 10th one can't do anything right. Even a genuinely friendly smile from him can't penetrate the 9 layers of dirt, which turns into armor when baked in the sun for even a minute.

What makes this situation even more disturbing to me is that both of these acquaintances fall into the category of writer friends -- not that writers can't be creepy, but I've found that writers in community give each other gifts all the time. And these gifts are often related to our shared passion: a poem or story; a book; a pen; a token of reminder to write every day. Yet I find it difficult to just say thank you. And the fact that I expect nothing good from my day to day interactions is a devastating fact to me.

This seems to be a common theme lately. Maybe I've just fallen into a late-winter darkness that will burn off like fog when spring comes. Already my afternoon commute is sunlit and that alone gives me hope. But then again...

If you're in the area, you probably couldn't avoid hearing about the courthouse shooting in Wilmington on Monday. Many of you nationwide probably also heard the news. In fact, I can say for certain that at least one of you has because on Monday evening, as I was sitting down to eat supper with my family, I got a phone call from someone who hasn't called in awhile. (I always try to take unexpected long-distance phone calls, for the record, friends.)

I picked up the phone and he said, "Oh good, you're alive."

"Yes, I'm alive," I said, confused.

"I was just listening to NPR and I heard that two women were shot in Wilmington so... I just wanted to check."

This is bizarre. I remember, too, when I was eleven and living in Upstate New York, and a very old friend texted me on September 11 to make sure everyone I knew was OK. It's always interesting to me what shakes the national conscience, what jogs our memory, what prompts us to get in touch.

And what puts us on the map. In 5th grade my hometown made the front page of Time for Kids with a picture of the frozen remains of First Presbyterian Church, which burned down overnight in the middle of January. It was a chilling, gorgeous photograph of a church in a town no one had heard of until it was struck by a particularly [visually] compelling tragedy. (For the life of me I can't find that photo.)

I'm getting distracted, though. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say there are shootings in Wilmington on a weekly basis; why did this one make the national news? I understand that too much happens in the world on a daily basis and the media can't report on all of it; the question has been asked before: What is newsworthy?

Chew on this: My uncle, a professor at Duke, investigates the connection between mental illness and violent crime. A week or two ago he was invited to interview with Anderson Cooper on a gun violence special; when they read up on his research they cancelled his interview. That freed him up to interview on Fox at the same time, but again when they read up on his research they cancelled.

So you might be wondering, what did his research say? Mental illness is not an accurate predictor of irrational violent crime. You can say that 7 percent of people with a serious mental illness have committed a violent crime, while only 2 percent of everybody else has done so. Or you can say that 96% of violent crimes are committed by people who are not diagnosed with a serious mental illness.

I mention this because it freaked me out to remember, so close to home, how subjective the news media is. I have even been struggling to listen to NPR lately because of all the violence. Not to mention the epic battles on my Facebook news feed on Monday about whether the courthouse shooting or the Pope's resignation was more important.

Here's what I think: WHO CARES?! We're talking about human experience here. We all look with our own eyes at everything, and everything that happens impacts someone very closely. Uncomfortably closely. We want to blame people with schizophrenia for mass shootings; we are afraid there is a deeper scandal broiling beneath Ratzinger's resignation; we are buying guns faster than ever before because "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

The problem is, nothing is either/or. I realize I think singularly in shades-of-grey (not FIFTY shades of grey, mind you -- just plain ol' shades of grey), but where I am black and white is that I cannot for the life of me understand why people forget that there are always two sides of every story. Scratch that-- there are at least two sides to every story, and I would venture more often than not there are hundreds. I'm like a little kid watching a movie that's just beyond my comprehension level: "Who's the bad guy, Daddy? Which one is the good guy?" Well, who are you? The bad guy or the good guy? Because the answer to that question will flip the answer to the first question on its head.

Not to mention, I personally get stuck on the question about who I am. I'm neither bad nor good 100% of the time; I'm sometimes one or the other to different people, or one or the other on different days to different people. I've made enemies, I've done things I'm not proud of, I've definitely been responsible for more than one person's pain (at least emotional, with some mostly accidental physical pain interspersed).

What I'm struggling to say, yet again, is that this all signifies to me a grand-scale cultural malaise. This world is full of pain. The mere knowledge of it keeps me up at night. It drives me crazy during daylight. It gives me an adrenaline kick when I'm getting ready for bed or driving to work or walking through the grocery store parking lot. I am afraid a lot of the time lately. Because I cannot predict or control the way things are or the way things will be tomorrow, and it's too easy to get sucked in to feeling vulnerable and susceptible 100% of the time.

That's where I spent a lot of my weekend and the first part of this week: somewhere lost inside that vulnerable, terrified black hole. So last night, I put on my LOVE T-shirt from RoadTrip and went to BodyCombat. It's a thin armor against the onslaught of despair being thrown at us 24/7 these days, a hollow effort to regain my sense of ownership on my block, my city, this nation. But I need constant reminders that love is something well worth fighting for. It can't be stolen or shot or blown up. It can be shaken. But it always bounces back.

I haven't bounced back yet, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it reallllly hard and hoping so hard that things keep happening to restore my faith in humanity, on any scale I can get, and to restore my sense of security in my own body and my own home.

Things, for example, like this video here: http://youtu.be/sP4NMoJcFd4

"single girl living"

Among the huge transitions involved in moving out of dorms and/or out of our parents' homes is buying food, and cooking it. I am just starting to get the hang of eating at 7:00 when I'm hungry instead of at 9:45 when the food I started cooking when I was hungry got ready. I still have not quite mastered Efficient Shopping for Singles -- I consistently buy too much food at a lower unit price, and then have to throw it away. And I always make either WAY too much or too little rice.

I've started eating lunch most days with bunch of girls at work. We all sit in the back room and compare notes on what we brought: leftover home-cooked food, leftover Domino's pizza, hummus and veggies, PB&J... We talk about a lot of things, actually: weight; our roommates/children/families; exercise and happy/healthy living; beers and bars; our social lives and dating lives or lack thereof; current events; what it's like being a working woman. You know the drill. Girl talk. I spent my final semester at St. Olaf independently studying it; and every other day I find myself wanting to add to the study or expand it or reiterate all the points I made in the first round.

Now that I'm out of college, I spend a lot less time talking about grand topics and a lot more time talking about basic survival: sleep, food, body pain, and work/life balance. This is what it's all about. No time for existential musing anymore. I don't mind it one bit! These are the things we spend most of our time doing, and so they are the things we spend most of our time talking about. And thus I continue my Life as a Series of Self-Improvement Projects.

Once, when I was complaining about running out of leftovers, Lori told me about a friend of hers who spends one whole day per month cooking. She makes a bunch of family-sized recipes, packs them up in serving-sized plastic containers, and freezes them. Lunch for a month! I know this genius as "The Queen of Single Girl Living."

I have been dying to emulate her for weeks or even months now, but given my whirlwind schedule I only got around to it this past weekend -- forgetting, of course, that I had a football-watching party to go to and sub sandwiches to make at church in the morning. And so I learned something very important: I need to set aside an entire day for this project. Nothing before it, nothing after.

I was shooting for 5 dishes, but I only squeezed out three. In round 1, only the lasagna turned out delicious. I ended up being 2 hours late to the Super Bowl party, and even that only after calling my mom in tears asking her how I could possibly fix the watery slow-cooked chili and the soupy jambalaya full of crunchy rice.

Which brings me to the second very important lesson I learned: I'm not really a "single" kind of girl.

Yes, I am fiercely independent, with a strong history of commitmentphobia. But I like company, and I need moral support. I have been blessed, pretty much since birth, with a family like football padding and first aid combined. I have sought out and been blessed with a series of good friends like crutches, wrist braces, and pacemakers.

I wrestled myself out of bed on Saturday morning to go to the First Saturday writers' breakfast at Panera. I almost didn't go because my mom wasn't going, but I'm so glad I did because I got to talk to a some great people. One of them mentioned her son, soon to be a college graduate, and how she feels she can hardly give him any advice because when she was in his position she was already with her husband.

My parents were the same way. It is strange being young and single and plotting out our lives as individuals instead of as a couple and a family, especially when our parents and grandparents often have very little context for our situation. So we craft these lifestyles centered around things we like and things we need to do to get by, and in many cases spend a good portion of our time trying to meet someone good enough to build our lives with. It can be a lonely road.

I force myself to get up and run every Wednesday morning, on the treadmill, with my earphones in; but every single week as I watch the miles tick up toward "3.0" the only thing I can think about is Anna pushing me to run another lap around the track, every Monday and Wednesday morning at 9:00. When I swim on Monday mornings I miss my lap counters for the 500 freestyle, and Kristi who always swam the butterfly races.

On Sunday, I was so late to church I missed nearly the entire first service. So I stayed for the second one, and walked into the sanctuary alone and sat down -- alone. And just as I did so, someone in the second row cleared her coat off the seat next to hers and beckoned me up to join her. It's a good thing she did, too, because when I started feeling dizzy in the middle of the service she mothered me nearly to death, and as hard as it was for me to admit there is nothing I wanted or needed more in that moment.

Wednesday night, as we have established, is date night, but here I am at the library by myself first, writing a blog post. This is my time. I have had to carve it out of a slew of other things I could do on Wednesday afternoons, and I need it. But what do I write about? And what do I write for? After my last post my dad recommended a few books to me. New Facebook friends liked and shared the post. And an old friend sent me an email saying she appreciates my constant focus on love.

Out of all the ways I describe my blog to people, somehow this has never made the list: a constant focus on love. I think of it as my log of adversity and (hopefully, eventually) overcoming it. It is about the struggles of young adulthood. It is about moving to a new place and meeting new people and rediscovering or evaluating the things that make my life meaningful. It is about depression and financial worries and the undeserved feeling of getting old. I write all of this in hopes of putting words to things other people feel but can't -- or would rather not -- express. Secrets rarely do anybody any good, so in an effort to conquer the struggles of being 20-something in the 21st century, I'm blowing that shit wiiiiide open. I'm crowdsourcing solutions to a world of problems, and at the very least asking questions that need to be asked.

And here I am, week after week, writing posts about love, of all things, and how I couldn't live without it.

I am going to try the cooking extravaganza again. Yes, I saved the jambalaya and the chili is on its way to goodhood, but I'm going to do a few things differently next time. The learning curve still hasn't leveled out, which continues to take me by surprise. I'll make different dishes, use my gut a little more, but most of all I'm going to love what I'm doing and I'm going to set aside the entire day for cooking and I'll probably bring a buddy (and maybe some wine) into the mix.

I'm going to be the Queen of Single Girl Living With Other People.

another reformation

I am ashamed to say that I have barely put a dent in the New Year's resolutions I spelled out last week. I'm putting it off, waiting to get over the "hump" that is actually just a plateau of too many things to take advantage of in life, too many tasks that beg my attention, too many people to be with, too many prepositions to end sentences with.

This last weekend was my last planned travel weekend for awhile: Back in November or December, I was roped into volunteering to be a small group leader at the annual Delaware-Maryland Synod high school retreat, called Roadtrip.

Roadtrip is what brought me to Baltimore the first weekend in January for training, and brought me again over the MD border to Ocean City for the actual event. Let me explain briefly what this event looks like.

Theoretically, all the Lutheran churches in Delaware and Eastern Maryland send youth to this big hotel in Ocean City. In reality, it ends up being mostly Maryland youth for complicated political, geographic, and economic reasons, but we're still talking a couple hundred kids, plus adult chaperones, pastors, small group leaders, service workers, and event organizers. We take over ballrooms, entire floors of the hotel, the staircases and elevators. We sing, clap, dance, swim, walk on the beach, do crafts and activities, eat, complete scavenger hunts, and discuss things with a certain filter.

After my post last week, I was feeling overwhelmed, stretched too thin. I didn't want to go. I felt roped in, convinced by someone who approached me at an optimistic moment to take on a pointless task, to lead students in a too-rigid curriculum and evangelistic agenda. To make things worse, on Friday morning I came into work to find everyone buzzing about the impending Winter Weather Advisory (which in Delaware means one inch of snow over the course of 7 hours or so, horrible driving conditions, and a fresh buttload of salt thrown haphazard all over the roads and parking lots). Stressful as this already was, I had made a rushed decision on my way out of the house that morning not to bring my warm coat or snow boots.

I got some stern talkings-to about my attitude, about making the best of things and putting some positive energy into the situation at hand. So I tried to fake it and focus on the not-so-bad parts, the not-having-to-make-food parts, and the coming-home-at-the-end-of-the-weekend part.

To make a long story short, my misgivings started to dissolve as soon as we were on our way down south. In fact, I left OCMD feeling spiritually refreshed and uplifted, and reminded of some very beautiful gifts the world, the church, and young people have to share. (Bookmark this page, dear readers, for the next time I put up a stink about some good-hearted commitment I made. It happens every time.) If I was a different person, a different, older member of my family, perhaps, I might say that I felt the power of the Holy Spirit. I guess I can't deny that I am tiptoeing around using those words, but that does not by any means erase the misgivings I still hold about church.

This lengthy introduction brings me to my first point: The Church, as an institution, seems to be losing touch not only with modern American culture but also with some of its core principles. I don't think I ever got to the point of denying that the Bible is one of the greatest stories ever written, or that Jesus was a quack/did not exist. (In fact I find the second point irrelevant. He was a cool dude, whether he actually existed or not, and I think we could all serve to learn something from him.) I have been known to rant about institutionalized religion being one of the most brilliant forms of population control ever dreamed up by us human beans and our ancestors, and as we know it today it has gone through so many cultural permutations and translations of translations that I can't help but question how we still cling to its sacred traditions as God's will. I think it works for some people and has made some great contributions to society, but by focusing all our energy and defensiveness on church we're missing the point.

Heathen ranting and raving aside, I love our bishop. He is a brilliant speaker, a model leader, and most importantly he is unashamedly human. In his sermon on the last day, he began by saying something like this:

"I really enjoy spending time with all of you. I have been here all weekend and I have been watching all of you, and I learned something from you this weekend. People say you are the future of the church, but I have seen this weekend that you are the present of the church. We need your energy and we need your vision, because the church is changing really, really fast. We are on the threshold of what I hope is another reformation."

WHAT did he just say?! These are the words I have been waiting to hear from a church leader for years now. As I was finishing my business at St. Olaf a friend and mentor mentioned to me that a pattern has been found since the founding of the Christian church 2000-some years ago: Every 500 years (give or take) the church goes through a major earth-shaking. First it was the end of persecution in the 4th century and widespread adoption of Christianity as a major world religion; this is when it started to play a major role in shaping Western Civilization. At the second milestone we see the Crusades; Martin Luther took the stage around 1500 A.D., and now here we are kicking off the 2000s and no new prophet to be found. Apparently some people thought the Great Awakenings in the 18th and 19th centuries were it, but look how long that lasted.

Here's the first thing to change: You would expect cell phones to be definitively banned from such retreats; but this weekend, in what I see as an absolutely brilliant move by organizers, cell phone use was encouraged in the large group sessions and during worship. The bishop actually asked us to send a text or tweet during his sermon. Brilliant!

The theme of the retreat was love. Love! Love who, what, when, where, why, and how. Love your neighbors, love the outcasts; love God. Love your family and friends and people who just really get on your nerves. Love the homeless and the hungry. Love people who look and talk different. Love people you've never met, never seen. Because we are all God's children. We all share the earth we have been given. We depend on each other. Because Jesus did.

Here's where I think we have something to learn. Jesus didn't go to church. He preached outside synagogues. He ate and drank with people who weren't allowed inside religious buildings. He chastised church leaders and scared the bejeezus out of them (ha, ha, see what I did there?). Jesus healed people on Sundays!!!!! (Didn't God warn him about the ten commandments before he sent him down here?!)

These days churches claim that they channel the word of God, that they do what they do in Jesus' name. But, pretty much since Jesus died the first time (OK, since anyone called religion something and started gathering people under religious pretenses) the church is all about rules and restrictions. Religion imposes a moral code and churches guilt people into not stepping out of line. Where is the love?

I can't say that religion is all bad, or that it's become only restrictions. I'm Lutheran because I can get on board with grace and forgiveness and fellowship and treating people with respect in Jesus' name.

...OK, I'm Lutheran because my parents are Lutheran, but I haven't completely thrown off the yolk because of those things I just wrote. Those are good things. Anyway, I still think the Black-Eyed Peas raised a valid question: Where is the love???

Well, I found it this weekend. I found it in my small group, these amazing, wide-eyed and open-hearted 18-year-olds; each of them was a completely different entity, but they came together with such compassion and intellect you wouldn't believe. I found it in my fellow small group leaders, many of whom made up "the Delaware contingent." We are tied together by our carpools and our home state, and by our willingness to be tied to each other inextricably by something greater than a synod and a shared road trip (ha, ha, I am so punny). I found it in the openness of everyone I met, adult or teenager, regardless of ability or interests or origin. I found it in the dedication to service, on a national, international, and local scale. I found it in those who spoke to us and shared their stories. I found it in the confidence of young people in vocation, that it exists and that it is within our reach to do something we are called to do. I found it in the sunrise over the ocean, in the frozen sand caked with snow, in the baby seagulls scurrying out of the way of the frigid waves.

I found love in a hopeless place, in a snowstorm and politics and disappointment and wavering faith and the apocalyptic anxiety of a church that feels out of date and unable to survive the next 50 years.

I found love 14 stories below me, in a man walking his dog on the beach at 7:00 in the morning, as he paused to turn and gaze out over the ocean before his day began.

resolute

I've spent some significant mental time debating myself today: To go home and nap, or stop at the library and write a long-due blog post? That is the question.

As if in answer, a friend posted on my wall that she noticed my long absence from blogging (Blogger has not seen me yet in 2013, I regret to say). No rest for the weary. (Kidding...)

It's not like there hasn't been anything to write about. New Year's Eve itself was a storied success--if you can get over the fact that our TV antenna reception cut out twenty seconds before the ball dropped and so, when the clock struck 2013, we watched it happen on a black screen, heard the big bangs from the neighborhood behind our house (presumably fireworks), toasted our extra-large mugs of champagne in the most disorganized manner.

And since then I've had one weekend to myself, which avoided turning into a party solely by virtue of bad weather combined with my brother's new job (congrats, bro). But that only saved Friday night. Other than that, I've been to Baltimore and Brooklyn, and am this week preparing to be a small group leader for a high school retreat in Ocean City, Maryland.

Off the top of my head, I can name 14 new people I've met since the ball dropped. My evenings are packed with social and personal commitments. This time last year, I was aching for interpersonal, extrafamilial encounters. Here's the closest I got to sharing my resolutions at the start of 2012:

I'm excited to get to know the people I shared the opening moments of the new year with, and I'm excited to get to know new people as well.  I'm excited to learn more things and read more books and taste more beers.  I'm excited to visit people and host visitors, the first planned guest of the new year being Anna Linn a few weekends from now!  I'm excited to stay in touch with far-flung friends and watch all my classmates find new opportunities and passions and whatever else we find this year.  Hopefully all good things!  I'm excited to listen to new music, watch new movies, to write new poetry and maybe even a novel, this year, and, of course, more blog entries.

Check that. Not only have I met a lot of people, including some who are quickly becoming dear friends, but I've read new books and tasted new beers--too many to count. I've traveled and hosted, I've stayed in (surprisingly good) touch, I've gone to the wedding of a good friend. I've fallen in love with new music, seen new movies, written some new poetry, and... OK, no novel--yet. And on top of all that, I have been blessed with hundreds, nay, thousands of priceless moments I never could have foreseen or even wished for.

This year, my top resolution is to carve out more free time, take more me-time. In Brooklyn, Borough of Hotties, over the weekend with Karin I read in a book about "artist dates"--basically, weekly appointments with myself nurturing my creative stimuli and impulses. I am excited about this.

When I've been asked so far this year if I have any resolutions, the only thing I have come up with is this: I want to learn to fight. I have never been a violent person, or wished to be; but I think living in the city, and just generally facing the real, driving sexism and racism and ageism and pervasive pain in the world, is making me seek sources of power. Not to wield over others, but to hoard for myself. A coworker-friend who lives in Philly has lately taken to saying, "I am prepared at all times to be attacked." I don't think this is an unusual thing for a young woman in our circumstances to think. We hear about violence against our peers far too often.

Yesterday, contrary to my aching for a free moment, I tried out BodyCombat at the Y. From the website, sticking with this class "tones & shapes; increases strength & endurance; builds self-confidence." Pretty much exactly what I am going for. I will say that I was not in the least disappointed. It was one of the most empowering things I have done in some time, and one of the most intense and satisfying workouts I have ever had. I am expecting to be sore for a short while now.

I'm also hoping this will add depth to my "training" for the Spartan Race I'm doing with a few friends in July. Just looking at the website makes me feel hardcore--or makes me feel like I will have to get a lot more hardcore over the next 6 months. But it is less intimidating than it is a challenge, and we all know how I love (need) challenges.

This year I want to write more, and get involved more with other writers. This means going to more Second Saturday Poets events, and actually staying connected with the people I meet there. It means dragging my roommate (a closet writer, as it turns out) to these writing events with me. I also had beers with a fellow Wilmington-based Ole (!!) last night, who loves and misses writing it sounds like as much as I do. How I would love to grow a really young crowd of writers here!

Speaking of, I never want to stop meeting new people and doing new things. I want to get more comfortable talking to people, starting mutually enriching conversations. I want to stop being so terrified of small talk, but then to take that small talk to the next level. Not necessarily to big talk, at least not right away, but I want to talk the kind of talk that boosts everyone involved for the rest of the day.

I want to be more patient, and more accepting of the wrenches thrown in my carefully crafted plans. I want to become less dependent on such carefully crafted plans, and be able to throw more caution to the wind, leave room for spontaneity.

I want--and this is really my biggest resolution--to recapture wonderment, awe, rapture. And, in turn, devastation. Skepticism. Wrath.

The past two or three months have been full of depression-talk. Talk about feeling depressed, talk about being scared of getting depressed, talk about the neurology and psychology of depression. Beacons blinking feebly into a seemingly very dark and empty sea, smoke signals and mirror morse code flashing back in an unconvincing display that the sea is less dark and empty than it seems.

The surface of that sea began to crack first in a phone conversation with my friend Liz out in Portland, a month or so ago. Roughly quoted, "I think in college we were constantly enraptured, consumed by wonderment. Things devastated us. And now that we are out, there is not so much enrapturement and so it feels like depression. The highs aren't quite as high, and the norm just feels like a droning low."

So it is. An informal survey about our post-grad circumstances has revealed that the intense intellectual, social, spiritual and emotional stimuli of our college years sets us up for a big fall into the routine of adulthood. And this routine, unlike routines of the past, is self-inflicted and seemingly unending. There is no diploma waiting for me anywhere down the road; there are no final exams and there is no specified expiration date. The discoveries we now must make, quickly and suddenly, are discoveries about survival, discoveries of grave significance. And these discoveries juxtaposed with the constant fast enlightenment of the liberal arts education, the designated creative spaces, the Pietri dish of like-minded meaning-seekers... We must be destined for disappointment. We are lost and lonely.

And so, my goal for 2013 is to be devastated, the way I was upon entering a Brooklyn bar on Saturday night to find myself surrounded by incredibly attractive people. My goal is to be starstruck by the beauty of sunrises and sunsets. This year I will be delighted, heartbroken, enraptured, disproportionate to my experience. This year I will feel.

I am resolute. These are my resolutions. What does 2013 hold for you?

guardians

This post is dedicated to my brother, partly because it centers around the events of his 21st birthday, but mostly because we were each other's first guardians.

Well, I was his first guardian--aside from our parents--and have always been protective of my little brother; he's not so little anymore, but I'm still protective. He, on the other hand, was the first person to understand that I dislike being "guarded," and so to watch out for me without trying to save me from anything. He is always observing me and thinking about me (and his younger sisters) and, because we have been partners in crime since 8 or 9 months before his birth, we destroy all other teams when we are paired at Cranium. (These days he's crushing all of us at the Man Game, but that's as it should be, I suppose.)

Anyway, as a result of all this, combined with his love for art and special effects, it's not so surprising that it was his idea to start our grown-up tradition of going to see animated movies for each of our birthdays. We've seen "Tangled," "The Muppets," "Arthur Christmas," and most recently (yesterday) "Rise of the Guardians."

OK everyone, listen up: WATCH THIS MOVIE. It's so good.

I know that I'm a sucker for this kind of touchy-feely, "good things in the universe" business, but I think everyone can benefit from a dose of that stuff every now and then. This movie features Santa (Alec Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher), and the Sandman, brought together by the Man in the Moon--all the guardians of our childhood, our innocence, our capacity for joy and wonderment, our ability to dream and to believe in anything of consequence.

And when fear starts closing in and extinguishing all these lights from the world--a topic I could almost write a thesis on--the Man in the Moon appoints another Guardian: Jack Frost (Chris Pine), the Guardian of Fun.

For me, jaded beyond reason this Christmas season, the Rise of the Guardians actually did save me from totally succumbing to cynicism. It reminded me of the true significance of holidays and rites of passage. Not that I had completely forgotten, but the older I get, and the more immersed in an individualistic, dog-eat-dog societal routine, the more profound and necessary these messages appear to me. The more I need movies like "Love Actually" and, now, "Rise of the Guardians."

But really, we are each other's guardians in the day-to-day. It falls to us to remind each other of our innocence and joy and dreams, year-round. My brother, for example, is the Sandman (and not just because he conked out on the couch halfway through "Back to the Future" on Friday night). He is the Sandman because he is utilitarian in his communication, and he creates art out of nothing, like dreams out of sand. He reminds me of the weight of details, the importance of paying attention to them and remembering them, every day.

Happy birthday, bro. And everyone else: happy new year. May your 2013s be full of wonder.

my grown-up christmas list: 6 things that are different about christmas as an adult

Welp, as you may have noticed, the world didn't exactly end last week.

(I'm still not convinced that there isn't a missing pin somewhere in the scaffolding of the universe, that is causing the whole thing to sort of slide gradually into complete disarray... But it looks like the Mayan calendar ending was more of a technical issue and not a cosmic one.)

So that left us to the shopping we put off in case the world were to end, to the stuffing our faces with all the food we were bummed to think we might never get to eat again, to the going back to the same old taking things for granted in absence of a definitive moment when they might be ripped away.

Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas.

For me, this Christmas felt like my first real adult Christmas. Here's why:

1. I woke up in my own house, and had to leave to go "home for Christmas." Obviously this isn't the first year I've done that, but let's be real: being a college kid home for the holidays is a TOTALLY different animal than living up the road and coming back to open presents and eat and then going back home to sleep in your own bed again.

2. Along those same lines, I've never been a holiday family hopper until this year. If you're not familiar with this term, I might have made it up. Basically, Jason and I had joint invitations to at least 3 different places on Christmas day, presents to open and/or food to eat at each of them. This belly-full day brimming with sometimes conflicting expectations and extra people to consider was a new thing for me, and certainly a learning experience that I'll have to remember when coordinating Christmas 2013. (Do we have any foretold apocalypses between now and then? Maybe just a surprise rapture here or there?) Plus, our Christmas dinner table had 11 people squeezed around it, and each of them was a part of our "immediate" family.

3. Somehow I've never experienced the Christmas Gift-Giving Competition until this year. I think this must be how adults make Christmas into a game, after we lose the excitement of Christmas. I guess the plus side of having multiple Christmases is increased chances of "winning Christmas"? If you don't win at one, there's always the hope of House & Family #2 to boost your personal odds.

To be slightly less cynical, it is nice to give a gift that hits the spot for somebody else, because honestly there isn't much stuff I still need in my life. And, it's a materialistic way to show new people that you have been paying attention, and/or to get brownie points with key players...

(I didn't say it was NOT cynical, I just said it was LESS.)

4. My sister asked me if I wanted to go shopping on Black Friday, and I said it sounded like my worst nightmare. Been there, done that. I would go nowhere near the mall on the day after Thanksgiving. I think I actually managed to steer clear of that place through the whole Christmas season; I made a point of it. I did end up doing some last-minute shopping on Christmas Eve, but I have vowed to avoid it until 2013 and so far I'm succeeding. Knock on wood. I did almost all my shopping online this year, and even had most of it in hand by December 15.

I understand that this level of forethought will be almost certainly short-lived, if my parents are any indication of later adulthood, post-marriage and -children. But for now I'm basking in my uncommitted young adulthood.

5. Also speaking of making Christmas fun after toys, and now that I'm out of college my win list has become populated with a new kind of toy: kitchen appliances. So far I've got a toaster oven and a blender, plus an adorable lunch bag that puts me securely in the running for cutest lunch bag at work, a colander, adjustable measuring spoon, cookbooks, coasters, mugs, and a gorgeous wooden fruit bowl. I am SO set for 2013: The Year of Smoothies & Slow-Cooked Meals. Can't wait to get started.

6. And last for now, my Christmas CD of choice (one of 2 I can stand at all) is a $6.99 Classic Soft Rock Christmas album from Walgreens that includes hits by Elton John, Kenny Loggins, Hall & Oates, and Carly Simon. My other 2 bearable picks are something by Straight No Chaser, and... Well, that's it. A hit here or there from the Biebs or Mariah Carey, and a few of the musicians and songs featured on NPR. I've tried on a few occasions this season to listen to Christmas music, to no avail. It pretty much makes me want to gag.

Maybe since it's been the only thing playing anywhere, and on my favorite radio station, since Halloween.

Merry Christmas, friends, and welcome again to adulthood. (If you're still a kid, disregard this message. Thanks for reading!) The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future swirl around us as we speak.

a hard one to write

This is a hard one to write.

There have been some very difficult conversations being had over the past few days. Come to think of it, it's been a big year for tough conversations: The presidential election was one of the most exhausting "conversations" I can recall, and brought up all kinds of broiling, touchy subjects. You know, everything we're "not supposed to talk about" - religion, politics, personal health, the works. And right after the election, our reps launched into "fiscal cliff negotiations," if you can call them negotiations. From where I'm sitting there doesn't seem to be much negotiating going on at all.

But I'm not talking about those kinds of difficult conversations, as you might have guessed. Since last Friday, December 14, 2012, I don't know many people who have really been able to erase that sick feeling in the pit of their stomachs. I feel sadness settling heavily into my diaphragm, my intestines, the nape of my neck.

There is nothing I can say that will make this better. Nothing anyone can say. But still, I think it's important to talk about what happened in Newtown, Conn., and to talk about what is happening to the greater community that we all share with them.

On Friday, when I heard about the shooting, I texted my sisters. Not to talk about anything. All I sent was:

<3

My mind was blank for most of that day. I wanted to share space silently with other people, since the air felt too heavy for any words to penetrate anyway. I wanted to be around people I love, people I would rather take a bullet for than live without.

On Saturday I called a friend from college and we talked for a few minutes, not wanting to speak aloud what had happened 24 hours before, but unable to avoid that void weighing down our minds and our hearts. (Incidentally, she was the one who told me that the Hebrew word for mind and heart is the same. I don't remember the word, but I understand why it is the same.) She said she is having a hard time accepting all the horrible things that happen to people. For her, this year, the biggest blow has been cancer. It has sprung up around her over and over and over again, too close to be coincidence. To me, this has seemed a year of suicides. A colleague of mine has been particularly struck by the endless chain of shootings and violence in our area. And then, of course, there are the Hurricane Sandys and Bopha typhoons of our meteorological present. All of these things and others hammer away at us, merciless.

In high school I got really into Dead Poets' Society and from there I fell in love with a few of the dead poets, Thoreau in particular. He wrote about the personal responsibility to exist fully on this earth, and in society where possible. Back then I had memorized a quote from Walden about sucking the marrow out of life... But the one that has stuck with me more through thick and thin is one I didn't memorize, and it's from Civil Disobedience:

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

To me the incessant hammering of tragedy these days is the cry that comes from a growing inability to contain this desperation. Although we try to silence it by increasing our standard of living, by buying new gadgets and suing everyone who blinks in our direction and medicating ourselves into oblivion, our desperation is not quiet anymore. And I think the earth is crying too.

I wish I had an answer to this cry. I wish it could be soothed with something as relatively simple as better gun control or a perfect balance of revenue with expenses. I wish I thought there was an answer that is within our power to find, but I can't help but feel right now some kind of apocalpyse closing in on us. I can't say yet if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I suspect, or if our imperfect reality is finally caving in on itself; but it sure feels like something pretty dark is happening. And I hope, as many newscasters have been saying, that we are finally ready to recognize that there are some serious conversations that need to be had.

And let them start with "I love you." Let those be the first ones we have. Whether the world is about to end or just the year, let us say the things we have been afraid to say to the people we care most deeply about. And let this remind us what power comes from community and from working for its good.

A friend told me about a text her mother sent: "I'm sorry for bringing you children into a world where such terrible things happen." I know she's not the only one who thinks this. But my response, after a pang of guilty empathy, was to repeat a conversation from the last episode of Castle where Esposito says to Ryan,

"The world's always falling apart, bro. Since the beginning of time.

But having kids, making a family - that's what keeps it together."

There have been a few events this year that tore the words from my tongue and even from my chest. I know that I am one of the lucky ones who has covers to burrow under and people who will let me bury my face in their necks, but the fact that this is any comfort at all - the fact that moments of pain and moments of beauty follow so quickly after one another - give me hope that there is an answer, somewhere, if we can work long and steady enough to find it.

While you and I put our minds/hearts to the question, know that we are not alone. People everywhere are working on it as we speak - on NPR, for example, which played a beautiful story called Would A Good God Allow Such Evil? Because I am my father's daughter, I latched onto the section called "A World Both Beautiful and Shattered," which finishes with the following quote:

"I have a responsibility as a human being...to look at what's

broken in the world, to mend it and then...to be a partner with

God in completing the work of creation which is incomplete."

I'm doing my best, but the beautiful/shattering thing about it is that no matter how close we come to getting it right, it's still incomplete. But maybe that's the point.

2012 in review, the good, the bad, and the...whatever

the apocalypse and other impending holidays

I officially declare the holiday season in full swing. It happened kind of fast for me; first I was waiting "patiently" for my birthday and Thanksgiving weekend, and then suddenly November was over. And then suddenly we're barreling into part II of December and the light at the end of the tunnel of things to do is somewhere vaguely in the middle of January (assuming the world doesn't end on December 21).

Speaking of the impending apocalypse, I'm obsessed with it. I have always had a thing for apocalypse movies (except those of the zombie variety) and I love to track the cultural psychology defining the vessel of human destruction each time a new one comes out. For example, I've been watching a decent amount of suspense movies from 2003-ish and the common plot thread is computers becoming too smart and trying to assume authoritative control over American society. Now, 9 years later, we've just given in to being controlled by technology and have turned our terror to slow scorching/drowning via climate change.

Back to the latest apocalypse, which is cloaked in the mystery of a forecaster extinguished by the very ancestors of we who will suffer the rapture... As I flipped through the month of December in my planner (which I am excited to replace in just a few short weeks) I discovered that I already have a plan for the apocalypse. Apparently there is no out, either. I have committed, in capital letters, to spend my last night on earth at Applebee's with my roommates. Drinking our regular drinks and eating half-price appetizers.

In other parts of the country, friends of mine are hosting apocalypse parties where they will collect nonperishable food items that, in the event this whole end-of-the-world thing turns out to be a hoax, will be donated to the food bank. My mom asked me if I would be free for a dinner with some family friends on that evening, and I said, "No, Mom, I'll be celebrating the apocalypse DUH."

There are many things to celebrate these days, though, and many less morbid than mass oblivion. As you may recall, I have been looking forward to the Spirit of Christmas in Old New Castle, an annual event on the second Saturday in December (i.e. the day before yesterday). On Friday night, though, while I was at an Eric Hutchinson concert (!!!) I got the following text message from my friend Annie: "Hi, crazy question- any interest in going to NYC tmrw?"

Guess how much I miss text messages like that in my routine, responsible, adult life. SO MUCH.

She told me the next day that I was the only person she could think of in Wilmington who would even consider doing something so wild. We ended up deciding between the holiday tour of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and after being made to see reason we settled on Philly's Christmas Village and that city's Macy's lights show.

love park at christmastime

We spent the day checking out different crafts from all over the world, watching German-American heritage groups performing traditional dance, finding our birth moons (here's my really awesome birth moon), eating German food and drinking hot spiced wine. We also got talking about how we can cruise on spontaneous, exciting events far longer in the sunny summer months than in the cold dark of winter. We decided to link up and help each other keep things fresh (and keep popping vitamin D) until the sun comes out again. THE LESSON: Having a partner in crime makes this a much less daunting task.

I'm still cruising on the concert Friday night and having the most awkward possible meeting with Eric Hutchinson on Friday night in order to get the new album autographed (see photo). Concertgoing is not a hobby of mine, but I've seen Eric Hutchinson live twice and it never gets old. Plus, all Jason and I have wanted to listen to this weekend is the new album. Check it out: Moving Up Living Down. It's excellent.

And I'm still cruising on Saturday's excursion and the warm, sparkly holiday spirit of the lights and the wine and tradition. Plus, we were counting Santas from Philly's annual Running Of The Santas pub crawl... which got me SO EXCITED for Wilmo's Santa Crawl pub loop next Saturday.

As if I don't have enough of a cloud cushion to cruise on, Annie and I made brunch plans for Sunday that turned into an all-day hot spiced wine pumpkin pancake homemade granola extravaganza. It's been rainy and foggy and damp and cold here, and no snow on the horizon, but it really turns the world around when you have good people to share it with.

Keep an eye out for:
 - our fambly Christmas card, complete with all THREE roomies and BOTH cats
 - holiday finances inspired by a fellow post-grad blog and my dwindling bank account
 - a cookie exchange
 - the Santa Crawl
 - Longwood Gardens
 - holiday food and drink and the long-promised pumpkin beer post which I SWEAR really is in the making!,
 - my brother's 21st birthday
 - AND gatherings of good people (siblings, grandparents, friends, other people's families, etc.) through the holiday season.

Stay on the bright side of this holiday season, friends. I wish you love and happiness this season.

believe in macy's

i am not good at being a local

I am not good at being a local.

I'm not good at being from anywhere, and I'm not good at being a regular. I'm not good at showing interest in people I might get to know, even though disinterest couldn't be farther from the truth (at least in many cases).

This is probably a result of some stunted attachment mechanism as far as my social development goes, and on a deep-seated psychological level a result of a strange juxtaposition of fears: namely, the fear of perpetual insecurity confronted by the fear of perpetual routine.

I won't go into this too much, but to make a long story short I will venture that this Battle Clash of the Fears has been the driving force in my life on all sorts of different levels. It is what keeps me from stillness. It creates such energy in my core and as some of us managed not to hear until earlier this week at work, "things in motion stay in motion."

So, since I am simultaneously battling both nesting instincts and nomadic instincts, I am not good at being a local. Being a local requires staying in one place.

There may be hope for me yet, though, because staying in one place requires dedication to the idea of staying in one place long enough to become a community fixture. And although I still feel that irrepressible fight-or-flight urge from time to time, I am at least putting a lot of energy into fostering my commitment to staying somewhere.

This morning was a great testament to my efforts. I got up at the crack of 7:40 to take my car to my (formerly local) mechanic. D & J is located 5 minutes, if that, from my parents' house, and these guys have been taking stellar care of my car for over a year now. I always look forward to shooting the breeze when I go there: we've talked about beer, theater, traditions, friends, travel, and books, to name a few. These are strikingly well-balanced, two-sided conversations. I aspire to be as nonchalant about social interaction as these guys are. Plus, I'm fairly certain they are Car Whisperers.

Revved up the now-purring Bizz III and swung by to pick up my mom for Delaware Writers' monthly breakfast. It's at the Panera also 5 minutes from my parents' house, and less than 10 minutes from my house. I like Panera (they have pumpkin spice lattes to die for in the fall) but it's not technically a local business, so it doesn't get a real shoutout.

Yes, I am a bit discriminatory on this. You may know that the day after Black Friday has been named Small Business Saturday (by American Express, ironically). I don't know that I have ever actually celebrated this holiday; I avoid crowds and mainstream things at all costs. But I'm glad that it exists. Plus, I just learned this week about National Small Business Weekend: the first Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of every month. Hey...that's THIS weekend! I don't get the impression that it has really taken off, but it will be interesting to see how the whole thing unfolds.

I'm going to divulge one of my priceless secrets to all of you: Clara's Foolproof Method of Immersing Herself in Every New Place Ever. (And take my word on this, because this is one thing I excel at beyond all others.)

• Start doing everything you can think of to do, starting with touristy things if you have to. (For example, I started on the Visit Wilmington website.) It may be helpful to make a list (because I have already forgotten scores of places I meant to check out, that I haven't yet). If this list starts to grow at exponential rates, do not be alarmed; this is normal. The more places you go, the more places you find out about or stumble upon or notice that you also must add to your list. I warn you, this may be one list that never ends.
• Patronize local businesses. This will get you quickly up to speed with important local issues, with the way people know each other and the way people do business. Plus, you just get invested in the community where you now live, because you are putting your dollars into it. A third added benefit of this is that you can choose to become a regular patron of these places, and the people who own and work there start to recognize you and know you, and they start to trust you. It may not go beyond that, but it never hurts to build that cred and rapport.
• Join groups. You might stumble upon these groups at your favorite businesses, at the gym, at places you like. You can also do Twitter, Facebook, or web searches or try Meetup, which hasn't done a whole lot for me but has been a lifesaver for a lot of people I know.

OK, so it's not a grand, dangerous DaVinci Code-type secret. But still. I promise you, it works. And if I had to boil it down into one bite-sized, 3-syllable masterpiece it would be simply this:

Leave your house.

Easy peasy.

So, Mutti and I headed to Panera and sat down in the meeting room with other area writers. This is her third meeting, and my second, with this tirelessly interesting crowd, and we have met and spoken to different people every time. It's inspiring and incredibly motivational.

It is December 1, but it's 51 degrees and sunny. As usual, I walked here (to the library), and stopped at Papa's Italian Market around the corner from my house for a piece of tomato pie.

QUESTION: Is tomato pie a Delaware thing? Our informal poll at work says yes. This is the second, more widespread informal poll. Let me know in the comments if you eat it where you're from/where you are now.

So I am walking through my neighborhood to my local library (a phrase which always reminds me of PBS), eating tomato pie, and I get this sense of almost belonging. I savor this in moments since it seems to much to hope for to ever take that for granted: belonging.

all good things: thanksgiving edition

I'm taking a break from mincing dried dates to catch up on the blog. Why am I mincing dates, you ask? Because it's fruitcake time. According to tradition, Thanksgiving weekend is fruitcake baking weekend. And of course I've left it to the last minute, sort of, since the dried fruits need to be soaked overnight in sugar syrup. Yum. Let me just tell you, cutting dried fruit into small pieces is NOT easy. It builds up my kitchen knife calluses and causes high sugar intake; dates, you should know, are the candy of the natural world.

I'm swaying toward doing another "All Good Things" list tonight. The consta-writer in my mind has been absorbed in National Novel Writing Month, which I am not even trying to finish this month, but I have still found that November is a great time for me to think about the novel perpetually in progress in my mind. The structure of this story is finally starting to take shape, and yes, I have managed to jot down a few pages. Moleskine pages, but pages nonetheless.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is cut out for All Good Things lists. "10 Things To Be Thankful For This Week."

1. In the spirit of KSTO Sunday nights, let me set you up with a song. Thanks to the AMAs last Sunday night, one of my coworkers discovered the acoustic ("deconstructed") version of Die Young. We all got pretty into it last week at work, and we've got a countdown going to the EP release of Deconstructed on December 4.

2. Tomorrow is my birthday. I feel like a cheat, though, since I threw myself a party a week ago and have zero plans for tomorrow. Or if not a cheat, something is incomplete: I celebrated something that hadn't happened yet. Not that birthdays make anyone feel any different, really, and not that this is a "big" birthday. But still. The party, and all the fantastic people who showed up, definitely makes this list in flying colors.

3. Dancing. Dancing. Dancing. The other night I was moving around the kitchen feeling like I was about to explode/stumble on something world-shattering, frustrated, with a growing itch. Like wanderlust. And then it suddenly occurred to me that I miss dancing. I miss dancing so much that it's starting to detract from the goodness of my life. The wedding made me realize this, and looking at all the wedding photos has made me realize this again and again over the past two weeks. So on Wednesday, to kick off the holiday weekend, I convinced Jason to take up an invitation from a friend to check out this bar downtown called Nomad.

4. This place deserves its own number: one for the dancing, and one for the place itself. It's in a part of town I haven't ever visited before, one that felt too quiet as we drove into it at 9:45 on a Wednesday night. Except for a flashy club called The Rebel on the corner, it's the only thing on the block, and we hardly even noticed it at all. It's got this speakeasy vibe, a door set sideways and cut into the solid white wall, with one set of blackout windows and a small neon sign flashing the word "open" in the middle of it. The owner was standing outside when we walked up, and she beckoned us over and invited us in, shook our hands. Inside, it is a narrow, deep room, dimly lit but warm with old brick and dark wood decor. On Wednesday night the crowd was treated to an excellent reggae band called Island Vibe. The bartenders were great, the drinks were great, the people were friendly. I felt that we were among friends -- and some of those friends even managed to get Jason on the dance floor! I am impressed.

I could have just directed you to the Nomad Bar's Yelp page. The comments corroborate my story.

5. You know me; discovering new fab pockets of Wilmington with each week that goes by. This next one, though, I have to credit to my roommate and her boyfriend: Borgia's Subs & Steaks. It's a block from my house, super clean and charming on the inside, and a great piece of Little Italy history. I got their home-cooked roast beef sub -- I love roast beef sandwiches, but I did NOT know it could be as delicious even in a bite by itself as it is here. Jason got a burger sub and I'll just say I didn't even get a bite of it, because he strategically finished it before asking if I wanted to trade tastes.

Don't worry, I still let him have a bite of mine. Because as we all know, I like to share good things with other people.

6. Borgia's was the flourish on the end of a mindblowingly great day. Jason and I both had Friday off from work (never happens), and while it was tempting to bum the day away in sweatpants, we both knew that I would get cabin fever quick if we didn't get out of the house. I suggested we take a short jaunt over the bridge by the library, to pretend like we were going to work off our double Thanksgiving dinner the day before.

On the other side of the bridge, though, someone had installed plaques divulging the history of "Bancroft Parkway - An Historic Greenway" (second blurb on this page). How pumped was I to discover that Wilmington has a greenway? SO pumped. And when I discovered that the greenway leads to the lovely historic Rockford Park, not so far away, there was no way we were not going to follow it. (I think I even got some sun on my face, we were out so long!)

We ended up at the Tree of Life on the edge of Rockford Park, rolling out in front of us, with the Delaware Art Museum to our right. Which way to go?

'nuff said.

7. We decided to go to the art museum, which I've been reading about since I moved here but have never visited. I assumed it would be in an old house somewhere in the heart of town, with some local artists drinking tea in the kitschy gift shop. (Sorry for underestimating you, Delaware!) But this place is a legit art museum, with a great variety and a beautiful display of different kinds of painting and sculpture. We got there an hour before it closed, and had just enough time for a whirlwind tour of some really satisfying, inspiring art.

8. Also, I managed to stay awake for all of Love Actually for the first time in four years. Score!

9. I'm thankful for pies. The partners at work bought us all Thanksgiving pies from Bishop's as Thanksgiving gifts; I chose apple cranberry crumb and it was to die for. (Also last week they gifted us lovely ceramic platters from a local potter, which I've already used twice. I'm so into it.) Anyway, in addition to that pie, I also got to taste Jason's mom's pumpkin pie and my mom's pumpkin pie; banana cream pie; light, creamy pumpkin cheesecake; and sweet potato pie made by the fabby baker Shari (Jason's brother's girlfriend). Talk about DELICIOUS. I won't describe every single thing I ate but the yams were to die for. Also, I am in love with sharing food, and with other people being proud to share their food with me and my loved ones. It's such a great way to weave a tight community.

10. This is sort of silly, and unrelated to pretty much everything, but on Wednesday morning I packed up my stuff for the day and hit the gym before work -- the last day of work before the holiday weekend. I got to the gym and realized: I'd forgotten my work shoes. So it was either sneakers or 6-year-old Target flip flops hanging on by a thread with my nice black work dress. I called Katy, who was still at home, and asked her for a HUGE favor: "Can you drop off my heels at the Y on your way to work?"

And she did. No sweat. I don't think she thought it was as big a deal as I did, but it really did blow my mind.


You know, I do the whole "All Good Things" schtick for myself almost as much as I do it for my faithful listeners/readers. It's becoming clearer and clearer that I am feeling the season closing in on me. The dark and the cold give me cabin fever bad. I'm irritable; nostalgic; lonely for no reason; restless; homesick for every place except the one I really live at now; tired; unfocused. Maybe it's a natural reaction to the prospect of spending the holiday season so far away from a lot of people I love to death. But it's not all doom and gloom, because I can make lists like this, and because I have been legitimately happy a lot in the past two weeks, and because I have laughed so much and so hard. Maybe it's seasonal affect rearing its unpleasant head. I'm doing my best to tackle it at its core, and I'm doing an OK job. But this time of year is never easy.

I guess the point of sharing this is, some of you may be in the same boat and I think it's so important to know that we are not alone in feeling like this. Because I know that I'm not. And, despite this morbid umbrella hanging over my head, I really do enjoy some things. The happy just doesn't last quite as long as it does in the summer.

I'd better get back to work. It's getting pretty late, and I'm being called for dinner. I can also hear two pounds of pineapple calling my name from the kitchen, begging to be chopped...