LaurieWrites

SXSW Smiles and Photo Dreams - What's Yours?

Cross-posted at BlogHer, with a few additions here.

As a photographer and an adult with a cleft lip and palate who had a transformative experience shooting an Operation Smile dental mission in Vietnam a year ago this week, I was thrilled to see the SXSW Smiles project at the huge SXSW Interactive conference in the oh-so-awesome Austin.

Well, I didn't actually see it. I almost missed it entirely. I walked out of my last panel on the last day smack into a table that had piles of Operation Smile stickers and buttons on it (I was tired, and it turns out when you buy an iPhone you can spend a lot of stupid time looking at the ground.) It kind of hurt my knee, but it got my attention. And after a little bit of research into the project that brought a nonprofit organization like this one to a huge tech conference, I kicked myself harder than usual for not paying attention before. There's a lot to pay attention to at this conference, but this is one more thing that given my love for this organization's mission of providing surgical repair for facial differences - primarily cleft lips and/or palates - around the world, I feel like the universe should have put in my scattered, hurried path. (And the universe is like, "Hi, pay attention to the important stuff, thanks.") So I am now, and I hope you will too.

Renee Alexander Hamilton, Operation Smile's Social Media Strategist who represented the project at SXSW Interactive, tells the story on her blog, SXSW Smiles Journal.

-I told her about my new role and how now I am trying to do the same thing we do in Donor Relations online and in person at events. I explained that while in the past social networking tools like chat rooms were thought to divide people and keep them at home in a dark corner having "virtual relationships'. Now with Facebook and Twitter, these interactions are actually driving in-person meet-ups and beyond that they are inspiring ACTION.

So I guess you could say I'm in Austin for a little Smile Action!

SXSW Smiles set up shop outside the very cool Beacon Lounge for nonprofits and social change organizations in the Austin Convention Center, with the goal of enough donations for 10 new "smiles" - repair surgeries for kids with cleft lips and/or palates- each estimated at $240.

Directions were simple. First, pick up or download a "Make Me Smile" sign, and write whatever makes you smile on it. Upload a photo of yourself with the sign to Flickr with the "sxswsmiles" tag. Donate by texting "smile" to 90999, or dropping it off in the Beacon Lounge.

Check out the Operation Smile SXSW Flickr set here, hosted on Alexander aka Entropy Art's photostream. The answers are fun to read - "Bhangra," "our absurdly clingy dog", "hot salsa"- and you'll also get a peek at some of the folks roaming the halls of SXSW, if that's a draw. I would include them for you here, but "all rights reserved" is what it is.

The SXSWSmiles project is part of a larger $240 Smile Challenge March (aka Smile Month.) The cause's Facebook page says that $4203 has been donated so far and $3710 is still needed to reach their goal of providing 20 repair surgeries to children. Check it out.

While this is so much on my mind, Lenovo Microsoft is asking people to "Name Your Dream Assignment," asking "Where will your lens take you?" on a photo project for which they will give a prize of $50,000, a video camera, a blog and a computer to record it all. I haven't entered, but mine? To go on a mission - a surgical one this time, and to shoot it. I don't know when or how this will happen, but I believe that it will, and just as I felt in Vietnam, I think it'll be one of the most important things I ever witness.

And why? I'm as idealistic as I am hardcore about photography, and that's a lot. Photos can change lives, I will boldly, idealistically, perhaps overdramatically say - whether they're photos of people talking about what makes them smile or, maybe more importantly, photos taken before and after cleft lip and/or palate repair. No pictures exist of me prior to my lip repair at six weeks old. Hospitals didn't take photos of babies with facial differences then. I'm not sure what the deal was in my family, honestly - I do know my mother was never ashamed of me, in fact saw beyond my flaws as mothers most often do. Who knows what pressures existed on a 20-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man, in the days before cameras were omnipresent, everywhere, where images were immediately available.

But photos are essential and I wish there were some. I would love to see what I looked like before this repair, to see the reality of this situation that has affected my life like no other. And I like seeing the impact a simple repair surgery can make on a child who may otherwise walk around in their impoverished town or village with a gaping whole where there ought not to be one. Photos can inform and change perceptions and raise awareness just like, and sometimes even more than, words can. It can be difficult to see if you're unaccustomed, but just like with many things that present challenges that can't be easily solved, or aren't so pretty, or disturb on some level, they don't go away just because we don't pay attention.

When its in a picture in front of your face, it's hard to ignore, so may there always be pictures of important things in front of our faces.

Me, exhausted, at the end of a harrowing trip, happy nonetheless to be spending time with the very important kids at Hanoi Medical University, March, 2008. Many had just received their first dental exam. Photo kindly taken by their teacher. (The whole set is here. I love these pictures.)

And I can easily say that Operation Smile is my favorite new Twitter contact from SXSW Interactive.

Other photo dreamers for this and other causes:

Joanne Bamberger/PunditMom's dream assignment is to tell the stories of moms keeping their families afloat in tough economic times.

Katie Ring's Photography and Life blog with footage of Operation Smile patients in India and her photos of a mission there.

Audra, an American expat writing at Nicaragua: The Obandos accompanied her students from the American Nicaraguan School on an Operation Smile mission

Beth Kanter was a fixture in the Beacon Lounge and wrote prolifically about the nonprofit presence at SXSW and in social media communities. Her post on the Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam is a good place to start, but scroll around for lots more. <

It's all around me.

Gwen Bell is inspiring. I haven't read her for some reason but I went from link to link and finally settled in to find out that I love her writing.

It is the lovely Jen Lemen's birthday today. She wrote this post about turning 40 and all she plans to do to commemorate it this year. I read it this morning and my heart sang for her and for me because I'm totally stealing this idea.

I've been sitting in the bookstore today reading and writing, trying to step outside the lines that have been drawing themselves in tighter and tighter around me. It's been a good mental and physical break from a life that's moving too fast all of a sudden and still presenting me with some challenges.Two-and-a-half months to graduation and there are so many questions I have that have no answer and yet I find myself gravitating more and more towards trust where in recent months there has been such uncertainty.

Lunch with an old friend today restored something in me that I didn't know was in need of it, really. It helped me write something I needed to get out, which was good - so often lately I've felt blocked. It helped me see my way clear to forgiveness, to putting something positive and of actual value into the universe. Actually I'm rediscovering all of these people from all along the path of my life - from high school and other times where maybe we needed a break or didn't really need one but it happened anyway. Add that to some tremendous new people who have come into my life in the past year and I feel that for all the things I'm afraid I lack, I have an embarrassment of riches in friends, which is so wonderful to know. I really can't overstate it.

My dear old friend K and I sat down over beers this weekend after three years of a fractured relationship and it's so great to know that with some people you can just pick up wherever you - for whatever reason - left off.

Then today I looked at a woman I last knew as a 16 year old girl and even though it had been 20 years there was so much that we still inherently knew about each other and there was so little back story that needed to be explained. Turns out we've lived really close to each other for years and it just needed this kind of time to reconnect, I guess. Last night someone I never thought would own anything in common with me at all set up some dinner plans and that was really nice too.

I don't know what the confluence of all of this means at this point - and I don't think I'm going to think about it too deeply for awhile. I'm just going to enjoy it since there's so much of life not to enjoy and what I'm focusing on is connection with good people.

I'll just add that it might not be useful to knock the good stuff that Facebook can do for you until you've tried it - you know, if you want to.

The fall light and colors are inside of me as they are every year. It's an amazing time to be alive - somewhere on the edge of melancholy, but not quite there. I'm not dreading winter as I usually do so much. It'll just happen and I'll move through it as usual. If I didn't have to drive in bad weather I really don't think I'll care. My mother asked if I was going anywhere for graduation and the truth is probably not but maybe I ought to. 

Now I'm listening to Hem, and to a little bit of Wilco. I'm checking the totals and hoping people donate to the Life Through a Lens project. I figure if I had kids by now I'd have hit my family up for thousands of dollars in wrapping paper and school candy bars so maybe we can just cobble together this $800 for these kids and call it even. At least I hope so.

I feel good today. I feel inspired today. I feel like maybe things can sometimes be good and I feel slightly more capable of letting go of things that weight me down than usual, which is to say that I actually do feel capable. And that does feel good, I have to say.

Learning to fly

I always worry about my plane crashing. I used to be a pretty normal flyer - a few butterflies on takeoff, random worries about the things that go bump on the plane, as it were, gratitude when I was on solid ground again, annoyance that that woman with all the crap in the overhead bin just couldn't slide over just a LITTLE bit so as not to impede the progress of 100 people trying to get the hell off.

Sometime last year I became a super nervous flyer. My mind became a total jackass and turned me into that person who actually buys the little bottles of cheap red wine for MEDICINAL PURPOSES. I don't know why, but it made a (total of, with layovers) 20-hour trip to Hanoi an exercise in hell, and sets me on the edge of my seat for the bulk of every flight, unable to sleep.

My trip to San Francisco for BlogHer, I planned for this - planned ahead, that is, with a little bit of medicine for mama to take the edge off, I admit it. I wished I didn't have to, but I was not going to go through this hell again, leaving me uncoiling for the first day of an event of which I do not wish to miss a single minute. Crazy stuff: it worked. I made it everywhere in good form, arms and legs quite loose and brain not completely overwhelmed and just all warm and fuzzy and in love with the universe.

Still not a huge fan of the flying thing, but if pressed, I would say that the reason my plane didn't crash on the way here was so I could read last night in the Community Keynote.

I love this conference. It's my third year, and the haters can shut it, because not only is it not ONLY about the shoes (although, for me, it's a little bit about the wine, but that makes it no different than anywhere else in my world) it is about everything else. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my writing life, and it's up there in my personal life as well. I am an unashamed, unabashed supporter. And now my love is just off any chart in existence, because no other opportunity has arisen in my life - ever - to get up and read something incredibly deeply personal in front of almost 1,000 people, and - once I got out there, after much pre-reading angst - to look out and feel completely supported and at ease.

And afterwards? AFTERWARDS? I'm still amazed that several wonderful people took the time to seek me out - in the hotel lobby - on the way to the party - at the MightyHaus shindig later - to tell me how they felt about what I wrote. They told me their very personal and meaningful stories. They cried. They made me cry. They said things about me, about bravery, about...well, just a lot of things that I have trouble owning for myself a lot of the time, and have to say I don't always believe, but this has been a pretty big step in the right direction of shutting up the aforementioned jackass brain.

I'll write more about this later - my battery is dying and I have to go speak on a panel about blogging without kids (which, gotta say, after standing up alone in front of a ballroom full of people? let's just say I hope it isn't harder than I think it's going to be.) But because I know some new people are stopping by here today, thanks to the awesome Eden Kennedy, I just wanted to say that the experience was one of the best and most meaningful of my life. I'm really glad my plane didn't crash so I could do it, and I don't really know what happens next, ever, with anything, but this was pretty fucking awesome.

Cooking With Gas

One of the hugest disappointments of my life online is that wordsalad.com is not available. Suckers. Parked there for who knows what and for how long. I tried other combos of .infos and versions involving my name and whatnot, but none of them resonated, so I've stuck with the pedestrian, eponymous title that I gave my site on the day I set it up.

But to me, it's word salad. I don't like the definition that I learned in speech-language pathology classes (my undergraduate major) because it's pretty negative. I've always thought about it in a more fun, Alice in Wonderland jabberwocky sort of way, and I wanted it for my blog.

I wanted it for my blog because word salad....well, that's pretty much my life. Not a word cake or a word buffet or a word whatever else, but a word salad.

It keeps on going. The words keep on coming out. It continues.

So when I submitted my post to the BlogHer Community Keynote a month or so ago, I did it as a personal exercise, and it really worked. It was super helpful. It meant disclosure on a level I've rarely been comfortable with, as many words as I put out there on a daily basis.

And then? They picked me.

And now, oh holy hell, I am going to get up and read this post in front of 1,000 people, give or take. I'm setting it back to draft here because we're not supposed to share what post it was, but I know some of you who drop by here regularly have read it. It's really special to me, was as easy to write as it was difficult, contributes to a larger truth and conversation as much as it's myopically about my life, and for those reasons I'm pleased as much as I'm terrified. I'm going to get reacquainted with it in the next week...going to print it out and read it on planes and in bed, until I'm quite sure I can read it without crying.

And in spite of all of the pain and trauma that the past three years have held for me, I'm going to keep getting comfortable with the fact that there's been a bigger picture here that reveals itself in tiny snapshots day-by-day, not by any means a paint-by-number. It's been completely abstract. Some days, even recent ones, have been shitty ones that involved choices I didn't want to make and words - thousands of them - that I wasn't sure were right but I somehow knew needed to be shared. It's involved the despicable, necessary act of letting go of someone I thought I knew, someone whose choices confounded me but who I knew I had to accept or die.

Turns out she was me. Who knew?

So I've been cleaning up the place a little bit. And it's funny what happens, when you get right(er) with the world - not with God, necessarily, although I'm pretty actively engaging with some spiritual stuff too. Just right with the things that haven't felt right, the places in my heart and mind where I've felt akilter, where I've left things bad with other people or with myself. And that along with this keynote thing, and the other things that are happening, are strengthening my belief that this life is a circle. You come back around to the stuff you haven't learned until you learn it better, you make friends with old stuff that didn't get resolved, you make yourself face pain and depression and anxiety because it's the only way to let it move through you and away. You can't always medicate it. Sometimes you have to feel it to acknowledge it and move the hell on. I haven't felt this actively engaged with life - the good stuff and the deepest, grossest basement of it - in, well, I was going to say years, but really ever.

I don't really know what's happening right now, but I know that I'm open to whatever it is, and not just because I don't have a choice. I know there'll be good and bad days ahead, just as there have always been. But I am holding on tighter to a core of something, at the same time that I'm letting go. It gets easier with some practice.

And...and...I love this site, no matter what the name is. I almost shut it down a few months ago, sick of myself and the world and the garbage in my head. But something wouldn't let me do it, something told me that if I started over somewhere else with one of the multiple domains that I now own, that it wouldn't make any difference. Just like relocation doesn't always fix stuff - sometimes you have to hunker down and bloom where you're planted (hackbarfhack.) I love this site because it's my single-most dedicated activity of a weird, strange, random, horrible, beautiful period of my life. It's the fruit of something daily, the effort to make some sense of this nonsensical world and one life lived within it. It's at the same time nothing, and in the ways that it's connected me to so much goodness and opportunity, it's everything.

Bluest Sky

I wrote the e-mail of my life yesterday morning to the love of my life thus far. It was final and (alarmingly) sane. It involved disconnection a la the phone company coming to cut the wires and it means we'll never correspond or speak again unless I unwittingly end up in the same place he does and we are the only ones there who haven't been incapacitated and one of us needs the other one to call 911. DAMN. I hated having to do it but alas it is time and it was done on my terms and yes, oh, yes, I know it is good, although not so good when you're in it. And while I was writing it I cried, and while I was reading it over before I sent it, I cried, and afterwards I cried a little bit too, because there's nothing like crying to make me cry more, and also at that point I was exhausted from thinking and trying to make things right that couldn't be righted. Crying is apparently my body's way of releasing stress and anxiety, and as annoying as it is, thank God I can do it, because if not I'd probably eat ten Snickers bars a day and mainline moonshine to get by.

Not really.

After the crying and the sending and the mental replay of the past 24 hours to make sure I was cool with the choice I'd made, I felt okay. I may have been born at night but not last night, and I may be dumb but I'm not stupid. Time to love yourself more and whatnot. So I talked to my mother, hung out with my roommates' dog for a while, and then my roommate (who is ultimately one of the most comforting people I know, just because of the ease with which he navigates the world) and cleaned out the first layer of junk in my car, that has just been a terrible sinkhole lately.  Then I went out with two of my favorite girls whose careers and lives I'll follow forever, and we had some good conversation and chicken wings. Then I dropped one of them off at a friend's house, and drove home. I sat in my favorite chair and read and took a bath and talked to another friend for a long time who I love so dearly, had some wine I'd saved just for such an occasion, and I finally went to sleep. 

I've grasped onto a Martin Luther King quote lately: "unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality." It's providing me a lot of comfort now. I can safely say that in contributing to the denouement of this most long and arduous situation in my life, I've been completely honest, and awash with unconditional love. That means that I didn't want anything. There was nothing left to want. I just still felt love for this darling person, and that was fine, and I wanted desperately to leave it on those terms. I really do believe that it's hard to start something else, whether it's a meeting with a student, a romantic relationship, or a chapter in a life, without ending the previous one well. That energy carries over, and I don't want all the messed up energy associated with the worst times in this relationship. And while being open with that has KICKED MY ASS, it has also left me feeling completely okay with who I am and what I've chosen to do, and I figure that can only serve me well in the future. I said what I meant, and I meant what I said. I said I had love, I said I had pain, I said what I needed to say, with no intention or expectation of receiving anything back. And that is, I think, the first time I can say that I've done that, in the context of this most important relationship, or any one I've had that's involved a man and some romantic something or other.

This has really, really sucked, friends, but it's set me up for good stuff. I still hate being an adult though. Can't lie. 

Today was recovery. Today was trying to talk myself into working through my stuff that's due for school this week, in spite of having absolutely no interest in attending to that task. And then! Good news! Tonight after I got in from walking to the gym and working out and walking back, in this kind of fragmented yet earnest attempt at training myself to work out, I called my cousin and I asked her to do the Avon breast cancer 3-day walk with me in October, and she said yes. We're going to do it together! We're going to walk for her mom, who is a survivor, and thanks to some excellent medical care after a move to North Carolina, is living some happy retirement years with my uncle down there. This was a blessing, the conversation and my cousin's immediate, "Yes. Sign me up. I'm there." She is six months younger than I am, my first and oldest friend. It made me so happy. It compounded the feeling of hope that I got from the walk to the gym, and then (don't laugh) reading the Obama coverage in Rolling Ston while I was on the stair machine that made me want to blow off school and join his campaign. It made me feel like the summer and fall and all the days after, although they'll be the requisite mix of ups and downs...that they're moving on to better things.

I just can't wait for all the beautiful things I'm going to see.

Links to Dar Williams's cover of the Kinks' "Better Things"

Here's wishing you the bluest sky
And hoping something better comes tomorrow
Hoping all the verses rhyme,
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the doubt and sadness
I know that better things are on their way.
Here's hoping that the days ahead
Won't be as bitter as the ones behind you
Be an optimist instead,
And somehow happiness will find you.
Forget what happened yesterday,
I know that better things are on their way.
It's really good to see you rocking out
And having fun,
Living like you've just begun.
Accept your life and what it brings,
I hope tomorrow you find better things.
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.
Here's wishing you the bluest sky
And hoping something better comes tomorrow
Hoping all the verses rhyme,
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the drudge and sadness
I know that better things are on the way.
I know you've got a lot of good things happening up ahead.
The past is gone, it's all been said.
So here's to what the future brings,
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.

Too long in the rain

At 12:27 this afternoon, I had the overwhelming urge to call it all off, to just stop in my exhausting tracks. Just stop. And go get a job in a frame shop or another bookstore, in some little Carolina town where it's cheap to live and eat and buy gas, and where it's maybe over 40 degrees for most of the year. Just make it stop - so much to sift through and handle, I'm not over it but I am a little antsy over the minutiae, have to say. And I also don't think I spelled that right. It looks weird.

It's just one of those days, you know, just one of them in a string of them and I'm not sure, really, how it all knits together but I guess it must.

My grandmother fell this morning and has deep lacerations on her toothpicky arm. I called my father on my way from campus where I sat in on a class I know I won't stay in (although it wouldn't be so bad) because I have another option that it turns out will suit me better, I think. I am so in charge of this whole class schedule thing right now - trying them on for size and considering how it'll help my CAREER and my SKILLS and things I never really thought so much about before in my life, in spite of my years of beating myself to death over what said career path would entail, and actually working pretty hard at a string of mostly professional jobs at the same time. It's funny when it just becomes both the big picture and your day-to-day, not just a job or even what passes for a profession in and of itself. I take it so seriously, I think because I waited so long for this, but I don't realize it until I see myself in action and then I laugh at myself (and my school people laugh at me too) because, for real, SO SERIOUS about it. It's quite mentally tiring, this.

I wanted to remind my father to leave the mail key and the key to my mother's car because they go to Mardi Gras tonight and I'm going back home (always back home, God I need a singular home, although I like my new house, for sure, no problems there.) to be with my geriatric dog for ten days, to heat up his turkey and chat with him about all manner of things and let him out a hundred times in an evening and give him his morning and evening medication.

My father was all messed up like I get when I go and help when traumas arise with her, especially when hospitals are involved, because the super value meal of the ER and falling at 5:30 in the morning confuses her and when you go and sit with her and manage the situation she's usually on another plane of experience entirely. I cannot even watch Sicko. I know what it's about. I've seen it in person and I don't want to get more depressed ALL the time. Today apparently she thought there'd been a card game and a boat ride, which all things considered is a better fever dream than lying there as an overlooked elder in an emergency room packed with chronic care and caterwauling pediatric patients.

(My friend Tim just sent me "caterwauling" as the word of the day. Didn't think I'd get a chance to pimp it out so soon.)

And also when you spend that time with her, dealing with a crazy, understaffed/funded/heated/supplied hospital on the one side and an assisted living facility on the other, you get a little mixed up too. So I didn't catch it when my father was like, "What's that song?" in the middle of the grandma update. He said again, "What's that song?" And he started half-singing it, "You know, it goes, 'love, blahblah, the freedom of my chains, looking back, dadada,' is it Emmylou Harris?"

So I'm walking to my car struck morose (ha! Another 50-center.) by the shitty, misty, chilly, cloudy weather, worried about this 80-pound lady who just keeps falling down and picking back up, taking in the realization that my parents are leaving the state to drive to Louisiana, of all places, for ten days and God could things please stay stable for one STUPID ASS TIME when I'm the only member of my immediate family in this state? Again, during the first week of my school semester when I've only had two this time around? Seriously? Please? Could that happen?

And nothing makes me more mildly crazy on top of crazy about relatively important things than not being able to place a song. So I'm trying to listen and walk to the garage and process all of this crap at the same time, and I told him I had to hang up to remember it, and although that didn't happen I remembered it anyway.

"'Looking back, my chains, dadada, freedom...dada', Dixie Chicks, it was the Dixie Chicks."

"Someone else did it first."

"Look, I don't know, but that's the one I know."

"What's it called."

Oh. God.

"I don't know. I'll check. Or I'll think about it. I have to get quiet to remember music."

"I'll figure it out."

I knew I would, probably before he did, because I need time to sing things to myself in peace and also Google and YouTube are my BFFs.

So yeah, Elvis Presley. Well shut my mouth. (And yes, also Tanya Tucker, and Brenda Lee, and Olivia Newton John, and apparently anyone who felt like it.) It is pretty nice..."'Cause I've been too long in the wind, too long in the rain,takin' any comfort that I can." Yes, very nice.

Comfort in cheap Carolina towns, maybe, I don't know, I don't know where it originates. I've stopped looking, for the most part. I just take it as it comes, if and when it does.

Dream baby

So in my dream last night I had a baby. And do you know what I did to that baby? I took her for a walk in her stroller, and she fell out of it. Headfirst. Onto the pavement. Hard. How disturbing is that? I am traumatized that I let even a pretend dream baby fall out of her stroller and crack her head on the sidewalk. I hate dreams.

The last guy I dated in Ohio - lived with, actually, which I find sort of shocking now for how incompatible we were on a cellular level - told me that he worried about us having children because I would be too "high-strung" with them, like constantly worried that they'd hurt themselves. He came to this conclusion because I was very concerned about my dogs running out the front door of the apartment building. Like, I cared that my dogs - the tiny four-legged centers of my universe - did not get hit by the cars that sped through our complex.

Get it? I'D be the problem. As I recall, much like when I shared a poem I'd written and he said, "It's just not my style of writing", he had something half-assed to say about me as a potentially "decent" mother, nothing overwhelmingly good, for sure, and whatever it was was cancelled out by the chance that I'd be hypervigilant. I'm sure he put a slam about my family of origin in there also.

First of all, there was not a chance in hell beyond a failure in birth control that I'd have had a child with him. Zero. Hence the whole "put my belongings in a big truck and drive it 500 miles due East" thing. Not a hater, just a truth-teller. If I could have found it in my heart to do it or thought on any level that it was a good or viable plan, rest assured I would have made it happen. I was pushing 30 at the time (oh, such a baby, little did I know) and certainly was ready to have a child. I just have this little caveat where I don't want to virtually guarantee the misery of another human being that I help to create. It would kind of be nice if the conditions in the home you're creating for them are as optimal as you can make them, hmm? I knew we didn't have that, and not because I'd be too busy putting knee and elbow pads on the kid to remember to feed him.

But now that I look back I'm amazed at how much I bought what he said wholesale, that I thought for a long time that he was right, that I'd be overzealous and worried and it would fuck any children I had up beyond repair, just because he seemed so sure and so dismissive of anything resembling a strength that I might bring to the parenting table. Now I'm pleased to report that in the myriad ways I could accomplish messing up a child, being constantly worried that they'd hurt themselves is the least of these. I have several more interesting ways up my sleeve that would likely give them good blog fodder themselves.

Internet, do not let people tell you how you are or how you're going to be all the time. Do not let them twist your (even quirky and questionable) strengths into weaknesses, especially if the topic is one that is very close to your heart - so close that they, in all of their intellectual certainty, could not possibly know  what it means or how it would turn out for you. Do not, especially do not, allow them to tell you that you care too much, unless what you care about is crack cocaine or felony theft.

(Especially if they quit their job to sit on the couch and play PlayStation for two months while attempting to grow a beard and hack your IM account to message other women. I'm just sayin'.)

Maybe it was this trailer for the new Tina Fey/Amy Poehler (and Maura Tierney! It's like a girl crush bonanza, seriously) movie that I found on Fussy's page that did it. I may go see this one on the first day.

Resolve

It is January 3rd. It's cold outside, way cold outside. I go back to work tomorrow after almost three weeks off. On the eve of that particular action, I thought I'd respond to the call that the Lovely Lisa Stone put out on BlogHer (with backup from Denise, the anti-resolution lady) for what kinds of things we were resolving for this shiny brand new year. I'm saving her list for the end though, because it's quite detailed and needed more thought than I thought!

I should note that I didn't intend to write the mother of all new year's blogs before I stumbled across the suggestions from these ladies. But the more I read on the BlogHer site and on the personal blogs of women I admire from there all year long, I got more jazzed about the whole thing. I'm in a good mood about looking back and looking forward, while trying hard to stay grounded in this moment, which is my hugest challenge (right now? My feet are cold, I just watched the great Letterman return with Robin Williams, and I'm ALMOST done with photo uploading. That's as grounded as I get around here.)

And since I've been reading all of these posts on BlogHer, I've been thinking about whether resolutions are necessary at all, especially if it matters if they happen now or in April. In general resolutions can seem like an invitation to fail. You know, tell yourself you're gonna lose 50 pounds and by the 3rd when your little sister makes homemade mac 'n cheese (with GRUYERE!) after you come back from dinner (AFTER!) things can maybe get a little shaky. Like when I quit smoking, for the final time, like seven years ago or whenever it was, it wasn't in January. It was on a day when my body, mind and soul together were sick of cigarettes and wanted to live a life that didn't include them.  I think one January I resolved not to swear, which is a total joke if you know me at all.

I don't think there's any harm though in looking back at what the previous year hath wrought (see below for that one) and looking ahead to how the new one can be better, or more of the same, or at the very least something pretty good (also see below.)  I don't think there's anything wrong with living with intention, honestly. I'm as flexible as people tend to come but if you have some idea of at least why you're going after certain things, maybe the hows and with whoms and whens can make a little more sense. Maybe.

This year I'm going to be on the move, I can feel it. As Maria wrote here, a guiding word or two or three can help to keep you on the right path. I've been thinking about what mine would be since I read her post. The beautiful Christine Kane writes about this word-choosing practice here. I keep coming back to "Create", with "Spirit" as the second.

I want to create good things this year. I want to create order, in my heart, in my world, in my bank account. I want to create a better, healthier self by getting my butt in motion and eating better. I want to create more peace in my heart and in my life by spending time with people who help me achieve this for myself and for them. I want to create more community where I'm meant to be and where I can find it. I want to create a new career. I want to create happiness, fun and laughter. I want to create better relationships. I want to create a space for myself to write and work with my pictures. 

I'm including "spirit" because I need to learn to tend to mine better. I don't read anything motivational or participate in any kind of meaningful ritual these days. I have no interest in organized religion at this point but maybe I need something structured. I read this article about Buddhists on New Year's Day and it just sounded beautiful, the things they believe and how they honor the passage of time. I felt a distinct lack of connection inside myself to anything of this sort when I read it, and I knew it meant I was lacking. I never really found true spiritual connection in the Catholic church. I don't know if this means I need to go to yoga or meditate or what, but it's one of those things that you don't realize is lacking until you find yourself wound really tight. Maybe it's just a lack of faith I feel, I don't know, or the result of years of talking myself out of love and denying feelings that have actually always been quite strong, I just didn't think they were acceptable. I don't know. I'm trying to strike a balance between being a total TMI head case and accepting quietly within myself what I can't change and moving forward. All I know is, spirit needs to be a part of this year. It needs to be a more gentle year on that level.

And on that note, I'll fill out this list that Lisa suggested. It's helpful. I'm going to put it on paper, too, as she suggested, writing it with my new set of 20 SHARPIE MARKERS (love my new markers!) and put it in my new planner. And then hopefully actually USE my new planner and not lose it and find it in July in my card smashed underneath 12 Diet Coke cans. Because this is NOT useful behavior for the '08. In fact, that should get its own category, which I may indeed add at the end. Here goes. 

Heart and Home - Try to stay open. Relax into and be happy with the fragile peace I've finally gotten. Take care of myself and don't worry so much about when "he" will arrive, because it's never gotten me anywhere but totally freaked out. Focus on my friends, because in that area I'm definitely really lucky. Get to know my new roommates and enjoy being in my new space. 

Family - Visit my grandmother more, and continue videotaping our chats. Try to send more cards and make more phone calls, especially cards. Help my parents get the basement cleaned out. Visit my sister's place in California.

Spirit - Try to be as kind as I can be, and not cranky. Cultivate some faith that's been lacking. Be grateful and give when I can. Try to volunteer, but I don't know where yet because I'm not sure what will fit my schedule as crazy as it is. Tell good stories about cool things - put some spirit in my writing, because I'm doing so much of it by necessity that it's nice if it serves some kind of purpose.   

Wallet - This is a huge area for me right now. I want to get my credit card debt down and my car paid off. I also need to handle the final semester of school and make sure that whatever path I'm on with my academic program is financially viable. This is what's keeping me awake at night currently.

Health - Try to prioritize sleep. It's so important for me. Make sure I stay current on medical and dental appointments, because I suck at this outright. Take medicine consistently. Do some exercise on a regular basis. Include some kind of supportive meditation or yoga in all this mess because  I'm no good without it. Ingest mostly water and bag the soda. Minimize alcohol intake. Breathe.

Create - I am going to begin printing my photos and trying to find a way to sell them, maybe on Etsy. Get back into Photoshop again. My sister bought me a huge cross-stitch pattern for my birthday with all the materials so try to do this by the end of the year. Redesign site(s) and get really good at video, audio and web stuff in my spring multimedia class projects so I can go out on my own by the summer.

Work - Have a really successful semester at school, do a good job at the bureau in the fall and build freelance work up to the point that it's a regular source of income and not just mad money. Cause I need my mad money to BE my money now.  Get my office organized at work and at home so I'm more productive.

Write - Write every day for personal expression as well as academic requirements. Pitch magazine pieces and don't just rely on local papers for class clips. That said, go BEYOND class clips to really write some interesting things. Also, make sure that the trip to Vietnam serves its purpose by publishing every day to the Web when I'm there and seeking out all opportunities to pursue the stories we're assigned. Write a separate article for the Carnegie seminar class to build up portfolio. Rework blogs - add and subtract as necessary.

Odds and Ends: Travel wherever and whenever I can. Take ten minutes every day to center myself and calm down. Approach problems directly whenever possible. And do not, not, not allow new Sharpie-markered planner to get lost under a pile of 12 Diet Coke cans in the back seat of my car. Oh, and also: smile more.

Sound like a plan? 

And finally, the Mayfly Project, a summation of the just-departed year in 24 words. 

Change, progress and letting go: journalism school, teaching, Katie moved, three houses, Grandmommy died. Thousands of words. Pictures and music. Finally moving on.

Happy new year, y'all.   I think it's going to be a good one. Thanks for checking in and sticking around to those who do. I really am just a sort of ordinary person with a lot of stuff on her mind, and if I didn't put it here, God knows what I'd do. It's an archive and a planner, a diary and a conversation. I expect it to take me as far down the road as I need it to, certainly at least through this year. May yours be happy and productive - may it be everything you need it to be.

(hopefully) Hanoi Rocks

I am going to Vietnam for ten days in March.

I am so excited. I just don't think this is a place I would have taken myself, at least not with any great confidence. I have never been to Asia, and have always been interested in traveling there, and it will be great to go with a purpose and a construct for the trip, and a charge to tell stories about the places and people. This will be happening in the context of a semester-long international reporting class. We'll study Vietnam for the first part of the semester, go there over spring break, and then come back and write (hopefully) publishable pieces. They wanted a mix of print, broadcast and online people. It shocks me like few things do that I am one of three people that I know in my program in the online concentration. THREE. This really shocks me. I truly love print newspapers. Reading the paper, as in holding it in my hand and reading it has been one of my most consistent daily activities over the course of my life. The Washington Post is "my" paper and has been since my grandfather used to bring it home every day, because he had to take a special trip to get it. I don't know if it was ever sent to the house. He just bought it every day when he worked, and then when he retired he had to go to get lottery tickets and "a Post paper" every day. There used to be two papers in the city, and in that case he'd buy the Washington Star, before it stopped publishing when I was a kid.

This is where it started. When I first hit a city I get a newspaper. My whole family reads the Myrtle Beach Sun-Times every day on summer vacation. When my Aunt Dot was at the beach full-force on our big family trip, she'd go down and get the USA Today and the Sun-Times, and drop them off on the doormat of everyone's condo unit. As family members trickled down who maybe had to work over the weekend and couldn't get there until Monday or Tuesday, they'd bring multiple copies of the Post and it would get passed around on the beach, people rushing to claim the crossword puzzle. So I come by it genetically I guess.

I even read the Dayton Daily News every day, and loved it for what it was, which was a truly Dayton paper. I worked at Barnes & Noble where we'd get the Sunday papers from major cities on Monday or Tuesday, and I paid triple the cost of the Sunday Post many weeks of the five years that I lived in Ohio, when the news was a couple days old, just so I could get Book World and the magazine. I LOVE being in cities where I don't live on Sundays, because a Sunday newspaper is like the heart of a town for me, and I like to pretend that I really live there and go to a coffee shop and read the paper. I've done this in Tampa, Chicago, Phoenix and Austin, among other places. And therein you have a window to my strange little soul, and also confirmation that I am really quite easily satisfied.

But as much as I love the actual paper, which I've ended up writing about more than I intended, I am also completely fascinated by and obsessed with, I'll admit, the immediacy of the online environment and what that means for telling stories. So when I talked to the director about this trip, I said I wanted to take photos (on my mythical D80 which now really, really has to happen) and video, and also set up a website, and she was all excited about it. Like it was hard. ;) I honestly think that's a big reason why I'm going, because of my desire and ability to capture the experience on film and in posts. But my new theory is that as long as people view this audiovisual stuff as difficult, I'll have a gig. And whether it's hard or not, mechanically speaking, what matters is that you have a better than average eye, and aren't afraid to take the pictures in unfamiliar places. That, admittedly, is more challenging, and what is thoroughly charging me up about the prospect of this trip.

This is really, really why I went back to school. I didn't set out to go to Vietnam, specifically, or really to travel anywhere, although I admit I was hoping that was going to be part of it somehow, I just didn't know where or when. I've embraced ambiguity on so many complex levels at this point that I'm much more comfortable answering questions with "I don't know," and I mostly don't mind if people aren't satisfied with that answer. I'm still working on whether I'm okay with it, and that takes up enough space that I'm not interested in inviting other people beyond my most important family and friends into my daily psychodrama at this point. ;) But it's amazing that what has been often said to me is true, that when you just jump in, stuff happens. Pretty basic. The hard part is the waiting for it, whatever it is that signifies to you that this, this stuff is the good stuff - the stuff for which all other (often aggravating, boring, daily grind stuff) is preamble. And I just have to say, I am COMPLETELY RIDICULOUSLY FUCKING AMPED about this particular STUFF, and a little bit embarrassed because like Wilbur the pig I am grossly humble, to say that I'm proud of myself for taking the chances I've taken in the past couple years, which have more or less amounted to putting one foot in front of the other lots of times when I was scared out of my anxiety-ridden little mind, and thought I was too old, and thought I was too scared of flying, or whatever.

And I'm also completely grateful to my university, it must be said, who let me back in to get this show back on the road, and who will be paying the freight for us to go, plus for a hotel in Hanoi and translators, who will come in very handy, and also for breakfast every day, I think.

When I sent in the university application forms, I had no conscious knowledge that this was a workable or advisable plan. I just did it knowing it had to be done, because as interesting and thrill-ride-like as I seem hellbent on making a standard trip to the mall, I didn't want to be the same anymore. I knew that the next act, as it were, had to be different, that I had to work that other 80 percent of my brain that maybe was left a little softer than it should be, and mostly deal with a nameless, faceless fear that seemed to have become my primary driver. I needed to go beyond the confines of comfort, outside of familiar mental geography, if not physical, and complete the only thing in my life that I really regretted that was within my control - finishing school. It shocked me when people assumed they knew stuff about me that to me was never a done deal. I never intended to just stay here, although there's nothing really wrong with that either, so there. You can do amazing things up the street as well as you can do them all over the world. There is no point to prove.

We won't have press visas so it's not like I can do any huge expose of anything, and that's not really the kind of story I tell anyway. I'd be happy to write about Vietnamese musicians, or street artists, or what it's like to be over 30 and single in a society that's really just taken off economically - for some? (key words.) I want to take as many pictures or more as I write words. By the end of March I guess I'll know how it should all come together. I have a lot of work to do for this.

Here I am, feverishly researching whether or not there's a Starbucks in Hanoi. Priorities, must attend to priorities:

 

So now I need to ask for a Vietnamese language program for my birthday, because I have no idea how to even begin with that part. I'm poking around on Flickr (the greatest invention ever) through the hundreds of thousands of photos tagged with Vietnam and Hanoi and Saigon and on and on and on. My very best friend called to tell me that she was so happy that I was in such a different place than I was this time last year, namely a spot from which to handle the things that still suck in a way that is much more hopeful and always with an eye on what doesn't. My mother has (typically) already called the lady who does her nails who is lined up to give me tips on street bargaining. And I kind of love that my family and friends have started wondering where the hell I'll end up next. And that I don't know either.

WONKA

I don't want this bed, but I find it fascinating.

I don't want it because in spite of my love for all things Roald Dahl and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I don't need a big-ass metal WONKA screaming at me in 2,000 point font on my bed, or really even anywhere in my bedroom. And also, this might be just me, but if you happen to be sharing your bed, and perhaps engaging in some activity best enhanced by a Marvin Gaye cd, I think it might just be a bit unnerving to be either staring at a big WONKA in 2,000 point font at the time, or thinking that someone else is.

There's something really wrong about that.

In other Wonka news (and yes I am a person for whom it is entirely possible that two Wonka newsbriefs exist simultaneously. Suck on THAT Everlasting Gobstopper.) I bought one of my favorite things that I've bought in recent memory this weekend: the 25th anniversary reissue of the soundtrack to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

(Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Tim Burton film, is dead to me, by the way. I can barely speak of it, so I won't.)

I've been listening to this cd in my car all weekend and have really been loving it. It has the several different versions of the Oompa Loompa song that were in the movie, plus a lot of the best dialogue, and, of course, "Pure Imagination."

"Come with me and you'll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look and you'll see
Into your imagination

We'll begin with a spin
Trav'ling in the world of my creation
What we'll see will defy
Explanation

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world, there's nothing to it

There is no life I know
To compare with pure imagination
Living there, you'll be free
If you truly wish to be

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world, there's nothing to it

There is no life I know
To compare with pure imagination
Living there, you'll be free
If you truly wish to be"

Sigh. Love it.