A mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.
Michael Chabon
I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness recently. Perhaps this is because I just finished reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, the memoir of the year this Yale Law School graduate spent test-driving conventional wisdom of “how to be happy.” It sounds very hokey. It’s not. She’s very to-do list orientated, very sensible, very lawyerly. You have to do your own happiness, she says, and ultimately: you aren’t happy unless you think you’re happy. Why of course—it’s so simple!
I picked the book up one rainy Wednesday (last rainy Wednesday, at it were) and read it in two days (cover-to-cover in two days is excessive even for me). I read it, and then I went online to read her blog about the book. Lo and behold, where should Ms. Rubin be scheduled on her book tour but my very own Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California—and this Monday, nary four days after I finished the book.
It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten a ping from the universe—a worlds colliding, things aren’t as random as they seem to be—sort of ping. So, pinging away, I went to Vroman’s last night and got my book signed. She was lovely and well-spoken, but it was a bit of a perfunctory event, in any case. We don’t read so we can listen to people talking about their books; we read for the silence, the solitude (the transformation?) of being alone with words.
You know I liked the book because one of the biggest things she struggled with was chocolate chip cookies. Specifically, the giant ones sold in delis in New York City. You’d think giant chocolate chip cookies would cause happiness—indeed, they sometimes do—but there are all sorts of unhappiness producing things that come from eating a giant cookie every day (guilt, inability to button pants, diabetes) and an odd, happy sort of satisfaction in resisting the indulgence.
She tried to push herself out of her comfort zone even though the act itself wasn’t pleasant; she saw that being challenged is an important part of happiness. But, she says—and I love this—“The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way, at the same time, every day, and savoring it, is worth noting.”
That is my ode to breakfast, to the first sip of hot coffee, sliding hot into my empty belly where it jostles around, hot and settling into warmth. Every day the same: I wake up starving, ready for a bountiful meal, fresh and sweet, every day undiminished in deliciousness. It is also my ode to writing. It feels the same, mostly, the sitting down to write. The same computer, my buddy, the same hands that pound at keys. The moment of nervousness while the computer whirs, opening a saved document (or worse, a blank document). I keep thinking I should find new places to write—again and again, I go to the Pasadena Public Library, always the same. But I love the library, my library: roving for parking spots when it opens at 9, heaving a heavy bag on a shoulder, and making my way to the same table with the same wobbly light.
So, I savored my entry and exit of the library today, brimming with ideas of happiness. Be generous, cut people slack, act the way you want to feel—smile more! laugh more!—be Megan, follow your passions, be mindful—mindfulness, oye vey (the one I struggle the most with). Etcetera.I was thinking about generosity and mindfulness when I arrived to the library this morning, parked my car, and enjoyed the pleasure of my routine. When I left five hours later, I found this post-it note firmly and deliberately—with care, one might say—stuck under my windshield wipers:
I’ll admit it: it was not my best parking job. I was on the line (on, not over). A suburban could not have fit next to me–but a sedan easily could have. So, some SUV-driving angry person (forgive the prejudice/stereotype) actually drove by my less-than-stellar parking job (I reiterate: on the line, not over) and was so offended, they took the time to tell me what a selfish bastard I was. They took the time to stop their car, find a post-it note and a felt-tipped pin (this was not the job of a ballpoint), and paste it to my windshield. Did you feel better, SUV-person, after having slapped the post-it to my car? Didja?! (On a sidenote, not entirely unrelated: I drive a minivan. Not by choice. Regardless: still a minivan. Who puts angry notes on minivans–a car with a driving demographic primarily consisting of middle-aged mothers.)
So, um, where was I… speaking of happiness. There sure are a lot of unhappy people out there. The note only strengthened my resolve to be generous, to cut people slack. Why be pissed? Why chose anger? It doesn’t do you any good, and it sure didn’t move my car back an inch. So–why not move along, get over it, let it go, lighten up (to quote a few of Ms. Rubin’s resolutions)–and just find a new spot?
I thought to myself, today, Thursday, as I was driving to the library in the rain: “Wow. I really never appreciated good weather until I got bad weather.” Six days of rain will get you thinking such profound thoughts. Yes, I am a spoiled Southern California native and once-Colorado-dweller–a state that has winter and also more annual days of sunshine than Hawaii (300 of ‘em). But, I maintain, constant sunshine is like health. You don’t think about it while it’s good.
Also, I thought: I never did put on those new windshield wipers. Said winshield wipers have been sitting in the backseat of my car since sweltering August, when the idea of rain was laughable. Since August, when the hills behind Los Angeles–behind my house–burned. We are now living the aftermath of that burn. 250 homes have been evacuated as the inevitability of mudslides looms. The land threatens to slip out from under us.
The rain, then, feels just the same as that week of fires, when the heat was oppressive, the smokey air pervasive, and we waited, tense, for news: any homes lost? Worse, any lives? Not yet, but it looms, over our shoulders (or rather, under our feet, slippery and slimy), and we go to bed and wake up to find that it’s still raining.
Maybe that’s why weather is the evergreen topic of conversation: because it so pervades our lives.
This is the third time it’s happened, and it pisses me off. There are eight empty six-person tables at the Pasadena Public Library, and he sits directly across from me. Unarticulated library protocol is that if you must share a table, you fill the empty lane, so to speak—sit on the opposite end chair as the other person. Never the middle, and never, never do you sit directly across from someone—leaning forward so that the book you’re reading brushes her computer, your long nails picking through pages without reading them while she shifts uncomfortably and tries to continue working, your greasy hair falling into your eyes as you steal glances at her.
The first time, I had turned up my music, changed the angle of my computer, and powered through it. The second I had waited an appropriate half an hour before I got coffee and changed tables. This time, the culprit—a young man wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and leather pants—sat down across from me, squeaking and shifting in his stiff animal skin attire, squish squish creak squish, creak creak. Seriously?
So, I packed up my papers and water bottles, threw away my empty coffee cup, and relocated myself to a table across the room. It was incredibly rude of me. Seriously, though, today is not a day I felt like pushing through, like blocking him out, when I’m already dealing with enough blocks to writing. What is the threshold of behavior that makes it okay to be inexcusably rude? I don’t think I allow myself to be rude enough when I’m uncomfortable. Although, perhaps rude–negative connotations abounding–is not the correct word here.
//
Perhaps my patience is not what it should be, and perhaps the fourth day of rain is wearing on me. (And so I wonder how on earth I’m suggesting relocating to another climate—a Midwestern or Minnesotan climate—when four days of rain makes me moody and mopey.) Perhaps it is also because I took a day trip to northern California yesterday to meet with a very nice editor and the whole thing just wearied me… physically and directionally. After a day splashing around Berkeley blocks and public transportation in the constant rain and occasional downpour—thank you Mom for letting me borrow your oh-so fashionable Wellington rainboots—well, I’m pooped. As it turns out, the idea of flying to Berkeley for the day—how very business traveler of me, how very adult—is very different than the execution. The idea: up early with the corporate folk, drinking coffee in the airport together, dressed in our business best; then an organic lunch with the hippie college students; then a stroll down to the bay and an informational interview with an acquisitions editor—sign me up, Southwest: you airline you, with your ridiculously low fares and delicious honey roasted peanuts!
Well, all of these things happened, just soggier, colder, and more suggestive that, after all, it may not, be feasible to make a living as a travel writer. Not yet, at least. And not ever, I wonder. Or at least not if I want to actually travel. What with “the internet” and the ease with which it connects people to the people they’re looking for, I learned that many companies prefer to hire “travel” writers who live in the destination they want to publish a book on.
I need to focus my area of expertise. (Hell, I need to find an area of expertise). I need to be more strategic in how I market myself and what I chose to write. For, after all, to paraphrase a quote I just stumbled across: I can do [write] anything–I just can’t do [write] everything. I need to be the only person that could write a specific article, guidebook, memoir. Whatever. And, I should build an online presence for myself. Write a blog that’s a resource for blank.
So—I spent the day mournfully looking at the rain and pondering ideas to fill in the blank. And, it is perhaps unnecessary and redundant to say—I’m feeling overwhelmed.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burnout in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
–Jack London
Jack London died when he was 40, so perhaps it is not an apt quote for someone who wants to live a prolonged life among multiple generations. Still, the sentiment is a bold one, and, to quote another favorite, William Zisner, author of On Writing: “Words are the only tools you’ve got. Don’t be kind of bold. Be bold.”
I’ve spent a wonderful two weeks on vacation, with family and food and friends (the triple threat position). A break after the stress of turning in applications, a stress which has turned into…a waiting. A passive waiting, I can do no more… which is stressful in a very different kind of way.
I’m a very visual learner/thinker, so I now have to refocus my calendar, click, and now I’m at the top rather than the bottom of a year. December was on the right end of my brain, and now I swing back around to January, on the left, at the beginning. Just like you swing across a line of type; reading left to right.
And so, on January 1–what a difference a year makes. Last year, at this very time, I had so much to write about–too much. Things I had done that I was just burning to write about, but I didn’t have time to write about any of them because I was too busy doing them, too busy being in places to write about them. I was being bold, was flying. And now, I’m stationary, and it’s sort of hard to have all these things that I did but not that I am doing. But, I must visualize this as a pause in my calendar, a plateau between dense, energetic scribbles, a time to record the scribbles and be with the triple threat.
Naturally, I am actually doing things, and really enjoying this life here where I grew up. Today, for example, I went to the Rose Parade for the first time in my conscious memory (my parents tell me I went as a youngster, but, as any college student knows–if you don’t remember it, it doesn’t count). I realize as a Pasadena native this is scandalous, my lack of Rose Parade attendance, but my oh my–did I have fun this year! I don’t know if you’ve heard… but the Rose Parade is sweet.
A doggy snowboards down a slope on a float made entirely of flowers.
Only in California.
I was rushing into the La Canada post office at 2:30 p.m., carrying my first completed graduate application, a firm white cardboard document holder. Inside was a crisp stack of white pages, black ink—months of work, all in order, stapled and paper-clipped, numbered and dated. I was sending my labor of love to some snowy town east of here, while meanwhile, here it was pouring down rain. I was loving the rain, but was stressed about applications, and so, I was rushing into the La Canada post office when I was stopped by a frantic looking elderly woman standing on the curb. I was just about to open the door when she yelled in a warble, “Oh, oh dear, wait!”
I turned and she said, “You look like a helper.” She couldn’t have been more stereotypical in her elderly women eccentricity: a plastic purple handkerchief—some sort of rain protection—was wrapped around her head, tied in a big bow below her chin. She stared up at me from her five feet, a plaintive look on her face.
“Um…what?” I said.
“A helper!” she stammered. “I’ve been standing here just wondering how on earth I was going to get the package in the door. I finally got it in the car—gee, that took me all morning, I tell you, getting first outside, I had to prop the side door open and then,” she paused, clasping her hands together, “and then I had to get it in the car!”
“Ummm…” I said. There we stood in the rain, my application tucked inside my sweater, and I wondered where oh where she was going with all this.
“So I just, can you help, I just need a big strong helper—and then I saw this tall woman!—and I thought to myself, I thought, well that looks like someone that can help you, because I’ve been standing here just wondering what I was going to do.”
Now, blog, I can’t lie to you. For just a tiny moment, I thought about turning around and just walking into the post office. For goodness sake, it was my first application! As if there weren’t enough details scrambling around my mind, knocking against my forehead, wondering if I capitalized Nicaragua on the 22nd page of my writing sample. And then, after half a second, I realized what had crossed my mind—refusing help to a little old lady!—and I said, through the soggy haze of rain, “Yes, yes, of course. Now where is this package?”
She opened the door of the car behind her, parked in the first handicap spot, to reveal the onerous box. It couldn’t have spanned much more than a foot on any side, and I picked it up, using my knees, to find it weighed perhaps fifteen pounds. Maybe twenty. And so, I carried it the fifteen feet inside—fifteen feet that had been prohibitive to this dear old lady—and waited in line with her whilst she told me far too many details about her son’s life.
And then twenty minutes later, I mailed my first application to graduate school.
The next day, when I was at the post office, mailing my second, third, and forth applications, I waited in line with thirty or so frazzled holiday gift senders. The woman standing in front of me kept harrumphing about the slowly advancing line, sighing like some people honk while in traffic gridlock, surely thinking that noise stimulates movement.
She finally arrived to the teller—Diana, a diminutive woman of Asian descent who had helped me the day before. Diana efficiently adorned the packages with all the necessary stickers and asked the frazzled woman if she would like insurance. The woman said no, and asked if there was a better time to come into the post office, a time when there might be less of a line (it was currently 3:05 p.m.). Diana replied, chipper and efficient, “You can come in after the holidays!”
Touché, Diana, touché. I, however, could not wait until after the holidays to mail my nine applications, so I spent a good part of the week standing in line, and now feel like I’ve made three new friends in the form of the three tellers at the La Canada Flintridge post office (although I surmise they don’t feel the same way about me.)
And so they are mailed. And so I get to wait until February (March?) to find out my fate.
In the meantime, the Flintridge Prep Junior Varsity basketball season is in full swing. I am the assistant coach, and am working to toughen up the post players—friendly, rosy cheek girls who haven’t quite figured out this whole height thing yet—just like my coaches toughened me up all those years ago. The Rebels are 0 and 3, but it sure is fun.
Speaking of holiday season at the post office, I haven’t been in the United States of America for the whole month of December since 2005. I’ve been home for Christmas every year, but have arrived back to the grand ol’ U S of A from my various travels in Latin America smack dab at the apex of holiday frenzy, right before Navidad itself. So, while some may grumble about Christmas music at the mall or twinkle lights abounding, I’m totally enjoying the whole spectacle. Picking out a Christmas trees in the rain, enduring tacky holiday marketing, drinking my first peppermint latte of the season. Aah, it’s nice to be home, watching it build to a crescendo, and not arriving paralyzed by culture shock. Feliz navidad to you, too.
It’s my birthday. Happy birthday to me, and happy day to you, blog. We’ve been together for almost a year and a half now, and I feel like we’ve got a lot more good times ahead. Wanderings and wonderings of what’s to come.
I got a feeling 23 is gunna be a good year.
I’m sitting in the Tattered Cover in Denver, drinking a latte and eating a cinnamon-dark chocolate chip cookie, which is—and I know cookies—on the high end of the amazing cookie scale. I just went for a leisurely stroll around downtown Denver, around Coors Field and up the 16th Street Mall, in the crisp sunshine of a Saturday morning.
It’s a breath of fresh air to be back in Denver after a very hectic month. A whole month, I realize, since I checked in with you, blog, and I apologize for my neglect. There’s a direct correlation between my happiness and how frequently I write, so it’s a good sign that I’m plunking away now (but similarly the gap between posts the sign of a bad month).
Let’s see. I took the GRE. I did well, but studied too hard and burnt myself out. I didn’t get the awesome, adventuresome writing job I really wanted—made it to the final two. Yes, yes, it was an honor even to be considered, but it was a disappointment, to say the least.
So, because I found out I was not going to move to Peru and become a travel writer—as least, not this year—I went and bought awesome, kicky boots at Nordstrom.
I also went to Newport Beach and walked the beach and listened to music and sat in the sand and watched the ocean. It was then, when I was sitting in the sand, moping about starting over, about how hard it is to dream big, when I was staring into the distance, a forlorn look on my face; it was then when a song clicked on my ipod—“So sturdy up sturdy up your heart. For the road is long ahead”—and I looked up and saw three dolphins meander by, not fifteen feet beyond the gently bobbing waves. They crested and arced, up and down, smooth and circular and natural. The message could not have been clearer—look up, look around, dear girl. Breathe and just keeping looking up and paying attention. And so it goes, and I got up, dusted myself off, and went home.
I think it’s important to find those reset buttons in your life—like chocolate chip cookies, beach days, and boots—that you can turn to when things seem like they’re going to shit—as they always seem to seem.
As Tim Robbins says in Jitterbug Perfume, one of my favorite books of the year:
“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”
And, in the vein of the dolphin meandering by: “Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin’ on himself and start paying attention to the universe.”
I woke up in the middle of the night on November 1 and as I stumbled to the bathroom I realized with a start—oh holy moly it’s November. The advent of this great month meant that my hypothetical statement of “I think I’ll apply to graduate school” became—oh my god, applications are due in a month and I haven’t started them. So, I decidedly decided to apply, after much wavering, to get myself an MFA (Master’s of Fine Arts). Specifically, I’m applying to MFA programs for Creative Nonfiction. I have a list of nine schools, but if you get my reference to individually sized raspberry pies, you know where my first choice is.
I’m in Denver because on Tuesday I turn 23 and because also on Tuesday, Kara turns 24. So we shall celebrate together and another year will swoosh closed and another will open wide, possibilities spread thick before me. I’m excited by the possibilities, by my possibilities, of the coming year. I feel like I’m on the verge.
I’m actually still a little obsessed with Jitterbug Perfume, which I read months ago in a hammock in Nicaragua. I’ve similarly been on a beet kick since then. I love beets. I eat them in salads, make beet-orange smoothies, eat them cooked, eat them raw. They just so pure and purple and primal. That color! Those long veiny leaves. The sweet vegetable flavor. Beets are a staple veggie in Nicaragua, indeed in most of Latin America, and beets play a huge role in Robbins’s book.
I don’t want to reduce his book, a lovely romp and frolic through the powers of the imagination, to a single quote, but I shall end with his words.
“At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by our parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habbits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.
“So the lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown.”
Dusk in LA today was pastel, blurry. A bright afternoon—a little humid, said my Mom, very warm—faded into a night through a fuzzy grey peach. I drove downtown for a dinner with old friends—at least a decade each of knowing—and crested the 2 freeway right at sunset. If it could even be called that, less a sun setting than thin sheets of tracing paper accumulating on top of the day’s colors, one by one. White tracing paper on top of grey cement and blue skies, another sheet, three sheets a thick haze; then a sheer sheet of black tracing paper slid carefully on the scene, another one, omitting details and fading foliage into two dimensions, and another sheet until only the sharp circles of electric lights pierced the paper.
The cover of Writer’s Market 2010 is spruce green. Or maybe mint green. In any case, it’s a nice organic, subdue green, offset by a fat brown stripe that highlights the white letters of the title and subhead. I just spent $32.91—and yes, I did just dig through my wallet to find what 29.99 plus 9.75% sales tax equaled, a number I should have calculated in my head in the spirit of the GRE. But I digress—I just spent $32.91 on the green Writer’s Market 2010 and I’m very excited.
I contemplated purchasing the 1200-page beast on Amazon, hopeful for a discount, but there was just something about standing in line with other book buyers, beaming like a new mother as I clutched my fat book to my chest, that paid for itself. 3,500 listings of places to publish your writing—imagine the possibilities! I’m not the first to discover Writer’s Market (if I believe the cover, I’m the five millionth). Is is, after-all, nicknamed the writer’s bible. It was the sole textbook for my magazine writing class in college. It is the book anyone selling their writing should have. And I knew about it all along. So yes, I did stop to wonder, in all the green excitement: why oh why have I waited this long to buy this book?
I’m all fired up, as I so periodically get, from a conversation I had this week with an established freelance writer, who offered such sage words of wisdom as only someone with such an impressive portfolio can. He generously sent me a copy of his book—located at www.writewherethemoneyis.com—and I now have a productive list of things to tackle.
This list was a nice thing to hold on to this week, the week of waiting that folds into a weekend and now, it seems, another week. I’m anxiously waiting for news on a writing job that I’m perfect for, that I would rock, and that would rock my career—a really great job that I didn’t even apply for but was contacted about. I have now made it to the final three vying for one spot. And so I wait, and so I check my email between eighteen and eighty times daily.
Appropriately enough, just now I was browsing in the same department that this job would put me in and saw that Lonely Planet had finally released their new, updated Nicaragua book. Previously, LP had lumped El Salvador and Nicaragua into one book, but now they have a whole book dedicated to the lovely country, and rightfully so.
One rainy Saturday in early December of last year, I was at Brio in Playa Gigante, enjoying my weekend off from English classes. Rob and I were tinkering with the espresso machine when who should appear but a LP writer, working on the new, updated Nicaragua book. He was responsible for updating and expanding the information on the Pacific side of Nicaragua in only six weeks. He seemed… on the cranky side of stressed. Granted, he had recently survived a long trip in the back of a truck (remember it’s raining)… and I had been pestering him with questions about his line of work since he had arrived; so he perhaps deserved a little crankiness (I pestered to the point that he said in a chipper British accent: yes, I do get asked this stuff a lot. I’m thinking of just making a laminate with all your questions and answers and handing it out.)
Rob made our well-traveled friend an espresso and told him about the goings on of Hotel Brio. Rob told him about the English classes he had invited me to Gigante to begin and I briefly told him the specifics about my classes and my students. Rob showed him through a few rooms and offered him lunch while I meandered in to town to visit with friends at a surf camp. Not fifteen minutes later, he stopped in for a hello, a look around yet another surf camp, and then continued on his way. Nine months later, it says this in LP Nicaragua:
“The glorious white crescent of sand snuggled into the wildly forested mountains is almost worth the 7 km hike from the bus stop.” (Although, it’s actually 4 km from the bus stop, and I should know since I ran it thrice weekly. Honest mistake.)
Of Hotel Brio: “You can get Spanish classes here as well as hire boards or bikes and get surfing lessons. You can also volunteer (two month minimum, basic Spanish preferred) in exchange for room and board if you’re willing to work teaching English or doing trail maintenance, light construction work, or landscape in the Reserva Ecologica Zacatan.”
Ha! Teaching English! That was me! All me. I was the first, and because I was there, because he met me and I told him why I was there and what I was trying to do, because he heard about the English classes, he put them into a book, and maybe, someone might read this book and say, hey I want to go there and I want to teach English. And maybe they will go, pick up where I left off, and little Leana and Martha and lanky Evelio the fisherman and jumpy, enthusiastic Ernesto will have an English teacher yet again.
That’s a bright blue feeling of triumph.
If my Writer’s Market is organic green, and LA at dusk today was pale yellow grits, then this waiting to find out which way my future turns is the red of a traffic light. It is waiting at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, red brake lights lined in a column in front of a red traffic light, neon lights flashing across billboards and store signs, anxious and artificial. It’s right and left arrows flipping to green while straight ahead stays red and you sit in gridlock.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. (Harper Lee)
It’s Banned Books Week. The PPL is decorated with posters: Celebrate Your Freedom to Read.
Indeed.
