define.

I have always been the changeable one. Whether in friendships or in love, I have been the one quickest to shape my thoughts, opinions and personality to fit those around me. I want to fit in. I want to avoid conflict. I want to be what I imagine others must want.

It’s strange to say that out loud. I admit, it’s not one of my proudest character traits.

One of the great challenges, I believe, of my adult life has been to learn how to be myself. To learn how to form an opinion and hold it as my own. To learn how I would like myself to be defined, as a person, and how I would like to tell my own story.

You know that we’re all telling our own stories, right? We’re telling them to ourselves. Which bits will you remember and which will you forget? What will be the mood cast on those memories? Who will be the good guys and who will be the bad guys? It’s one great long story-telling venture, from one end of your life to the other.

Things happen. And then we tell them in a story. And that is our life.

Things happen that you can’t control. But many many many things happen that you can control. That’s your ammo. That’s your story-crafting material.

I ate popcorn for dinner. I tried to watch the newest Downton Abbey, but my internet was too slow. And I told myself to sit down and write you (lovely reader) a mess of crap because writing a mess of crap is better than writing nothing at all. There’s no wisdom today, and really no point (which I believe is breaking a great cardinal rule of blogging). This is what comes of having nothing to say.* I am forced to dredge deep. So I dredged up my slowly growing ability to define myself as a person, independent of what others may want or expect. I also dredged up my story, which made me think of yours. You better dredge it up too.

*For the record, this is what beat out my attempt to write about a glass of water...sitting at the edge of the table...with tiny bubbles. Here we are, being real.

old words.

I am wild with the need to write. Wild with it. I love it.

I was looking over this blog today and my eyes landed on the Twitter feed on the right. I have fallen out of that Twitter habit, which is ok for now. I might pick it back up in the next months, but for now it’s ok. One life lesson I’ve learned: don’t try to form or break too many habits at the same time. Being overwhelmed is the surest way to abandon your goals. At any rate, I hadn’t realized before that Twitter lists those tweets by how many days old they are. The most recent one is 134 days ripe. What?

I realize that, in other words, that is a few months. But there’s something about seeing the number of days that makes it feel an epic long while ago. And so, seeing those 134-days old words made me think of T.S. Eliot.

For I have known them all already, known them all --
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
- The Love Song of J, Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

A dear friend sent me a link to this post yesterday. I zeroed right in on the end, which contains the thought I will carry with me for the next many days:

"There is literally no reason not to write. Nothing bad can come of it. Even if no one reads what you are writing, you have a chronicle of something. You are creating something. I’m not the first to say it, but the act of creating almost always leads you somewhere you never would have gone otherwise, and makes you see things differently. How is that ever bad? The luckiest among us might even get nice notes from readers saying how much what we’ve written has inspired them. I’m telling you, if you are coming from a real place, there’s no question that will happen.” - Jenny Rosenstrach (of Dinner: A Love Story)

august: remembering.

I label my writing by day, nothing else, never titles. So I have files and files full of unidentified writing. Some of it I remember vividly, the exact moment and emotion that triggered the words. Some of it I don’t remember at all. Those are my favorite - forgetting severs my emotional, possessive attachments and I can read with clean eyes. It's an incredible thing, to read something you know you wrote, but you can't remember writing it. At any rate, while digging through this mess today, I found what follows below. Technically I didn’t write it today...but I decided to share it today, so that counts.

15aug2012.
I’ve grown tired of running in the neighborhood we’re in right now, temporarily, for a few more weeks. It feels like any direction I run, there are hills at every inconvenient moment. At the moment when I need a flat stretch to keep going and find my second wind, there is a hill. So my lungs start to burn and my head spins and I slow to walk over the crest.

So last night, as the light was falling earlier still, we drove up the road to a man-made lake with a paved path around it. The path is flat and weaves in and out of cool low brush and stubby trees that smell of damp moss and wet dogs. The lake, I have heard, was made when they extended the Metro line out further into Maryland. I have heard that, for some time, this lake was just marked by a sign: Lake Metro. Now it has the name of a person.

food.

I don’t write about food much here (really, ever). Strange, because I think about food, more or less, every waking moment. I love to cook, eat, and feed others. I love the creativity that comes with opening a refrigerator and asking, What can I make out of all this? I just love food.

There’s this desire that I believe comes with any creative urge to make something new. We all want to contribute our own thing. I don't think I’m alone in my instinctive need to make something original and unique, something that would make everyone say, Ah, we never thought of that!

But anyway, it’s bound to be an unrequited desire. It’s all been said and it’s all been done. I am slowly learning this lesson: it is less about original and unique, more about the truest expression of myself and my lens on the world. Authenticity - that is the business of this artist.

I love reading food blogs, but I would never never never dream of trying to write one. There are so many. There are millions. Everyone wants to write about food and take pictures of what they eat and pictures of what they make and pictures at restaurants and put the pictures on Instagram and on their blogs and...so on. I enjoy my share of food blogs, but it just seems too awfully popular to be writing one. That sounds very hipster of me, but even so, my reaction to a glut of food blogs is that I never write about food.

the ride.

Since mid-September I have been gloriously free of public transportation. For several months I commuted via a lovely one mile walk. These days, a zippy bike ride. But this morning, it was raining hard and I needed to wear something nice. I also needed my hair to not be a hot-frizzy-helmet-mess. So I took the bus.

I love the freedom of using my own legs to get wherever I need to go. I also love exercise that has a purpose, i.e. getting me to work. But this morning I remembered with a rush the infinite wealth that lies on one short bus ride, the ammo, the people. There’s so much to see and listen to and speculate about and imagine. I don’t particularly enjoy riding the bus, but it still fires up my writer/thinker brain.

The bus cleared out at the stop where I got on, so I sat in the front, next to a large man with a tall umbrella and a heavy head of fuzzy black hair. It had been raining, and in the moments his umbrella was closed, before he got on the bus, a dozen tiny drops caught in the net of his hair, like drops of dew on a morning spiderweb. He let me get on the bus first. He heaved and sighed until I got off. He looked up at the ceiling and out the window behind him and he just sighed these deep, anxious sighs.

When I reached my stop and the bus halted with a bump, he held out his arm, straight across the aisle, like a rail, offering it to the woman behind me, something to hold onto. People are always falling all over each other on the bus, and pretending that it's perfectly normal to stumble and cram oneself against strangers. She didn’t take his arm.