Rainy day brain ramblings

It’s raining, and I’m eating strawberries. It's early for rain, and it's early to be eating strawberries. They’re not in season. It was hard to find a container that didn’t have some severe squishy going on, but I’m eating them. With just a little sugar.

This tastes like memory to me. It tastes like dessert after Easter dinner at my grandmother’s house. Fluffy white meringues of Schaum Torte. Even fluffier peaks of whipping cream and the decadent brilliance of strawberries out of season.
Red juices running over the clear glass plates that Grandma brought out, only for Schaum Torte. The plates are shaped sort of like peaches and are completely appropriate for the inexact shape of the mound of white meringue. A round plate would have made the tortes look sloppy.

By the end of dessert, the sludge on my plate is pink. The meringue isn’t crisp anymore, but I’ve eaten all the strawberries.

I remember strawberries as a luxury. This is possibly a slightly modified memory, but I feel like they were something to be eaten only in season when the prices were down or as my neighbor's freezer jam later in the summer.
And so eating them at my desk for no apparent reason, while reading an exquisitely crafted book, watching the early not-yet-spring rain happen, feels like a nap in a sunbeam. I'm stretched full length in it, a happy, warm cat.

Back with Another Book Rant

It irks me that I can't finish a novel (that I'm writing) because I really seem to know what I'm doing when it comes to picking apart stylistic problems with novels I'm reading.

Today's exhibit:
The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

I read an article the author wrote concerning his research on the Battle of Agincourt, thought he was engaging and well-researched and went to find his books. Lo, Mr. Cornwell had written this book about King Alfred (the Great), champion of literacy and bane of the Danish invasion...founder of England as we know it in a great many ways. I've read lots of historical fiction set in England, but most of it is 13th-16th century, and I was all about reading Danish conflict. Some of my favorite days in England were spent learning about the places the Danes had set up shop. (Yay York!) I was also really interested in how one goes about telling the story of this great English king from the POV of an English boy, taken as a slave by the Danes, who is then trained as a Danish warrior to go a-Viking. Really? What fascinating angle, so I gravitated towards this early history, rather than the book about the Battle of Agincourt, or Cornwell's retelling of the Arthur story.

And aaaaagh....Cornwell, while well-researched, has fallen into the biggest fricken' pit trap of first-person story telling there is. His narrator relays events like a person might relay their day. "Well, I got up and dressed in my [historically accurate and detailed] battle garb. We all boarded the long ship. It was [historically accurate description of the way a ship is built and how fierce all the Vikings looked]. While afloat, the old, blind scald told Odin's battle stories. They were quite inspiring. The battle was grim and bloody and people's guts were everywhere, but the battle rage came upon me and no one could stand. My leader rewarded me by giving me another arm band. I was growing quite wealthy. [Description of the use of metal jewelry as currency.]..., & c."

He even runs aground on my biggest pet peeve: "It was then I first saw [the man who would be King Alfred, the first woman I would love, this guy who I think is suspicious and weaselly, but with whom no one else takes issue until he tries to kill me..."] Oh for fuck's sake! Give us some build up.

And it's not like this guy can't create character and dialogue. I read too quickly through the places where he pauses to actually flesh out an interaction. He wrote a really brilliant scene of the young narrator, while still a slave boy, saving the war leader's daughter from a pack of other young boys. (This was a game of war and plunder that went a little too far.) There was suspense and character, and the punishments and rewards that followed did well to illustrate the way Cornwell researched systems of justice and allegiance that may have been in use at the time.
It advanced the plot of the narrator's move up the social ladder among his adopted people. It gave some character development, AND it fleshed out the cultural setting.

There is lamentably little of this, and I'm finding it really difficult to get through this book. I still am very curious about how this is going to become Alfred's story, and the way it is narrated indicates that it will make the shift sometime. However, it might be a miracle if I get there.

So let it be said, even if you are writing a first person narrative, you must still make it detailed. You cannot get away with info-dumping your way through a novel. We will appreciate your researching efforts so much more if try a little harder to show us the action. I want to feel squicked and nervous while reading a battle scene. I want to feel elated when the main characters make it through. I want to be amused by the budding relationship between the saucy new slave girl and the narrator. I want to slowly become suspicious of the man sent to kill the main character, and be either triumphant that I figured it out before the rest of the characters or startled by the treachery right along with them.

...and in a minor, unrelated complaint, I kind of want Danes that don't read like Beowulf caricatures. I understand that most of the Danes I'm reading about are the advance fighting/colonizing force, and that the Dane Next Door has yet to arrive in England, but come on! I bet they weren't all ready to feast on the flesh of their enemies and laugh in the face of danger at the drop of a hat. Facing farmers and unfortunate conscripts or not, you could still die with a pitchfork or an eel spear through your gut all slow and rotty...ew.

On that positive note, I think I'm done.

Staging Macbeth

I went to see the Guthrie Theater's production of Macbeth last night. Thanks to DB's Big Brothers, Big Sisters connection, we had free tickets in row H, dead center. Awesome. The performances were all quite good.
MacDuff's son in particular blew me away. It's not easy to be a kid with multiple lines of Shakespeare. (Alas, I can't remember which boy played him last night, as there are two that share the roll in alternating performances.) Michelle O'Neill as Lady Macbeth was fantastic as well. She played a very turned-on-by-power vampy Lady which made her descent into sleep-walking madness really incredible.

After the play, we had an interesting conversation about the decision to set it in alternate 1940s. We both agreed that what was fresh in the mid-90s--that taking Shakespeare out of it's literal time period and putting it somewhere else thing--is actually getting kind of old. We found ourselves wishing that maybe everybody had been running around in 11th century Scottish gear, rather than crisp military uniforms and pretty swing-dresses.
DB thought there is just too much jar between the setting and the language, that it takes even longer for your brain to start "speaking Shakespearean" than it does when you're faced with people in time-period correct costumes. To a certain extent, I agree. I think it's more that you have one more thing to try and figure out. Where are we? When are we? What did he say?

That said, we did roam down a "what non-11th century settings would work better" sort of path. Neither of these solves the head knot brought on by adjusting to setting and language at the same time, but roll with me on this one. I like it.

Macbeth, we decided, could be quite easily set in a sort of post-apocalyptic time. Thus, it makes sense for there to again be a king of Scotland as an entirely separate entity from the UK. The amount of knife fighting suddenly makes sense again if firearms have grown scarce post some sort of WW III. The presence of the Weird Sisters as a sort of we've returned to a more superstitious time makes sense again, and if the time period is already stressful, resource-low, etc., the madness is more believable again.

My favorite, however, was sort of a high-punk, super underground early 80s thing. Similar to what Luhrman did with his now-iconic Romeo and Juliet, the factions involved could be very much rival gangs. We're not talking kings and queens at all, we're just talking leaders with delusions of grandeur and inflated titles.
I also think the Weird Sisters as drugged out nutjobs is a rather fun image. Madness works well in this environment too...if everyone is a little strung out on stuff all the time.
It would have to be done carefully because the Macbeths' guilt-raddled visions are one of the most powerful things in this play, and if it gets played off too much as the result of his drug-delusions, it could lose something. (But I just keep thinking of the baby crawling on the ceiling in Trainspotting...it would work quite well with the ghost of Banquo.)

There's certainly still a language-jar, but somehow it feels more right in my mind than alternate 1940s. I can't explain precisely what didn't work, but something kept pulling me out of the moment. I didn't have this problem with a Napoleonic Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Victorian Midsummer Night's Dream also works well for me, but I just felt like Macbeth could have been staged better. ...so we fixed it, and now I have great desire to be a director.

POV

I'm reading another novel suggested by one of my professorial coworkers, and I find myself jumping from book, to other things, back to book. It took me a few moments to figure out why, and I'm not entirely sure yet that I've figured it out, but I have a hunch.

POV shifts mid-scene make me mental.
This is a stylistic choice. I don't think it's even on the widely accepted "list of big no-nos", but it's on mine. It just messes up the flow to go from one character's head to another. Surely the bit of world-detail presented by the switch can be saved for another time. And, if not, omni-narrator it or have someone say something aloud. Of course people think things that are only somewhat related to the present task. The mind works that way--it just reminds itself of things as it goes along, but keep those little digressions in one head at a time!

I write, often from the POV of multiple characters, but I really try to be sure I keep it to one individual per chapter or scene. Narrator 1 exits stage right; narrator 2 who watches him/her go picks up the slack. Most of the books I read also seem to function like this, leading me to believe it's sort of the "currently accepted norm" for fiction (especially genre fiction).

(An aside:
Can you imagine if writers of genre fiction couldn't stay in one POV character's head per scene? Casts in fantasy novels number in the hundreds sometimes. It would be cacophonous! The reader would get lost in the text...and not in a good way.)

I may really get into this book and wind up liking it. It was, after all, billed to me as a good thinking-woman's antidote to Stephanie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. It has a good set-up in place for the World of the Supernatural that thrives beside normal people, even a couple "that's new" explanations for things like vampires (which is madly rare these days when there's a vamp behind every velvet chaise). It's very accurately Victorian. It is certainly witty and wryly written, but these POV shifts might kill it for me.
And that, my friends, is that.

ETA: The POV shifts don't really end, but Soulless (by Gail Carriger) is a romp of a book. The characters grabbed me enough that I can forgive her little slips into other people's heads. She writes a real strong heroine, not one of these women the author is always telling you is strong, but a real, take-initiative, won't take no for an answer gal. And SMART.

The other thing this book does that's kinda nifty is make a real attempt to stay in Victorian language. It was a nice change of pace to keep that sort of tone up throughout. I don't think I can do it yet, so: nice job Ms. Carriger.
My feelings about POV have not changed, but I'm pleased to say this book really cranked it out once I got into it. I look forward to the next one in the series.

Confession time: Impure Thoughts.

Long time, no bloggy. I'm actually doing a lot of fiction writing, and that doesn't necessarily lead to a whole lot to put here. I've also been reading nothing but young adult fiction and comic books. It's not been a bad January. Good brain rest.

But I do have this:
A while back, when I was doing a sort of "character inventory", a "what do I learn about myself from looking at my characters thing, I discovered something interesting about the sexuality of my female protagonists. It was...rather nonexistent. These women apparently all have bigger and better things to think about than how blazingly attractive their male lead is. Goodness, they're all crusaders and artists and gods know what else. They don't have time for such entanglements! (Maybe they secretly like girls, and I just haven't noticed yet...)
And it's not that I write pure, virtuous gals either. They're just...not interested. They don't notice men. They don't notice women. They just go about their business. UNLESS, and this is a sizable unless, I've designed them to be that sort of stock "man-eater" character who exists to be the punchline of many a discomfited man joke.

This struck me as odd when I first noticed it, and it still rings wrong, perhaps because it's not at all like me. I notice people. I have a nearly-male brain when it comes to being dropped into lust over something visual. Narrow hips on which pants fit well. That classic triangle man-shape (broad shoulders/narrow waist). Men's legs (oh days as the soccer team ball girl, how formative you were...). Hands. The right mouth on both men and women have been known to send me flailing into moments of trying to remain appropriate. Flawless skin on women's upper bodies. I could probably go on.
My leading ladies display none of this. I suppose that I could blame it on time period and what have you, but honestly, people still noticed other people, even if they thought they were being terribly unchaste for doing so.

My point here is not to figure out what this says about me. I KNOW what this says about me. As much as I enjoy physical relationships, I've always thought that living without longing for one would be really nice. Just hang out. Love your friends, have fun, no worries. Viv' la self-sufficiency.

What concerns me here is actually the believability of my ladies. I write fiction with a very present romantic element, not going to shy away from admitting it. The women I create do end up paired off (mostly), and I don't want it to seem out of character when it happens.
This may be a statement of the obviously, but:
Becoming involved with someone is not a purely cerebral thing (even if I'd like it to be). It has a (if you'll excuse the near pun) nuts and bolts biology to it as well, and that can be tremendously fun. The writing of that attraction can help draw a reader into further identification with a character.
I mean, who wants to read about two characters whose relationship build goes thusly:

Genetically, they were compatible and conversation ran smoothly. They found time in each other's company quite satisfactory. Surely this is what it was to be "in love." Perhaps it was time they took the relationship to its natural next level. They shook hands on it, business like, for soon, it would be business time.

(So I exaggerate. None of my character interactions are this bland, but it is the risk one runs, I think.)

I also wonder, if--in addition to my own little weirdity--that some of my lack comes down to a societal acceptance of men having these obvious "want to bone it now" thoughts, and women *wilt* just shouldn't. I dare say. I hate it when stuff like this creeps in unexpectedly. Just when I think I can be above what is societally ingrained, I have asexual women who will go blithely along with a man's attraction once it has been made known that he wants her as though it had not occurred to her until that point. LAME.

Then, this morning, I came back to a character I created last summer (just so a costume I threw together would have a little more meaning to me).

She is Quincy Anna-Victoria Winchester Darlington IV. (Her father didn't think he should stop the family tradition of Quincy Darlington-ing just because he had a daughter.)
She's a sky pirate in an alternate historical England (time period to be decided). She may be a bit rough around the edges, but my dear Quincy has the potential to mark a departure in my heroines. For the first, and relevant here, she arrives on scene with a lust-interest. Mr. Nathaniel Brooke (just Brooke to the endlessly informal Quincy) is a bit of air force hot stuff who is not opposed to making a little money on the side if his pirate friend needs a hand from time to time.

Part of the three pages of hers I have written include the place where the reader would meet Brooke for the first time, and I'd like to think it's one of the best pieces (if not only) of flirtation I've ever written. It's obvious they're interested in each other. Quincy may do a little "this is not ladylike" censoring, but it's more tongue-in-cheek than anything, and Brooke might be guilty of thinking Quincy is easy 'cause she's a woman in trousers, but they're still attracted to each other. It's not sweeping and epic, and it's not tragically doomed (and maybe I've just put my finger on the problem with some of my other characters). It's just interest. Plain and never simple. (Ahaha. ehem.)
********

Goes like so:

“Quincy.” He stretched out his hands like a gentleman to greet me, but we both knew I was no lady and he was no gentleman. At least, there was no way I could be a lady, thinking the things I thought about the way his belt road on his hips. The way his military issue coat fit his shoulders.
I bowed over his hands, touching my forehead to the back of them as he took mine, an Eastern habit I'd picked up in my childhood. “Brooke. I’ve got a situation.”
“You always have a situation Quincy. Is it a lucrative situation?”
“I always have a lucrative situation.”
He smiled. He was like Helen of Troy when he smiled. Thousand ships, no fooling. My knees felt dangerously watery.
“I’m listening.”
I explained things to him.
“I know those containers. I didn’t recognize the mark.”
“You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”
“No. I can bring them to you later.”
“Why not now?”
“I’m a little busy. Besides, I’d like you to take me to dinner for my trouble.”
It was easy to narrow my eyes at him. My insides were feeling especially traitorous at the suggestion. “I’m taking you to dinner?”
“You’re the wealthy one. I’m just a governmental employee. You know we make nothing. I could take this cargo and run with it."
I frowned. “You wouldn’t.”
“No?”
I shoved him. “No. Your happy little job means too much to you.”
He raised one coppery eyebrow. “It does at that. I’ll have the cargo to your ship by 6, then we’ll get some food. I hope you brought decent clothes.”
I looked down at my slightly out-of-date military trousers and boots, ancient shirt and somewhat begrimed gloves. “My vest is decent.” I said, grinning.
Somehow with Brooke, I always managed charming when I grinned. He shook his head at me. “You’re something else Quince. Go shopping, why don’t you. You’re about to have the money for it. The officer’s club serves up a mighty good meal.”
“The officer’s club?! Brooke, you know I hate being around so much brass.”
“I know.” He grinned. “But I like making you squirm.”
********
I really want to do more with Quincy--and not just in the interest of consciously addressing the issues stated above, though that will be part of it. This morning, when I was thinking about how long it had been since I've written anything here...and how much fiction I've been doing, I thought it might be fun to try to post a serial here. I'm hesitant, due to my complete inability to finish anything I start, and I already have too many projects.
But if I start with say...one piece a month, with the goal to get it up to every other week...that might work. 'Cause I think this gal really wants to come out and play.

Credo

I feel, as I move closer to making a decision about what I want to be when I grow up, that I need some sort of "mission statement". Part of me is cranky that I know I'm going to need to prepare explanations for people who "thought they knew me" if I suddenly show up with "by the way, I'm going to seminary to get my M Div." Part of me is really excited to turn expectations on their heads.

It's bizarro to be "church shopping" as part of a job search/planning. This is--perhaps--the process that every potential job should have: more research, more exploring people working in your proposed field...not just several years of school and: See what you can do with an English major that we've been telling you for four years you can do a whole lot with, good luck!

It feels both wonderful and ridiculous to be coming at something with such purpose, especially since I have not been "church-going" in nearly 15 years. I was confirmed, and I said: no more.

However, before I decide if I want to throw myself on the mercy of loans and a heavier classload, I have to see if there really are religious communities out there that I could feel at home in...and, more importantly, fall into a leadership role within.

Which brings me back to: How on earth can such an agnostic woman even begin to think of herself as someone others might look to for spiritual guidance? ...and fears of suddenly not fitting into the circles that I currently frequent. I'm going to be the same person, I just hope to have an outlet for my talents...which I think lie in writing, speaking, and textual analysis.

I recently spoke to Rev. Paula Northwood (youth education director at Plymouth Congregational), and she has a comfortingly familiar theology. She's comfortable talking to people about Christ because she knows that she means Christ on a more cosmic/universal "divine" level, and the people to whom she is speaking bring their own levels of interpretation to what she says. They don't all have to believe in the same way to make the meaning work. I like that. It's rather how I function. Though I still think I might be a bit more Unitarian than Progressive Protestant...I guess we'll see.

Regardless, Paula made me feel like there is a place for people like me in the rapidly altering spiritual world of today. I think I can believe that. I also want to believe that I could be part of a movement among leaders of my generation to take back the spiritual from the religious...to be part of the dialogue across cultures. These are things that matter to me, and whether or not we're a secular society, I think they're sort of at the heart of humanity--consciously or not. Humans make meaning--in varying degrees of complexity--from the scientific to the world unseen, however we choose to personify (or not) that piece of the puzzle.

I can speak to these things. I can (and would love to) learn more of the histories of our world's belief systems, so I can teach others about them, allowing them to make their own decisions about the meaning they make. I think the truth of my potential vocation is inside that. At its core pastoral work should be about helping others to understand and interpret. I grew up in a much more "throw it at you and make you believe" sort of environment, and, I think, many others have too. My explanation of what I do, should I find myself in this sort of employment, will be more along the lines that I'm a teacher...and not in a high schooly names and dates sort of way. This is teaching high level college English...without the ridiculous university expectations from which I am trying to stay away.

And so, to everyone: myself, those who would be excited and those who would be turned off at the thought of Wendy the Bible-thumper--this isn't that. It's newer than that. More involved in the world than the theology I grew up around. It is questions, maybe answers--at the very least--theories. I know this is a lot of work. I know it has potential to be exhausting, and I hope I'm up to that, but it also has the potential to be uplifting, educational and non-rut-forming. And perhaps, most importantly, not a regular desk job. Some desk. Minimal desk, but not all desk all the time.

Keeping my oar in: A first stab at the black beast.

In which I try and fail to write about my "examining my girl-self" project and turn to a prompt that leads me to That Other Essay I Have Been Avoiding.
This comes out of a prompt in Elizabeth Andrew's Writing Your Sacred Journey...prompted to write about a way in which nature is not always pleasant.


When I was in eighth grade, I joined the church youth group on an end of the winter camping trip. It was a warm sort of March, made for endless afternoon broomball games in the slushy surface of the frozen river. As a group, we made good on Camp Luther's highway clean-up promises. We found the usual sorts of things you find at the side of northern Wisconsin's highways: shoes, beer bottles, soda cans...underwear. Things that make you wonder. We were given instructions that if we found roadkilled deer that we mark it and call in the truck that would take it away to a wildlife center for critters to munch on.
About midway through the day, my partner Jenn and I found such a deer. It had frozen and thawed many times over the course of the winter and had a sort of dehydrated, sunken look. It hadn't any eyes and crows had been at its insides as well. We stood and looked at it for a long time, taking in the broken legs, the way the constricting muscles had pulled the vertebrae of the neck back, bending the head over the spine. The formerly dense fur was patchy and sticking together in wet spikes.
It was, at that point, the largest dead thing I had been near.

When I was little, our neighbors' house had eves made for bird nests, and starlings and house sparrows used them every year. Each spring, some of the nestlings would overflow, long before they were supposed to be testing their wings, to meet their death on the ground below. I patrolled the back yard, looking for these unfortunates, ostensibly to keep my neighbor's indoor/outdoor cats from eating them. I still remember the sort of guilty-nervous swoop of my stomach when I found the small, featherless bodies, eyes still closed, looking more like bruises on the sides of their overlarge heads.
My summer rambles around the neighborhood were relatively unsupervised, and between bike-rides and games of empty-lot kickball, I'd often check back several times, looking in on the progress of decomposition and insect activity. If I didn't see Damon and Pythias (my neighbor's mythically named cats) in the yard, I wouldn't tell my neighbor about the dead bird. I liked to keep it to myself, a little science experiment.
Over the 16 years we lived in that house on Summer Street, we buried a lot of fish, birds, bunnies and cats under the pine tree in our backyard. By the time I was in high school, I started to think about digging them up to see if I could reconstruct the skeletons of the larger animals, even my beloved bunny Fluff. I always felt sort of ashamed about it, but I still wanted to do it. I never did.


When I began looking for colleges, I searched for a place that would let me know how to determine age, ethnicity and sex from skeletal evidence. I made my decision based on several phone conversations had with Professor O'Connell, skeletal anthropologist extraordinaire. I had a lot of great opportunities. I went to the city morgue in the company of another professor to examine the remains of a man who had been found in a field. It was possible that his fingertips had been removed to make identification difficult. We determined, based on spiral fractures in the phalanges, that it was wildlife chewing on his fingers that removed them, not the straight-across tool-marks that might indicate human action. Professor Myster pointed out to us skull features we'd only seen in the lab (mandibular tori, for example...bumps in the bone of the lower jaw. I have them too). We watched the insect life that had come to the morgue along with the man's remains thaw out and move about. I remembered eighth grade's frozen and thawed deer, for this man had also spent some time in the elements. His skin reminded me of pictures I'd seen in National Geographic of the Ice Man. (Oh, how I used to inhale anything Nat Geo had for me about human remains in archaeology!)

I remember Professor Myster's excitement in the field. It seems strange to admit to excitement around death, but it was very academic. It made me feel less weird for all those years of backyard decomp studies. It made me feel like I'd found a place, like I had chosen correctly.
The world needs these people who do not find the processes of death terrifying and stomach-turningly disgusting, and I was ready and willing to join the ranks of these men and women.

I spent the summer between my junior and senior years holed up in the osteology lab for hours with boxes of bones that had been taken from the desert 80 years before--Hamline's teaching collection. I put to use my skills in bone measurement, defining age at death, the sex of the individual, learned also to keep the skeletons I had laid out respectfully covered with red cloth and to smudge with sage before and after--and whenever something felt off in the room. (And there were times when I suddenly did not feel like I was alone.)

Even as I gloried in this work, my mind was crumbling on itself. The black sludge that traveled the genetic lines from at least as far back as my great grandfather began to bubble up in me...I always have images of that cartoon ice-age critter in a tar pit when I think of this time. The more I struggled, the more exhausted I became, and so I gave myself over to it. All my uncertainty, all my feelings of unworth. I allowed those feelings to get in the way, allowed myself to believe it was easier to just give up. Friendships dwindled; my senior project died. If DB hadn't been enrolled in school and determined to finish, he would have gone as well. I wonder, sometimes, if he had, if I would have crawled back to my parents' house. Taken a leave of absence and come back at some better time. Come back to my bones.

And I've lived with this feeling of life interrupted/gone awry for the last eight years.
Eight years of being ok with a sort of slacker underachievement that would never have appeased the gods of my younger days. ...and really, didn't appease the gods of my early twenties either, but I hadn't the will to crawl out of that damn tar pit.

Out of intense longing, I've never closed the door on this time of my life. I have to do it now. It's part of me. In some parallel universe, I have no doubt that I pour over skeletons, both modern and ancient, unwrapping their secrets. I may even be an entomologist, taking insect evidence from dump sights. I dreamed, for a time, of following in Professor Myster's footsteps and going to the U of Tennessee to study decomposition at the "Body Farm". Maybe I'm hangin' out down there, teaching and studying, the next in a line of delightfully off-kilter academics who don't mind decay.
But I don't live in that world, so I must find a way to lay it down and pick up the dream that is real in this world. I know that moving forward now requires me to face this part of my life that I have--to this point--acknowledged, but not yet embraced.

As I go through the detritus of my young creative life, and find pieces of real brilliance and pieces that make me love me all over again, I'm sure there is also wealth in the years of my life between 21 and 28. I think the first step in discovering that wealth might be accepting the mistakes and decisions I made as my own.
We all come upon the life we're supposed to live in different ways, and the way the world is opening up before and behind me right now scares the hell out of me. ...the comparison springs readily to mind, so forgive me...scares me like all the dead things in the world haven't been able to.

My friend KC told me something fantastic the other day (and she has lived through a lot of the same things that I have and has the benefit of nearly 30 years on me). KC is an avid outdoorswoman. She kayaks and white-water canoes like a pro. She said: "Do you know why most people capsize in their kayaks?" I, knowing nothing of kayaking, shook my head in the negative. "People tip because when they hit the rapids, they stop paddling. They grab the sides of the craft and try to find their balance that way, rather than paddling through it. You just have to keep your oar in."

That's the advice with which I'm moving forward. No more tar pits, just sections of river that are more rough than others. (I imagine that the sense of getting through the rapids is exhilarating.)