summertime and the livin' is...

                                         where can a girl find a nice scientologist these days?

I had a blast in school but I can't say I really miss being in college overall. But there is one this I really miss: summer vacation.

It wasn't just that you had less responsibility, it was that you had different responsibilities in the summer (the concept of responsibility being relative here). My college summers were completely distinct from each other, each with a different job, a different (overly dramatic) romance, different friends. Where other seasons just alternated for me between 'tennis season' and 'off season', summer had its own unique rhythm and different setting. I spent one of my summers living in Whistler working as a hostess and partying every night with a bunch of kids who'd skipped out on the whole college thing and were traveling around the world, picking up work in resort towns where they could. God that was fun.

The idea that summer should be different lives on in my mind. So this summer I just want to write in the mornings, dance every night until I collapse and spend the afternoons drinking rose on my porch reading Carlos Hijuelos and dreaming about Cuba. Maybe just maybe I'll even fit in a wildly inappropriate romance with a shelf-life of eight weeks or so.

What are your plans for the summer?

blog on blog

                                                              beach blanket blogger bunny

Oh irony. I wrote about blogging for the Gloss this week since starting this blog was a list item and so in that I blogged about the blog I've been neglecting all week.

The daily writing isn't so much an issue as it is the daily sharing. I've been at work on a new novel these past few weeks and you know what? Lots of days what I write in a given day is garbage that will never be read by anyone because it won't make it past my own first draft edits. But these wasted words are the foundation, the thing that gets me to the real stuff, so I just let fly and don't worry if it sounds good or even makes sense.  I'd forgotten how freeing that is.

And then there is the question of the overshare. At times I write something and then freeze in horror with my finger over the PUBLISH button and think oh my God, I can't send that into the world with my real name on it; I will embarass myself, hurt someone's feelings, horrify my parents/ clients/ third grade teacher. I admire memorists but I don't have the stomach for it. What's here is not and will never be the most raw of truths but rather a glossy, still-somewhat-reperesentative-of-my-life truth. For the whole truth? You'll have to wait for the ficional account.

get your geek on

Yesterday I wrote for the Gloss about why I'm having so much fun as of late being a dance geek and it got me thinking about that word geek and its many iterations.

Way back when I was a kid, you didn't want to be called a geek, it had negative connotations of loserdom. Being a geek was the antithesis of cool.

But this word has become transformed in our pop culture conception and colloquial use of it. The show Glee has spawned a cavalcade of fan declaring themselves 'Gleeks' and a couple of weeks ago the mighty Anna Wintour descended from her throne to accept a webby award and decreed that 'sometimes geeks can be chic'. 

In adult life we use the words 'geek' or 'nerd' not to describe some shameful state of ostracism but rather to illustrate how passionate we are about something: I'm a book nerd, a wine geek etc. When we're with kindred spirits who are similarly passionate about something, we 'geek' out about it. This usage is sort of fitting because in a way it did mean the same thing in childhood. When you're a kid and especially when you're a teenager, being too into anything besides a sport (and not every sport at that, badminton wouldn't really have cut it) made you automatically seem too earnest to ever be cool. But adults who are really into something are well-rounded and interesting, the kind of people you want to be around.

So go on, geek out. You know you want to.

we don't need no water

I saw a friend tonight who has had a really rough Spring. I asked her how things were going and she said, 'you know when something huge happens in your life and you just have the urge to burn the rest of it to the ground?'

Boy do I.

A life crisis, not quarter and certainly not mid, just a crisis of life coming at you harsher and faster than what you could ever have anticipated. And then when the smoke clears, you're left standing there wondering 'what now'?

You don't just burn your bridge, you throw a molotov cocktail at that sucker and then you walk away while you're still young enough, still hopeful enough to build a new one. You make a new plan. Find a new job, a new man, new friends, a new city. Something, anything.

How do you know when it's time to change something? Moreover, how do you know when it's time to change everything?

all the young dudes

Ah, Summer. When the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the populations of this nation's fine universities are released back into the wilds with the rest of the unsuspecting adult population.

Dealing with these young adults-in-training is odd when you're thirty-ish; it wasn't so many years ago that you were in their shoes but it's a shock sometimes that there are all these people around who can vote and drink and work a professional job who just seem so young. 

Last week I went out to local place that plays blues music on Tuesday nights.When I walked in the door someone carded me and slapped a green wristband on me to show I was twenty-one; I'm at that point now where I beam and sometimes let out an embarrassing little giggle when someone is asking me for my ID in earnest.

Later in the night a guy who was cute despite some rather questionable facial hair asked me to dance. He was really into the local lindy-hop scene, he told me with no discernible trace of irony, which was how he found this place. He told me about another club he liked out in Kirkland.

'Oh do you live on the eastside?' I asked.

'During the summers yes,' he said. And just as I was conjuring some sort of summer cottage situation in my head he added, 'the rest of the year I'm at WSU in eastern Washington.'

I bit my tongue, remembering how much I hated at that age the way people were always reminding me how young I was, as if I wasn't aware  (and to be fair, I did think I was rather grown up at that age but this delusion is a right of passage).

The day before I had spent about an hour talking to a recent graduate who was newly living in New York and looking to break into book publishing. I shared what wisdom I could and reminisced a bit about my days there. It was eerie how familiar she sounded, my own self coming back to me across the line. I recognized her excitement, her fear and most of all that sheer edge of determination in her voice. I told her lots of people wished they had the guts to do what she'd done, that I heard that from people all the time. 'I know. People always say they wish they could move here,' she said, 'but I did it.'

All at once I recognize in myself the exact mix of pity, generosity and wariness that I was once on the other side of when I was fresh out of college.

God. Were we ever that young?

on deadline

I wrote for the Gloss today about my number one list item: getting published. I've been questioning the wisdom of giving myself an arbitrary deadline for such a big life goal; what is the purpose of it? If it was to make myself write? Done. If it was to make myself pursue publication? Done. All done. TWICE! It's in the hands of fate now, deadlines be damned.

At what age did you think you'd have made it big?

girl meets muse

Last week I wrote about my first love; as I mentioned in the piece, I wrote an entire first draft of a novel in my ensuing heartbrokeness (word? spellcheck says no, I say yes!). One of the great silver linings of life as a writer is that horrible situations and their concurrent mess of emotions can make for excellent fodder for your work and serve a purpose greater than just making you miserable. Indeed, many of the worst experiences serves as the most inspirational. It also made me think about how I have traditionally begun the process of working on a novel (I can say traditionally now since I am at number four); in each case, it's been sparked by a close encounter with a muse.

I've led an interesting life and met lots of fascinating people--no small number of whom have influenced my characters. But a muse is something more; a muse is a person who not only serves as inspiration for this other world of mine but who seems to have actually come from it. Someone who, for whatever reason, so fascinates and mystifies me that they seem not quite real and I can't shake the feeling that I'm making them up, that the madness is finally setting in. A telltale sign is when I can't imagine them grocery shopping. The way to any writer's heart is through their imagination--you captivate this and you've got us.

A muse is not necessarily a person of the opposite sex but mine often are. What could be more mysterious than the opposite sex? They are human just like you and yet not like you at all. The sexes will never figure each other out--we were designed to mystify one another. An attraction is possible, even likely. But to ever act on it is dicey not only because you necessarily idealize this person but because any relationship that so closely treads the border between your imagined world and your actual one is dangerous territory. And to see a muse's all too human side is to break the spell and risk losing the inspiration they've brought you. Simply put, some things are just better left to the imagination.

Who inspires you?