and then there were 25

And what of the list after my epic journey?

# 3 Spend a month abroad
Done! Hurray. That was easy. Okay not easy, easy. But honestly if you’re looking to get your head straight, to really step away from your life without abandoning it completely this is the perfect amount of time. And if you go to Argentina you won’t break the bank either.

#6 Learn Spanish
I thought hard about whether or not to check this one off. It’s a difficult question because what does it mean to ‘speak’ a language? To be eloquent and have a rich vocabulary? That’s an accomplishment in one’s first language. To be understood by those you’re speaking to and understand them as well? Okay then. I would never call myself fluent in Spanish, not even close. But I was able to get past that very rudimentary level of ‘where is this?’ and ‘my name is?’ to being able to chat and converse pretty comfortably. I wouldn’t say I speak Spanish without the caveat of a ‘mas o menos’ attached but I am the boss of this list so I say: done.

#7 Learn the Tango
Again, there are many levels of knowing a dance and you don’t become an expert at a dance in a few weeks time no matter what DWTS tells you. But I can do it, I have the basics and I intend to continue with classes here in Seattle. I also give myself extra points for bravery from making an ass of myself in a genuine, Argentine milonga with a genuine Argentine. Done.

#10 Reconnect with someone I never thought I would see again
Done and done. In addition to my darling friend Jim who was my travel guide and occasional lifesaver in Buenos Aires, I reconnected with my wonderful Uruguayan host family from my student days. I took the Buquebus over to see them the day before I left for Ushuaia and spent a day with them in Colonia, Uruguay where they still live. My host parents looked exactly the same, the kids however were about four times the size they’d been when I’d seen them last; they were 4 and 6 nine years ago so were now teenagers. The chubby cheeked little boy I’d known was now taller than me and wanted to talk about Jersey Shore (our finest cultural export) and his rock band. How had so much time gone by? Where had I been? Colonia looked the same as ever: beautiful and quaint. Nine years? Feels like a moment ago. Feels like a hundred years. I got misty-eyed when I left, remembering the long nights I’d stayed up chatting with my host mom in the kitchen after coming home from a night with my friends and the nights we all danced samba in the living room with the kids and drank Amaretto. What I ever did to deserve having these amazing people as a host family, I wish I knew.

So the list and the year are off to as a good a start as they could possibly be.

What’s on your list for this year? Have you checked anything off yet?

No rejection before breakfast

Of the literary variety I mean. Although while I’m at it, I sincerely hope I never have the misfortune of dating someone who would dump a gal before she’d had her coffee and eggs. Anyone who knows me even a little knows how seriously I take breakfast. Breakfast first, questions later. This is why I have to restrain myself from running over and firing up my laptop the moment I wake up in the morning; anxious as I am, I know it’s not wise to court big news on an empty stomach.

Number one on my list of things to do before I’m thirty (and in life really) is get a book deal. A week ago I started sending out queries for an agent for the novel I just finished. I had an agent for the last one but she’s left the business so I’ve got to find someone new to help try to usher my work out into the world. Now, because I’ve been through this all before I’ve been talking a really good game about how it’s all going to be different this time. I am not going to turn into a crazy person who picks totally irrational fights on dates and disgraces herself while dressed as Wonder Woman (true story). As a dear writer friend told me about ‘handling’ the submission process (the prettier, more evil sister of the query process), ‘honey, if you’re not on the bathroom floor with a bottle of vodka you’re doing fine’ which is a good dose of perspective, though I think it might have been better if I HAD locked myself in the bathroom some of those nights, especially the ones where there was any vodka around.

But not this time! This time I had resolved to be mature about it. And you know it has felt different. For one thing I happen to like this book more than the last one. Not that I didn’t like the last one and not that I didn’t work very hard on it but I remember feeling some deep ambivalence about it too. I dreamt from time to time while I was doing revisions of burning it page by page with a lighter in the kitchen sink or sitting on the edge of the dock at my parents’ place and releasing each manuscript page into the wind one by one until the entire book was floating on the water. No one could tell me, by the way, whether or not feeling this way about one’s own work was normal. And this was before all of the rejection started. After the rejections letters—first from some agents and then from rather a great number of publishers—after the close call that broke my heart, after the dream slipped away, then I really didn’t want to think about that book. It was like an ex boyfriend who I would always in some way love but didn’t really want to talk about let alone hear from again.

But this one is different. I’ve never dreamed of burning it for one thing. My dear former agent did me a solid and sent me a handful of great referrals as did a close friend of mine who is an assistant editor and what do you know, a bunch of them asked to see the book in the first couple of days! And you know, I was feeling pretty great about things. I had conquered a demon just by finishing the book. I had gone back to the blank page after the biggest disappointment of my life and I had triumphed over it. And aren’t I lucky that I have a passion that I care about? Aren’t I lucky that I don’t live in a war-torn country or have to raise three children on my own; that I have the kind of life where I can even aspire to be a novelist in the first place? I reasoned that the pursuit of publication is like the pursuit of love: the first time you get your heart broken, you are SHOCKED by how much it hurts; you think I will never get over this but then lo, you do get over it. One day you wake up and you start feeling better and then you meet someone else and the pain becomes a memory faster than you ever thought it could. After that first time, it still hurts when a relationship ends but it’s never that bad again because you know that you will someday get over it; after all, you’ve been there. So I reasoned it could never quite hurt like the first time. I felt I had the situation in hand. I was saying things like ‘que sera sera’ and ‘if it doesn’t work out, I will just write another one’ and believing these things. Secretly I wondered how long this feeling of Zen could possibly last. Answer: until this morning.

I woke up this morning with an all too familiar feeling in my stomach. You know how you totally forget how really truly awful a stomach virus is until you get one again? It was like that. You see, this is the point at which my email in-box becomes angel and executioner, and there’s no knowing which until I open it on any given day. Mondays are the worst because there is always the possibility that one of those agents decided it was too cold to go outside and curled up with my manuscript to get a jump on the week. By the time I open my email in the morning its midday in New York (where books are born and agents get their wings); plenty of time for an agent to have had her coffee and get down to the business of making dreams come true (or you know, not). My Zen mind says not to fret over this because, again much like dating, ultimately you want to be with someone who wants to be with you and if they’re not the one, better they just let you know so you can move on and keep looking for true love. Because after this comes submission (aptly named that) and that is its own fresh hell; if anything, it’s worse than querying because there are not one tenth as many good publishers to try for as there are good agents. I know this; this is not my first rodeo. A writer needs someone who really believes in her; someone who will join her in the folie a deux in which both agent and writer believe that—though the odds are so supremely against it—she will be the one who makes it. I’m trying to maintain perspective but all the perspective in the world doesn’t keep those letters from hurting when they come. And there will be rejections, just as sure as there will be tears and anxiety and moments of unbridled hope. And vodka. 

Because # 5 on the list is start a blog about the list

I have a list.

A couple of months ago I was fresh out of a relationship, coming to the end of a long term freelance gig and finishing up a novel which I’d been working on for a long time. After moving back to Seattle from New York City about a year ago, I’d been living in my parents’ beach house so I didn’t even have so much as a lease to my name. I felt like I could either freak out because my life was once again in a state of flux or embrace a moment that might never come again.  

So I made a list: thirty things I want to do before I’m thirty. Why thirty? Mostly because it’s my next milestone birthday (in a little under a year and a half for those keeping track) and as a writer I love nothing more than a self-imposed deadline, it’s a way of making things happen just as the act of list-making is. You put a thing in writing, you give yourself a deadline and magically things happen. This strategy works well for writers and other diligent masochists because in order to be effective, you must fear yourself and your own capacity for self-flagellation. Do they teach self-flagellation in MFA programs? They should.  

Let’s get one other thing out of the way, I don’t think thirty is old or in any way some magical number. I do not think I will awake in the morning of April 5^th, 2012 and arise a fully formed adult person who has Everything Figured Out. There’s something wonderful about being in one’s late twenties, you at last don’t feel like a complete novice—in work, in life, in love—but you also don’t feel too far along in everything to turn back, you can still start all over. For me and for a lot of my friends who are around the same age it’s a time when a lot of Big Questions begin to come to the forefront. Is this really the career I want to be in? Is this the city I want to put down roots in? Is this the person I want to marry? These issues have a sudden sense of urgency they never had before when we were in our early twenties and still in the very experimental stages of adulthood. With thirty in your sights there is the sense that now is the time to change what needs to be changed; it’s not going to get any easier to relocate/change careers/break up.

We all have moments when we are struck with the deep sense that time is precious; whether from something as pleasant as a vacation that comes too quickly to an end or from something as painful as the diagnosis of an illness, every once in a while we really feel the days going by us. For me this is one of those moments and so I choose to embrace it, to make it an adventure. Because the truth is, time is in some sense always running out; it’s not limitless, not for any of us. So what do you want to do before you’re 30? Before you’re 40, 50 or 60? Before you’re married? Before you’re dead and gone? Before it’s too late? Because someday it will be too late. Ask yourself—really ask yourself—if not now, when?