Since I’m in Kansas I can’t wish Kevin a Happy Birthday today (Wednesday) or Kirk tomorrow (Thursday). This 11:59PM birthday post will have to do.
Happy Birthday Kev & Kirk, and please make sure your days are filled with fake mustaches, Jason Cooper catcalls, and/or silly hats.
I’m heading out to Kansas tomorrow afternoon and won’t return until Sunday. My blogging will be pretty much non-existent except for a surprise or two that I’ll be setting up before I leave. You can bet I’ll be tweeting my heart out. Despite the sad circumstances, I’m look forward to seeing my family and spending some time together. I’m sure I will play many a hand of Liverpool Rummy and eat some sort of cheesy casserole that involves french fried onions. Ah, the Midwest.
I watched/listened to the President’s primetime press conference tonight while packing and like Sean said afterwards, I always feel better when I hear him speak. Still, my feelings of frustration about the administration’s economic policies are real and persistent. I’ve been saving that Matt Taibi article everyone’s talking about for the airplane so I’m sure that will give me some depression on top of my recession depression. Also, I’d be remiss not to mention my fellas over at LittleSis.org who have given me much to think about. I highly recommend adding their blog Eyes on the Ties to your feed-reader of choice.
I will leave you with five random points before I sign off, have a great week(end):
Well, shit, you guys: my Uncle Leon died early this morning, shortly after midnight.
It’s beyond crazy that he made it one year and a few minutes after my Aunt Donna’s passing, given how sick he was last year at this time. I’m so grateful that we had his voice & love & feisty sense of humor around to keep us company for so long.
I don’t really know what else to say except that I’ve never known anyone as positive as my Uncle, let alone an 11-year lung cancer survivor. Obviously I’m going to miss him.
We’re headed to Kansas next week.
A year ago today my mom’s sister passed away unexpectedly. It was sudden, and due to a short illness. While cleaning out my Aunt Donna’s house, my cousin (and her son) Laurel found a list entitled, “Ten Reasons to Live,” and it was exactly that: a list of the most simple, profound, and touching reasons why she should keep going.
My Aunt struggled with depression and was pretty open about it towards the end of her life; I don’t think I’d share these details if she wasn’t. My cousin Darla, her daughter, had also dealt with depression and after Darla died because of it, my Aunt decided that she needed to be honest about her own struggles. At a family reunion one hot July day in 2003, my Aunt announced that she suffered from bi-polar disorder and then gave the whole family a mini-lesson in what that meant for her and for us. I don’t know if I was ever more proud of her than that moment. She was so brave.
This list that Laurel found, which he read aloud at her funeral service, was probably written during a very dark moment in my Aunt’s life. I think she probably wrote it because she needed to write it. Because if she didn’t have that list as a reference, she wouldn’t be able to get up or make food or otherwise function. When I first heard her reasons to live, my heart swelled and nearly broke. When I first saw the list scratched out on a sheet of notebook paper, I gasped.
Hearing and seeing that list reminded me and my family that despite her death, my Aunt won the battle. She died too soon and too young and it felt massively unfair but, if there can be any comfort in anything when you’re grieving, her depression did not win.
My Aunt kept going so that God could help her create the best Donna possible, and despite sometimes feeling like the world was closing in on her, she stuck to it every day and I don’t think that anything–especially that stupid disease–got the best of her.
I’m missing the farm a lot these days. In particular the time I had to wander around outside and watch the seasons change. I have two vivid memories that creep back: one is of an early morning walk I took before work, probably around 6:00 a.m., and the other is of a nap I took in a field one Friday afternoon when the last class left.
On the morning walk I listened to Bjork on my headphones and watched the sunrise from the fire pond, and the afternoon nap was preceded by a bike ride down some bumpy dirt roads to the field. I dumped my bike in a ditch and spread out on the tall grass. Zzzzz.
I’m aware–very, very aware–of sounding whiny and privileged. More than anything, I feel overwhelmed right now and honestly, a bit disconnected from myself. My mind and heart immediately travel back to one of the more self-indulgent times in my life, during which I thought and analyzed and dreamt maybe more than I should’ve been allowed.
I want to hang on to that head space for a little while, escape for a couple more moments if I can. Lately it seems like I have to save all my big thinking (and doing) for after work or the weekend, and if I can’t actually lay in a field or watch the sunrise, I’m going to day-dream the shit out of it.
Hi-five to Cupcakes Take the Cake for featuring my rainbow cupcakes on their blog today. I’ve taken great pride and joy in declaring, “My cupcake was featured on the #1 Cupcake Blog.” OH WHAT.
In other randomness, a set of New York City rooftop gardens aptly named “Rich People Rooftops NYC” on Flickr. Kinda creepy but also awesome.
I’m going to New Orleans this May with some girlfriends from high school. We’re staying downtown and I’m hoping that our time there includes lots of walking, pastries, and photo-ops.
After I booked my flight earlier this week, I started thinking about my only other visit to New Orleans in January 2005. It was my senior year of college, and my friend Brynn and I rented an apartment in the Bywater neighborhood, which we found via Craigslist. Every day that week we walked or took the bus to and from the French Quarter, downtown, and the Garden district. It was an amazing trip.
About eight months later, Katrina hit and since then both Brynn and I have wondered about the fate of Bywater and whether the house we stayed at still stands. I’m sort of embarrassed to say that up until a couple days ago, I didn’t do much beyond wondering. In preparing to return to NOLA, I decided to do the obvious and googled Bywater. Good news: the floods pretty much avoided the neighborhood.
After learning this and seeing some signsof Bywater’s continued revitalization, I started searching for our house. A little background: all the trip planning for my 2005 NOLA visit was done via my college email account so unfortunately, I lost the owner’s contact information as well as the address of the property. I honestly thought it was more likely I’d never find the house or owner again than not.
I decided to try a Flickr search, and the first photo I found was this one(sorry, the photographer won’t let me post it here so click on it). I noticed the the street signs for Dauphine and Mazant, and they sounded familiar. I figured I was just remembering major thoroughfares thugh and clicked to another. That house, with all the smoke behind it, it was the one Brynn and I rented.
Incredible, right?
After that, I was able to find another ad on Craigslist, this one posted on March 1, proclaiming the house available for NOLA visitors. I felt a tremendous amount of relief reading through the ad, and then some good old-fashioned happiness. I know most post-Katrina New Orleans stories are not relieving or happy or anything but depressing, and I’m thankful that this small search turned up something good.
Maybe my trip this May will bring more.
I think it was Anna from Door Sixteen that originally turned me on to Sandra Juto’s photo blog Smosch.com. And it’s from Smosch (and Sandra) that I’ve learned of fika.
A Swedish word and institution, “fika” is basically “having coffee” except more than that. It’s not simply the act of drinking coffee, it’s coffee plus conversation plus a sweet pastry plus taking a break for a minute. It’s an event, the very sweetest of every day traditions.
I’m saying this all secondhand of course since I’m not Swedish nor have I ever visited Sweden. And I really only took the time to google “fika” this morning. All that aside, I think I’m in love. It’s like I’ve been searching for the perfect word to express a feeling I have and out of nowhere it comes to me. Except it’s more than a word, it’s also something I love to do.
Look, it’s fika:
How could you not swoon? Fika–alone or not–is about my favorite thing in the world and I am desperate to read a history of it if anyone can point me in the right direction. I want to write novels about fika and take a million photos of fika, I want to tattoo fika on my forearm in an elaborate script. I hope when I go to bed tonight I have a dream about fika.
The End.
P.S. Sandra Juto has an amazing collection of fika photos.
As I suggested in my earlier post about creating a small cabin or tree house, I’m reading Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams and it is indeed stoking the fires of my obsession. It’s also turning out to be the perfect book for me at this time, and for this mindset.
I wanted to share a couple passages and since I’m only on page 50, I’m sure there will be more:
Of course I knew something about gardening. And while it seems to me building has some striking things in common with gardening–both are ways of giving shape to a landscape; of joining elements of nature and culture to make things of usefulness and beauty; of, in effect, teasing meaning from a tree–the intellectual and physical abilities each discipline calls for could scarcely be more different. In the garden a casual approach to geometry, a penchant for improvisation, and a preference for trial and error over the following of directions will rarely get you into serious trouble. Building a house is another story. It seemed to me that the difference between gardening and building was a little like the difference between cooking (which I like to do) and baking (which I can’t), a difference that has everything to do with one’s attitude towards recipes. Mine has always been cavalier. (Pg. 25)
I laughed out loud when I read those last couple sentences, not because they were hilarious but because man, do I relate.
And the following passage, a perfect meditation for Sundays:
Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward. For regardless of the result (if any), the very process of daydreaming is pleasurable. And, I would guess, is probably a psychological necessity. For isn’t it in our daydreams that we acquire some sense of what we are about? Where we try on futures and practice our voices before committing ourselves to word or deeds? Daydreaming is where we go to cultivate the self, or more likely, selves, out of the view and earshot of other people. Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others. (Pg. 7)
A week ago (last Saturday), I got sick. It started with the aching and what I like to call “woozy-headed-ness,” and soon turned into a full fledged cold/flu thing. And man, has it been a pain in the ass. If someone you know tells you that they’ve got that flu bug that’s been floating around, spray yourself with hand sanitizer and run, even if they tell you over the phone–you don’t want near this thing.
Friday, knowing that I was approaching my one-week anniversary with the flu, I became desperate to relieve the ever-present sinus pressure and began asking people for advice. Brynn, like I knew she would, suggested that I buy a Neti pot. Since we were IM’ing when she mentioned it, I responded with something like, “Great! Thanks! Will do!” and then laid my forehead on the desk in agony. I was and have been afraid of Neti pots.
About ten or eleven years ago I took my first yoga class in the back store of a New Age bookstore on Main Street near UB’s South campus. It was my 9th-grade boyfriend’s idea and, adorably, we signed up together. Our teacher, whose name I think was Jim, held court at the front of the room under a Sanskrit-worded banner and table lit with candles. We chanted Om.
One day at the end of class, Jim asked us to wait for a minute and pulled some things out of his bag. In his hands he held a small, ceramic pitcher, which I immediately associated with the Genie lamp from the Disney movie Aladdin (I was a year out of middle school, give me a break). He poured some water into the pitcher and then placed the rounded spout into one of his nostrils. He tilted his head to the side and as he lifted the pitcher, water poured out from his open nostril and into a bowl on the floor. My boyfriend, David, and I looked at each other, checking to make sure that we were both thinking the same thing: Eeeeeww, grooosssssssssss.
Ladies and gentlemen, my introduction and last impressing of the Neti Pot. Perhaps if I had not been a teenager and therefore incredibly self-conscious when I first learned of them, I wouldn’t have associated Neti pots with weirdness and disgust for so long. It’s sort of strange that I’ve maintained my revulsion for them considering my embrace of almost all other natural body and healing products (google “the keeper”)
So strong was my desperation though that on Friday after work, I went to the Lexington Co-op and bought myself a Neti Pot and non-iodized salt. At home I took the pot out of its box and slowly read through the instructions. In the bathroom with my warm (not hot!) saltwater-filled pot, I took a deep breath and tilted my head to the side. Though not as graceful as my yoga teacher Jim, water poured through one nostril and out the other. I crossed over.
from Sandra Juto
from flickr fika pool