the year's end.

Note the date. The year's end--and in fact the decade's--approaches swift. Obviously I am excited about it: 2009 was a real bitch, and I am eager for the metaphorical turn to something else.

I've been mostly doddering around the house these last few days, pushing through the editing of the June 2010 issue of AA,* trying to get all my workshop reading done, reading for pleasure, finding real random gems as I reorganize my files, submitting and getting my story "The Shape of Love" accepted to Hawaii Woman's Journal,** listening to about four different versions of auld lang syne, and packing for Vermont.

That's what time it is, for another residency, the dreaded winter one, with temps dipping below zero and all of us bundled, sniffling and miserable, into our unfashionably padded coats and cooped up in the dorms. Oh, goody. I'm hopeful, though, that we've all tried to learn what we need to do socially to survive ten days on such a small campus. And by that sentence, I am really talking about myself. I felt so caught last year, uncomfortable, uncertain, and then ashamed of decisions I made, anyway, despite all that torturous silent inner deliberation. I wrote all kinds of cryptic crap on this blog about "lessons learned" and "values" and blahblahblahblahblah, but what I come to now, a year later, is this:

Who cares what anyone else does, Mayumi? Stick your nose back in your own business where it belongs. Don't want to feel like you are taking sides? Then refuse to see any. Wanna be friends with everyone? Then be a friend. GEEZUS.

I am hopeful that we can all be mature adults and get along. Drama-free winter residency 2010, yeah!

Then again, you haven't seen the size of these dorms.

Am I still going to do whatever I can to be present and listen to my gut about what I want to do, with whom, and when? Certainly--on a case by case, slow as we go, basis. Does inclusion/exclusion stuff still make me extremely uncomfortable and irk the fuck out of me? Well, duh, but where do I get off imagining my point of view is an objective one? There's no goddamn such thing.

Anyway, here's to hoping the only fireworks are because of New Year's Eve.

Wait! Wait! Did I mention being excited at all? Because I am that, too. Residency is a ten day vacation from real life for me. No dog walking, no housework, no doing real work at the expense of creative work. 'Course I miss my beast and my man, but then again it is only ten days. Meanwhile, it is ten days chockfull with writerly friends and readings and lectures and brilliant professors and eatingbreathingsleepingthinking writing 24/7! For some of you, this may sound like an exotic form of torture, but for me it's an absolute dream.

As for 2009: you can suck it.

Regarding resolutions: I suppose I did learn to be less hard on myself, and friggin delicious dirty martinis (hendrick's, dash of extradry vermouth, heavy dash of brine, blue-cheese stuffed olives, stirred gently 30 times with lots of large ice)*** were in the bag. The creme brulee goal, though, fell flat on its crusty little delicious face. I didn't even dust off the torch and ended up using the ramekins for serving ice cream. Ahhh, maybe next year.

2010 is about to bring a lot of change again. There's looking to be an other big cross-country move at some point, I'll celebrate being with Dave for ten years in March, I'm turning 30 in April, I'm (hopefully) graduating with my MFA in July, and frankly I'm starting to look very intently at starting a family.

I say, Welcome, 2010 ... and bring it. Wishing all of you who are reading this the very best in the new year.

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* And how crazy is that: that at my work, I'm already halfway through 2010? I write to you from the future. 2010 is awesome, by the way, and much kinder than its predecessor, old tyrant that she was.

** About which I am PUMPED BY THE WAY, HAVE I WRITTEN IT ENOUGH PLACES ON THE INTERNET YET!

*** I want one. Like, right now.

On Eat Pray Love.

... First off, I realize this discussion of this book comes nearly four years after everyone else’s. Oh well ...

Because I’m in a fancy MFA program, I’m probably not supposed to like Eat Pray Love. In fact, CNF and fiction writers alike all over the world might be cringing as I write this. Maybe if I read creative nonfiction more widely, I wouldn’t. But I can’t help it, because like it, I did.

I mean, I’ve heard the criticisms: Who gets to traipse around the world on someone else’s dime, looking for inner grace? If I’d been given a huge advance, I’d have found grace, too—go the criticisms. Which sounds to me like a great big batch of sour grapes. So what. Liz Gilbert’s lucky. At least by page 334, the 109^th bead, she’s come to understand how lucky.

So, some of the descriptions of Others are a bit generalizing: Italians are like this; Indians are like this; Indonesians are like this. Yeah, this is irritating at times. Who among us, though, does not do this unwittingly at times? At least she’s slapping her name on her opinions and calling the thing what it is: a memoir, an accounting of her version of events, a creative but still non fiction. No one’s going to read her book to learn the full accounting of these people or places—and if they do, well, God help ‘em.

Fact is, Eat Pray Love is an easy pleasure to read. Liz has this tone of voice that is sometimes self-deprecating and sometimes self-centered and almost always funny and occasionally even so elegant it moves the reader to actually feel her words. It’s well thought out—indulge in pleasure in Italy, practice devotion in India, and find balance in Bali—if perhaps a little gimmicky, the kind of memoir a dear and smart CNF friend of mine terms “pop immersion.”* Most of all, it is honest: Liz went through heartbreak, braved and faced it, and then was willing to share that experience. Also known as “got to write about it.” Bringing us smack back to that notion of luck.

If I were to choose the one thing I most took away from the book, I would say the notion of “Diligent Joy” (discussed on page 260 of her book). Yes, it is easy to pray when life feels hard and you need to believe in deliverance, but to continue to pray when life feels good, to guard your joy, to be present and grateful for it, well, that’s harder to remember to do. But that’s exactly what we need to be doing. The declaration of independence even gets it right in this regard: we are not entitled to happiness itself but, rather, the pursuit of it. The word pursuit connotes an exciting chase sequence, where happiness is the little red convertible sports car and we’re in a police clunker, roaring after it, sirens wailing, flying crazily around bends and near the edges of cliffs. Sometimes we catch happiness, sometimes we even hold onto it for a while, but if we are not diligent about it, if we do not think about that happiness every day, be in it, be grateful for it, it can give us the slip, and back we are to pursuing.

Which is fine.

It’s just that we need to acknowledge that’s what’s going on here: no one is happy all the time. Even the people who you think are. Everyone struggles, but it is how you struggle and how you choose to live that matters. Do you choose to let yourself get sunk by the escape of happiness, sunk for months or years at a time, sunk so low that you can’t even remember happiness or you convince yourself out of ever having possessed it at all, or do you choose to dust yourself off and pursue again, perhaps this time wearing street clothes and using an unmarked car and no siren, so you can sneak right up on that motherfucker Happiness and be all “Wop-a-cha! Caught you, SUCKA”? I say the latter, definitely the latter.

Finally, in closing, I would just like to add I appreciated Liz’s very wide definition of “God” and “prayer.” I am NOT a God person, and the Christian overtones of the word pray kick me straight in the gut. I wish I could find different words for both notions. I don’t happen to believe in Something that takes the shape of an old white dude with a flowing beard in big shiny white-golden robes, nor a skinny long-haired brunette man crowned in thorns and wearing a loincloth, nor even Morgan Freeman in a spiffy white suit and/or a janitor’s costume. Or any other less Hollywood renderings either. Neither do I feel more akin to Buddha in his many incarnations or Allah of Whom I know next to nothing or any of the world's many, many, many other deities. But that does not mean I don’t feel the things other people feel when they think of God or when they ask Someone (that is, no one, for they ask inside their heads) for guidance or a better understanding of their lives. It does not mean I wish I had something to offer when people ask for prayers regarding a difficult time in life, an illness, a death, so forth. I’m just not sure I’ve found what shape these things take for me, or even if I believe I should go questing around looking for a shape into which to pour my ideas about there being something bigger and more powerful and inexplicable and—okay let’s go cheesy but true—magical/spiritual out there.

What Liz Gilbert learns that God is everywhere, especially within her, and that her notion of God might be the older her, waiting for and holding the hand of the younger her, wanting her to catch up and become the who she will be. I think that's pretty much spot on.

Gilbert, Liz

2006 Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Penguin Books.

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* Hi there, Suzanne Farrell.

Holiday salad.

For the salad:

bed of spinach

one red pear, cut into bite-sizedness

handful of cranberries

handful of chopped walnuts

generous smattering of blue cheese crumbles

For the dressing:

homemade balsamic vinaigrette (or if you get lazy, Newman's Own version is tasty)

For to make this a meal:

Drink wine. It's good for you. Mumble-mumble-vitamins-antioxidants.

Wintry soup + salad.

This was dinner a few nights ago: fennel-and-apple salad (loosely based on these two Mark Bittman "recipes": here and #16 here) with butternut squash-and-leek soup.

For the salad:

fennel sliced paperthin

apple sliced paperthin

celery sliced pretty thin

some parsley

some shaved Parmesan

For the dressing:

some olive oil + lots of lemon juice

For the soup:

We pretty much followed the recipe above, except we used butternut squash instead of pumpkin and dried rosemary because we're too cheap to buy fresh rosemary for one recipe.

Small animals in December.

Autumnal potato salad.

We made this back in October but I forgot to post the picture and recipe. It's funny, I go through the photos I've taken this year and there are so! many! of food. So! many! pictures I took, intending to blog about the food presented, and then I forgot. Which means I have a ridiculous amount of pictures of food that I will never do anything with unless I post-post the recipes.

Anyway, this is Mark Bittman's sweet potato salad featured back in September on The Minimalist. Except we skipped the jalapeno, because D's been feeling burned by the pepper. No, literally. The two most recent times we've used jalapeno in a recipe, he ended up with pepper oil on his hands that would not come off and invariably he would touch his face or (WORST EVER) rub his eyes. I seriously had the poor man bent over the sink washing his eyes out with milk. I know that sounds crazy but it totally worked.

Long story short: Beware the jalapenos!

TEAM WOLF.

(photo by D.)

Gives the phrase a whole new meaning, don't it?

What yesterday looked like.

(photo by Suz)

I spent yesterday at my friend Suz's house. It was purportedly a "work date," wherein we were both going to buckle down and start reading the hundreds of pages in our workshop booklets for winter residency, which we'll be heading off to in less than two weeks. (Yikes, btw, I better start thinking through the packing process, which takes me embarassingly long.)

Really, though, I told Suz that so she'd left me hijack her entire day, playing with her brand-new kittens, who came home a week ago today. And hijack I did, staying from 2pm with coffee and snacks till dinner with an entire bottle of wine and delicious Indian take-out. All we did was gaze at the kitties, play with them, pet them, and tell them how beautiful they are ... oh and I suppose we fit some conversation in there somewhere too.

Just look at my face, though. I am clearly having as much--if not more--fun as the kittens. Animals just ... do this to me. And by this, I mean make me so incredibly happy.

Christmas spirit.

Took this picture on December 8 in Cobble Hill but forgot to post it. I guess the board should now read "ONLY 7 DAYS LEFT TO PANIC."

Or "Just give up already, foolio."

The b-cards @ societynotes!

You lucky ducks! A. at societynotes uploaded photos of my business cards to the Internets.* Look just how beautiful the designs are: likolehua, lehua. Note the fancy rounded corners and gorgeous colors!

Even the presentation was beautiful: A. divided the cards into six bundles (3 of each design) and tied each design with a different ribbon, placed them all into a nice white box with her business card logo mounted on the box, and tied it up with a polka dot ribbon.

And we all know how I feel about polka dots here. (LOVES!)

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* Just please don't look too closely at the phone number, which A. kindly blurred, and get all creepy and start calling me, please.

High praise for societynotes!

Allow me to laud societynotes’s incredible design talents for just a moment. A. @ societynotes makes book plates, business cards, cards, stationary, you name it! You can order off of her Etsy site (http://www.etsy.com/shop/societynotes) or contact her to work closely on a particular design. For example, I e-mailed her a link to Google photos of a particular Hawaiian flower (the liko lehua) and she patiently rendered it into unbelievably gorgeous business cards, allowing me to collaborate on style and colors. In fact, she came up with two different designs, one of the liko lehua (leaf bud) and one of the lehua flower. Both designs were incredible, so I ended up ordering 100 of each because I could not make up my mind. I wish I could post images of them here, but then my personal information would be all over the Internets.

I'll post instead the photo of another awesome purchase I made, via her Etsy store: these adorable hand silk-screened strawberry note cards.

I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but they were this delicious green with silver strawberries, paired with matching envelopes. I so enjoyed the art of correspondence on those babies, lemme tell ya.

Also, I'll go ahead and say it: A. is a fellow SLC alum as well as a true Brooklynite, so if you buy from her store, you're genuinely supporting a New York artiste!

The right thread, hesitations about.

That all said, it better not take me twenty years to finish this damn story.

The right thread.

I am all tucked in for the night—pajamas, hot chocolate with marshmallows, editing American Anthropologist obituaries (forthcoming in June 2009)—when I stumble across an excellent metaphor for writing. The obituary is for the anthropologist Jane Goodale (not to be confused with Jane Goodall, the primatologist, who is alive and well), who died in November. Evidently, one night Jane was trying to undo a skirt hem and the next morning when revising a lecture made the margin note, “pulling the right thread.” It is said that, twenty years after witnessing a Tiwi ritual, she “pulled the right thread” and finally understood the meaning of the ceremony.

The metaphor came at a good time, when I’ve turned from writing/revising my work and toward the editing of others’ work—partially because the semester is over, partially because work deadlines now take precedence, and frankly partially because I feel discouraged. I went over the last revision of a long story I’ve been writing, and it seems like no matter how many times I revise, I am never done with the thing. Every time I think I am done, I give it to another reader and am beset with another list of comments to address. UGHGHGGHGHGHHG! And the worst thing is, I can’t even disregard the comments, because when I consider them, many of them are worthy criticisms.

It’s not even the additional revision required that bothers me as much as the fact that I couldn’t see these qualities lacking in my work. I mean, how do writers in “the real world” handle this? If you no longer have professors and peers whose job it is to look for the shit that’s missing, how do you develop that objective, querying voice that can look at a work as if it is not one’s own?

It’s okay to feel discouraged sometimes, I realize: keeps us humble and so forth. But I do then need corresponding encouragement to then drop from the sky and somehow rescue me (deus ex machina!), because it’s no good staying in a stuck place. And so I am given the metaphor of the right thread: revision as the act of tentatively pulling at all the threads, asking all the questions and thinking through all the answers, remaining undaunted by constant fallibility, moving on always to the next more promising thread, until finally the right one unravels story wide open.

Stuffity stuff stuff stuff.

(picture from a previous visit to S+R+C's lovely home in Jersey)

Yesterday, I finished a first full draft of my VCFA critical thesis, “The Strange Familiar, the Familiar Strange”: In Defense of Writing What You Don’t Know." One down (critical thesis this semester), two to go (critical lecture and creative thesis next semester). It felt good, although with the looming work ahead, it also felt a little like being handed a bigger bucket to bail out a still-sinking ship. But, at any rate, I finished a first full draft (38 pages and over 12,000 words)--along with the cover letter, short story revision, and tentative table of contents for next semester's creative thesis--and sent it all off to my advisor. It felt exceedingly good to get especially the thesis off my desk and onto his (sorry, Phil!), and within five minutes of sending, I was dressed and out the door to meet Shaun, Rachel, and Cooper for Coop's first day in New York city.

Well, Brooklyn to be exact. And, unless I'm mistaken, Saturday may have also been Coop's first snow. Not truly the best showing, though, Snow: I mean, really, a kid's first snow and you send the slushy, half-rain, icky kind? You couldn't send the lacy kind, intricate as doilies, or the snow so fluffy and falling so thick and soft it's barely noticeable as individual flakes? These are infinitely better kinds of snow for a child's first sighting.

Anyway, it was lovely being with those three, as it always is. We hung out the day in Tillie's, joined by other friends who wanted to ahhhh over Coop, and then we had an earlyish dinner at The General Greene. Through it all, Coop was a champ in his nubby brown bear suit, his beautiful blue eyes and patient tolerance toward being handed from friend to adoring friend. I love those three like family and it was a delightful day, but I can't quite shake this shadow overhead.

I'm hoping very earnestly to shake this feeling. It's been floating over head for weeks now, but it kept me up till 3 am last night. It's a vague sense of dis-ease, a premonition of ... what? I don't know, but it doesn't feel good. Like something is hanging in the balance. I thought last night that if I slept on it, I'd feel better in the morning. Instead, I let Ian McEwan accompany my insomnia, reading the last 250 or so pages of Saturday in a fell swoop. Which no doubt didn't help my mood.

Today, I'm off to hear an ukulele band perform the entire Beatles' songbook with an old friend. If a lovely day with friends who are like family, a sleepless night with a good book, homemade cookies with dunked liberally in milk, and alcohol don't fix a problem, it seems like the perfect time to try something less conventional: ukuleles and the Beatles.

Happy Sunday, y'all, and here's to counting down the end of this demon year.