solitude

A few years ago, I thought I wanted to be with someone, but his answer was no. I know that’s common, but his reason stuck with me, one word: solitude. It took a few minutes to find that word, but when he did, he knew that was it. Solitude. As a generally extroverted person, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone want to be alone?

It’s taken me until recently to understand.

We were on a hike, some friends & me, and as usual, I lagged behind. About six miles in (the tail end of a loop trail), I realized that I didn’t mind hanging back. I soaked in the shade of the Redwoods and breathed in the green. I could see no one ahead of me on the trail, no one behind. With the quiet of the woods around me, I kept going at my pace. To me, hikes aren’t the time for timing to beat a personal best.

After being consumed by the regular chaos of city living, I realized that one moment was what I longed for: to be truly alone. (I admit, it was weird at first to hike without my dog, but honestly, do you know what it feels like to be truly alone?)

Sometimes it’s easy to feel alone when surrounded by people. In the city, you can walk up the street & not talk to anyone (rarely, albeit) and feel like you are the only person alive—the rest of the passersby are part of the surroundings. Have you felt that?

I just wasted about twenty minutes trying to find a single word, but it’s a word that means the realization that every person around you is simultaneously leading their own life with their own emotions, feelings, needs, beliefs. The notion crossed my mind occasionally over the years, but my first memory of it was at a gas station in Utah. It was my biggest solo trip. The man at the pump across from me had deep lines in his face, though he could not have been more than fifty. It suddenly occurred to me that this man had lived 40+ years before this one moment of our lives crossing. Have you ever thought this about your co-workers? Your boss? I think about it at work the most: all of these acquaintances, but we are all human, at our core.

It’s funny to think that we are different. We live off our experiences and become so indulged in our own lives that it’s easy to forget that everyone else’s lives are just as complex. They go to bed at night. They get hungry. They feel sad. Sometimes remembering this is the only way living on the other side of the country from my family makes sense. Life does not stop in Pennsylvania just because I am out here. That’s why it’s always different when I go back; that’s why people call with news: life is still moving, even when I am not there to witness it.

Sometimes the complexity feels like too much. Sometimes I wish it would slow down (how many times have I wished it would go faster?). Sometimes I wish I could go back. But the pace is constant, along with change and intricacy.

I think that’s why we all need moments to be alone. This is my season of understanding solitude.

Solitude can often be confused with prolonged singleness. I’ve mistaken it myself, wondered why I am single, why that person chose to be single. There is a difference. There is a tiny knowing somewhere that solitude is a choice, that even when the opportunity to not be single presents itself, the direction to take is apparent: solitude.

That is where I am. While there are moments of doubting that, there are more reassurances that this is where I am supposed to be. I am grateful to live alone (with the company of my pets).

As I flip through pages of Rilke on solitude in Letters to a Younger Poet, I realize this topic is just beginning. I’ll leave you with these excerpts from Rilke:

“There is only one solitude, and it is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company, be it ever so banal or trivial, for the illusion of some slight correspondence with whoever one happens to come across, however unworthy…But perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring. But that must not put you off. What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours- that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.”

and

“And you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind of tool, will help you to extend your solitude over a greater expanse of ground. People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult. All living things do this, everything in nature grows & defends itself according to its kind and is a distinct creature from out of its own resources, strives to be so at any cost and in the face of all resistance. We know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it. To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, do not yet know how to love: they must learn. With their whole being, with all their strength, concerted on their solitary, fearful, upward beating hearts, they have to learn to love.”

an encouragement to writers (I think)

I get into these moods where I suddenly think that I don’t need sleep because my life should be spent reading and writing and learning instead of sitting idle in bed. I guess it’s more of a season than a mood because it lasts a bit longer and tends to happen after Daylight Savings, when the days get just little longer, and I start to think that I can be everything at once.

I’ll come home from work and explore the outside world: walking the dog, going to the park, watching the dusk, sitting on the rocks watching the shore. And when I come in, I suddenly find that I have a whole evening to spend as I please—read, write, & repeat.

Somehow, I constantly seem to be simultaneously reading 5-8 books at a time. I keep, well, multiple books of poetry on my nightstand as well as a solid novel to trudge through a little at a time. My purse has a Kindle plus a paperback, always. Literary journals are scattered over my apartment—on the windowsill, on the back of the toilet, on the tv stand. As are Bibles. And journals, notebooks, and Post-Its. This sounds very scattered, but I like to think it’s an organized chaos such that a visitor wouldn’t notice how frantic my attempts at intellectuality really are.

The most clutter at my apartment is on my bookshelves, and I like it that way. They are overflowing, yet I never seem to have enough. It’s like how they say when you pull out one hair, three more grow in its place—when I read one book, well, you can finish the rest. Sometimes I scan the shelves for the books I haven’t read and I wonder if I will get to read them all in my life. I think of my Grandpap, who has read all of his books, many multiple times through. I hope I can do the same, though I don’t think I’ll ever catch up. I’m still not through the Classics let alone reading books from present-day.

Then there’s writing. If I spend all of my time reading, when will I write? When will I do things to write about? It’s a very amusing circuit of constant discomfort: not reading enough, not writing enough, not living enough.

I do believe this to simply be the nature of the writer’s life: nothing satisfies. Even when we think it does, like having time to write, the words are all wrong, and we feel just as unsatisfied as if we hadn’t written at all.

I used to be single-minded: one book at a time, one poem at a time, one post at a time. Now I find that I am reading more than I can comprehend, writing such random things that I have half-poems and lost paragraphs in scattered documents on my computer’s desktop (just tonight I’ve started and not nearly made sense of three different pieces), random notes on my phone, computer, and Post-Its that haven’t made it to my notebook, and I am wondering why I ever thought I needed sleep to begin with.

There came a time last summer when I decided 5 hours of sleep was plenty for a young woman. I created a pattern of what I would read when and what I would write when. I actually woke up at 5am to read the Bible then force myself into poetry. I was coming out of a long season of not writing a single poem for months on end, and I was desperate to write something. Since winter, I’ve become a bit of a bear, soaking in all the sleep I can with the long dark nights; summer leaves no excuse for sleep.

I do this a lot—force myself into patterns that I pray will become daily rituals but usually whither after a few months. I suppose I’m doing so now with my new-found motivation, but I will always pray that the muses would keep me company even when I don’t feel like thinking let alone putting thought to paper.

Just now, I turned to stare at my bookshelf as I waited for the next sentence, actually more like wondering why I am even writing these (I guess I’m documenting these words as encouragement for when this season ends or returns; I’ll need reminded.)  My bookshelves say: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes…tallying which books I’ve read vs. haven’t. I do this frequently. When I finally decided to “invest” in a second bookshelf, I told my then-roommate that I thought I had finally reached a point where the number of books on my shelf I had read out numbered those I hadn’t. Time for more books, I thought. Got to keep the balance in-flux.

The funny thing is, there are some books I have that I can’t imagine ever reading, but they have sentimental value, and who knows? Maybe someday I will. Like No Latitude for Error by Sir Edmond Hilary. As a sprouting teen, I thought I would, but now I realize that I simply hold onto it because it is the only book I have autographed (I despise autographed things), but this one is different because: 1) of Hilary’s accomplishments 2) because the book was my dad’s dad’s and then my dad’s and now mine. It has its own lineage and lives on the same shelves it has for many years now, shelves my dad built when he was in high school.

I guess it’s all a bit of idolatry. Sometimes I ponder the point of learning if we all end up in the ground anyways. A bit morbid, I know, but with how easy it has become to publish your own books and send them off for no one to read makes me uneasy. Like anyone is a writer now just because they can get published. Not that I don’t think anyone could be a writer. I just think there is a distinction between a writer and an author, and people desperate to get published get those confused and rush into becoming a title on a shelf instead of an impact in the hearts and minds of readers. (At Barnes & Noble, the cashier asked me to sign the receipt; I told him I’d rather be signing a book; he asked if I was an author. No, I said, I’m a writer.) And the people who confuse the two and skip straight to author try to escape what I’m going through right now—the ebbing seasons of the writer’s life: the hypnotic chaos of feeling inadequate, then motivated; accomplished, then purposeless.

An artist does not choose this—it is simply in his blood, his being, his life and work. There is no joy without it and limited joy with it. But there is hope.

revelation

Today, I walked into an antique shop. I like to browse the old things—“treasures” the man at the shop called them.

I bought a pair of clip-on earrings, but I can’t even wear them because of my gauges, and they hurt my ears anyways. I got them because they remind me of my grandma. Both grandmas & their old jewelry boxes full of large, heavy clip-on earrings.

I bought a paperweight. It’s a delicate, egg-shaped mauve: heavy. It seemed like the thing to do—like every writer should have a nice glass paperweight. Also, it reminded me of 1984—buying a paperweight from an antique shop.

I have a problem with books; I even bought one of the four total at the antique shop of all places. It’s not that I want my life to echo the books I have loved; I certainly don’t. (Besides, who ever remembers the end of most books? You don’t; you remember the details in the middle. When your life is over, you’re just dead, and people have no choice but to remember that.) I love books because they let you relive the past, though not your own & often not even a past that ever was.

I went to my favorite used bookshop. I purchased the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor. I decided to read one out loud to Pickle this evening. I was about a paragraph—half a page, maybe—into a story when I froze. I suddenly remembered reading O’Connor’s “Revelation” out loud to Derek in the hospital. Then I remembered listening to her short stories on audiotape during the long commute back and forth to school after Derek died. I can hear the man on the tape’s voice reading the title “Everything that Rises Must Converge”. Most days I didn’t hear much more than the title; it was just noise to drown out all else but the passing lights on the highway.

beautifullittlefools

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Sometimes, we lose sight of the stars. Stars—those ancient flickers that appear and fade like lightning bugs. We are so caught up in the tall shiny buildings that we forget there are solar bodies flickering past the late night offices and 23^rd floor janitors.

We went to see The Great Gatsby. I knew I would be heartbroken. I didn’t realize it wouldn’t be for the same anticipated why.

Living in the city has forged new perspectives in me. I now walk down the street and see beauty in each person. I wonder if they think they are beautiful (some of them know it). I wonder if they think I am beautiful (I will never know).

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Some cultures find staring to be impolite. We Americans, for example, are used to hearing our mother chide, “Don’t stare,” or feeling ashamed when the person at whom we are staring catches us eye-to-eye. I’m told this is not so in China—that you can stare all you want and no one would think the less. Sometimes I try to justify my want to stare with the thought that it’s all about the intention of the stare—there is staring just to get a better look, staring for the purpose of storing up gossip, and staring because something appears slightly unbelievable. Not that any of the intent behind any stare could really matter, since the person on the other side of the eyes cannot know your intent.

Walking along the sidewalk today, I noticed a man walk along a perpendicular sidewalk. Our paths were about to cross like comets. I gave a brief glance up. Neither of us made eye contact. We simultaneously slowed to avoid hitting that turning point at the same time. He was turning left; I was going straight. We managed to time our steps such that we didn’t come within one foot of each other. Sometimes we try so hard to keep to ourselves.

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

I have a friend that is ten years older than me. We’ve known each other for a long while now; he’s seen me grow out of awkward teenage years, and I’ve seen him morph into a thirty-something adult. Sometimes he acts much older than he is; we both joke about it. One night, he called me “kiddo,” and it suddenly hit me that I am still just a little girl to him. He is the only one getting older.

Not long ago, I noticed bags under my eyes for the first time. I had a long work week—too many hours in front of computer screen and not enough hours with my eyes closed for rest. I’m too young for this.

In my attempts to train for a half-marathon, I overworked my knee, causing sporadic pain and swelling and inability to run until further notice. “You’re too young to be having those problems,” my mother told me over the phone.

Contrary to popular belief, most wines don’t age well.

“I just remembered, today is my birthday,” Nick Carraway says. Thirty years old—“the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age…So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

We are always so aware of the death in others, but surely it must be the only topic on which we think least of ourselves. We are so concerned about losing others, that we forget that we ourselves will be lost too.

An excerpt from Annie Dillard:

Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature—but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West: we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract “humanity” whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?

We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we’re a lousy snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave. What marvels shall these future whizzes, damn their eyes, accomplish?

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

This week, an image was released of planet Earth from a spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn. God, will you still love us, this shining speck of dust, though we’re no longer young, though we’ve ruined this sphere from a lush snowflake on the tongue to a pinch of salt in the eye?

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out farther…And one fine morning—“

Tonight, the full moon reflected off tall, empty windows. Standing on the bridge, all at once, the rush of a train below hit me in a gust, so suddenly that I for a moment thought the train was upon me, that I was hit, and my mind had not yet caught up. Now when I think of trains, I only think of Anna Karenina.

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Have you ever noticed how our eyes wander when we talk on the phone? What are you looking at as you tell you mother “good night” or you laugh with an old friend, unseen? Sitting on the bus, a young woman across from me gazes all around. Her head bobs like a floating gull, her eyes focus out at the un-seeable horizon point the gull is ever watching.

My friend is not the only one getting older. I asked him to please, please see me as equal, as adult. See me as my own person, not a college-buddy’s cousin. See me as a grown woman. Individual. At least another branch on the tree.

He once told me, “You know, you really are beautiful. I don’t think you’re told that enough.” I can’t stop wondering what he saw just then. Am I just like all of the other people on the city streets?

“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”

Nick- You can’t repeat the past.

Gatsby- Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!

I’ve learned that moving to a new place is a lot like being in the same place you’ve always been only taking your photo album and shaking it so that all of the photos fall out, and somehow, as they fall back into place, the faces look slightly different—they have different names, their voice is a little lower or higher. The people walking down the streets are the same ones in Mamont, Waynesburg, Florence, Seattle. You can’t repeat the past, but that doesn’t mean a new day will be all that different.

The way that all red wines have that same thickness but a different tinge of taste on the back of the tongue. The same warm feeling going down your throat.

Jordan (in Gatsby) says that she loves big parties, “They’re so intimate; at small parties, there isn’t any privacy.” Is this what it means to be a snowflake in an ocean? As Nick meditates, “I was within and without.”

Jay Gatsby was 32 years old when he watched the green light from the end of his dock—that light, that hope. And in what? In the past? In the Daisy he once knew?

Time and aging are funny things. “We are the youngest we will ever be again,” they say. Don’t ask me who ‘they’ are. As a tree grows and bears fruit, as branches fall, as wine stews stale with age, as our bodies step into year after year, as change is slow and not noticeable on a day-to-day scale, so it is with God, outside of time. Even if he were to change, would our souls even see the difference?

“Will you still love me when I’m not longer young and beautiful?”

Daisy Buchanan, “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in the world, a beautiful little fool.”

my Charles Wallace

I just finished reading through A Wrinkle in Time Trilogy. As I moved pagepagepage through each book, I found myself hanging on to pieces of the previous. I hung on to the magic in A Wrinkle in Time and the way that it awakened my imagination, poking at the long unused sections of my brain like the soft and gushy meat in the grocery fridge.

(Vegan aside: despite my meat-free diet, I have never been able to help myself when passing the vacuum-sealed meat in the grocery. My mom always told me not to touch, but it was so squishy and unfamiliar--and to think of its source! And how different it looks cooked. And that somewhere inside us, in a different, but similar, form, we are that!)

I'm still hanging on A Wind in the Door. Charles Wallace is to Meg what Derek is to me. My brother. We could kythe (a form of telepathy in the book) and understand each other in ways that others couldn't. We knew each other's needs without saying them out loud. In this second book in the series, Charles Wallace becomes quite ill, his lungs weakening, the farandola failing to "deepen". All along, all that I wanted was to become Meg, to be taken under the literal wing of a cherubim and delve into Derek's being and encourage his muscle cells to keep fighting the Echthroi, convince them to deepen.

Part of me wanted Charles Wallace to die in the book. I wanted there to be some realism to the fantasy. I wanted to know that even if I could have done the impossible, things would have still happened this way.



On Friday, I fell asleep on the bus. I had gotten up at 4:30am to go to work early, which ended up being much earlier than I anticipated because as I got ready, I soon realized that getting up at 4:30 was ridiculously unnecessary to catch the bus. I arrived promptly at 6:40, and counted down the hours until I could go back to bed.

At 3:30, I made my way home. I sat, book in lap, trying to finish A Wind in the Door when I nodded off. I awoke suddenly. A few seats over, a man was staring at me. I tried to shake off the sleep but couldn't keep my head up. At each stop, my eyes jumped out the window to catch the name of the bus station. I managed to not miss my transfer, and rejuvinated after my nap, my eyes were locked in that lefttoright repeating line like a typewriter's paper roll--so locked in that I was entirely oblivious on my second bus.

There was a sudden turn and sharp incline. I've ridden this bus plenty and don't remember this road... "Next stop, Newell Street". Not one I remembered. I waited one more stop and noticed that we were on 9th avenue. My stop is several stopped prior along 10th.

"Did you already stop at Halladay?" I asked the driver. I was the last person on the bus.

"Yes."

I laughed and stepped down to the sidewalk. Can't be too many blocks. Surely it wasn't, and the sun was unusually bright, especially for my way home from work; I've become so used to leaving in the dark and coming home in the dark. I passed children walking home from school with their parents, and I thought how funny it is to be a child. A little girl cried to her mother about the mean kids at school. That used to be me--how I would cry and whine. What shamefully funny beings we are as children. I thought of Meg in Book 1 and how she would stamp her foot as if she were younger. But we all are that--strange little learners with a developing sense of emotion and very little grasp on why we're thrown into it all.

The wind has been particularly strong. As I walked, my hair tossed across my face, and I squinted my eyes to avoid the chill burn. It was an autumn wind--the late afternoon kind that brings a cold front and fallen leaves.

The only thing on my mind was A Wind in the Door. Why that title? Why Charles Wallace? Why Derek?

The past year, wind has represented a voice. At Derek's funeral, I first learned of the offering of wind chimes to the deceased's family as a token to hear that person through untranslatable tingdings and clinktinks. Dawnna and I would sit on the porch and cry because sometimes, the wind chimes sung without a breeze.

This wind is audible with chimes. It whooos and whooshes like a washing machine. It's the kind of wind that pushes you forward and slams the door behind you.

It's the kind of wind that embraces your tired bones when you're walking, silent, home from work and wondering why Meg can save Charles Wallace but you cannot.

It is well.

Yesterday morning, I slept in. When I finally rolled out of bed, I went through my usual routine, which ended with me actually getting dressed. As I stripped off my night clothes, I looked at the selection on my floor. Yup, same jeans as I've worn the past week...mhmm, wore this shirt yesterday...yup, this jacket smells clean enough. Look at that! I cleaned my room and got dressed at the same time! Now that's economical!

I told myself that I wanted to enjoy my last day off before official employment. (I also told myself that I wanted to wear as few clothes as possible so that I would only have to go to the laundromat once-a-month.) I stepped outside and was shocked--the sun was out! And I don't mean "out" like it was when I excitedly told Katlin over the phone, "I can see light behind the clouds!"; I mean it was fully exposed, as were my eyes, which I fear will shrink into black spots accustomed to dark spaces like those of a mole. I got to wear sunglasses on my walk to the store!

My excitement for such beautiful weather--in the 60s!--in November lasted all day. Certain that Mt. Rainier would be out, I biked down to Kerry Park and sat on a bench reading Annie Dillard until the sun went behind a cloud for the evening, an instant chill which sent me biking home. And no, Mt. Rainier was hidden behind clouds that mirrored its snow-capped shadow. Somehow, even when the whole sky is clear, there is so often a full cloak surrounding the mountain; it only shows its face occasionally, making each appearance a majestic display.

And it was.

I woke up this morning as someone way too excited to be going to a thing called work. I've just been waiting and growing weary, and now it was here! A job! I had my clothes laid out, my lunch packed; I was ready. I tried to go to bed early last night, but of course failed; I even woke up at an ungodly hour and couldn't sleep. It was like anxiety over the first day of school, back when I was excited to go to school. (I wish the excitement would stay.)

Regardless, I was determined to have a good day. As I left the house, tea in-hand, I smiled. I smiled as I walked to the bus. I went through the checklist in my head and realized, holy shit--I don't even have a pencil. Or paper. Or a pen. What kind of writer goes into a writing job without any writing utensils?! I looked at my watch; the bus would arrive in three minutes, and I still had to get to the stop--no time to go back. I walked past the church, where a man was mopping just inside the door, and I honestly contemplated asking if I could borrow a pencil from a pew. (Don't worry, I didn't; I reasoned that it would be O.K.--chill.)

So I kept smiling. As the bus slid down Queen Anne Ave North like a snake clinging to the ground yet propelling on, I looked over my left shoulder. The sky was orange sherbet over the Cascades. The Space Needle stood just to the left of, you guessed it, shimmering Mt. Rainier. I gasped at the purple against orange palette. Where have I been all my life that I have never seen such colors? That my life has been coated in the same backdrop of green and brown forest?

The cold air caught my exhale in a steam in front of my face as I waited for my transfer. I pretended like the air was fresh from Rainier, even though it stunk in the exhaust of the passing motorists. Cities are strange places.

But I continued to smile, even through the sharp pang of diesel thickening in my lung. When my bus arrived, I was shocked to find it nearly full. I scurried to the first open seat I saw and attempted to sit down. However, I dropped my tea in the process, which promptly landed, stuck, upside down over my book bag. It sent a steady stream of hot tea over everything I had brought with me. I wiped my wet hands on my dress pants (ladylike, as always) and assessed the damage. I looked around--no one had seen: that or they didn't care; my bag had absorbed the liquid before it could reach the floor, so at least I had no mess to clean up. I shrugged it off and looked on the bright side--my book bag would smell good!

Alright, alright. Fast-forward a few bus stops, and I arrived at work. I talked to another first-day temp in the lobby and noticed that she didn't constantly smile when she spoke. I tried to do the same. I let my cheeks relax and tried to talk with some expression other than geeked out. I failed and ended up with a puppet grin as she continued to appear uninterested in my Pennsylvania talk--she was from L.A. and had bigger stories to tell about working as a fashion stylist for high-end commercials.

We waited for the woman from HR to direct us to 'our stations'. When she finally did, she handed us our fancy little electronic door key card swipers and pointed at the desk and said, "Here you go! Good luck!" I scanned the desk: a mug! (there must be coffee somewhere...), Post-It notes, A TIN OF PENS AND PENCILS!, scissors (why would I need scissors?), a stapler, staples, paperclips, a laptop, a separate keyboard and mouse, another monitor, and a packet. I started by tacking my name to the (lime!) green board behind my desk then sat down and began reading the packet. I started the instructions, which of course, failed. My computer wasn't working right; error, yada yada yada. At first, I thought they were crazy to just drop us off the cliff like that (there was another girl starting as copywriter, too).

Finally, another copywriter filled in as our mentor. She spent all morning showing us the ropes and how to run the programs and register for everything. I caught on quickly; I was eager to learn. In the afternoon, we were given some assignments--write titles and bullets for several events; follow the formatting in the packet. Okie doke. I began typing. My partner newbie did the same. Every so often, she would turn to me and say, "Do you remember how to do ....?" Sure; I'd show her and go back to my computer. It felt good to have answers; it felt good to be needed. I finished my first set of assignments and messaged my copy lead (we all IM each other, even though we're in the same room; odd but convenient, I guess). She sent me more work, which I did and sent it back to the writers to fill in with copy.

"You work fast," my copy lead told me as she let me go early for the day. My partner sat still typing at her desk.

"I'm just really excited, and I think I'm getting the formatting better; my last assignment seems so different from my first!"

"I'll give you feedback tomorrow so that you know what can be improved." And I'm really excited; I'm a format geek. I love lists. I love alphabetizing. I love matching the letters and numbers of the SKUs to each other to upload to the website!

I felt bad leaving my new friend still working. Was I lazy to leave early? Had I done enough? I did have a lot of down time... She was very quiet and seemed to move in a methodical rhythm, her pace tagging along. I kept thinking that I was going to be her--when I pictured myself going in to work, I expected to be nervous and afraid to ask my supervisor questions. I expected to question every word I wrote down, thinking I must be wrong. I'm still wondering how I wasn't, but I certainly don't see it as a bad thing either; I'm sure that her work was much more careful than mine. Different processes, I guess? Regardless, I said good night and see you tomorrow and rinsed out my mug for tomorrow's tea. (That's right; there's tea and hot chocolate and coffee and a pool table and chess and beer and cookies. It's crazy.)

As I walked to the bus stop in the center of downtown, maybe a mile away, I enjoyed the lights (how did it get to be dark already?) and the whir of all of the people leaving their jobs for the evening. Two men were walking in the same direction as me. I caught the tail end of a conversation.

"You were right; it's not this way."

"What's that?"

"You were right."

"What?"

"YOU WERE RIGHT." How we so love to hear it; I laughed, and they guy noticed. "You didn't hear that," he joked.

"I've been there," I said, and from there, we kept talking as we walked, but the conversation was so odd; we spoke as if we were good friends and new each other well; he described his day to me and I to him and soon enough, he looked at a building and realized he and his friend had passed the address they were searching for and headed off in the other direction without even telling his name! People are so funny! Though I didn't tell him my name either.

And I found that I was still smiling. I came home to find TWO packages at my door; one, a pair of discount rain boots that I've been so looking forward to (I will learn to love the rain.) and the other a box of books sent from my mom in PA, even though they weren't expected to get here until Saturday! I took off my jacket and ripped open both boxes. I put on my rainboots and stood in my room taking each book out of the box, saying, "Yes! Yes! YES!" They were all the right ones (though there is no such things a wrong book). I've been telling my parents that I needed my books because even some that I've already read simply comfort me from the shelves. It just feel so good to have so many arrays of words within reach to reference to my favorite lines and read my marginal notes that I don't remember writing.

I arranged the books carefully on my shelves. Poetry down here, uh huh. Nice! Now, nature to the left, then religion, then Dillard, Hemingway, Didion, Rilke, and all the rest of the singles who don't get special placement by author because they're loners. They don't make the top few whom I can't get enough of, least not yet anyways--I haven't read all of the singles yet. Ahhh, books. I just want to open them and absorb them and read them all at once. It's a sickness; it really is. The only cure is a cup of tea in one hand and book #1 in the other, a quiet space, and a chunk of a few hours.

Suffice to say I read for the evening, but I did replace the tea with a newly invented vegan pumpkin banana smoothie that tasted like skinny pumpkin pie and left me with this huge spurt of energy right before bed, where I should have been sleeping an hour ago (two?). What the hell! Tomorrow's Friday!

So all in all, it was a good day. The best. I feel great, and I hope that it lasts. I pray that it lasts. I feel like this is what I've been waiting for: to feel fulfilled.

It is well with my soul.

P.S. It turns out I did need the scissors at work. While I was waiting and waiting for a new assignment to be sent to me, I decided to make the most of a scrap of a Post-It from the lovely arrangement of notes and hints I had posted along my monitor (wow, what a nerd). I folded a triangle and cut off the excess to make a square, which then magically turned into a little birdy that sits on my desk. Quite a productive day!

The Raven and other thoughts

In the holiday spirit of Halloween, all I can think of is Edgar Allan Poe. He's really the reason that I ever took an interest in poetry. Well, actually, it's because my dad would read me Poe until I could read it myself. My first and favorite poem was "The Raven"; I was in first grade. I even memorized the first stanza or so. Anytime an opportunity came up with the "--or" sound, we would rhyme out loud, "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore!'"

In the evenings, after elementary school and before I got into after-school activities like bowling and band and basketball, I would change in to my pajamas and curl my lanky limps on my dad's lap. Together, we read books like The Mad Scientist Club and The Yearling. I was a fast learner when it came to reading, and I have him to thank. We read most every night, as long as we were done before eight o'clock when Mom would watch "Wheel of Fortune" and we'd all race to solve the puzzles before the contestants. Some nights, we only got a few pages read, but it always felt like an accomplishment.

It especially felt that way because I was still just starting to read. We had a few kid's books but not many, save for an entire Dr. Seuss collection. They were fine, but I liked the books that Dad gave me. They suited us in some way. They seemed boyish, but I loved being a Daddy's girl. I would read aloud until I got to a word that I didn't know or couldn't pronounce, and Dad would help me out.

I just got a flash of the To Kill a Mockingbird film scene of Atticus and Scout reading together. How lovely. (Dad, you give Gregory Peck a run for his money!)

Photo from: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3306404608/tt0056592

So "The Raven" was way up there on our reading list. I wonder if my dad ever got tired of hearing that same poem again and again. I just loved the rhymes and the stanzas and the eery feeling that I certainly didn't understand at six and seven years old.

Sometimes, even now, as I age into my twenties, I still sit on my dad's lap when we're at the table after dinner or at a holiday get-together. At first he always whines that I'm too big for that, but then he laughs and wraps his arms around me in a squeeze, saying, "Aw! My Daddy's girl!" We don't read together anymore because now, I do the writing.

Here is a link to 'The Raven' by Poe.

Oh, and my dad's birthday was October 30th! Happy birthday, Dad!