2011 is a weird year, there's no getting around it. All the "00" years seemed kind of cool because we were still in that "It's the new millennium!" excitement. You know: "I can't believe it's 2005!" Then 2010 came along, and it's such a nice number, so round and bouncy. Sure, it's kind of square but even so it seemed like a really partial number, an even keeled one. A number that could see all sides of an issue, wouldn't judge you, and would totally be willing to help you move that couch.
And now it's over and it's...2011. You can't make funny New Year's glasses with it. It's a prime number, which either makes it very cool and exclusive, or the sad loser year that no one wants to hang out with. Either way, it's odd. (Ha ha. Sorry.)
Looking down the barrel of this year from January is kind of intimidating. You know that scene in Home Alone (the first one) (great movie) where Kevin has his hands to his face and is screaming? The scream is actually in response to aftershave and therefore ripe for a metaphore about growing up, but that scene became representative of the whole movie, of Kevin's feelings about two burglars trying to break into his house and ruin his already-terrible Christmas. And it's how I feel right now, like I need a moment of unbridled screaming to calm myself before tackling the bear that is 2011.
Like last year, I'm not doing resolutions this year but rather listing things I'm looking forward to/need to focus on.
1) Women in Children's Media
I'm now the V.P. of an amazing organization, which means it's time to quit making excuses, put my big pants on, and get shit done. Those are all things I'm telling myself while I panic about how little I know about how to host media online.
2) The Work Move
Our offices are shifting around inside our building, and it's going to put a strain on pretty much the entire company. This year will require a lot of patience, flexibility, and some really great noise-cancelling headphones.
3) The Wedding
Anyone who had fun planning their wedding must have had a much bigger buget than we do, as I've spent the last 2 months either overwhelmed by guilt for how much we're spending or in a total panic that no one will have any fun because we aren't spending enough. A lot of deep breaths (and about 10 excel spreadsheets) will help. Also, I need to keep in perspective the best part of all this: marrying Dan.
Also, I guess I should blog more. Or just write more. And start getting to work on time. And stop eating so many bagels. And run more. Train for a half marathon. Talk to my friends more. Clean the apartment more often and dust more than once a year. Call my mother weekly and talk to my siblings more and see my new nephew and be more organized and oh my God the closet shelf needs work and AHHHHHHHHHH. Hands on face!
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Monday, October 4, 2010
Toast and Bananas
It is fall and I am upstate, driving west on Route 17. Mid-afternoon sunlight saturates the car, tumbling unfiltered from a brilliant blue sky that is trimmed at the bottom with riotous leaves: some still green, but most yellow, orange, and the deepest, darkest auburn red. I guide my boyfriend’s car—a very responsible sedan—off the highway and towards 208, checking my speed just as a 30-year-old who is more concerned about car insurance than looking cool should. At the stop sign, the car is silent for a moment as my iPod switches tracks, and in that pause I hover between present and past, between the time I am in now and those years I spent on these roads as my character was shaped and formed. The speakers open up and a pop punk song from high school spills out, filling the car as I make that hazardous left onto one of the most familiar roads I know.
Suddenly, I am 17 and behind the wheel of the boxy, hopelessly dorky white LeBaron that my parents insisted on and that I was both embarrassed by and enamored of. It’s very hard to hate the vehicle that is your means to freedom and possibility, but it’s also very hard to love a practical white car with a thin blue and red stripe running along the length of it. It was just so wholesome.
My shift at the Bugle Boy clothing store—at the bottom of the social hierarchy that is life as an employee at the Woodbury Commons— is over and nothing else matters but getting to my best friend’s house. The night, the world, and my whole life unfurl in front of me as I round a bend and dive into a straightaway, and my entire body pulses with joy. It’s not the actual plans for the night that make my heart sing, but the possibility of what will be. This could be a night where something actually happens, and to a suburban teen girl, the possibility of something is everything.
For a moment, self-awareness takes hold and I am fully alive to how young and fresh I am, how little I have lived and how much time I have ahead of me. My adrenaline spikes and giggles involuntarily escape from my lips and I am simply—and please forgive the cheese—high on life. I crank the volume knob, knowing the music can never be as loud as I need it. I want it to surround me and suffocate me, seeping in until it’s sweeping through my veins and coming out my pores. It should be so loud that I can’t hear myself belting out the words, so loud that my ribs vibrate to the bass line, so loud that the car can’t contain it and the music pours out through the cracks. If I could just make it loud enough, the song will overwhelm me and permanently infuse me with its magic.
In the present, in my 30-year-old body, I wonder at the power music from adolescence has, its ability to transport you. I can feel the youth and naïveté of my younger self, that skin I shed years ago. I can reach out and touch it from enough of a distance that it seems sweet instead of sad. It makes me a little wistful—not enough to actually want to be 17 again, but enough to remind me how powerful music can be and how what you experience when you are young affects you in ways nothing ever will again.
[I think I need to lay off dashes for awhile...]
Suddenly, I am 17 and behind the wheel of the boxy, hopelessly dorky white LeBaron that my parents insisted on and that I was both embarrassed by and enamored of. It’s very hard to hate the vehicle that is your means to freedom and possibility, but it’s also very hard to love a practical white car with a thin blue and red stripe running along the length of it. It was just so wholesome.
My shift at the Bugle Boy clothing store—at the bottom of the social hierarchy that is life as an employee at the Woodbury Commons— is over and nothing else matters but getting to my best friend’s house. The night, the world, and my whole life unfurl in front of me as I round a bend and dive into a straightaway, and my entire body pulses with joy. It’s not the actual plans for the night that make my heart sing, but the possibility of what will be. This could be a night where something actually happens, and to a suburban teen girl, the possibility of something is everything.
For a moment, self-awareness takes hold and I am fully alive to how young and fresh I am, how little I have lived and how much time I have ahead of me. My adrenaline spikes and giggles involuntarily escape from my lips and I am simply—and please forgive the cheese—high on life. I crank the volume knob, knowing the music can never be as loud as I need it. I want it to surround me and suffocate me, seeping in until it’s sweeping through my veins and coming out my pores. It should be so loud that I can’t hear myself belting out the words, so loud that my ribs vibrate to the bass line, so loud that the car can’t contain it and the music pours out through the cracks. If I could just make it loud enough, the song will overwhelm me and permanently infuse me with its magic.
In the present, in my 30-year-old body, I wonder at the power music from adolescence has, its ability to transport you. I can feel the youth and naïveté of my younger self, that skin I shed years ago. I can reach out and touch it from enough of a distance that it seems sweet instead of sad. It makes me a little wistful—not enough to actually want to be 17 again, but enough to remind me how powerful music can be and how what you experience when you are young affects you in ways nothing ever will again.
[I think I need to lay off dashes for awhile...]
Monday, September 27, 2010
Next on the Life List
Life List #...er, I'm not sure because the list is at work and I'm at home: attend a TED conference.
I mean, how amazing does this look??
The price tag is a bit out of my reach, but there appear to be "watch parties" akin to those live broadcasts of the Opera that the Met has been doing lately. Until I have $2,200 burning a hole in my pocket, I'll make do with watching the talks in a movie theater.
As always, thanks to Mighty Girl for the Life List inspiration...
I mean, how amazing does this look??
The price tag is a bit out of my reach, but there appear to be "watch parties" akin to those live broadcasts of the Opera that the Met has been doing lately. Until I have $2,200 burning a hole in my pocket, I'll make do with watching the talks in a movie theater.
As always, thanks to Mighty Girl for the Life List inspiration...
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Life list: Ride my bike to work? Check!
Five things I learned while biking to work today:
1) Safety before pride.
It really doesn't matter if you slide through that yellow light or beat out that cab if it leads to you getting squashed by a bus. There is no prize for getting to work 3 minutes early.
2) NYC needs to put in some cross town bike paths in Manhattan.
The 20s and the 90s? Really? Nothing in between? That's like 70 blocks of heart-pounding, terror-filled, small margin of error bike riding. Give me just one lane somewhere in the 50s!
3) Streets are safer than sidewalks.
Intimidating though they are, biking in the streets is still more predictable than going up on the sidewalk. Also, pedestrians don't have to roll down a window to yell at you.
4) In NYC, there's even construction on the bike paths on the bridges.
And it requires a large van that forces everyone to dismount and walk their bikes, which always feels alien after having ridden for so long.
5) I love riding my bike.
This sounds much more new-agey than I usually go, but I truly end up feeling at one with my bike while shooting through intersections and navigating around potholes.
I may just make this a regular thing...until the sun starts setting at 5pm. But that means it's boot weather, which is a fair trade to me.
1) Safety before pride.
It really doesn't matter if you slide through that yellow light or beat out that cab if it leads to you getting squashed by a bus. There is no prize for getting to work 3 minutes early.
2) NYC needs to put in some cross town bike paths in Manhattan.
The 20s and the 90s? Really? Nothing in between? That's like 70 blocks of heart-pounding, terror-filled, small margin of error bike riding. Give me just one lane somewhere in the 50s!
3) Streets are safer than sidewalks.
Intimidating though they are, biking in the streets is still more predictable than going up on the sidewalk. Also, pedestrians don't have to roll down a window to yell at you.
4) In NYC, there's even construction on the bike paths on the bridges.
And it requires a large van that forces everyone to dismount and walk their bikes, which always feels alien after having ridden for so long.
5) I love riding my bike.
This sounds much more new-agey than I usually go, but I truly end up feeling at one with my bike while shooting through intersections and navigating around potholes.
I may just make this a regular thing...until the sun starts setting at 5pm. But that means it's boot weather, which is a fair trade to me.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Leave a Light On...
Last night I had “Leave a Light On” by Belinda Carlisle stuck in my head, and it kept rattling around in my brain while I lay there, trying to sleep.
That song reminds me of a video I saw when I was twelve. I had to endure the unique brand of religious torture that public school children of Catholic parents are subjected to: CCD class. Mine was a class of 10 middle school kids fervently trying to make sure that everyone knew how little we cared about religion, how cool and above it all we were.
We watched a lot of lame videos, but for some reason the ending of this one stuck with me. It was a classically cheesy story in the vein of after school specials: a boy who seemed much older than me at the time—meaning he was probably 17—gets into a fight with his parents and decides to leave home. I remember that he left with just a backpack, and I thought, “That’s not nearly big enough to fit all my stuff.”
At some point he decides that he misses his family and would like to return home. I think there might have been a priest involved, some kind of counseling. The boy calls his parents and ends up leaving a message on their answering machine (the kind with a tape—I miss those).
The gist of his message was this: “I want to come home. I’m going to walk by the house tonight. If you want me to come home, leave the lamp in the living room window on. If it’s not on, I know to keep walking.” Cheesy, right?
So, there he is on the top of his street, backpack slung over his shoulder. It’s dusk, and most houses on the block are dark. Except his—his house is lit up like Christmas, light blazing from every window. He walks to it and stands outside, drinking it in.
And I, straining to remain cool and detached, was horrified to find myself crying.
I still get a little misty-eyed when I think about the story. All those lights! They really wanted him home!
Wonder if it’s on YouTube…
That song reminds me of a video I saw when I was twelve. I had to endure the unique brand of religious torture that public school children of Catholic parents are subjected to: CCD class. Mine was a class of 10 middle school kids fervently trying to make sure that everyone knew how little we cared about religion, how cool and above it all we were.
We watched a lot of lame videos, but for some reason the ending of this one stuck with me. It was a classically cheesy story in the vein of after school specials: a boy who seemed much older than me at the time—meaning he was probably 17—gets into a fight with his parents and decides to leave home. I remember that he left with just a backpack, and I thought, “That’s not nearly big enough to fit all my stuff.”
At some point he decides that he misses his family and would like to return home. I think there might have been a priest involved, some kind of counseling. The boy calls his parents and ends up leaving a message on their answering machine (the kind with a tape—I miss those).
The gist of his message was this: “I want to come home. I’m going to walk by the house tonight. If you want me to come home, leave the lamp in the living room window on. If it’s not on, I know to keep walking.” Cheesy, right?
So, there he is on the top of his street, backpack slung over his shoulder. It’s dusk, and most houses on the block are dark. Except his—his house is lit up like Christmas, light blazing from every window. He walks to it and stands outside, drinking it in.
And I, straining to remain cool and detached, was horrified to find myself crying.
I still get a little misty-eyed when I think about the story. All those lights! They really wanted him home!
Wonder if it’s on YouTube…
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Chipmunks
On a road trip with the fam, and we stopped the car on the side of the road to Estes Park, Colorado, which sits on the eastern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. This little pull off is home to the sweetest and most polite chipmunks in the world. They run up to you, stand on their hind legs, place their little paws gently on your hands and take the food you've offered them.
Seriously, I want them as pets. Here's what might just be the best picture ever.
Seriously, I want them as pets. Here's what might just be the best picture ever.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
I think that the ability to publicly compare Obama to Hitler and Lenin without fear of government retribution completely invalidates the point of this billboard.
After all, it wasn't so much their fiscal policy that was the problem. I think it was the mass murders and the wars and the media control and the closing of the borders and the brutally violent repression of opposing ideas...and kind of the overall crazy-pants dictatorships that were the problem.
After all, it wasn't so much their fiscal policy that was the problem. I think it was the mass murders and the wars and the media control and the closing of the borders and the brutally violent repression of opposing ideas...and kind of the overall crazy-pants dictatorships that were the problem.
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