What Happened When I Tried To Make a Comment on the Orangette Blog

I didn't really intend to do a whole blog post on dinner at Delancey. The idea of that just sort-of sounded like taking owls to Athens, but then on Orangette today, Molly mentioned a Goethe quote. "Do not hurry, do not rest". I love that quote. It's right up there with E.M. Forster's "Only connect", for me. So I started writing a comment and guess what happened? The operative word ended up being "writing" rather than "comment". I blame it on the upcoming writing week. I don't know what's going to work out for that, but I can feel it brewing. I have hopes. In the mean time, here's what used to call itself a comment.

Susan and I had pastries the other morning at Honore, the bakery next door to Delancey -cannele and macarons and cafe bom-bon, and there was Molly at Delancey! So early, red hair restrained in some cute messy pony-bun thing, trying to keep Jack away from whoever was at the door, while we were sitting just outside on the adirondack chairs, giggling to ourselves and thinking No NO! Let Jack come to the door! We love Jack! I felt the teeniest bit stalkerish and wondered if that well-worn media phrase "we ask that you respect our privacy at this time" ever crosses Molly's mind in those early hours when she is back at the restaurant after a 16-hour day, the tenth in, what, two weeks? In our defense, we were not at ALL the only people sneaking peaks, and at least we didn't actually cup our hands against the glass, right??

Not that we didn't want to.

Kate and I were supposed to have dinner later that night, before the new Mike Daisey show. She was going to make "Kate's Corn Buffet". I don't know exactly what that would have been, but Good would have surely been one word for it, since it was, after all, Kate cooking. Or would have been, if I hadn't suggested Delancey.

It was just that Kate was a little tired, not feeling that great, and we had to be at Hugo House early, and hadn't Delancey been open for like AN AGE, and we STILL hadn't been there yet?? So we each put on some little summer number, and arranged to meet in front at precisely 5 PM. Already, there was a little queue, but it was a cheerful queue, with all of us smiling secret smiles, thinking about love stories and chocolate chip cookies with grey salt and yes, pizza. There was a pretty pregnant woman in a yellow dress, with a big table's worth of handsome friends, and there was a cute girl with a grey dress and leggings, smiling at her date, and everyone else was also looking photogenic, in that particular way that friendly people who spend their time liking things do. Blog readers, Orangette lovers, fans. Lovers of love and pizza and ideas and things that seem impossible but aren't.

Kate said it felt like we were going to see a rock band, a really good one, one you've been waiting and waiting to see.

But the great thing was that it was like one of those concerts that is as satisfying as you think it will be - the live version of the tomato/corn/shallot vinaigrette salad IS better than the recorded version! And the framed photo of the italian man in his suit in the pink chair, and the delicate-looking waitresses in their grey t-shirts, and the tomato salad with the shallot vinaigrette and the kind of corn so sweet that I don't even know how one would find it, and the overall famousness feeling of it all! You can imagine.

I haven't even started on the pizza. We had the zucchini and anchovy and the Brooklyn. Of course, what else? I have to admit, I don't really want to go on and on about how fantastic it was. I just want to say that it was exactly what I expected, exactly what I hoped for and exactly what I was craving. Sometimes you want something to be simple, and just right. We didn't have to ask for the pizza scissors, and I wasn't tempted to use a knife and fork, and I didn't burn all the skin off the roof of my mouth, but nothing had congealed either. The sauce was exactly the way I like a pizza sauce, didn't taste like something you'd put on bruschetta or like spaghetti sauce, wasn't too sweet or overpowered by oregano, it was sort-of one with the crust, which should not for a moment be mistaken for "soggy", it was more that it felt inseparable in the best way, like a perfectly placed phrase in a poem or story, something said at the right moment in the right way, the not only well-worded but just what you wanted to hear, too.

But that was the start of Delancey being popular of course, the way Molly always pared it down to just the right details on her blog, in her book, recipes both made magic by her mythology and demystified by her willingness to share - I made this, she says, you can too.

But of course, even if we could, and really, at our table, only Kate gets put in that camp, the Camp of Could in the Kitchen, why would we want to? It was so nice to be welcomed in by Delancey, to sneak admiring peeks at neighbors, feel famous by proxy, energized and enthused, happy and summery and very very well-fed. And if reading this doesn't make you almost feel all those things yourself, then click on the love story link and get a little taste of Delancey for yourself.

Things You Can't Keep

It isn't very often these days that I feel like writing. That's just a fact, and a sad one at that. Other things are good, it's a rewarding time at work, where I feel challenged to almost exactly the right degree, and where I know I am at times seeing the best version of myself. And reading is good, better than usual.

But still, I miss the writing, of course, so when I felt like writing tonight, it was like that day in winter when you finally wake up to light instead of darkness. Jenny Lewis did it. B and I went to see her at Meany Hall tonight, and I sat there next to him, so happy, wishing I could write everything down, remember every note. I can't tell you what I would have written, that's how these things happen, it slips away, and you know it's going to slip away, and sometimes you have to let it.

But I can tell you how beautiful her voice was. It was more beautiful than a guitar or a violin or a cello. More beautiful than her long hair or pretty face, or the lyrics to the song with the chorus that tells your best girlfriend to keep the lighthouse in sight. She and Jonathan Rice sang Love Hurts more beautifully than even Emmylou and Gram, and I know, believe me I know, what sacrilege that sounds like, but I swear, for me, tonight, it was true. There was not a wrong moment in her voice. I'd be willing to bet it will be the most beautiful singing voice I hear live all year. It was more beautiful than even the way B smiled at me when I told him I was scared, and more beautiful than the way he asked, gently, "What is there to be scared about?"

And for one evening, sitting still, listening hard in the dark, with Jenny singing about all the hard parts of love, it was all so beautiful that I almost believed there wasn't anything to be scared about at all.

The Undead Book Club

I've been having a writing crisis lately. Maybe you've heard me say this before. Lots of people have. I think when I say it, people think of something like a literary case of low self-esteem. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I have never suffered from that, but that isn't exactly what's going on right now.

Tami helped me articulate it a little more clearly a few days ago, and then last night Lisa and Kathleen indulged me in further musings on the subject. It's not the words that are the problem, it's not individual sentences. I love those, love tinkering with them and spend many minutes a day on that tinkering. Some things don't get revised much - text messages, emails, certain blog entries. But some things just run through my head like lyrics to a song that I am always changing the tune of. This is one of the reasons I crave the walk to work, why I will freeze my nose and have bad hair every day and wear out a pair of heels in less than a month. I want the sentences, I need them. I would go so far as to say I am as addicted to them than I am to lattes. More addicted to them than I am to cheese.

The problem with the writing is the idea of a story. I am not being modest when I tell you that an understanding for how to make a story eludes me. It's as though I am trying to build a mammal, backbone and all, but know only how to make a candy-coated covering, or a jellyfish.

And of course, part of the problem is clearly a problem of faith. Part of the problem is that writing a story seems to me to be an act like building a mammal, an act for a deity, not a mortal. Who am I to say What Happens? And that's what a story is, right? What Happens?

What happened last night was a little vodka tasting. Just a little. Hints of fig, a soupcon of ginger, a touch f grape. Lisa and Kathleen met me at Venik for what I am now thinking of as the Book Club That Will Not Die. I met Kathleen 8 years ago because Lisa took me to her book club, after I begged. That was a lifetime ago for me, when I was a homeowner, settled, partnered. Those things changed and so did book club, but it keeps coming back, and I love that it is turning out to be an irrepressible force.

Kathleen and Lisa are the reason, as has become evident now that the club has been whittled down to we three. These two are the perfect people to talk books with, to talk about my own writing with, because they are the kind of readers that writers write for. Thoughtful, generous, eclectic in their tastes, willing to take a chance. Kathleen has been in school recently, so not reading as much as she'd like, but the book we read this time, The Raw Shark Texts, lured her back into the world of fiction. When her husband Scott saw her curled up on the couch, racing through the book, he said "Uh oh, It's Back!"

Which is why I am so glad to have the two of them as blog readers, because as I told them last night, at some point, all this work I do with sentences, all the ways I carve and cut and paste and weld things together, it needs to go somewhere. To invite a reader into your writing is a risk that work demands and deserves. Whether you, whether I, ever learn to write a mammal or not. Because candy-coated shells can be good too, and jellyfish are lovely. As long as I can manage to resist the urge to combine the two. Cause nobody really wants a candy-coated jellyfish. Do they?

Still talking, even in the rain

Still Doesn't Explain What's Up With MY Hair!

Mo at the studio

I went back to my writing space yesterday. I might as well admit it, I've only been there a handful of times since starting my job. The writing has picked up a bit since the Tomales Bay week, but if you've been reading here regularly for a while, you've probably noticed that the blog has been a little bare. When the blog is bare, it often means there isn't much writing happening at all.

There are some benefits to not writing now, it turns out. Since I haven't spent much time at the studio recently, the smell, the sound the plywood floors make, the view out the window, all of those things brought summer back to me and that made being there surprisingly delicious. And seeing how little I'm writing now has made me realize that the time off was more productive than I realized. I was so busy being afraid that I wasn't being productive enough that I didn't see how truly unproductive I can be.

Still. I'm doing things a little differently these days, because I don't think I want to be as unproductive as all that. So, I've been home almost every night this week, and last night I was asleep before ten - that's almost unheard of for me, right? I'm making room for things, reorganizing, turning string into things. I'm liking the string things, the string things are good. We'll just see about the writing.

I Don't Always Know What I'm Doing Here

... and sometimes that's the best way to start a blog post. Mostly because those times, it's really the only way. Ordinarily, I have a general sense of what I'm going to write about, often I've even worked out some words, during a walk, or a long drive, so I know what the whole piece is going to rotate around. Other times, like tonight, I think, well damn, I liked that last post but that was two days ago, and let's at least give folks something new to look at, right? So we take a little tour through iphoto and there's a shot that isn't too attached to anything, not too loaded with meaning, or requiring explanation, really it's just a pile of leaves, a chain link fence, could be any of these fall days, so off we go into whatever blog post will coagulate in the little window where we write these.

I was just a little off all weekend, that's the truth. Strange things happened, like the power being off at Kingfish when we went for my birthday dinner. We ate fried chicken, mashed potatoes and greens by candlelight, and we were ready to move on to a giant slice of chocolate cake when the lights went on and everyone cheered. After all that time in the dark, having the dim lights on was the thing that seemed off.

There were other off things this weekend too, like how I didn't watch a second of football, and how I actually bought an ironing board. Furthermore, I bought things to clean my kitchen floor with. And in addition, I did laundry (though I have yet to fold one of the two loads) and there was a meal cooked in my kitchen tonight, after which all the dishes except the dessert plate were cleaned. My apartment was nice and cozy tonight, with Julie London playing and white Christmas lights on over the dinner table. It made me think of visitors and comfort and being happy to be home.

So, yeah, all a little off. Like how that chain-link fence looked surprisingly beautiful to me when I decided to photograph it. Off, but only in the nicest way.

Hope you had a good weekend!

XOXO
H

Oh, AND! I think I rule because I got to level 47 on Free Rice. FORTY-SEVEN!!! I know some words, yo! As you would say, Ali.

We Were All A Little Blurry

The Man. The Cheap Wine and Poetry Man.

But what did you expect from a night of cheap wine and poetry? It wasn't the wine for me, though, it was definitely the poetry, the crowd, and probably that chocolate cake I ate instead of dinner. And while we are on the subject of chocolate cake, I wanna let you in on a little insider tip. Something they don't tell you about Hugo House when you come in the door with your little notebook and paper, or your copy of White Noise for that mind-bending Don DeLillo class you are taking (oh, sorry, you wish you were taking). Ready? Here it is: If you should find yourself at Hugo House, and someone sets food in front of you, and at that same time, Brian's girlfriend is somewhere on the vicinity, maybe scooting upstairs mysteriously from time to time? Well, you need to eat that food. She made that food, and knowing that, you know that you should eat it. Now I've told you, now you know.

Last night that food was chocolate cake. And while the chocolate cake itself was pretty and all, a big round birthday-looking (Happy Birthday Brian!) chocolate thing, a classic cake shape, not that big square Safeway baloney you get from co-workers who don't really like you all that much, even though this cake was not that cake, it still did not get eaten with the fervor which I believe it deserved. It's not your fault, you just didn't know. But I have to tell you, that was some goooood cake! I still don't believe her that it was vegan. That's crazy talk.

Mmmmmh! Dayum, that cake was gooood!

What did get eaten, voraciously, with loud mouth-noises and even some snorting, was the poetry. The crowd was big, and the crowd was thirsty and the thirsty ones drank and this only made them more hungry. Thank god, or in this case, Brian, there was both cake and of course, poetry. When we left, we were full.

What I filled up other than cake, and other than the pleasure of sitting next to Kate's man Jason, the kind of man who puts his arm around you and says "Where you been?" like he's gonna' beat up whoever has taken you away, but in a nice way, like the most friendly ass-whupping ever, maybe like he's just gonna open a can of Maldives songs whup-ass on someone, you know, just sing or even headbang them into whuppedness, the kind of man who you hope your boyfriend will understand, who will understand your boyfriend, if you ever happen to have one, because he is the I'm-looking-out-for-you-advice-giving type if there ever was one, but where was I? Right... what I filled up on other than the pleasure of sitting next to him, was poetry.

Prose too, I guess, since Ryan Boudinot delighted me with "An Essay and A Short Story About Motley Crue". I never knew about that time Motley Crue's tour bus broke down in Conway Washington, or about the burrito thing either, though maybe I didn't need to know that. Anyway, I'm glad I know now, because I am going to get that au jus recipe from Vince Neil myself, when I finally meet him.

And you know I can't end this without a word about Brian. I love that guy, and the truth is I love listening to him even when he's telling me to stuff envelopes. In fact, sometimes I get in trouble for how much I love how he sounds. Every once in a while, he'll say something I like, and I'll find myself, without thinking about it, repeating it, kinda chewing it over, only with my mouth open, which is not so polite because it means that Brian can see that I am swallowing all the R's when I chew, just like he does. "Are you makin funna me?" he says. But of course I'm not, I just love the taste of those words.

When he reads poetry, it's even better. I heard a laugh sound come out of Kate's mouth that I swear I've never heard her make before. That whole birthday weekend, I never heard that sound. And the crowd started out all hungry and rowdy at the beginning but by the end they were buzzing and satiated. My favorite? The one called "The First Pair of Panties I Seen In a While." It was about buying a house. For real!

Hell yes I ate some cake!

On Not Knowing Where To Start

I've been home a few days now, working on getting things in order a little, doing some minor edits to the story I workshopped with the writing group, catching up on laundry, latte drinking and trying to see all my lovely friends here in Seattle. As sad as I was to leave the ranch, I have to say, I am feeling the love now that I'm back in Seattle. Seattle seems to have almost as much love for me as I have for it.

And that's all good, but I have this funny feeling right now, like I'm behind on my homework. I have all these ranch photos, and I had this excellent couple of weeks, both on the road with Katherine, and then at the ranch with the writing group, and I have done so very little blogging, even though all of the things that I have experienced and enjoyed are exactly the kinds of things I love to write about here.

Pam works her magic

I keep putting it off because I have this feeling of not being able to do justice to all the great thing, like how the road trip to Creede just flew with Katherine in the car, and how ridiculously hilarious Tami was as a roommate, how good Pam's food was, as always, and how thoroughly she outdid herself with this year's entertainment - a private living room concert with Bucky Baxter and his young buck, Rayland, plus the readings by Greg Glazner and Summer Wood (I am not making these names up, click the links to see for yourself!), how great it was to sit in the hot springs in Pagosa, and how very satisfied I felt sitting under the night sky and eating buffalo burgers and stuffed green chiles at Kips again. . Colorado was spectacularly beautiful, as always.

Lucky Bucky - dinner with ten of the least bitter women you've ever met

And that's not even saying anything about the real purpose of the trip - all the great stories we worked on and all the thoughtful comments and help I received from the women in my writing group. I don't have words for how inspiring that was.

Best bloody mary ever, courtesy of Kip's

Which is why I'm going to stop here. I'm a little out of words right now, but I just needed to give you something, a few snapshots, a couple things to picture, to break this bloggers block I've got. There are too many good things coming up to stay away from here too long.

Dex Decker and the blue truck, moving a winter's worth of hay

Maybe This Is Why Dialogue Is Not My Strong Suit

Gourds at the Tractor Tavern 9-2-07
Happy Birthday and thanks Dan and Earl!
Photo by Pete from Kozy Shack

Here's how a lot of conversations with me go:

Bill Frisell comes on stage with Wilco at Marymoor.
Elvis: Oh, we saw him at the Tractor!
Me: Sigh. I love the Tractor.

At the coffee shop with Kevin, of Widower fame.
Kevin: My band's playing the Tractor on October 3rd*.
Me: I love the Tractor!

With Pam at the Shannon McNally show.
Pam: Oh, we played here when I toured with the Nields.
Me: Oh, I love the Tractor.

Which is just about all I want to say this morning too, after last night's Gourds show. They were fantastic as always, those boys are true professionals who deliver every time. They killed at the Mural Amphitheater at Bumbershoot, you should have seen everyone dancing on the lawn to their wacked out mix-up of Gin and Juice. You know I was in heaven! And look at Kevin Russell, how nice does he look? I love his crinkly-eyed smile and all the silliness he brings to stage. Last night, he taught us to do a dance he calls The Oyster, and now I'm going to teach it to you. Ready?

Okay, first thing you do is you stand up. Are you standing? Kevin said that all you need to do this dance is a pair of shoes, so if you aren't wearing your shoes, just go put them on real quick.

Okay, now. Put the back of your heels together, touching, and then try to put your feet in a straight line, so it's like this, 8 is your toes, the >>> is one foot, and then ) is your heel.

8>>>) (<<<8

Now just try and stand there. Pretty soon you'll find that you are waving your arms and "dancing". Isn't that good? I thought so. Other things I thought were super good include meeting Pete (who took the photo above) for the first time and getting to take Camille and Erik, who were having an anniversary that very night. Camille got Erik the new Gourds album as an anniversary present, before she even knew that we were taking them as our plus ones. How perfect is that? Now I know relationships are never quite what they look like from the outside, but I have to tell you, from what I can tell, Pete & Carrie and Camille & Erik are two fine arguments for True Love. I hope there is never cause for me to be disabused of those notions. Carrie is in Taiwan right now, and you should have seen how Pete's eyes lit up when he told me that he's going to go meet her there soon. "It's gonna' be good to see her," he said, and you just know that was the understatement of the night. So, I was sorry I didn't get to meet Carrie (or Rabbit, dogs not invited) at the show, but that gives me something to look forward to in life, right? I'm liking the new Gourds album so far, even though I am completely serious when I tell you that the first time I heard one of the songs, I actually cried. How often does that happen? But that Kevin, he just gets to me. I hope that song is fiction, cause I would hate to see such a seemingly nice man suffer like that. I'll just let you figure out for yourself which song I'm talking about. I don't think it'll be hard.

Which reminds me, those CDs are almost done, and on their way to you commenting folks. I am loving this mix, and I hope Katherine does too, because I'm sure I'll make her listen to it a time or two when we take off for Brighthound Crest on Wednesday morning. It's a pretty twangy mix, definitely inspired by Regan and Pete, and I left most of the mopey songs off it, and people, it is hard to make a non-mopey mix that is also twangy. The hardest thing to leave off was probably Laura Cantrell's outstanding The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter, and I suppose that's appropriate in more ways than we will talk about here. If you don't know what I'm talking about with all this CD making stuff, take a look here. One last chance to put your order in. Cause I love you. You know I do.


* I'm going, you should too.

And Then You Start to Expect a Little More, Sometimes Maybe Too Much

I haven't been taking a lot of photos lately. For a while there, every day I had 20-30 photos to download. These days, the sets come in groups of six, and they're only downloaded every couple days.

It's not that things aren't worth taking photos of. That walk I took from my writing studio to the coffee shop in Ballard took me by good graffiti and wrecked-looking brambles and my expensive shoes got all dusty from the gravel and wanted their photo taken. But I just didn't feel like taking those photos. That's all somehow so outside of my head, and I am very much inside my head, I've been rattling around in here all week.

This is what it's like, here, rattling around in my head:
On my walk to the coffee shop, I think of a sentence I want to use for the opening of a story. I get to the coffee shop. I write it down. I stop writing and just sit there, leaning forward on my elbows, chin in my hand, listening to the music. This is music that plinks along slowly, and I think, This music is eating up time, plink plink, time goes. The door opens and a mass of cool air comes in and I watch the amber glass light that is swayed by it. I sit there. The music plinks. I look over at the barista and as he raises his eyebrows, one corner of his mouth smiles and he says "This music makes me feel like I am in a child's music box, and I am the little figure that dances" and then he raises his hands over his head. I smile not with a corner of my mouth but all the way and think about how much I have liked liking the baristas.

This is something the girl in my story and I have in common, though it doesn't work out quite so well for her. She doesn't really know how to right the boat once it's tipped over. The version of me that is writing the story, instead of being the character, can pretty much right the boat, in my own way. Most of the time.

I look at the photo on my desktop and think about going away for two months, and how in the story I'm writing, she doesn't go to a ranch to write, she goes somewhere else that we might not ever know about.

I am never sure when it is time to leave the coffee shop. I pick something, like, when those two girls who are wearing identical black dresses leave, I will leave. When it happens, I get in my car and I am thinking about outfits, those two identical black dresses, same buttons on the sleeve, same eyelet material, and I think about how my character thinks about what she wears, and how her particular look is about her attempt to be the prettiest inmate at the asylum. I think about how when she gets away from wherever she was for two months, she plays "You're So Vain" loud on her car stereo and sings the Mick Jagger part with a fake country accent. When I play "You're So Vain", I sing the Carly part.

I heard Stephen King on Fresh Air once, and he said that his stories come from writing about his worst fears. The thought of that was liberating somehow, because I already had the urge to write through my worst fears, but when you do that, then you've got this story that is, wow, it's just always gonna be dark, and if your worst fears are not rabid dogs or killer cars, if your worst fears are a lot more pedestrian than that, you might be afraid that writing them will make them more real. Though maybe Stephen King felt that way about his stories too, like he was going to make a killer dog come after him, or a rabid fan, for that matter.

So maybe it's not that different, except that in Stephen King's books (based on my deep knowledge of them from the movie trailers for the books, terribly accurate, right?) he seems to work more with monsters who live outside his body, while my worst fears lock themselves in the bathroom and turn the knives on themselves rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

Which is why writing a lot in a short period of time, rattling around in here, with the Lindsay Lohan's and other girls who get sent away for their own good, well, it sometimes makes me feel a little sick of the world, and then I don't feel like taking pictures quite as much.

And this is all a reminder of why if you take a walk, and look up from your dusty expensive shoes, and there's that Camaro, turquoise with the little gills on the side, and the license plate that matches your own sense of humor, you are going to be grateful. The thing that you are grateful for is that you know for sure that there's at least one good photo for you, one that takes you out of this place you've been rattling around in and puts you back in the world of Kozy Shack and Elvis and road trips and the feeling that there are places to go in the world.

And if you wake up the next morning and there doesn't happen to be a Camaro handy, you can always go back to the coffee shop and take a photo of your latte.

Bitchin'

Hey Chris, how do I get the camera to quit overexposing muscle cars when the sun is so bright?

I think I get it now. Deciding that I should probably start looking for a job is what has me writing like a woman possessed, isn't it? Sigh. Ah well, whatever works.

I didn't even intend to go to my studio today. I did a little Hugo House volunteer work in the morning and then I meant to go home and work on this hurricane that hit when I decided to move my writing life elsewhere. Then as I drove home it occurred to me that maybe the next paragraph needed to be about how Lindsay Lohan probably has enough shame in her life already, what with the dad who keeps getting thrown in jail and wearing black mesh tank tops on TV. So instead of doing dishes or putting away the clean laundry that's sitting on my bed, I grabbed my laptop and drove off to my writing space (which needs a name, by the way, Katherine!!). I wrote for about an hour and a half and then wandered over to the Ballard Fiorre for an iced latte, where I wrote more, and then I walked back and then I wrote more and now I'm at home and I just want to pull that story out again, I'm so in love with it.

Oh, and can anyone tell me whose car is this? My god, I love it so much. A turquoise Camaro with the license plate Bad Co? Damn, you gotta be kidding.

And Then There Was Pie For Breakfast!

OR: 35 Things That Made it Feel Like My Birthday This Year

OR: What Happens When You Make Me Steak For Dinner at 8:30 PM

OR: What I Write When It Is 1AM & I Am So Happy I Can't Sleep

Last night, the moon was so bright here, that when I turned out all the lights in the house, it startled me. You could see everything outside. The fence posts, the tall grass in the yard, the clothesline across the driveway, the hills behind the pasture. At midnight, I tried to go to sleep, but was thinking about so many things. Eventually, I sat up in bed with my computer on my lap and wrote two pages of my novel, two pages that I’ve been needing and that I feel sure I will keep.

I woke again in the morning to find the sky an even steady pink from the sunrise. I let MaryEllen out, and then slept again until 10:30.

It’s 1 AM now and I suppose I’ve been trying to sleep for an hour or so. This time, it’s not the book that’s keeping me awake. I’ve been thinking about blog entries. I have to admit, I do that a lot. Pam and Gary, and Pam’s friend Kelly, got here this afternoon, and we talked about blogging a little, and about reading blogs. Pam was saying that she just hates the thought of spending any more time in front of a computer than she already does, and I understand that, but of course it’s not at all the way I feel.

The truth is that I would prefer letters, if I could have them. Of course Pam wasn’t talking about wanting to spend less time with words, this is a woman who is absolutely gleeful at getting to bring books with her on her upcoming trip to Tasmania, it really is the computer piece of it that she means. But I love the computer, because it’s the little way that I’ve been able to seduce people into the world of letters. I know that some of you just look at the pictures, glance a little at what I’m going on about, and that’s okay, because we are still somehow here together, and if you read just one entry here that you like, that makes you think about or experience your own day a little differently, well, that makes me pretty happy. If you just look at the pictures, and see the first blue sky you’ve seen all day after 30 straight hours of rain, then we’ve accomplished something there too, then, haven’t we?

But I also know that some of the emails I get every day contain words that would never have been said if we only had letters, and they are words I’m glad to have, whatever I had to do to get them.

In college, as some of you know and have evidence of, I was a prolific letter writer. I still have more stationary than probably anyone you know, and I have a feeling that by the time I leave this place, I will be back in the habit of writing letters longhand, and will again be someone who can be counted on to reward most letters sent to me with a reply, probably on nice paper, probably saying at least one happy thing, after all, there is always “My dear friend, I got your letter” to say.

But I wasn’t thinking about letters when I got up to get my computer again tonight. I was thinking about blog entries, and about the blog entry that would accompany the photo of our dinner tonight. I always take pictures when Pam makes dinner. Her dinners are always worth taking photos of.

I thought the title would be “My Birthday Party Arrived Today”, because that was how it felt when these three people and the other Irish Wolfhound I like so much got here, bringing two pies and a box of truffles, and all of the good food that we ate for dinner. To tell the truth, I had second thoughts about writing that it once again felt like my birthday today, when it has felt so much like my birthday so many times in the past month. It didn’t seem fair to feel like it was my birthday at Tomales, and then again when I got all your lovely packages and emails and cards.

And thinking back on it, getting to take the road trip with Susan kind of felt like my birthday, but then, so did going to dinner with Kirsten before I left, and going to Stumbling Goat with Erin, Pam and Gena, and the baby shower I threw for Jenn felt like my own birthday party too, which is crazy, but not as crazy as you might think, since it turned out that the baby we were having the shower for was born on my birthday, and getting that email that told me that her baby boy was born on my 35th birthday made it feel like my birthday again too. And surely there has never been a day in my life that felt more like a birthday than the day I was in the delivery room with Kirstin and held Rhone in my arms for the first time.

I could go on about this particular November 3rd, because I have it on good authority that there are more packages in the mail, and I know for sure that there are leftover smashed potatoes and seven kinds of cheese for lunch and I have an email from Bobby to answer, and I finished my orange sweater tonight and can block it tomorrow and it will probably be ready to wear for real by the time it gets cold in the evening, and on top of all of that, Seneca Wallace has a win.

What I’m really trying to say is what I’m always trying to say on this blog. Every single time I write here I am trying to say I’m grateful for my life, and please don’t think that I don’t know I’ve got it good. I have to admit, I am grateful to the point of feeling a little guilty about it, of feeling like maybe I don’t deserve all this, and then I can’t help it, I want to point out that the year after my 34th birthday started with losing the man I loved in such a painful way, and that did not make this past year a good one.

But that doesn’t explain it, all this good luck and happiness, because even in that hard year, that same birthday that saw the end of that relationship saw the start of my time with my writing group, and that has changed so much about my life, including the fact that I am now writing to you from one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. And anyway, why do we so often want to buy our happiness with pain? Why do I? Why do I want to know if one outweighs the other, if I have broken even or am overdrawn? It shouldn’t work that way, especially since all the happiness doesn’t make that pain any less, and truth be told, I miss him still something fierce, even as I sit here so happy, writing about all the goods things that happened to me in the year since we’ve been apart.

Because I will certainly never doubt that I had happy moments as long as I have that blog entry with the ferris wheel, or the one where Ali told those ladies at Cascade Pizza that I’d be back next year, or the entry for the Summer We Were Single or the love letter after Nate’s visit. And there were a hell of a lot of things that didn’t even get their fair share of play on the blog, including knit nights with Regan and Alexis, and the night we celebrated at El Camino, not to mention the night Paul and I went there and I got to relive how much I loved having him as my work boyfriend back in the day, and then there’s book club which we have to do again when I get back, and red wine and lamp skewers at Portalis with some of those ladies, and there was Gary’s workshop with Dana, and the whole 4th of July weekend, not just the cowboys and clogs, but the dinner outside at a long table set with candles and with more loving family than I ever thought we’d get to have.

And maybe it just always feels like my birthday when I am with someone I love, who may also happen to love me, like those great times with my mom up in LaConner, going to the Skagit River Poetry festival, knitting and watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and there were good times with dad too, eating his homemade chicken noodle soup and hearing him talk about how cute we were when we were little, and last December there was that day at Peanut Butter and Ella’s with Candice and Amber, when I really needed the girlfriend love and really got it, and same thing with Lillian the night we went for gelato and walked around with me saying “I hate everyone” and both of us laughing because I so clearly love her, and drinks with Camille and Kristin were so good even though we were having drinks at that place that sort-of smelled like bleach, for god’s sake!

And who can say if it was a better gift for me or for Dawn that I got to be there for her beautiful wedding this year, and this summer there was that afternoon eating fudgesicles and sitting by Lake Washington with Kere, and there was Bumbershoot with Jeth, where we went to Flatstock, which he loves as much as Nate and I do, and where we saw that deer that I really want to put in my book, and I know I talked on the blog about going to Rat City Roller Girls with Dakota and Clay and Jenn and Chris, but oh the Roller Derby, and if I’m being honest, I have to admit that even though the whole love thing didn’t work out, that lost weekend in Portland over Christmas break really was great, and there are just so many other days when I was totally content being with the person I was with, like drinks at Sambar with Darren and while we are on the subject of birthdays, even Andy’s birthday party at Sambar (no, this blog is not sponsored by Sambar) with Caitlin felt like my birthday because I was with Caitlin, who I love, and everyone knows I love those baristas almost as much as I love a birthday.

So what I’m really really trying to say, is that if you write a blog, you are definitely going to have more fun. Okay, maybe it’s just that you notice it so much more when you think about writing it. My mom sent me a quote recently, someone saying that writers write in order to live their lives twice, and that’s not a bad idea. I do know that one of the great pleasures of this year has been doing this blog with you, Ali, and hearing from friends who confess to me that they read it, or even just check the pictures. I’m so glad we started this, and can’t wait for the next 228 posts bring. That, and…

...wow, I could not be more grateful for all the people who made the last year good for me. I hope you’ll all let me return the favor next year. That way no one (and by no one I mean me) will have to worry about being overdrawn.

XOXO
Heather.

Wicked Writing Women

This photo of me and Dana cracks me up. I think we look sort of like we are considering you carefully, and may at any moment call you out for your naughty behavior. Which is appropriate, because we did some of that while we were at the Tomales Bay Workshops, the night we crashed the grad students party. Okay, I did more of it in class. Hopefully I will be forgiven for this sin.

It's a shame that our other roommate, Wendy, is not in this photo. After the night we got lost with Dorianne and laughed our way through 6 hours of wrong turns, bad directions, and cell phone calls to men who might be able to direct us to the right road, Dana and I started referring to Wendy as "Poor Wendy". We hadn't met her yet, we just thought she was probably in for it, being our roommate and all. It wasn't long after we met Wendy that we realized she could hold her own with us, and the three of us ended up looking at each other sheepishly the morning that the conference coordinator made the announcement "And please try to keep the 2AM conversations at a low volume, or better yet, take a walk so that the other people staying in your dorms aren't kept awake". Yeah, we were the ones having impassioned conversations about writing at 2AM. I'm sure we weren't the only ones.

Having Dana and Wendy there was a little like having your sister with you in New York. Like New York, writing workshops are wonderful places full of great experiences to have, and really interesting people to meet. Like New York, they are also scary as hell. There's an energy to a writing workshop - there are ups and downs in the collective mood, in self-esteem, sometimes even in your desire to be there. This workshop was an extremely positive, low-ego experience, but we all still have our doubts about putting our writing out there.

Just like New York, the workshops I've done have always been worth it in the end, and are the kind of places I find myself wanting to return to. As Kristin pointed out, I definitely drank the KoolAid.

Having your sister in New York, was knowing that someone always had your back, even if she didn't always agree with you, and knowing that someone would be patient with the vicissitudes in your moods. I know I shouldn't compare someone I had previously spent only 6 hours with to you, Ali, but sometimes extreme situations forge a bond that doesn't require a lot of time to develop, one that is as forgiving and full of affection as you could ever hope from a friendship 6 hours old.

So, not only did I have that with Dana, and then get to enjoy Wendy's company and writing as well, I had some of the writing group women there, and those women kick ass. I've written about them before, and no doubt will again. At some point I realized that the biggest reason I was sorry I wasn't in Ron Carlson's workshop was that it meant I didn't get to read what they had submitted. I've been assured that I will see those stories at some point and I hope that's true. And don't get me wrong, I aspire to do a Ron Carlson workshop, but I have that thing about not understanding how people write short stories that makes it seem a little inappropriate for me.

So. Thanks for making me feel like you had my back, Dana and Wendy. It almost made me feel like I could have read without passing out. But don't quote me on that.

Halloween at the Ranch

For Halloween at the ranch, MaryEllen and Rose dressed up as Irish Wolfhounds, who, the night before, had dressed up as two pairs of shining eyes, loping down the driveway to meet me, and their tongues dressed up as tongues ready to reclaim me as their own, as part of the ranch again.

What I dressed up as was an almost-35-year-old who had not bathed for 3 days, and who has developed a fondness for boiling water in the kettle on the wood stove, which was dressed up as a wood stove that allowed itself to be filled with fire by a woman who had previously almost never started a fire by herself on the first try. I also dressed up as someone 5'4" who wears the same pair of jeans almost every day and just came back from one of the best weeks of her life that did not include a lover, and who has written every day since and will write every day after.

My computer dressed up as a laptop that got left behind in Denver at the Cherry Creek Four Points Sheraton and that refused to return until $10.76+$49.85 had changed hands, and two days had passed, until the FedEx man miraculously pulled his truck up in my driveway and handed it over, after I signed my name on line 6.

The dining room table dressed up as my work space, complete with writing notebook and fountain pen, but no computer, and later in the day, for it's second costume, it dressed up as the resting place for all manner of happy things, like Hershey's kisses, which had dressed up as a package from Regan, which also included a puzzle, and a little bird dish from Elvis, which was dressed up as the place where the Hershey's kisses live now.

And on Halloween at the ranch, my hands dressed up as the spookiest thing, the thing that gives you a fright and leaves you delighted at the same time, like the reveal at the end of the Sixth Sense - five fingers full of words, including a little finger smeared with the shadows of writing, and then my hand refused to take off that costume and is wearing it still.

Thank You Pam Houston, I Have Died and Gone To Writer's Heaven

I almost wrote "Thank You God... etc" as the title of this post, but then I realized I should really thank the one who is directly responsible for the heaven I now find myself in. Maybe God has something to do with it, maybe not. But we know Pam does.

Holy Shit, this conference is good. Good. Good food, beautiful beautiful setting. That's the least of it. Look up the writers who are here, every one of them is amazing. That's as articulate as I can get about it now. I have to go do my work for tomorrow.

This photo is from the night we got lost on the way from the airport to the conference with the poet Dorianne Laux and took 6 hours to do a drive that should have taken an hour and a half. It was one of the most fun nights I've ever had. In. My. Life. And she is a damn good poet. Check out Vacation Sex.

What NY is to you, Pamfas is to me

This post has been a long time coming. I'm in the midst of my third week back since I went to the town with the pseudonym, to see the ranch where I'll live for October and November. About every other night, I sit down and chip away at an entry, but it never seems to get done. So tonight I'm just going to sit here until it does.

People keep asking me how the trip was and all I ever seem to say is “It was beautiful/great/I loved it.” All of which are true, but seem so weak in comparison with what the experience was, and I feel a little guilty everytime I see the little sad look on the face of whoever I say this to. It's like they are saying to me "You went all the way to Colorado and all I get is this crummy slogan?"

When someone asks me how the actual writing workshop was, then I branch out and say “It was really helpful”. And it was. But again... that isn't much of a keepsake either.

There's a thought I keep having, which I think of as a symptom that might lead to some diagnosis of whatever keeps me from being able to breathe life into a description of my trip.

What I keep thinking about the trip is this - the photos are so gorgeous they look photoshopped.

Think about that for a moment. I could have described the sky as being the color of the kind of swimming pool that’s always the perfect temperature, or the color of the way you feel at sea level after you’ve been living at high altitude for a while.

But in my head, the description of the landscape is “photoshopped”.

There are other symptoms.

Like, how while I was there I would find myself sighing, and that sigh would be coincident with the thought “I’m so happy”, but thenfollowing thought would be “I’m probably sighing because I’m not getting enough oxygen”.

Then there was the fact that I had some sleepless nights. And some weird dreams. Like the dream where the town with the pseudonym was a big carnival for the weekend, and I went into town and got plastered (even though we know I only get plastered at the Loggerodeo) and danced with someone else’s husband (another thing I'm unlikely to do) and paid the price in town the next morning when I found myself shunned in that way that only a small community can shun you. Thoroughly, seemingly irreparably.

There was also the dream where there were horses almost drowning in the river. Big powerful horses that I seemed to have spooked somehow, horses which nearly trampled me as they clambered up the river bank.

You don’t have to tell me what the dreams meant. I know, or I know as much as I need to.

Karl used to say I was better in the bad times. I never could disagree with that. In a way, I'm sorry that I was a better bridesmaid to the friend whose wedding I cancelled than I was to my sister, who glowed, and danced all night, and is still gloating over the groom she snagged. But sorry or not, I think I was better in the worst case.

The good times, sometimes they leave me sleepless, unsettled, dreaming about all the things I could lose, now that I have so much of what I want. All the symptoms, what they really tell you, ironically, is just how good a good time I had.

But the photos? They aren’t photoshopped. I’m not even a good photographer. It’s just that beautiful there. And even though I had some sleepless nights and my vision went all fuzzy and white around the edges at the top of our long hike, and I fumed over some slights I’ve suffered in the past few weeks, and wished that I could forget the things from my Seattle life that were troubling me, it was still that beautiful. Any time I doubt that, I see the photos and they prove it.

And no matter what my anxieties are or were, the fact remains that I spent a week eating incredible meals made for us by Pam herself – that gorgeous lamb, polenta with wild mushrooms picked that day on our hike, Thai shrimp curry, a fantastic salad with nearly every meal, homemade ice cream and lots and lots of cheese.

The food was enough art and pleasure for a week in itself, but of course, still there was more. We read writing so powerful that it left some of us sitting on the couch with tears streaming down our faces. We also read some damn funny things, and laughed out loud, and added to the list of running jokes that we’ve got going. We hiked and took naps and drew animal cards and thought about dreams and metaphor and love and Jazz and writing and writing and writing.

Add to all of that the fact that I haven't even started to tell you how much I love the women in this group. I love them a million little knit stitches worth, because they are writing things that are clever and poignant and ruthless and beautiful, and they are generous with their praise and brave with their criticism and I am so grateful for that. And when I tell you that they are a credit to the woman who leads them, I am saying a lot, because there is no superlative strong enough to express our gratitude for the way in which she is so smart. Towards the end of the workshopping, Tami said, with great passion and a hint of frustration, "Pam is so fucking smart!" and we all lost ourselves to laughter at that point, because it is so so true, and it certainly captures the feeling I have, that any attempts to articulate how great she is will only ever leave me frustrated.

But maybe a way to say a little part of it is that Pam is smart in a way that is Good, in a way that helps us all be better writers, and gives us room to be ourselves.

So, it was a dream week, but a dream week in the most complex sense. It was strange and surreal, beyond anything I could have imagined for myself a year or two ago, full of anxiety and joy and deep satisfaction and the spiritual peace you sometimes have after the kind of dream that helps you resolve something you've been worrying over for weeks.

Do you know the kind of dream I mean? The kind of dream that transforms you, that makes you feel like there's a real world inside dreams, that makes you believe that some dreams are experiences that really happen to you, rather than just the sets of images that flit through your sleeping self most nights, without leaving a mark on your memory.

See the truck in the photo above? That truck is exactly the kind of vintage, impossibly blue, photogenic truck that I dream of when I dream of a ranch life. But someone lost the keys to it, so now, it just sits in the driveway. And of course, I like that fact. It keeps it all from being too perfect, too photoshopped, too cliche.

I can have the dream, but only if I bring my own wheels. For someone like me, there's something comforting about that.

Especially when the wheels come attached to an almost-new, turbo-charged, all-wheel-drive sport wagon named Mo.

No, I Really Did Work on The Manuscript

It's true, I did! Okay, right after this picture was taken, I stopped writing whatever I was writing and goofed around with Susan a bit, but I had already been at the coffee shop scribbling for a while when she took this. And I will be tapping on the computer for more hours tonight.

Which makes it a damn good thing that I LOVE the manuscript. Don't take that in the "I think I'm such a great writer" way, because that's not how I mean it. It's just that something happened, and now I live in that place that writers talk about, where the characters take on a life of their own, the story takes on a life of its own, and you know that when you sit down to start working on it, something is going to happen.

Last night, on a break from the manuscript (lots of breaks, very important when you are in love with your own work), I watched one of the DVD extras from Lost in Translation - the making of, or whatever. Sophia Coppola was talking about how happy she was that she got to work with Bill Murray, and how she couldn't believe that she got to dress him just the way she wanted to, and have him sit on the hotel bed looking glum the way she imagined, like in that photo for the poster, and I just thought "yeah, that's exactly how it feels". I love the manuscript like it was my child, the way Bill Murray's Lost In Translation character says that your children grow up to be "the most delightful people you've ever met".

Maybe all of this is really vague if you aren't into writing, but I think most of us have something we do that we can look at and say "I like that" about. I know you have that as a designer, Ali, and sometimes I also feel it about my knitting.

But feeling it about my novel is just a different thing. It came from me, but it has this weird life, I can step outside it, I can read the book and appreciate it as a reader. I think a lot of this is just a meditation on the magic of language, the way you can pick a word, but the word has an iridescence to it. It's as though you picked red, but what you got was red underneath, with a lot of other colors that you didn't anticipate, shimmering over the top. It has more meaning than you necessarily put in it - the words just give you that. This especially happens when you get to the point where your piece is long enough that the old stuff you haven't touched in a while is almost new to you.

People ask me what the book is about all the time. After last night, I wanted to tell people that it's like the Lost In Translation of novels. Two people who are lost sort-of bump into each other and you see these little sketches of their worlds.

I hate to say it, because I worry what people will think, but it's also about grief. A lot of loss in this book. But it's also my attempt to talk about some of the things that hold me to this earth, and my two characters are like the parts of me that are not sure they want to stay here, but do. I started writing this book when I was in the worst part of things with Steven, and while I knew I would never hurt myself, for various reasons, being close to him meant being close to suicide as a question people ask themselves about the world.

I haven't been close to that question much in the last ten years, but before that, I put myself in its way a lot. I was close to that question when I was tending bar in NY, when among my regulars was a man who would sometimes go out into the night, quietly, and lay down in the middle of 2nd Ave to be run over. His fellow drinkers would go out and drag him back into the bar, but he was really only coming inside to kill himself another way, wasn't he?

Only a few years later there was Pauly, and there are numerous other people I've been close to whose grip on any kind of healthy existence... well, if you said that grip was slipping, you might be accused of being WAY too optimistic.

It isn't an accident that the only men in the manuscript so far are ghosts. Stephen King says that he writes about his worst fears, and with this first book, in some ways I can say the same thing. I have always felt that I could help my girlfriends, that we made a vital difference to each other and could keep each other going through the worst stuff. And my girlfriends have seen some hard things, every kind of loss. The kind of loss that can make me tear up now just thinking about it, more than a year away from most of it. I'm sorry to say that, while I have some kind of faith that my girlfriends and I can keep each other going, the only really close friend I've had who committed suicide was a woman.

But the original seed of fear that this book started with has to do with how hard it's been to be close to men that I didn't feel I could do much for. Or at least, that was the surface thought, until I got deeper into the book, and realized that it was about something else, something that I might talk about some other time.

I was thinking about all this when I drove to work this morning, pondering the finishing touches I wanted to put on the love letter to Nate. I was thinking about the love letter to Nate and the love letter to Bobby, and the unwritten love letter to the cowboys, and I realized that these guys are showing up as a kind of counterbalance to the ghosts in the novel. I was inspired to write about these men who give me some kind of delight with their existence, and I like the pattern that writing about them makes. I like knowing why they are important to me, what they mean in my world right now and why I feel so grateful to them. What matters to me most right now is not my relationship to any of them, but that they exist.

Maybe the second book will be short stories, after all.

Poetry and sock madness continues

Hi there,

How was the weekend? Are you feeling better?

My weekend was fine. Had the Skagit River Poetry Festival on Friday night in LaConner, which I enjoyed.

The headliner rock star poet of the night was Billy Collins, and it was interesting to hear him read, since you felt like you got some insight into what it must be like to be a full-time poet in every sense.

He talked about how he likes to write haiku, just as a little poetry exercise, and how once he started, he would see and hear haiku everywhere. One example he gave was a haiku he heard on a college campus. Two young women walked by him, and he heard one say to her friend,

And when he found out,
he was like "oh my god", then
I'm like, "oh my god"

We were at the LaConner middle school listening to him, in their big gym, and he called our attention to the fact that while he was listening to the other poets, he noticed that the scoreboard and a poster below it also made a haiku. Then he read it to us. I can't remember exactly what it was, but hearing a scoreboard read as haiku made the whole room laugh.

I continued my sock-making madness over the weekend as well. I've cast on for the second sock in Walter's pair (featured earlier on this blog) and am also going to cast on for 3 or 4 new socks, so that I can send the next sock recipient in the writing group some photos to choose a sock pattern from.

I delivered Pam's rainbow socks to her on Thursday. They ended up looking similar to this. Pretty mismatched, but gorgeous colors. We had a great dinner out on Thursday at Palace Kitchen - until 1AM! I had white asparagus with a butter boached egg and potato crispies. So delicious, but the rhubarb mille feuille dessert was the highlight for me. I got to see the dogs that I'll be living with in October. Gorgeous creatures. They look like dragons, or something from a Jim Henson movie.

What are you doing for the long weekend?

XOXO
H

Photographic evidence of Kristina, and some poetic evidence that Kristin will recognize

So funny about Kristina! I'm sad that I don't have more photos of me in her stuff. You have to let her know that I still have and wear a dress and skirt and top that she made for me. They are still gorgeous and still fit perfectly!

Now, here's your poem for the day:

_1990_

We freshman read Greek tragedies, and sang in chorus in the Great Hall

I still wore long sleeves most of the time, and black, and glasses

My mother joked that after graduation, I would move to New York, find John John, get married

On the adobe balconies of the college, cats from the pound were dissected, kittens found inside

I cut my hair short. The professor with the Kennedy accent asked me
"What are you in mourning for?"

Evidence from my poetry workshop yesterday with Gary Short. The exercise was to write a quick poem (we had about 5 minutes) after the poems "1967" by Nick Flynn, and "1969" by Lance Larsen. I'm loving the workshop, it's a small group of us, four women, and Gary. He is very charming, funny and talkative, and there's something very gentle about him, which of course I appreciate since this whole poetry thing is a bit scary. The question that keeps rattling around my head is "how do you make a poem better?". I don't know why this seems like a more mysterious thing than "how do you improve your fiction", but it does.

More poetry workshop this afternoon. We are bringing in a draft of something we want to work on more, and I know just what is calling me. We get to hear Gary and Pam read tonight (Dakota will be there, yay!), and I finished Pam's socks, so I can check one knitting project off my list when I give them to her this afternoon.

This is my baby-like project, since the baby thing sure doesn't seem to be a path that's calling me at the moment. I'm interested in hearing more about that from you, but will have to ask questions later.

A post from a top 10 blog

Hi there,

I haven't linked you to any of my favorite blogs yet, but today I thought I would. Posie Gets Cozy is a great blog written by a crafty woman in Portland who sells her lovely crafty things out of a shop there called Ella Posie. She's a great blog writer! She makes it look very easy, as though she is just having a little chat with you, but she has written some of the most moving posts. Just TRY to read her posts about the serious accident she had that left her bed-ridden for a long time without feeling tears well up in your eyes, both in pain at what this person (who very quickly starts to feel like someone you know, after reading just a few postings) had to go through, and at her very touching gratitude for the life she has and the people who helped her. It's saved on my Bloglines (as well as 23 other posts that I like from her) because it's the sort of thing that reminds one of the Big Picture. Good if you are feeling petty.

The post I am linking to today is just about blogging. It's like reading a good book about writing, inspiring and thought-provoking and I though you might enjoy it.

Go here to read it.

I like to confess to friends and acquaintances that I am an avid blog reader, and most of my friends think that's a little odd, one of my little quirks. Like the obsessive knitting, or my Veronica Mars fascination. But for me the blog thing has been some silliness and fun, but also a really satisfying world to peek in on.

I think people think the blog world is odd because it seems voyeuristic to read someone else's blog, to think things and feel things about a person you have never met (sort-of like our fascination with famous people). But I think it's radically different from reading US Weekly, because we are invited in to the blog world.

I also think the blogs I like end up having a certain kind of prayer inherent to them. Behind each of the blogs I enjoy is one human who is working on creating a life, a world that is something they can be proud of. That human is also usually working hard at being grateful for her life (yes, they are all women that I read so far) and at being happy.

Noble pursuits!