Sara Ryan's Blog, page 17

In case you thought I had stopped going to estate sales

Well, I kind of had, for a while. But there was one this weekend, and my goodness.

I went twice.

The placement of the price tag, and Devil Baby’s jaunty stance.

The juxtaposition of the vintage dolls & records with the quite recent shot glasses.

A seasonal promotional item promoting seasonal promotional items.

When Halloween costumes were truly frightening.

Oh wait, excuse me. Not a costume. A Ben Cooper Costume ‘Jama.

I don’t know if this photo is at all related to the person or persons whose possessions these were. It was that kind of sale, where you really couldn’t tell.

This presentation, with the extruded Venus de Milo torso in amongst the cake toppers. Why are the other ladies all wearing blue? Why is everyone brunette? We cannot know.

My friend found this lovely trio of titles. The third has gorgeous endpapers, too:

And of course, you never have to look far at an estate sale to find mementos mori.

Things I did not capture photographically include, but are boy howdy not limited to: bedazzled goggles, the function of which I hypothesized, and later when I found the Black Rock City t-shirt, felt confident in my hypothesis; the quite astonishing book and magazine collection which occupied the majority of the garage, the fascinating assortment of storage solutions, the array of vividly colored lingerie, the maps and pamphlets and greeting cards…oh, here, the link probably won’t be good for long, but it’s the gallery the estate sale company put up in advance. Go, marvel. It was something.

 

 

Saying no

A while back I wrote a post called Saying No and Saying Yes, about how hard it is to turn down invitations, whether they’re social or professional.

I turned another one down this past week. It made me think again about why it’s so hard. I wrote then:

An invitation suggests that the sender values you and/or your work, and for that reason alone, it can be hard to turn one down. And when you say yes, you almost always get additional positive feedback: so glad you’ll be able to participate! can’t wait to see you! looking forward to your contribution! Etc.

When you consider turning down an invitation, it’s hard not to worry about the implications of the refusal. If it’s a professional request (especially one with $$ attached) you might face the traditional freelancer’s fear that if you turn down work, you won’t get offered more work ever again. If it’s a social invitation, you might worry about giving unintended personal offense by your absence. But if you keep saying yes to new things, you necessarily limit the energy and time you have left for everything that’s already a part of your life.

While I agree with what I wrote in 2009, I also think I left something out of my analysis. We’re trained — and by ‘we’ here I somewhat mean everybody, but I especially mean the female-socialized subset of everybody — that we should do useful things with our time.

How do you know if a thing you’re doing is useful?

Well, we’re also trained to seek external validation.

So if someone else says they want you to do a thing — and that they want YOU, specifically, to do it, because of your unique talents — it is difficult not to decide that yes, absolutely, you should do that thing, right away. Because you’re needed!

In other words: saying no can feel really selfish. And arrogant. Really? You think the manuscript you’re working on is so important that you can’t (fill in the blank) for this incredibly worthy (person/organization)? Who do you think you are? 

And if you’ve spent a lot of time getting that external validation by doing things other people want you to do, it can also feel scary to say no. Because saying no means turning away from something you know you’ll be rewarded for in favor of doing something that may not feel rewarding for a long time.

So how do you do it? In the case of my most recent refusal, recognizing two things helped:

how much time I’d already contributed to the entity that wanted more
how long I’d been saying I wanted more writing time, but then saying yes to doing things that would mean I’d have less

Semi-related: Katie Lane has an excellent post on how to say no to doing things for free: “How to Not Die From Exposure“, and Mette Harrison has wise words about how to define success as a writer (hint: not by what other people think).

But as hard as it is to do, saying no isn’t the point.

You say no in order to grant yourself more time.

Once you carve out time by saying no, you need to fill it with what you wanted the time for in the first place, and avoid the infinite sidetracks that will immediately present themselves; like housework, or blogging.

 

 

If you hate yoga you might not want to read this.

At the risk of resembling the spring bloom on the bottom right in the excellent botanical guide by Dylan Meconis pictured above, I want to talk a little about how yoga is helping my writing.

I take yin yoga classes. Someone today called it naptime yoga, and it’s true that it’s  almost entirely done seated or lying down. It is challenging, though. You hold each pose for three to five minutes. You definitely feel it.

But as satisfying as it can be physically, and I generally do come out of class feeling significantly bendier, what keeps me there week after week is the way I disobey the instructor.

See, one of the classes I attend is on Sunday afternoon. Sunday has also become the day on which I’m most likely to get a solid amount of writing done. So I tend to show up having spent the time immediately preceding on my manuscript.

Yin classes are quiet. Because you spend so much time in each pose, your mind is likely to wander. The teacher makes gentle comments to bring you back to the mat. One I’ve heard many times: “Drop out of the stories in your head.”

I do the opposite. As I lean back into saddle pose, wincing or smiling depending on how tight my quads are, I drop into the scene I’ve just been working on. As my muscles first protest, then gradually relax, I often find I’ve figured out what happens next.

This is not substantively different, I realize, than thinking about your book in the shower, or while you ride your bike, or when you’re in bed on the edge of sleep. These are all times when your brain can go sideways productively, bypassing the top-level chatter of anxieties and errands to get to wherever the story comes from.

But I love the getting away with something feeling I get when the teacher tells us to drop out of the stories, and instead I drop in.

 

 

 

 

Gym wisdom

One of the guys at the gym has Clarke Peters-level gravitas. So for purposes of this post, I’m gonna just call him Lester.

Lester’s a trainer. And although I am not officially being trained by him, he sometimes trains me anyway.

One day I was doing squats. I really want to be able to squat my bodyweight, so I keep trying to go heavier. But in my striving, I can get a little careless. Lester showed me a couple of ways to improve my form — finding a fixed point to look up at, lifting my toes.

“It’s not just the weight,” he told me. “It’s the technique.”

Another day, a dude came in whom I hadn’t seen before. He gave a very enthusiastic pep talk.

To himself.

“Make it BURN!” Dude said, watching himself in the mirror as he did a few fast dumbbell curls.

While Dude continued his motivational speech, infrequently punctuated by further reps, I was doing a compound exercise: front/lateral raises. Lester admonished me to keep my elbows in close during the front raises. “Oh thanks!” I said, panting a little. “I always find it harder to do the compound exercises.”

Lester barely glanced at Dude as he spoke. “Yeah,” he said, “but you doin em.”

 

Tradeoffs

For the first time since 2007, I took no part in the Stumptown Comics Fest, except by hanging out both evenings with folks who’d spent their days there.

It was still an eventful week.

Monday was the Oregon Book Awards. You’d think it would be less nerve-wracking to present an award than to be in contention for one — and okay, it was, actually — but it was not a stress-free occasion by any means. You want to do right by the folks in the category you’re presenting; enunciate their names and titles properly, then read the selection from the winning book with feeling but not, like, you know, totally over-the-top. I might initially have erred on the side of excessive seriousness.

AT FIRST I WAS LIKE

BUT THEN I WAS LIKE

Super congratulations to winner Emily Whitman whom I am hugging in the photo above, and also to fabulous finalists Jen Violi, Lisa Schroeder, April Henry, and Heather Vogel Frederick.

(Tuesday featured a series of events that were not documented photographically, nor do I intend to describe them here, but they were also not stress-free.)

Wednesday was VERSELANDIA, the first ever all-Portland Public high schools poetry slam, and although I was initially all deer-in-the-headlights about having to give actual numerical scores, Olympics-style, I was very honored to be a judge along with Eirean Bradley, DLUX THE LIGHT, Leanne Grabel, and Turiya Autry. Here we are applauding the amazingly talented poets:

And here are the five winners, from left to right: Micah Fletcher, Madison; Lauren Steele, Jefferson; Desiree DuBois, Jefferson; Alex Dang, Cleveland; Gus Coats, Wilson.

I would add links for all of them too, but so far I have only tracked down one of their Tumblrs, and maybe that already makes me a little bit of a creeper.

Thursday was Comics Underground, the documentation of which I will leave to the esteemed Christian Lipski. But here I am watching the action onstage while Steve grins  at photographer Paul Guinan:

We had a swell time.

But man. By Friday, it had already been a very long week and while it was extremely excellent in terms of literature appreciation, it was not so conducive to the production of same. So I elected to miss Stumptown in favor of holing up and increasing my wordcount. I am sorry not to have been there, but glad for the words that resulted.