Rae Jones's Blog, page 6

The Devastation of Fire.

If you haven’t heard by now, Central Washington is ablaze. They are calling it the “Taylor Bridge Fire”

Currently, over 70 homes have been destroyed by this fire and it is only about 25% contained. This changes by the moment in an area where high winds are normal and dry lightning storms are predicted for this evening.

On any other day, we send our love and hope to those effected, but today is a little different. One of the people effected was my roommate/close-friend’s mother. The woman who has cooked us meals, played dominoes and been up for any adventure that us ‘wild kids’ take her on.

She lost her ranch. A ranch she has spent over 20 years building with her own hands, through blood sweat and tears. She her home, her rental property and 5 other out-buildings (barn, shop, shed, garage). She lost everything.

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The only thing left now is sheet metal.

She was interviewed on Kiro about here property (click here), and since then, we have set up a fund for her.

CLICK HERE

I know it won’t replace what she has lost, but in the meantime, we wanted to help her cover some of her immediate needs.

You can help too!

Please take a look, consider a donation (every penny counts when you have nothing left), and please share this with people who you know that might want to help.

Thank you from the deepest part of my heart.

A letter from a son, to a father.

As previously posted on Reddit. None of my commentary could do justice, the only thing I can say, is I proudly support EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL. It is 2012, this should not even be an argument anymore.

*****************************

“Dad,

I saw your recent post on Facebook “liking” Mitt Romney and had to write. (Admittedly, I’m still getting used to my 66 year-old father using Facebook, but given what I’m about to write, I assure you I’m quite supportive of it.)

Though your public support for Romney doesn’t surprise me, given how open you’ve been about your dislike of President Obama, it does bother me. Since coming out to you and mom nineteen years ago, I’ve watched you vote for the Republican candidates in every major race. Save for the occasional mealtime argument or sarcastic Fox News barb, I’ve held my tongue, despite the hurt and anger that came from watching you vote for a party that has made a sport out of demonizing gay and lesbian people, like me, for political gain. I did so because I never had a solid enough argument that the Democratic Party was wholly different. They often stopped short of institutionalizing discrimination of gays, but were sadly lax on standing on principle and advocating for its eradication. Until now.

For the first time in our nation’s history, a U.S. President and his party have publicly stated that gays and lesbians are equal citizens and should be such under the law. I know you’re aware that Obama believes gays and lesbians, like me, should have the rights and responsibilities of marriage and that the 2012 Democratic Party Platform will include marriage equality as one of its tenets. You will never know what it is to be gay in this world at this moment, but I’d bet at some point in your life you’ve known how it felt to have your essential worth validated by someone with authority. I can’t overstate the power of having my president and his party say to me, and the nation, that I am not less than, but equal to, and validate my inherent right to pursue my life with liberty and unimpeded happiness. Never before has this happened. So, never before have I made the argument that you should vote for the Democrat. But, today’s a new day.

Four months ago, I sat at my younger brother’s wedding and watched you well up, speaking publicly with pride for the man he’s become and the woman he chose. His life, though certain to have unexpected turns ahead, has a clear path, one available to him simply because of his sexual orientation at birth. Mine has never been so clear. Oftentimes, being gay feels like being a salmon swimming upstream. Our relationships aren’t supported by tradition or institution, any models we may have remain hidden, as openness invites derision, and the pressures to carve a life out with another person, minimally as equally affected by the ever-present fear, instilled in us from our earliest memories that we’re different and unlovable and bad, can often be too much to bear. And yet, not always. The resiliency of my community, in the face of such misunderstanding and hate, is astonishing and inspiring. They’ve taught me to think twice before underestimating the will of the human spirit in its slow march toward progress, whatever the circumstances.

I’m almost forty. Both of my younger brothers are married, enjoying all the rights and responsibilities of that government-issued status. Do you want that for me? Do you believe I should have someone beside me on life’s journey, legally recognized as my spouse, able to visit me in the hospital, able to make my end-of-life decisions, with whom I’m able to build a financially interdependent life? I have to believe you do. I have to believe you’re too good a man not to. Because if you don’t… If, like the candidate you’re supporting, you believe marriage should only be between one man and one woman, I feel sorry for us both: you, because it means you’re on the wrong side of history and your own son’s happiness and me, because it means my father does believe I’m “less than.”

In any other election, given any other choice, I’d stay quiet. If you, and others like you, wanted to believe the worst about Obama – a good man, trying to do good work – and vote against your interests (Romney’s tax and Medicare plans won’t help you), I’d shake my head in wonder and watch you do it anyway. But this isn’t any other election. This election presents a clear choice between two people whose policy beliefs directly affect the course of my life. Let me be clear: A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote against me. There is no argument to counter that fact.

You might want to argue that you’re not a single-issue voter, but when the single-issue is your own son’s equality under the law, I wouldn’t recommend that argument. You might want to argue that, because you live in New York State, your vote won’t ultimately matter since Obama will carry the state anyway. You’re correct. He will. In that way, I suppose, your vote won’t matter. But it matters to me. You might want to argue just because you don’t like the idea of your son telling you what you ought to do. But, whatever else, you know I’m a good man. It’s been said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing;” and I’m a good man who’s never been good at that.

Will I change your mind? I hope so. I’m sure Mom would tell me it’s a lost cause. And maybe she’s right. But that would be sad. Because it might be nice to one day have my father stand up at my wedding, realizing he helped make it happen.

Your Son

EDIT: My dad’s reply, in part: “I will honor your request because you are my son and I love you. I do support the democratic position on gay marriage…I hope this is a position that they really stand for and not just a political statement for votes.”

Writing muse.

I have read a lot of memoirs over the last few months. I think of it as a form of ‘research’ as I am writing my own. I listen to the stories, analyze how they are told, the cadence and the depth and particularly lately, how the ‘endings’ happen.

I read for the truth and honesty in the words, I look for the alliteration, metaphors and colorful descriptions which can take the words to a deeper place.

I have read all sorts. From Spygirl to Bossypants (both I did not enjoy at all), to Chronology of Water to Unbearable Lightness (both were incredible/amazing/straight from the heart must-read type of books!), even to Stephen King (the King. Enough said.). The pursuit of reading these memoirs and living another person’s journey has been a fun little adventure as I walk down the same road they have cleared.

In a couple weeks I meet with my photographer, my graphic designer and my editor. I scout locations for a book release party and start contacting people who will determine whether my own prose will receive a 1-star or 5-star review (or hopefully somewhere in between).

And… I start shooting the book trailer.

All while keeping two jobs and a house-hold together, not to mention doing the 100+ pages of re-writes and edits on the entire manuscript.

That should be fun.

… and I’m actually looking forward to digging into the manuscript again.

Memories of past Olympiad.

As the 2012 Olympics begin in London, my brain is flooded with memories.

Memories of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, but perhaps more than just the Olympics, it was the few years prior. The few years prior when I was swimming. Swimming and dreaming of making the times. Knowing that the 1996 games would be my best chance.

and yet… as close as my dreams were, in reality I was still a long way away.

1996 was the year that USA Swimming won 13 gold medals. It was the year of Amy van Dyken, Gary Hall Jr., Tom Dolan, Brooke Bennett, Jenny Thompson and the cute Amanda Beard.

Amanda Beard. She was 14, and carried a teddy bear everywhere.

Amy Van Dyken was 23(ish)

Jenny Thompson was 23(ish) – *Note: I count Jenny Thompson in this memory because she was a part of the dominant swimming force than was Stanford University but failed to qualify for the Olympics at the trials. She was however, included in relay’s in the ’96 Olympics.*

My dreams of the ’96 Olympics started when I was watching the ’92 games of Barcelona. In 1992 I was 13 years old, and in the pool almost 5 hours a day. My dream was possible, my dream was going to happen, my dream lived in the water with me, breathed with me, ate with me and slept with me. My dreams included my entire family being able to afford to travel to Atlanta and watch the competition. My dreams included being able to meet Summer Sanders, Janet Evans, Dana Torres, Lea Loveless and Jenny Thompson. My idols. The Goddess’s of the water. My Yemaya. My Oshun.

By 1993, the dream was there… it was growing and dying in exponential parts equally. With every practice, with every breath, with every touch of the wall and with every hundredth of second.

By 1994, the highs and lows came at an astonishing rate. The hope lived, and died in splashes.

By 1995 my dream suddenly died. Was buried. And I never entered the water as a competitive swimmer again. I never looked back. There are no pictures left, no medals or little gold statues, they have long since found their resting place in the bottom of a garbage pit.

Now, 16 years later. I wonder what might have been.

*I sorta talk about this in my upcoming memoir titled Breathe. Mark your calendars, November 11, 2012 is the release date!

Know when to hold ‘em…

I’ve had the Kenny Rogers song ‘The Gambler’ in my head for the last week or so.

Let me explain…..

I’ve sent my manuscript to the editor, and got some really great feedback. Including:

“I think there is a solid strength in the way your stories connect and disconnect, merge and drift apart.”

“You have more than a strong voice in your writing, there is a great cadence as well… it brings a special power to put breaths and pauses and separations in the format of your script to emphasize what is in fact-the very title.”

Excellent!

However….

I have a handful of writes and re-writes which should be easy…. but my brain, body and emotions are just fried. I consider daily to burn the manuscript and never publish it. I’m not sure if I want anyone to read it anymore. It seems so strange to think about, after having worked on this book for well over a year, as I get closer and closer to the finality of it, I question if I really want to follow through and give it a life of its own.

So, I read articles about writing, articles about self-sabotage, and distract myself with walks and coffee and sunshine. But yet, this little manuscript nags me from the back of my mind. It tugs on my brain’s coat-tails and is relentless in its need for attention.

I wash between the ‘holding’ of it, and the ‘folding’ of it, and yet come back to the investment I have already put in…. My pea-sized bookkeeping brain wavers back and forth between the ‘investment’ and the ‘return’… and I struggle to find breath between these waves.

Perhaps it is only fitting I have titled this book

Breathe.

Ten States Where Young People Can't Find Work

Reblogged from 24/7 Wall St.:

Unemployment in the United States has been a hot-button issue since the Great Recession left millions out of work. While the employment picture has begun to improve, albeit slowly, one group that still is in particular trouble is those aged 20 to 24 years old.

Read: Ten States Where Young People Can’t Find Work

While unemployment rates rose during the recession, they shot up much more dramatically for the part of our population that had just graduated from college.

Read more… 1,585 more words

Something to think about.

This is not a real post.

Writers block… and it’s eating my brains….

oh look, a kitten

Send help, but only in the form of cuteness.

Guilty!

I am guilty of this, I know you are too.

I am re-posting this article that was originally published by the NY Times. It is called,

“The Busy Trap”

written by TIM KREIDER

(See full article here or scroll down)



I am ambitiously lazy, meaning, I will find the most efficient way to do something just so I don’t have to dredge through a time-consuming (and sometimes wasteful) process. I like to work on my own time frame, with my own expectations, and often find that I hold myself to a much higher standard than anyone externally.

I crave the ‘quiet time’. I think most people do. I get more done when I have many hours of idleness, than when my schedule is cram packed full of appointments and meetings. My day is structured, don’t get me wrong, but it is not overcommitted. It took me years and years of frustration to finally understand the deepest meaning of this idea, but my life is better for it.

So, consider this your intervention to idleness. Take a day, a weekend or even a week to not schedule ANYTHING. Do whatever you want, whenever the mood strikes you. Really. Try it.

You life will never be the same.

xoxo

***************

The Busy Trap

by: Tim Kreider

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.

Pre-Sales, Pre-Views and Pre-Funking.

I got the artwork back for the cover of my upcoming book and IT IS AWESOME. In the HolyBabyJeeebusBatman kind of way. WOW!

But that isn’t the reason for this post. The reason for this post is to give you a HEADS UP!

1. There will be pre-sales.

2. There will be pre-views

3. There will be PRE-FUNKING.

The deets:

#1 PRE-SALES

Pre-Sales will happen for the paperbacks prior to the release date, but more importantly, Pre-Sales are THE ONLY WAY you will be able to get a signed, numbered, leather-bound, hard-back, limited edition, copy. There will only be 1 (ONE) run of these made, and I am only have 25 printed! Yes, you got it. Only 25 first-edition, leather-bound, signed, numbered with ARTWORK (and other extra’s) copies will be made.

I have also negotiated with the artist (Micah at DejaBlue) that Pre-Sales are also THE ONLY WAY you will get a signed, numbered print of the artwork which will be on the cover.

What are you going to be buying you ask?

That question will bring us to ….

#2 – PRE-VIEWS

Stay tuned, I will post previews EXCLUSIVELY on my blog (not on my Facebook or Twitter) – just here (lucky you)!!! Previews will include posts of artwork, selections of the book, the Book Trailer (yes, a video) and EXCLUSIVE INFO on the release date (and subsequent party).

Which brings us to #3

#3 – PRE-FUNKING

Start now.

Writing…. and long live the King.

Inspiration of the day is courtesy of Stephen King. I have been reading his stufff since I was small (and probably should have been reading Nancy Drew instead). I have found over the years that whenever I have gotten stuck in life and taken a few moments of a ‘time-out’, the way he puts together words have been inspiring.

Today is no different.

Writing and editing the memoir I am working on has been tough the last few days. It has punched and kicked back at me, and today I have felt defeated by it. That is until I was reading Mr. King’s book On Writing.

He says:

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness or even despair-the sense that you can never completely put on the page what is in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl [guy] to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say again: YOU MUST NOT COME LIGHTLY TO THE BLANK PAGE.“

For that reason, Long live the King.