Abby Rosmarin's Blog, page 16

A Little Bit Lighter

Because it’s pretty, because it’s symbolic, because I like that we made the tree all stripe-y, because the last post was a bit too somber for my tastes, here’s a picture of our tree with lights, before ornaments, on dry carpet, and with no one crying. And with Salem posing for the camera.  We started the night with Bing Crosby as we decorated the tree, then ended it with a brilliant UFC fight night on Fox, because that’s just how this household operates and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A Need for Christmas Spirit

Two days after Thanksgiving, my father was rushed to the hospital.  He was delirious, incoherent, and had lost all control of his legs.  A day later, he had a seizure so severe that they had to sedate him.  My life since Thanksgiving has been a series of frantic text messages, sets of calls and emails to and from every possible extended family member, and a constant confrontation with the unknown.

Without going too much into my father’s personal history, I’d thought I had long-since come to terms with my father’s compromised health.  I understood that there were just going to be some things I would have to deal with before the average person does when it comes to their father.  After those first 48 hours in the hospital, I came face-to-face with what I thought I had been preparing myself for and I realized how woefully unprepared I actually was.  Even though he’s in a more stable condition now, it’s hard to go back from thinking you were going to have to say your goodbyes before saying, “Merry Christmas.”  It’s hard to set the dial back without seeing the impression it left in the first place.

Suffice it to say, it hasn’t been the easiest December.

Out of everything that has been going on in my mind, Christmas has been at last place.  I’ve had no interest in Christmas music or putting up decorations, something I usually dive into the second December 1st rolls around.  It felt like, every time I thought I was ready to get into the Christmas spirit, I’d get a text message from my little brother or an email from an uncle.  I’d get good news, bad news, or the job of passing that news on.  And all the ornaments and tinsel and lights continued to gather dust in our closet.

Yesterday, we finally went out and cut down our Christmas tree.  I decided enough was enough: I’m putting up decorations and I’m playing Christmas music and I will find the Christmas spirit if it was the last thing I’d ever do.  We carried the tree into the house and set it upright in our tree stand — a green, plastic contraption that looks more like a wide volcano than a Christmas tool.  I went to task of watering up the tree, going back and forth from the sink with my little watering can in hand.  Two, three, four trips to the sink and the stand still wasn’t filling up.  I blamed it on a super thirsty tree and continued my watering adventure.

It wasn’t until my fifth or sixth trip, when we started seeing a ring of water creeping out from under the stand, did we understand why the tree stand wasn’t filling up.

We grabbed every towel in our linen closet, as well as our space heater and our wet vac.  We soaked a laundry load’s worth of towels as we desperately tried to sop up all the water.  My husband started going at the carpet with the wet vac and I ran off to the store to buy a new stand and a dehumidifier.

While at the store, I got a call from one of my older brothers.  With my voice low and my body tucked away in one of the corners of the building, we talked about what was going on, verbalizing a lot of things that usually went unsaid in our family.  It was a comfort to hear his voice, to hear the exact things that I had been thinking but didn’t want to say, but I still went to the cashier with a palpitating heart and a forced smile after the conversation ended.

I got back home, taking a turn at vacuuming the carpet as my husband set the dehumidifier up.  We joked, we made light of things, we let our frustration leak out in snarky comments about the situation.  We took a break from the toweling and the vacuuming, letting the dehumidifier attempt to do what we had been working towards for the last hour.

We placed the tree in its new stand, sat down in front of the TV, and I immediately started crying.

I started crying because — dammit — today was supposed to be the day I finally got that Christmas spirit.  I was going to fill the house with Bing Crosby and Mariah Carey and put every dumb little knick-knack in its dumb little corner.  I was going to set up wreaths and unroll welcome mats and get something merry and bright.  It was something I desperately needed and I wasn’t going to get it.

I needed Christmas spirit.  I needed Christmas spirit the way a broken leg needs a cast.  I needed garland like a bandaid, eggnog like medication, and carols like the words from a doctor, telling you everything’s going to be okay.

I needed the Christmas spirit because sometimes spirit is all you have.  I needed Christmas spirit because I needed to be reminded that there is life outside of all this.  That you can find a bittersweet victory hearing that your father is moving around with help, and then go to the local parade and smile broadly at the floats as they pass by.

But sometimes it doesn’t work that way.  Sometimes you’re given curveballs.  Sometimes you’re scrambling to fix things and it forces you to put more things on the backburner.  Sometimes you’re convinced that it’s all the fault of a cheap stand with a crack along the inseam, forgetting that it’s not as simple as putting up a tree with zero issues.

The Christmas spirit isn’t something you can find or catch.  You can’t slip on a Christmas CD into the stereo and realize the Christmas spirit had been under the couch all along.  You can’t chase the Christmas spirit down the street, snatching it up in your arms as you look at all the pretty lights.  The only thing you can do is put on the music and look at the lights and understand that the spirit will show itself on its own terms.

The only thing I can do is remember that the Christmas spirit cannot be a bandaid.  It cannot be a distraction or a way to avoid.  And it’s okay to feel gloomy or pessimistic or downright depressed when Andy Williams is telling you that it’s the most wonderful time of the year — and that it does you no favors to force cheer in the exact way Hallmark tells you to.

The Christmas spirit can come in the shape of hugs when you need them, tissues for when you don’t want to admit that you need them, and a reminder that this too shall pass.  The Christmas spirit can come in love, in all its weird and complicated and nuanced forms.  The Christmas spirit can come in remembering that you have an incredible network of people around you, support where you need support most.

I think, most of all, the Christmas spirit can come in the shape of hope.  Not necessarily hope that it’ll all work out the way you want it to, but hope that it’s all happening for a reason, to teach us something we need to be taught, to put a set of events in motion that could change someone’s life for the better.  It takes a lot of faith to believe that.

And, really, this is what Christmas is about: love, hope, and faith.  In as much of an abundance as available.  Regardless of your theological background and beliefs.

The dehumidifier is now running for its second day.  Our carpet has downgraded from “micro swimming pool” to “slightly damp”.  With any luck, we’ll be able to decorate our tree sometime later in the week.  And we’ll do it with Bing Crosby playing in the background, our cats weaving their way around our feet, and a break for a hug or two if anyone needs it.

Today’s Life Lesson, Brought to You By Gordito-Cat

This is Milo.  We adopted this little guy nearly 7 years ago from the ARL in Boston.  He’s got big floppy ears and a squeaky meow.  He gets up on his hind legs like a meerkat and he comes when he’s called (usually at what can only be described as a happy-trot).  He’s the sweetest, most precious thing you will ever meet.

He’s also a complete and total moron.

He’s not a cat so much as he’s fat chihuahua with identity issues.  Close a door so that it’s slightly too small for him to get through, and he’ll just push his face against the edge until the door inevitably closes on him.  Point out a scuttling bug and he’s scuttle off in the opposite direction.  He is an actual scaredy cat.

And he’s about as graceful as a bag of sand.

The poor thing just does not know How to Cat.  He doesn’t land on the ground so much as he belly flops.  And he cannot jump to save his little self.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

Milo loves the area on top of our kitchen cabinets.  He’ll snuggle into one corner and watch the world like Mufasa on Pride Rock.  The problem, however, is that the cat cannot jump onto the counter, which is needed in order to jump on top of the fridge, and eventually to the top of our cabinets.

Instead of jumping on the counter like a proper cat, Milo will sit by the edge of the counter and meow pitifully.  Somewhere along the way, we learned that we could put one of our kitchen bar stools by the side of the counter and he would use it as a bit of a step stool.  That is, except for when he belly flops against the edge of the stool.  Then he’ll refuse to jump on even the bar stool for days after that, opting instead to paw at the seat and attempt a few false starts.

If no one helps him, he will just meow at the counter as if he’s trapped in a well, eventually giving up and walking away with what can only be described as the opposite of a happy trot.  We’ll put treats on the counter to tempt him into actually jumping up on his own.  The treats will go untouched and Milo will just look at us like we’ve committed the ultimate betrayal.

But here’s the part that I don’t get: Milo will jump from the counter to the top of the fridge without any hesitation.  Our counter is essentially at the halfway mark for the fridge, meaning that the floor is equidistant to the counter as the counter is to the top of the fridge.  It’s almost the exact same jump.  Only one of them he can jump with ease; the other one fills his fat chihuahua mind with so much doubt and dread that he’ll refuse to even attempt it without a step stool.

If this is not a reminder that our limits are usually arbitrary and unnecessary ones that we’ve put upon ourselves, I don’t know what is.

What Do Teachers Really Want For Christmas?

I stumbled across a post on Facebook, asking one simple question: What do teachers REALLY want for a gift this year? It immediately caught my attention and – like any proper link on Facebook – I clicked on it, expecting “it” to be some type of op-ed piece on what teachers really, truly want.

“It” turned out to be a poll question: a marketing company figuring out what teachers would potentially purchase for their classroom if they were given a certain amount of money. The link was literally asking, “Teachers, what DO you really want for your classroom this year?”

Even though I had a few ideas, I couldn’t in good faith answer the poll. That ship sailed for me about 18 months ago, when I finished up my last year as a teacher and never returned.

I remember the Christmas gifts I would receive from my students (or, to be more specific, from my students’ parents). Handmade cards, created with construction paper and markers; flowers, maybe even a gift card or two. Whatever the token was, I was desperately happy for it, because it meant that the parents took the time to show their appreciation.

I’ve actually been asked this question before: friends with children would get in contact with me, even after I had quit, asking what they should give their children’s teachers for Christmas. I’m not part of a marketing firm, nor do I have any kids (let alone kids in the school system). But the question of what one could potentially give teachers for Christmas – something they’d really, truly want – stayed with me.

If I could, this is what I’d give teachers for Christmas:

 First and foremost, I would give you peace of mind for Christmas. I know that’s in incredibly short supply.

I would then give you proper resources. That’s in even shorter supply. It’s hard to produce miracles when you can’t even produce enough paper out of the supply closet.

I would also give you smaller classroom sizes. I’d find a way to get the Mitt Romneys of the world – y’know, the kind who say that championing good student-teacher ratios is just a ruse to hire more teachers – to finally see that there is a world of difference between a small classroom, where a teacher can individually help students, and a classroom filled to maximum capacity, where teaching becomes less like teaching and more like crowd control.

I would give you good administration for Christmas. That’s a serious rarity. No boss is perfect, but teaching is one of those jobs where you need the higher-ups to have your back, to fight for you, and to provide support and guidance when things get overwhelming. A classroom is stressful enough without administration constantly looking over your shoulder and criticizing your every move, throwing you under the bus whenever there is an issue with a student, or deliberately neglecting very big problems.

I would give you the freedom to create your own curriculum, one that works for you and your students – not some hyper-standardized, one-size-fits-all, No-Child-Left-Behind, Common-Core, revised-for-the-seventieth-time-just-to-be-changed-again module. You’re the one in the classroom. You know what is best for your students. Not some guy in a suit walking around a state house somewhere.

Lastly, I would give you a change in public opinion. It feels like, these days, those who aren’t busy calling teaching a part-time job are busy labeling the education system a lost cause. Nobody really wants to do anything – either because they don’t believe there is an actual problem or because they think the problem is now too big to be solved. So they look the other way when funding gets cut yet again, when good programs and good schools have to shut down because the town cannot afford them anymore. I would give you a culture that can recognize that the fate of our country rests in how well we can educate and inspire the younger generations – a culture that is no longer willing to say, “Well, what can you do?” in light of the issues facing the education world.

It’s not a bouquet of flowers or a gift card to a local restaurant, nor is it a parceled out budget you can use towards your classroom. It’s not even something that could actually come to fruition just because one former teacher wrote it out in an essay.

So what do teachers really want for Christmas? Maybe I’m completely ill-equipped to answer that now. Truth be told, if I were asked towards the end of my time as a teacher what I really wanted for Christmas, I’d answer with a highly negative, “A new job.” I stopped wanting smaller classes, better resources, a more supportive network, and started wanting the courage to put in my letter of resignation.

Outside of a few pipe dreams and hopeful wishes, the only thing I can really give you this Christmas is my understanding.

It’s not easy, what you guys do, and people are quitting the field at an alarming rate (I should know). This Christmas, I can only give the reminder that, whether you stay in the field or end up leaving, there are countless people out there who sympathize. People who are, were, or never will be in the field; people who can step back and go, “You have been given an impossible situation and you have my undying respect.” I might never step foot in another classroom that way ever again, but I still care deeply for everyone involved – especially the teachers and students who have been wronged by an incredibly misguided, shortsighted, and deeply flawed system.

For Christmas, I can giftwrap you a reminder that there are people out there saying, “I get it” – myself included.

In a way, this sentiment is essentially my version of the construction paper card. Slightly meaningless, no intrinsic or marketable value, but my feeble way of showing my appreciation for every little thing you do. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

An Ode to a Chiberian

“The wedding was amazing, but now I’m hungover!” she downright sings. Even her hangovers are energetic and entertaining. “Text me your address and we’ll grab lunch!”

It’s just like any other phone call with my best friend.  She’s telling me the adventures of last night as I drive back from my morning class.  The only difference is that, for once, we have an opportunity to spend some time to face to face, which we haven’t done in almost a year.

At a red light, I text her my address (God bless autofill keyboards) and make my way back home.  I manically clean up the house (using an impending guest to inspire what hours of self-chiding cannot) and patiently wait for the rental car to pull into my driveway.  When she gets here, we spend a few minutes hugging each other, futilely making up for months upon months of missed hello and goodbye hugs, before she asks:

“Who’s driving?”

Side by side, we make absolutely no sense.  I’m sporting what can only be described as “laid-back yogi in cold weather”: sweatshirt, baggy cotton pants with a tank top and spandex leggings underneath.  She’s decked out in black skinny jeans, a leather jacket with a side zipper, and slicked back hair.  She looks like she’s on her way to a rock concert or an exclusive club, and I’m on my way to a yoga studio (which I technically am, after I get lunch).  We look like two strangers from opposite sides of town, not two absurdly close friends who have known each other since they were 10.

But then again, we’ve never made sense.   I’ve always been a bit like basil and she’s always been a bit like chili powder.  I’m a social introvert and she’s an antisocial extravert.  I stay silent until I can gauge just how much of my weirdness a person can take; she’ll bust through the room, unapologetically letting people know exactly how weird she is.  She can outdrink almost anyone I know and I get sick after 3 glasses of wine.

Our lives in the real world have been just as different.  I met the man I was going to marry while still in college; she went through a major break-up just as I was getting married.  I moved away from Boston and into the woods of New Hampshire; she moved away from Boston and into the heart of Chicago.  Our career paths have veered and zigged and zagged, neither of us in the same place professionally at the same time.  But none of that ever really mattered.  We were still each other’s first person to contact, whether there was a slip-up at work, a bump in the dating road, or a new essay draft that needed reading.

I remember people clicking their tongues when I got married, warning my newly-single best friend that “things will be different” now.  And to that, we both said, “How is that going to change anything?  How would anything in our lives ever change anything about our friendship?”

What people don’t get is that you can live completely different lives and still be on the same wavelength: that your respective paths can go in a thousand different directions, but still intersect where it matters; that you can live a solid timezone away and still talk to each other like you’re about to go out for coffee together.  It takes a specific type of bond for a married woman with two cats, a mortgage, and the idea of hypothetical future motherhood on her mind to talk for hours on end with a woman with first dates, new apartments, and staying child-free on hers, and still feel like you can completely relate.

“Wouldn’t you want to spend more time around people who are, y’know, doing the same things as you?”

Quite frankly?  No.  Not in the way I like spending time with my best friend.

We get it.  There’s no other way around it.  We’ve been friends since we were in middle school because we get it.  We’re each other’s writing partners in crime because we get it.  The exterior is different, but at our base, we know how similar we are.  We’re kindred spirits from an environment that could’ve crushed a lesser person’s spirit.  We both know what it’s like to attempt to build a life on an unsturdy foundation, to figure out our own definitions of love and respect.  We both feel the constant desire to create, create, create.  We know that when one’s emotions are knotted up, the other will find a way to untangle it.  It doesn’t matter what the problem is, one knows exactly how to get the other’s feet back on the ground.

We stop at an Irish Pub on the main strip in Manchester.  She mentions that, unless you’re in the south side, you cannot find a proper pub in Chicago.

“It’s like a bunch of rich people decided to create a watered-down version of what they think an Irish pub should look like,” she tells me. “It’s nothing like this.”

As a man with an acoustic guitar begins to set up in one corner of the pub, my best friend shows me pictures of the wedding she attended, pictures of the bride and groom and the beer that was on tap.

“They are so adorable together.  You can really tell these guys are right for each other,” she says, before adding: “I think I’m pretty lucky to say that, every wedding I’ve been to, were for people who you just knew were right for each other.”  She talks about the guy she has started seeing and I talk about the man I’ve been with since 2006 and both sides of the spectrum complement each other perfectly.

We start driving around after that, making our ways through and around towns that I now know by heart.  The best part is that, after almost a year of not seeing each other face-to-face, when we get out onto the road, it’s like a thousand Sundays before, when we were younger, driving around 3A in Massachusetts, back when our cars had ridiculous nicknames (like Fucker, or the Chevalier).  It’s like a million afternoons after school, when we were too young for cars and instead walked to the 711 and then to the nearby park.

The assumption is, when someone you love has returned, you need to pull out all the stops, do something big and eventful.  But we’d rather pick up exactly where we left off, doing the things we’ve done countless times before.  We talk about the things we always talk about, topics that we slide into like a familiar pair of jeans.   We even end up on New Hampshire’s version of 3A.  All we’re missing is an iced coffee from Mary Lou’s and a dated mix CD in my music system.

“People at the wedding kept making dumb jokes about Chicago,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh, you live in Chi-raq?’  No, you’re not funny, and no one says that.  ‘Chiberia’, yes, because it’s fucking cold there.  But ‘Shit-cago’?  No.  Actually come to Chicago and then make a judgment call.”

Three days later, we’re in the car again, this time driving to Portsmouth — a city we constantly went to when I first crossed the border and New Hampshire was still new and uncharted for both of us.  We walk down maybe one or two of the downtown streets before immediately going over to the water.

Even with the biting winds and the setting sun, we take in the salted air with a smile on our face.  Our hometown — home of the 711 on North Street and Great Esker Park and the Chevalier and Fucker — stopped feeling like home a long time ago, but the Atlantic Ocean is forever home to us.  It doesn’t matter where we are on the east coast, or how far inland our permanent addresses may be, our hearts will always feel a little bit fuller here.  Our noses are turning red and I’m immediately regretting my lack of layers, but we pause, standing still, watching one of the bridges to Kittery open, a supreme sense of calm in the midst of shivering skin.  We get coffee like we’ve done a thousand times before and we drive back to my house, talking about everything, nothing, and whatever is in between.

The best part is that our good-byes are not long and drawn out.  We part like we have a million times before, like we’re going to see each other tomorrow.  And, in a way, we will.  We will talk the next day, and the day after that.  We’ll continue to tell each other anything that comes to mind, from our issues with Kim Kardashian to our issues with trusting our own intuition.  And then we’ll email each other a draft or a blog link with a hopeful, “What do you think?”  One of us will start a conversation with, “My family…” and the other will end with, “…I know what you mean.”  I’ll remind her to breathe and she’ll remind me to take it easy.  And I’ll roll my eyes over “Chi-raq” while she rolls her eyes over “Cow Hampshire”.

And we’ll both shake our heads at “Beantown” — because, seriously, nobody from there actually calls it that.

Pulling Out All The Stops

Forewarning: I’ll be talking about somebody else’s circumstances, only to immediately turn it around and talk about myself, only to attempt to make it universal by the end.  You’ve been (fore)warned.

Someone I know was recently let go from her job.  It was a job she liked, didn’t love, and was doing until the next chapter in her life began.

Being let go sucks.  There’s no other way around it.  I remember working as an editorial assistant at a publishing house — a gig that was originally a co-op internship but then morphed into a part-time position — knowing full-well that I might not have a job after a major project was completed, and still feeling that crushing disappointment when the director pulled me into his office.  I finished his sentence for him and laughed it off and made some innocuous comment about the bad economy and packed up my cubicle.  It was the softest blow you can ever receive in the working world, and I still felt weighted down as I waited for my train to take me home.

“I’m sorry”s make you feel worse, disparaging remarks about your former employer provides a temporary and negative relief, and blindly swearing that it’ll all be okay does nothing.  The person in question and I had talked about our plans for the future, and when it’s a right time to do anything.  I decided to edge dangerously close to Clichéd Response #3 and responded with:

“Sometimes the universe pulls out all the stops to put you on the path you were meant to be on.”

I said that because I had used that exact wording with said person a few weeks ago, to describe my situation a year or two ago.  One of my overused stories these days is the story of me being a former ECE teacher.  Pre-K was my bread and butter, but I also was a substitute teacher, a teacher for 3-year-olds, and a teacher for 1- to 2-year-olds.  I quickly learned that, as much as I loved the children, I was brutally unhappy.  There were days when I’d walked through the door of my apartment and just burst into tears, prompted by nothing more than I was finally home and away from my classroom.

I recognized on some level early on that I needed to leave.  In the beginning, I didn’t know what the future would hold after I quit, but I knew I needed to do it.  And yet, there was always a reason to not quit: that “aha!” moment when a kid gets what you’ve been trying to say, those hugs in the beginning of the morning, the parents who take the time to let their appreciation be known.  There was always a reason to explain away how I felt, always a reason to stay on just another month, another season, another year.

But sometimes the universe pulls out all the stops to put you on the path you were meant to be on.  And sometimes said stop-pulling absolutely sucks.

My time in the early education field got bad.  Laughably bad.  Literally laughably bad: there were some days when things got so stressful, so impossible, so downright toxic, that I would laugh out loud, because there was nothing else I could do.  After a really, really, unbelievably, so-bad-they-wouldn’t-believe-it-if-I-put-it-in-a-movie day, I curled up on my bed and decided that, no matter what, this was my last year.  I didn’t have the chutzpah to just walk out, but I could give myself a deadline, a hard-set date with no going back.

As if to make sure I didn’t back out, the rest of the school year was the type of stuff nightmares are made out of.  Again, literally: I was having nightmares of the very things going on in the school.  There were days where the only thing that could keep me centered was a downright ritualistic countdown of the remaining time.

And so I quit.  It took going through the worst of the worst to finally say, “I’m not renewing my contract.”  Anything less, and I probably would’ve stayed on “one more year”.

As much as I miss the kids, quitting was the best thing I ever did.  Sometime during my preschool tenure, I discovered yoga as a means of finding a bit of peace and calming (two things that were seriously missing in my life), and I ended up returning to school to become a registered yoga teacher.  Before my training was over, I already was teaching.  Within two months of graduating, I was teaching at four separate studios and volunteering my time at a services center, with classes steadily adding on with each passing month.  I remember talking with my husband about one particular class and one particular set of clients.  He looked at me and said:

“I know you once felt you were meant to be a preschool teacher.  But I think you were meant to be a yoga instructor all along.”

I don’t regret being a preschool teacher.  In fact, I think I needed to be a preschool teacher before I became a yoga instructor: before teaching little kids, I saw yoga as a way to stretch, and I only had a vague understanding of what meditation was.  I needed to turn to yoga at my lowest point.  I needed to get that gift of a little peace of mind — albeit temporarily — in order to have that passion to give that gift to as many people as I can.

My best friend once dreamed of living in Chicago.  She deeply loved the city; she was a Boston girl, but her spirit had a Chicago flavor.  It was nothing more than a pipedream: she had a steady job and a good living situation in Boston.  Yes, the job was soul-crushing, and rent is absurd even in neighborhoods like Dorchester, but it was something guaranteed.  Then, one day, her job was unceremoniously scrapped, with no proper jobs at any other company to replace it.  After a few weeks of failed interviews and temp agency disasters, we both realized that this was her opportunity to finally move out.  She dropped the job search, packed her bags, and has been living by Lake Michigan ever since.

I’m a big believer that we’re all meant to be on a very specific type of path, something that weaves in and out of countless other people’s paths, and for very specific reasons.  The reasons might have nothing to do with our own personal lives, but they’re still important reasons.  And I believe that, if you’re meant to be doing something else, the universe (or God, or fate, or the Powers That Be, whatever you feel comfortable labeling) will make sure every obstacle is thrown in your way until you’re inevitably bounced away from what you were doing and into what you were meant to do.

There’s a quote from Memoirs of a Geisha that has always stuck with me: “We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”  And — call me a pretentious little pseudo-philosopher – but that “something” was meant to be in our way all along; that the downhill course etched out for us was never the one we were supposed to be on for any length of time.

On the flipside, I think we’re also meant to be on the wrong course initially.  There’s something to learn going down the wrong roads that we wouldn’t get if we followed the directions to a T.

This is a whole lot of blog for one little comment on a Facebook page.  And I’m about two paragraphs away from shifting into some dangerous territory, like “screenplay of Signs” dangerous.  But, hey, that’s my belief system, as convoluted and slightly psychedelic as it is.

Writing and the Primadonna Yawp that is, “Creative Freedom!”

I first want to start this by saying that my cat has just indicated he wants to go on my lap my turning my back into a human scratching post. He is now happy as a clam sitting in the nook I’ve created by crossing my right ankle over my left knee (the figure-four position the only way he prefers lap sitting), intermittently pawing at my forearm whenever he thinks I should stop typing and start giving him my undivided attention.

I’m saying this for two reasons: 1) My blog, and bitch gets to write what bitch wants to write about, and 2) I need to show that there are bigger prima donnas in this house than me.

So I’ve apparently gone meta these days, writing more about writing itself than about any other topic.  I blame the NaNoWriMo participants and their “writing about not writing”.  But, oh well: again, my blog, and bitch get to write what bitch wants to write about.

I typically post my published articles on Facebook or Twitter, usually as soon as I find out they’ve been posted.  And, since it’s such an instant reaction, I got into that habit of posting them alongside my knee-jerk editing gripes.  I mean, there’s nothing more professional than seeing: “Hey, here’s my article on Elephant Journal!  Let me take a moment and complain about how they butchered the layout!”

Sometimes, this public griping is justified: I once wrote an article about why it’s problematic that people reacted to the “F-Bombs for Feminism” video with comments like, “That 10-year-old is swearing!  They ruined her purity for this video!” — and why this reaction is actually symptomatic of the exact issue they are addressing.  The published piece had vital sections taken out, with a new, combative title in place.  It made it look more like I was yelling at the people who were upset at the video, not pointing out that the hyper-emphasis on purity in girls sets the stage for a whole slew of issues women deal with.

“They turned a sociological piece into a piece of clickbait!” is a reasonable gripe. “They added paragraph breaks where I didn’t have any!” is not.

It’s easy to get possessive and protective about how my writing is published.  To be clichéd: this is my passion.  This is something I’ve devoted years to. It’s my passion because I have an obsessive love with the English language.  I choose and change around my words like a musician chooses their chords.  And we all know how well musicians fair when they find out they don’t have full creative freedom.

It’s downright laughable: I write whatever it is that I want to write about.  I have no editor-boss telling me, “Write a piece on Nick Jonas is playing a gay character on a TV show!  And talk about how he’s very verbal about the gay sex scenes!”  Actually, that would be something I would write about: former tween sensation whose marketing people branded him and his brothers as the ultimate “pure” Christian boys now excited about playing a gay MMA fighter, and what that means in a world where “gay” is no longer synonymous with “bad/sinful” — and virginity can’t be a commodity like it has been over the last 10 years (over the last 5000 years, really).

Oh, oh, and then I could write something about homosexuality in MMA.

Okay, that has turned into a complete and total digression.  But again: my blog, and bitch writes what bitch wants to write about.

So, let’s try a different angle: “Write a piece on Nick Jonas playing a gay character on TV!  And don’t try to get all ‘observations on the changing social tides’.  Talk about how he’s got lots of muscles!”

(He does have a lot of muscles right now.)

But, seriously, I have none of that.  If I wanted to write said piece about Nick Jonas and virginity as commodity, I could.  If I wanted to write about homosexuality in MMA, I could.  Granted, I need to pitch it and hope to God it gets accepted, but I have full “creative freedom” to write whatever this bitch wants to write about.

I imagine musicians who write music for a living might hear the final product, sung by some tween sensation (I’m going to keep using that phrase because it’s just that contrived), and immediately wonder if people can hear the changes.  “That’s not how I put melodies together.  Anyone who knows me would know this!”  I know I do the same with my writing: every time I see an editing change-up, I go:

“That’s not my voice.  Anyone who knows me would know that.”

But here’s the kicker: they can’t.  No one really knows that you would never word something like that.  No one really knows that you would never use commas in such a fashion, or prefer “’til” over “till” (c’mon people, it just makes sense! “‘Til” looks like a proper abbreviation of “until”.  “Till” is something you do to your garden.)  Some friends know that I’m insane about Oxford commas, quotation marks inside the punctation if I’m just quoting a single word, and en-dashes even when an em-dash is the correction hyphen.  But no one — save for maybe my husband or my best friend — will read a piece and go, “They took out all your Oxford commas, huh?”

And maybe that’s why I internally flail, letting everyone know that this piece is not 100% my wording: I’m so stupidly attached to my syntax that I cannot stand any variation.

But, in the end, editors are needed.  Yes, it’s fun to write in my blog (where bitch writes what bitch wants to write about), but I’m limited in how I express my ideas.  I know what I’m thinking, but no one else does (unless there’s a psychic in the room, in which case: stop judging me).  I’m going to write already knowing what concepts I want to convey.  The reader has no clue what I’m thinking — which means they run the risk of having no clue what I’m talking about in the first place.

We all want to think we’re Joss Whedon: creative genius, only hampered by authority, best left to do exactly what he wants to do.  But the reality is, most of us are, at best, George Lucas: great ideas, but God help you if you’re given full reign.  We’d like to pretend that, given full creative freedom, we’d make a Firefly.  In all likelihood, without people there to challenge what you’re putting out, we’d make a Stars Wars Episode One.  Or we’d Michael Bay it, and just blow shit up for no good reason.

A generic explosion picture, a scene from Transformers 4, or what we’d like to do with the script for Star Wars, Episode One. You decide.

A writer’s voice is key, but we have to find the balance between the muzzle and the karaoke microphone (that is a terrible metaphor and any proper editor would delete that).  Like any good idea, thought, or piece of work, if it can’t stand up to critique, if it can’t be properly defended, maybe it’s time it gets reevaluated.

Also, the cat in question just jumped off my lap and is now trotting around the house meowing, because he has decided he doesn’t like it when I’m awake and my husband isn’t.  What a brat.

Writing and the Ultimate Unpaid Internship

Pictured: a failed prototype cover art idea for a failed prototype manuscript

Long before I tried my hand at op-ed pieces and personal essays, I was a wannabe novelist.

I knew I wanted to be a novelist before I could actually read books that counted as real novels.  I told everyone I was going to be the next Stephen King (only, y’know, Stephanie King, because I’m a girl) long before I had actually picked up a Stephen King book.  I wrote a terrible “novel” in the 10th grade that exists now only in paper form in a binder in my basement, and I’ll make a nice campfire out of it before I let anyone actually read it.

I wrote my first actual novel when I was 22.  I started it as part of a summer-long fiction workshop class, where the final project was the first 30 pages of your novel, plus a full synopsis.  My classmates loved it.  My professor (who, thanks to her most recent book, is now a NYT bestselling author) urged me to finish it.  I had dreams of becoming a renowned novelist, jetsetting around the world for international book tours, selling the movie rights for millions of dollars and getting full creative control as they shot the film.

So, yeah.  That didn’t happen.

My professor’s agent passed.  A lot of agents passed.  Even when I overhauled the manuscript, overhauled my query letter, and went at it again.  A lot more agents passed.  I threw my hat into the ring for the Amazon Breakthrough Novelist award and my little manuscript didn’t make it past the first round.

The lesser-failed, still-prototype cover art for my still-failed prototype manuscript, charitably made by my wonderful sister-in-law

Somewhere around that time, I had finished an additional manuscript (which I knew right off the bat was even less marketable than my first one), and I had started writing for websites.  It started off as a way to process: I had just quit my job as a teacher and I had written about the emotional fallout and at some point I had decided to send that to Thought Catalog.  They published it, it got attention, and I decided to submit more pieces.  By the third published piece, one editor asked me to start sending things directly to him instead of through the website’s submission form, and I was officially on board.

In some ways, I take a lot of pride in what I do.  It’s incredibly cool to say I’ve had things published in ElephantJournal or xoJane, that I’m a “contributing writer” to Thought Catalog and EliteDaily and now HelloGiggles.  Actually, in a lot of ways, I take pride in what I do.  It’s one thing to be a shitty English major, crooning about how you’re a “writer”; it’s another thing to say, “Yes, I’m a writer, and here are the various platforms of publication where you can find my work.”

I don’t write because I still think I’m just one lucky email away from becoming that jetsetting novelist.  I write because I have something to say, dammit, and I want people to hear it.  I want to express my views in a way that might help people reevaluate the things they assumed were true (people never do; they just read the stuff that they agree with and disregard the rest, but, hey, a girl’s gotta try).  I have a story to tell and, the same way misery loves company, experiences are validated in their potential common ground.  I write because nothing brightens my day more than when I get an email from someone who says, “Hey, I read your piece on this particular subject.  I went through that, too, and I want to thank you for putting those feelings into words.”

It’s not about the attention and it’s not about the money.  It’s about the connection.  Which is good: because I can count on one hand the number of websites I’ve pitched to that actually pay their writers.

I’m not here to call anyone out.  This is not me denouncing the websites that do not offer money for their writers’ time.  Like I said, I’m not here for the money.  I’m here for the connection.  And I am exactly what’s wrong with the system.

Somewhere along the line, writing became the ultimate unpaid internship.  Gone are the days when you were guaranteed to get paid for your time.  Like the unpaid internship, writing jobs became something you did for experience, exposure, and the potential to maybe, someday, get paid down the line.  Like most unpaid internships, there is a hoard of too-willing hopefuls ready to fill that slot.  And, like most unpaid internships, the promise of it paying somewhere down the line is never fulfilled.

I’m exactly that hopeful little sprite who puts the “free” back in “freelancing”.  When I start actually thinking about the amount of time I devote to writing — and how little it actually pays at the end of the day — I remind myself that I’m doing it to get my words out there, I’m doing it to help hone my skills, and — hey — maybe my superbly-bloated résumé can translate into catching an agent’s eyes and maybe (just maybe) selling a manuscript or two?

And, like the unpaid intern hoping to snag a full-time spot at a company, only to watch their internship end and be replaced with yet another internship cycle, this has yet to come to fruition.

At some point, the image of a writer morphed, and this disfiguration got romanticized.  Now writers are people working full-time jobs in a field they are either neutral about or hate, while they burn the midnight oil and use any remaining free time to write.  We’ve become enamored with this writer-on-the-side persona, this tireless artist plugging away at their favorite hobby, like someone who works on their car or does woodworking in their spare time.  Nevermind the part that there are actual jobs out there for people who like to work on cars or do woodworking (I’d like to see a properly-trained mechanic get told he could come on board for a garage, but only get paid in exposure.  Exposure to what?  Oil?  Metal?  Annoyed soccer moms?).

And who is to blame for this?  Well, if we’re being honest, everyone is.  We’re a culture that will make articles with titles like, “15 Ways You Know Your BFF is, Like, Totally your BFFL” insanely popular, while ignoring the posts that we can’t easily gobble up like potato chips.  To be blunt: a culture where 50 Shades is the best selling book of all time is not a culture that values its writers so much as it values easy entertainment.

Then there is the problem of “everyone’s a writer”.  Everyone buys into it, from the aspiring poet using shitty similes to the owner of a company who’d rather pile on additional duties to their sole English major employee than actually hire an in-house writer.  The attitude builds on itself, creating a causal loop, until even the most distinguished writers are, say, unemployed and getting rejected from container store jobs.

I think of how quickly Amanda Palmer’s attempt at getting musicians to work on her tour for free crashed in on itself.  It’s a problem every artist faces, whether you write or play guitar or photograph the world.  The saying used to be, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  Now it’s more like, “If it’s something you love enough that you’d do for free, best believe you’ll probably be doing it for free.”

photo by Neal Sanche, who is getting paid in exposure through CC licensing. See how easy that is?

So, what’s the remedy?  You tell me.  I’m obviously part of the problem.  I’ve yet to contact the websites I’ve written for that don’t pay their writers and go, “How much money did you make off of ad revenue on this article?  And you can’t throw, like, $15 my way?”  I’m too much like the overeager daughter, desperate for a few words of approval from her self-absorbed father.  You mean it?  You like my work?  You actually read it?  Aw, shucks.

But, even though I’m a symptom of the illness at hand, I’ve already noticed a shift in my behavior: I give priority pitching to websites that pay.  If I have to pitch, submit, potentially rewrite, and most likely deal with my work being edited in a way that I don’t agree with, I might as well have a few dollars to buy lunch with.  But I still pitch and submit to websites that pay in “exposure”, which shows that my behavior won’t be remedying anything anytime soon.  Still that overeager daughter, too timid to say something that will remove that bit of attention from daddy.  Still too pleased that my writer is out there, in some form, even if it will never help pay the bills.

And maybe that’s the biggest problem: as writers, we don’t write because we want to be millionaires.  We write because we have to.  We write because we have these ideas that are burning up inside of us, and we feel like we’ll surely combust if we don’t get them out.  We toil on our off days, our time off, because there’s nothing else that will put out that fire.  And then we put the end result out there in any way that we can: we blog, we submit to agencies, we work for websites for free.

If the writers can’t stop themselves, if the Big Guys see no reason to stop themselves, if the culture prefers sharing ecards that say inane shit like, “Kids get their coolness from their aunties!!!!”, then what is a writer to do?  Write a somewhat defeatist blog entry — a blog that she routinely updates for free, in her free time — and turn to everyone else to see if there’s anything left to do.  That’s what.

Another Reason Why Modeling Is Not For the Weak of Heart, Brought to You by a Rejection Email.

I got an email from my agency yesterday, letting me know I was released from a set of wedding shows in the upcoming months.  This is standard operating procedure in the modeling world: an agency will ask for your availability for a show, a shoot, whatever they’re potentially hiring you for, only to release the models not chosen for the job.  This usually takes place within the span of a week to two weeks, with the notification coming as last minute as one day before the schedule job.

I usually don’t get my hopes up. I respond to the availability check and go on about my life as planned, fully expecting that email a week or so later.  However, this one was a smidge different: I had already worked two of these wedding shows, and assumed I would stay around for the remaining shows.  I should’ve known better: each show had a slightly different group of models.  The likelihood that I wouldn’t be chosen for future shows was pretty high.

Of course, this didn’t stop me from asking a thousand self-defeating questions: did I do something wrong on the runway?  Did I do my hair the wrong way?  Did I say something that offended someone?

The most likely answer is that the people in charge looked over the potential models for the upcoming shows and decided, “Let’s have these models instead.  Tell the ones we didn’t pick that we don’t need them.”  Which is brutal, but also how the business operates.

There’s a whole misconception with modeling.  People think that becoming a model validates your appearance in some way — or that it’s the ultimate confidence booster.  When people think “model”, they think an open-layout studio with huge lights and a photographer shouting out, “Yes!  Perfect!  You’re beautiful!”  Unfortunately, that couldn’t be further from the truth: you need to go into modeling already sure of yourself and your appearance or else you will collapse in on yourself.  All it takes is one casting directors snide remark, or an outfit that is too small for you, or your first set of rejections, to make you feel like the lowest of the low.

Even in the best case scenario, you have to deal with thousands of potential jobs slipping away from you because your look wasn’t the exact right look they were going for.  You have to go forward with your own brand of self-confidence, your own way of feeling validated.

That’s a good skill for everyone to have, regardless of their involvement in the modeling world.  Not constantly relying on other’s behavior to make or break you, and recognizing that it’s useless to take things personally all the time.  It makes it easier to manage when friends act up, guys don’t text back, or coworkers get out of line.  You’ll drive yourself crazy if you use people’s opinions of and actions towards you as you’re only gauge of self worth.

Besides, you have to focus on the positives in every situation.  Like this one: yeah, it stinks that I’m not part of the show, but it does free up my weekend, which means I can actually go to a birthday party that I had originally nixed due to the potential show.

Thoughts on a Day

It’s been a low and dreary couple of weeks.  The weather has been a consistent gray, with patches of rain and wind to keep things interesting.  It’s getting to the point that there’ll be a momentary break and I’ll involuntarily squint in bewilderment, as if I’ve forgotten what sunlight feels like when it’s not being diffused by a layer of cloud cover.  It’s a reminder of what’s to come: a long, cold winter, and yet another reminder that my mood is far too dependent on the weather.

This morning’s yoga class only yielded one student.  As an independent contractor, that can get frustrating: with only one student, I’ll essentially get paid in the gas money spent to get to the studio.  But I got paid in spades in other ways.

To backtrack: I remember my very first yoga studio class.  After spending way too much time at home doing yoga videos and crappy yoga apps, I finally bucked up enough to go to a studio.  The class was exactly what I needed, the instructor was exactly the type of instructor for my personality, and I drifted into savasana with this weirdly innate understanding that the flesh and bones that made up my body was nothing compared to the dynamic spirit inside of me.  It was an insane and unexpected and incredible experience and I’ve been chasing the buzz ever since, with varying degrees of success.

I always go back to that first class, that first instructor, and think about how lucky I was to have that class be my very first class.  My dream when I became a registered yoga instructor was to someday give someone else that same experience.

The one person who showed up to my class had also shown up to a class I had covered a few weeks prior.  She had a martial art background and I was actually her very first class.  Up until today, I hadn’t seen her since — most likely because I don’t usually teach the Saturday morning class that I was subbing for — and we ended up having an accidental private (which is fitness instructor jargon for “only had one student”).

We spent a good portion of the class just chatting as we practiced, as it is incredibly weird to put on your yogi teacher voice for only one person.  I got to play around with sequencing to the point that I actually found myself running out of time, and finished out the class with just enough savasana to make it a proper yoga class.

There were a lot of things we talked about that morning.  Our jobs, finding out path in life, the realization that the universe tends to conspire to make things happen when it’s time for a certain change in your life to happen.  She brought up her past with taekwondo and her health ailments and how she knew she had to switch to yoga.  She also said a sentence to me that I thought I’d have to wait years to hear from a student:

“I’m really happy your class was my first yoga class.”

She mentioned a lot of the things I felt with my first instructor (who — spoiler alert — hosted my teacher training and owns the studio I had this morning’s class at): that connection that is rare to find in a yoga instructor, that incredible moment in savasana when the energy shifts and you feel like a new person.

Later that day, I taught my afternoon class: a gentle series at a different studio.  I’ve been feeling a little unsure about teaching gentle yoga over the last week or two: I’ve been covering a “gentle” class in another town at yet another studio, only to find out that at least one student found the class “too gentle”.  I’ve had a few “boring” comments semi-facetiously thrown my way (usually from those who try the yoga class at the homeless services center; comments that I don’t take to heart but still find their way of factoring in) and my first go at the aforementioned Sunday Afternoon Gentle Yoga class (which happened to be last week) felt rushed and weird and ended up not being as gentle as I’d like it to be.

But today’s class had two things: one, a student who had tried out this studio for the very first time, during my very first Sunday Afternoon Gentle Yoga class, and was now returning to be a repeat student, and, two, a brand new student who was in her later 60s and wanted to give yoga a go, and told her friend after class,”This is exactly what I need.”

In some ways, I’ll always be that little kid desperate for acceptance and recognition for her hard work.  But it’s also a reminder that I’m on the right path.  This is what I’m supposed to be doing.  I can feel it in my bones.  Every crazy curveball that had been thrown my way was done so in order for me to be where I am right now.

It was also a reminder that my cheeks can still get red even when I haven’t felt the sunshine in weeks.  That I can feel warm all over even when the thermostat for the house is at a draconian 60*F (hey, you try paying the oil bill).  It reminded me that, even though I drive all over town and walk into studios with zero students signed up and deal with the minutia of being registered, I’m in a considerably better place than I was not even a few years ago.

Tomorrow is slated to be the only sunny day in the entire week, followed immediately by cloud cover, rain, and potential snow.  I’ll have to make it a point tomorrow to bundle up, get outside, enjoy a little of that natural light, and hope my seasonal affective issues can be tricked by a few sun salutations.