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What uncertainty looks like

“We just need to get to the ocean,” Josh said.

Really? I thought. As much as I love the ocean, I wasn’t sure if we should really go. We have two littles, after all. Even with each other, with rock-paper-scissors,  drawing materials, and an Ipad for company, they can get impatient on road trips. Did I really want to drive for about three hours out to the coast just for one night on Thanksgiving weekend?

We hadn’t gone anywhere on a family vacation, getting-away-for-getting-away’s-sake in far too long, almost several years. Over the last few holidays, and over the last two summers we had promised ourselves a vacation, even a staycation. Things never quite worked out, and money was far too tight.

But we had to get away. It had been a month of waiting, layered on top of other months of waiting, layered on top of months of career transition. A couple of weeks ago we’d been waiting to hear about job news for me. When news came—not quite a simple yes, not quite a simple no—I had to rethink what uncertainty means, and what stability would mean.

*****

Despite my slight misgivings, the four of us piled into the car. I’m a terrible camper, because I want to take EVERYTHING with me. I packed ridiculous amounts of clothing and two grocery bags of snacks for the girls, for an overnight trip. We drove down the coast. On the way down we drove over long bridges, crossing wide rivers, and as we neared the coast, we caught glimpses of the ocean behind the hills. But then we got to the cottage, half a block from the beach. We knew we had to catch some time on the beach before it got too dark; the Northwest winter sunlight ends by 4:30. So we bundled up, and walked out to the sand.

To our left, Haystack Rock reared its head. It was low tide. Part of the beach was so wet, it seemed to overflow with pieces of sky. The wind whipped around me, the horizon stretched into the distance. And, there, unexpectedly,  were all those crucial times I’d spent near the ocean.

There were all those coastal road trips that Josh and I took to the Oregon Coast in grad school, before grad school. We’d been to Cannon Beach, and Manzanita, and Coos Bay: quick weekend trips, or even part of a week.

There was our honeymoon, where we drove back from Mill Valley and San Francisco to Seattle, up the coast. That week we saw more moods of the Pacific than I’d ever seen, from an optimistic turquoise to a stern cobalt grey.

There was the morning after we’d slept next to the ocean in a cabin. I woke up to the sun rising over a village where the Russian River meets the Pacific, in California. It wasn’t the sunlight that woke me up that morning; it was the reflection of the light on the water, as pink and as golden as the haze in a Maxfield Parrish painting. I looked over Josh’s shoulder, and saw that glorious light.

Why was I surprised that the beach would insistently tug the memories right out of me?  It was the power of the waves: pounding slowly in, pancaking towards you, and foaming away. It was the sharp wind, clear and cold in so much open space. And this surprised me: it was the sound of the ocean that I’d missed the most. Oh, we have polite wavelets in Puget Sound. But nothing like these waves.

And it was the pull of the horizon—it stretched so far away, I couldn’t really see where it ended.

*****
Back at the beach cottage, the little girls were simply thrilled to be somewhere else for the night. They squealed their way through each bedroom, opened each kitchen cabinet, and climbed onto the mountainous easy chair multiple times. The toddler, who loves putting things away, happily unpacked her clothes into a dresser and began work on my overnight case. I laid on the couch, as relaxed as cooked spaghetti. By nightfall I had a book in one hand, a toddler sitting on my stomach and the other curled up next to my legs. We were all in front of the fireplace, content as kittens. Josh had gone grocery shopping and was making us something with pasta in the kitchenette.

Lying there with the girls, my memory traveled still farther back. In seventh grade I visited Mendocino with my GATE class. For part of the trip we sat near the ocean in near-silence, and wrote about what we were hearing and seeing. There I wrote some of my first prose poems. It was my first stream-of-consciousness writing, and words poured out of me almost faster than I could write. We also made lists of our favorite words, and had to read the first fifteen words out loud. (As steeped as I was in fantasy novels at the time, I remember that unfortunately the word “darkling” made it onto my list.) But I  remember a certain small silence that fell over the group after I’d read my list out loud. I was so uncertain and so afraid of so many things, but even then I knew that I wanted to be a writer.

In our cottage, I left the bedroom window open before I went to sleep. And the ocean roared all night long.

(P.S. Photo credits here should go to my husband, Josh Parmenter. The batteries on my camera were out that day.)

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One more breath

Just to be clear, because I don’t want to scare anyone, everyone’s fine here.

I’m not talking about one last breath; I’m talking about one more breath. If you practice yoga, you know what I’m talking about. I’ll come back to this in a minute. While you wait, you can take a look at the picture I took, over left there. It’s a tree that I pass every day when I drive back from my yoga studio.

*****
So: I’ve been looking for a job.

I’m not going to write too much about the career change here, for a number of reasons. Maybe I’ll write more later. But I can say that the job search hasn’t always been easy. I’ve had a job or some version of a job since I started college. Nevertheless, I’ve been lucky in so many ways.

I have the very best of partners, the one who surprises me with a copy of this book by one of my favorite authors, the one who nudges me to go for a run when I’ve got anxiety to burn, whose belief in me is bedrock to my days. I have two adorable daughters who constantly make me laugh and teach me to discover the world anew. I have the very best family who has taught me about resilience through the courage of their examples. I have the very best friends both “on” and “offline,” who bring me presents like this book and send me messages and hugs and go out for coffee, where we analyze and then take over the world. I have roots in my community, and friendly faces at my grocery store and the playground at C’s elementary school, and my yoga classes. I’ve got a house that I love in a neighborhood I love. And during my unemployment I’ve been able to do a lot of writing, for causes and people that I support. If it takes a village to raise a child, I can tell you that it’s taken my village to support me during this time, and I’m so grateful for you all.

One of the most difficult (and in some ways, interesting) parts of the job search has been thinking myself out of one career and into another one yet to be determined. I spent almost 12 years thinking myself into that last professional identity; that career seemed to carry so much certainty and forward movement. I loved parts of that job, and I will miss them dearly. But as things stand now, I will probably be leaving that career behind. I’m glad that I get to keep so many of the relationships that I developed in that time.

I’ve been applying for jobs for about four months now, and I think there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. I’m excited about the possibilities. In a job market like this one, I’m extremely grateful that I even have possibilities. But right now, I need to wait, for at least a few more weeks.

Last week, the waiting room space was just about to drive me a little insane. The suspense, the tension, the lack of resolution. I wanted to scream, or go for a run, or tear up a hotel ventolin inhaler no prescription room, or preferably all three. “Why does it take so long?” my 3-year old likes to ask. “Because you’re not being patient,” I like to answer sometimes. And last week I realized I’m not being patient. (Great: just like my 3-year old.)

For the first time in my life, I understood the idea behind Waiting for Godot, if not Waiting for Guffman. I wanted to write a play called The Waiting Room. You know: the set would be furnished with bad landscape art, and old issues of Good Housekeeping, and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” played on Muzak panflute. The main character would be waiting, unable to leave the room until someone else unlocked the door for her. People would come to slide unexpected presents under the door, and talk to her through the windows, but she couldn’t leave until it was time.

But of course, I didn’t know how the play would end. I suspect that I’ll just have to write it and find out.

*****

And here’s where I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of “one more breath.”

Yoga teachers often say this phrase to you when you are holding a pose—let’s say, downward-facing dog, or Warrior 2—and they want you to stay in the pose for just a little bit longer. They usually say this to you when you’ve been in a pose for a while, or for a little longer than you’d like. In those poses your legs might be screaming like 1960s Beatles fans, your arms might be stretched out taut as John and George’s guitar strings, and the rest of your muscles might be protesting like Beatles fans stranded outside without tickets.

In that kind of tension, “one more breath” can feel like a very, very long time.

If the pose is especially challenging, “one more breath” is the very last thing you want to hear. Some days you’re kinda pissed, actually, that you have to stay there a bit longer. (Not at your teacher. Don’t get pissed at your yoga teacher. They can make you hold poses even longer. If you’re my yoga teacher and you’re reading this, I don’t mean you.) But I’ve decided—and this must be yoga rewiring my brain, I can think of no other way to describe it—that “one more breath” is one of the very best things that yoga can give you.

See, in yoga the breath becomes a way to measure time. The space of “one more breath” is where you’re challenged, you’re waiting, and (somehow) you’re calm. In those few seconds you hold the pose. Sometimes, it’s true, you fall out before it’s time to move to the next pose. But more often than not, you stay in the pose, and you keep breathing. Your mind and your body say together, “It’s okay. You can do this. Just a little bit longer.” You learn to inhale slowly, in, and exhale even more slowly, ouuuuut.

There, you realize it: one more breath is really just fresh life, waiting to rush in.

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In this economy

 

Photo by Josh Parmenter

1.
Did you know that “economy” comes from ancient Greek, meaning “to manage a household”? True story. So let’s begin and end there.

2.
Well, you know.

In this economy, we use the phrase “in this economy,” trading it easily as a head shake or a handshake. Layoffs, job losses, not to mention inequality on so many fronts that we don’t even think about the backs, literal or metaphorical.

Sometimes, it’s true, we say it as an excuse crutch, a lip curl dismissal, a shoulder shrug adjective.

Sometimes we say it as a paper cut insult.

And sometimes we say it like we’re fluffing a pillow on a guillotine.

Let’s be clear: too often we say it too damned often.

2.
And saying it too often makes it part of our everyday fabric, and we might forget that this economy will not always be this economy.

Or rather, we might forget that this economy sparks other economies, or what my friend A calls “informal economies.”

So in this economy, I feel a manifesto coming on.

3.
Informal economies? Barter and trade. Eggs for milk. Classes for web updates. Child care for an airport ride. Under an informal economy, the currency I have may not be what you normally accept, and it may not seem equal at first. But there’s wealth in the social fabric woven by our exchange.

This economy depends on the question, “how can I help you?”

This economy rests in a counterintuitive imbalance. A trust that whatever you give will come back to you, probably in ways that you never imagined, probably when you least expect it.

In fact, this economy depends on a surplus of trust, an abundance of altruism, an unprecedented deficit of selfishness.

This economy depends on the unexpected kindnesses of near-strangers, the stunning acts of giving across continents, across oceans, across alleys into backyards. Like my friend’s S’s love for her friend J, like my friend T’s love for her former home and her people. Please give there, give what you can. By itself, it might not feel like much.

But sometimes giving in some small way is all we have, and all we have is exactly enough.

4.
I know. We can burn out on giving, you want to say. I know.

So I want to tell you about my friend A. We’d ventolin inhaler 2mg worked together over e-mail, and we met in Seattle when she came there for a conference. We lost touch, regained it again. In an e-mail shortly thereafter, she explained that she’d gone through near-unimaginable health issues and surgeries for a young woman our age, which I’ll leave vague for her privacy. She was going through another round of issues as we wrote. I couldn’t say much, but I could write back a little bit, mostly to say, “I’m here.” It wasn’t much.

Almost a year later, I lost my job.

When the whole process of job loss began—and it was a long process, almost a year—I sent out a message to friends asking for moral support. So many responded with shock, with anger, with disbelief, with hugs. I felt and needed them all. A was on the recipient list.

And yet A, I knew, was enduring even more health complications upon complications, severe as the face of a cliff. And from that place, she wrote, “Send me your mailing address! I’m sending antioxidants!”

I sent her my address. I pictured a bottle, some kind of herbal supplement. A few days later, a small plain brown cardboard box arrived on my doorstep, shipped with a FedEx mailing label. No note, not that a note was needed, but these were clearly the antioxidants from A.

It was a box of homemade biscotti. Part—only part!—of what A was facing, herself, was cancer.

Not much: exactly enough.

5.
Now I can remind you that “economy” is about managing a household. As a writer, economy makes me think about tightness and restraint.

But in going back to the origins of the word, there’s comfort and expansiveness and freedom. Doesn’t that make “economy” easier than textbooks and infographics, than pie charts and statistics?

In other words: shouldn’t this economy be about making a home?

P.S. I asked A if I could publish her story here. Part of her awesome response: “For the record, I *did* intend to put a card in that box, but it came down to a ‘send it while they’re fresh, or put in a card’ choice. I chose freshness.”

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Where I’ve been

A can of vintage MSG. No, this is not where I have been. Though that would explain a lot.

Where have I been?

Well, I’ve been thinking about you. You’ve been on my list, believe me.  I imagine you peeking through the velvet curtains, clicking the website address in vain. Anybody home? Not recently. Ah, well. I’ll try again. And I’m grateful you did.

I’ve been writing, so don’t worry too much about that. You can find my latest food writing here about chocolate and butchers and teriyaki history on Seattlest, and about yoga and running here for my yoga studio. I’m also excited for my upcoming first freelance assignment with the International Examiner, a Seattle Asian American community newspaper. And there’s some other writing I’ve been doing that I can’t quite post here just yet. But I’ve been writing hard. Just not here. Sorry.

I’ve been reading, too. I bought a few new books for the first time in ages—my own copy of Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, plus Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin, on the recommendation of a couple of friends. I’m excited to begin Monique Truong’s latest novel Bitter In the Mouth.  I’m also two-thirds of the way through Daphne Kalotay’s novel about ballet and jewelry and Stalinist oppression, Russian Winter. And I don’t want to return my library copy (though I will!) of the letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, collected and called As Always, Julia. Their affection and wit and friendship made me fall in love with the two of them, and made want to write more letters again.

And I’ve been following the discussion on the movie and book The Help. In case you haven’t ventolin inhaler for sale seen this response yet, by Ohio State University professor Rebecca Wanzo, I highly recommend it. It’s pretty evenhanded and thorough, acknowledging the book’s emotional power while sustaining a more detailed critique.

I’ve been out and about a lot more—even a lovely date night here!–which is mostly good for me, not so great for the household sleep schedules, and thus not so good for downtime and writing time here.

I’ve been making jam, stocking the jam closet space downstairs. There’s a wonderful line from my goddess of domesticity, Pat in one of L.M. Montgomery’s novels: “While I move and live and have my being I’ll want a jam closet.” A jam closet! I might have scoffed a few years ago. Ah, but now. Now I understand.

And if you read the last few paragraphs of this haunting essay by Alexander Chee, you’ll get some of the feeling of where I’ve been. “What can you trust of what you can’t see?” his yoga teacher asks at the end. Like the yoga students in that essay, I’ve been moving thoughtfully through uncertainty, and trying not to fall.  It is terrifying and it is heady. Because of that combination, I’m sure it will eventually be good for me.

Nevertheless, I’m here too. I made you chocolate cookies. They’re still warm. Or you can spoon up some homemade peach jam over vanilla gelato, to hold onto summer as I have for the last two nights.

In other writing news, my creative nonfiction essay, “How It Feels To Inherit Camp,” is being republished and anthologized. It appeared in Kartika Review this year. I’m thrilled. And I’ll keep you posted.

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In praise of bulbs

Since moving to the Pacific Northwest some thirteen years ago, I’ve come to appreciate bulbs. Not the light kind, the flower kind.

Though my California childhood house had a big yard in the front, I can’t say that I grew up gardening. In the front of the house we had two pine trees nestled in a huge patch of ivy next to the carport, facing a hedge of bay leaf trees. We had persimmon and orange trees. Lots of greenery, but my sister and I didn’t really garden. I remember a patch of marigolds that we tried to grow in our backyard, but they didn’t do very well.

Gardening’s something that I came to know more in the Pacific Northwest. It’s one of the most popular pastimes here. People in our neighborhood care about their yards, about terracing and native plants and lawns. This makes us sound like a region of senior citizens, I know—with all due love and respect to any seniors reading here—but it does make for some lovely city neighborhood living.

See, we have a true spring in the Northwest. After months and months of early darkness, of pewter skies turning to charcoal, we gravitate towards bright color wherever and whenever we can find it. Our grocery store sells primroses these days, to help us remember what fuchsia, violet, and daffodil look like outside. Last week, I found myself silently thanking the anonymous person (or force of nature) who planted a tiny patch of yellow crocuses along my running trail. Oh, thank goodness, spring’s coming. We can start counting down to the light.

Spring, when it comes, is a gorgeous thing here. Apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, plum blossoms yield showers of petals washing onto the streets in frothy tides. Daffodils stretching their necks, russet dahlias blooming like fireworks, pink camellias unfurling their ruffly skirts. And then, when the sun’s out: vibrant colors against blue-silver skies and silver-blue water. Spring is when I breathe in all that color, all that light. Some days I can’t believe I get to live here.

Yet it’s the bulbs that I’ve been thinking about lately, perhaps as a way to describe what’s been happening here on the blog. I’m still learning about bulbs, but I understand that they often lie dormant for seasons. Some people pack them away in their garages, in the wintertime. If you’ve ever seen bulbs, you know that some of them are rather unsightly. No symmetry, no smoothly self-contained packaging like a seed. They’re gnarled, and knotty, and even brown-papery in places where dead foliage might have order ventolin online uk been. You might even think, “Really? Something beautiful’s going to come out of here?” Bulbs are something like the Ugly Duckling of plants. In the spring you have to plant them, trusting that they will grow quickly with the sunlight, and eventually explode into color. Their blooming sneaks up on you, and almost before you know it, a cluster of red tulips have returned in your yard, the tulips that you planted from last year’s Mother’s Day present.

That’s how I’ve been feeling about writing lately: unglamourously, unpoetically, something like a bulb. After the start of a new semester, and a series of minor colds in the family house, the book project is coming off of the back burner. Clearly, the private MFA has the perks of flexibility and sick days, but its main downside is its lack of structure and accountability. I have missed writing here and tried not to scold myself for posting less regularly. I want to keep this space as a space of pleasurable focus, at least for now. So my degree in progress has been dormant for a while, but I’m planting it again with hopes of spring. The Northwest spring allows you to do that.

We’ve got an amaryllis bulb in our kitchen, since our kindergartener C had one in her classroom. Amaryllis flowers grow well indoors, and they grow quickly. The class got to measure the growth of the stem every week. When we saw amaryllis pots at Trader Joe’s, C asked us to get one. It’s the first living plant we’ve welcomed back in the house in years. The amaryllis bloomed in late December, with red flowers like a hibiscus, at least in my range of flowers familiarity. But the flowers and leaves didn’t last for very long; we were on holiday vacation for most of that blooming. The flowers wafted pollen onto C’s bookshelf in her bedroom, and eventually their long green stems shriveled to light brown. We had to explain to her that we had to remove these parts of the plants, in order to make room for the flowers to come back.

Now I see that bulb every morning next to our kitchen table. The green stems and leaves are coming back again, and they’re growing at odd angles, reaching for that elusive Northwest February sunlight. Every few days I’ll water it, and check on it, and turn it around to straighten out the growth. That’s how I want to come back to the blog. And writing. And light.

Thanks again for returning, and reading.

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Next to the road

Dear baby bird M,

This morning I found a car rental receipt for May, 2007. I had to do a double take—the date was May 17, and I had one car seat so your older sister was with me, and I flew in and out of Sacramento…but the year was 2007. Were you born yet? I had to ask myself. No: that was one year before you were born in May 2008. About five months before we knew about you.

When I realized this, I was stunned. I can’t believe that it has only been two and a half years since you were born. Since that day, I have felt so protective of you, my second child, second daughter. Your dad and I are oldest kids, and now your big sister’s an oldest kid. You’re a youngest kid in a household of oldest kids. So I have felt protective of you in different ways. Maybe you don’t always want to play what your big sister is playing (although this is rare, it’s true); maybe you don’t want to watch that movie that she chose; maybe, gasp, you have your own choices and preferences. I want to protect yours, if I can. I understand big sister urges all too well: we want to express our love through teaching, protecting, guiding. But I want to honor you, too.

When I knew I was pregnant with you, I remember being worried. How could I love you like I love your sister? And of course, the answer was that I can’t. And I don’t. Loving your sister taught me that I could love someone differently than your dad—but just as equally, just as helplessly, just as deeply. You taught me that of course I can love a daughter differently from your sister. And yes, just as equally, just as helplessly, just as deeply.

Now, I know there are older and younger sibling gripes. Your dad and I try to manage these as best as we can. Older siblings gripe about how younger siblings get more attention for being “the baby.” But younger siblings gripe about being treated permanently like children. Older siblings gripe about having to go first, or “breaking parents in” to the first sleepover, the first driving lesson, the first time away from home. And younger siblings gripe about how little documentation there is for them, compared to the oldest child.

And oh, this last one is so true. I’ve talked to a number of parent-friends who have two or more kids, and it’s not just you. I wrote down daily, weekly, monthly things about what your sister was doing at this age. Milestones: first steps, first words, first meals. She had her own web page. We do take pictures of you, but not as many; we update your shared web site every three months, rather than every week or every month. I have felt, keenly, the lack of documentation that we have had for you, compared to what we had for your sister. It happened with me, too—there are so many picture albums of just me, the oldest and for four years, an only child—and not as many picture albums of your auntie, my younger sister. So this is something like an apology for not having enough pictures of you, or equal documentation of you.

But it is also a letter to tell you this: if the older sibling is about the magic of the milestones, the younger sibling is about the magic of the middles.

When your dad and I held your sister as a baby, we were terrified most of the time. We didn’t really know what or whom or how to trust, as parents. Good students and lifelong readers to the core, we consulted What To Expect (both before and after her birth) every week. We loved it, but we were also gut-scared.

And you? By the time you were born, we had learned better how to trust ourselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of my very favorite pictures in the world was taken on the day you were born. It’s a picture of you, burritoed up in the white flannel hospital blanket, and your big sister C, with the biggest look of surprise, looking up and laughing. I asked my sister, your auntie, to take these pictures, as many as she could. I knew that I’d still be in surgery for a little while after you were born. And I couldn’t be there when you met your sister for the first ventolin inhaler price time. It broke my heart a little, to tell you the truth. So first you should know this: the urge to document was there the day you were born, even though I couldn’t be with you, and the urge is still there.

And second, you should know this, immediately: very early, you taught me how to enjoy the in-between. As a baby, you were a world-class champion cuddler. Even now, your body melts into my lap, pours itself onto my shoulder. Your head still snuggles into my neck, that sweet spot that babies seem to seek and find, automatically. What will I do when you no longer want to sit on my lap in the morning during breakfast, or lounge against my legs as you eat your snack? You crave physical contact, lots of it. I’ve never been that way, but I love that hunger in you.

For the first three and half months of your life, you were colicky at around the same time, around 4-6PM. It was usually dinnertime, which meant that we had to take turns, or eat later. I never thought that I would have been mostly all right with holding a screaming, seemingly inconsolable baby, but there were also times when I was so happy that I got to hold you. I wasn’t so scared. I didn’t take it as a personal insult or parenting comment that you were screaming every day. And every once in a while, when I held you, pacing, swaying, singing, breathing deep… you’d calm down. I like to think that it was because you knew me, knew my smell, in the most mama-baby animal primal way. I wasn’t looking for your first smile, your first anything. I just knew that I loved holding you, breathing you.

Now you are making new leaps and bounds with your language, it seems almost every day. You’ve gone from naming, to demanding, to describing, to pretending, and even to analyzing (“Can I sit down to put my pants on?” you asked this morning. “It’s easier.”). You love wearing the same clothes as your older sister: “We have twins!” you like to say to her. You’re catching your balance more, and you can now trot sturdily after your sister, chirping “OK! C!” Your Japanese-manga-size eyes stare up at us from under your blowsy, curly bangs, and all three of us, we who live with you, are at their mercy. Your sister even runs to get a tissue when you sneeze.

Your moods are usually sunny or stormy, and most of the time you like to be sunny, silly and funny. I don’t remember the first time you said your first word, but I do remember when you said to me, without any kind of prompting, “I yahv yoo.” You still want to be carried a lot (“uppy!”) and you still love your “chocky milk” from the store. You love to pretend to put your baby doll to sleep, and you want us to pretend along with you. Tonight I was a crocodile. A couple of weeks ago I was the Cookie Monster. Who knows what I’ll be next? I can barely measure, much less document, when and where and how all of this is happening.

But we are learning how to express ourselves in newer and better ways, you and I. Though I can remember what life was before you were born, I am amazed by how richly you and your sister have textured my life, how thoroughly you ask me to live my life every single day. Stitches that outline a shape? Pretty, sure. But intricate embroidery in lush, multiple colors, unfurling designs: now, there’s something like my life now. A century of stitches.

That’s why I can’t believe that you’ve only been alive two and a half years.  And that’s why I’m not writing this letter to celebrate any developmental milestone. You, the younger sibling, have taught me that the journey of parenting is not only the direction of the road, the distance to the next rest stop, or the relief of the endpoint (and really, how to envision an end to parenting now?).

Thank you for teaching me to see the beauty of the landscape next to the road. You are the long tall grasses waving in the wind, the green hills relaxing in the distance, the white lace dancing on the waves.  You taught me that parenting’s also holding you, breathing you. These are the journey of parenting, as much as anything else.

Love, Mama

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The clenched fist

So I’ve been running—no, jogging—for about five weeks now. It’s still hard for me to say that I’ve been running. It’s still incredibly hard for me to call myself a runner. Too much expectation of what a runner’s supposed to look like, and that’s just not my body type.

I never thought that I’d take up running as my cardio exercise, ever. With the quirky exception of soccer, which I love to play, running has had bad connotations for me for a very long time. The timed high school run around the practice fields, the lagging behind almost everyone else. Unattractively out of breath and sweaty in an unattractive big T-shirt and shorts. Running was all about pointing out how out of shape I was, particularly compared to (as it felt) almost everyone else.

Oh yes, and running was always about the aching feet, which I thought was just a natural part of running for everyone. And then I got some real running shoes, from a store that actually analyzes your feet, the shoes’ fit, and your stride. As a lifelong low-maintenance girl, the running-shoe fit is the closest thing I’ve come to an in-store makeover, for now. (What’s next: Sephora?)

I didn’t even want to run. Walking has always been more, ahem, my speed. However, having come through a difficult year with my mind mostly intact, it was time to take better care of the body. A couple of people very close to me have had great success with this program, so I thought I would give it a try.

Now, running by myself meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone timing me, or about competing with anyone else, or thinking about how quickly I lose my breath. So for the first two weeks or so, I walked most of the time, and listened to music, and walked a little faster for a minute or two, here and there. But I didn’t think that it counted as running. Then, ventolin inhaler nyc during the “run” portions of the program, I began to shuffle, faster than walking and almost to a fast race walk. I didn’t think that was running, either.

Maybe it wasn’t. I now realize that in running, there’s something important about the hands.

As I walked for the first few weeks, I’d kept my hands open, loose, mostly so I could move them along with the music coming from my Itouch. I played air piano for Stevie Wonder, or waved my hands around as I sang with ABBA, and even played air typewriter for the Prince lyrics. But the hands have always been loose: fingers open, keeping their options open. I’m not running, no sirree. Who’s running around here? Not me, not me. La, la, la.

But last week I began to close my hands into loose fists, thumbs inexplicably tucked under index fingers. And I realized what making a fist does to the arms: it activates the muscles in the forearms. Once the forearms commit, they activate the elbows. When the elbows swing forward, in counterpoint with your feet, they bring their own momentum. When your elbows and arms are swinging, your entire upper body commits to the run. Since your lower body’s pretty much moving already when you run, simply clenching your fists involves your entire body in the run. The grip isn’t violent. Your fists just have to be clenched, fingers closed enough for a fist-bump. Those of you reading this who are runners, you must know this already. But it’s huge news to me.

You have to clench your fists first: then the commitment will come.

I’m here, after a couple of crazy weeks. I’ve been worried about writing, worried about grading, worried about teaching, but mostly worried about showing up in the first place. I still don’t think I’m a runner. And yet, I suspect that I’ll be learning from what it is to run, for a long time.

Thanks for coming back and reading.

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An unexpected stretch

“How does it feel to be writing your own MFA?” my newly-refound childhood friend asked me, while we were chatting on Facebook this week. A concert pianist, and thus an artist herself, she wondered if I faced issues with writer’s block, or struggled with a blank page, or a blank screen. “Sometimes the longest trip is between me and the piano,” she wrote.

“Well, I’ve been away from writing for a while—for now, I still hunger to write,” I replied. “And I know that an artist’s life is not a linear one.” (“Amen, sister!” she wrote back.) “But right now, I think it’s more fulfilling.”

And it’s true, so far. While writing my dissertation had its own rewards, a life lived in bookstore cafes and libraries, this version of my writing life is, well, fun. And it’s a foreign work ethic for me, when my work ethic is usually much more Puritan.

These days I just don’t want writing to be work that I hate. I don’t mind it being hard. I don’t mind working hard. But I don’t want to hate it. I don’t want to write out of guilt for having not written. I don’t want to write in order to please a hostile or cynical audience. I want writing to always have some element of pleasure as the goal. (I’m telling you, Stephen King’s On Writing has some great stuff in it.)

So when I write these days, I am seeking pleasure. Every time I decide to write creatively, it is a gift that I am giving myself.

You might hear the faintest hint of yoga-speak creeping into that last sentence, and I don’t blame you if you are skeptical. Too granola, too Berkeley, too earth-mothery, too woo-woo. I know, I know, I know. Surprising that despite growing up in California, despite going to UC Berkeley, I didn’t take up yoga until I moved to Washington. Like many people, maybe even some of you reading right now, I rolled my eyes at yoga. But really, now that I think about it, the idea of writing as a gift to myself must have something to do with my yoga practice.

A few years ago my sister convinced me to try yoga. For a little while, I took yoga classes at the recreational sports center here. And when the karate students were thumping upstairs over our overheated yoga room, I couldn’t see any “horizon” past my Warrior II fingertips, pointing at the heap of dirty blue gymnastics mats. And then I bought some DVD’s like the ones here. And it was fine, but not great, much less life-changing.

But then I started taking classes, and found a studio that I love, about a mile from my house. The teachers often incorporate meditation techniques. (Some of my favorite techniques: focus on an image, a word, a quotation, and use these as themes for the hour and a half. It’s actually quite literary.) The teachers gently correct postures. And the studio itself tries to create community within its community, from the self-introductions at the beginning of classes to the sponsorship of farmers markets to the weekend retreats, events and workshops.

And for someone like me, who lives so deeply in the mind, yoga has been a priceless gift, because it emphasizes the mind-body connection. Academics live at computers, at desks, at tables; it can be physically and mentally damaging if there are no times to take a break. It’s absorbing, and rewarding, but it can take its toll.

While academia often involves judgment, yoga doesn’t judge me. I rarely look around to see what other students are doing, and I don’t feel the need to compete with them. (“Ooh! She’s holding her ‘tree pose’ longer than I did!”) I’m never sorry that I went to yoga, and that’s an entirely new approach to work, and even exercise, for me. Even after several years, I feel like I’m still pretty new, but I’ve gone to a few advanced yoga classes. There I’m nowhere near as flexible or practiced as other students, but it’s actually fun to shrug my shoulders (mindfully) and just give the pose a try. Or rest.

There was a series of poses that used to be very difficult for me; I had to start out in the easiest, most modified version. Then I had to modify a little less, but for months my arms would shake when I’d lower myself to the ground. But one day I realized that I could do these poses without any modification or protest, mental or physical. And I wasn’t doing it to please my teacher, or to get a good grade, or to receive validation from anyone but myself. For an academic overachiever like me, it’s a revolutionary approach to learning.

Yoga taught me that holding up your own weight can sometimes be the hardest thing to do, but holding up your own weight can also be exactly what makes you strongest.

So now, six years after I started yoga, I can list almost identical reasons for my yoga practice and my writing: I go because there I can practice, and screw up, and fall; because there I can rearrange my mental furniture, or even redecorate my mental living room. And because there I am constantly surprised that I can discover new ways to be happy.

(And yes, now the title of this post comes into play. Sorry for the pun. But honestly, I didn’t expect to end up writing about yoga. I was going to write more about the latest developments with the book. Next time, for sure.)

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Findings in fractions

Music Scores at the Seattle Central Public Library

Here’s a paradox to consider. I’ve got a lot to think about, so you’ll have to look past the academic scaffolding.

First premise: There are very few traces of my dad on the Internet.

You can Google “Taku Nimura,” or “Taku Frank Nimura,” and there isn’t very much connected to him, or who he was. I have active e-mail accounts, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a SheWrites.com page… and as a new daughter of this digital age, it makes me sad that you can’t Google my dad*, for lack of a better term. You can’t find his obituary, the most stripped-down version of a life outline (except for the tombstone inscription), in online newspaper archives.

(Maybe I will create a Wikipedia page about him, but there’s still so much that I need to know. And one wonders: if what makes someone “historic” is debatable, what makes someone Wikipedia-page-worthy?)

And so I wonder about the countless individuals who do not have an online presence, even now; I wonder about the connection between the Internet and identity. I’m not saying that Google should be the only way to find out information, but it’s the first stop for so many, for so much. I wonder about the impact technology will have on my daughters, and the impact it’s had so far. I wonder about them finding out more about their grandfather, in an age where they can’t find him, through search engines that mark their findings in fractions of a second.

Second premise: And yet, Internet technology gave me these things:

1. Pictures I’d never seen before of my dad, from a long-lost friend of his on Facebook. “Are those his granddaughters I’m looking at in your profile picture?” she asks. And that’s a relationship I had not yet connected with my father: he would be a grandfather, my daughters would be his granddaughters.

2. A blog comment here, from someone who knew my dad—during a time when I know so little about his life. I’m not sure we would have found each other without the Internet. I’m so excited to find out more.

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realize this next thought, and my ten-year-old self would have resisted this, I’m sure. But here goes: my dad never belonged just to me, or just to my family. He also ventolin usa belonged to his friends, and other communities I’d never known or seen. The memoir that my sister and I are writing, then, may not be just a “dual” or “triple” memoir; it may also be something like a community memoir. I want to ask more people what they remember about him.

3. His Masters thesis in Public Administration and a bibliography that he wrote about Japanese in the United States. (Coming soon from Interlibrary loan, more Internet: cross your fingers!)

4. And this page from the California State Sacramento Library catalog, which makes me so happy. Taking my cue from my wonderful university reference librarians, I know that Google does not see everything. There is, however, a great deal of less-Google-able information, available from libraries.

5. A bookstore in Sacramento selling a poetry anthology; one of the poets is my dad.

Last part of the paradox: what does it mean?

Perhaps more obviously, search engines can erase (or obscure) an identity, but it can also restore an identity, in completely unexpected ways.

In the project I want to think more about what that means about humanity’s urges to record, document, remember. Google might not get me a quick answer about my dad, and I’m not sure I want it to do that, anyway. But I can still find him—or fractions of him—through these vast oceans of time and memory.

Despite our rapid technological changes, I think he would have loved our here and now. He wrote so many letters to friends and family. (My first copyediting job, by the way: proofreading those typewritten letters.) I think he’d have an active Facebook account, to share pictures of his granddaughters. And I can almost see him writing witty status updates. Like me, I think he’d share anecdotes about his family, menus of evening dinners, pictures from his travels.

Librarians, writers, readers: our human urge is to connect.

In the book I’ll be writing more about each of these artifacts. For now, I’m remembering that writing the book is one way to put my father’s presence back in the world.

The paradox rephrased: I’m writing both through, and despite, a technology and history that might otherwise erase my father.

*The dystopic novel I’m reading right now–set in the “not so distant future” describes such a person as “ITP” (Impossible To Preserve).

This picture says a lot about where, how, and why I’m traveling, taken at the Seattle Central Public Library:

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To daydream, to promise, to liberate

It’s 10:24PM, and I just finished sending a cover letter and book proposal to this contest. It’s the first writing contest that I’ve entered in…now that I’m counting…hey, twelve fourteen years. I was lucky last time, so maybe some of that luck will carry over to this time.

I’m excited (it’s out there!) and relieved (it’s out there!) and terrified (it’s out there!).

This is the second book proposal I’ve written. The first one was for my academic book. I may return to my academic book eventually. But by comparison, this proposal was so much fun, and so rewarding. I hadn’t realized that I really could write something before I’d written it. I have similar problems writing academic abstracts for conference papers: how do I know what I’m going to argue before I’ve argued it? So I usually need to write the entire paper first, then write the abstract. And, given that proposal deadlines are usually months and months before the conference, the timing of these two acts never works out very well.

With the academic book, I’d already written a full version of the project. So it was easier to write the proposal, knowing the chapter outlines, knowing most of the “through line,” having an academic monograph format to follow (introduction, 3-4 body chapters, conclusion).

But with this project, I have not written the book yet. I know its focus, and I have an idea of how it will be structured. At least for now. You can ask my students: I am a huge believer in (and preacher of) process, allowing the writing process to carry you where it will. That’s where the real insights and discoveries lie.

As I wrote this proposal, however, I was surprised at the book proposal genre’s ability to daydream, to promise, and to liberate, all at the same time. It opened watershed expanses of possibility. Could I do this? ventolin inhaler 100 mcg no prescription Sure. And if I could do that, why not this? It’s a creative work! The writing process actually can carry me where it will. To write the proposal is just that: it’s writing into possibility.

And, I realized, the proposal is a proposal: it’s not a contract. Maybe there are acres (if not oceans) of latitude between the proposal and the finished product.

I have had a hard time with uncertainty, but, as my sister pointed out to me, this is one of the first times in my life that I’m uncertain about my next steps, my next stage. I knew I wanted to major in English before I set foot on the Berkeley campus. I knew I wanted to teach before I finished college. I knew I wanted to be a professor before I finished graduate school. I landed my first teaching job right out of graduate school. To top it off, I’ve had the same lovely and amazing partner for almost 20 years, over half my life. A lot of my life has been stable, and well, I’m a Capricorn: driven, ambitious and goal-setting. Most of the time, I like it that way. And I know that I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have so much stability, especially with love.

On my best days, in my best moments, I know that this new uncertainty—like the creative process—could actually be good for me. Yet I know myself. There’s a strong possibility that what’s good for me, as with most people, is not always going to be what’s easy. That’s all right, though. Capricorns are used to hard work, and that’s usually where and when and how we thrive.

I just want to be strong enough, and graceful enough, and grateful enough to see this uncertainty as a privilege: to see uncertainty as freedom.