I... don't have words.

Some true things I'd like to tell

Dear Diary, I woke up at 6:30 this morning, raised my head to turn off the alarm on my iPhone (a little ethereal piano clip I took from Angelica by Lamb, apparently stolen from Debussy), saw a display of gold and orange streaks across the eastern sky over the tall buildings along the Charles. I thought of getting up. I looked at my phone and a text had come in while I was sleeping - a friend still in college asking me if I was watching the meteor shower. I missed it. I missed it when I was in college, too, even though I always sorta remembered when it was coming. I fell back on the pillow. When I got up an hour later, I did a sun salutation yoga series for the first time. Sunshine was glowing in my windows. It seemed the thing to do.

Dear Diary, last night I had the 3rd-to-last bottle of a lavender Belgian homebrew left over from the batch my good friend made especially for me when I turned 30. This morning I had a pinch of cooking lavender in my oatmeal. With cinnamon. I also have a rag doll donkey stuffed with lavender from Apifera Farm. I don't remember when it became my favorite scent - was it before or after I started visiting Seattle every summer when Dad's neighbors would harvest their lavender and leave heaps of it overflowing from a wheelbarrow by the side of the road? I put it in buckwheat blueberry pancakes, too. Real maple syrup is non-negotiable in these parts.

Dear Diary, when I write about a male character, he always ends up with a smooth forehead and a certain gesture of putting his palm to his forehead and then running a hand over his hair when stressed or trying to think. I should probably come up with a new gesture.

Dear Diary, it has been too long since I: read philosophy, ate butterscotch pudding, got back to the midwest, drove for pleasure, had a flying dream, finished a story, watched Harold and Maude, got out my huge box of old magazine/newspaper clippings and made a collage, danced like a crazy person alone in my room, ate pecorino toscano, traveled abroad, wrote a love letter, spent time with anyone very much younger or older than me, took care of a plant, read out loud to someone.

Dear Diary, I didn't buy the latest Indigo Girls album, but I did download the song True Romantic. For me, listening to that song is kinda like scratching a bug bite raw. I find these lyrics painfully true and compelling (as a long out-of-the-closet romantic):

Baby, if you took all the good stuff and you put it all together

And you took all the bad stuff and you threw it all away

Would I still be the girl that suits your fancy

Would I still be the boy that rocks your world

Dear Diary, sometimes when I'm singing onstage I look out into the dark crowd and see impossible faces.

Dear Diary, I lost my camera charger in the basement bathroom of a New York club (I think?!) and I really miss taking pictures but also I guess I think I've been more present without it.

Dear Diary, I of course L O V E D the Where the Wild Things Are film. It surprised me at first (and then seemed deeply obvious) that my most heartwrenchingly powerful moment of identification in that film was to Carol when he watches Max sail away.

Dear Diary, I love the Snickers ads. Hate the Pepsi ones. I think this really hits on my relationship with words but I've never fully fleshed this out.

Dear Diary, is everyone as driven to connect as I am? When I perform, I want nothing more than to feel recognition from the crowd - for even one person to be feeling a significant Yes. Yes as in, I know...I know exactly. When I think of the people I've loved who have sailed out of my life, I want nothing more than to believe that every once in awhile we are thinking of each other at the same time and smiling. When I am talking with someone, I so want them to lean forward and really absorb what I am saying because it resonates with something inside of them. I tend to believe this drive is fundamentally human, but as inherent to the human condition is the absolute inaccessibility of any other consciousness, so how would I ever know? This kind of thinking makes me a bit mad at times. Reading Milan Kundera makes it worse. Reading Jonathan Safran Foer makes it better. I just learned that he was a philosophy major, too. I think he stole "everything is illuminated" from Kundera. I also happen to think he stole the passage where the phrase "extremely loud and incredibly close" appears from Wind in the Willows. Anyway.

Dear Diary, it has taken me some time to get back to this, but it is now possible to take a snapshot of my wardrobe and in any given frame to find every color of the rainbow represented. Today I am wearing orange and purple and green. My beer-making friend recently told me my wardrobe is entirely too colorful for me not to be working with children. I concur. I regularly read a lot of artsy parenting blogs. Sometimes this makes me self-conscious. I am nowhere near having kids. Sometimes this makes me worried.

Dear Diary, most of my friends call me MacK, if anything, for short. Generally you know a person met me before 2002 if they call me Kenzie or some version of that.

Dear Diary, Christmas is coming. I recently gave up holding out till after Thanksgiving and put on Little Women. I've had the same TV with built-in VCR for ten years and I still have that movie on VHS. It's starting to get a little fuzzy. I wonder if there's any movie more evocative of my childhood. Is there something about 4 girls and a mom in a home that is inherently fertile ground for laughter and play and creativity and wildness and the occasional dramatic outburst? We used to put on records and dance. This is a myopic representation of my childhood of course, but if a person can't be a romantic at the holidays, then when? I haven't been home to Iowa since last Christmas. It is the longest I've ever gone. I am so homesick.

Dear Diary, live music I've seen (in large venues) in the last four years: Death Cab for Cutie (2), Dar Williams, Ellis (4), Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2), Radiohead, Modest Mouse, Leonard Cohen (2), Beirut, Amanda Palmer (2), Bob Mould, Paul McCartney, The Cure, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, TV on the Radio, Fleet Foxes, U2 (one layer back in the inner circle!), Snow Patrol, Natalie Merchant (with the Pops), Noah and the Whale, Airborne Toxic Event (yes I love that midnight song, say what you will), M.I.A., Andrew Bird, Calexico, Silversun Pickups, Band of Horses, Conor Oberst, St. Vincent.... Oh, and Steven Tyler and David Cassidy doing the national anthem at Fenway. Two different games, of course. Leonard Cohen wins, by the way. Well, U2 was an AMAZING show and I jumped and sang my heart out. But Leonard...he romanced me to the bone.

Dear Diary, I have a problem with my ears that gives me a great excuse never to sky- or scuba-dive, even though I kinda always thought I'd eventually try both. I did fly that plane once, which remains one of the best experiences of my life, and I still hope to do that again someday. I am also strongly considering trying to learn Greek; I want to learn to think differently. The last skill I learned was mandolin playing, but I haven't played much since my last lesson. Boo.

Dear Diary, juice is one of my favorite words. I LOVE Rodale's Synonym Finder (really this is no ordinary thesaurus), and the entries for juice and juicy have to be the best collections of words EVER. My Nanowrimo novel (currently stalled at 10,000 words but that's still more fiction than I've written in five years) is an exploration of the idea of potential. Last night I realized that for me the juice metaphor - the sweet, vital stuff under the rind, under the skin, hiding inside - has everything to do with potential.

Dear Diary, I could keep going like this forever. There's so much in a life. And still forever something yearned for.

Dear Diary, last night I read a tip in the Nano forums about writing small talk dialogue with significant subtext. I feel like I am always painfully aware of subtext and sometimes am just dying for people to come out and say whatever it is that is flowing under the surface because that's the juice and that's the truth and that's the most human vital stuff. I love you. I miss you. I'm sorry. I drive the people in my life nuts sometimes, forever prodding them to just say what they have to say. But the person who posted that tip was right - talking around those concise punches of truth VASTLY boosts the word count. I ended up writing 800 words of dialogue about what kind of bird each character would be. The subtext was I care about what happens to you so take good care of yourself.

Dear Diary, some songs will always make me feel like crying. Two of them are This Blue Heaven songs and another is a future This Blue Heaven song. You Are My Sunshine is another. The sun has made good on its early-morning promise today. Happy day.

You look so human, just like me

Ho dudes...  I just wished a co-worker Happy Friday and she reminded me, Happy Friday the 13th!

DUN-DUN-DUNNNNN!!!!

Aha.  Here I thought this was just my monthly clumsy day, but now I see it's much more serious than that.

Let me tell you the story of how I came to dread Friday the 13th.

But first, a prologue:  As a woman who is rather in awe of other women, both present and back and back and back in history, I would very much like to conceive of 13 as an auspicious, feminine, lunar number.  There are 13 lunar cycles per year, and as I hunker down into the colder days, I really am trying harder this year to recognize and go with nature's cycles, rather than against them.  Maybe this means that if this WERE the day of the month that always seems to come around when my depth perception and equilibrium leave me to spill, trip, and stumble my way through the day...well, maybe going with it would mean slowing down, sticking closer to home, being mindful of myself and where I'm at and generally taking care to be patient with myself.  That feels right.  I'd like to go back and maybe tell that to my 8-year-old self on the day I came to see this as a day of high misfortune.

So here's what happened. I was in the 3rd grade and it was Friday the 13th and my mother had scheduled our first family photo since my parents split up; we were to be at the photographer's studio right after school.  The idea for the shot was that my three younger sisters and my mom and I were going to be dressed up in all-white frilly lacy stuff against a white background.  Angels, see.  Well, since the shoot was so soon after school got out (and since she was trying to manage an 8-year-old, a 6-year-old and two 3-year-olds largely on her own for the first time), my mother sent me to school in my fancy white dress and my fancy white shoes and my fancy white tights.  I went out the door with a hug and a warning to be very careful not to get anything on my clothes.

It was a long time ago, so my memory of this day is fragmented into three very vivid moments with darkness in between and around the edges.

Snapshot one:  Walking alone along the sidewalk on the way to school.  Feeling pretty and singing a made-up song to myself.  A wide and silty puddle along the curb.  A clunky old car speeding round the corner.  A fast splash almost as tall as me.  Soaking dress, soaking tights, cold and gray from the waist down.

Snapshot two:  Running at recess.  Suddenly face-down on the blacktop with gravel in my palms and, of course, my knees.  Getting up and frantically dusting off my knees as droplets of blood appeared and smeared around the edges of the holes in my tights.

Snapshot three:  Sobbing on Mrs. Clark's shoulder in the empty classroom, trying to explain between hiccups how I had ruined my mom's angel picture.  Three of my girlfriends peeking in through the windows along the wall.  Mrs. Clark telling me it wasn't my fault, it was just Friday the 13th striking again!

Hm.

My sisters and I always half-joke that the stories my parents tell from their childhood are all kinda depressing.  Having just written this, I'm now having one of those ever-increasing freaky moments of omgI'mturningintomyparents....  Soooo let me try to parse out what it is I see in this story today, looking back.

Mrs. Clark was so sweet to comfort me and not to blame me (for getting myself all dirty) or my mother (for sending a little kid to school in fancy white clothes).  But she totally threw Friday the 13th under the bus, man!  And here I am, a full-grown adult, getting real nervous because I just realized the spiteful day has come around again.

I think there may be another lesson here and I think it has to do with that thing I'd like to be able to go back and tell that sad and guilty little kid now, which would go something like: Kiddo, you're not an angel.  You're better than that.  You're human.  And you have to let yourself be human so that you can find out all the wonderful things you are capable of as a human being.  So get yourself some rad playclothes and go do exactly what it is you feel like doing right now, because that is where you will find out who you really are.

So far this morning, my bangs are stubbornly sticking straight up, I spilled my mocha on the Starbucks counter, and I knocked a bunch of stuff off my desk.  Most often, days like this make me feel like a hopeless mess.  But what if this time I just slow down and listen.  What if I honor being human by stopping and breathing and listening to what it is I'm really yearning for today.

I'm thinking it's Sigur Ros and hot tea and maybe my new oil paints and uninterrupted time to pay undivided attention to the girl in my NaNoWriMo novel who's about to dig herself a new home underneath the ruddy roots of an ancient madrona tree.

And how will you celebrate this Friday the 13th?

Snapshot of my psyche

You don't go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?

In this day and age, we all have impossible To Do lists, right? At any given moment, I have - no exaggeration - 50 things I should be doing, which means that even if I'm doing something productive (and chances are not as good as one would hope) there are always 49 other things I'm neglecting. Always.

Between personal stuff, home stuff, band stuff, work stuff, writing stuff, and friend & fam stuff, some things just have to go by the wayside. In the last two months I have embraced the reality that I may never again wear a pair of truly matching socks. Same color is awesome, same color family is still okay and some days it's an accomplishment if the socks are in the same color palette. (Good thing show attire for me involves tights, so left and right never leave each others' side!) The good news is that once you start calling yourself an artist, people seem more apt to let these things slide.

With all of this Stuff To Do (I was going to type STD but I think that acronym already belongs to a whole other set of unpleasantries) I've been really trying to savor and soak up the quiet moments I find to myself. Lately that has been limited to my lovely walks to work.

I'm such a sun worshipper that this time of year up here can darken my outlook by several shades. My recent strolls through the sunlit colors and textures of autumn have been nothing short of medicinal.

In the course of writing this, I thought of 3 things I need to get back to this afternoon; I'll bet you did, too, in the course of reading it. As we both rush off, I wish you your own moments of stillness and light: may you find the time to completely forget all the Stuff (Is this a...what day is this?) and just bask, however briefly, in the present.