I woke up at 6am and noticed this, through the large hotel window. Our trip to San Francisco was exciting and fun in so many ways and this was only a quiet, brief moment for which I was only half awake, but it was still quite beautiful.
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-Discover a new favorite flavor of ice cream
-Swim in a lake.
-Watch a movie outdoors.
-Find the perfect sangria recipe.
-Host one really fun get-together.
-Hang out around a bonfire.
-Eat watermelon with salt and lime.
-Buy a bike.
-Read a really fat novel.
...And wear a lot of sunscreen.
]]>Cheryl Strayed (aka Sugar!) gives a few helpful words on writing and giving up the idea that everything you write needs to be the best thing ever.
Knopf Doubleday has a whole series of these short videos from writers on their YouTube channel. It's both a great resource and a nice example of publishing embracing all the internet can offer in the world of books.
]]>2. Things will look weird in the dark, but roll with it. Jump when you walk past a pond and hear a bullfrog. Say, "What is that?" Be alarmed about the unknown creature and walk quickly towards your adventure.
3. You must be with friends. Any kind will do, but the sweet funny kind that buy you blow-up mattresses from Target and drive you an hour through the dark morning, the kind that you do not see often enough, work particularly well.
4. When you see the balloons for the first time laid out on the driving range at a golf course run towards them saying things like, "I didn't know how big they'd be!" and "Ballllloooooons!" until the people in charge heard you back to the group.
5. Take photos. Instruct your friends and long suffering boyfriend where to stand. Repeat "Tequila!" over and over again, because that is the name of your balloon, and because everyone loves tequila.
6. Notice the following things: the damp grass, the occasional golf ball under foot, how loud the flames are, how the balloons swell and slowly lift into the air.
7. Climb into the basket!
8. There will be other people in the balloon. People will be chatty and a group of women from Texas, who are out a Winetastic day, will flirt with the balloon pilot, leaving you to your corner of the balloon, shifting around with your people for the best views, to lean into each other and grin and say, "This is epic!" and "Ohmygod, look!" and "Let me take a photo, this is too gorgeous, can you believe we're in the sky!?"
9. Except for the Texans and the on-and-off again burst of the burner it is quiet in the balloon. Notice the following things as you drift over wine country: The green landscape, the shadows of balloons against the hills, the way, how ridiculously happy you feel to be where you are.
11. Look down.
12. Look around.
13. Don't be self conscious about becoming a broken record. You're right. This is fun. You are loving it. Go ahead and let the experience fill you up and float you away like the warm air contained above your head.
14. Keep taking photos!
15. At some point, you'll drift towards the ground. Enjoy these moments. Hold hands. Grin at your friends. Watch the earth get closer. Wonder, just before you touch down (and maybe after), if you're on the ground or not. A team of people will come to pull your balloon to a resting point.
16. Climb out of the basket.
17. Follow the morning up with a champagne brunch. Eat some extra bacon.
18. When, days afterward, you return to your normal life and sit cross legged on your bed to download photos to your laptop, you will barely remember being tired, will barely recall the wave of exhaustion that you hit you later that night. Watch the few seconds of video you captured. Begin scheming for your next flight.
(For more of my photos, check out Flickr. Also, if you can't get enough, read Lauren's thoughts and Kamel's, too!)
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This weekend I watched my best friend open wedding gifts.
I've been meaning to write about the fact that Vanessa is getting married since she got engaged over a year ago. It was a weekday evening and I was sitting on the couch with Jeff. We were watching an episode of "Law & Order" on my laptop. When my phone rang I had to push myself up from where I was slumped against the back, my legs hanging over Jeff's knees.
I paused the show and Jeff raised his eyebrows at me. It was the first day in April, the first game of the season for the Minnesota Twins. It was unusual for Vanessa to call instead of text.
We grew up two and a half blocks from each other and a grade apart. I think we fought once and stopped speaking for a week or two, but that time is hazy for me, a strange blip in what was otherwise a continuous loop of phone calls, sleep overs and trashy magazines we walked to the gas station to buy along with big bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. Because I was always trailing behind Vanessa from school to school, and because she was a theater kid while I joined the debate team, we did not always have the same friends or schedules. But we would meet in the middle, teaming up to do a Dramatic Duo routine on the Speech team one year and always only a couple blocks away. When I was gone at summer camp I would write her long letters and when she wrote back she would include pages torn out of magazines and gossipy updates on my crushes.
(We were cool kids.)
When I answered the phone I heard her take a deep breath and then say, "MARGO! You answered!"
"Yes," I said, "I answered!"
"Well, it's just that I called my mom and she didn't answer and then I called my dad and he didn't answer!"
"Vanessa? If I'm the third call after your mom and your dad... does that mean you have something exciting to tell me?"
Vanessa laughed and laughed. In all iconic Vanessa stories she laughs and laughs. There was the time we went to a movie and afterward a friend who had moved away found us and said, "I knew you were in the theater because I recognized your laugh!" Two of the games we played at the wedding shower involved drawing, and every stick person representation of Vanessa was accompanied by either a huge silly grin or a halo of ha ha ha's.
"Yes, I do," Vanessa said. "I'm engaged!"
I don't remember what I said next. Probably "Oh my god!" and "Congratulations!" and "What!? Tell me the story!" and "Yay!" and I'm sure we laughed and squealed a little. What I remember is feeling, suddenly, like I was thirteen and laying on the fold out bed in Vanessa's dark basement, imagining our grown up selves, promising each other that we'd be best friends forever and each other's maids of honor, obviously.
We didn't go to the same college and for a long time after high school ended we didn't live in the same city, sometimes not the same state. I was in California when she met her fiancé and New York when he proposed. Many of the guests at the shower were family and friends from parts of Vanessa's life that I haven't been a part of, from college and her first job and local politics. You can't imagine all the people you will meet, when you are young and it seems people are mostly knowable, your friends names called off in alphabetical order at the start of every school day, adults easily tagged with a Ms. or an Uncle or a parent of so-and-so. You try to imagine it. You puzzle over it as you fall asleep at night. You speculate. And because you are eleven or thirteen or sixteen, you get it wrong.
But maybe not entirely. If you asked thirteen year old Vanessa who would be handing her the gifts at her wedding shower, she would have said, "Margaret."
"Obviously," my thirteen year old self would have agreed.
And so I did. However unknowable life might be, it's good to know we got this part down.
(We are still pretty cool.)
]]>To note the occasion my mom has posted another of her textiles based on "The Scream" on her blog. Which I am shamelessly stealing in order to revive the thus far not very extensive Scream Collection series.
Pretty cool, right? There are more details about how my mom made it on her blog. Go visit her! Add to her site hit count (which is actually already impressive and more international than mine).
]]>I generally do not buy into the idea that things happen for a reason or that "no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should" (sorry, Max). But I recognize how serendipitously things fell together, how the disappointment at not getting the other apartment in March was a blessing in disguise, how lucky it was that I saw this apartment listing when I did, how it came in the same week Jeff lined up a new interview.
"So things might really work out?" one or the other would ask, a little dazed. "Yes," the other one would say, "I think maybe so!" And then, so not to jinx it, we'd quickly look away and shrug, hoping the universe didn't see us getting our hopes up, again.
And then. Minus one long day when we knew his references had been called but Jeff hadn't, yet, things just slid easily and quickly into place. I was standing underneath an umbrealla at the bus stop when my phone buzzed. Jeff had already texted earlier to say that he got the call just as he was going into another interview and that he was planning on returning it when he got back to his car.
So I knew, without looking, and for a few seconds after the phone buzzed I stood there and thought should I stop on my way home to get the champagne or just rush back as quickly as possible?
The new apartment is nicer than the one we didn't get. It has French doors that separate the living room from the dining room and big windows. The kitchen is small but it's a top floor corner unit with decent storage and a (decorative non functioning) brick fireplace. It's on the same block as the one that fell through, within easy range of Thai food and bookstores and movies and lakes.
It was a long time coming, but it turns out that April was our month. Finally!
It is tempting to think that with one giant weight off our shoulders that everything is great! Perfect! I have no complaints! Which is almost true. I know new and different challenges will present themselves. And we will only be worrying less about money, not suddenly becoming financially secure. But at least for now most of my complaints are quickly followed by the thought, "...yes, but at least this tough chapter is over. So there's that."
And that, happily, was April.
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When I bought the book the guy at the counter glanced at my selection, smiled and said, "Ah, hot off the presses!"
Lauren Groff's Arcadia is not a surprising new find, a new under-the-radar release that I can't believe no is making a fuss about. People are making a fuss. It seems redundant, then, to mention it or write too much about it. You'll probably like it. Maybe you'll love it. The bright cover will look nice on your bookshelf. The narrator will stay with you for a while after you finish, lingering.
That's the word that kept coming back to me as I read Arcadia. Lingering. Everything seemed to linger. The book follows Bit, who is born on a commune in the 1960's. At first Bit lingered in the woods and grounds that made up the commune's homestead in upstate New York. The descriptions of his observations are long and detailed, and though eventually the books move on and outward as Bit ages, I continued to feel the early descriptions in later pagers.
It's a good book to sink into, the kind I appreciated reading in hardcover, the weight of it seemingly appropriate for the thick prose and dense images.
You don't need me to tell you think, but I'll throw in my two cents. It's one worth reading, hot off the presses.
(Bonus! Read a charming interivew with Lauren Groff at The Millions.)
]]>How to Write a Novel from Antoine Wilson on Vimeo.
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