A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard

If A Million Little Pieces (the favorite book of the editors at amazon.com for 2003) made me glad that I’m not an alcoholic or drug addict or criminal or the parent of an alcoholic or drug addict or criminal, My Friend Leonard makes me glad that I feel free to be who I am, and not trapped living my life in a huge lie. It’s a relief to see that James Frey’s life has come a long way up from the opening pages of A Million Little Pieces. He’s still struggling in My Friend Leonard. It opens almost as hard and more sad than Little Pieces and continues in the semi-stream-of-consciousness prose voice that gives his work such rawness and immediacy. Both of these books are ultimately tales of recovery from loss and the stubbornness of James Frey’s spirit. Read them when you’re feeling strong —

Roomba Rocks

Although I really do love to vacuum, I have had an incredible amount of fun today watching the Roomba do all the work. Colin Angle, the co-founder of iRobot, the company which makes the Roomba, is a fraternity brother and friend of Brad’s from MIT, which makes it even more fun to watch such a great product in action. Having a Roomba didn’t actually save me much housecleaning time today since I watched it zoom around for almost as long as I would have spent doing the work myself. There’s something mesmerizing about watching this frisbee whirl around sucking up dirt. We had an earlier version at our house in Boulder, but that house has lots of different levels and the Roomba doesn’t work as well there as it does here where the house is just an upstairs and a downstairs (okay, and an entry area, and the stairs themselves, of course). This version has a docking station where it charges and the really cool thing is that after the Roomba has decided that it has covered the surface of the room, it returns itself to its home. How cool is that!?!? I sat on the stairs (thereby tamping them down significantly) and watched the end of the Roomba’s activity downstairs and got to see it scootch itself up to its station. I’m still waiting on my teleporter machine, but am completely happy with the entertainment value and vacuuming skill of the Roomba. Magic.

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

I love Anne Lamott’s writing. I first read All New People years ago, and Bird by Bird is one of my favorite books to read about writing instead of doing my own writing. Plan B continues the themes of Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, where she describes her reluctant experience of coming to Christianity as being "hunted down by Jesus." As she says in the acknowledgments page of Plan B: "I am deeply grateful to David Talbot, editor in chief of Salon.com, who published much of this material in earlier form. I am just about the only overtly spiritual person he can stand…" Some of my best friends are spiritual people. I even invite them over to my house for dinner sometimes, as long as they agree not to talk about spirituality. And I won’t even start on any of a wide range of possible diatribes about religion and politics and how the last election radicalized me from being self-identified as an agnostic to being an atheist. One of Anne Lamott’s many gifts as a writer is to bring sadness and humor together in the way that life does, and bring us along with her. Here is a sample of her work:

I asked a friend of mine who practices a spiritual path called Diamond Heart to explain the name, because I instinctively know that both Sam [her son] and I have, or are, diamond hearts. My friend said our hearts are like diamonds because they have the capacity to express divine light, which is love; we not only are portals for this love, but are made of it. She said we are made of light, our hearts faceted and shining, and I believe this, to a point: I disagree with her saying we are beings of light wrapped in bodies that merely seem dense and ponderous, yet actually are made of atoms and molecules, with infinite space and light between them. It must be easy for her to believe this, as she is thin, and does not have children. But I can meet her halfway: I think we are diamond hearts, wrapped in meatballs.

I would call my path Diamond Meatball: people would comfort and uplift one another by saying, "There’s a diamond in there somewhere."

Still, on better days, I see us as light in containers, like those pierced tin lanterns that always rust, that let the candlelight shine out in beautiful snowflake patterns. (p. 160)

As a person clearly on the Diamond Meatball path, it’s nice to have a companion like Anne Lamott, and as I finished her book late last night in the after-midnight Alaskan twilight, I didn’t want it to end.

Only One of the Many Ways in which I am Crazy

I love to vacuum. I’ve always loved to vacuum. There’s something so satisfying about seeing the progress of the clean vacuum tracks and paths across a room. I stopped doing my own housecleaning when I moved in with Brad in Boston about fifteen years ago, but I do clean our house here in Homer. Yesterday and the day before I scrubbed bathtubs and toilets and folded laundry and did lots of aerobic housecleaning; but yesterday I did my favorite household task of all. I vacuumed the stairs until the carpet looked brand new, including the risers, which are so fluffy and nice now. We have a central vacuum system here, which is awfully fancy, and very quiet. I could vacuum for hours. That’s only part of the crazy part, though. The real craziness is that I then don’t really want anyone to walk on the carpet and tamp it down after I’ve made it all fluffy and nice. It’s probably a good thing that our Eldorado Canyon house is all tile and stone flooring or I’d never be able to have friends over.

Blogging Anniversary

I passed the one year anniversary of Thoughts in Random Patterns about ten days ago. I wrote my first blog post on Saturday, June 19, 2004, and then did what apparently a lot of bloggers do: I didn’t write another post until Monday, January 3, 2005. Then I only did one post in February. It has taken me awhile to build momentum, but I’m in the groove now and definitely intend to keep communicating this way. Going to Paris steadied my blogging practice, both because it was an easy way to communicate to friends and family what I was doing, and because I felt like life in Paris was "worthy" of writing about. It’s so hard to realize that all of our daily lives are "worthy" of writing about. I wanted to share my experience of that great city, and writing helps me synthesize my own thoughts, too.

Part of the long blogging hiatus last summer and fall was that after my initial post I had a couple of frustrating experiences with blogging and got discouraged. Just a couple of days after my first post I crafted a long essay about something and posted it as a draft. When I went back to do some editing, the post was gone. That was frustrating. Typepad has improved significantly in the past 6 months, but I still use a blog posting tool called BlogJet that allows me to create posts without needing to be connected to the internet and has a spell-checker and lots of editing options and saves files to my local hard drive. Formatting still has challenges. I changed from a 2 column layout to a 3 column layout after I got back from France and all the pretty pictures that I had incorporated into text got squished instead of magically resizing to fit into the new column size. I’m sure the blog magicians will figure all of that out, too — and the technology is at a point where I feel fairly confident that my labors won’t be lost.

Two friends whose blogs inspired me to get going aren’t blogging anymore. Jerry actually closed his blog down, and Jenny just doesn’t write much anymore. I keep them on my Blogroll as an optimistic gesture that there may come a time that blogging works better for them than it does now. The ocean of language always awaits us.

And part of the long dry spell was that I didn’t write at all last summer, and didn’t write much last fall, and haven’t been doing much writing work in the last year at all. I still haven’t come to a place in my writing life where I’ll say no to six weeks in Paris to stay home and work. I am committed to working on my writing this summer. I have a two month window of time here with only the occasional interruption (e.g., a trip to Japan at the end of July). I printed out the current draft version of The North Side of Trees and am going to start working my way through what I’ve already written and see what remains to be done. I’ll have my very own writing desk and music and candles and no excuses.

Every day you must say to yourself, “Today I am going to begin.”

(Jean Pierre de Caussade SJ)

Time Zones

Okay, I’ve already admitted to being befuddled by time zones and time changes, and now my computer is living in two timezones at once, which is extra confusing. The little clock in the corner of my screen says 10:48 p.m. right now, but when I just did my blog post, it goes through the Mobius server in Boulder and comes out the other side as being posted at 12:48 a.m. on July 1st. We’re straddling our own dateline here. I’m sure I’ll figure this out, eventually, right?!

Redundancy

We just finished unpacking our 12 boxes of books and clothes and put the books into some semblance of order on our wooden red JC Penney bookcases. Brad and I both shipped hardback copies of books from Boulder that were already on the shelves here. Oops. I discovered my duplicate first, The Devil that Danced on the Water by Aminatta Forna. I felt silly for paying to ship a book here that I already had, and then we discovered Brad’s duplicate, Platform Leadership: How Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco Drive Industry Innovation. I guess when we want to read a book, we really want to, even if it takes two copies and almost a year of waiting in the Unread Books bookcase.

At Home in Homer

It’s just after 9 at night here, and the sun still shines brightly and will shine for another 3 hours or so. It’s great to be here where my desk is completely empty except for a computer and there are no piles of things to sort/file/do and the phone never rings.

In the past 30 hours we’ve settled in nicely. I’ve been doing a steady stream of laundry, mostly the sheets used to cover the furniture while we’re gone, and our travel laundry, and making sure all the towels and bathmats are fresh for our visitors. I like doing laundry and seeing the clean, orderly piles of clothes when I’m done. We’ve gone to the regular grocery store and the good-for-you healthy store, signed up for summer memberships at the health club, and picked up our 12 boxes of books and clothes that my fantastic assistant, Kelli, shipped to us and timed just perfectly for our arrival. The Jeep battery was dead when we got here, but our kind neighbors let us use their battery charger and the Jeep is rolling. Brad magically emailed the nice former owners of our house and found the furnace boiler repairman, Lyle, who came this morning and made the hot water work again and was friendly and cheerful, too. I like this small town.

Tomorrow I’ll vacuum the carpets and wash the floors and finish cleaning all the bathrooms and we’ll be ready for our first visitor who arrives from Boulder via Anchorage at 2:50 p.m. The house needs to have the trim painted, and the windows need to be washed, and the driveway needs to be graded, and the yard needs to be weed-whacked since you can barely get in the front door for all the growing things and and and — all the joys of home ownership. But there’s nothing urgent now that we have transportation, food, and hot water, and plenty of books, of course.

Getting here was quite pleasant except that Brad’s flight from Boston to Seattle was delayed and he just missed the Seattle to Anchorage flight. Just. We were text messaging as he rode the shuttle train between terminals and I really thought he’d make it; but he didn’t. I was sad when the big door to the plane closed and Brad wasn’t on it. Then I put on my new velvety black eye mask from Sharper Image that Velcros tightly to the head and slept soundly through the entire flight. I don’t even know whether they served a meal. When I landed in Anchorage, the jetway wasn’t working, so we walked down the stairs and across the tarmac and in that short time the smoke from a nearby forest fire made the old semi-post-traumatic-stress disorder responses kick in. I wonder how long it will be before seeing television news coverage of fires in Arizona or California or the smell of a lot of wood burning doesn’t make my heart race and acidify my stomach. Still working on that one.

When Brad flew in an hour later, he said the snow and the arctic light on the mountains coming in to Anchorage was beautiful.

We had breakfast at the Snow City Cafe, which feels like a very Boulder place to me — or maybe it’s just that I like cafes with Nuevo Huevos and chai on the menu. We took a DeHavilland Dash 8 puddle jumper to Homer and here we are, both blogging away, connected to the world on our computers, listening to Buddha Bar III, looking out at the Homer Spit and Kachemak Bay.. It’s good to be here.

Trashy Detective Books

The Starbucks across the street from the W Hotel here in Seattle feels like an actual cafe and not just a coffee delivery factory. It is large and has wi-fi internet connection and nice music and there are a couple of comfy lounge chairs in the corner by the floor-to-ceiling windows. I have spent the greater part of two days sitting there reading trashy detective books, which is one of my very favorite things to do. I’ve read Cold Service and Widow’s Walk by Robert Parker, (two more in the very long series of Spenser mysteries which are set in Boston), One Shot by Lee Child, (a Jack Reacher mystery), The Forgotten Man by Robert Crais (an Elvis Cole mystery), Ten Hot Ones by Janet Evanovich, (a Stephanie Plum mystery), and am making my way through The Bourne Legacy, which is written by Eric van Lustbader but is copyright 2004 by the Estate of Robert Ludlum. I’ve had a lot of grande decaf nonfat lattes and Earl Grey tea with milk while hanging out at the Starbucks, and I’ll confess to at least a couple of delicious glazed donuts. Yum. Indulging all around. I’ve also been watching West Wing Monday marathons on Bravo and The Closer on TNT and renting silly movies (Hitch, Hostage (which was actually a Robert Crais non-Elvis Cole book)) and basically soaking up a bunch of indulgences that aren’t available to me in Homer, especially television. I did buy several first novels and have read Osprey Island by Thisbe Nissen and started The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw. Knitting, a first novel by Anne Bartlett, and Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life will go in my carry on, but I suspect I’ll find another mystery to entertain me on the plane tonight. I think John Sanford has a new Lucas Davenport book out…

Brad will fly across the country from Boston and we’ll meet at the airport to take our flight to Anchorage together, arriving late. We’ll stay at the downtown Marriott and have breakfast at the Snow City Cafe and take a de Havilland Beaver puddle jumper down to Homer and our summer can officially begin.

Seattle

I’m sitting in the terminally chic lobby of the W Hotel in Seattle, having spent the entire day yesterday in my hotel room. It’s somehow incredibly decadent to stay in bed and order room service meals and watch television and read trashy detective books all day long. It did pour rain pretty much the entire day yesterday, so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to stay in bed. This morning I felt rested and ready to hit the town. I drank the Starbucks latte that Brad kindly brought to me unprompted after his morning run and took a shower and got dressed and actually left the room and the hotel and walked around for an hour and a half getting some sense of the city. It’s sunny and breezy here today, and I covered much of the downtown area on foot. I like cities: the apparent purposefulness of people walking quickly, the availability of bookstores and coffee (especially here in Seattle!) and shiny new things in storefront windows. Seattle is nicely ethnically varied and laid out in a fairly tidy grid pattern and all the steep hills raise the heart rate during a casual stroll. It’s strange to me that Pike’s Place Market, which is probably the most touristy part of town, is also home to a large concentration of adult movie theaters and Girls Girls Girls places. Or maybe XXX entertainment action is why people travel to Seattle?? The Rem Koolhaas designed public library is just around the corner from our hotel. I’ve walked past it a couple of times, but am saving going inside to share with Brad, who is mostly excited about checking out the bathrooms.

I suppose that we’re technically on our way to Alaska. We left Boulder yesterday, but I’m here for a week while Brad does board meetings and a Microsoft thing and a Gnomedex conference (whatever that is — something for geeks, I think) and then he’s making a quick trip to Boston. It’s good to do a cross-continent 2 day trip on red-eye flights; really makes you appreciate sleeping in a bed again? So I’m going to have plenty of time to enjoy Seattle and being in an urban environment before we get to Homer for the rest of the summer.