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How Murakami helped me define adulthood

January 9, 2012 by Linda | 0 comments

I would also link creation with adulthood, which is probably how a lot of people channel their creative energies into having kids.

My favorite things to read are long, epic novels. When I am enchanted by a fictional world, I want to stay there for as long as I possibly can. Bring on Moby Dick, Infinite Jest, The Man Without Qualities(both volumes), In Search of Lost Time, and 2666. I’ve happily revisited them all.

Recently I’ve tucked into Murakami’s IQ84, pleased to immerse myself into a new world of weird splendor. I enjoyed it as I read it, but I am left with a feeling of missed opportunity. I don’t intend for this to be a book review, so I’ll skip the breakdowns. What struck me most about the reading experience was that it’s like visiting a country you’d never been to, where the culture is new and captivating and filled with interesting art, foods, natural landscapes and people, but you’re stuck with a tour guide who draws your attention to the wrong things which you don’t notice as being the wrong things because everything was still new and wonderful to you until you get home and realize you missed out on so much because of an idiot host with poor taste.

In life, I suppose there is a lot of this. You can only focus on one avenue at a time. Most of the time I’ve made decisions serendipitously, letting chance dictate and going where the currents take me. The choices I made were usually reactive, not proactive, and many times simply capricious. Mostly this hasn’t harmed me. But maybe this is why I have a hard time feeling like an adult. What is an adult? I just had this conversation with a friend of mine, and though we are both around 40, neither of us feels like a grown up. But neither could we figure out what that means exactly. I reckon I’d spent the last 15 years or so being solely responsible for my well being, but that’s apparently not enough. Because the reality is, major decisions are fucking serious business. Who you choose to build a life with and how you do it, impacts all aspects of who you are or become. The choice of vocation, the true pursuit of a calling, changes how you think, earn, prioritize, value, and live.

It’s easier to just “fall into” something, because when the shit hits the fan, it’s not your fault or it doesn’t really matter. Your hopes and dreams weren’t pinned to the outcomes, you can flit away, find someone new, and let something else happen to you. But adults choose consciously and are invested in outcomes. Maybe this is how I define adulthood. It’s more than just having commitments or responsibilities. In wanting to marry Anton and create a life with him, and finally trying to write a book, I find myself for the first time deeply caring about what happens next. It’s no longer, well, whatever happens, I’ll manage, but admitting: I want this to happen, and I will try to make it so.

It struck me then, that writing fiction was akin to being an adult. Because an author has to make decisions and is responsible for her story . No wonder I find it so difficult.

 

Staying above the fray

December 16, 2011 by Linda | 2 Comments

There can come a time when you realize that the cascade of choices you have made did not yield the expected results of satisfaction, comfort, or safety, that what you have actually succeeded in doing is trap yourself in a cycle of misery and cruelty as both the perpetrator and victim, and the overriding feeling that grows and is nurtured, is the burning force of rage.

To feel rage is to feel powerless. And to give in to rage and let it take hold is to be rendered blind and insensitive to the world around you. My mother was one of eight sisters in South Korea, met and married my military father and came to live in the US in 1972 knowing no English. I was adopted in 1975. It quickly turned ugly between them. And this is why I do not blame my mother for leaving me and my father when I was eight to return to her home country.

Nearly thirty years have gone by. My father passed away, there was an entire decade through which my mom and I didn’t speak, and now she lives in Florida with a new family. She is 70 and raising grandkids. I got drunk with my stepbrother and heard him proclaim how much he loves my mother and how wonderful she is with his sons ages 8 and 10, that they turned out so well because my mom is the one actively raising them as he and his wife grow their restaurant business. And I am relieved. Her rage has passed, and though her nature is such that she will always nurture a kernel of dissatisfaction, she has an outlet to love and be loved.

There are those who cannot forgive a woman for leaving behind a young child to be raised alone by a man who was emotionally incapable. But I have seen rage from all sides, and the best outcome for everybody is to walk in opposite directions until it burns itself out. The profoundest gift my parents ultimately gave me was to leave me alone.

Sometimes the people in your life fail you and vice versa. Guilt builds, knowing that the best you can do is catastrophically, at times, not good enough for the people who rely upon you. We are different people at different stages of our lives. So let it go. Hopefully life gives us chances to make amends.

This way lies madness, and that way madness lies

December 8, 2011 by Linda | 0 comments

Sometimes the world feels as empty as this. Actually, that's not so bad.

How much of your waking hours do you spend alone? I no longer have an office nor colleagues, thus am generally alone for 12 hours of a day, say from 8 to 8 when Anton returns from his job. I now understand why writers have a reputation for being crazy. Or turn into drunks.

I haven’t posted much on the blog, gathering my scant discipline to rally around the act of producing words of fiction. I’ve amassed somewhere over 20,000 words, 60 pages or so, of which very little will make it into any semblance of a future novel. It is ridiculously tiring work, mostly because of the psychological dramas that play out every day just to get myself to sit down and write. But it’s also profoundly rewarding. So what’s the problem?

Marinating in your own mind for days on end is almost certainly a recipe for madness. Writing fiction for yourself is also different from simply “working at home.” In the latter scenario, you still have outside forces calling the shots and setting your goals, clients or colleagues with whom you could email, call or skype, and ultimately have external parameters with which you calibrate yourself and your output.

Essentially, I am outside the realm of every day society now. And the thing is that without these words, I don’t exist. Alone in my apartment I have nothing to show for my existence save for the very words I produce.

So to get my head out of my ass, I’m off to meet Phil for lunch…

The case of the missing grill

November 21, 2011 by Linda | 1 Comment

Our grill in happier times. Which is last week, when we still had it.

Saturday night, we wanted to barbecue. I marinated some Korean style ribs, had some salmon and pork belly to fire up. Most of our fellow eaters had arrived and Anton and Davit went downstairs with the charcoal. Two minutes later they came back reporting that the grill was not there. Not there? Not where? In the spot it usually sat? Not outside? Not in the backyard at all? I marched down to check it out, mostly expecting that it was some sort of bizarre joke, but indeed, no grill. How does a 70 lb. cast iron grill just disappear?

Mind you, we have a small enclosed back yard space that we share only with our downstairs neighbor who had moved out a few weeks ago. There is no access to the yard except through the apartments. High walls separate each building lot. It is not a trivial matter to have executed the absconding of our grill.

However. There have been workmen renovating the neighbor’s space below, and perhaps in a bit of miscommunication, they were advised that they were welcome to take home anything they found left behind in the yard. I was told to put blue tape on the items they should remove, and maybe they got their signals crossed and thought they could take anything without the tape. But yet, there is still a bunch of existing crap out there, both with and without tape. Also, the only things missing are our grill and two oil lamps. Perhaps someone just really wanted to have a cookout that weekend and will return our things today, post-haste. (Just looked outside. Still not there).

It was my birthday yesterday. A common congratulatory wish is that your upcoming year be even better than the last. Last year was pretty damn terrific. I got my camera and a few lenses. Went to Greece and Turkey. Sailed to Martha’s Vineyard. Got laid off and started writing again. And I got engaged. So this year will hopefully reflect the maturation of those themes: actually being married, participating in the Newport-Bermuda race, more traveling, and greater skill in writing and picture making. And of course, staying alert to life’s currents and being grateful for all of the people and experiences that help steer our path. Or as they say, appreciate your grill while you have it, for tomorrow it may be gone.

Visual vs Verbal storytelling, part 2. And, why don’t more people pursue their dreams?

October 26, 2011 by Linda | 1 Comment

I had no idea what it was I wanted to do with this blog when I started it. Intermittant entries for a month led me to understand that I want to write fiction. And now I’m having a bloggerly crisis. Where do I go from here? Or rather, how do I maintain this blog?

In preparation for starting the novel, I’ve been doing a lot of personal writing, or as I put it, writing as psychotherapy. I’m a little tired of myself and I imagine it’s uninteresting to post. But there have been a few things that have occurred to me.

1. I was talking to a lively woman in her 50s over the weekend, and she confessed that her dream had always been to work with animals. Unless you count job seekers as animals, this is not how she makes her money. It was a short conversation, and we didn’t go into what exactly “working with animals” entails, but you wonder, why don’t you then? I imagine it’s because anytime you hear that somebody is following their dreams, it comes across as self-indulgent and impractical. Shameful, even. Especially when you already have an established life, used to making a certain salary, your days routinized and comfortable–changing it up seems rash or too difficult. But middle age strikes me as a perfect time to go for it. The kids are in college, the career has plateaued and the marriage may need some new sparks. You can either let your dreams remain ineffable, or try to make a plan to turn them into concrete action. But the upshot is that making your dreams come true requires a bit of sacrifice in the short term and one needs to be okay with that. Seems worth it though. How many people can actually say they are living their dream?

I had dreams of going to Pamukkale, owning a Leica rangefinder camera, and being a writer. One left to go...

I am not quite middle aged, and my family life is only beginning. I’ll be 37 when I get married, and kids may or may not follow. But I have a strong sense of now or never. I was lucky in that being laid off from my job acted as a catalyst, but I am also struggling with feelings of being selfish or non-contributing as I sit and try to write instead of looking for a “real” job. This will not be sustainable in the long run because, yes, having even a little time to attempt this is a luxury if I want to maintain my current lifestyle.

2. “Don’t write unless you have something to say.” This little piece of advice is probably what has kept me from writing fiction most of my adult life. Because I’ve never had a particular story I needed to tell. For years I’ve had teachers, mentors, the hobo on the street, friends, lovers, bartenders, telling me I should be a writer, most of whom have never actually read anything I’d written (which I’d always found strange). But recently, I read this and felt that click of recognition:

“McGurl persuasively suggests that O’Connor wrote ‘The Crop’ as an ‘auto-exorcism’ of her own inner amateur, who must occasionally have wondered what she was going to write about. The story had to be disguised as a satire about someone else, because no real writer would admit to such a shameful lack of ‘creativity’. But what is there to be ashamed of? Proust was surely speaking for many of his colleagues when he wrote that the desire to become a writer often comes long in advance of an ‘authentic’ subject:

Since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was time I knew what I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, trying to find some subject … my mind would cease to function, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or that perhaps a malady of the brain was hindering its development.

Writing remains the ‘invisible vocation’ of Proust’s narrator, for the greater part of seven volumes. Marcel’s desire to write comes not from some inner need to tell the world about medieval churches or his grandmother, but from a love of reading.”

3. Writing, and art in general, is stressful because you are putting your work out there for public scrutiny. People can read my blog and check my progress or ask to read or inquire how much one has written on any given day. This is different from most jobs. Most people go to work and don’t have someone beyond their boss looking over their shoulders every day and evaluating whether what they are doing has any merit or elegance or what your improvement curve looks like. In most occupations, people can just assume their loved ones are doing a good job at work without ever witnessing the actual performance. But everybody has opinions about writing and what constitutes worthwhile art. The best one can do is acknowlege that there will be people who read your work and deem it to be crap, and that’s just fine.

4. Photography to me is different somehow. Yes, it is the artist’s vision that shows up in the way they frame their photographs, decide on the subject matter, the angle of composition and light, choose the moment of exposure, etc. But all of that is background, and what most people notice is simply who’s in the picture. This is why I enjoy it so much. I like to hide.

Does this picture say more about them, or me?

Yes, I am adding more crap to the internet, but here is why I am blogging. You should do it too.

October 21, 2011 by Linda | 0 comments

Celsus Library

Celsus Library, built 17 AD. Ephesus, Turkey

JMR once asked me if I was planning on starting a blog when I moved to New York. This was January 2008. I was taken aback and asked why would I ever do that? He said it might be nice to have a place to write about my adventures and my friends could know what I’m up to. It sounded preposterous then, but now, looky here. A friend just wrote me an email saying she doesn’t have to write me so much now that she can read my blog and know what’s going on in my life.

I started this website with no rationale for it, other than to instill some discipline and give order to my life. Writing is psychotherapy. I have had variations of the thoughts presented in my posts a million times over, fleetingly, repetitively, broodingly, but seeing them in front of me puts a talismanic spin on things. Turns thoughts into convictions. If you write something publicly, well… it’s out there (out where? in the universe? at least in the interwebs…), and you’re accountable. I am not new agey, but I’ve come to believe that you have to make your intentions clear and known (whether to yourself or others) for the rewards to start coming in. Or at least, buy a lottery ticket.

So how’s the novel coming along? I’ve been stewing on this and plan to start writing by November. My head hurts. Recently, I had a long and convoluted dream. Well, this happens regularly. And in the midst of the chaos, there is generally one part that sticks and seems to be the main point of the dream. In this particular case, I was a ghost. A short little ghost being punished (for reasons unclear). I stood at a large cauldron, bigger than me, and I was stirring the stock inside via a very long stick. Anton and someone else came into the kitchen and inhaled the aromas coming from my pot. The person not Anton mentioned that he loves soup, and we were trying to identify the smells. I had a suspicion that all was not exactly right, and so I floated to the top of the pot and saw my head floating on the surface, face side up enabling me to identify myself. I had been sucking on something the whole time, and so I spat it out into the soup, possibly a piece of my own bone or gristle. The whole affair struck me as mildly distasteful, serving up my old head, but I kept on marinating it, swirling it around the cauldron.

Following your passions, and trying to make money: are the two compatible?

October 19, 2011 by Linda | 0 comments

There is much to do. Having decided to write a novel, well that was huge. For me. It is a daunting task, but one that I very much plan to accomplish. Still, there is the matter of making money. Last night, Anton and I talked about our upcoming wedding. I reckon that if we keep to our plan and not run off to city hall, we will likely end up paying another 10k into it, conservatively. I need a job. So I started looking to see what’s posted on LinkedIn and Media Bistro, not really thrilled with what I’m finding.

My last title was content director. Similar posted jobs currently available require one to have a background or passion in obstetrics/gynecology, finance, or reinsurance policies. I have already done time attempting content strategy around a subject matter I don’t hold dear, and shockingly, it’s a drag. Maybe I should be putting my efforts into freelancing, consulting, or contract work. This way I could stay flexible, have time to write my novel, and be free to take time off for our honeymoon and other travel whims. Great idea! But how to make this happen now…

So what am I good at? A lot of career advice start with nailing down a list. I tried having this conversation with a former colleague a few weeks ago, and we sat there stumped like two lumps of unsalted potatoes, unable to see how tasty we can be. Since freelancing requires a healthy dose of self-advocacy, here goes:

1. Writing/storytelling
2. Taking pictures
3. Introducing people to new things (or old new things; things new to them, but are things that I love.)
4. Giving advice/perspective
5. Advocating on other people’s behalf
6. Connecting with individuals (not masses)
7. Being honest. And knowing when not to be. (story curation)
8. Aesthetically attuned/having a good eye
9. Risk friendly/responding to crises with grace
10. Having compassion

What am I passionate about, or partake in regularly? I could pontificate at length on the following:

1. Reading (some faves: Nabokov, Bolano, Wallace, Cortazar, Waugh, Melville)
2. Drinking wine
3. Traveling
4. Snowboarding
5. Sailing
6. Food as an art form
7. Leica rangefinder cameras

Alrighty. What does that tell me? That it took me some time to come up with this list. Seriously, it is hard to self-assess, so if you think there is anything else I’m good at, please let me know in the comments. What I need to do is figure out how to combine my skills with the activities I’m most interested in. I’d also be curious to see what’s on other people’s lists. Try making your own and let’s compare.

This picture represents at least 6 different skills and interests from my lists.

Less hiking, more eating: A lesson in planning

October 17, 2011 by Linda | 0 comments

It is said that in the Altai Mountains, the weather gods serve up very localized conditions based upon the general temperament or moods of the hikers. One harmonious group may pass through with blue skies and calm winds, while another discontented bunch just half an hour behind or a few miles over will have to contend with blizzards and gales.

After the rain

So how to explain the Catskills? It was a lovely autumn weekend, and the leaves were just starting to turn. Four hardy hiking enthusiasts set out with a plan for two days of trekking separated by a night of camping. We had tents, sleeping bags, marinated steaks to grill on a camp fire, potatoes, cheese, bread, and wines. However, we were not prepared for two eventualities: the camp grounds were closed and it decided to rain on us precisely and only while we attempted our hike.

These two started off optimistically...

It isn’t that we didn’t bother to check the weather, but such things are apparently fickle. And unfortunately, none of us had water tight gear. We also knew in advance that the camp grounds were closed. We just thought this meant that though the facilities would be shut (no water or bathrooms), we could still camp, roughing it (yes, to me, peeing outside is hard core). This was not the case. Turns out, this means no trespassing at all with threats of being fined and/or arrested.

Thus, four very damp and dejected travelers ended up driving back to Manhattan that evening. But we contented ourselves with a fire in the back yard and incredibly tender steaks nestled in our bellies.

We journeyed 12 hours for the joy of "camping" at home.

Daily inspiration

October 13, 2011 by Linda | 2 Comments

In my 20s, I had two dreams that were visually played out as animations. In one, I am a bear, a crudely drawn cartoon bear, with a little short sleeved shirt like Winnie the Pooh’s, but not drawn like him exactly. I am climbing a mountain, one of those classic cartoon peaks with jagged edges, swinging myself upwards through layers of cottony clouds using only my arms and hands to grasp the protruding ledges. My chubby legs just swing about jauntily, as they are wont to do in cartoons. About half way up, I am met by a girl bear, differentiated by the red bow that is affixed to the front of one ear. She tells me she is sorry she can’t go all the way to the top with me, for I must go alone, but she gives me something to take with me. It is a small, clear jar, maybe glass, filled halfway with water. Floating on top is a sparkly star, and the whole cup glows of faerie dust. I continue on to the peak, one arm cradling my gift, and the other arm propelling myself to the top, ledge by ledge. I feel warm, protected, loved.

There is a talismanistic quality to the dream, and I no longer remember the circumstances in my life at that time. But it is a nice story to straw upon as I sit here every day trying to motivate myself to keep to my goal.

Insert cartoon bear here.