Category — Uncategorized

When I was 24 years old, I was in an awful place during graduate school, and I came home for the summer to mentally regroup and decide whether I wanted to finish my degree.  I had finished all of my course work, so it was literally down to the thesis.  I was that close to being done, but I didn’t know if I had the emotional reserves to go back.

I spent the first month home breaking up with my boyfriend, crying, and staring at my bedroom wall.  I had a job teaching creative writing at a camp, but it hadn’t started yet.  So I mostly did nothing.

One night, my mother coaxed me downstairs to see clips from the Tony Awards.  I’m not a fan of award shows and, at that point, had never been to a Broadway show.  But she was desperate to get me out of my room.  I moped downstairs and sat on the sofa as she ran through all the musical numbers on the VHS tape.

I sat up when she got to Alan Cumming singing from Cabaret, completely mesmerized.  I was spending 24 hours a day being not happy, but the performance held the unhappiness at bay for three whole minutes.

I started watching the clip once a day, giving myself three minutes of happiness.  After a while, I was able to hold onto the happiness for three minutes after the clip, too.  Then ten minutes.  Then I could be happy for a whole hour after watching it.  I could see it before camp and get through the whole day.

Finally, it was August and I felt like I could take the tape back to school and watch it once a day to get through my last year.  It was really scary going back.  But I did it.  And as a treat, I saved up all of my money and bought tickets with my cousin to see Alan Cumming in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club in New York.  Being there, in that room, seeing the whole play made my heart explode.  And I started saving and buying tickets to the show as frequently as possible, watching Alan several more times.

That performance made me interested in other performances, and I started to buy theater tickets as frequently as possible.  We did a lot of same-day tickets for both plays and musicals.  We bought a lot of cast recordings.  I started seeking out theater whenever I traveled.  Finally, I fell in love with a playwright, and, Reader, I married him.

Our lives are filled with a lot of theater performances.

When I was turning 40, Alan Cumming did a revival of Cabaret, and my brother offered to buy us tickets since he had been one of the people I dragged along in the late 90s to the original Broadway performance.  But I decided not to go, feeling like I couldn’t recapture how special that show was to me.  It got me out of a deep well of sadness and gave me the emotional strength to finish my degree.  I felt like I needed to let it rest.

But last week, Alan Cumming was doing a last performance of Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs at a theater gala, and Josh and I went with my cousin.  I felt such a tenderness, seeing this stranger who meant so much to me during this really hard time in life, and being there with my cousin who started the journey out of the sadness with me and the husband who was at the end of that theater-loving beginning.

Afterward, Alan mingled with the crowd, and he took this selfie for us (because my arms are too short to take a proper selfie).  I was going to do the lunge, but there was no possible way to fulfill my lunge fantasy, so we opted to stand and smile.

I hope my huge grin conveyed how much it means to your heart to stand with your arm around a person who unknowingly brought you out of your sadness while at the same time stand with your cousin who knowingly supported you as you climbed out of your sadness and your husband nearby who came into your life because you were finally going back out into the world again after your sadness and your parents (who showed you the tape that got you out of your sadness) with your kids so you could hear a man sing sappy songs.  It was a huge for me.

So thank you to my mum, dad, Josh, my cousin, and Alan Cumming.  A long story for a brief encounter, so I hope the smile conveyed what there wasn’t time to say.

Stop the press!

Right after I wrote yesterday that people want to relive their 40s more than any other decade, I learned that life gets better after 50.  How is this possible?  If your 50s are noticeably better than your 40s, wouldn’t everyone say that they want to relive their 50s?

According to the article:

Academics have found increasing evidence that happiness through adulthood is U-shaped – life satisfaction falls in our 20s and 30s, then hits a trough in our late 40s before increasing until our 80s.

I like the idea of life being U-shaped; of happiness dipping and then rising.  It makes what lies ahead that much more enticing rather than thinking that things are downhill from here.  Down here, nearing the “trough,” is okay.  It fills me with hope to hear that it’s only going to get better.

Though apparently I will first travel through an emotional slump in my late 40s caused by — according to the research — nothing.  Unless it’s caused by something.  But I will only the notice the nothing if everything else is going smoothly.  According to the author, “Those most likely to notice the arrow of time are the people without a lot of other change or difficulty in their life.”

Hmmm.

I have two more years until I hit the nadir — 46.  And while research points out that events later in life such as dealing with health issues, deaths, job loss, or empty nests affects people emotionally, when life is still, we’ll feel happier in the stillness.

It’s a very interesting article about why we feel happier in our 50s and beyond, so read the whole thing when you have the time.

Does it ring true to you?  That happiness increases in your 50s and beyond?

Josh got me a real, live, immortal quokka* for my 44th birthday.  Technically, he needs to keep living his immortal life in western Australia, but he’s totally mine.  And I’m his.  And his name is Akiva.

But I call him “Keevs” for short.

We got him from the World Wildlife Fund.  Apparently they believe this is just a monetary donation and they’ve given Josh a certificate in return.  BUT NOPE.  He is totally mine.  I have his picture up on the refrigerator, and I’ve been filling in his back story; how he spends his days and the fun we’ll have together when I finally get to Rottnest Island so I can watch him frolicking with his quokka friends.

So Akiva will live forever in Rottnest Island, and I will bore the family forever with imagined tales of Avika’s hijinks.

I LOVE MY QUOKKA.

This is the best birthday ever.  Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeee.  (And Akiva, who is an extension of my heart.  I love my quokka so much.)

* World Wildlife Fund said they couldn’t put status of his immortality on the certificate itself, but they let Josh add it to the message so I have it formally in writing because I hate the idea of being given something that will die.  My quokka will never die.

An art exhibit opened downtime a month or two ago featuring the art of Burning Man.  I don’t have a lot of interest in Burning Man itself, but I am very interested in seeing Candy Chang’s piece called “Before I Die,” which is part of the exhibit.

The piece came out of a time in life when she was grappling with a loved one’s death:

She wanted to start a conversation, so she covered a crumbling house in her neighborhood in New Orleans with chalkboard paint and stenciled it with the prompt, “Before I die I want to _____,” so anyone walking by could pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on death and life, and share their personal aspirations in public.

Answering the question really becomes talking about life.  What you want to do while you’re here on this planet.  And the best part is that there are no wrong answers.  Well… I mean… I guess if you said you aspire to pollute all the oceans before you die, people might feel that answer crosses the line.  BUT almost everything else.

There are now 4000 Before I Die walls around the world, and you can click over to see pictures of the original one in New Orleans.

Before I die, I want to see how the twins turn out as adults.  I want to visit the Faroe Islands.  I want to give a TED Talk.  I want to hold a puffin.  (And I want the puffin to want to be held so it cuddles into the crook of my arm.)  I want to take a class with Josh.  I want someone to tell me that I’ve always reminded them of the title character from “Really Rosie.”

What do you want to do while you’re alive?

I bookmark articles about ghost towns.  I love abandoned houses and empty storefronts.  My goal this summer is to get to Mockhorn Island.

I don’t know why I’m not equally drawn to untouched spaces; to open land and rolling fields without houses.  I don’t know why I’m drawn to emptiness and decay.  All I know is that when we’re passing a house with the roof caving in and a condemned sign on the door, I sometimes hear the kids sigh in the backseat and say something about how we’ll have to pull over.

“Mum loves things that are falling apart.”

*******

There was an article last week about how Snapchat has become a ghost town, and that emptiness is a welcome change to the faster pace of the rest of the Internet.  The article is an ode to an Internet ghost towns.

But the article begins with a description of the early days of blogging and social media:

It’s difficult to believe now, but there was a time when the internet was nowhere instead of everywhere. Before the social internet had mapped so completely onto our social lives that attempting to separate the two or call life away from the internet “real” became a ridiculous endeavor, online was where we went to escape, to be unseen, to be nowhere.

And THAT is the Internet in my memory.  I remember how carefully I used to hide my blog from people in my face-to-face world, and how exposed I felt when one informed me she was reading it.  I remember how we used pseudonyms — there are still old bloggers that I only know by their online handle.

In 2006, I knew about and read a handful of blogs.  After a few months, that number grew into the hundreds and the sound from all those stories was a happy buzz.  It was exciting.  We were a large, close-knit corner of the Internet.  We knew each other’s spaces, and could talk about one another easily.  Everyone at least knew of everyone else’s blog, and chances were that they read it, too.

And then the blogging scene exploded and suddenly the community was enormous.  New blogs came and went.  I started finding that people would refer to other bloggers and I had zero clue who they were.  My face-to-face friends joined social media sites, and the wall came down between the online world and the offline world.

And now the blogging world is quieting down.  It has been quieting down for a long time, though I don’t believe it will ever entirely disappear.  In a few weeks, I will celebrate my 12th year of blogging.  About a quarter of my life has been spent writing this site.

*******

Before something is built, it’s just a blank slate.  And after something is gone, we describe the loneliness of that emptiness.  The article has a continuous graphic of tumbleweeds.

Which is strange because I read about the same number of ALI bloggers that I did in 2006 or 2007, back when I knew hundreds (as opposed to thousands or tens of thousands) of bloggers.  Back then, the space sounded so loud.  Now it sounds so quiet.  But it’s the same number of people, give or take.

When something is starting out, we focus on what could be.

When something is quieting down, we focus on what isn’t there.

But I welcome the tumbleweeds.  Noting they exist means that we’re still here.