This Is Helpful

If you want to find local sources for various fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy products, and other items. Online sources, farms, co-ops, restaurants, and markets are represented.

Also, eggs are good for you; research shows that consumption of eggs isn't related to higher levels of cholesterol and that they may provide other health benefits.

I'm also liking this place for workout tips and videos and nutrition and meal suggestions. The whole concept of nutritional content gets decoupled from calorie content and "bad" elements like fat, so it's nice to get away from the simplistic "hey, here's some diet-friendly low-calorie processed snacks off the shelf" in favor of a more holistic approach. I used to have a pull-out nutrition guide from a magazine, which featured gorgeous photographs of sample meals and portions for a week. It hit all major food groups and proper allotments of them over X span of time. It was great inspiration for nutrient-rich combos to try and also useful for measuring how much I was eating and why. (Appropriate portion of cheese for a protein boost of a meal: the size of your thumb.) And seeing the food look so yummy and lovely fed the virtuous cycle of how good eating well made me feel.

It pisses me off that we live in such an unhealthful food environment and that we blame individuals for what it does to them to eat poor diets. Based on my own experiences, I honestly think that we are so conditioned to crave high-fat, high-sodium, high-calorie processed food that it's like physical withdrawal to get away from it. Every single time I have, for example, potato chips, it's never a one-off deal. I crave and want to eat more every single day, for lunch or what have you. So I buy them and eat them--snarfing, say, half a can of pringles in an afternoon, until my stomach hurts--each time telling myself I'll moderate or stop. Eventually, I have to go cold turkey and not buy the stuff at all. And it's like hell waiting for the cravings to subside.

So I think I'm bucking the system by preparing my own foods and choosing healthful ingredients, raised responsibly. But as a solution, it's only sustainable so long as you have the income to do it.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hug 'em if you got 'em. Or boycott, which is perfectly respectable. At the very least, I suggest clearance chocolate after the fact. B and I are celebrating remote cupcakery.

I am also coughing my way through day ten of my creeping illness and prepping outfit scenarios for Oprah. Set your DVR's people. I'll be applauding with great zest.

The Day in Productivity

• Got up at reasonable time.
• Filed taxes, both state and federal.
• Completed and confirmed financial aid forms (absent late-discovered correction that must now wait a week, so as to allow prior changes to go through).
• Investigated certificates of deposit.
  
• Exercised.
• Bought foodstuffs.
• Bought cheapie additional exercise gear so as to facilitate future exercise.
• Worked on languishing story.

Now I just have to clean the house and unpack all of my luggage from, um, holiday travels.

Frantic Displacement Activity?

I am sitting at my desk and fantasizing. Not about vegging on the couch, watching movies, writing, eating ice cream, or drinking an amazing wine, but about exercising. Specifically, running. I hate running. I have exercise-induced asthma, I have flat feet, and I get side stitches. I also have crippling childhood memories of forced running in gym class. Everybody else would be done, and I would still be puffing through my ten-and-a-half-minute mile. There are old ladies who can walk faster than that.

Nevertheless, I'm really really wishing it weren't 20 degrees out and/or that I had a treadmill.

For the Love of All That's Holy

I'm So Bored . . .

I may be slipping into a coma.

Counting Down

She's Weary from All This Effort Too

Do you know how exhausting it is to listen to me read essays and stories aloud, over and over again?

It Is An Important Day in Application History

I have completed all of my applications, I have submitted all of my writing samples, I have ordered all of my transcripts. My final letter writer is getting his recommendations out next week.

I am done done done. Now I start the financial aid begging and the long, scary wait.

Observed, by Someone Much Wiser Than Me, and with a Better Wine Selection

We are all suffering from brain clouds.

What Does it Mean When the Time Capsule Looks a Lot Like Your Current Life?

So as you all know, since I talk about it ad nauseum, I'm applying for MFA programs. The list is rather short and centered around geographical and cost considerations. That is, I am happy to endure some geographical contortions if the school in question is not only a top-ten school, but if they also offer waiver of tuition and a living stipend. I'm less inclined to dive into debt for fifty grand a year at a program that may do nothing more for me than give me a community to write among for a couple of years. Having an MFA shows that you're serious about your writing and helps you polish your craft. A top program can also provide networking possibilities and the opportunity to learn from the best writers. It can also open doors for teaching, if that's a course you'd like to take. (And it's something I'm interested in, from the viewpoint that I feel strongly about what I've learned this far about approaching writing as a craft and also from the viewpoint that writers have to earn a living if they're not publishing best-sellers. Focusing on helping others improve their craft allows me to immerse in creativity as a vocation, which is much more conducive to what I want to accomplish than copyediting.)

In short, it's a tension between getting into the best school I can and balancing realistic considerations like age, debt worries, partner aspirations and career goals, and what I'm likely to get from the whole endeavor. It's a lot to consider, and I worry a lot that I'm selling myself short, or dreaming too big, or wasting time on the schoolin' when I should be writin'.

In a lot of ways, I wish I had thought to follow this course when I first graduated. I would have been on a more traditional track, with fewer detours. I think about the time when I was flopping around for a direction, terrified to just find a job. I sent our resumes, I researched graduate programs. I liked the cocoon where I was, so I determined to apply for library school at my alma mater. I knew people in the program, I liked books, I worked in a library, it seemed sensible. I took the GRE, I collected my paperwork, I filled everything out. Then I lost the application right before the deadline. I never found it. I took that to be the ultimate sign of ambivalence and gave up on library school.

So in my current endeavor, I am similarly busily filling out online applications. However, I found myself flummoxed trying to remember my GPA and credits earned as an undergrad. I have my transcript requests at the ready, with a request for my own unofficial copy. Alas, this solution doesn't do you much good when you're trying to save you hard data-entry work on screen seven and fill in the crucial information later.

While I cursed and fruitlessly beat my desk, it occurred to me that I have a filing cabinet in my attic, which I've been lugging around with me every since I graduated college. It represents my earliest attempts to put my life on some sort of track--each goal and aspect is represented by tidily labeled hanging folders. Thus I could label, categorize, and slide things into their appropriate folder. Soothing order amid the chaos of a life that I had to, for the first time in my life, direct the course of.

So I climbed into my attic and unearthed it from amid the dust and shingle debris from my re-roofing. Here are some of the folder categories: "short-term job search" ("How do I not starve while I figure out what I want to do?"); "long-term job search" ("What do I want to do as, like, a career?"); "bills" (Attempt to assert financial control as a Real Life Adult); "writing," in which I had stuffed the one good piece I had written thus far and hoped to collect more; and "grad school." When I dug through the grad school folder, the only thing I found was a copy of my unofficial transcript from college. Brilliant! So very helpful in the current circumstances and exactly what I was looking for.

In this case, I take it as a good Freudian turn that I could remember enough to actually locate something I stored so many years ago. It's like my brain is onboard with the ultimate plan as opposed to sabotaging it. But I can't help but be a bit humbled and disturbed that my categories haven't changed all that much. I have a career that I'm not enamored of or growing in. I can open the want ads and apply to be an "X" with the following skill set. But I'm still trying to touch base on the same goals, still trying to figure out how to earn a living, figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and figure out how to write things I'm proud of. I just hope that some of this is converging.

We Begin the Final Countdown to Turkey Fest 2009

Hope your preparations, if you are doing any, are progressing well. We did the final pre-prep checklist last night, and I think we're good to go with ingredients and accessories. We reiterated menus, we ascertained cooking times and temperatures, we set up a schedule of food-preparation. So tonight is the first round of cooking and baking, plus the house prep. Then tomorrow, we launch Mr. Turkey on his voyage to, we hope, carnivorous splendor.

Fingers crossed that it all comes off well, but if anything does fail, we have at least twenty bottles of wine, some beer, some champagne, and port to carry us through. (Yes, my wine rack has actually been pressed into use and been allowed to accumulate.)

When I Am Rich and Famous, I Will Never Forget You Little People. Yes, You. You Made It All Possible.

So I'm furiously revising my stories for MFA applications, and they're coming along pretty well. I don't want to speak too precipitously, but I believe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've completed the actual application for one school, am gearing up for the other two (one started), and am following all that up with a flurry of transcript ordering and mailings to departments.

I was perusing through some old drafts of one of them on Saturday, looking for things I had cut in past versions, and I was surprised at just how much revision I had done on the piece in question. I think of myself as noodling around the edges and making superficial changes, but it's been a long evolution on this story. It's heartening, really. One of my references, a former teacher, showed me a draft of his letter of recommendation, and he noted that I grasped the importance of revision. It reinforces a view of myself as hardworking, looking to improve, and taking in constructive criticism. I like that view a lot.

The part about this whole endeavor that really runs contrary to my makeup, though, is the schizophrenic melding of the solitary artist with the self-promotion machine. You can write the most beautiful pieces in the world, but unless you send them out in the world and work toward getting published, you might as well leave them in a dusty drawer.

So, it behooves writers to network, promote, send things out, withstand rejection. I had a couple of offputting classmates in previous classes who pelted everyone with their myspace pages and facebook fan sites, all promoting their work. It's uncomfortable to get blatantly networked for someone else's career aspirations. I'm supportive of other people's work and am happy to spread the word if I think it's worthwhile, but at the same time, there's a line between cultivating relationships that enhance your ability to spread news about your writing and treating people like their sole purpose is to help you.

Which brings me to friend X, whom I met about fifteen years ago. We both loved books, talked about writing, and followed a similar trajectory from our unsatisfying technical jobs to editing and academia. After I moved away, she kept me posted for a while on stories she was getting published (which I would diligently and mostly unsuccessfully try to look up), but we lost touch a couple of years ago, at the time her first novel came out. At her exhortation, I bought the novel, told all my friends, mindful that sales figures would determine the fate of the book itself and her eventual career. After that, I sent her emails, to which I never got replies. I figured she had changed email addresses. From other sources, I learned that her press was good, and she's launched what appears to be a great career, for which I'm very happy. I know she worked really hard for it and is very talented.

Recently, she friended me on facebook, which was awesome--I was excited to see how she was and tell her what was new in my life, on the cusp, as I am, of new frontiers. I sent her a quick email commenting on her kids (one more than last I spoke to her), effusing over her successful and good work. And I heard nothing back. And what was initially a personal page when she friended me has morphed into a professional promotion page, pictures and personal details gone.

So I kind of feel like I've been used to up the facebook promotion footprint, and that she really doesn't give a shit what's going on in my life anymore. Which is, to say the least, depressing.

Ergo, I vow to not be one of those power-hungry, fame-hungry people who will only trade personal banalities with you if you promise to sell ten copies of my Great American Novel. (The one that I'm writing right this very second. Um. Yeah.)

And Today I Am Somewhat Charged and Creatively Energized

I got some boosting feedback from one of my old writing teachers, who is writing a letter of recommendation for me. Not that it's helpful to have only praise singing (he did offer concrete fixes to the stories I sent him), but damn, it helps buck you up for the ego-slamming of applications and writing in general. Plus, seeing yourself as hard-working as reflected by others helps to affirm that, yes! I'm working, improving, and hopefully going to produce better and better things. It's also helpful that he harangues me to send things out, for that is the bane. I wish I could outsource that dreary research and administrative work to someone else.

But, as a result of the confidence infusion, I rode in the train this morning jotting notes to myself on the various pieces I'm working on.

It's tough to stay on track. That picture up there is my work desk and provides an uncanny depiction of my schizophrenic life at present: I'm celebrating! Happy! Great things! contrasted with "Oh, my god, don't make me push this thing again, it's just going to come back down and squash me."

Cranky R Us

You know the feeling, when you want to gnaw carrot sticks, not because you're hungry, but because the sound and the crushing of your teeth on the tender carrot fiber is so satisfyingly forceful.

I swear that I've not spoken to a human being all day, apart from the guy at the DMV, who was not amused at my jokes about spending years of your life stuck with a bad driver's license photo. Possibly this was because as I was working my feeble attempts at mood-lightening, he was looking at my new photo, in which I look like a hypnotized soccer mom. Which is not to say that soccer moms are bad, it's just that when you've been carrying a ten-year-old photo around, it's a bit jarring to see yourself looking like you should be in a mini-van commercial.

Also, this day may never end. Notwithstanding that a paycheck is important these days especially, it's irritating sometimes to spend the bulk of your day-to-day running in useless little hamster-wheel circles.

Hmmmmmm...

I've figured out how to do everything on my spiffy new BlackBerry . . . except make a phone call on it.

The Holidays Are Fast Approaching

It's had to believe it's almost Halloween, isn't it? Doesn't it feel like summer was just starting a second ago? Then of course we'll have Thanksgiving festivities coming up soon. On that last, I'm kind of excited because I'm hosting my first official holiday in ten years. Yay! I'm pondering exciting mashed potato recipes and all the variables in cooking a turkey. I'm ill prepared to be in turkey-land on account of being a vegetarian, but I hear they have help lines and everything. Plus, B is a knowledgeable carnivore and thus will be helping to game things out. It shall all be fine and fun, if for no other reason than we'll make sure to have plenty of alcohol flowing all around.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like I'm running at top speed through fog. There's so much to do that I can barely keep track of it.

In other news, I'm in happy technology land. Here are things that are way fun: slingboxes and Blackberries.

You Get What You Give

Contemplating Writing and Cupcakery

I declare it to be a universal good to be away from the daily routine of ineptitude to lounge, beach adjacent, watch hummingbirds flit from nearby palm trees, and think about your day's adventures. To write? To wander down to nearby shopping and cupcake bakery? To nap? To do all of the above? Why, yes!

Man, the only thing I miss is my cat. If she packed up tidier, you'd all get that "no forwarding address" sticker tout suite.

Saturday, however, we explore new grad school horizons. I'm very excited.

Ah, Higher Learning

I have my first information session at an MFA program on Saturday. I like them already for speedily answering my battery of application information, though they need to do a better job of providing directions, like where recommendations should be mailed besides, "directly to the college."

I feel like a wee young lass of eighteen again.