barn jam

On nights like this, I believe in magic. The air is chilly and we perch on a picnic bench, wrapped in a blanket and drinking cold beer from icy cans. Nearby metal drums are full of fire, flames licking upward, the light dancing merrily from designs cut out around the sides. The fire closest to us settles a bit, a log shifting down deeper into the barrel, and the movement sends up a shower of sparks, ascending like fireflies into the night sky. I tilt my head back to look up, following their flight against the dark silhouettes of oak branches, and I smile as the crowd falls away from my peripheral vision and I am left with only the music wrapping around me, lifting me upward to a warm, inky black filled with pinpoints of orange and yellow light. In this moment, I stand at the edge of the universe, a gently welcoming abyss.

 

tidbits

• In every book that I’ve ever truly loved, there is a line or two, maybe a paragraph or even a whole page, that breaks my heart with its perfection. It can be simply written or more complex, sometimes only a single well-turned phrase, but it’s always there. I didn’t really notice this about myself until I started writing here, but things that are really good tend to hurt me a little. What’s with that? Memory, music, home, something poignant and well-written – these are all things that cause a little heartache, a little pang in my breast. I wonder why. Maybe it’s about yearning for something – for the world or the life or the experience described in those lines, or even the ability to describe something of my own half as well. Maybe it’s just that the art I love best is the art that reminds me of who I am and where I want to go.
• Please help me convince my mother that the next puppy she adds to our slowly growing Star Trek-themed Vizsla menagerie should be named CRUSHER. It must be spelled in all-caps.
• Sometimes when I’m sad, I watch baby sloth videos on YouTube to cheer myself up. It works.
• For the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself getting more easily up in arms over things than I normally do. I was a bit more of a firebrand when I was younger. I got angry, passionate, loud; I would fight and denounce, get frustrated to the point of tears. Looking back, it was all very dramatic and probably not very effective. I suppose I’ve become a little more temperate with age, but still, I cannot abide the casual disregard of another human being. We do it all the time, and we never check ourselves. We make jokes and judgments, we support initiatives and candidates who display a blatant disregard for anyone who’s been labeled other, we thoughtlessly repost witty but snide images on Facebook, and it seems so rare that we stop and think, “That’s a person. I’m talking about another person.” Lately it’s been nonchalant racism, demonization of the working poor, inadvertent misogyny. I feel like I’m constantly noticing it, and it makes me anxious, sad, and cranky.
• Last Friday I went to a burlesque/rock show in Park Circle, and there was a guy standing near me in starched khakis and a sweater vest. Heh. Hehehe.
• My favorite days at my job are the ones when we get in local artwork and I get to help put the displays together. There’s a cart full of really pretty glazed ceramic stuff sitting in the office right now that I want to take home, and this afternoon I helped set up a display of high schoolers’ birdhouses made from found objects.
• I’ve been rediscovering Iron & Wine lately, and it makes me very happy. Pursuant to point one, “Resurrection Fern” kills me. Kills me!
• Listening to Iron & Wine again also reminded me how much I loved Garden State when it first came out, and how disdainful I was toward it once I did a little thinking about Natalie Portman’s character. I need to do a re-watch and see if the whole Manic Pixie Dreamgirl trope still seems so in-your-face. Then I will listen to some more Iron & Wine.
• I will trade my adorable plaid snow boots for a full-time library job in Charleston. JUST SAYING, THEY ARE REALLY CUTE. Unworn, size 7.5, insulated. Sorel! Can’t beat that for quality!

the details

Well, I continue to be a god-awful blogger. I am not even going to apologize to the three of you (haha, see what I did there?) because the apology wouldn’t be worth much unless I were sure this wasn’t going to be the norm, and I’m not sure of that at all. Part of it is that my life, career-wise, is fairly up in the air right now, which also means that my life, where-I-will-be-living-two-months-from-now-wise, is also sort of up in the air. For the past month or two, I’ve really been letting my job search and the lack of permanence in my situation define me in a day-to-day sort of sense, and that is seriously starting to drain. Someone asks how it’s going or what I did today, and that’s all I can think about. So naturally, I don’t feel I have anything to write about. Dear Diary: still not king. Gripping stuff.

That’s silly though, right? My life is so much more than that. There is – or should be – plenty of other stuff going on that warrants putting pen to paper. And if there isn’t, then that means I’m shutting myself up and not living nearly enough. Go outside, for god’s sake! It’s the same with my little photo project, the link to which has appeared up there in the nav bar. I have a couple of friends who have, for the past couple of years, taken at least one photo every day and posted them to Twitter or Facebook or whatever their chosen platforms are. I decided to give that a try this year, and have, of course, have fallen behind already… but I’d like to push myself to do better. For me personally, writing and photography are caught in the same impulse: to call my own attention to the little things, the little details in a day that we’d never consider noteworthy, but which are, in the end, the stuff a life is made up of. I’ve been academically and professionally trained to look at the big picture, but I don’t think that’s really enough. Small moments matter to me.

charm and grace

Wow. I am terrible at this! Twice a week my eye! Well, maybe I should write some New Year’s resolutions re: blogging or something. This weekend, I’ll do it this weekend. Yeah.

Righto, anyway. I mentioned a while back that I’ve started to think of Charleston as home in the past few years. I never did when I was actually living here full time, before I went to college. I had a huge chip on my shoulder as a high schooler, guys. Even though the town we lived in in California had a serious boot-wearin’, rodeoin’ sorta vibe going on, and even though the average Charlestonian is perpetually clad in shorts and flip-flops, I had some idea that I’d been moved from laid-back, cool California to some kind of redneck pergatory. This was, of course, not the case. Charleston’s a lovely town, and Rhett Butler was smart to come back.

the hole in the ground

Today I was eating my lunch at my desk and browsing the internet. Sometimes I do that because I’m working, but, you know, sometimes it’s because I’m 29 and still occasionally the dorky introvert who can’t deal with the lunchroom. I can’t for the life of me remember what I started out reading, but eventually I somehow stumbled across a couple of expat blogs that I liked. When I use the phrase “expat blogs,” I pretty much exclusively mean Americans/Canadians/Australians teaching English in either China or Korea and writing about whatever wacky things went down in the classroom or while they were out drinking last weekend. I guess it’s kind of a niche audience in terms of reading material, but hey. Anyway, I was reading these blog posts about people’s weekends, weekends that sounded just like the ones I used to have in Dalian, and I started wishing I’d written more down when I was there. The salient little moments in your life when you’re a Western expat in China are really fascinating (maybe only to other expats? maybe-probably), but it’s the kind of stuff you eventually forget about for years after. Then when something triggers your memory and you think about it all again, everything that you took as par for the course just seems so surreal.

shem creek, sunset

I’ve lived in Charleston on and off for fourteen years. It’s only been in the past four or five that I really started to think of it as home.

I’ll tell you about it later.

three themed lists

Last night I started writing a post about the 18-month period during my youth when I desperately wanted to be an astronaut because of Apollo 13, but I kind of got sidetracked making fun of Bill Paxton and then forgot what I was doing. I’ll finish that one off later. Because I am tired and undercaffeinated and preoccupied with weighty public relations issues* at the moment, here are some lists of things: