"What's Next?"
Once-Teacher (with resources!), Teach For America Staff, Writer, Runner, Reader, Actress, Dancer. Always on the lookout for what challenge to take on next | Writing/thoughts/opinions are my own.
President Bartlet: When I ask 'What's Next?' it means I'm ready to move on to other things. So, what's next?
-The West Wing
New To What's Next? Some of My Faves:
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Q: Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
A: I’m a self-help queen, dedicated to continuous improvement. I read books about problems I...
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Cartoon logic: come on now.
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“Good cover songs are about necessity — something about the source material that needed to be revisited, revised, redone or otherwise rescued from the...”
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My favorite childhood doctor can still make me smile.
What you love can differ, but the love, once it comes, that feeling of waking up with a kind of eagerness, a crazy momentum that pushes you into your day, an excitement you realize you don’t ever want to go way… that’s important.
If you don’t have that feeling, maybe you’re lucky. You can lead a more sane life. But if you do – I say congratulations. You have what it takes to begin.
(via theatlantic)
Tina Fey, Bossypants
This is exactly how I have responded to moving! (she says as she wakes up from a stress-induced nap…and self-narrates…)
OHMYGOD MOVING. I CAN’T WITH YOU. AND WHY AM I COMPLETELY SOBER DURING THIS PROCESS?! UGHHH!$&@#$&!*
Our ground game isn’t working; we’re gonna put the ball in the air. If we’re gonna walk into walls, I want us running into them full-speed…
We’re gonna raise the level of public debate in this country, and let that be our legacy.
The West Wing,”Let Bartlet be Bartlet”
Yup. Definitely using The West Wing as the inspiration for some big changes in my life. As usual.
I never will have time
I never will have time enough
To say
How beautiful it is
The way the moon
Floats in the air
As easily
And lightly as a bird
Although she is a world
Made all of stone.
I never will have time enough
To praise
The way the stars
Hang glittering in the dark
Of steepest heaven
Their dewy sparks
Their brimming drops of light
So fresh so clear
That when you look at them
It quenches thirst.
Looking at the Sky -Anne Porter
PS, if you’re not getting The Writer’s Almanac, please get it together and do so.
Msgr. Lloyd Torgerson, St Monica’s Parish (paraphrased)
Really trying to take this one to heart today.
Love after Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.Love after Love -Derek Walcott
As a tumultuous January ends, I offer a prayer for February.
This month is so often dedicated to love, I have the chance to, for the first time in 8 years (#truestory), take the month to “feast on [my] life,” on my own, and hopefully in every way possible.
Now, I don’t at all regret (m)any of the opportunities I have had to give/receive romantic love, but it’ll be interesting and even a little exciting (I hope) to experience this month of love in a whole new way.
Of course, I’m not never truly on my own. I have so much love in my life (family, friends, cat), that I am bubbling and overflowing with it always.
By the by, I can’t the PRI podcast “Being” highly enough.
Trails, me
Posted this before, but it’s something that’s worth being remembered.
Daddy.
Really though, how did I get so lucky? Even in a time of stress and sadness, my heart is always smiling.
Charles R Swindoll (via Daddy)
When I was 5, my dad put up this poster by my bed. It had an Eagle.
Anyway, he did a pretty good job of drilling into me, because now that + “You can let it fail you, or you can let it fuel you” are pretty much how I look at life. So, thanks Daddy. <3
What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.
Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.
He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”
When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.
Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.
His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
- Tina Fey, Bossypants
yup.
