Good News

The Good News

Thich Nhat Hahn

The good news

they do not print.

The good news

we do print.

We have a special edition every moment

that we need you to read.

The good news is that you are alive

and the linden tree is still there

standing firm in the harsh winter.

The good news is that you have wonderful eyes

to touch the blue sky.

The good news is that

your child is there before you,

and your arms are available.

Hugging is possible.

They print only what is wrong.

Look at each of our special editions.

We always offer the things that are not wrong.

We want you to benefit from them

and help protect them.

The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,

smiling its wondrous smile,

singing the song of eternity.

Lo! You have ears capable of hearing it.

Bow your head.

Listen to her.

Leave behind your world of sorrow

and preoccupation

and get free.

The latest good news

is that you can do it.

* * *

During the summer of 2020 I was one of many people walking laps around our city neighborhood. My husband, a city bus driver, had just gone back to work. I was frantically worried about our health, his lack of insurance, and catching COVID-19, I needed to burn off the extra anxiety.

The Good News was that I had space to do it. 

On the way back from one such walk, I noticed a dandelion growing from the brick retaining wall. I looked at it for a long time, snapped a picture, and sent it to my husband. “If this isn’t,” I said, “an admonition to thrive wherever we are planted, I do not know what is.” 

Little did I know it, but I was hearing that dandelion’s song of eternity at that moment. 

Dandelions are a remarkable plant that seems unremarkable. For example, one thing that we all know about dandelions is their ability to thrive where they are planted. We see them in pavement cracks and brick walls. We pull them from our gardens’ deep soil. They are very common and they bloom where they are planted. 

Where have we been planted? 

Beloveds, right now I feel very much like the dandelion growing out of a sidewalk or brick wall, trying to sing the song of eternity into a world filled with sirens. But while the soil here may not be deep, it is rich. The good news is that it is enriched by this spiritual community, by my friends and family, by my volunteer work and by daily my spiritual practices. 

What enriches your dirt? 

The other interesting thing about dandelions is that they are edible–flowers, greens, and roots. It’s funny to think of this ubiquitous (and for some, irritating) sign of summer, as a nutritional powerhouse, but it is high in vitamins and calcium. They’re also delicious.  

Let’s pause and consider this briefly. What we roundly consider a nuisance flower or a pest is food not only for our beloved pollinators but for us as well. 

Consider too one of the most frustrating parts of our lives today–the knowledge that we are each one person standing against a tide of special interests and a broken political system that will sell us and our children, and our children’s children down the river for a quarter of a percent increase in profits or votes. In the face of this power we, like the dandelions, are common and perhaps a little unremarkable. 

The good news is that you too can feed a community. In my Catholic childhood we called these acts of spiritual and physical feeding the corporal works of mercy. Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick & the imprisoned, and bury the dead. We know how to do these things. We can recognize them even in their less obvious forms in our community and each of these acts is a  note in the song of eternity. 

The final thing I want to say about dandelions is that they spread prolifically. Each head contains hundreds–did you know that–hundreds of seeds. Every time we make a wish on these little weeds, we ensure that they will continue to grow into the next season. 

Here we are, rooted in this church, with the ability to feed those around us, and the good news–the best news–is that these actions plant seeds of hope, love, and grace in the community around us. They ensure that our notes in this song of eternity are heard, and lead us to the next movement. 

Beloveds, may our lives be representations of the good news. May we grow here, in this soil in which we planted, provide food to others, and let our deeds carry forth into eternity. 

May it be so, and amen. 

Soft

I lost someone close to me this week. 

Not lost in they've died but lost in the "well, that was an unforgivable betrayal of my trust" kind of way. 

I've been through so many relationship implosions over the years that it took a little while for this one to hit me. I did all the automatic stuff that I do--blocked them from my phone and social media, put away the things they've given me until I'm less emotional, activated my support group. I thought to myself "Well, that was unexpected" and went on with my day. 

We all know where this is going. 

That evening, after I held it together all day I tried to pickle myself in bourbon (it takes less now than it used to). I got into a horrible fight with David. I cried at a bus stop. I self-harmed in a more intentional way and screamed with grief and sobbed for hours. I've said it before, but going through life with big feelings is a constant fight.

Friday night I lost that fight.

* * *

My favorite Mary Oliver poem is only four lines long. 

"The Uses of Sorrow"

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness. 

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift. 

* * * 

I have fallen a little in love with most of the people I have met and liked over the years. 

What can I say? I have a lot of feelings, sloppy boundaries, and a soft heart. 

Each time someone lets me down in a big way I tell myself that this is it. This is the time that I'm going to put up taller walls, keep people at an arm's length, stop calling that one friend who never wants to hang out. 

Then the next time I meet someone with the same obscure interest, the same favorite book, hell, just someone who looks cute and smiles at me I lose myself all over again. 

I am grateful to have such a loving, supportive partner in David. Every time I get excited about some new friend (or, frankly, crush) he's patient and kind. He gently reminds me that not everyone in the world is worth my time. I laugh and say "Yeah, but this person is."

He throws up metaphorical hands and I let myself be disappointed all over again. 

* * *

I am a walking trope: 

The person who walks around with ohmygodsomuchlovetogive and who gives it to all the wrong people and ohgodsomeonejustloveme. 

Kind of. 

I'm also the person who left her divorce with the determination to keep a soft heart and I've worked really fucking hard to keep it that way. I'm also a person who believes that the more love you let into your life, the more your love grows and reflects in the world. More than that, I believe--no, I know that loving people, even the ones who do not deserve it, has made me a better person.  

So what the fuck am I supposed to do? 

* * *

It isn't until Monday morning that I can really even begin to contemplate my most recent box full of darkness. 

I spend much of the weekend in an emotional and actual hangover, tinged with just a delightful soupçon of self-recrimination and disgust. I manage to pull myself out of it long enough to spend some time with friends on Saturday and go to church on Sunday, but I make sure to make myself feel worse at every opportunity (saddest shoutout to people who use food as punishment, too).

There isn't anything special about Monday. I went outside and felt the ground under my feet and the sun on my face. I went to the park and walked the gravel paths. I observed the mallards, finally home for summer, as they fed and played. I saw a cardinal--a bird that always reminds me of David--and took a short video of its song with him later. 

The whole time I carried that box of darkness with me and thought about how fucking fragile we all are. How stupid and frustrating and maddening we can be when we're hurt and want to hurt someone else. And then I did what I always do, what I hope I will always continue to do. 

I reminded my heart to stay soft and went home.

Grief

 I have a print hanging in my bathroom that's held an outsized significance in my life for awhile. 

It's a quote from a Louise Erdrich book that I love. 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will break you with its yearning. You have to love. you have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to be swallowed up. 

Mostly it just sits there on the wall, placed inconveniently for anyone to really notice while they're peeing or washing their hands, but I know it's there. And occasionally I stop and read it and think of when I bought it and how my life has changed. Or I'll read it mindlessly while I brush my teeth. 

Sometimes, though, I read it and my heart breaks open. 

* * *

David and I have started going to church.

I can't remember how it happened. I know that we were both yearning for something. Community was a part of it. A lot of my friendships have changed dramatically during COVID and before COVID. But it was more than just looking for a beloved community for me. "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord" says Mary in one of my favorite bible passages. "My spirit rejoices in God, my savior."

God and I have not been on speaking terms since 2012, but my soul has been proclaiming something recently. 

So David and I have started going to church. We attend a Universalist Church not far from where we live. 

In graduate school, Unitarians were easy targets for derision because "They don't believe in anything." I made this argument as much as any of my peers, and what an arrogant, judgmental little shit I was. I didn't realize how badly people who didn't have my confidence in the One True Church still needed a place for spirituality, hope, and love. Now I find myself regularly attending Unitarian services. 

Who says the universe doesn't have a sense of humor?

Yesterday we had a Service of Remembrance. It was the first in-person one this community has had in over two years (everyone is asked to be vaccinated and masked for the entirety of the service, and we were in N95s, so don't get sassy). The service had some aspects that felt odd to a recovering Catholic (speaking your losses to a stone and dropping it in a bowl of water, profligately having conversations with your neighbors about loss mid-service) but weren't any odder than almost any Catholic ritual I could name. Near the end of the service there was a litany of the people we have lost in the past year, and the congregation lit a candle in remembrance of every person. 

I have never grieved communally. My beloved grandmother died in May of 2020 and I was stone faced throughout her entire service. When I came back to Minnesota I screamed with grief. I cried and retreated from David and held on to my grief like a weight. The worst of it passed. 

It always does. 

So when I found myself in the midst of a bunch of very earnest people speaking about loss so openly, I was terribly intimidated. Afterall, the only thing I'd lost was a beloved pet. Listening to people speak the names of their loved ones who had died made anything I've experienced in the past two year seem mild. 

At the end of the service, a little embarrassed, I went up the altar and lit a candle for my beloved kitty. And in the act of lighting and thinking her name, something odd happened. 

My heart broke open. 

* * *

We've lost so much in the past two years. 

Families and friendships. Pets. A civic society. Live theater and music. Jobs we loved. Time. Illusions. That teacher we really wanted our kid to experience. A sense of normalcy. Hugs and shared laughter and warmth. Maybe our conceptions of ourselves. 

I've lost a a grandmother I adored, a pet who got me through difficult times, getting to watch my adopted nieces and nephews grow, the choice about whether or not I'll be a parent, my sense of smell and taste, months to long COVID, a little bit of my sanity, the joy I used to take in my work, more things than I can name. 

And in the act of lighting that small taper candle for a cat who died in November, my heart breaks. 

It breaks and it breaks and it breaks. 

And then it's all there. All the complicated, overwhelming, messy feelings that I've been carrying with me for two long years now. 

Probably for longer than that, if I'm being honest.

Somehow, it's easier in this place. Perhaps it's the message of the day. That the kindness we hold for one another is the only thing that is left after grief. It might be that quote from my bathroom, rattling around in my head and reminding me that these complicated feelings are the reason I'm here. It could just be that it was a cathartic experience and my brain is hit with a wave of feel-good chemicals. 

What I think it is--no, what I believe it is--is that doing this together has somehow made things easier. That speaking our losses, whether to a stone or a neighbor, and lighting our candles for a person or a pet has made this act of grieving lighter. Grieving communally has created a place of compassion, empathy, and love that is so necessary and so lacking right now. 

As we leave I take David's hand and smile. "I'm glad we did that."

"Yeah, me too."

And my heart begins to mend. 

Fat Girl Fashion Rules

Fat Girl Fashion Rules

1. Always wear black. It's slimming and hides all kind of flaws. 
2. No sleeveless tops! Michelle Obama set the bar HIGH for sleeveless, so always have a cute wrap or a fun cardigan with you.  
3. Weigh yourself every day. Base your outfit on how much weight you've gained/lost in the past twelve hours.  

***

"You need to throw out your scale."

"What?"

"Or have your fiance hide it."

"Huh? Wait, why?"

"You also aren't allowed to count calories anymore."

"Are you trying to keep me fat?"

Therapy appointments have been combative recently. 

"Because you fixate on it and do your body more harm than good. I also want you to list five things you like about your body right now."

I cross my arms over my chest like a shitty teenager. And sigh. And roll my eyes. 

"Okay, now it's seven."

"I could pay my mother less to do this."

She eyeballs me. "Do you really want to open that can of worms today?"

"Ugh. Number one . . ."

***

Fat Girl Fashion Rules

1. Disguise your thighs! Never mind that "Thunder Thighs" sounds like an Asgaardian compliment. Hide those thighs! Unless they don't touch. In which case, keep rocking that Diet Coke Diet, girl!
2. Buy some shapewear! The Kardashian gals do it, why shouldn't you? 
3. Invest in sexy lingerie! Regardless of what they say, your boytoy does not want to see you naked. 

***

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"I mean . . . wow."

"We should high five."

"It's usually good, but that was . . ."

"I know, RIGHT?"

It's quiet for a few minutes while we catch our breath. 

"Hey?"

"Yeah?"

"Did your therapist tell you to turn on the light?"

***

Fat Girl Fashion Rules

1. Skinny jeans are for skinny girls. 
2. Channel your fashionable side through getting REALLY GOOD at makeup. BONUS: You can contour away your double chin!
3. Wear things that flatter your body! STYLE INSPIRATION: Fashion forward nuns in the 1950s. 

***

I mean, I get it. I really do. People come in all shapes and sizes. We're brought up in a culture of Photoshop and fast food. Skinniness is not an indication of moral superiority. Forget fashion rules, wear what you want. Love yourself and all your flaws. No, not flaws.  Flaws are being cruel or greedy or arrogant, not being chubby.

I also, you know, live in the world. I listen to my coworkers brag about how far under their calorie count they've managed to say. I remember the long conversation I had with brilliant, funny, beautiful women I knew in graduate school that wasn't about grace or ecclesiology, but was about how badly we all wanted thigh gap.  I've gone into stores that seem to assume that all fat girls want to hide their bodies under yards of fabric, stick to monochromatic clothes, or that we don't deserve anything pretty, fun, or for Christ's sake, that doesn't look like a mumu. 

I do what I can. Every morning I look in the damn mirror and list the seven things I like about myself. I develop both the ability to gently laugh at myself and cry silently in front of the mirror. I leave the light on during sex and don't hyperventilate. I stop getting on the scale, counting calories, and reading Harper's Bazaar. I buy the clothes that I actually want to wear and try to be brave enough to wear them. 

Grace 2.0

The theological gears in my brain have started spinning again.

It was sort of inevitable after the weekend. We went to go see a play called The Whale on Friday night. I spent most of the week looking forward to it. The boyfriend told me that it was a beautiful show, and he hadn't missed with a recommendation.

Most of the time I know what (and how to avoid) things that I find profoundly upsetting. I flatly refuse to see shows or movies with sexual violence. Ditto domestic violence. Actually, I consume very little violent media, at all. My favorite video games are puzzle based games rather than first-person shooters.

Aside from violence, I tend to do pretty well.

The Whale, though.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I spent most of the play crying. Or that it impacted my mood through much of the weekend. I went to bed sad on Friday, teared up a few times thinking about it Saturday, and spent a solid chunk of today writing and thinking about it.

One of the most interesting parts of the show completely opposite ways the boyfriend and I saw it. For me, it was a show about watching someone commit suicide by tiny increments. For the boyfriend it was a show about redemption and the ability to see grace and kindness in other people, even when they are verifiably rotten.

Either way, the show was a lot to process.

In theology, when we talk about grace, we talk about God breaking into the course of human events. For Christians, the major example would be the Incarnation, but also through sacraments and the liturgy.

One of the things I loved best about my theological education (especially graduate school) was the idea that moments of grace would break into our daily lives, without the sacraments, without liturgy, we could find these little moments of God's love in the everydayness. But more than the in-breaking-of-the-Divine-into-the-world, what appealed to me most was the idea that everyday grace could be transformative. 

The accessibility of God in those moments, or the idea of it, always appealed to me. 

It's been . . . awhile since I've thought about anything even tangentially related to theology. But our differing reactions to a play that was about depression, loss, and redemption, has me thinking about grace throughout the weekend. 

Relationships are such grace-filled things. 

Not in the big born-of-a-virgin or the slightly-less-big-consecration-of-the-Eucharist kind of way, but in the everyday way that has always meant more to me. The chance to see yourself in a different way is no small thing. Particularly when seeing yourself in that different way makes you want, quite simply, to be a better version of yourself. More than that, it's the other person's ability to look past who you are in your worst moments and say "I believe in the person you want to be and want to help you get there." 

That kind of unflappable belief in another person and the transformative power of grace is, I think, what The Whale was about. And it's something I would have missed, had I not had someone there to help me see something that wasn't colored by my own experience. 

Like I said, perhaps not the Incarnation, but in my worst moments, it doesn't feel any less miraculous. 

Gimme Sympathy

"And the lyrics go: "So whiskey won't you come and take my troubles, 'cause I can't seem to do it anymore.""

I stop singing and look expectantly at Jessie, who's holding the guitar. We're with the gang, on our annual Labor Day cabin weekend. There are people playing Hammerschlagen across the way, a few people have wandered off to bed, and a few of us are sitting around the the fire, singing.

Jess look at me, amused. "I haven't heard of it, but Kel, I want you to know that almost the entire time, you were singing the same note there." She pauses and smiles the sweetest smile I can imagine. "I don't know if it was the right note, but it was the same one."

We pause for a moment and then burst out laughing.

***

"Kel?"

"Hang on, I need to leave the room for a second." My satin party dress makes a slight whispering noise as I slip out.

"Hey, what's up?"

"We have your birthday present!" 

I start laughing. "From half a country away?" 

"Yeah, are you ready?" 

"Of course!"

After a few moments, someone notices that that I'm no longer at my own party. When they find me, I've kicked off my high heels and am sitting cross-legged on the bed, in my party dress, crying softly and listening while my friends sing me I'll Fly Away, a song I love, and a song they learned specifically for my birthday. 

The guy who's walked into the room gently rubs my back, hands me a tissue, and quietly leaves. 

***

"How much have you guys had to drink?"

Mom and I look at one another and burst out laughing. We're in the kitchen, listening to Motown, drinking wine, and singing along to my Motown playlist when my father walks in.

I love hearing my mother sing. 

My mother's childhood was full of Sunday dinners that ended in complex harmonies. Her mother possessed perfect pitch, a trait that missed both of us, but when Mom and I are together (especially if we're in the kitchen) we're usually singing. It's been this way for my whole life. When I think about my childhood, any memory is almost inevitably accompanied by the opening chords of Springsteen's Rosalita or Aretha Franklin hitting the high note on Share Your Love with Me.

I grew up in a house full of music, even if we weren't the ones making it. 

***

There's a nine second video on my phone that makes me so happy I could spit. 

I took it last week. I went to my running partner's house for a mid-week party. He was at the piano, taking requests, and I asked for my song of the moment, Metric's Gimme Sympathy.  It's one of those songs, like Skinny Love or Wagon Wheel that just, gets me, right in that spot behind your sternum where music hits you sometimes. It's a song I have to hear to the end, that I will belt out with abandon while I'm cooking or driving or in the shower, it makes me smile so hard my cheeks hurt when I hear it unexpectedly. 

The video is of my running partner, whose voice I love, singing a bit of the chorus. Right after I filmed it (specifically so that I could watch it when I was having a rotten day) he paused and said: "Kel, come here and help me out. I don't really remember the lyrics." 

I pulled a chair up to the piano and we sang it together. 

***

I love to sing. 

How could I not, after growing up in the house I did? Of course I turned out this way.

If I am alone, I'm singing to myself. I sing while I'm cooking, while I'm cleaning the house, while I'm walking to and from my bus stop, while I'm texting with friends, I sing at my desk while I'm working. 

I sing constantly. 

The problem, of course, is that I can't carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it. My sense of rhythm is so bad that I don't clap along at concerts because I am invariably half a beat behind. I sound awful and I know it. I've known it for most of my life and I've just adapted. I only sing when I'm alone. The second I see another person walking down the street toward me I clam up. When there are other people over helping me cook, I play instrumental jazz so I won't be tempted. I would rather set myself on fire than do karaoke. 

***

Some years ago, a couple friends of mine started learning songs for my birthday.

It's the birthday tradition I look forward to most every year. They kept it up even when they moved across country and it means the world to me. Most of my friends are musicians, either vocalists, music teachers, or simply gifted with the innate ability to pick up an instrument and follow along on a song, so I've started to ask more of them to learn something for my birthday.

The reason I love this, particularly, as a birthday gift is because the songs they learn are my favorites, and they learn them with the intention of singing together. The friends who started this tradition, the friends who I impose on every year are people who have known me for most of my adult life. They've either managed to get enough wine into me to convince me to sing along, caught me in the kitchen, or been the recipients of enough inadvertent pocket dials that they know how rotten I sound and that I'll usually be dragging the beat.

They don't care.

That's not quite right. They're talented musicians and they take a great deal of pleasure in sounding, you know, good. It's more that they love me and the know how happy it makes me to do something I love without a shred of self-consciousness. Or, as my running partner frequently tells me:

"I love singing with you. You've gotten to the point where you stopped giving a damn how you sound and it's refreshing."

I don't know that the friends who do this for me understand the enormity of the gift they give me every year. It's the sort of gift that requires a tremendous "thank you" but I've never been able to find the words to describe what it means to me.

Instead I just sent along my song requests for this year.

I can't wait.

Beauty #14 CHVRCHES

I’m wearing my Holly Golightly sunglasses into the office, carrying a blueberry smoothie in one hand and a huge glass of iced coffee in the other.

I nod to my assistant, drop my beverages on my desk, and head to the bathroom. Removing my sunglasses, I assess the damage.

I’ve got to stop wearing waterproof mascara to First Avenue.

***

I suffer amnesia when it comes to shows.

I forget, every damn time, what it feels like to hear a band play your favorite song. I fail to recollect how amazing a good bass line feels when it’s thudding in your chest. I disregard or downplay the sheer visceral pleasure in being closely packed in with other people, all sharing the same experience.

The amnesia is a blessing in disguise, I think. It keeps me going back.

***

I didn’t think I could be surprised by live shows.

It’s not that I’m not moved by, impressed with, or enjoy live shows. It’s that after fifteen years of attending everything from punk shows to jazz clubs, I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a band could surprise me.

For someone so smart, I can be a real dummy.

A few days ago, Nick texted to ask if I wanted to use an extra ticket to the CHVRCHES show at First Avenue.  I tried for tickets when they went on sale, but the show sold out super quickly and I’ve been bummed by the prospect of missing it.

The show was sort of an unusual one for me to want to attend, as I avoid anything that even remotely smells like electronic music. Unsurprising, I suppose, considering my favorite bands tend toward banjos and complex harmonies.

Regardless, when Nick offered the ticket, I jumped at it.

One of the themes that keeps coming up in my writing is the slipperiness of describing attending a show. It’s hard to nail down because it’s such a confluence of physical sensations and emotional responses.

CHVRCHES was like that, except moreso. I didn’t expect to love the show as much as I did, to dance so hard I woke up with inexplicable bruises this morning. I never anticipated hugging Nick in a sheer overflow of emotion over hearing the lyrics: finally/we agree/no place for promises here.

I didn’t think the experience would keep me awake into the early hours, and leave me with dark circles under my eyes this morning.

I’m glad it did.

A Story, During a Slow Day

A conversation, in a Riverside bar.

"Did your ex ever tell you that he thought you were beautiful?"

I'm drinking PBR Tallboys with a friend and the question takes me by surprise. It's a rowdy bar, one we've come for an event, and I wasn't anticipating anything heavier than normal late-Saturday-night conversation. I think for a moment before answering. It's not really the kind of conversation you want to shout across a bar table.

"Nope. None of them have."

"Really?"

"I mean, they had parts of me that they liked to compliment, but yeah, really."

"Is that something that's important to you?"

I set my beer down and study her for a moment. If the question surprises me, the conversation that follows stuns me. This woman is one of my closer friends. God knows she's heard me spill my guts hundreds of times, and we've never had this conversation.

More than that, she's pretty.

Not pretty enough, not pretty-in-the-right-light. She's just pretty.

I would have never thought she would need reassurance.

***

A text, during the middle of a long work day.

"I've got an extra ticket to CHVRCHES tomorrow night and  I know you're bummed that it sold out before you could get a ticket. See you at First Ave at 7:00."

***

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about wants and needs lately.

The conversation in the Riverside bar doesn't exactly help. It's late, late, late when I get home, but I'm wound up and everyone else in the world is already in bed. I spend most of the rest of the evening up, journaling, and thinking about relationships. It leads me to thinking about what I want from a partner, the qualities I'd like him to find in me and the things I need from a romantic relationship. 

I make a list.  

There are the obvious, immediate things. I'd like my partner to think that I'm funny, bright, and interesting. Beautiful would be nice, but I'd rather have sexually desirable. Getting along with my best friend is a non-negotiable. A desire to continue to learn and a certain level of excitement over learning something new is incredibly important.

Then there are the less obvious things that are also important to me. Understanding why I love First Ave. so much or how there are certain songs I always have to hear to the end or I feel like I missed something. Knowing that after a really bad day I want to go for a run and then eat a bunch of gummi bears. Learning to run interference when I'm staying with my family so I can have a little time to myself. Leaving me to myself when I really do just want to stay in and read. Appreciating that the real way to my heart is bringing me coffee in bed on a slow Saturday morning. 

***

A phone call, late.

I squint at the number through my sleepiness and pick it up.

"Hello?"

"Kels?"

"Yeah, are you all right?"

"I thought your phone would be on silent! I'm sorry. I just called to tell you that I love you."

I smile through my sleepiness. "There's a rule on my phone to always ring for certain people. You're one of them."

"That's sweet. I love you. Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

***

"Have you had the experience of talking about Us at work?"

I'm walking through South Minneapolis, holding the hands of two of the girls from the gang from the neighborhood. 

Let me back up. I have a group of friends I see, on average, three times a week. We have impromptu weeknight dinners together. We run together. We go to shows and one another's work events. I do my laundry at their houses and they have the keys to my apartment. I snuggle with them when my heart's broken. I plan my vacations with them. Most of us live within walking distance of one another in the same neighborhood in South Minneapolis. When something goes wrong or I've got news to celebrate, they're my first call. 

Anyway, I'm walking through South Minneapolis with two of these people. I'm talking about how the fact that I live in the Cities still hasn't gotten old, that I love being able to get together with them on a random Wednesday, and that it's good to have people to talk to over the course of the week. That sparks the question about whether or not I've talked about the gang at work. 

Of course I have. I already said that I spend all my free time with these people. They come up in my conversations with my coworkers frequently. But I know what's actually being asked, because it's an experience all of us have had. When you tell your coworkers that you spend all of your time not with your spouse or significant other but with a group of six-to-ten close friends, the reaction tends to be the same:

"That's not normal."

***

An email, on the bus ride home.

"We're running tonight. You're stressed and not dealing with it, so you're coming over, we're running, I'm making you dinner, and then we're going to snuggle up and watch House of Cards.

I have gummi bears."

***

It's pouring when I leave the bar. 

The walk back to the car is well-lit and not necessarily unsafe, but the guys in the neighborhood are inclined to catcall and my dress is not exactly modest. I ask one of my more broad-shouldered friends to walk me back. Despite his lack of an umbrella, he cheerfully accompanies me the six blocks or so. On the way I talk a little about how nice it was to get together tonight and thank him for being sweet enough to walk me back through the deluge. We're stopped at a crosswalk when he turns to me.

"You know I'd do anything for you, right? We all would."

It occurs to me then how lucky I am. Some of those more subtle needs, loving Metric's Synthetica album and realizing that sometimes my favorite way of being with people is to be in the same room reading separate things, are already being met. It is, I suspect, one of the reasons why I'm happy being single. 

***

A moment, outside a Riverside bar.

I give my broad-shouldered friend a lift back to the bar so he can catch up with the rest of the gang from the neighborhood. When I pull up, he hops out, shuts the door, and opens it and sticks his head back in.

"What's up?"

"I just wanted to tell you that I really like your dress. You look beautiful."

30x30 #16: See Hamlet Live

When I was eighteen I read Hamlet five times.

It wasn't an early OCD episode. It was a series of assignments for my particularly mad AP English teacher. Hamlet was his favorite play, and he was absolutely convinced it could be used to answer any question the AP test writers could throw at us, so he wanted us to be able to cite it act, scene, and line.

I was a pretty huge smartass as a teenager so I spent a lot of time mouthing off to this particular teacher about how much Shakespeare sucked and how I would never write about Hamlet. I was going to write about The Great Gatsby or Lolita. 

You know how you had that teacher? The one who changed your life, who made you less of a terrible person, the teacher who inspired you to pull up your socks and start acting like an adult? My AP English teacher was that for me. He was the first person who told me that my work was sub-par, that being a smart kid was fine, but it didn't go anywhere if you weren't willing to apply yourself.

For the record, he was yelling at my about my AP Econ grades, not the work I was doing in his class. 

He's the reason I read The Great Gatsby, The Razor's Edge, Lear, Othello, The Dubliners. He gave me Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Maltese Falcon. When I graduated from high school he gave me my copy of Franny and Zooey, with a message written inside that still makes me cry when I read it. 

He's the reason I read Hamlet, the reason I learned one of the soliloquies by heart. I don't doubt that writing about Hamlet and being able to cite it, act, scene, and line was the reason I did so well on the AP Exam. When I left the exam he accosted me in the hallway and asked what I had written about. 

"Hamlet," I groaned, rolling my eyes. "But I still hate Shakespeare."

Over the years, despite what my smart-alecky eighteen year old self asserted, I've realized that I love Shakespeare. More than that, Hamlet has become my favorite play. 

I couldn't possibly tell you how it happened.

For whatever reason, Hamlet kept popping up in my life. I'd be sitting in church trying to pay attention to services and I'd think of Claudius "Pray can I not, though inclination be as sharp as will." In graduate school during a particularly intense fight about sex and ethics I remembered Ophelia's response to Laertes: "Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven." During an emotional move (and its attendant break-up) the man I was seeing kissed me on the forehead and quoted "Doubt thou . . ." before sending me on my way.

Having favorite things shouldn't be problematic. But I'm the girl who can always find a way to turn good things into problems and here's the issue: I can be insufferable when I love something. 

After sitting through Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing with me, Nick has vowed never to see another movie with me. During a live jazz show a friend of mine pinched me so hard she left bruises because I was holding my  breath and she suspected I might pass out. I will nearly always say "The book was better" after seeing any kind of adaptation. As a result, it was no surprise that I ended up having to go to Hamlet alone. 

I went to Hamlet expecting, well, I don't know what. After over ten years of loving this piece of theater so intensely, I didn't think I could be surprised by Hamlet anymore. 

Last summer I wrote about how experiences can be slippery, how despite my best efforts as a writer there are events or books or people who impact me so unexpectedly and deeply that it's impossible to talk about them and their effect. Early in May I wrote about the stories that you don't tell.

I can't write about Hamlet.

I can't write about it because writing about it feels like being back in that AP testing room. I can't write about it because in this case, the play isn't the thing. The important part of seeing Hamlet wasn't seeing how the director staged it or speculating why they did it in period dress when so much Shakespeare seems to be reset in the 1940s. The thing about Hamlet, about seeing it live was less about the play and more about what happened after seeing it,truthfully, what happened after having it in my life for the past eleven years.

A good show, be it Hamlet at the Guthrie or Doomtree at First Ave should leave you shaky, breathless, without words to describe what's just happened, perhaps a little uncertain that your legs will carry you out of the venue. It ought to leave you open and vulnerable in ways you did not anticipate, and fill something inside of you that you didn't realize was empty. Hamlet did all of those things to me. It started doing all those things to me on the first of the five read-throughs all those years ago. Seeing it live surprised me and left me vulnerable in ways that I'm still discovering nearly a month later.

My AP English teacher would be proud. 

Beauty #13

"Am I going to sound weird if I say it's sexy as hell?"

"Kel, when in your writing, when in your life have you ever worried about sounding weird?"

"Point taken. "

One of my favorite feelings in the world is when someone or something gets under your skin. The moment you realize that you've been thinking about a person or a book or a song for hours and that even if you wanted to, you couldn't stop it. Obviously, it's most enjoyable when it's a person who gets under your skin (Correction: it's most enjoyable when it's a person who gets under your skin and you know they feel the same way about you.) but I certainly still appreciate the sensation when it's a song or a book.

Right now, I can't stop thinking about Saga.

Of course I can't stop thinking about Saga. It's exactly the kind of story to catch my attention. It's a love story set in space in the distant future. There's a large puma(ish) cat that can detect when someone is lying and lets its owner know. The spaceships are made out of trees (a change Brian K. Vaughn made because Fiona Staples (*swoon*) hates drawing mechanical things). There's a character named Prince Robot IV who is drawn just like a person except he has a television for a head.

Is this all sounding a little too weirdly grand?

It is. It's a completely mad, brilliant story. Everything that happens is completely improbable and it requires more than a normal comic book suspension of disbelief. But if you allow yourself that suspension of disbelief and crawl into the story (a process made SO much easier by Fiona Staples's art) you wind up with a story that is, well, it could be the plot line to almost any romance novel ever written. Girl meets boy. Girl and boy fall in love. Girl and boy overcome tremendous obstacles to be with one another.

The problem, of course, is that Saga is still in production, and Brian K. Vaughn is second possibly only to Joss Whedon for killing off characters you adore, so I'm certain that at some point I'm going to end up on Nick and Victoria's couch crying like an idiot. 

It'll be worth it. 

There are so many things I adore about this comic. The originality of the characters, the gorgeousness of the artwork, the way Vaughn makes a (let's face it) somewhat tired storyline feel fresh, the fact that ohmygod there are moments when Alana is talking that I feel like he's been poaching things from my brain.

But the best part of the comic (for me) is the relationship between Alana and Marko.

I frequently get sort of frustrated when reading or watching something that depicts couples who have been together for years, or couples who are married, or couples who are anything except just starting out. How often are those couples depicted and either estranged or as madly in love as they were when they first started out?

It's a dichotomy I wouldn't notice if I wasn't surrounded by so many people in long-term relationships (many about to close out their first decade of coupledom) but because my immediate circle of friends is made up primarily of people in long-term relationships (and because we are all ridiculously involved in one another's lives) it's something that stands out to me. None of their relationships are perfect, but they're not miserable either.

It's what I love about Saga, it's what makes Alana and Marko stand out among comic book characters I've encountered over the years. I know how this sounds coming from a self-professed socially awkward nerd, but they have the kind of relationship I want, the kind of relationship I see in the couples I hang out with regularly.

They're a couple that's obviously deeply, crazily in love with one another. They also get pissed at one another, and fight, and fuck and make up and make one another laugh. Their relationship is sexy as hell and not just because of smutty bits (although, Holy Jesus). It's because their relationship is complex and complete. It's a real relationship, drawn and written into comic book form.

It's the kind of relationship, the kind of story that gets under your skin.

Beauty #12

I've got a lot of thoughts surrounding the fleeting nature of jazz and how much it relates to my style of dating. 

I don't feel like writing any of them.

Suffice it to say, there are very few singers who can make heartbreak beautiful (Patsy Cline and Bon Iver are at the top of my list).

And Billie Holiday. Jesus. No one, but no one, sings about heartbreak like Billie Holiday. 

I love Billie Holiday because she can simultaneously indulge my need to feel like hell and (somehow) make me appreciate whatever relationship has just ended for what it was worth. 

And, what the hell, one more. 

Beauty #11

I love poetry.

Like everything that I love, I love it intensely, deeply, borderline obsessively. I (would) have bookshelves devoted specifically to poetry. I try to memorize one poem a year. When I'm having a terrible day, I listen to Auden or Eliot reading their work and it, well, not cheers me right up but certainly helps me settle things into their proper perspective.

I believe (with the exception of Eliot) that poetry isn't something you should have to torture a confession out of. It should be something that you read and that--just for a moment--breaks you open. It should be something that pulls your heart out of your chest and forces you to look at it closely.

"Misgivings" by William Matthews does that to me.

Of course it does. I'm commitment-phobic. I intentionally keep people out of my life because I'm afraid of getting hurt. I only tell people about the bits of me that I think they'll like.

But. But. But.

I'll admit it quietly.

I want someone to share my life with.

William Matthews has somehow managed to reach into my brain (maybe just the brain of all slightly-neurotic young adults) and scoop out all of my apprehensions surrounding undoing the safety line and going top over teakettle for someone and put them into a poem (a poem that I have seem to have accidentally memorized). It's exactly the kind of gut-spillage that I look for in a poem, the exact kind of poem that makes me want to think about love and my life and the people who are in it.

My favorite line(s) are . . . well, wait. I don't want to spoil it. Bonus if you can correctly guess them.

***

"Misgivings"
William Matthews

Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns

for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

Beauty #10

One of the happiest moments of my adult life was when a friend took me to hear live jazz at the Bohemian Caverns. It was about a week before my birthday, I had flown into D.C. specifically to geek out on American History as a birthday present to myself. After arriving mid-morning I spent most of the day standing in front of The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and wandering around various monuments and thinking about history. The evening was a total surprise--I had asked to be taken to do something I wouldn't find on my own. I didn't find out where we were going until we were there, and I barely had enough time to jump up and down before we were in and seated and listening to jazz.

I don't think I breathed the entire night. 

I love jazz. I love jazz like I love history and poetry and Doctor Who. My older brother introduced me to Thelonious Monk while I was in college and it was the start of one of the great aesthetic loves of my life. Throughout the years my brother has sent me Charles Mingus and John Coltrane albums. We've sipped Scotch and listened to free jazz.

My favorite jazz musician is Miles Davis. Undoubtedly. It's a little predictable, I know, but Miles is the one who reliably pulls at my heart, whose music I turn on after a long day or a bad day or when I'm just feeling kind of quiet and introspective. 

There was a great story on NPR about Miles Davis's concert at The New York Philharmonic in '64. If you haven't heard it, you should go take a listen. That concert resulted in two of my favorite jazz records of all time, and a version of "Stella by Starlight" that is unimaginably good. 

It's one of a very few jazz recordings that can do what the show at the Bohemian Caverns did. It makes me stop breathing, stop thinking, stop doing anything but listening to the music. Every time I hear it I can't help but think of that night in Bohemian Caverns--and revel (however briefly) in good music's ability to take you outside of yourself. 

Beauty #9

My last couple posts about beauty have been esoteric (pits, PRs, Doctor Who). Here's one that's a little more concrete.

My family owns a bit of land on a lake in Northern Wisconsin.

It's the most beautiful place in the world.

I spent summers up there as a kid. Once I turned 18, I got my own key to the place and free license to head up there whenever I wished. Over the years I've had a number of bluegrass sing-alongs on the front porch, cooked and consumed fantastic meals in the kitchen. I learned to take a fish off a line, the rudiments of butchering a deer, how to count while playing cribbage. I've cried over broken hearts and written long essays about my father and smoked endless cigarettes at the end of the pier. I've seen the Perseid meteor shower and gone skinny dipping and swamped canoes.

In the spring I go on walks through the woods and see the Trillium blooming. Summers I try to spend at least one weekend fishing with Daddy. Fall I cook Thanksgiving dinner. Winters I head over and read curled up next to the fire. The natural beauty is one part of why I love it so much. The other is that it's a place of deep memory. My grandfather became enamored with this part of the state when he worked in the CCC. He and my grandmother finished the place in 1959 and every summer since then my family and extended family has spent time on the lake. My great-aunt had the place next door and when we were children we would run back and forth between cabins, swimming all day and playing cards with Dorothy when we got cold. My grandmother's best friend, an elderly Czech woman used to let me eat raspberries out of her back raspberry patch and always made me these special Czech cookies that were my favorite.

It's the place that I think about when I think about my gram (still fishing at nearly 90!). When I remember the happiest moments of my childhood and my adult life they were here, in some capacity. I have, on more than one occasion, tied an inner tube to the end of that pier and floated off of it reading a book for hours. My favorite bike rides have taken place on long, hilly roads surrounding the place.

There are a few things for which my dorky enthusiasm knows no bounds. History is one. Doctor Who is another. Also on the list is: urban bee-keeping, running, baking, and French cooking. Building things with other people. Learning what "home" means.

As I've gotten older, the sort of rural area where I grew up has turned increasingly into the kind of suburban nightmare I can't stand. Mom and Dad's house feels a little less like home with each passing year. It's inevitable, of course, but it's still a little sad. Minnesota has become home in a way that Wisconsin can't be. I have not just friends here, but an honest-to-the-gods community. It sounds not only dorky but sentimental to say that we're building something together, but it's true. Each random Monday night dinner at someone's house, each bonfire, each mile we run together is building a home that doesn't exist for me anywhere else.

Except on this tiny bit of land in Northern Wisconsin. Out in the middle of nowhere, on this wooded lot there's a sense of place and belonging that my family has built together. From digging the foundation back in in the 50s to putting on new siding sometime in my early adulthood to a Jarts tournament on the place's 50th birthday to pitchers of sangria on the porch with my brothers this summer, we've built this little place that will always carry the feeling of home for me.

Beauty #8

Hanging above my scale there's a list of five reasons to go for a run, RIGHT NOW,  instead of putting it off for another hour or day. They range from "race results are forever" to the name of a recent paramour with a line drawn through it.

A few months ago aforementioned overnight guest stopped the proceedings to say, off-handedly, "For someone who talks so much about running and cycling, I thought you'd be skinnier."

If I live to be one hundred, I will never, never forget how that made me feel.

A week later, on my way out the door for a run, I tripped and fell down the stairs, spraining my ankle, putting my spring half marathon on hold, and leaving me with nothing to do but to obsessively weigh myself and (equally obsessively) think about what he had said to me.

I thought you'd be skinnier.

***

I started running again, post-injury and post-rehab, three weeks ago.

It's been a pretty mixed bag.

I am, hands down, one of the least naturally athletic people I know. Running doesn't come easily, and I don't often leave runs thinking That went great! I'm also, you know, sort of hard on myself, so I very rarely know that I did well on a run. And it means something to me to know, unequivocally, that I did well at something. I've been working really hard to ramp up the mileage, go for more runs alone, get to a point where I depend a little less on my running partner for motivation and a little more on myself.

My motivation these days seems to be that goddamn sentence.

I thought you'd be skinnier.

More than the sentence itself, it's how I reacted when he said it (and other horrible things) to me. I didn't kick him out of my house. I didn't call him out on his shit. I merely accepted that These are the things men think about when they see you. These are the things they have always thought. These are the things they will always think. Get used to it. 

Looking back on that moment makes me feel weak.

***

Yesterday I ran my first race in years without my running partner. I ran it coming off of an injury and a bad night's sleep and after running without a watch for over a year. I had no idea what my pace was, I couldn't make an educated guess as to splits, but I knew that I had been running a little faster and that I might be able to set a new PR at this race. In the end, I grabbed  a permanent marker, marked my old splits on the inside of my arm and guessed that I was probably running about fifteen seconds/mile faster. I thought that if I pushed myself I might be able to pick up another fifteen seconds a mile. I put those paces in a column next to my old PR and decided that if I crossed the finish line one second ahead of the old one, I would be pumped. If I crossed slower than the old PR, I would just call it a day and be pleased that I finished after coming off of a non-trivial injury a few weeks ago. 

I beat my old PR by four and a half minutes.

This is, for those of you non-runners out there, not an insignificant improvement, especially over a four mile course. 

When I crossed the finish line I was dry-heaving. My iliotibial bands promised to make my life miserable over the next forty-eight hours. I was red-faced and taking huge gulps of air. It was not a photogenic finish (mine never are). But despite the blorchiness of it, I was grinning like an idiot.

***

Here's the secret, I don't run to be skinny.

I mean, I would love it if all the running I do would translate into a more delicate figure, but that ain't going to happen.

I run to be strong.

That's it. That's the reason I run. It's the reason that guy's name is still on my Go for a Run list. He's not there because I want to be as skinny as he (and all the asshats like him) think I should be. He's there to remind me what it felt like to feel weak. He's there to remind me that I never want anyone to make me feel that way again.

There's an impossibly good photo of me from the race finish yesterday. It is (to me, at least) the sexiest photograph I've ever taken (despite, you know, being spandexed up). As of today, it's hanging with the Go for a Run list not because it's an inherently good photograph, but because it reminds me (in the inevitable moments of vulnerability that come with, you know, weighing yourself) of what it felt like to know, even at the cost of dry-heaves and tight iliotibial bands, what it was like to finally feel strong again. 

Beauty #7

The first time I heard the Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings I was on a date.

It wasn't just any date, it was a top-over-tea-kettle kind of a date. A swoony, feelalittlelightheadedwhenhehelpsyououtofthecar kind of date. I had asked him to accompany me to the chamber orchestra and then out for a martini. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to keep my palms from sweating, to say nothing of being able to pay any attention to the concert whatsoever. But he was a chamber music fan and I figured that the concert would keep him engrossed enough that I could spend the evening staring at him (he was just gorgeous) with impunity.

Like I said, top-over-tea-kettle.

Imagine my shock when, forty minutes after the orchestra had taken the stage, I tried to explode into applause only to realize that he had both of my hands in his. I had little recollection of reaching for him, even less of apparently holding my breath throughout the concert, and absolutely none of starting to cry and borrowing his handkerchief.

Five years later the guy is gone, but (and thanks to the SPCO) I can still hear the concert from that night. Despite not having a greek god of a man's hands to hold during it, I find that certain passages from it can still leave me holding my breath.

Beauty #6

I'm limping up the stairs to my apartment.

In the course of the past four hours I've been crushed, stepped on, kicked in the head, and gotten into a shoving match with a 200+ pound guy with a shaved head. I've wrecked a pair of jeans, lost my favorite pair of leather cuffs, and accumulated an impressive collection of sore spots that will definitely turn ugly shades of black and blue by morning. 

I can't remember the last time I felt this happy.

***

I have a beastly temper. 

It doesn't take much to trigger it either. Or rather, it wouldn't take much to trigger it if it weren't under such tight control. I keep it coiled up inside of me in a box that makes the Pandorica look like a dollar store lockbox. 

It's the reality of being an adult, is it not? You assess your personality for assets and liabilities. You amplify your assets and make every attempt to limit your liabilities and square them away as best as possible. Over the years I've learned to deal with my liabilities (depression, anxiety, a hair-trigger temper) pretty productively (usually by channeling them into some sort of grueling endurance event). And it works. It works really, really well for the depression and anxiety. The anger is another issue. I find that after a hard run or long uphill bike ride it's not that I'm not angry. It's that I'm too tired to care. 

So the anger is always there, just below the surface, even though most people wouldn't guess its existence. 

***

Tonight found me in a ton of smudgey black makeup and knee high boots congenially kicking the shit out of a bunch of people (predominately dudes) that I'd never met. 

Have I mentioned that I love punks? 

I cut my teeth on post-hardcore, post-punk bands. I was in my first mosh pit at fourteen and have been in so many that I've lost count. As I've grown older and my musical tastes have diversified, I've been to fewer punk shows, but I still love the wacky sense of community in a good pit. There's angry dancing and elbows and intense physical pain. There's getting kicked in the head by a crowd-surfer. There's shoving matches that look like they might break out into actual fights until the crowd swirls again and people move away from one another. There's also the knowledge that if you slip and fall, someone will be there to pick you up. There's the ability to reach out and grab someone around the waist when the crowd behind you is pushing too hard. There are the hugs that happen when your favorite song comes on and you're standing next to an equally sweaty, beer-drenched person who also happens to love the same song. 

Have I mentioned that I love mosh pits?

There's an elegance and a beauty to the ebb and flow of the people dancing and ricocheting off one another. I can never throw myself into a pit without thinking about Dylan Thomas:

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My adult life is unbelievably buttoned-up. It's tailored dresses and briefcases. Budgets and bills. Meeting someone who doesn't necessarily want to stay up until 4am talking existentialism and Michel Foucault and Waiting for Godot but who you can take home and introduce to your family. Adulthood is about learning to quiet anger and frustration, finding ways to accept them as part of your daily existence and ignore them until they go away.

Punk shows aren't like that.

They're a place where you get to be furious and frustrated, where anger isn't a liability, but an asset. You can rage against all the things that piss you off about your life and the world around you without having to turn the volume down. Your anger can be let out of its box and people either won't notice or won't care.

No, it's note quite that they won't care. It's that they'll understand.

It's amazing how once you get the space just let it all out that rage gets transformed into something else--a kind of crazy exuberance, a strange, mad joy that doesn't just belong to you but to the entire pit, the whole show. You're still raging against the dying of the light, but about halfway through the show it also becomes a celebration that you've experienced any light at all.  

Beauty #5

I fell in love with Doctor Who from the first episode.

I adore Doctor Who. And by adore, I mean, you know adore. I wear my "Blink" t-shirt regularly. I can quote whole long soliloquies from the show. I have cried during every Doctor Regeneration I've seen (I am, admittedly, a bit behind on the Classic series). I refuse to watch the Matt Smith Regeneration until I'm in a less emotional space (which will be sometime next January after lunch). When I want to tell someone that I love them I say "I  ♥♥ you like I love Doctor Who."

I know, right?

I started the series with the Christopher Eccleston reboot. And it was pretty good. A little kitschy, but certainly enjoyable. I watched the first season shortly after I finished Battlestar Galactica, which just destroyed me on an emotional level, and a little goofiness was in order.

But, oh, the David Tennant series.

I was bound to love it from the moment he stepped onto screen. David Tennant is brown-eyed, skinny, and Scottish. With great hair. And he was playing a brilliant time-traveler with a superhero complex.

Yeah. Bound to love him.

This is to say nothing of the fact that I thought Russell T. Davies an excellent story-teller. And that you got all of the shining genuis of Steven Moffat without any of the downfalls (a dearth of intelligent female characters, no real consequences in any of his universes, too-clever-by-half syndrome). But what I love(d) most about the David Tennant series was his ability to make me feel something, whether it was goofy joy or anger and holyfuckingshitripmyheartoutofmychest sadness.

It feels weird to be talking about a television show as beautiful in the same series where I'll be talking about Hamlet, Auden, Faure's Requiem Mass (Spoilers, Sweetie). As though comparing a British sci-fi television show with which I have a total fangirl relationship to capital A Art somehow diminishes either of them.

As I've been writing these posts, I've been ruminating on what, for me, moves something from the realm of "loveliness" or "brilliantly crafted" to something beautiful. How is it possible for me to put a four minute segment of Who the same category and a painting by Matisse?

During the course of the week I consume a not insignificant amount of emotional material. Thursday I read a case of a woman whose boyfriend beat her (literally) senseless and then attempted to set her on fire. Then I came home and read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and listened to some Bach cello suites.

This was not an unusual day for me.

When you live on the edge of the bell curve, high dynamic range of emotionalism and consume highly emotional content day in and out, it takes a little more to push you over the edge, to really pack an emotional wallop that sticks with you over the course of time. During any given week a novel, a Lorde song, a comment made in passing may all move me, but it's the things I remember at the end of a few years, that still impact me when I see or hear them again that are allowed to move out of the "impactful" group and into the "beautiful" group.

There were two moments from the David Tennant run on Who that I considered for this post although (again, Spoilers, Sweetie) this won't be his only appearance. They both come from the same season and have, I suppose the same theme, which is 10's love for Rose.

I am a total sucker for a good star-crossed lovers story and how more star-crossed can you be than an un-aging spacetime traveler who falls in love with a human woman? This clip comes from the last four-ish minutes of the episode "Doomsday," which I have only watched in its entirety once (I can't stand to sit through an hour f television when I know the ending is going to murder me emotionally). I have, however, twice in the past four years, used this four minutes as a break glass in case of emotional emergency. When I'm too emotionally exhausted to deal with said emotions, I've cued up these last four minutes and allowed the catharsis of them to help me deal with my own shit. (Full disclosure, I couldn't even watch the whole video for this post because right now it's too much.)

I'm not the only person who has this emotional reaction to Who or even the only person to have this emotional reaction to this episode of Who. A friend of mine refuses to watch it because "it reminds [her] of every horrible, gut-wrenching, heart-shredding breakup" she's ever had.

In the end, isn't that what art, what beauty is supposed to do? To reach inside of us and tear out our guts and show them to us? To squeeze our heart and our lungs until we feel like we might die and remind us this is what it means to be human? 

At least, that's what I've always thought it was supposed to do. That's why, with very little embarrassment, I can leave 10 and Rose here, amid Matisse and Auden and Faure.

Allons-y. 

Beauty #4

This is one of the few pictures taken of me that I, without any reservations, love.

It's me, crossing the Headwaters of the Mississippi up at Itasca for the first time. 

I was an invited third wheel into a nascent relationship. Things were a little awkward (I was along for a weekend trip I didn't know was a weekend trip until much later) until I mentioned that I had never seen the Headwaters of the Mississippi River. The couple took me to the Headwaters and I nearly lost my mind for joy.

I've had a lifelong love affair with the Mississippi River. Whether it was because I read Mark Twain early on or the fact that it links my early years in Wisconsin and my later years in Minnesota. That river has wound its way throughout my entire life and crossing its Headwaters for the first time was one of the most profoundly spiritual moments of my life.

When I wrote in the first post that I fear a sort of Loss of the Creature moments with these entries, this was the one I was thinking about. Unless you've stood at the Headwaters or seen the Mississippi where it empties into the Gulf, it's difficult to describe the beauty and fragility of the river. It's a force onto itself. 

I return the Headwaters once every few years and take off my shoes (always in the fall. I've got to go sometime when the weather is warm) and wade around. I like knowing that however polluted and full of Asian Carp the river is even a hundred miles downstream that this place exists. That there is this one moment in space and time where the Mighty Mississippi is just a stream that you can walk across. 

Beauty #3

I attended one of those snooty college preparatory schools. The kind where an emphasis is put on The Classics. My four years there were basically an agonizing, protracted course in Great Books, Great Poetry. As a result, I made some interesting literary decisions. I memorized The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at sixteen. I read Lolita before I was really old enough to understand what was going on. 

During my first year of college I had a professor who introduced me to poetry that didn't require footnotes or a working Latin and German vocabulary (I'm looking at you, Eliot). She reinvigorated my love of poetry and my desire to one day be a poet myself.

Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac picked up where that professor had left off. I read the poems on the website every day. When a poem strikes me, I cue up the audio and listen to Garrison read it (he really does have a very fine voice).

I found Eleanor Lerman through The Writer's Almanac, through this poem particularly. One of her lines in particular just knocks me out. It simultaneously expresses one of those moments that is so mundane and so odd that you have to stop and think to yourself "Did I slip into a Neil Gaiman novel?"

I'll let you guess what line it was.

Starfish
by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you were born at a good time. Because you were able to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.