(Holy shit wow.)

Doing a little sprucing up around the homestead. Spring cleaning and all. I even sorted through my bookshelf (it’s true) and made a little give-away pile (remain calm).

Flipping through one, I found a pencil-scribbled note from 04/23/12 on the back page. Almost a year ago. I’d just gotten back from a trip to Memphis. A really great weekend with friends and family. A wedding I’d been looking forward to for…years.

So it’s only natural I was experiencing the “post-birthday party” letdown feelings. But I see something beyond the general gloominess that follows a fun vacation. I see restlessness here that I’m glad to report has settled. I think. For now.

Perfect not-cold sweater weather outside. Sun setting. Everything green. I try to look at my surroundings with fresh eyes. What if this were my vacation spot? My refuge or escape? I’d think it was beautiful. Breeze. Birds. Sunshine. Trees. Peace.

How can I bring vacation-me home and let her roam around my everyday life? She’s so hopeful and happy. So eager and open to good. Creative and relaxed. Energized. Her eyes want to notice things. Her eyes want things. Her body craves movement. Her mind needs food. She sees possibility. People like her and think she’s fine.

Post-birthday-party-me clearly saw vacation-me as the type of person she wanted to be. “Her eyes want things.” I underlined that word…and I think I know why. When I’m feeling stuck, I can lose my ability to want things. Drive, desire, chutzpah — what have you. But there are moments when I can get it back: in a new place, with an old friend, at a movie or in a book. Hell, sometimes a particularly good snack can transport me to a better place. You never know.

Later that night, Ben Rattray (founder of change.org) was on the Daily Show, and I scribbled some more notes in the back of that same book. (Nice pre-loaded blog post fodder, last-year-me!)

“Putting your efforts and life’s work into making the change you need in yourself.” (paraphrase)

(Holy shit wow.)

Ben Rattray — 1st attempt FAILED.

These scribbles are a little more cryptic. But, thanks to the internet, I found a clip of the episode. And here’s what he actually said.

The paraphrased scribble was from Jon Stewart, actually, and I got pretty close: “Incredible story. Putting your efforts and your life’s work behind the change you wanted to make in your own being.”

In other words, hey lackluster SJ, you know this hopeful & happy, creative & energized person exists. But you’re having trouble tracking her down. In the meantime, what can you do to make your world a more hopeful, happy, creative, energized place? Do those things. She’ll come back. 

The idea sounds absurdly simplistic when I spell it out like that, and I’m also not sure I’m completely articulating my point…it’s bouncing around in my brain, but I can’t quite reel it in.

If you have six minutes to spare, watch Rattray’s full interview. If not, just take his final words:

The power that people have to make a difference right now, with social media, is far greater than ever before. and if you identify an issue you care passionately about [...] you have a greater chance of success than you can possibly imagine.

(Holy shit wow.)

There’s no “I” in Thesaurus

I’ll be 30 in 100 days. I know this because I have a countdown widget on my laptop dashboard…and I happened to look at it yesterday while I was using my thesaurus widget, which is also a thing I have. (I think about synonyms more often than I think about my birthday, for what it’s worth.)

I get to spend a significant portion of my workweek thinking about words. Things like:

“What rhymes with ‘fries’?”… (Answer: so many things!)

“How can you say ‘delicious and moist’ without sounding pervy?”… (Answer: you can’t.)

So I spend a lot of time with my thesaurus. And rhyming dictionary. And lists of idioms. I fancy myself a lucky girl.

I hopped on Facebook to say something about this Countdown to 30 milestone today, but I couldn’t come up with anything that I felt was worth saying. Maybe because I’m a little sheepish about it anyway, but also because today so many people are posting some pretty serious things.

Gay friends. Straight friends. I-haven’t-asked-and-they-haven’t-told friends. One friends. Two friends. Red friends. Blue friends.

And I wanted to say something, too, but I wasn’t sure what. I don’t engage in debates on Facebook…religious or political or Thin Mints® vs. Samoas®…I just don’t dig conflict, in general. And so Facebook conflicts tend to go from zero to “BITCH, PLEASE!” too quickly for my taste.

But I want to say something. Here’s what I got: I looked up “marriage” on my thesaurus widget, and one word stood out: union. This issue is so divisive. It feels like the opposite of uniting. Some people in my life, very close-to-me people, probably disagree with me when I say that gay people, straight people, red people, blue people — all people should be able to get married and make a legal commitment to one another and start a family and make a life together if that’s what they want.

C’mon. The jig is up, homophobes. Find a new issue to care so passionately about. There are so, so many.

What I mean to say, in a less divisive way (see?! Zero to “BITCH, PLEASE!” in 2.5 seconds!!), is this: if you look up most anything in the thesaurus, you’ll find  a list of other ways to say that thing. They don’t all look the same or sound the same. Some might even have different meanings to me, depending on what my life experience has taught me about those words.

But their essence is the same. You have to admit that they’re the same-ish.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about people in my 30 years (minus 100 days) of being one, it’s that under all our differences and preferences and protective barriers and bullshit, we are really very much the same-ish.

Even Grumpy Cat is on board. The jig is up.

oh for crying out loud

“EIGHT WEEKS?! Dear god!” is what I just said to myself, after doing the math on how long it’s been since January 1. Since I last wrote anything on this “blog” that I “write.” The irony is not lost on me that I write for a living but can’t, for the life of me, write for fun. But I’ve been thinking about it, I swear.

If I had a nickel for all the times I’ve almost-blogged the last few months… (Have you enjoyed reading my almost-blogging? Been real fun, right?) That nagging voice of inner Resistance will find any good excuse to keep you from writing, even the sneaky-sneaky Thinking About Writing: the seductive almost-but-not-quite euphemism for not writing at all.

You feel me, fellow creative-procrastinators out there? Forgive me muses, for I have sinned. I have royally fallen off the blogging wagon. But more like I fell off the wagon…and then a Native American tribe came along and took me in, like what happened to the lady in Dances With Wolves, and then I’m not seen again until years later, when I teach a handsome stranger how to say “buffalo” — and also how to love.

That kind of wagon-falling. Severe.

One disgruntled reader’s affectionate scolding has been bouncing around in my brain (since he told me this…on Christmas Eve):

You owe it to yourself to carve out time for writing every week.

Owe it to myself. That phrase has teeth. And they’ve been gnawing on the nails of my conscience…

Another loyal reader called me out a few weeks ago, saying a simple paragraph would at least be something for her to read. This was a slight revelation: maybe I don’t have to spend as much time perfecting posts, if time is what keeps me from writing. It’s a perfectionist’s paradox: If I take some pressure off myself, care a little less, I actually accomplish much more — and much betterly, too — than when I push myself to the edge of insanity with anxiety and unreachable expectations.

(Hullo therapy bills, you are now paying dividends.)

So. Here we go. An attempt at trying to TRY a little less. Try less in order to DO more. (Hullo Yoda.)

Most of my almost-written blog posts stem from random snippets of inspiration that I collect — mostly in a series of docs on my desktop, curated by month. I’ve been performing this ritual, a lovely mix of hyper-organization and typical-me haphazardness, for years. It amounts to a digital scrapbook of articles I read, funny things coworkers did, things I learned, encouragement from friends, ideas for screenplays…all the things that bounce around in my brain. (Some of the All The Things.)

So maybe that’s the twenty-thirteen 2.0 of whatsarahisreading: instead of a few posts and a self-imposed pressure to Say Something Important, maybe many shorter posts that just try to Say Something.

(If nothing else, I know this will keep one of you happy: looking at you, HKB.)

So. Here’s one Frequently Snippeted Topic: Television. One of the realities of a post-30 Rock world for me, besides the genuine sense of loss I felt that next Friday morning, was an immersion into the world of online entertainment writing. I found comfort in Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker analysis and Vulture’s top 10 lists alike, both serving as that welcome reminder during any time of grief: you are not alone.

Maybe that’s what we have to look forward to in the new blog year. Thinking about little slices of life (a lot of them TV-based, let’s just be real) and looking for small reasons to remember you are not alone. Along with the usual self-criticism and idiosyncratic liberties with syntax. That all seems like a good enough reason to hop back on the wagon.