You take for granted that it will be sunny every day when you live in a place like Los Angeles. You take as a given that you will never, ever build up the kind of network in a new town that you’ve built over 16 years in the same town. And then…you come to Seattle. [...]
Staying Awake in Seattle
Oct 6, 2008
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Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 10: The bu-u-u-u-us
It’s full-on Seattle weather, finally. I celebrated by wearing wool socks, an undershirt and taking the bus. Or, as The BF calls it, “the bu-u-u-u-us.” Yes, I have my car here, but I am not much for driving, even in L.A. So when I am in a place with public transit that kinda-sorta works, I [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
Oct 5, 2008
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Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 9: It’s a dog’s dog’s dog’s dog’s world
I’ve met a lot of people thanks to the Internet. And packing myself off to Skedaddle, as one now-non-imaginary friend calls it, has allowed me to meet up with some of them, or remeet some of them, in the flesh. But one of the nicest visits I’ve had was my trip out to my friend [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
Oct 4, 2008
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Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 8: Down on the farm
Sometimes you eat the bear. Sometimes you head out to the farm, the bear puts on a pot of French press, and the two of you eat a little cheese. Everyone should get a day off. Even the bear. xxx c
Posted in: The Personal Ones
Oct 3, 2008
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Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 7: Shitty First Draft
There are a million websites, okay, a couple of hundred thousand, that will tell you to curtail your email time. Your chat time. Your surfing time. Here’s the thing: what they’re really telling you to do is to limit the amount of time you spend on things that net you little-to-nothing, and max out the [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
Like most human messes, the process of shifting from one thing to another is not linear. Two steps forward, one step back. (Oh, wait, that’s a line.) I want my growth to happen faster than it does, no matter how fast it happens. I want it to happen in a forward-ly direction, and only in [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
You settle in more quickly than you know. The apartment that seemed so strange becomes home (so much so, you relax into full-on slob mode). Within days, you have your grocery store, your coffee place, your routine. You came up here with intention to try things differently (to get away, to try living elsewhere, to [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
Sep 30, 2008
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Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 4: Small is the new big
Whatever directions your circumstances take, expanding or contracting, growing or reducing, uptick or downward trending, you adjust. I’ve adjusted upwards and downwards all my life. Up, up, up for years; then, a few years after my parents divorced, a sharp downturn when we relocated to Gloomy Manor, a.k.a. my maternal grandparents’ house, where we lived [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
Sep 29, 2008
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Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 3: Wax on & serendipity
Anne Lamott says Mondays are bad for writing. She goes so far as to say that one, “one” being you, the aspiring writer, should never endeavor to begin an important project on a December Monday, December being the Month of Mondays. Perhaps. She also speaks (kindly) to a lot of important concepts for the creatrix: [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
Sep 28, 2008
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Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 2: Tables and sharing
I will go to great lengths of accommodating discomfort in order to avoid Discomfort. Case in point: I ate white-bread-and-cheese sandwiches for four days in London during my first visit there, at age 16, because I was too terrified to venture out beyond the first place I found that sold food. (I also missed my [...]
Posted in: The Personal Ones
