My Year in Lists: 2011

Reading

• Final count: 47 books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry!
• Most fun: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I read twice! I also read the first five sequels in the Mary Russell series in a matter of months.
• Biggest surprise: Eat, Pray, Love. I can admit that I found it profoundly moving when I read it last spring. Sometimes books live up to their hype.
• Greatest accomplishment: Vanity Fair. It was looooooooong. Fortunately, its awesomeness was proportional to its length.
• Highest quality to quantity ratio: Winesburg, Ohio. Written about small town Ohio in the early 20^th century, Sherwood Anderson's tiny little collection of short stories was phenomenally beautiful, sad, and honest. I have no idea why I left it collecting dust on my To Read bookshelf for so long.
• Best poetry: Sleeping Preacher. 
• Fictional character I was most in love with: It’s a tie between Mary Russell’s Holmes or Mr. Thornton from North and South. (Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this!)

Television

I was all about period dramas this year. My favorites were

• The absolutely brilliant Downton Abbey from Masterpiece Theater.
• Granada’s beautiful 1980s interpretations of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. 
• The VampireDiaries. (Hey, there’s enough Civil War in there that I’m going to count it!) 

All three of these were superbly written and beautifully produced and addictive as all get out. Thank you, Netflix!

Music

What didn’t I listen to this year? Here’s a playlist of a few of my favorite songs from a few of my favorite artists this year. Most of these albums didn't come out in 2011, but they've all spent a lot of time on my iPod in 2011. 

Real Life

This year was tumultuous, at best, and while I was never bored, I was never quite at ease, either. 

The good:

• Three good friends got married and another got pregnant for the first time. 
• I got a new job that I love and am consistently challenged by.
• I traveled to Denver and Winfield and Manhattan, Kansas had a great time with friends at all three locations. 
• I did a lot of yoga and played a lot of softball and even did a bit of belly dancing. 
• I started a book club with my friends.
• I submitting my writing for publication again for the first time in years, and had a poem accepted for publication sometime in 2012!

The bad:

• I had an icky bout of bursitis that kept me on the couch for a good chunk of the fall. 
• My university went through a substantial restructuring process, and not everyone made it out unscathed. 
• My mom was in the hospital twice and recovering from surgery for a good part of the year.
• My grandma was in the hospital for a stroke and had to move to a nursing home with her husband in the fall.
• My grandpa was in the hospital twice, first for a hip injury and again for blood clots a few weeks ago.

The confusing: 

• Even awesome new jobs can be terribly stressful, baffling, brain-addling things.
• I set aside my first savings for retirement and taught myself about a bunch of grown-up stuff like building credit and buying cars and health insurance deductibles. Yay responsibility?
• I spent a lot of time thinking about Occupy Wall Street and the recession and global warming and the crimes at Penn State. The future seems more complicated and challenging than it ever has before.

When I look back on this year, I think that I’ll remember it as the first time that I realized that whenever life gets harder, sadder, or scarier, it also gets more interesting, gains a richer texture, becomes more precious and vital in its complexity. Life is a bit like beer: yes, Bud Lite (i.e. college life) is easy to drink, but it’s the bitter complexity of the hops that makes an IPA (being a 28-year-old) memorable. 

I’m glad I was here for 2011, whatever challenges it’s held, and I’m glad I got the chance to drink it to its dregs. So if you're lucky enough to live in the Midwest, go find yourself a Boulevard Single-Wide IPA and have a happy new year. See you again in 2012!

Communication and Technology: A Smattering

1. At a work event last week, I added a short PowerPoint slide show to a presentation that I regularly deliver to students. There were like eight slides. The information I conveyed was exactly the same as my regular verbal presentation, but the students were way more impressed. They kept saying things like, "I don't have any questions! That was sooooo informative!" I don't know if it helped them to have the visual representation in front of them, or whether they were just impressed that I had my stuff together enough to have real life slides with the real live University logo on them. Either way, for 15 minutes of work, it was a pretty major WIN!

2. I've ordered myself the new iPhone 4S for my birthday. It's completely unnecessary and expensive and a little bit pretentious, but I'm soooooo excited for it to arrive! Siri looks downright amazing; I imagine that talking into my tiny handheld computer and having it talk back to me is going to be one of those things that makes me go, Holy crap, it's the future and we're living in it! It's funny to think that only 10 years ago I had just started using the Internet, I had just gotten my first (brick-like, green-screened, hideous, non-texting) cell phone along with my first car, and I didn't know how to search for things on Yahoo or AskJeeves or whatever was popular then. What a crazy and awesome time it is we live in.

3. I've been watching Occupy Wall Street in the news, and I'm absolutely fascinated by the protesters' use of hand gestures and "the human microphone" to communicate (you can read about the history of the method at New York Magazine). By using simple gestures and group repetition, the protesters can communicate a single speaker's information and respond to his/her ideas without relying on megaphones and amplifiers (which are often prohibited in the occupied spaces). The process is so simple and old fashioned, yet it's still marvelously effective. Not to mention the fact that it's pointedly democratic and, in my opinion, downright inspiring. You can watch a protester teaching the method to the Occupy Boston protesters here: 

Gifting the Good Life

This weekend, I made my first, last, and only Christmas shopping trip to Wal-Mart, Dillons, and Sports Authority. To be honest, I wasn't really buying any Christmas presents for anyone. I was looking for a yoga mat for myself and a heaping mound of baking supplies. I didn't buy a damn thing for anyone else, and I have to admit, it felt pretty great!

I'm not Scrooging it up or anything, but I just didn't want to this year. I didn't feel like barreling through crowds at the mall or Best Buy or Borders. I didn't feel like agonizing over trying to make the people in my life happy by buying them something they didn't necessarily need or even want for themselves. I didn't want to deplete my bank account for gifts that could very well end up sitting around the house, collecting dust. Shopping just seems like a tiring routine this year, one that benefits corporations without really making the holiday any more enjoyable for me and my family.

So I straight up opted out. I took my dad to a KU basketball game for his Christmas present, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. I'm taking my mom for a short wine tasting road trip in January, which sounds like a blast for both of us. My mom's family does a white elephant-style gift exchange on Christmas Eve, but instead of buying something at, say, Target, I bought my gift from my farmers' market; not only did my gift directly benefit my local economy, but shopping there made for a really fun Saturday morning with a friend! My grandparents on both sides will get a pan of homemade cinnamon rolls, as will my friends (Sorry if I'm spoiling the surprise for anyone!). And that's it! I'm done!

Psychologists have discovered that people are happier when they spend money on experiences rather than things, and I hope this proves true for receiving gifts, too. This year, I'm doing my best to give experiences, not gifts: the experience of a basketball game or trying new things or enjoying a lazy, delicious, properly fattening breakfast on Christmas morning without any effort.

And along the way, I'm working on enjoying the Christmas season more, even as I spend less money and less time doing so.

The Peanuts kids, experiencing the Christmas season.

Sleeplessness

After a weekend full of plentiful and restful sleep, I had a bad bout of insomnia last night.There aren't many pleasures to insomnia, except for the quiet reading time. Once I accept that I cannot sleep and drag myself out of bed, I usually enjoy the quiet, late-night time, the sense that I have no place to be and nothing to do.

Last night, I read a fascinating New Yorker article about Colorado uranium mining towns that have been gutted and razed due to radiation. Despite the health concerns that plague the towns, the "uranium widows" would happily welcome back the uranium mining industry. You can read an abstract here, but it's definitely worth tracking down the whole article.

I also read more of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, which I've been working on for awhile. It's not the cheeriest late night reading, but it's a great anthology, in part because editor Kevin Young does such an excellent job of mixing old and new poems. The poems in the collection are varied in age and style and message, but Young is nearly unfailing in his ability to choose compelling poems from excellent poets.

Here are two of my favorites from the collection. The first is a poem by Mary Oliver that I heard her read last fall. I liked it then, too, but these days it seems so important to remember these lines: "When it's over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

I read the Galway Kinnell poem for the first time in this anthology. It's so beautiful, so simple and spare, that I couldn't resist posting it here. It has that ring of trueness to it that all poems should have, no matter what their message or style.

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When Death Comes

Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. 

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Wait

Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now. 

Distrust everything, if you have to. 

But trust the hours. Haven't they 

carried you everywhere, up to now? 

Personal events will become interesting again. 

Hair will become interesting. 

Pain will become interesting. 

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. 

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, 

their memories are what give them 

the need for other hands. And the desolation 

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness 

carved out of such tiny beings as we are 

asks to be filled; the need 

for the new love is faithfulness to the old. 

Wait. 

Don't go too early. 

You're tired. But everyone's tired. 

But no one is tired enough. 

Only wait a while and listen. 

Music of hair, 

Music of pain, 

music of looms weaving all our loves again. 

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, 

most of all to hear, 

the flute of your whole existence, 

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. 

Five Things to Read: My Favorite Weekend Articles and Tidbits

1. "The Pay Problem" from The New Yorker: "What's to be done about C.E.O. compensation?" asks David Owen as he profiles Nell Minow, a lawyer and independent researcher of C.E.O. salaries. It's a great and often horrifying read. You can't get the full article on-line, but the article is certainly worth tracking down in the October 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
2. "Eating Animals Is Making Us Sick" from CNN's Opinion section: Another great but disturbing piece of writing. Jonathan Safran Foer discusses the connection between factory-farmed meat and foodborne illness. My favorite quote: "Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car."
3. "Some Reasons for Reviewing" from The Best American Poetry Blog: Craig Morgan Teicher muses on the benefits and purposes of reviewing poetry. This is definitely reading for poetry nerds, but Teicher's writing is still smart, compelling, and thoughtful.
4. "How to Advance Your Career Without Selling Your Soul" from Advertising Age: Joe Hodas suggests the best ways to advance your career without being a jerk. My favorite tips: know your personal toolkit and how to use it, and strive to be "that ray of light in your boss'/co-worker's day."
5. "A Good Style Comes From Lack of Pretentiousness" from the Advice To Writers Blog: The Advice to Writers Blog compiles writing tips and wisdom from famous writers. I loved one of its recent selections from Charles Bukowski: "A good style comes primarily from lack of pretentiousness, and what is pretentious changes from year to year from day to day from minute to minute. We must be ever more careful. A man does not get old because he nears death; a man gets old because he can no longer see the false from the good."
   

The Round-Up

Despite the utter lack of job postings in the KC area, I've been busy lately. I've been conducting informational interviews (Callahan Creek must have the kindest copywriters in the world), reading up on marketing, working on my portfolio, and generally trying to let the world know that I'm looking for a job.

My brain's been fragmented, so this post is going to be, too. Just go with the flow, people. Dig the melange.

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1. I finally chose a poem for my friend's wedding, and she loved it. I'm so thrilled! It's by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first major black American poets. I've never really cared for his poetry (I always thought it was too sing-songy and cliched), but this poem is killer precisely because it so gentle, soft-spoken, and unexpected. I especially love the refrain of "And you are welcome, welcome."

Invitation to Love

By Paul Laurence Dunbar

Come when the nights are bright with stars

Or come when the moon is mellow;

Come when the sun his golden bars

Drops on the hay-field yellow.

Come in the twilight soft and gray,

Come in the night or come in the day,

Come, O love, whene’er you may,

And you are welcome, welcome.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,

You are soft as the nesting dove.

Come to my heart and bring it to rest

As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

Come when my heart is full of grief

Or when my heart is merry;

Come with the falling of the leaf

Or with the redd’ning cherry.

Come when the year’s first blossom blows,

Come when the summer gleams and glows,

Come with the winter’s drifting snows,

And you are welcome, welcome. 

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2. There's a fantastic article about swine flu in this month's Vogue. It's called "The Year of the Pig," and even if you're not a Vogue subscriber, I'd strongly recommend that you park yourself by a Border's magazine section and give it a read. In the piece, Robert Sullivan takes a look at how the government has been planning for the swine flu pandemic and why experts are so worried about it. He explains that H1N1 is behaving very much like the Spanish Flu of 1918: so far, it hasn't proven very dangerous (except to children), but experts suspect that the strain may mutate by next year and cause rocketing number of cases in the fall and winter of 2010. They don't believe that the virus will grow much more fatal, but it will severely strain the American health care system. Scientists are raising alarms about the flu now in order to prepare for next year. So, in conclusion, ack!

Reading this reminded me of Ellen Bryant Voigt's Kyrie, which is one of the saddest and most beautiful books of poetry I've ever read. It's a series of sonnets about the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Voigt writes mostly in the voices of the flu's survivors, and her use of the sonnet form is clever, appropriate, and moving. Go out and read it, like, now.

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3. Speaking of horribly sad poetry, I finally managed to read Donald Hall's Without. Hall's collection follows the illness and death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Surprisingly, the volume was a page-turner; I read the whole thing in about an hour, and, naturally, waterworks ensued. Why am I so attracted to poetry that ruins my make-up?

To be honest, I wasn't in love with the poetry in this collection. The poems were just so raw, so straight-forward, so narrative that I couldn't call it very good or interesting poetry (thought, in general, I think Donald Hall is quite brilliant). But it did depict a beautiful love affair and the sort of raw emotion usually reserved for romance novels and chick flicks. I'd recommend this book if only for the catharsis.

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4. I've also been reading The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It's a fascinating exploration of how to successfully position a product within a unique market. Jack Trout and Al Ries use a ton of real-world examples to prove their points, including the never-ending marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi and lots of little tidbits from the emerging PC market (well, emerging in 1993, when the book was first published).

But despite the myriad references to Atari, Commodore, and a hundred other computer and software companies I've never heard of, the book feels relevant and useful to a business newbie like me. In fact, these guys are kind of blowing my mind: they make me realize how complex marketing strategies can be, but they're also reinforcing how much I have to learn if I want to be a part of the marketing industry. It's wonderfully exciting to read about something as familiar as Coke and Pepsi, but to find myself seeing it in an entirely new way.

Headlines: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Truth

I've always been a big fan of The Kansas City Star, which I think of as my hometown newspaper and read regularly whenever I'm in KC. Here's a round-up of my favorite headlines from the past few days.

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Sunday, Matt Campbell reported that Kansas City is turning a portion of its biosolids (read: human poo) into fertilizer for trees and biofuel crops. According to Campbell's article, the city is currently turning 8,000 pounds of dry biosolids into fertilizer each year and plans on expanding the program in the future. The system helps the city save money by reducing the amount of waste the Water Department has to burn, by providing cheaper saplings for planting in public parks, and by contributing income to the city budget in the form of biofuel sales.

Not only is this process amazing, but it's especially impressive in Kansas City, a place that has, until recently, never seemed particularly interested in going green. But then again, large-scale composting has come to KC, so maybe we're not as environmentally backwards as we Midwesterners sometimes seem to be.

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More bad news: Today, Emily Van Zandt and Chad Day (who, ironically, are recent college grads employed as summer interns at the Star) revealed that college grads may have diplomas, but they're still missing their paychecks. Van Zandt and Day profile four local college graduates who can't find work, despite their degrees in civil engineering, music education, communications, and Latin American studies.

It's a good article, but not a terribly surprising one since I'm also struggling to find my first post-graduation job. This piece did make me wonder, though, why such articles get published and read at all. Each new issue of every paper in the country is running articles about the state of the economy and how high the unemployment rate has soared, yet nothing visibly changes day to day; there's nothing new to make this "news" exigent. So why are newspapers giving this space, and why do I find myself reading these pieces again and again?

Well, to be honest, they help me feel a little better when I don't get called back for an interview. So there.

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Mary McNamara's piece on the shrewish business woman type in American comedies first appeared in The Los Angeles Times but was reprinted in today's Star. McNamara uses Katherine Heigl's role in The Ugly Truth as an example of how most comedic movies depict independent women: as high-strung, neurotic, cold, and bitchy, at least until the manly co-star proves the woman vulnerable and persuades her into leave her career for love. McNamara argues that actresses like Heigl (and Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston) should avoid these Taming of the Shrew-style roles in movies and stick to the richer, more realistic, and less misogynistic roles found on television shows like In Treatment or The Closer.

While I don't watch enough TV to know whether or not I share McNamara's preference for women on the small screen, I do know that she's dead-on when it comes to romcoms like The Devil Wears Prada. Plots like these are why I want to hurl a copy of A Room of One's Own at my TV screen every time a Jennifer Aniston movie comes on late-night cable.