What Color Parachute Would You Like?

I feel like 27 is some sort of critical age. Which is a stupid 27-yr-old thing to say, I know, but it *feels* true nonetheless. The truth is EVERY age is a critical age, but it is only now that I'm starting to feel like possibility and limitation are scaled in equal measure before me. And that is an entirely new prospect for many people in their late twenties.

What I mean is this: you never tell a 5 year old that they're being unrealistic when they say they want to be an astronaut/President of the United States/ballerina/doctor/pirate/NBA star/firefighter. Our own cynicism might quietly *think it*, but, for all you know that freakin' kid MIGHT ACTUALLY DO IT. Who knows? Life is before them. Possibility outweighs limitation. But at 27, the field narrows. What was once an open meadow is now this scraggly little path winding up Work Mountain.

But the funny thing is, I'm finding this narrowing to be a sort of blessing.

I have a dear friend who is pulling his hair out trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life. Ah, that question: what to do, what to DO with our remaining youth, our remaining work years? He's prayed. He's discussed. He's researched. He's sought counsel. What he hasn't done, in my humble opinion, is be quiet. Quiet enough to have an objective discussion with himself. All of his understandable fretting has made me think about my own career trajectory, and in retrospect I find it ironic that my true passions were illuminated only after I recognized and accepted the limitations I have. I had to have the cajones to be painfully honest with myself and my desires before I could start reaping any joy from the work that was, in fact, sucking up my youth.

For me, teaching was a disaster. Not because I wasn't good at it, or because I didn't like the kids, or because the pay was bad (and it was). I LOVED my students, and by all accounts I was a stellar teacher. But, and here's the thing, I felt like I was extinguishing some essential part of me in order to do it. If it had been my "calling" all of that work would have been nutritious for my soul instead of draining, taxing, toxic. This is not to say that our passions should come easily, but rather, the work that comes as a result should grow us, feed us.

The narrowing of the field has helped me to zero in on what I want my life to look like, really. Not what I think my life should look like. And for the first time, I'm starting to see glimpses of the dreams I began as a girl. At fifteen I read and fell in love with The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. At 22 I taught this book to my 9th grade students. And now, at 27, I've received a note from Sandra Cisneros herself saying she loves my poems, lauds my future in writing. How else could that have happened, ever, if I hadn't been honest with myself about my desire to become a poet no matter how daft it made me look to other people?

I may never achieve any measure of *success* where writing is concerned. And I am, in fact, a no-name in the publishing world. But I'm totally okay with that because I am living a life that looks and feels exciting to me. Thank God the field is narrow for me now. Thank God I've had the good fortune of falling on my face hard enough to know now what I want. Bring on my thirties and beyond: I'm ready to run through them, torch in hand.

Pity Party for One, Anyone?

I've kept a journal since I was probably...10? For the last 17 years, I've chronicled every awkward phase (or, I should say, every phase of a perpetually awkward life), every heartbreak and new love, nearly every vacation, most of my harebrained book ideas/poem drafts/sketches of random strangers on NYC subways. My diary has been with me on the bank of the Seine, the beaches of Hawaii, and in the hospital room where my daughter was born. My diary contains the eulogy I wrote and read at my father's funeral.

I think it's a peculiar thing that people should even have the impulse to journal. Some might think it is an inherently narcissistic motivation--this desire to archive the minutiae of one's existence. Who, after all, stands to benefit from your illegible musings besides you? But narcissism or not, I was incredibly grateful for my journals the other night when I was in the midst of a pity party for one.

I've been in a weird place professionally and creatively. An odd purgatory where I've had enough success or achievement to lodge a foot in the door, but not enough to actually be invited in. Last week I was battling a hefty double punch of self-pity: I'd received two rejection emails from literary magazines I was hoping to publish in, and I was dealing with an unmitigated sense of loser-ness in the prospect of my future career as an academic librarian.

And as I retreated to my journal to commemorate it, I noticed that I only had one page left to write. Not only that, I was finishing my journal EXACTLY a year to the date that I'd started it. I figured it was a sign. Divine intervention. So I gave the first entry a reread.

What I wrote about myself was this, "For what purpose am I here? Failed poet and sappy diarist. Overblown ego and burning heart."



That one line in particular, "failed poet," prompted me to read my diary from start to finish. I wanted to know if that statement still felt true a year later.

What I realized after reading my diary was this: I had grown tremendously as a woman, as a writer in the past year. When I wrote those things I was coming from a place of brokenness having made the difficult decision to leave my teaching career behind, and feeling insecure in my capabilities as a writer. But in the year since I penned those statements I wrote two manuscripts worth of poems, won a poetry prize, secured publications in three fantastic literary journals, nearly completed a Master's degree, and conquered some personal issues that had been previously crippling.

That's when it hit me--this understanding of the transformative power of journaling--the unique treasure of being able to rediscover yourself and grow from the retrospective examination of who you were, are, or wanted to be at any given point in your own personal history. As my pastor likes to say, "That's good stuff." Good stuff indeed.

I felt reborn after rereading the ups and downs of the previous year. I was ready to become my own cheerleader. I was ready to steam forward into my next journal, and whatever next phase lay ahead of me with some genuine joy in my heart. For my last entry, instead of lamenting my rejection slips and lack of professional security--I wrote a list of specific ways I had grown over the last year, and another list of traits I'd like to develop in myself going forward.

Page one might read "failed poet," but the final page has yet to be written.

You're So Vain, I Bet You Think This Status Update is About You

Hello. My name is Christeene, and I'm a Facebook junkie.

After an entire work day of staring at a computer, I came home the other night and fired up my laptop for an extended YouTube/Facebook/piddly waste of time extravaganza. I wanted to unwind from my long day of exhaustive computer usage with...more computer usage.

[Enter toddler, stage left]

My daughter ran in the living room, circling the coffee table in her brand new plastic play heels and hot pink tutu. "Mama, can I sit with you?" she asked. Before I could respond she plunked down next to me on the couch, sucking her middle fingers while I looked at a friend's family vacation photos. She asked, "Who's that, Mama?" when it hit me: I was looking at pictures of other people's children while my own sat next to me, ignored.

I snapped the laptop shut, and proceeded to make a jerk of myself for her entertainment for the next two hours. But I have to admit, and here is the ugly truth: some small part of me hesitated momentarily, as though this were an actual choice that required thought or sacrifice.

Recently my brother told me he was writing a research paper about social networking for his Communications class. "What about it?" I asked, to which he summarized, "Basically about how social networking sites gimp us as humans." Well said, Plato, well said. Gimps, indeed. I couldn't agree more.

But what is it about social networking sites that "gimps" us as flesh and blood people, communicators?

Some people argue that social networking sites are the penultimate tools of the narcissist. Where else can you update your friends on the completely useless minutiae of your day? Where else can you carelessly broadcast every idiotic or base thought that crosses your mind? I am not exempt from this. It's just an observation. You know the old adage, "God gave us two ears and one mouth so we could listen twice as much as we speak?" Well, He also gave us ten fingers to type, and those bad boys can construct atom bombs in 140 characters or less. Just ask chief-foot-in-mouth tweeters John Mayer and Kanye.

Now we can snipe and ponder and proselytize via status update, the Reader's Digest version of conversation. Thank God there was no Facebook when I was in high school lest every embarassing moment, ill-conceived blurb, or compromising picture haunt me ad infinitum.

So why even bother with these things?

I think there's something fundamentally human about the need for connection. Even the biggest misanthrope wants connection, or at the very least a sense of being "understood" by someone outside of him/herself. Social networking sites give people just that, or, at least they give us a possibility of connection. In many cases, Facebook has allowed me to reunite with family members and old school friends I might have never have spoken to again after life took us on our separate paths. Indeed, I even know two couples (former sweethearts) who reunited over Facebook and were consequently married. But for every reunion and joyous reconnection, there are countless stories of Facebook or Myspace as the impetus for many empty and false relationships, bullying, strained friendships, and in some cases, divorce.

It's not just social networking sites, it's the whole way we communicate as a generation. Text messaging has made me all ancy about phone calls, even with people I know well. Admittedly, I will silence a call and reply with a sufficiently witty text message later if at all possible. Despite the false appearance of the instant update, we've in essence taken the spontaneity out of communication and relationships in an effort to put our best faces forward; and in many instances end up looking and behaving even more foolishly, and feeling more empty, I think, in the long run.

The problem lies when this virtual life replaces or supercedes the actual one; when writers/teenagers/businesses begin to believe the things that are said to or about them online; when our time and energy is directed toward posting family pictures depicting a happy life instead of living one out. Of course I don't think social networking is 'The Devil,' or the next great social ill. It is what you make of it. Most of us, unfortunately, make too much of it.

I propose a detox.

I think over the Thanksgiving holiday, I will NOT allow myself to access Facebook, MySpace (yes, I still have one), or Twitter. I want to take this opportunity to be totally present for my family, whatever that entails, as we sit at my mom's house and salivate over the turkey. If I want to communicate with someone else not physically present, I'll call them (holy panic attack, Batman).

Now if you'll excuse me, before I detox, I need to make sure this blog post is linked to all three of my social networking sites...

Stop Waiting, Start Living

"My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends. It gives a lovely light."

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I don't think I've ever simultaneously neglected and nurtured myself to this extent. Let me explain. For the first time in my life, I feel like something is actually on the horizon because I'm consciously putting it there. And that requires a lot, metabolically speaking.

The future is not this amorphous thing, even though I have no idea what will happen to me in the next hour. Of course if I don't unexpectedly keel over from an aneurysm, there will be work, and the commute home, dinner made for my family, and bed time stories for Ava. But I guess what I mean is, I am conscious of the future I am creating for myself: repercussions, pains, pleasures, and all. I'm writing this after having stayed up until 3 am to finish homework, so maybe the overdose of caffeine and the lovely crisp weather is making me grandiose, but I don't think so.

I'm tired of waiting for my Hollywood ending, for life to come banging on my door as if it is obligated to me alone.

In August of 2009, I looked at my father in a casket.I held the weight of his body in a box, poured his ashes into the ocean. He was 45. And as trite and common as this may sound to many, something inside of me snapped. My father told me once that he wanted to be an architect. He wanted to build things, be both an artist and a mathematician. In no way do I believe that his life was wasted or cheapened because he did not do those things. It's just that, I know how bitter that was for him at times, knowing that he could have had something else, something more.

The last year, I have nearly broken myself apart living my life. I rarely sleep. I've gotten down to about 1 or 2 meals a day, max, because I'm writing every chance I get. There are days and even whole weeks where I feel so burdened by school obligations and life and my own self that I cannot talk to people. BUT. And here it is:

I am alive.

I will not waste my time chasing down retirement. If this means living a life that is odd or inconvenient to some, so be it. What extraordinary person ever lived a life that looked like a carbon copy of someone elses'? Some people may call me crazy for it, but I'm telling you what's crazy is living like you have time. For me it is writing, but for someone else it could be starting a family or a business. Maybe it's a mission trip you keep sweeping under the rug, or a move to another state. Or a job that you hate but are too fearful to leave. What really is our excuse when the smallest, most insignificant thing could end our lives this very hour? Perhaps the best thing we can do to combat the grave--even over and above diet and exercise--is pursuing a life worth living now. Mistakes. Scars. Memories. Relationships. Art. Even if it means making ourselves look ridiculous from time to time.

We are candles, light. Impractical and beautiful things. Candles are useless if they sit in the cupboard waiting for a power outage. Candles were meant to burn. And burn I will.

A Girl's Girl

Surely you've heard of the expression, "He's a man's man." This implies that a man has certain qualities that makes him lovable by other men.

Usually this involves some sort of hard cowboy stoicism, a certain sense of humor, a notable knowledge of "man things" like sports statistics or vintage cars. He holds his liquor well, is good with the ladies, he's respected by other men, has a sense of fashionable edginess without looking like an overly-coifed metrosexual. You know, he's a dude the other dude's want to be, or at least be friends with.

So what's the woman's equivalent? What qualifies someone as a 'girl's girl' or a 'woman's woman?'

From my experience, a girl's girl is someone who:

1) Is attractive without being threatening or overly sexy. In other words, she escapes the skank factor. This is a big one. Because most women want to better themselves with friends who will propel them into the next category, without constantly worrying if their spouses secretly lust over their gal pals.

2) Her house is just so. Do I even need to explain this one? No.

3) She wants babies, lots of babies. Or at least, she publicly pines over all things motherhood in a way that rivals only her husband's rabid love of SEC football. Because this, apparently, is the fruition of womanhood. And of course one child is never enough. One child forces her to ask the question, "So when are you going to have another one?"

4) She is smiley. In fact, the probability of being a girl's-girl increases with the size of and the frequency by which you flash your pearly whites. Think Julia Roberts toothiness. She played a prostitute in "Pretty Woman" and still audiences perceived her as wholesome as granny's apple pie every time she bared those mega-watt chompers.

5) She does not have a past. Or if she has an unsavory history, it is one that makes her look enduring in a June Carter, Lifetime movie sort of way.

6) She is good with correspondences: think thank you cards, holiday cards, birthday cards, scrapbook pages, etc...

7) She has a well-stocked purse. Need a tissue/nail file/safety pin/tampon/ironing board/tire iron/vintage off-white cameo pin? This girl has it all in her Kate Spade. Eat your heart out Mary Poppins.

8) She is better than all of your friends in at least one hobby. Bonus points if she is a) a militant jogger or triathlete, b) insane coupon-clipper, c) yoga instructor, d) culinary queen, or e) a combination of two of the above.

9) She looks effortless in ridiculous trends. Somehow she manages to be the one person on earth who doesn't look like bloated roadkill while wearing jeggings and faux-fur wrap.

10) Other girls like her, and she likes other girls. The majority of her friends are other women (mostly) like her. Because girl's-girls tend to attract one another.

I've brought a good deal of suffering down on myself wanting to be a girl's-girl. I've always known that I wasn't one. My throw pillows are not perfectly fluffed, or even necessarily matching. My nail polish chips almost instantly. Sometimes I go a little overboard on cleavage or eyeliner or high heels, or all of the above at once. I loathe baby showers. I am terribly uncomfortable in groups of women. I've got a past that may land me a movie deal with HBO, not Lifetime. I'd rather fish than go on a girl's getaway. But that's okay. The strange thing is, I've recently made a few girlfriends because of church, and they are ALL girl's-girls, and they're...wonderful. I've learned at least that there is room for us all. The girl's-girls and the...well, others, like me.



NOTE Celebrity girl's-girls include: Reese Witherspoon, Gwenyth Paltrow, Julie Roberts, Kristin Chenoweth, Meg Ryan (before the Russell Crow affair), Natalie Portman, and anyone who is stylish, but not classically beautiful i.e. Sarah Jessica Parker.

To MFA or not to MFA? That is the question...

You know, there is something to be said for people who get out there and make it without the vestige of the almighty M.F.A, aka the 'I'm a mother-f*#&in-artist-so-recognize' degree, or Master of Fine Arts.

I think there is some sort of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps romanticism about it that appeals to us. A sense that this person was either so wildly talented and/or ambitious that they cheated the system and went blazing into anthologies everywhere without paying tuition to learn the craft. Who am I talking about? William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway to name a few. But it's the same with any profession--we love a good underdog story. How many times must we read about Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school basketball team? Or Einstein failing Math?

Why? Because these stories give hope to the average person that they too, could be a genius, a basketball prodigy, or a literary great who just hasn't been discovered yet. But some part of me thinks this kind of legend-leeching gives people false dreams. There will never be another Einstein, after all.

I love this picture that I've coupled with this blog post because in some ways I feel like this explains the curse of a writer, or at least, a creative person: "Just because you are unique doesn't mean you are useful." Ouch. Some part of me recognizes that this must be true. I am not performing life-saving surgery, or even helping someone save 10% or more on their car insurance--I'm writing. Writing about things that, in many cases, never happened.

I think getting a MFA is part of this fear, and maybe that is why I'm seriously considering it.

Don't get me wrong, MFAs open doors and create a certain caveat when you are publishing and speaking and doing all the peripheral puffery that comes with writing--particularly poetry. BUT. Why else get it if you weren't afraid of being useless? Jobless? Without insurance? Without prestige? Some people, granted, do it to become professors; but I think if they were honest, they'd tell you they'd rather be holed up in a cave (or bar) writing their magnum opus without having to grade scores of terrible student first drafts.

So maybe I'll MFA and maybe I won't. I'm leaning toward won't. But who's to say? I want to be useful and talented. I need health insurance too. Just remind me to delete this blog post before I apply to the Iowa Writer's Workshop or Vanderbilt...I can't have an Admissions staff Googler reading this and ruining my statement of purpose.

Though I did fail English one semester in high school. And wouldn't that make a lovely addition to Michael Jordan, and Einstein, and Hemingway? Har. Har. Har.

Sometimes Reading Isn't Power

I never thought I'd say this, but...I think I need to stop reading. Well, at least for awhile.

Let me preface by saying that I have great reverence for reading. Nothing makes me happier than the smell of a new book, except maybe an acceptance letter from an editor. I take pride in the fact that I have more books than I can handle; I could probably make furniture pieces out of the more substantial volumes.

The problem is this: as a writer (or still a wannabe at this point), I find that the things I'm reading are starting to choke me out. I've been reading so much that I feel quietly paranoid about what I'm doing. Sure, the right piece of literature can awaken and inspire other literature, but lately, I feel like all the things I'm reading are trying to puke up on my page.

I've read so many great poets online recently (time for unsolicited plugs): Mathias Nelson, Justin Hyde, and Amanda Aucter among others. I've also gone the traditional route and raided the library for inspiration. Recently I devoured Sandra Cisneros' Loose Woman, and Natasha Tretheway's Bellocq's Ophelia is sitting on my nightstand in the cue just behind Bukowski's What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.

I think it's a fundamental thing to educate yourself by reading as promiscuously as possible...until it's time for you to speak. I've been a reader my entire life and now? Now I need some quiet. I need to blood-let all these other voices and talents that want to smother mine. They are screaming at me when I'm writing, especially the male poets. And they say: who wants to read about that? You are too sentimental, too clean, too Tampax to have any bite. Be a misanthrope. The academic poets tell me that I'm not pedigreed enough. The influential poets tell me to copy them. It's vicious I tell you.

So I think, just for awhile, I will be alone in my own room and see what sort of sounds I can make. I think the cruelest thing you can tell a writer is that they are a stillborn version of someone else. I don't want to be anyone else, and I think the most successful people are those who are willing to be a total failure for the sake of being themselves. And maybe I'm not a special snowflake, maybe my writing voice isn't avant-garde or powerful, but I'll never know if I can't tell the other writers to shut up and go away while I work.

Why We Love What We Love

Writing love poems is harder than you'd think.

Let me clarify that: writing honest love poems that do NOT make me gag is harder than you'd think. I abhor sap. I dislike love poems that don't sting just a little. Anyone who writes those kind of love poems has failed to capture the astounding range of love. Their 'violets are blue' sentimentality does the reader a disservice.

I'm in the process of writing my second book of poetry, Desir, a volume of love poems based on the four loves as understood by the ancient Greeks, and later redefined for modernity by C.S. Lewis: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (erotic love), and agape (unconditional, God-like love).

I find that writing about love is some of the most challenging writing I've done because of the amorphous nature of that emotion--the erotic melding into the platonic, or the platonic yielding to the erotic. Soaring, iridescent love as impressionism of the senses, fruition of memory, desire, and psychosis.

Why do we love the things and people that we love?

In writing about love, this question is almost more important, or certainly more interesting, than the expression of love itself. The apertures of erotic love, for instance--the yearning, the kiss, the embrace, the explosive desire--are universal. But why him or her? There is nothing more individual or singular than the trajectory to the beloved. How is it that two people with so much in common could find absolutely nothing to love in the other? How is it that two people with nothing in common can bind their lives together without much consideration?

I don't care about expressing how love makes an individual act, per se; I'm interested in reading and writing about how love melds the mind. I'm interested in exploring why we love the things and people we love in the first place. Is our choice of partner merely an expression of out "desire-mapping" through past experiences, media images, familial models, or is it more?

I don't know if I can believe in something as delicious as fate. I don't know that I can get behind something as idealistic as soul mates; and that really says something about me, doesn't it?

What I can believe in is this, at least: when we say 'I love you' or 'I love ___,' it says more about the person saying it than the object(s) of affection themselves. We are what we love. This can be both a wondrous and terrible revelation.

Who Are You?

At the writer's conference I recently attended, I sat down to pitch my book idea to an editor, and before I could lace up my tap-dancing shoes she asked me, "who are you?"

Now let me explain that she was not being cheeky, or rude in the least. It was a perfectly legitimate question. In fact, I've been trying to answer that very question for the last 26 years.

Successful writers generally have a tag of some sort. Stephen King is synonomous with Horror, and Danielle Steele with the trashy beach novel (my profound apologies to Steele readers clucking in disapproval, but let's face it--it's not exactly Jane Austen).

So who, then, is this Christeene person? I can't really place her in a neatly packaged, PR-ready, glossy-photo'ed, cataloged section of the bookstore just yet. But what I can say is this: I am a girl who dreams with a book in her hand, and a poem on her lips. I disdain sappiness, but crave romance. I take copious pictures of trees because I can find no other thing in creation (beyond human life itself) that amazes me more, except maybe the ocean. I am someone who loves God, and fails time and again, only to rediscover His unfailing grace.

I am a mother who packs extra socks but forgets the juice. I am someone who cares deeply about young people, especially the "scary ones," with tats and wild hair and adult mistakes; I want to mother them all, I want to shake my tiny little sausage fist in the faces of those who won't. I am someone who loves rainy days, and sad songs in French that I can't really decipher. I am full of dark desires and sanctified by Jesus. I am Christeene Renee Fraser (nee Alcosiba), half Hawaiian and half redneck--a girl who learned to gut fish, drink black coffee, and quote T.S. Eliot.