Happy New Year

One of the best things about living in California is that, on the second of January, the following things can happen: t-shirt weather; a hike to the ocean, with waterfalls; snacks with friends on the cliffs above the beach; whale sightings at sunset.

Happy new year, everybody.

Thirty and flirty and thriving

I turned thirty a few weeks ago.

I went to Disneyland for my birthday, because of course nothing says "new horizons of maturity" like singing animals, hordes of children in polyester costumes, and unrealistic expectations about love.

Actually, it was because I have these friends, Maggie and Sue and Mandy—actual, honest-to-goodness lifelong friends. We're scattered all over the West now, and living a diversity of lives, but there was a time when we used to own coordinating Winnie-the-Pooh paraphernalia and talk along with the safety warnings on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and so we set aside the weekend between three of our birthdays to spend together. Specifically, Sue and Mandy and I spent two days revisiting our awkward glory days and then road-tripped to Scottsdale to visit Maggie and her new baby (newborns being un-conducive to the continuous riding of the Matterhorn, unless of course you are my parents and allegedly don't mind handing off your infant son to the ride attendant for a few minutes, which by the way I am absolutely not making up). In any case, I have to say: I don't actually talk to any of these girls all that often, but it doesn't seem to matter. Something about thirty years of shared history makes it easy. We're exactly who we always were, only more so—different-er than we ever have been, if that's even possible—and I think we fit together better than ever. I'm pretty sure our six-year-old selves would have approved (but also would have encouraged me to buy those sequined Minnie Mouse ears that I showed such discipline in leaving in the store. Ah, well).

Thirty didn't hit me hard. I didn't and don't feel especially contemplative about it; it's not like the weight of the universe is pressing on my lady parts. If anything, I'm feeling the opposite—the sense of confidence and self-acceptance they say comes with a new decade, but not in a hair-care-commercial kind of way. It's not an angsty age, thirty.

That said, my good friend Amanda wrote a great post for her birthday this spring: Thirty-Onederful Wishes for her thirty-first year. I loved what she had to say, and I decided to steal her idea (because that's another thing about being thirty: knowing when not to reinvent the wheel; also being able to make silly statements like "that's another thing about being thirty," like life is Marie Claire magazine). And so.

Thirty wishes for thirty years:

I want to be the salt of the earth. I don't want to settle. I want to know a good thing when I see it. I want to spend my days writing something I love: TV, or not. I want to control my tongue. I want to be a faithful friend. I want to visit all fifty states (current count: thirty-nine). I want to visit Africa, Cape Horn, and the Great Wall of China. I want to be better at conflict. I want to knit everything. I want to read everything. I want to give a home to a child who needs it. I want to look my reptilian nemeses in the eye and not run away screaming. I want to take my future family to Mount Hermon. I want my current family to be healthy and engaged and not afraid to have fun together. I want to live in an old house with hardwood floors and lots of windows and probably floral wallpaper. I want a teleportation device. I want a gentleman with selected characteristics of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zachary Levi, John Krasinski, Jon Stewart, and Jon Hamm to fall in love with me. Seriously, though, I want to meet a guy who makes me tingle but also makes me want to share a life with him. I want him to want the same thing. I want to make gluey potatoes and German pancakes like my mom's. I want a guest bedroom, so my friends don't have to sleep on the couch when they visit. I want to say "I want" less. I want to tell my friends how much I love them. I want to road trip. I want to find the elusive balance between interrupting with the answer, rudely, and not knowing the answer, vapidly. I want to run a race with my dad. I want to learn how to apologize. I want to try out for Jeopardy! I want a Roomba. And, of course, I sincerely and unequivocally want world peace.

Ask me again at thirty-one.

Introducing Austenacious

I have a new website. Maybe we're not fully ensconced in the 21st century yet--there are no cards for this, no "it's a site!" banners, no candy cigars to hand out. Instead, we have frantic networking and checking of Google Analytics, which is plenty entertaining to a new website owner, but it somehow lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Meet Austenacious, where the women are accomplished, the men are smoldering yet virtuous, and nobody ever gets mocked for being a great reader (or, for that matter, for taking pleasure in a great many things).

This is a labor of love--or, really, a labor of friendship. Brainstorming began with Christine and Heather before I moved to the East Coast, and our slogan, "Jane will keep us together," has proven true: we have the full inboxes and the hours logged on Skype to prove it. We think Jane would have liked what we're doing: reading and watching and thinking and talking and laughing and definitely, definitely eating, and looking at her works with the required sense of humor. We certainly like it.

So now you're invited to look around: check us out, join the discussion, leave a comment, tell a friend! (Especially that last one: the internet is a big place; getting the word out is tough.)

Welcome.

Grateful

You know, I'm discontented with a lot of areas of my life right now. My career isn't going where I want it to; I'm shy and flaky and frustrated about dating; I keep waiting for change, striving for it, and it doesn't happen.

But sometimes, like this weekend at Lake Tahoe, I can't help but look at my life and think, this is amazing. I couldn't have made this up: this place, these people, cruiser bikes and grilling on the beach at sunset and poker late into the night and having people around who care one way or the other about me. I can't complain about any of this, or about anything else. This is good.

12 of 12: April

Aha! I bet you thought, what with being on vacation and all, that I'd skip 12 of 12 this month. Not so! This is 12 of 12: Vacation Edition, wherein I chronicle my last day visiting my friend Kendra in Southern California. It is, frankly, way better than weekday 12s, for obvious reasons. (For more on the 12 of 12 internet art project, including other people's 12s, check out Chad Darnell's blog.)


10:07 - Waking up at a reasonable hour after arriving home from Disneyland at a not-so-reasonable (in the best possible way) hour.



11:10 - How great a hostess is Kendra? She made us Mickey Mouse pancakes, with chocolate chips and/or blueberries, that's how great.



1:40 - A trip to the Agoura Hills Library's weekly book sale, where I didn't buy anything, though I thought long and hard about a copy of H.L. Mencken's notebooks. (I...am a nerd.)



2:35 - Winter feet + two full amusement-park days in flip-flops = time to call in a professional. (Public service announcement, though: Judgemental pedicure ladies are untoward. I know my feet are gross. If they were as soft and fresh as spring lilies, I would take care of them myself. FOR FREE.)



4:00 - Much better. This will last approximately 2.4 minutes.



4:52 - On the 101, driving to put our names in for the Wicked last-minute front-row ticket lottery, or find something else to do if we don't get in.



6:03 - We won! We won!



6:04 - See?



6:32 - Killing time at Hollywood and Highland before the show. Ice cream and elephants! Two of my favorite things!



7:29 - Found embedded in the sidewalk on Argyle St. in Hollywood



7:45 - Clandestine pre-show non-flash photography from the front row of the Pantages. That's the dragon above the proscenium arch, sort of.



11:10 - Somebody finally volunteered to take Kendra's and my picture after several failed attempts at doing it ourselves. Thanks, guy!

What a good day, right? I could totally get used to this. I can't believe there's, like, work on Monday.

Like I just won the Superbowl

"Liz! You just finished three days of work, and it's your friend Amy's 30th birthday! What are you going to do next?"

I'm going to Disneyland!

No, really. I'm going to Disneyland.

It didn't occur to me until relatively recently that I might be a Disneyland Person. My parents took me a few times as a kid, and my youth group took me a few more times after that. I went to Grad Night. Everybody in California goes to Grad Night. I'm not one of those people who wants to get married under Sleeping Beauty's castle, or get engaged at the top of the Matterhorn, or anything. It's not like I walk around with Eeyore's droopy eyes printed across my chest (...anymore). But I was talking to my office-mate a few years back, and he asked me if I went to Disneyland a lot. "Oh, not that often," I said. "Maybe once every other year?" He looked at me like I'd suddenly grown Mickey ears. "I've only been twice," he said. "Ever."

I think that, for a lot of people, Disneyland is not cool, especially if you are not eight, don't know anybody who's eight, and are at all aware of the socio-economic impact of the Disney Corporation (what my brother would once have called "media control"). And maybe they have a point, in theory. Is Disneyland part of an eeeevil corporate empire meant to take our hard-earned money and poison our children with leaden toys? Probably. But I love it anyway, and here's why.

First, Disneyland is fun. It's fun when you're four and your favorite princess is RIGHT THERE and MOM MOM MOM THERE'S DUMBO AND OMG HE FLIES! But I'm not gonna lie: I am 27 years old, and I love Space Mountain. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, too. And have you been on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride lately? Cracked out, I'm telling you. (The ride ends in hell. Yes. Hell.) I do not get tired of going fast and seeing fun things. Also, I have history with this place, like the way you have to find the constellation in Space Mountain that looks like a big oatmeal cookie and yell, "Giant cookie!" Or the time I wasn't paying attention and my backpack fell out of the Jeep on the Indiana Jones ride, and we had to come back the next day to pick it up (Public Service Announcement: The mesh pouches in front of you are there for a reason, kids!). Or the time Al and I rode the Matterhorn while perfecting our Julie Andrews impressions and watching the 50th-anniversary fireworks, which is basically a confluence of perfectly wonderful things. Who could be too highbrow for that?

Second, it's all about atmosphere, and nobody does atmosphere like Disney. I'm always amazed by the sheer amount of thought, money, and energy that goes into being The Happiest Place on Earth. Half the fun of Disneyland as an adult is how they do it, the perfect little touches and extra flourishes attached to everything, and the painstaking hiding of all seams. In that sense, it's a trivia gold mine. Did you know that there's a small basketball court inside the top of the Matterhorn? Did you know that Walt Disney kept an apartment, which still exists, above the fire station on Main Street? Did you know that the penny arcade on Main Street originally used real .22-caliber rifles and real ammo? See? Disneyland is a crazy, crazy place! This is the kind of information I'll keep (mostly) to myself, so as to not be a complete Wonder Killer, but rest assured that the Disney factoids are strong in this one.

And that, my friends, is why I'm (apparently) a Disneyland Person. See you in L.A.

2 of 2

I know. I know! Late already.


3:36 - My living room as a sweatshop. Luke and I volunteered to sew/hem 25 chiffon sashes for the women in our choir; turns out working with chiffon is like trying to sew fog together. But Christine and Christine offered their help, and Luke's serger will save the day, and we will have our 25 sashes by the time of the concert (Sunday and Monday, December 16 and 17, for anybody interested)! It's going to get done.

My apartment still looks this way--three hours of work yielded a few well-measured pieces of fabric, some diagrams and planning sheets, and exactly one (admittedly beautiful) sash. Since we have twenty-four left to cut and serge, we decided to leave the Young Adult Choir Wal-Mart Express up and running.

Any mess in the name of choir is so worth it, though. It's hard to express to people who've never been in a choir what it's like. It's even harder to express to people who've never been in this choir what it's like. I'm no vocal prodigy, but I love this choir. I love standing in the middle of the group and getting so carried away with the sound of us that I almost forget to sing. I love Monday night rehearsal, and post-practice trips to Yogurt Park for yogurt or Triple Rock for cheese fries and a cider. I love that I know people now that I never would have met otherwise, and I get to call them my friends. I love that the music stays with me all week--I know I'm not the only one that practices in the car, in my office, and in my head. Sometimes our songs catch me off guard, so that I realize that what we're singing is exactly right for my life in some moment, and it can't possibly be accidental. Can it? The whole experience has blessed me in a way that I never could have expected and wouldn't trade for much of anything.


11:47 - Stayed out too late on post-Hanging of the Greens energy. BED!

Eight Things

Oh, my! I've been tagged! Whatever shall I do?

Rules: Give 8 random facts about yourself, then tag 8 more people to do the same thing.

The facts are these.

1. I always eat colored candy in reverse-rainbow order, starting with purple (or brown, if we're talking M&Ms) and working my way up to red.

2. I keep a mental list of alternative careers just in case the wordy writing-editing thing fails me. Thus far: librarian, florist, movie location scout, professional driver on a closed course.

3. My friend Maggie and I like to pretend that we're going to start an all-girl punk cover band called Israel and the Minor Prophets.

4. Top Five Celebrity Crushes, Fall 2007 Edition: John Krasinski, John Corbett, Jon Stewart, Zach Gilford, Lee Pace. Orlando Bloom visits when he has a few days off, but he's awfully busy with all that swashbuckling he does.

5. I hand-wrote most of a novel in the seventh grade.

6. I'm not much into shoes, but I adore cute purses.

7. I am a starboard rower, which means that a) my oar goes to the left, b) I sit in an odd-numbered seat (usually 1 or 7), and c) my right arm is bigger than my left.

8. I used to be grossed out by the Presbyterian tradition of dipping sourdough communion bread in grape juice, but now I like the way it tastes.

I don't think I have a combined total of eight bloggish friends, so: if you have a blog and want to consider yourself tagged, do so. If you don't have a blog and want to consider yourself tagged, well, either or Blogger or Wordpress could probably oblige you...

Cute overload: friends and kittens

All photos by Luke Lim and Elsa-Jennie Bliss.

12 of 12: May

Sooper-speshul Saturday 12 of 12! Very exciting in theory; not really all that exciting in practice. But:


8: 15 - The obligatory waking-up picture. We've moved on to cotton sheets and tank tops this month, which is a step up, I'd say.



9:30 - My new, semi-bad weekend habit: lazing around in bed with my computer. Wireless and a functioning laptop battery have ruined me for anything productive before 11 a.m.



12: 15 - Post-haircut. The temptation to somehow Photoshop in some lipstick here was absolutely absurd. Note to self: in future, do not look like well-styled zombie in photos.



12: 27 - Wandering the streets of Alameda after the haircut. Alameda's like Stars Hollow--every time I get my hair cut there, they always seem to be having a festival of some kind. It's kind of bizarre.



12:34 - Thrift-shopping for a bit.



12:42 - Nanette Lepore? In Alameda?



1:12 - Testing out a new taqueria with a vegetarian burrito. All taquerias must win me over with an acceptable veggie burrito--only after they've shown their trustworthiness with beans and rice can we move on to meat (chicken, then carnitas if they're really good). My burrito was huge, but not super-authentic. Real burritos shouldn't have cheddar cheese in them.



3:32 - A trip to the Target in San Leandro. I like it better than the fancy two-story one in Albany (though Albany's escalator for carts makes it a close contest). This one has a more diverse clientele, and has yet to fail me in the area of DVDs under $10. Thumbs up, San Leandro!



4: 25 - On the way home from Target. A sunny day in the Bay Area.



7:40 - Lasagna for dinner with my friends Helen and Bill, and then...



10:23 - ....off to the Starry Plough for some music! This is the Shelley Doty X-tet. They were good.



11:47 - Plum Crazy, who were talented, funk-wise, but also a little jam-bandish for my taste.

Good weekend, all!

More, please.

Oh, Monday. Why are you so persistent? It's like every seven days, or something. What is that about? You're there and you will not be ignored. It's not even like my Monday was a bad one. We had sunshine and a reasonable workload and reduced-fat banana dulce de leche coffee cake at Starbucks. All good things, right? It's just that I had such a good weekend. Monday is not the weekend. It's a bit disorienting.

On Saturday, the (super-fantastic!) Internet friend Glenna came to visit all the way from Canada (via a conference in San Francisco), and we whisked ourselves off to Napa for a rainy afternoon of wine-tasting and yarn-ogling, which in my opinion is a fairly excellent way to spend a spring day. We stopped through V. Sattui, which is one of my favorite wineries, but I'm now realizing that I mostly love them for their hardcore deli and their pretty picnic grounds. Maybe it's because they skipped out on the Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc region of the wine spectrum? I was less impressed than usual by their crowded tasting room and their "herbal" Semillon. After, we headed to Rombauer, which is a ways off the beaten path and makes my friend Erin's favorite Chardonnay. It was a completely different crowd, a testament to what happens when you move off Highway 29 and raise the price per bottle by $30--far fewer Reeboks, we'll say. And some darn tasty Chardonnay, truth be told.

We spent our evening in a vortex of homebody fangirl bliss, surrounded by pasta, Hershey kisses, something to drink, knitting, and a mini-marathon of Bones, which is not a bastion of excellent twenty-first-century television, but it's sort of engaging anyway. We were productive. We watched and knitted and discussed, and then promptly passed out in our beds after a day well spent.

And I can barely even talk about Sunday. My mother will think I had some kind of temporary illness, really. After Glenna left, I did the dishes. Doing the dishes turned into cleaning out my ridiculously full shirt drawer. Cleaning out the shirt drawer turned into weeding through the bedroom closet. Weeding through the bedroom closet became a full-fledged assault on the coat closet, which--I kid you not--was mostly taken up by a box I hadn't unpacked after moving into my apartment nearly two years ago. I filled three garbage bags and an ancient suitcase with my (former) stuff, packed them all into my car, and drove them to the Goodwill on International Blvd. I'm telling you, it's a miracle. I can see the floors of both of my closets. There are shelves I didn't know I had, people! Book space! Brilliant, this cleaning-out thing. Who knew?

Anyway. Tomorrow is Tuesday, which will probably be less of a shock than Monday. Right? Right.

How to become friends with your friends

I got a long e-mail from my friend Sue the other day.

Sue and I have known each other since the toddler Sunday school class at First Baptist Vallejo and since then have sometimes been best friends, sometimes best enemies, and sometimes both at the same time. We went together to church, to school, to kids' choir, to adult choir, to play practice, to youth group, to summer camp, to winter camp, to Carson City, to Nebraska, to Disneyland, to anywhere and everywhere. Our families were friends, and we were friends, mostly.

Looking back, I can see that we were two tremendously different people trying to occupy the same space--she's an extrovert and I'm an introvert; she's naturally affectionate and I'm reserved; she wanted to go out and be social (!), and I was happy with a couple of friends and a book. We competed for a lot of things. We were like sisters in the same family--we got along some of the time, but just as often, we didn't. We got into a huge, screaming fight at the Iowa State Fair, right by the butter sculptures, if that says anything.

Thankfully, adulthood has been kind to our friendship. I look at us and see that we're both in the middle of the lives we were meant to have. She lives in Southern California and says it's home to her now. She's on the road to a career she's wanted for a long time, something at which she will, incidentally, be excellent. She's dating a great guy. I'm here in Oakland, fulfilling my destiny as a bookworm extraordinaire, doing my own thing. I love looking at us as junior highers and looking at us now, and seeing that we are just ourselves, only magnified--and somehow, that makes us better friends. Being happy and secure in what we're doing, I think, has made us able to enjoy each other. Turns out that Sue is fun and welcoming and a really great encourager, and she always was those things, but I had a hard time letting her be that way, because it wasn't my way. And I'm so happy that we've gotten over that and can see each other clearly, like we probably always should have.