Hi Friends

I've decided to switch to wordpress for my blogging. I like the layout and what not. Though, I will miss this theme and as I am not technologically savvy I cannot make my own.  Maybe I'll duel post on both, I haven't decided. It would be a lot if ya'll would check it out.

Find me there.

http://www.eachdayinhandfuls.wordpress.com

I love you.
-Me

Allons-y!

Time to work harder.

On Sunday night I stayed up late. I couldn't sleep. In my apartment, at midnight, I grabbed my keys and went for a drive. Portland is full of secret corners and I have yet to discover one that seems fitting for me. A place to call my own. But I know about this field, a pocket of greenery and weeds and a picnic table. If I had to pick a spot, maybe this would be it. The field is at a steep slope and you can see the radio towers from the top, blinking red along the west hills. I sat on the picnic table for a long time.
I thought about all of my wrong doing, and all of the wrong doing that has been done to me. I thought about things that happened years ago and how they feel like another lifetime. I thought about how this moment will feel like another lifetime to 25-year-old Mary.

And I realized.

I am wasting all of my fucking time.

All of these things I want to be doing. Writing. Reading. Photography. Painting. Learning to play the guitar. Picking my violin back up after so many years of letting it collect dust. After I finished and published Originally From Here (buy it), I just sort of stopped. I hit a wall, if you will. None of my work since has felt good enough to continue on with. I thought, well, I'm not a writer. I am not creative. I am not any of the things I have claimed to be my entire life. And if I am not those things, I am nothing. Nothing.
 So I fiddle faddled my time away. TV, movies, tumblr, facebook. I stopped buying books. I stopped reading books. If I write, it's here and there and incoherent ramblings about unimportant happenings. I couldn't bring myself to write about the things in my life. I felt almost as if writing about those things would cause them to slip away.... Or maybe it's because I am, for the most part, happy. Do I need to be eternally miserable to put pen to paper and write something worth reading?

Anyhow. All of these thoughts brought me to a conclusion. Seperate myself from Facebook, and from Tumblr. And from any other distractions. If I cannot control the distractions, I will eliminate them. This morning I deleted my Facebook. Later today, I will delete my Tumblr. And how sad it is, the thought that went into deleting my account from a website. But you know? I want to be remembered for something I create, not something I once posted on my wall about. And honetly guys, who wants to know you're eating rice for dinner?

Really, what I am getting at with all of this isn't that I am egotistical and will tell you all about me. What I am wanting to tell you is to examine yourself, your life. Look closely at where you put the time you're given. I know you hear this often, but your time is precious and you cannot get it back. Do something that matters with it. I am not saying social sites are a bad thing, they are only bad if you cannot handle them.

Let's get back to how I said I was nothing. I'll leave you with this.

Enjoy every minute.

Love always,
Mary



Oliver, Mrs. Fox and Co.

Plaid and Stripes could be a band name.

There was a strange energy in the café. The air smelled of beer and wine and coffee and I was under 21 but I thought about the tequila in my trunk and if I could spike my tea. I watched a man play his guitar and he was drunk. I could tell because I’d seen him drink more beers than anyone else here and he was sitting beside Ms. Red Wine and she had just filled her glass again.

The boy wearing plaid in front of me was dating the girl in gray. I could tell because he was holding her hand beneath the table. And they matched, because he was wearing plaid and she was just in plain gray.  Beside him was the girl wearing stripes. She kept looking his way. She kept leaning in to whisper. And they would never match, because you don’t put stripes and plaid together. My heart went out to her, because I know what it’s like to be Stripes, wishing you were Gray.

Then the man on stage stopped singing and stopped playing and we all clapped. Next up was Plaid and Stripes. He picked up the guitar and she got behind the mic. He played a sad melody and she sang a lot of “oh’s” and she sounded sad, too. My heart began to hurt for Gray, because maybe she didn’t know that when two people make music together it is nothing short of making love. And maybe she did know, which made me even more sad, possibly. And then Stripe’s heart was hurting, and Gray’s heart was aching and I just kept thinking about the tequila in my trunk.

Keep Portland Weird

February is usually a time when Portlanders know nothing of the sun, nor the warmth it brings. I’ve lived my whole life in Portland and I can hardly remember a February that was optimistic, that the sun was strong enough to break through the cloud cover and remind us we hadn’t been forgotten. I believe this is something Northwesterners worry about. What if the sun never came back? We wait and we wait and the sun decides the Caribbean is better and takes an extended vacation.  Don’t laugh, Florida. This is a legit fear.

See, as a sun worshipper, I bitch. I bitch a lot. Then what am I doing here? Well, where else do I belong? This is Portland. I bitch and say I need sun, I need San Diego, I need Santa Cruz, I need New Orleans. But this is Portland and Portland is meant to be inhabited by a very select type. I happen to fit the description. So here I stay, and here I bitch, and here I worship the sun. 

On Friday the sun surprised us. Like pasty gremlins we emerged from the depths of our caves, hands shielding our faces, our dark, sunken in eyes adjusting, blinking, squinting. Holy shit, batman, is that what I think it is?  The strangest part? It didn’t leave. Through the weekend, and into today, the sun rejoiced with us. Girls wearing flip-flips and tank-tops and boys in shorts and though maybe still a tad chilly for these things, we didn’t care. I drove around in my MX-5 with the top down, I played Jason Mraz like it was 2009 (that was a good year, though any year is a good year with Jason) and I held my hands up going down 205. This is the life, I thought. 

Sunday afternoon, while the sun hung low in the sky, I sat on the riverbank with my dad and said, “it’ll go away.” My dad said, “definitely. But it always comes back.” And I know we were both talking about something other than the sun, but I nodded and sipped my chai, and he his latte, and we watched as the sun dipped lower and lower behind the West Linn tree line and the Willamette river went dark without the bright reflections.

Today I drove home with the top up and tiny rain drops spattered across my window. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even disappointed, because this is how it is and how we knew it would be. Tomorrow we’ll look up and the sky wont be blue, but grey and that’s O.K. because this is Portland, and our funky mood swings and wet streets, and terribly inaccurate weather men are what make this our city. 

Keep Portland Weird. 

Enjoy every minute,
Mary