EOD--What books are you kraving to read?

EOD/EOY END OF DECADE, END OF YEAR.

What are you reading? What would you like to be reading?

I oversee a delightful group on FACEBOOK, called BOOKRAVE.....a group all about good reading and audio books. We encourage conversation on all things book related.

I am addicted to audiobooks. Having lost the sight in my left eye over then years ago to a detached retina, actually READING is much more physical than you can imagine....so having a book read out loud to me, without the commitment of that person being in the room is my not so secret habit. I still love to turn the pages and consider the choices of typefaces....but me and my battered IPOD have a special amore going!

To this end I offer my list of faves...in no particular order, and YES I do keep shifting it around....

MIDDLESEX

4 HOUR WORK WEEK

THE WORLD TO COME

MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES

THE GIRL WHO (yes , technically at this time here in the US, this is 2 books)

THREE CUPS OF TEA

1000 SPLENDID SUNS

WOLF HALL

SPECIMEN DAYS

THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

DESTINY DISRUPTED

THE BOOK OF ILLUSION

I will post entire list by year's end on BOOKRAVE page.....as you can see, I have no real agenda in what I read....just finished THE LACUNA and it was really good....hard transition from the majesty that is WOLF HALL...so it took some time to get into this, but, well worth it. I am now in NEW YORK-the novel. Usually when they have to announce that it is A NOVEL, that is not such a good sign for me...but I am longing for a long, toothy, chew in these wintry streaky skied days. Need help getting out of the hat, and dog walks and treadmill sweats with a good tome are big assist.

Lemme know you thoughts on the abbreviated list above....check out BOOKRAVE.

I bid you comfy reading (chairs and earbuds) and long winter nights with the light burning, cuz you just cannot put that book down!

what is better than that?

The Balance

You can only look for work for so many hour s in any day/week.

I tell myself that. And I try to adhere to it. More in an emotional way than in a logical and rational way.

I do my due diligence...I send emails, I make calls, I set up appointments. I do the back research, so that when I get there I have something topical to say and something topical to ask.

I have enough good clothes to be presentable, and I arrive on time.

I go at it hard.....I know it is a metric of seeing as many people as I can, for that time when they need me.

I wrote an ebook about looking for work in my chosen vocation..and the interesting thing is that I am living it now I am grateful to say that I GOT IT RIGHT, THIS SYSTEM WORKS.

I did get it right. It is a metric, and I am working carefully using my own prescribed system and as I follow it thru the funnel, I am seeing people. The tough part is that there is just not enough work for the many people at my job level. And, my years on staff took me out of the race...so my previous clients moved on to others....essentially I am back at the bottom of the ladder. Searching for work like PA...with a much smaller opening in which to thread the employment needle.

That is the hard part of it.

So, I go out and meet, I go out and greet....but, it is a harder sell. People are wonderfully nice and most of them either know me, or know of me. and, nobody wouldn't like to give me a gig...but, their limited gigs are already filled by producers that the directors know and have worked with and have the relationships with. I must wait my turn, must wait for that time when there is an opening for a new face.

And, unlike a PA, where we need more than one on any given day, there is only one line producer on any given job...so the metrics are not in my favor.

But I carry on, and will continue to carry on.

The balance?

Knowing this, keeping on, keeping on...while keeping my sanity and esteem in place.

TIME MACHINE--found! Alert the media!

NEWS FLASH....time machine found!

And it is something really old and ridiculously in our culture..yoga. Yeah, plain old yoga. Ivengar, power or Bikram....it is a time machine. Really.

On Sunday mornings, I like to walk to my gym to go to yoga class. I know we are supposed to refer to it as practice and not a class, but it sounds o pretentious...so, class it is.

Sometimes I drive, but it is a 15 minute walk, and I am in the free zone of listening to a book on audio.....so, I prefer to walk.

As I walk, no matter how compelling the audio book (THE WIND UP GIRL is what I am listening to now, and it is pretty doggone good), I consider what I will do after the class. A quick trip to Ross, an overpriced tea or coffee, or just what the rest of the day has in store for me. Whatever it is, I find myself dreading the hour of yoga. Despite how great it feels, despite how much I love it..I just want the hour to go by I have a list to attack, and my nature wants to get at it.

"You are a fraud," I tell myself.

Now, this is an ongoing piece of my internal dialog. You say you want to study yoga and how meaningful it is, and yet you are kicking this one hour to the curb in anticipation of........grocery shopping? overseeing 5th grade homework?....this listmaking in my head....trickey!

I will arrive, take my spot in class (back of the large exercise room, on the right) and sink into the practice...and it happens every time...at first I am stiff, and panting, but after a short time I am LOST in it. My body starts moving and that mind thing happens...I become present in class. The list starts to recede and I find myself sighing and moving and just being...all that cool yoga stuff...it actually happens.

THE TIME MACHINE AHS STARTED....

This hour is elastic...in the midst, it seems so long. How long will they make us hold plank? How long will I have to try to balance? I check my watch at various times and although I see time slipping along...I think that I am falling into a vacuum that will take me where it wants to go. Time is moving I know, but somehow, this hour jumps off the clock and calendar and does not exist except for me..... I dreaded it, and now I want it baaaaaack!

I skip the bridge pose and go right to the wheel. I am sweaty and tired now and I so wanna be a corpse and listen to the music and doze for a few moments. Officially the time machine does not crank til I sit up and and stretch and applaud the teacher and roll up the mat. But my list making monkey brain is trying to crank it up......I resist.....elastic, I tell myself....be stretchy.

In the 90s my husband enjoyed the cigar trend. He called them his time machines, because smoking one would slow down time.....you could not rush it and it made a space for you to do little more than savor and think. Now, I get it.

We can do this trick, we can crank it up, or slow it down...not easy...and not often enough.

Tis Better to Have Loved and Lost (A House)...

Tis Better to have Loved and Lost (a House)…

Or so they say.

David keeps saying that it is the smart move.

It is April of 2009

I keep walking around and running my hand against the rough walls and the smooth floors. And I look out the upstairs window from my office where I tap on these keys, looking north at the palms and the wires and the backs of the billboards. My private view of the world.

I loved this place since the first moment I ever thought about it.

I loved it since I stood in the back yard on the peeling and splintering deck while the couple of nice gay guys (flippers) walked thru shaking their heads…too much work. They were disappointed. To much to do

But, not me.

I had just finished improving a little bungalow as much as it could be improved. I had a full time job and I was letting this house speak to me. I stood on that termite eaten deck by that teeny little pool and looked up at the windows and the upstairs eaves and I fell hard. I knew I would live there, and consequently, improve there.

It all happened so fast, I walked out of the bungalow on a Tuesday with rosemary branches in the oven and candles lit everywhere. It was a gloomy day and the fire burning and the scent of the kitchen and a happy 4 year old were everywhere..and I was ready to pass it along. I was ready for somebody else to love the tiles of the kitchen, and the gardenia bush that David planted by the bedroom window, and the raised planter boxes that replaced the useless driveway. I was ready to move on.

And so we did, and in a week it was over.

it was June 2004.

I called it a wrinkle in time. I am all book-ish and so that title stayed with me and it did feel that way. Like it was meant to be. And I really believed it…I felt it was destiny. We would move the three blocks to this new house, trade our little tidy bungalow for two stories of Spanish chaos with a teeny pool and a funny garage turned guesthouse. The kitchen has terrible black Formica and the windows were bad and leaked. But the living room had souring ceiling beams and I would have a narrow window filled office of my own.

And, it put is right in the school district that I would have to apply for a permit to in our present house…and it just felt SOLID…and like a place we would never have to move from. I love the pine tree in the front, twisted and fragrant and the tree house room as we call the walled in balcony that is a reading space and a place for the fish tank. The windows open to the trees and ou see the tiled roof of the living room and all is well with the world from that view.

We traded 1600 square feet of finished and polished and DONE for 2000 sq ft of needs a lots of stuff, with a pool and a guest house and a scrap of yard. It was 2003 and it all seemed do-able and manageable.

It was all so do able, so manageable. We were experts at renovation, so why not take on another challenge.

28 new windows, re finishing of all the floors, painting the stairs, tiling the fireplace and stairs, putting In heat (upstairs), landscaping the back yard, fixing the pool, fixing up the laundry room, put in a skylight in the guesthouse, do we need heat downstairs? Put ceiling fans in the rooms, fix the oven, remove the deck, who knows what is under it?

The list was endless and we just kept at it…

David says the smart move is to sell the house now, and have the cash. We can put the cash in to the bank and rent a house for a year or so, and see how the economy goes.

He is betting that it’ll all keep tumbling and that housing will decrease in value, yet again. He reads all manner of esoteric economic newspapers and websites. He thinks that we are spending too much and will never get our world out of debt. He thinks the bankers are just looking after each other and that the rest of us are gonna be screwed.

He also sees our business as faltering. We are both freelancers…and it is true that we are both holding our breath every day looking for work. Some days we work, and some we do not..the days we do not, are the days we hold our breath....we talk about re-inventinng ourselves and we talk about how we can hang on here, and how long.

At the time that we bought the house, I had a full time job and my husband was a busy freelancer, and the mortgage was very manageable.

And, that is not how it is now.

I lost my job and went back to the freelance, world, and them I didn’t work for 6 months and my husband didn’t work for 3 months and we ate deeply into our “panic” fund…and we were both scared.

The brutal part is watching our business get thinner and thinner. And even though we told ourselves that we only had to each work ten days a month to make it…..we were slowly , but surely depleting our savings.

Now here is where we differ…

I felt that we should do ANYTHING it took to stay in the house…cut back on everything, I would keep driving the 15 year old car that I had, the one with no AC and the wipers that only work on high….David thought we should sell, take our money and go rent for a year and see what happened.

Take our money now, ride it out….he had many ways of saying it, and all his ways of saying it were gibberish to me that day.

I was shocked when he first suggested “the smart move”. It was a Saturday and I was devastated, I thought I would throw up in the bathroom at my daughter’s gymnastics class.

This house, is as much about subtext as it is about reality. I cherish that part. The one piece of original grillwork that is left on my daughter’s closet window, the wrought iron hand rail on the stairs, the old and tilting wood floors…all authentic, original to the crazy builder of the house.

But , more than that, it is the 32k that was our first down payment on our first house, the money that I put away and saved…..it is the sense that we worked hard and saved and struggled and could buy this house and the idea that we had a bit of luck (that wrinkle in time) and somehow that this was the kismet and that we were meant to have this house. That feeling I had that spring day when I stood in the yard on that mangled deck and tingled with anticipation that I would live here. And, now, that feeling that I would be leaving.

That last part hurts to the pit of my stomach.

David says it is the smart move…and I am sure he is right.

If we sell and rent and have a cache of cash, …if we both do not work, which is likelier than not…we have reserve…which now we are rapidly depleting….

With all it’s many flaws, all its trouble, I love it here.

And, I love what it represents to me….a sense of completion…of ability. The good part of being a grown up, and a parent. We are about 11 blocks to my daughter’s school and we usually walk in the mornings…I love that part. We are three houses from a major thoroughfare, and a bakery and a donut shop and a bagel store and I love that. We have a little pool and people come to our house all the time….on Fridays and Saturdays in the summer, the front door is constantly opening with friends and neighbors. The tequila flows and the guacamole is chipped and we swim and the kids slide down the stairs on blankets and sleep in a dog pile on the living room floor, and I love that.

David says it is the smart move. And, I am sure he is right.

I guess what I love is so much more than the house….the feeling of optimism and forward momentum…of success and derring do. The derring do of bringing a house back to life, back to it’s original breathing space.

I try and focus on all the problems of the house…it is cold (no heat downstairs) and the front door is badly placed. The kitchen was designed by a sadist who never cooked a meal, and the stairs are way too steep to pass any modern code. The driveway is pebbled and the doors are narrow. If I keep listing and re listng the problems, maybe I can feel that we will be free of it all.

Renters again…and grateful to be. Right?? I am working on embracing it, and why not? Camille is delighted, she thinks we will move to a mansion... Not owners who have to worry about the creaks and blemishes of an old house. But, care free renters, just there for a while….not worried about the sink backing up (call the landlord) or the light fixture (call the landlord)..liberating, wont it be!! Unpacking our stuff and fitting it all in….maybe a laundry in an actually useful place…..

I used to tell David that I never wanted to move again, that he could bury me under the twisted pine next to the dining room window…I was DONE with moving….never wanted to pack it up again. But, I was wrong about that one....and that is OK We are a family and we will make it thru this.

David says it is the smart move, and I know he is right.

It is now nearly October, six months later...and we keep seeming to stave off the inevitable...so again I walk around touching the walls, creaking the floor and twisting my heart. It only goes one direction, that time/space compendium..so I have no choice. I am working on that re-invention part...it is the one part of this that I may be able to do something about.

Sept 24 2009