day thirty: passports

When I was growing up, I used to imagine that I lived in a split ranch that was built exactly on the border between the U.S. and Canada. My parent's bedroom would be in one country and mine in the other. I'd have autonomy but would still be close enough to cross the border to their room if I had a bad dream.

I feel the same split today on my birthday, now that I've actually entered my thirties. I want a lifeline back into my twenties, but I'm choosing the best sort of autonomy--the kind with the people I love being right there, offering prayer and support, with me reciprocating. Instead of boxing what I could have accomplished so far into a corner closet, I'm learning how to age with intention.

Like you, I have this simple urge to love the people in my life, and to become more like grain or milk--something that can nourish.

day twenty-nine: steak and champagne

When my grandmother got married to my grandfather, it was a peanut wedding. "That's what we called all the Italian weddings in the neighborhood," she told me. "We'd carry trays of beef sandwiches through the crowds, and we were too poor to rent chairs so no one would sit for the entire reception." Before they left, the newlyweds stood at a receiving line. This was jut after the Depression, and when the they got home and opened the freshly licked cash envelopes, "Most people gave us one dollar, some two, a few four," my grandmother recalled, "but to save face lot of men put empty, unsigned enveloped in the receiving bag."

Things had partly been so bad when my grandmother was growing up in Chicago during the Depression because her dad was too proud to ask for help or stand in line at the food bank. "Every night, we'd get a cube of sliced bread with milk poured over it." It's amazing, that my mom and aunt, and then me and my cousins a generation later, came from her tiny body.

day twenty-eight: taking advantage

When I turned 29 last year, my dad sent me a big, bright yellow birthday card. On the front, in this meaty font, it says, "BE BAD". Open it, and an instrumental version of "Bad to the Bone" starts playing, which is obviously completely awesome.

It's official. Tomorrow, my wish is granted. I don't know how or when exactly, but I will find some way to be as bad as I emmereffing want to be.

day twenty-seven: what thirty looks like

I think thirty might look more than feel.
And I think it might look a little like this.

day twenty-six: I don't sleep, I dream

We live near Interstate 5, and in the summer I sleep with my head next to the window with tips of Seattle skyscrapers lite-brighting our wall. Sometimes when it's warm and we sleep with the window open, I dream big dreams. Once, I dreamt about this wild night scene. I'm convinced it was the closest I've ever come to leaving my body:

The air smells like a mix of sweet from the lavender in our flower box and stale from highway exhaust. I leave the window and crawl through field on field of purple flowers and reach this cliff that slopes toward the interstate.

Look right, there's Mt. Baker, Bellingham, that wall of mountains scuffed up against Vancouver. Look left, there's Mt. St. Helens, red lava like ketchup dripping from her chin. Then past Portland to Ashland. The Redwoods are a lincoln log patch. There's the Bay Bridge, wobbling next to San Francisco, the first city I lived in on my own.

If I look straight ahead, squint past the Sound and over the Olympics, there's the ocean like a thick blue moat--my private zoetrope--animating whole cities in Asia, Siberia, clustered skylines further west.

I am Jude the Obscure--a frame of ruffled feathers. And suddenly, quietly, I push back through the lavender, feathers floating every which way but up.

day twenty-five: you're invited

Saw this sign in Dresden last week for a party you can only get into if you're thirty or over. And the best part--the first gig is on my very birthday!

day twenty-four: pacify the elderly

I'm eating a bowl of frozen raspberries, which are the same color that the water turned when we cooked swiss chard for dinner, which is the same color as the ruby slipper tea I drank this afternoon.

It's funny when monotonous things are repetitive yet interesting. Hating and loving the idea of collaging my walls. Walls covered with old black and white newspapers would give me this easy leaning, like I'm on a 4 pt. Times New Roman road trip.

And so at work for instance, hours turn into days, then to weeks and so on. Time feels the same, but in a comforting way. That's until you look back, and see that we always have chocolate chip mint ice cream in the freezer, and you complain about having to take the dog out before bed, and I fall asleep with under the pumpkin-colored afghan in the den, and you keep awake until after the weather.

I think that's when repetition stops being the symptom and becomes the pacifier.

day twenty-three: artsy+crafty

I like living in Seattle, even though lot of artsy crafty young people are departing towards Portland or Austin, Buenos Aires even. But really, I can use the leg room, and D and I are pretty good at joining revivals. So I'm anxious to see where the city goes, and when things turn around again will I, then firmly in my thirties, choose to care?

Speaking of artists, here's my birthday present from D for my thirtieth. I didn't know what I wanted, nice sheets with a high thread count, or a thick, 80's digital watch with a velcro band, or feather on a roach clip for my hair (like the ones carnies wear!) were all the gift ideas I could think of. But then I saw this painting by Aaron Tucker, an old acquaintance from Indiana, and took the plunge. I love how it's just bright enough, but all quivery.

day twenty-two: changing what you eat

A gross sketch of the contents of my kitchen, a decade ago versus now.

day twenty-one: sukr kava limonada

In Europe, everyone is so quiet when they eat. We found this place in Prague, Sukr Kava Limonada, that already was so away from all the tourist stuff, but inside it was like each table was set endlessly away from the next, and each chair was a silent plant, so imagine what happens when you sit down!

day twenty: moving closer

The closer I come to my 30th birthday, the more excited I'm starting to feel. Which is totally surprising me. I can't think of anything I'm leaving behind, expect maybe good intentions, incomplete projects, and lots of slept in beds. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I imagine every bed I've slept in for more than two week's time. You should try making your own list--no matter how old you are, it makes you feel like your life has already lasted for miles and miles and miles.

Slept-in-Beds (two weeks or more)
Childhood bedroom Indiana
Basement guestroom (with termites!) in aunt's rowhouse Bridgeport, Chicago
Mint in the backyard, oatmeal in the mornings grandparent's house Indiana
Sun tea on the porch, watermelon in the creek lakehouse Sturgis, Michigan
Dorm rooms, various Indiana
Haight-Ashbury Victorian, summer internship San Francisco
10th and Waverly walk-up, across from Nine Lives Bookshop Greenwich Village
NYU dorm, by the farmer's market Union Square
Loft above the Civic Theater with a huge vintage vault, Green House with slugs in the garden, blue house by the river Indiana
House by the arboretum, house with rats in the basement, co-op by the doughnut shop, Seattle

day nineteen: L'chaim

I'm pleased to report that women I've seen in Germany and the Czech Republic eat food, don't seem to exercise but walk everywhere, and are healthy, average sizes! I haven't been to Europe since an August in Spain five years ago, and I'd assumed before coming to Prague that--to hell with early Spring snow showers--women here would surely be walking around in white spandex tights, heals, and terry tube tops, just like the women I'd seen in Seville.

Could I live here? Yes! The Frye boots, the sweaters, colorful Israeli scarfs, and women with real asses trotting down the little streets. L'chaim, to life!

day eighteen: towels and clouds

When you're flying to Prague and Stevie Wonder comes on one of those looping airline radio channels, close you eyes and bam. You're a kid, sit-and-spinning, pogo-ball-jumping on the shag rug in your living room. There's piles of unfolded laundry all around, and you pop off whatever you're bouncing on and dive into a mound of warm towels, just out of the dryer.

After you stay under for a little while, you lift a towel from your eyes, and you're somehow below the clouds. The whole of Europe is land-locking you in, which is surprisingly the safest feeling ever.

day seventeen: feeling swoony

Eating the end of a very crunchy peanut butter cookie, about to start on my mint tea in the window seat of Bakeshop in our Prague neighborhood. There's a big bowl of sugar lumps in front of me that look like tiny, snowy meatballs. A man next to me, a tourist, hides his camera low in his lap, picks it up when he thinks no one is looking and snaps photos in irregular heartbeats.

I used to collect sugar packets with my friend Amanda, who lived a few hours away from my hometown, in Detroit. We used to mail letters back and forth often. Each time I'd go to Big Boy, or Denny's, IHOP, whatever diner or restaurant, I'd grab a sugar packet and write where I was, with who, what time of day it was, on what occasion, that sort of thing. She did the same, and we ended up sending dozens of packets back and forth in letters. On a trip to my house a couple of years later, we brought all of our sugar packets together, read the notes we wrote on each one, and tore enough open until we had what we needed to make a cake.

So if you can imagine a sugar packet in your mind, let's say Sugar in the Raw with that nice brown color, here's what I'm going to send you:

Bakeshop, Prague
29 years, 357 days
All alone
Feeling swoony

day sixteen: He spreads the snow like wool: a little breather

Mount Rainier looked like a baked Alaska driving south on I-5 tonight. You could just see the top of it, floating like an orb. I wonder what air travel you could get done if the sky was full of many sliced rocks, moon pie pieces.

And here we are, flying with salt-and-pepper bird suits and matching hat boxes to the capitol of Bohemia. I'll be away for a couple of weeks and will record bits and pieces each day, posting several entries at once when I get back home.

day fifteen: I love the eighties

A few nights ago, I watched the Anton Corbijn-directed Enjoy the Silence video. I love how Dave Gahan is such a bashful king, roaming the country carrying a lawn chair. I watched the Cure’s Just Like Heaven, where Robert twirls on a cliff with his wife Mary, a ghost bride. And I watched R.E.M. play So. Central Rain on the Letterman Show in 1982, before the song even had a name. In this clip, Michael crouches behind the camera while Peter and Mike are interviewed by Letterman. He stands up just before the music begins, shirt tucked into high pants and hair over his eyes.

I love these songs so much, and when I think about having a kid I imagine scenarios when I'd play this old college rock for her. She'd shake her head, and roll her eyes, and maybe secretly like it in this timeless, emotive way.

day fourteen: orange you glad I didn't say banana

We went into Souvenir in Ballard and bought a tiny lemon charm on an animal print ribbon. The shop owner told me that the lemon was a prize from a vintage Cracker Jack box.

And that's what I want to do for a living in my thirties, could make a real killing finding treasures in junk drawers, keeping the precious stuff close to my chest, loving the hell out of it.

day thirteen: never a dull moment

One afternoon in sixth grade, we were given homework: to sketch a shield with our family motto written inside. The next day, my classmates came back with neatly drawn shields filled with crowns and swords, with proud words like integrity and honor sketched inside.

I went home the night before and asked my dad what our family motto was. He instantly shrugged and said, with his slight lisp, "It's a tie between 'never a dull moment' and 'welcome to the real world.'" I chose the latter, my shield filled with a ferocious lion in the center, with the words "welcome to" curving around the lion's head, "the real world" fitted under the beast's paws.

day twelve: and he takes and he takes and he takes

Good friends of ours had a pretty wild overnight in the emergency room with their little boy last week, who had complications from the flu. One hour he was healthy, the next he was violently ill. Thankfully he's well now, but hearing their story reminds me of the fine line between the sick world and the healthy world. It's like the spiritual and the corporeal. When we and people we love are well, maybe we think about what it would be like if that changed.

My thought pattern for, say, how life could go on if I lost my husband:

I want a piece of gum
What's new on the NYT.com
I need to go to the ATM
What if my husband has a tumor on his head from using his cell phone too much, and he dies young and I'm alone and how could I ever marry again or want someone else to see me naked
I want another piece of gum

+

But when it really happens that someone you love gets sick, things feel slow, your body gets achy. When I found out my dad got bladder cancer last November, I listened to the saddest song I had on my iPod, a Sufjan Stevens song about a friend who dies of bone cancer of all things--because I knew I had to cry and wanted to do it good.

On one the hardest days of my twenties, I started to play this song, called Kasmir Pulaski Day, walking home form work, and when it got to the very end, when he talks about the way God gives and takes, and how that's a good and bad thing at the same time really, right then I walked in my door went to my room and wrapped myself in the curtains like a ghost blanket, like I was a kid. "And he takes and he takes and he takes".

My though pattern when it was really happening:

I'm crying.
I want to cry more.
There's a cell that split in my dad's body and if they don't stop it, it can split a million more times and cover him like that guy in Pirates in the Caribbean is covered in conch shells and starfish.
Maybe I should get sick, too so he's not alone.
My mind is rational enough to know I'm being totally irrational.
God, it feels really good to cry.

And I was in the sick world with my parents for a good while. I canceled plans with friends, read statistics, every website, couldn't sleep. And then one day I got this bright pocket where I thought about people that lost parents and kept living healthy lives. And then I went through the grief of what could happen all over again. Then I found a few more air pockets, and then, like I was holding my breath in a bath with my fists really tight together, I imagined myself coming out of the water, letting my bath hands out like jazz hands or something ridiculous. And I knew then that being in the healthy world is this thing given to us every morning like oatmeal or coffee. That health itself is a secret routine.

day eleven: some things never change

When I was in high school in the 90s, this is what I liked: thrift stores, Mike Stipe, driving around downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana late at night, making mix tapes, Denny's, and pasting up the opinion/features page for my school paper.

I'm almost thirty, and I'm not sure if it's cute or sad that this is what I like: thrift stores, Mike Stipe, driving around Seattle, Washington late at night, buying songs on iTunes to spruce up my iPod, going out to eat, and grading slides and transparencies for my job.

Off with you, stuff white people like. I can proudly say none of the things I like best are (yet) on your silly list. Well, with the exceptions of #1, #5, #8, #40, #44, #46, #48 and #49.

day ten: Saturdays=brunching, hair trimming, heart beating, floor sweeping

Today, I'm wearing a dress with a sweater vest over rolled up jeans, carrying a black bag with a little frowning cloud. I read about living a quiet life, filling time working with my hands, being anxiousless, like birds. And it seems like half of my mind is the same as a sourly sacred heart, the other part a mixology of numbers, patterns, lists of best practices for my time.

day nine: things you think about when you're an only child

I used to lay in bed at night and imagine watching tv. And on my tv, there would be a show with a tv turned on. What if there was another tv on inside the tv on my tv? And another tv and another, folding in on itself again and again for infinity?

day eight: I care about reading

I went to a typography workshop today. The typographer lectured on how using and reading fonts is all about understanding figure and ground. "We read the rhythm of letters," he said. "It's about the spacing in between letters."










Which reminded me that I used to be more conscious of things like how the end isn't half as important as the means.


If my twenties were about descension, my thirties better the hell be about ascending.












I intuitively understand the rhythm of reading t-w-e-n-t-y more than t-h-i-r-t-y










Growing up, my dad would always talk about taking it "a day at a time" which seemed impractical to me. Because if you were going to live, it had to look like a connected line and not a bunch of bits and pieces. But now I understand what he was saying--it's about how each day relates to the next that builds into days, weeks, and decades, and that's why single Mondays are as important as whole Marches or Mays.

day eight: everybody's name sounds like food

When we were in NYC the Summer I was 21, we ate Indian food in the Village on the Fourth of July. So full our bellies could explode, we shuffled back to your apartment on Carmine Street and layed on your bed next to the window. I watched people below eating in a courtyard under white lights, squinted at the big glass bulbs until how my belly felt and what I saw was the same mixture of light and decay.

Exercise: Everyone's Name Sounds Like Food
Goal: List each member of your extended family and jot down the first food you think of when you say each name out loud. Imagine all the food from your list on a huge platter, and consider what the different flavors and colors representing these people in your world says about what your love would taste like and everything. Here's mine:

Jewish family first:

charles=dark meat chicken, fried, leg and/or thigh
roselyn=roast beef in a buffet, Sunday morning brunch in the 80s, skip the crepe bar, straight to the heavy stuff
donna=punch with ginger ale and maraschino cherries
steve=something breaded, too
mike=crisp apples and flavored bottled water
irvin=instant mashed potatoes and gravy from MCL, disappointed, no strawberry shortcake this time
tom=chocolate pudding pops, swirl maybe, but not straight vanilla

Italian:

deedee=Sara Lee coconut cake
nettie=gin martini; lots of olives with big pimentos
john=milk and single cookie
ross=meatball; so easy
tracy=overripe watermelon in the 80s, seedless, but still with the white chewy half-seeds

day seven: A complete medical history

of things I've worried about being diagnosed with in my twenties:

fungus on the brain
lupus
costochronditis
heart murmur
ms
overactive foot/feet
tumor on the top of my right foot
total overnight hair loss
early-onset osteoporosis
tumor with teeth and hair on the small of my back

plan of attack for my thirties:

admit irrational fear as soon as it enters mind: a flu shot of sorts to protect my worried head.

day six: black sea/red sea

We've moving closer to the vernal equinox. I learned that every year in March, after the equinox, we gain two more minutes of light per day instead of one. My father-in-law told me that, and it's one of two things I can remember him saying. The other is that I am only other person he's met that picks the extra-white embryo out of egg yolks before frying.

The day I turned 27, I told my husband that it was gonna be my year. I'm a few weeks from 30, and I can check off grown up stuff that's happened to me in the last three years easily, like buying a condo and starting a 401(k). But I wonder how much progress I've made creatively, if I would ever feel like I'd written enough, took enough photographs, recorded enough radio stories.

Moving into a new decade, I'm like a bean bag somebody unzipped. All these little white bulbs scatter across the kitchen floor. It's the 80s, and I'm still a kid, only I know it and so it feels easier. I love you.

A short list. In my twenties I ______________________

stopped thinking so much about dying of terminal illness
fell in love with terry gross and ira glass
stopped buying so much coffee, started drinking tea
recorded bits and pieces of radio stories
took photographs of my friend giving birth
got good with a loupe
went to Europe three times
wanted to go to Israel, Turkey, and Bulgaria a whole hell of a lot
got better at making up recipes instead of following them
conquered my fear of rats by beating a dead one with a metal pipe in the backyard of a house we used to rent

day five: the places you forget to forget

At the Charles Art Museum in Baltimore over Christmas last year, I spent a long time walking through the Asian art, looking at tiny Japanese inro and netsuke. Passing through a sitting room between two galleries, I became transfixed on this tower and old church sitting outside the window and had this complete urge to sit and be quiet and stare out the window, which is a common impulse I learned growing up as an only child.



I got really good at sitting and watching things long enough to see them change, like this rose bush that would grow all spring until it could tap my bedroom window. I wanted to watch for the opposite reason at the art museum, because I was looking at this tower and church that had been around for dozens of decades. These things aren't going anywhere, and they don't age. This actualization seems incredibly simple, I know, but sometimes that's how thoughts work. You certainly intrinsically understand that monuments age differently than people, but one day you see something that makes you feel the fact.

And this certain fact felt quiet, like a blue but not black evening. I thought of the Cure song The Big Hand, remembered first fall chills, felt a little woozy like I'd had coffee too late in the afternoon. And I was obscured, pea coated, and common.

day four: umame me

Just had dinner with two other couples, which was really amazing. Five courses over five hours at a friend's place in Queen Anne. We made rainbow carrots and chard with juniper berries for dish one, chocolate linguini with cherries and mascarpone for dish two.

At these sort of dinners we stay out later than usual and talk about things like dangerous sushi. Someone mentions how people in Japan die from eating blowfish, like one hundred fatalities each year. My husband asks who's heard about umame, the fifth flavor. "Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and now this new elemental taste," he says. I start to think about how umame, shrimpy and closer to salty seaweed than anything, is more like a combination of all tastes than a new taste on its own.

When I turned twenty, I felt sweeter than sweet. Listened to a pop song about a sugar rush on my birthday ten years ago. Now I'm most likely mashed up, all-spiced. Umame-fied.

day three: moving closer

I try to manage the gravity of turning 30 by making lists and pie charts, plotting where I'm going on graph paper with color-coded subsections. Like if my papers are in order, somehow that means my mind and heart are primed and I enter into a new decade by choice, all resolute.

A list to try:

Alphabetized list of how it feels to move closer to thirty.
Goal: list one word or phrase starting with each letter of the alphabet to represent how you feel about the change to come. My list is below.

A-About to choke
B-Blood-oranged
C-Cherry stuck in the ice on the bottom of my drink
D-Doing the unstuck
E-Egg salad, jello, other stuff I'll eat when I loose my teeth
F-Family
G-Godot
H-Helvetica
I-Ink on my arm, a tattoo I'll never get
J-Juniper berries we're cooking with at dinner with friends is a grown up spice
K-Kibbles and bits
L-Like listening to Life's Rich Pageant
M-My very heart is wrinkled
N-Naan, please
O-Old old old old old
P-Peter and the Wolf
Q-Quarterlife crisis was so five years ago
R-Rich is the new rich
S-Serpentine belt
T-Total, Special K, Bran Flakes; time to eat old cereal
U-Uterus
V-Vegetables
W-What we were supposed to have written
X-Xerox my ring finger at work when no one is looking
Y-young young young young
Z-Zoology, botany, bird watching, slow food

day two: taxing

Our floors are covered with all this helvetica, bright black letters and numbers. It looks like alphabet soup spit up on the ottoman. 1099, E-Z, EIC, FDIC, WAMU, -C. I just filed our taxes in an hour and a half. A sure record. I remember whole work weeks, milk and cookie all-nighters spent doing taxes in my early twenties. And now I'm fire-wired, all connected to my bank and state thanks to Turbo Tax. Who says I'm getting money back this year, which is a wild change from 2006, when I freelanced for three months and we owed and owed and owed. A good omen for the next decade, I think, crossing my toes, fingers and eyes.

day one: begin the begin

I think seeds and wings are the same things really. Because one pollinates and the other floats, and they're both moving fast towards new beginnings. Sometimes when I want a fresh start, I lay still and think about my lungs. My lungs look like seeds and wings. Like two pieces of a split heart, one east one west. And these lungs have sardine tin lids over them, the old-fashioned kind with lock-and-key openers. I hold my breath and poke at each lung, lifting my hands across this riblet continet, turning the tiny keys up and away until they pop off, fall rusty on the floor. And just then, my lungs are so clean I feel afraid. And then I run for miles.

+

I've decided to blog thirty days of vignettes, observations, lists and images each day over this, the last month of my twenties. I'm calling the month-long project Thirtymoon. Which sort-of sounds like Thirtysomething, that TV show from the 80s my mom used to watch. And it sounds a little swoony, like Moonstruck, the chocolatier. Or like honeymoon and golden years in one, which is much more of what I'm going for.

I live in Seattle, in a vintag-ey place without a view, with a husband who's already six months into his thirties. He tells me I should just jump in, that the water's fine over there. To which I reply, "I have twenty-nine toe dips before I'm diving into anything, thankyouverymuch."