Light on Broken Glass: a wending writer's life

[Talking Pretty Today] Logical Deduction

2012-01-07T18:05:00.002-07:00

5-year-old Oscar: "Where are you from?"
Me: "I'm from New Jersey."
Oscar: "What is your..." ::pause:: "hairtage?"
Me: "Oh. Well, I'm American and Pacific Islander."
Oscar: ::frowns:: "Did your island sink?"

Interactions with the Internet and Other Living Things

2012-01-07T18:00:00.002-07:00

Hello! I'm starting three new things at Light on Broken Glass.

1) Sip-spiration: Link Café
In Spain, you always have a coffee after lunch, which often means your lunch has already gone on for two hours and, what the heck, why not tack on another? Some afternoons during the week (2-5 times, to be not specific) I'll be sharing links for you to enjoy as you sip your midday café cortado. They will be inspired by my own Internet meanderings, pulls and triggers, so you can trust the authenticity of their emotional fortitude and general usefulness.

2) Talking Pretty Today
Maybe I overheard something. Maybe you said something ridiculous to me and now everyone will know. Maybe you will not be able to rest until you read the next conversation I had with a five year old. You never know. I may be sneaky and back-date these.

3) Yay! Poison!
At some point, I have talked to everyone I know about dangerous additives, chemicals and preservatives in our food. I still don't think people know enough about what these ingredients do to our bodies. I could get upset or take a serious stance, but why not use the Brechtian technique? As actor/author/playwright Mike Daisy puts it: "use humor not to anesthetize, but as a tool for deepening connections, so that an audience will hear things deeply that they might not normally be willing to listen to." Inspired by the Yay! magnets, I will point you to your (not-so-)friendly neurotoxin or carcinogen of the day!

Also, isn't 2012 amazing?

Some go for the shoes; I go for the shawarma.

2011-12-20T14:44:00.001-07:00

Last year, I went to Nicaragua with my ex. Right before our trip he expressed concern about the possibility of food poisoning.

"I might just not eat anything there," he said.
We were going to be there for two weeks. I was confused.
"What will you eat?" I asked.
"I don't know, I'll bring yogurt or something," he replied. I knew a pop culture reference was coming, something that convinced him this atrocity was pardonable. "You know, Charlotte-SATC-movie style."

It occurred to me that I wouldn't want to go if I couldn't eat the local food. If I couldn't immerse myself through taste, if I couldn't adorn my taste buds with what locals choose to nourish (or at least pleasure) their bodies… why go at all?

Since then I've come to embrace the fact that my travels revolve around food and people, with a side of alone time to write about food and people… while drinking a pourover coffee.

Photo courtesy of Tertulia

So before I visit my mother for a New Jersey Christmas, I am going to spend one full day in NYC. I am scrupulously plotting my meals, coffee breaks and wine-accompanied meriendas.

Before I maniacally try to cram the city's culinary craftsmanship into my belly during a 24-hour period, I am open to suggestions. So leave me a comment (mind you, my dinner slot is taken by Tertulia, recently reviewed in the Times—there's my love of Spain, ever surface level). Oh, and I will be reviewing every place I visit in a January 2012 post (and on NiftyNYC).

Pizza, Love and Jesus

2011-10-24T11:36:00.000-06:00

This piece was also published in Yellow Scene magazine and can be found here. Enjoy!

Local food sees infusion of European culture and tradition
By: Amy Segreti

The farm-to-table concept of making a connection between farmers, food and consumers has finally, in recent years, become cherished—and people in Boulder County are taking food authenticity to a moralistic level.

Flippin' pies at Locale. Photo by: Vandenoever

When you step into Pizzeria Locale, the first thing you’ll notice is the massive 1,000-degree wood-burning oven forged together from pecan and oak wood and volcanic rock culled from Mt. Vesuvius—the only Ferrara oven in Colorado. While the folks at Locale understood the value of producing culturally authentic Italian food and incorporating tools and materials, including the Ferrara oven, the Transportation Security Administration didn’t. Stefano Ferrara originally sent over all of the materials to build the oven in Boulder, including brick, clay and dirt from the heart of Naples. But all TSA saw was raw organic material.

“They were like, ‘Why don’t you just use dirt from Boulder?’” said Chris Donato, general manager of Pizzeria Locale. “They didn’t understand that it was an authentic thing, that it was going to be more of an art piece.”

TSA destroyed those materials. What you’ll see when you walk into Locale is the second attempt, an oven made by Ferrara and shipped over, pre-made on the soil that is the home of what most agree is the best pizza in the world.

Traditional European food culture embodies the elements of simplicity and craftsmanship—a duo Americans haven’t, until recently, been accustomed to seeing served together. Only in the last several years have Americans started to value high-quality food (U.S. sales of organic food and beverages grew from $1 billion in 1990 to $26.7 billion in 2010) and make an effort to become knowledgeable about where their food comes from.

Chef Jordan Wallace of Locale spent four months in Italy working at pizzerias, studying the art of pizza-making in Naples before the restaurant opened in Boulder.

“We wanted to have the exact same thing that’s offered on the streets of Naples,” Donato said.
Everything from the V.D.F. prosciutto slicer (hand-crafted by father and son team Mirco and Gary Schnidero) to the arrival of the pizza to your table uncut—which annoys some diners—is a nod to authentic Napolitan style and tradition.

“The pizza isn’t pre-cut because there’s lot more moisture to it; our mozzerella is very fresh so it’s really watery, the San Marzano tomatoes have more water to them, and we store mushrooms in oil so they’re richer,” Donato said. “If we cut the pizza for you, the water seeps into the dough faster, compromising the integrity of the dough.”

Donato said Locale is not about kitsch, but rather, holding true to tradition.

“People have been doing things this way for hundreds of years,” Donato said. “If you do things one way for that long, you end up producing something beautiful.”

After spending two years in Girona, Spain, fiancées Coral Ferguson and Will Frischkorn opened Cured, a cheese shop, in downtown Boulder. But they haven’t left their European ideals behind.

“European culture around food is so thoughtful. It’s not convenience-focused,” Ferguson said. “It takes more time out of their day, but it’s time they enjoy because so much of their life is focused around food.”

Cured has a small-market feel, with sections of the shop dedicated to local fruit and vegetables, cheese, bread, cured meats, wine and freshly made to-go items such as salads and sandwiches.

Frischkorn said he hopes to help people become more knowledgeable about their local food and farmers through the presentation of their products (read: samples abound!) and hosting weekly classes.

“We’ll bring in different purveyors, cheese makers and brewers, and teach people how farmer’s grow things, about the composition of the soil,” he said. “None of the cheese will be cut and wrapped in plastic. You’ll be able to try everything.”

Cured isn’t about importing European delicacies, but selling specialty meats and cheeses from the states, further expanding the growing movement toward local, fresh, simple food.

“We have so many incredible restaurants here, but we want to teach people that if you have quality ingredients, you can create incredible meals anywhere,” Ferguson said. “It doesn’t take a massive amount of tools or skill.”

Sarah Amorese designed downtown Boulder’s Piece, Love & Chocolate like a European boutique based on her travels.

“There’s a chocolate shop on every block in parts of France,” Amorese said. “It’s just the way they treat food: everything is smaller, there’s more attention to detail and craft, and there’s such respect for the purveyors and the ingredients.”

Amorese said she was amazed how food—even basic staples—was revered in France.

“I was in the Camargue [region] where fleur de sel comes from, and there was this huge festival of rice going on. Just rice. There was even a rice princess,” she said.

The shop’s open-glass chocolate case, based on that of a shop in Beaune, France, displays the truffles like jewels.

“We designed it so there would be more conversation,” Amorese said.

This sense of personal connection combined with experience of European culture provides the backbone for well-traveled locals trying to maintain the authentic experience.

“Our whole shop will be filled with products that speak to us,” Frischkorn said.

And if you don’t see the oven first in Locale, you’ll definitely see Jesus. Floating prominently above the bar and hand-carved in 1905, the piece was an opening gift representative of the religious and cultural tradition in southern Italy.

“If you walk into a pizzeria, there should be some Jesus,” Donato said.

Amy Segreti is a journalist and editor living in Boulder. She strives to live purposefully with regard to place, pleasure and palate. Especially palate.

Behind the Scenes: Being a Master Sommelier

2011-09-12T13:21:00.002-06:00

A version of this article was published in the September 2011 issue of Rooster Magazine, of which I am the managing editor. Enjoy!

How to be a master sommelier
Your exams are nothing compared to this.
Photos and interview by: Amy Segreti

Take it from Master Sommelier Bobby Stuckey, co-owner of Frasca, winner of a James Beard Award and runner of marathons—even if you fail an exam five times, you can still be a baller. Rooster sat down with Bobby to get behind the scenes of becoming a master sommelier, which involves passing an exam that 90% of testers fail every year, due mostly to its rigorous tasting requirements. Want to try it? Let us put a glass of wine in front of you and then tell us all about it—acidity, grape, country of origin, district and appellation of origin, and vintage. Exactly.

Bobby Stuckey

What made you want to become a Master Sommelier?

I had been a sommelier since 1994, and when I went after the master sommelier diploma, I really struggled. So many people meet resistance with the master som degree, and a lot of my peers were wondering why I wanted to do it. I said, I’m not doing this for you or for an employer, I’m not doing it to get a raise—I’m doing it for myself. So I kept plugging away. I joke that I think I spent more on my MS degree than on my college education.

How many tries did it take you to pass the exam?

It took me six times. If you pass [the parts of] service and theory, you have two more tries to get through tasting, or you have to give up all the parts you’ve passed and take them again.

How did you train your palate to be able to pick up incredibly subtle nuances in wine?

The hardest part is recalling your olfactory memory when you’re stressed out. So I developed a new technique. The six months before my last attempt, when I passed in 2004, I totally changed how I tasted. I began tasting red wines before whites, and it made it much easier for me.

Interesting. At wine tastings, you almost always taste white wines first.

Exactly. But I felt that I personally tasted the nuances of acidity in white better after I had the red, so at the exam I asked to taste that way. It worked for me, but it was a crazy idea.

Take us behind the scenes of the tasting part of the exam.

You walk into a room and you have six wines in front of you; there are two master sommeliers in front of you and one taking notes behind you, writing down what you say. It’s you against the clock and you have 25 minutes to get it done. Say you’re tasting a white wine—before you came in, the master soms wrote down five flavors off the palate: lemon lime, cut grass, bell pepper, etc. Then they labeled it: alcohol medium, acidity high, length long, etc. So when you’re tasting, you name those elements, and they check off those boxes [on a tasting sheet] for you.

So you don’t need to give a description of say, “mustard seed,” to gain points.

Right. Some people will try to use shotgun descriptors trying to get a point or two, but that’s not what they’re looking for.

What was the strangest thing you had to learn in order to pass the exam? For example, we heard you get to learn about Havana cigars…?

Yes, I had to do a whole cigar service in London. But once I learned what I was getting into, I learned it was all relevant, learning those classic things. I mean, other than the Flagstaff House, there isn’t a restaurant in Boulder that has really old dishes, like beef rossini, or an old-school prep of fish—and those are the types of questions you get asked in service. A lot of young soms haven’t worked in an environment like that, and that becomes stranger and stranger for them.

Frasca Food and Wine

Do you feel that becoming a master sommelier was worth it in terms of running Frasca?

Worth it? Totally. There are very few master sommeliers that run a restaurant, or at least that stay on the floor. The business is tough, and it’s a young person’s activity; for example, last Saturday night [August 13] we had our busiest night in seven years, and the older you get, the harder it is to put out that wattage every night.

We overheard you talking to a table of diners who asked you what your role was at Frasca and you joked, “I’m the head bus boy.”

There’s a lot of people who don’t even think I own this place, and that’s my style—being part of the craft of the service. Being a master sommelier definitely helps me run this restaurant, because I’m better able to deal with those thresholds of effort.

How has earning this degree affected you personally?

It makes me more empathetic. When Matthew, my employee, didn’t pass tasting this time, it was a lot easier for me to understand what he was going through. It’s nice to mentor younger people. It also teaches you humility. You see a lot of young sommeliers who are arrogant, but very rarely do you see a master sommelier who is arrogant.

Hot media, two media, three media, four

2011-07-20T20:48:00.007-06:00

Newsosaur Alan D. Mutter always sparks insightful discourse on the journalism industry.

His post, "Time to Bring Back a P.M. News Product," highlights an idea similar to the one discussed at length in this month's Economist magazine: that "everything old is starting to look new again," that the way news was shared hundreds of years ago—by people in communities and coffee shops gossiping, sharing and even adding to the day's news—is reflected by today's social media hodgepodge.

Journalism started as a conversation; it's now returning to that state.

Also. My thoughts on Google+:

I am writing short stories again

2011-06-27T21:48:00.006-06:00

Hermeneutics.

The art of interpreting.
The study of the theory and practice of interpretation.

A word can inspire a story can inspire an examination of self.

Thank you, Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Safran Foer, Julio Cortázar, and every other author who has inspired me to write outside of the linear.

The other day a stylist who was washing my hair said, "It's strange, your hair holds so much water. It turns pitch black."

Jump in
wet things
see what they dry like.

The outside making the inside safe

2011-06-26T14:05:00.005-06:00

I have found a little sanctuary in Keystone, Colo. called Inxpot. I'm here on a mini-vacation, hiking and relaxing yet oddly surrounded by a Bacon festival and distracted by resort conversations like:

"He called me last night after he got pulled over on the way back to the hotel."
"But I thought he was walking back."
"He was. He got pulled over walking."

But everything is ok in here.

When I claim spots as sanctuaries, I mean that they satisfy both inner and outer aspects of the meaning: inside of my head and my outside surroundings. I need a blend of something, of music and intellect, a concoction of words and wind and movement, of quotes scrawled on walls—"Live where your friends will defend you, but never have to"—and of men alone reading with an intensity to not notice any of it. An outside space created to foster one's inner space.

Inxpot is part coffee shop, part bookshop and part bar. It really only has six full shelves of books, but somehow the diverse collection managed to keep me occupied for an hour and a half before I became inspired to write. Although it's situated in a resort, the café has managed to maintain an air of authenticity. And within that, I can be authentic to myself.

A confession: I haven't read in a while. Not really read—not sat down with a book and let it devour me, let it cloak me so people can't find me anymore until I am done with it. I have skimmed New Yorker articles with spotted interest; I have read Facebook updates with embarrassing voracity. I am worried about my brain. I have started to read articles about how our brains are changing and our attention span may be waning, but I cannot finish them before I move on to something else. I am worried about my brain.

Yet "I am worried" does not accurately reflect how I feel every day. I am so many things to myself and to so many people—and I love it, and it's scary to live this way, and I never admit that, but it is. When you build a thing of many different types of wood—pecan, maple, yellowheart—they must be soldered together with exquisite care to create a solid piece, or things can be unsteady and give you splinters when you rub yourself across their many lives within a life.

Taken with my awful iPhone 1 camera, but I am still so very excited!

A little over a week ago, I celebrated my four-year "crash-iversary," and I hiked my first Colorado 13er yesterday: Mt. Sniktau. I am so in love with Colorado and its mountains that it frightens me. I have never come back to live in a place after leaving it. I have never annoyed so many people with how much I love a place before, but I figure those who are left will be as enamored with life as I am—the ones who will defend me but never have to—and those are the people I build my wood-woven existence with.

And sometimes I need to find a sanctuary like this café, where I can remember that I am safe. Sometimes it's a teahouse, or a rose garden, or a spot on the earth where I can weave grass through my hair, green-brown life threadings, my heart starting and stopping, feeling the in-between of things—and I can feel that it's safe inside there too, because I make it that way.

A Love Song to Vancouver

2011-05-15T19:29:00.010-06:00

I am still
plump, loaf-risen
Pink and tender
from rubbing myself
ripe.

What caves do we crawl in when we play like
animals?

What are these holes in the universe
I am attuned to finding and spreading open
to dance in where there is no light?

I stand, look at you
from where the rain has
caressed lightly like fingers
the fallen cherry blossoms,
trying to soak them back to life
but they lie, love-
ridden, ladled with the scent of
rose-not-quites.

You see,
It is in the
unwanting.

My legs are like a cricket's
as I burst from the center
into song.

The psychometry of books

2011-05-15T19:19:00.006-06:00

I confess that there is in my book hunts and book passions something pretty close to hoarding the hair of martyrs and the sweat of saints. My books are a private altar. They are a source of strength and a place of worship. I see no reason to refuse to bend the knee.

Close the shutters and turn up the lamp. The room is full of voices.

—Jeanette Winterson, "Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery"

"Beware of misquotes on the Internet." —Abraham Lincoln

2011-05-03T10:58:00.011-06:00

If you tried Googling the quote, "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy," yesterday, it wouldn't even matter that you were trying to verify its accuracy.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. quote circulating Twitter and Facebook with regards to Osama bin Laden's death was fake, but it wouldn't make any difference if you were hunting for the truth. Google would have only turned up hundreds of results that told you one thing:

He must have said it. (And if you "like" it, it must be even truer!)

The rest of the quote, "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that," MLK Jr. actually did write in his book, "Strength to Love."

But the first, oddly a propos line? It was written by a girl named Jessica Dovey, who wrote it correctly, attributing MLK's words to him and hers to herself. The people who reposted it were the ones who started the status update version of the game of "telephone."

But—it's not about the quote.

It's not that I want to badger all of my Facebook friends who blindly reposted it or spend my entire morning stabbing everyone's status update with the butcher knife of truth, ranting about misinformation and social media sheep herds.

What bothers me is that most people didn't care—not before they posted to see if it was accurate, not that all Google results were clearly showing only one day of results, not even after I or someone else would write that it was inaccurate.

In our age of misinformation, compiled with the belief that the younger generation doesn't give a crap about real news and has a "majority rules" mindset—this is not ok. We've created technology that allows us to invent truth and base its worthiness on quantity—on the number of times it's retweeted, the number of people who "like" it, the amount of hits it gets.

We, as Ted Koppel puts it (originally in a Washington Post column, "The Case Against News We Can Choose," and also here), "are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we’re now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers."

My friend Annie shared a kinder perspective: when people's emotions run high, logic and reason go out the door. No one bothered to check if Martin Luther King Jr. actually said he wouldn't rejoice in the death of even one man; it just resonated with people so deeply that they didn't care if he said it or not. The majority of Facebook and Twitter users agreed he said it—so he did.

Megan McArdle says it best in her article on The Atlantic's website:

We become invested in these quotes because they say something important about us—and they let us feel that those emotions were shared by great figures in history. We naturally search for reasons that they could have said it—that they could have felt like us—rather than looking for reasons to disbelieve. If we'd put the same moving words in Hitler's mouth, everyone would have been a lot more skeptical. But while this might be a lesson about the need to be skeptical, I don't think there's anything stupid about wanting to be more like Dr. King.

TakuanSoho, a reader who commented on McArdle's article, speaks from a psychological standpoint and calls it "cognitive dissonance on display," noting that people feel something they can't articulate, and so they latch onto a quote from someone they admire and use it as a rhetoric device to defend their belief in the sentiment.

I say: cheers to Jessica—for speaking her own mind.

Overheard: reminders from writers

2011-04-20T12:19:00.012-06:00

I'm sitting at Trident Café (as I do often) overhearing an interview between two male writers and an author named Sara.

When one of the writers asks her why she moved to Boulder, she says that she had been in Thailand wondering where to move next, and as she was doing yoga looking out her window, an intense wave of feeling washed over her and she saw Boulder. She saw the mountains.

"My sister was living [here] and I called her and said, 'Don't tell anyone, but I'm going to ship all my things from Thailand to you and I'm moving there.'"

When asked how she felt about Boulder, Sara replies:

"It's felt like a really good incubation place to write my book, to connect with a lot of other like-minded people, to have access to great teachers, to have access to nature—which is one of my great teachers—and to really strengthen myself internally and externally."

This is the point when I find out she was diagnosed with an illness; I'm not sure which.

Sara is a runner, yoga practitioner, meditator, hiker. It seems her book focuses on the idea of exercise helping to self-heal.

"I have a lot of fire energy, and I like to turn that inward to heal myself," she says.

I look at her more closely; she is beautiful. Healthy. Strong.

"I don't regret how things happen," she says. "I'm not a victim."

Thank you, Ms. Unknown Writer, for the reminders.

Creating for creating: portable sacred space for artists on the go

2011-03-26T17:35:00.005-06:00

"Creativity, like many things, gives back when you use it." (Molly O'Keefe)

I was in Paris when I met Roberto. He spoke five languages, introduced me to neighborhood markets and bourgeois bars, and attempted to teach me tango (although I was too faint with awe at that point to remember any steps). He was writing a lengthy research paper about impoverished neighborhoods of Paris, and told me that in order to have time to write, he brought his laptop on his hour-long train commute.

“Even if I only get one perfect sentence out of it—it's worth it,” he said.

Modern writers, artists and other creatives wonder how sacred creative space can fit within a fairly commute-oriented work life. Author Kelly L. Stone writes that when we make space for creating, it naturally becomes a safe and comfortable place for one's muse to emerge. Much like a Pavlovian response, simply going into the space will energize the creative process.

But what can we do when our lives don’t allow us to sit home all day and create?

Believe it or not, we can assemble a portable version of a sacred space in the form of supplies: bags, drawing tools, notebooks, folders. It sounds simple, but your mind will help your muse along. It’s all about ritual and repetition.

Here are some ideas for coaxing out your traveling muse:

designate a notebook only for your creative ideas. Don’t write to-do lists in it (that's what your planner is for) or phone numbers. Make it sacred and it will give back to you.
get a large purse or handbag and put all of your creative materials in that bag. Find a few things (quotes, photos, drawings) that are motivational to you and keep you on your path and throw ‘em in.
for days when you’re feeling uninspired, include a token of your past success. For my business partner, Heather, this is easy; she can take an actual bag. For me, I would take a writing contract or a clip of a published article I’m particularly proud of.

The important part is the power of association you’ll create almost effortlessly each time you use your traveling sacred space for its purpose. You can be anywhere; it can involve coffee or Chardonnay (like perhaps it is for me right now...). It can even be on a noisy, crowded train in Paris. If you’ve decided that this is your creation time and make it a ritual—that’s what it will be.

Note to Boulder/Denver folks: check this out. It's a free, Denver-wide, creative-space-finder (who knew?) for artists in the area.

And let me know your secrets—how do you create your sacred artistic space?

Note: I wrote the original version of this article for the local Boulder-based eco-company, English Retreads.

Key lime pie and that is all except for the so much more

2011-03-21T22:50:00.022-06:00

My ex always used to bring me water. Before bed, at a café, wherever—but at night was when it mattered. He did it half-asleep once, in the hours when there is no light, only feet peddling against sheets. Then he drank all of it and got up again to get more. There was never any question.

—

I carried a key lime pie around my house tonight. For several hours, without eating it.

I carried it from its Whole Foods' bag in the kitchen into my room where I called my ex. He talked, I listened, then I saw the pie sitting on my desk chair. I began to get angry; he was standing in the way of me and my pie. I hung up.

Instead of getting my pie, I almost immediately called another ex. I stopped. I examined why I flew down this reactionary, pie-less path. I got out my journal to write about it.

I wrote, then started creating something that could be a big something. It was going to be called The Purpose Project, but it might not be because of this and these guys. It will be something else. It's in my journal now gestating, growing limbs.

I noticed the pie was still on my chair, but now I had to go to the bathroom. I took my pie into the bathroom, which I realize is gross. It sat on my sink for a while, until I realized I hadn't written in my blog for quite some time, since before the ex was an ex. I brought the pie to my bed, where it is now sitting next to me as I type, looking soggy and more like lemon key pie.

But I am writing. In journals and on keyboards. I am creating although it is just me right now, me and my Monday nights and stacks of books and long, dusty brain-hallways. But how sweet and pie-worthy it all is.

—

I am eating my pie now. I am thirsty. But I am going to keep eating.

Download your mind: eco-friendly paper planners that reconcile aesthetics and sustainability

2011-02-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a frazzled friend came into my office, which is not really an office but a conference room in an office building that I sneak into.

“My brain can’t fit anything else! 8x10 papers are scattered all over my office!” he cried. He actually does have an office, so I imagined this to be a problem.

I told him to buy a planner, and showed him mine. I don’t know what I’d do without it. I’ve been using a variety of year-long paper planners for the last 15 years, although I have a Macbook, iPad, iPhone and, practically, an iChip embedded in my brain (I was once nearly kicked out of a Nokia store when my iChip decided to make a theatrical, impromptu sales pitch to my new-phone-buying friend...). But when it comes to planning—can’t use ‘em. I need paper.

Last July, I even bought an 18-month planner, because my friend Debbie wanted me to be her bridesmaid in 18 months, which is a ridiculous time commitment to expect someone to remember. But she knew me when I was four when I didn't have any friends, so I did it for her. I’m unsure of what country I’ll be living in at that time, but I know I’ll be posing for pictures in a maroon dress in New Jersey on July 16. And she has my Moleskine to thank.

I’ve always needed a paper planner. I need something tactile, something I can doodle in, a canvas for creativity amidst structure and lines. I love to smell the paper, feel the weight of ink on them, feel how tangibly heavier the past is than the future. With a paper planner, it’s all embodied, with an open and close and a whole life inside.

People go nuts over their planners. They write long blog posts about choosing a planner based on what could be labeled as complicated algorithms, complete with pro/con lists, numerical scoring and charts. Another lady writes romantically about the luscious feel and sound of paper and the interactive nature of flipping pages versus scrolling over a digital screen.

For myself and many others, paper planners are the way to go. But is it sustainable? How can I reconcile my love of paper and be eco-friendly?

I’ve done some research so you can rest easy (and subsequently mark and check off that you rested easy). These two are great to grab when you want to be conscious of both the environment and your next yoga/therapy/work meeting:

EcoSystem planners each have their own unique ID number, which can be used to track the book's origins, learn about its environmentally-friendly roots, and find out exactly how to recycle each planner. They utilize New Leaf Imagination, a production effort that creates materials made with 100% post-consumer waste. They’re also pretty and colorful; “green doesn’t have to be brown” is their motto.
The Quo Vadis Equology planner is made with chlorine-free, FSC-recycled, alkaline/neutral paper (quite a mouthful). And apparently they “invented” the concept of Weekly Time Management. In 1954, the founder of the company, a French doctor named F.G. Beltrami, sketched a grid on a notebook, and voila, planning would never be the same.

As for my friend? He decided to go with iCal. At least my iChip is still firing.

Note: The original version of this article was written for the local Boulder-based eco-company, English Retreads. It can be found here. You should consider buying a purse from them, as they are astoundingly awesome.

Sip coffee. Start a business. Enjoy wild cookie infatuation.

2011-02-07T14:49:00.009-07:00

Things lately:

1) My very own business was born four days ago, and it is already crawling, talking and making Facebook status updates. My company is called Dynamic Expression, LLC and it is an Aquarius born slightly after the New Moon.

My business is about infusing fun and finesse into people's professional products—whether they be print media or online publications. I am a merging of worlds. I really just want to play chess and stroke my beard but I must realize I’m 27 in 2011 someday, and it might as well be today.

I went to a gathering of creative minds called "Think and Drink" that night and talked about my company over a glass of wine, and over the next two glasses I talked about other things I do not remember, except that I roughly edited someone when they added an "s"—Dynamic Expressions NO—to my company name.

2) After I started my company in about an hour using just two websites (the Colorado Secretary of State page and the IRS site—don't ever pay anyone to start you a company, it is so simple and satisfying to do it yourself), I went to the bank at 5:50 p.m, ten minutes before closing.

I whirled in and luckily encountered a jovial woman named Jennifer, who told me she wanted to start her own small business walking dogs. I told her to go for it!!! with many exclamation marks. She then asked what my opening deposit would be.

I hadn't thought this far.

I looked in my wallet and took out a faded bill.

"Does $1 work?" I asked.

She began to nod slowly, then faster as she noticed my exuberance, and the exclamation marks in my eyes shot toward her once more.

The next day I went in with my first check from a client and she photocopied it so I could keep it for posterity. She told me she was thinking of me the night before and feeling inspired, and she said she hoped Dynamic Expression does well. With one "s."

3) My sister Kristi had a baby girl named Emi recently, and I think of her every day, and how I want her to be a happy pretty baby, because other impressive adjectives don't come when I see her happy pretty face, only the desire to hold her. Little baby girls float into my consciousness a lot lately, and I wish I could borrow one from time to time and give her love.

At brunch on Saturday morning at the Mercantile Cafe in Jamestown, where I sipped enough coffee to keep me awake until today, a 9-year-old boy ran up to my table. He was dressed like a tiny red pirate. He bent down and put his hand in his rubber boot and rapidly pulled up a tape measure. I am assuming he was trying to show me how tall he was, however I could see no numbers and he said nothing to me; he was a very stoic tape-measure displayer. Then he ran away without a word.

I sipped. Wondered how tall I was now, if I ever even owned a tape measure, or a rubber boot. Then I noticed his 2-year-old sister eating a cookie and subsequently hopping up and down wildly in her chair in sheer delight. Yes! This I relate to.

4) I've been spending a lot of time in Trident coffeehouse. There are old men here who read books on how to improve their game at bridge. Today I sat by the wood-burning heater and talked with Ian, the man who brought me to Boulder. When he left, I moved to a booth where someone had gifted wet rose petals to the table. I am still here, staring at the spot across the room where I created my business on Thursday, while I listened to people discussing the latest issue of the New Yorker. Somewhere in the café, a man is singing opera softly and people are playing Scrabble not on an iPad but in its original form.

I am curmudgeoning and modernizing simultaneously.

R e l a t i o n s h i p

2011-02-01T17:26:00.017-07:00

When you are little, you have boyfriends and girlfriends, and you call this a relationship. You go through that, think it is fun. Perhaps you will collect multiple of these? So you have another, and another, a relationship in the wholeness of the word, the beautiful simplicity, the non-dissectedness of it. Relationship. Fun!

Then you have another, and you are larger and have another, and the word grows—and becomes scary. It's growing bigger and you're growing bigger and relationship needs to mean more, but it is still just one thing. Just one word—so why this opening and closing, and then a deeper closing because of the deep opening, and then the deepest closing you didn't think you were capable of? Because you haven't figured it out yet, you haven't learned the secret. Relationship is playing with you now, because you think you have met it, but it has been giggling at you from behind its secret the whole time, Wizard of Oz-like.

And then one day you meet someone. And you realize.

You look at the word again. Turn it upside down, with him. Spread it out, spread yourself out further than you thought you could. There are things inside you never saw before.

Now you see an r. And an a. And a ship and an elation. And it's all there, and it's so grand and powerful that you are so small on this ship with your elation, and your ions and your re. And you look around at this new world, and wow.

Relationship.

This is huge.

And fun!

There is no such thing as a grown-up

2011-01-24T16:10:00.007-07:00

Today I was working on my computer at Whole Foods and someone ran up to my table. And stared at me. And giggled. And stood there for 10 minutes smiling, marveling at me all the same whether or not I looked back, whether I hid behind my laptop or popped out from behind it, whether I told him not to touch the dirty strawberry on the ground or complimented his neat cookie-eating style. Sometimes he'd wiggle a bit, still smiling.

Ah, to be as close to the heart as he is.

Happy New Year, everyone

2010-12-31T10:45:00.004-07:00

My Intentions

Don't be afraid to be a beginner at something.

Keep learning about yourself.

Develop a consistent spiritual practice.

Be open to romantic love.

Speak your truth. To everyone. Most importantly, to yourself.

Scents of crumbs of days of lives

2010-11-05T16:20:00.010-06:00

I’ve always enjoyed smelling people as they walk by, generally inside modes of transportation. Tight spaces, forced hallways. On trains, buses, planes. I inhale the waft of themselves they leave behind, the layers of their days. Their mornings, their showers, their indiscretions.

I generally like the smell of women more. When an intriguing woman walks by, I make my nostrils sive-like to distill her smell and form an opinion about her. Not so much men, women are the ones, licking at my nose, apple sweet.

There was a Scorpio man I was in love with who was not in love with me, which at those times of my life was the only kind of man I could love.

I could smell him before he came into a room or after he left it. I don’t mean his cologne; I mean him. His being, his incense. His life, what he showered with, what he shaved with, what he left on him from where he’d just been. I loved it. I loved feeling so in tune with him, using a sense we hardly ever use to recognize someone. It made me feel poetic at a time when I used my writing very little.

Once I was walking down the hallway to my office and I smelled him. It always made my heart gymnastic; I went in, blood cooling after the swell. He wasn’t there.

Then I said, out loud, “I could have sworn he was here...”

And out he popped from under a desk. Hiding. Found.

“Hi Amy!” he said. I was embarrassed. He was not supposed to know I knew his smell. That I could track him. It meant I studied him too much. It meant countless things he already knew, that I just wanted to stop proving.

People are like that. They say they want to be known, but they don’t really want to be known. They want to know, but they don't really want to know. Everyone wants a cliff, a stunning view, a palpability but a mist, too, a part that is untouchable. A foam, a snow globe.

Two years later I was on a plane with another man, another Scorpio I’d known for eight years. He had just woken up from a useless Plane Nap and he immediately leaned over and sniffed me. Really sniffed me, staccato-like but lung-deep, like he was breathing in something vital. Like he was trying to break a boundary because he knew I could not put walls on my scent, despite wherever else I put them.

What is this need to inhale someone? Isn’t being inside of one human body enough?

A pottery kind of life

2010-10-04T13:22:00.005-06:00

There’s a smile that I only have in Colorado.

I see it in photos; somehow the smile has both widened and sucked in any fat on my face and I am left with slimness and truth. The wrinkles are thinner, lighter, but more dam-like, standing strong against the others to hold their own.

There is a brightness, a reflection of this state on myself and on the state, and all of it melding to multi-colored fluidity. We are blues and reds and greens and tans, smooth silky tans against a ragged mountain backdrop. The sharpness of the mountains makes an angled complement to the curvy, waviness of me and my yin energy. We are juxtaposed, we are missing puzzle pieces, found.

My jaw is both rounder and pointier, as if it were becoming more feminine and yet more focused at the same time. Focused on her path, her goals, yet exuding what she can along the way. Peppering it with love, spicing it with sensuality. Molding and being molded a la vez.

2010-09-01T06:07:00.017-06:00

What does one do with the
half-borne glimpses
of another potential life?

Balloon-thread ends
that fray, unrealized
unwoven

I will breathe it all whole,
supple it with intention
until I can no longer—

and let them fly away

and fly the
other way.

2010-08-31T03:37:00.002-06:00

through me through me through me
the light, the colors,
you, deep spine of myself
do do! do?
and yet i'm floating
not backwards or forwards
in a purgatory
i never think of staying
in
and now maybe, maybe,
do.

Spanish beer inspires me to write about other beer

2010-08-03T11:16:00.004-06:00

My piece on international brews and bars, published in InMadrid, the city's English-language newspaper:

Have we got brews for you

Craving something other than Mahou or Cruzcampo? Amy Segreti tells you where you can find great beer from Germany, Belgium and elsewhere without leaving Madrid.

José Luis Ramírez doesn’t want you to have any distractions when you come to his bar. His beer haven, Oldenburg (C/Alburquerque, 13, Metro: Bilbao), appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the world’s largest selection of cerveza in the smallest space–14.4 square meters to be exact.

No distractions means no television to watch the fútbol game, no Wifi for checking e-mail, no cigarette machines, no juice machines, nor anything else that characterizes old Spanish bars, even though Oldenburg was founded over two decades ago. And although you’ll find pinchos, salchichas (hot dogs) and a wonderful tortilla de patatas on Fridays and Saturdays, you won’t find anything else to drink besides beer and Coca-Cola, which Ramírez only started serving two years ago when his long-time clients began to have children.

“When you come, you must come only to drink beer,” says Ramírez firmly. And that is something he makes very easy.

Oldenburg offers more than 150 bottled beers from all over the world, as well as half a dozen on draft. And despite the great variety, there is a distinct lack of snobbiness about the bar, which is decorated in beer memorabilia and showcases a small model of Oldenburg, the city in Germany the bar is named after.

“There is no such thing as ‘bad beer’,” says Ramírez. “They are all different.”

While some of us may beg to differ, there are enough options in the thick menu to satisfy everyone. Toward the back of the menu you’ll find a glossary of terms defining each style of beer and lengthy descriptions of the areas in Belgium in which each beer is made.

And if you’ve seen Te Deum beer around Madrid, it’s because Ramírez helped to create it in Belgium in 2002, hecha al gusto español (made to suit the Spanish taste). Eight years later, it is still only manufactured and bottled by Du Bocq brewery in Belgium and shipped to Spain, the only country permitted to sell and distribute it.

“The Belgians say the only defect Te Deum has is that it doesn’t contain enough alcohol,” says Ramírez.

If you can’t decide what to order, you can always try the beer of the month; order two and you’ll receive a glass especially made for that beer. Ramírez started the program in 1998 because he found a lot of his clients always drank the same thing, year after year. “It’s easier to say, ‘Have you tried our beer of the month?’” says Ramírez. “If you start listing specific beers, they don’t pay you any attention.”

If you want to focus specifically on Belgian beer, just behind Plaza Mayor you’ll find Cafeeke (C/Cuchilleros, 3, Metro: Sol), where attentive waiters speak several languages and there are plenty of small flat screens to watch the games. Prices are a bit higher, which is to be expected because of its central location (you’ll pay 5.40€ for a Delirium Tremens, a bit less for others). However, it has a cozy upstairs salon and if you come with your pet to have a drink on the terrace, dog treats are provided free of charge.

Cafeeke carries 50 bottled Belgian beers and five on draft. Try the Mongozo coconut beer, which comes in a coconut shell (but ask for a spoon, as the rich mixture quickly separates).

If you’re looking for microbrewed beer made in Madrid, try both Naturbier (C/ Plaza de Santa Ana, 9, Metro: Sevilla) and Magister (C/Príncipe, 18, Metro: Sevilla). Naturbier claims to produce the only “natural” beer in Madrid; they don’t use any chemicals in the beer’s production, and you’ll get it straight from the cask in which it was produced. Right down the street is Magister, which is similar to Naturbier with the wonderful exception that you can choose which of the 10 free tapas you’d like to accompany your brew. The quality of the beer is adequate, and there are usually around three options.

Finally, a Spanish chain named La Fábrica: Museo de la Cerveza (C/Princesa, 5, Metro: Plaza de España, and C/Génova, 21, Metro: Alonso Martínez, among others), offering almost 20 different types of Spanish and world beer, deserves an honorable mention. It serves as a restaurant as well, so you can eat your meat and potatoes with your beer and admire interesting collectibles that showcase the evolution of the Spanish brewing industry since the 19th century.

Historic moments and croquetas

2010-07-13T09:16:00.006-06:00

How good am I at choosing countries (capitals, no less) to live in?

Congratulations, men in red, and thank you; you have made my days unforgettable.

I live in the center of a firework

2010-07-07T16:27:00.004-06:00

I have never been so happy to be shouting my head off, jumping with a pointy flag, blowing a vuvuzela and having beer and sweat splashed on me after not having eaten for three days and likely prolonging food-poisoning recovery.

And I run with them, and hoorah, and make mistakes, and get back up. And I'm not a part of them, but I am. I really am.

Goodnight, screaming, beautiful city, my pulsating home-for-now.

You, and him, and you even harder

2010-05-30T16:23:00.007-06:00

Sometimes when his tongue heats
my flesh
and I close my eyes,
I let the lightning bolts
flicker across the back
of my lids,
but they don't touch ground
they don't
electrify.

I looked at my hair today on the Metro and thought, that is not my hair. I fingered the ends, almost-blonde, butterscotch tints on black matte. They came from another time, a warmer time —and then I stopped and thought of you, summer heat, oozing through the afternoon like caramel, letting go, rounding you, your cave, your shelter— my hair. Those shades, the opposite of shades, because there was nothing in the shadows there. It was bright, brilliant, and very far away.

Bosses who say, "you didn't get the soul out of this one," bosses who aren't you. The nicest thing you ever said to me was, "you give me input," in a way where you half-pointed to your head to indicate things going in there, from me, from what I gave you. You didn't need to say it. You made me want to lose all of my experiences and have only this one, this pearl-threaded disaster, sewn with the intimate, heart-flesh color of roses. You made it feel like my tongue and throat were one, pulsating together with my heart, and on downward the thick river, inky and muddy now with stunted edges.

I occasionally read words I wrote about you, but I can't see all of them. I see "trace" as "thrown." I see pain as poetry. I see my poetry and wonder how much I've poured out into it, how much is left, how much more juice will I get out of this non-romance, como si toda la vida fuera un gran cuento. I read things I wrote about you where I indicate that I am over you, that you are not on my mind. And I laugh at my silly younger self, tossle her hair, which is not my hair but butter-blonde tinted, soft and innocent, so fine and untangled that no secrets could tumble out of it.

I once wrote about the lover after you. "He's young and teachable." Teachable. What a word.

Bread crumbs, bridges, the sometimes of things

2010-04-28T09:55:00.008-06:00

A journalist friend who worked at El Mundo for 14 years asked me recently what I would be doing in Spain if I could choose. I didn't have an immediate answer. I had to dig around in the pockets of my desires and pull up linty wishes and mold them into recognizable shapes for him. Ah, yes — that dream, that place, that job. This is enough to tell me that my intentions aren't clear enough for the universe to hear them.

"Have you been writing lately?" my friend Sara asks, and already I am reaching for my glass of wine, trying to avoid the question.

"No," I say, and start thinking of an excuse — I've been to the United States again, I'm feeling out of sorts lately, I've moved in with a new family in Madrid and they take up all my time.

And sometimes it feels like they do. I can incorporate exercise by playing with the 2-year-old baby, Alvaro. I do plank pose and he drives toy trucks under the length of me. I am a bridge always in danger of collapsing, and this makes him giggle. However, when I try to write and he spies my Macbook (I mistakenly showed him the cool sounds the volume keys make), he starts manically poking at the keyboard. And I let him because it's cute, and with the way I feel lately perhaps using this method might yield a better piece of writing.

And so I don't give Sara an excuse, because she already knows that part of me.

"You told me to tell you that when you're not writing, it means you're not being honest with yourself," she says, and I curse smarter, month-ago Amy.

It's true. Writing is a meditation for me. I can feel my mind focusing, filtering, wading out to sea.

I live on the edges of myself too often here. It feels safer. Sometimes I feel alone and scared in this country, and paradoxically too vulnerable to go deeply with anyone. Because if I access that route, I leave bread crumbs, and people can follow me in there.

I constantly ask myself what all of this is worth. The Spanish language, of course, but what else? Do I need to know now? Why am I always trying to frame works of art that haven't taken their shape yet?

My friend Harvin saw a psychic recently, and when I came up in the conversation she told him that what I'm doing right now will help me in my career. I wanted to fly to D.C. and shake her and say, "What am I doing? Please God tell me what it is. I don't feel it, please help me feel it!"

And then I did go to D.C. last week. And I didn't shake her, or see her. I was too happy to be home.

Ida y vuelta

2010-02-28T13:10:00.003-07:00

I'm reading a book of personal essays in Spanish called "La Loca de la Casa" by Rosa Montero. She writes that she has become accustomed to organizing her memories according to lovers and the books that she's written. She says all humans do this, categorize their life using idiosyncratically-chosen landmarks.

Todos los humanos recurrimos a trucos semejantes: sé de personas que cuentan sus vidas por las casas en las que han residido, o por los hijos, o por los empleos, e incluso por los coches. Puede que sea obsesión que algunos muestran por cambiar de automóvil cada año no sea más que una estrategia desesperada para tener algo que recordar.

All of us have similar tricks: I know people who tell their lives by the houses they lived in, or by their children, or by their jobs, or even by their cars. It's possible that this obsession people have of changing their car every year is nothing more than a desperate strategy to have something to remember things by.

Basically, I've figured out mine is moving to different places. I remember my time in each state I've lived in—New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado—because of that state. I go first to the place. Then I recall events, loves, friends, jobs, storms, losses. It is easy to build chapters this way.

But although I left Spain for the U.S. on Feb. 4—coincidentally my intended date of permanent departure—I wasn't quite done with this chapter yet. So I came back.

I spent five days getting buried under the worst snowstorm in history with good friends in D.C., saw my mother in New Jersey, and flew back to Spain the night before all Continental flights out of my home state were canceled due to the severe weather.

Because for now, Madrid is home to me. I'm building a life here, although it has taken me three months to feel the roots of it.

I have girl friends from four other countries, and when we get together, we speak in five different languages (as my Italiana says, "Lo que quieras, aquí tenemos.") It makes me feel safe in an inexplicable way. Like with this many languages, we couldn't possibly get lost.

I teach English to a little boy named Jaime who amazes me daily with his intelligence, intuitiveness and generosity. He just turned eight, but his soul is much older. I looked at him today during our lesson, when he had started drawing a picture of a beach to explain a Spanish word to me, and I nearly burst into tears at the thought that I will lose him, and that he is exactly what I would want in a son. I stopped myself, said, "Jellyfish, madusa, thank you," and we moved on.

I take an hour-long Spanish class every day, then spend the rest of my afternoon studying what I've learned over café con leche largo de café. The other day in Pepe Botella, two of my extranjeras and I spent 5 minutes talking about one verb—just one Spanish word, enorgullecerse, to be/feel proud—and it didn't feel like a chore. It's because we want to dissect the language that much, to liquefy it and inject it into ourselves so it stays with us forever.

And so Feb. 9 I had one more plane ticket than I thought I would have. Because I could not imagine tearing myself from Madrid after only three months. How I ever thought I could has been another lesson in knowing myself better.

A curious Spanish day

2010-02-01T13:18:00.005-07:00

Today, three months after I arrived in Madrid, I finally started Spanish classes at my appropriate level, of which I am quite proud (B2, according to the European standard for language proficiency). Afterwards I spent a languorous afternoon relaxing in the sun in Puerta del Sol, sipping café cortados with my Italian and German girl friends.

I ate lunch at one of my favorite vegetarian restaurants, during which a tiny Spanish baby waddled over to me carrying big metal salad servers he had stolen from his parent's table. Excited, I said, "Hola!" and started speaking to him in Spanish. As a response he placed the giant tonsils into his mouth and gurgled. Yes, little one, this is what I want to do instead of speaking Spanish sometimes, too.

As I was walking to a café later, I passed a crazy homeless man shouting into the air. All major cities are blessed with this phenomenon, however I find that when the hollering is in Spanish it is a lot less alarming.

"¿Cuántas pipas hay?!" he screamed at a building.

I am not sure how many sunflower seeds there are, sir, but I hope you figure it out.

On my way home, I passed by another cute child. Except this one was being held in the air by his parents, allowing him to pee on a small tree on the side of the road. In my upper-middle class suburban neighborhood. His pants down, happily relieving himself on the tree like a puppy.

And so tonight, I am staying in, indulging in an episode of Desperate Housewives in English, and turning my brain happily, delightfully and completely off.

Wisps and wafts and circumstance

2010-01-22T13:35:00.008-07:00

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt."

— "Nadja," Andre Breton

Say "hello" and I will love you forever

2010-01-20T12:23:00.011-07:00

On owning a language

I was standing on the Metro today reading To The Lighthouse. Its cover is unmistakably English, the title screaming to everyone my native tongue.

When I want to appear Spanish I don't read it. Instead I read ADN, a free city paper (primarily available in suburban neighborhoods, another plus for my disguise). I gasp or chuckle at some article or another, thereby demonstrating my ability to read and understand the Spanish language.

But today I felt more like absorbing words rather than walking among them, occasionally having to tap one on the shoulder and ask, excuse me, what do you mean in this particular context?

So I chose Ms. Woolf. I looked up to see what stop I was at, and that was when I saw it. Smeared vulnerably across the face of a man of about 40 years. The look. The "please say something, anything, in English!" look. Floating there so exposed, above his cheeks that were gently etched with wisp-thin lines, like a palm.

It's a look I know well, because I give it to others on days I feel most lonely, when I see someone reading in English, or pass by people speaking it. One time in Chueca I meandered around three people talking about their English teaching experiences like a silly satellite, waiting for a way to break into the conversation. But there didn't appear to be an opening, so I shuffled away.

This is one of the more difficult aspects of being here. I am at an intermediate (some days low, some days high) level of Spanish, and I often feel trapped inside of myself because of the language barrier. I'm trying every single day, talking to people, reading newspapers, books, study materials, watching Spanish telenovelas. I am listening, always. I am putting myself out there; I am trying hard enough.

But when I start to think deeply about language and communication, as I have been lately, I feel that I might not be able to know another language intimately. To the point where I can express, for example, that sometimes I feel like a paper bag billowing in the breeze of someone's departure, gulping up thick mouthfuls of the air he leaves behind, my lips caked with dried longing. I am not able to pour things out of myself in another language, and I don't know if I ever will be.

There are moments to the contrary, of course, where I'm able to see the beauty of not needing words. Zoe, a girl from London who I befriended in Spain, was in pain over the recent burial of her grandmother, and she wanted to explain it to her Spanish friend, Cristina. She wasn't able to be there for the burial in London, so her family emailed her photos. She showed a picture of the box of ashes to Cristina and said, simply, "Mi abuela."

And she said the simplicity of that was comforting, that she didn't have to explain everything surrounding the death of her grandmother. That she could just say those two words and it was enough. That, essentially, the limitation was freeing. Freeing her from saying unnecessary words and, perhaps, the trouble of not knowing where to start or end, and allowing her to express herself in just two.

I am so drawn to the Spanish language, and I intend to be fluent in it. But maybe fluency is different than knowing a language intimately, the way an artist uses language, as threads for weaving. You don't go digging for threads; they are already there, and it is the final artistic product that takes the effort. Maybe I will create art with Spanish words someday.

Or maybe I won't.

And that's the interesting thing about living in another country. You learn things about yourself you did not expect. For instance, I am in love with the language I already own. It's almost as if I feel I need to explore English more, because these words are my tools, because I am a writer and can be nothing else.

But as for the man on the Metro, I will admit — he and I didn't need words.

Images: #1, "Raining words," Flickr user pfv; #2, snow-day in Madrid, Amy Segreti

The 427,000th definition of love

2010-01-12T06:51:00.003-07:00

It's like when you scratch a new bug bite, and the old one mysteriously starts itching again, reborn anew. You're like that.

Still you lurk beneath my skin, hatching memories.

In the static between hums a melody

2010-01-07T17:53:00.021-07:00

"El mundo es un pañuelo," I say to him. It's a small world.

But what I end up saying is "pomelo" — the world is a grapefruit.

And he laughs, and I laugh, and between the padded walls of language everything is all right again.

An incomparable comfort

2010-01-06T17:08:00.012-07:00

The holidays are hard on me. Always. I'm not sure if it's because I make them hard—like, say, choosing to be 5,000 miles away from close friends and family—but I always dread them.

I am going to admit to the world right now that I did nothing, absolutely nothing for New Year's Eve. If I have told you otherwise, I am a huge liar.

The Spanish family I am living with was away in Zaragoza for almost two weeks. I've enjoyed having the house to myself, but my very sensitive line between demanding/loving alone time and becoming lonely/morose was getting a bit fuzzy.

I knew that the whole family would be returning today, and so I went out for a late dinner. I wasn't sure if I wanted to wait until tomorrow to see the kids, as sometimes they drive me a bit crazy.

I hadn't seen them in 13 days. I came home at midnight, and when I walked in, Ana saw me, looked at me curiously for three seconds... then, her face lit up. It just... glowed.

"Amyyyyyy!" she screamed, and ran over to wrap her arms around me. Jaime—the macho 7-year-old that he is becoming—even came over to tug my arm and smile at me.

They proceeded to show me their new toys, and I played a game of Star Wars chess with Jaime while Ana sang to us with her new, soon-to-drive-me-insane microphone and mini-stage set.

I'm not used to this. I didn't grow up with younger brothers/sisters/cousins/anything. I don't understand this kind of emotion.

But basking in the simple purity of their affection was something I'd wanted—needed—and didn't even realize.

Blogger: Welcome to the writer parade

2009-12-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

This is brilliant. It's the work of French illustrator Stéphane Massa-Bidal: popular Web platforms like Flickr, Facebook and YouTube reinvented as old-school book covers.

Classy, hilarious and inspirational. See my random Blogger ideas:

Blogger

No longer just on mom's fridge
Comments speak louder than actions
InVenTed wOrDs display inGeNuity
RSS feed me
Freedom of speech unless deleted by author
Welcome to the writer parade

On est toujours mieux chez soi

2009-12-15T12:50:00.007-07:00

I just spent a colorful, decadent, freezing weekend in Paris. It was my first time traveling-while-traveling.

Much of the time I stood tapping my foot at an intersection of cultures: saying "merci" like "merthi," reading El País in French cafés, speaking half-English/half-Spanish because I didn't know which language someone was more likely to know ("Tiene water? Agua?" ::cup hands for emphasis::). Considering I cannot even pronounce "je suis" correctly no matter how many times I try, these language juxtapositions were necessary.

I spent time wandering the city and visiting neighborhood markets with one of the most interesting men I've met in a while, Roberto. He speaks five languages, is extremely thoughtful and intelligent, and inspired me to bring my laptop on the metro to write, like he does.

“Even if I only get one perfect sentence out of it—it's worth it,” he said.

I taught him some salsa tricks and he introduced me to tango. I spent my last night savoring a French wine over an immense dinner and accidentally seeing for the first time the Eiffel Tower, while midnight bike-riding around the city. After drinking hot chocolate at a bourgeois bar, I slept for four hours and hopped on a plane back to Spain.

And I was perfectly content to do so.

Being in Paris made me realize how much Spanish I actually do know, how proud I am of it, how happy I am to use it... and how much I have come to regard Madrid.

I wandered in and out of consciousness on the flight home, due to the lack of sleep. As we touched ground, I opened my eyes and thought, simply, "I am home, and home is Madrid." And then, a smile bloomed across my sleepy face, sprouting from deep within.

Home is Madrid.

The ocean is right where I put it, still stinging

2009-12-10T11:32:00.006-07:00

I lay there for a month, a year, a week. Taut and spellbound. Carving the sand with the arches of my body, waiting.

You polished my curves with salt, traced me with foam fingers. Rocked me with your push-pull, insistent and consuming. You chaffed me, made me softer, made me rougher. You were high and low, and I was worn away by your tides.

When your waves had ceased lapping I was still there. Mineralized.

There will be no turning of the page

2009-12-09T14:20:00.003-07:00

Google Living Stories. Wow.

The Washington Post, The New York Times and Google have awkwardly joined hands to create this masterpiece. Or, what looks like it could be a masterpiece — something that won't be "saving" journalism but is definitely desired and, for the most part, expected. It's one of those things that feels like it must have been around for a while because you've already been creating something like it yourself, with RSS feeds, customization of home pages, etc.

And now, voila. Unification of coverage for a single story or concept, all on one dynamic and well-organized web page.

We have come together.

Right?

Well, according to The Washington Post's piece on the project:

Post editors are concerned that the overall process could eat up valuable staff time unless it is made more automated.

During the process a half-dozen Google staffers spent three days in the Post newsroom in May, trailing editors and reporters with notepads and video cameras like some archaeological expedition. "The culture of Google is a culture of engineers," Brenner says. "We exist in different worlds."

The part of me that is enamored with the idea of Living Stories is unfortunately the same part of me that, guilt-ridden, chooses the latte over the newspaper and instead reads the cafe's copy of the paper while drinking the latte. But the journalist part of me wonders how this is going to help journalism stay afloat. In particular, as has been a huge point of discussion for nearly a year: investigative journalism. It's wonderful for consumers, but will this pay the professional journalists? No. (I'm sorry, but the phrase "citizen journalist" still irks me. TIME magazine's recent piece on Examiner.com is a must-read if you share—or don't share—my point of view.)

My opinion on Living Stories is similar to what Richard Kendall's expressed in his comment on an online journalism blog:

I hate it and love and bow down before it at the same time. This sort of advanced story curation is what news sites have been crying out for.

What we will lose in this is what we have already been losing in the process of transferring journalism from print to print+screen — the precious notion of turning our heads 1/4 inch and finding a completely different article that catches our interest. An article that we may glance over, yes — but also one that may inspire us, anger us or encourage us to explore our own values. An article that we never would have found.

Now, we find Google ads.

Escribir para comprender

2009-12-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

- El País del 9 de Diciembre, 2009

Storing words for winter

2009-12-08T18:38:00.002-07:00

I've been reading some Spanish books lately (please regard the word "reading" lightly), but I've been missing reading English. I miss the poetry of the language I own, diving into it, and how enrapturing it can be, how it feeds me and influences my own writing.

I have two English-language books with me in Spain. This is very different from the United States where I have two for every day of the year.

I brought:

1) "The New Spaniards" by John Hooper, second edition. It's a very well-written and entertaining history of modern Spain. I like it. Well, I liked it; I honestly have no desire to read it now that I'm in Madrid and would rather place myself in beautiful old bars with smoke-stained ceilings, sipping manzanilla and talking to Spaniards.

2) "The Secret Lives of People in Love" by Simon Van Booy. I found this book of short stories in September and was enthralled by it. However, I cannot read it at the moment, as there are remains of masticated love still stuck between my ribs.

So in the midst of missing my language, today I bought a third.

In all honesty, I wanted to buy "Lolita" (both of my copies are in Boulder), because even just the first paragraph makes me want to slit my wrists in a dramatic sacrifice to alliterative craftsmanship. But the only version that Casa del Libro had was one with a soulless, forlorn-looking rubia on the front cover. I just could not walk around with that. Not because I care what other people think, but because it depicts a character I don't believe exists in the book.

Anyway. I bought Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." I've never read it, although I own a copy in the U.S. But I am hungry for poetry and it seems this might be what I am looking for.

[Our attention is drawn] to Woolf's poetic prose: her rhythms and images, her use of hard consonants in monosyllabic words in counterpoint to long, soft, dreamy words and phrases. "To the Lighthouse" plays back and forth between telescopic and microscopic views of nature and human nature.

In the introduction, Woolf writes of her novel:

I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions.

And so inward I dive.

La Niña

2009-12-03T12:56:00.002-07:00

My Spanish family is very endearing, and after hearing some friends' stories about the Spanish families they are staying with, I appreciate mine even more.

The little boy, Jaime, is an absolute treasure. Like his grandmother said, "Con Jaime, todo es siempre bien." He gives up his candy for his sister Ana and then she pulls his hair. He puts himself last in order of turns when the three of us play "Memory." He seems to know intuitively when I am uncomfortable because Ana isn't listening to me, and he will try harder to show me that he wants to learn English. If I had just him, my teaching life would be a bit too perfect.

And so — enter little Ana.

My relationship with Ana is a bit like a non-functional romantic relationship. It is filled with anxiety, emotional ups and downs, occasional compromise and random destruction of property.

Today, Ana not only spilled water on my computer, she then broke a glass in the bathroom and danced away as Jaime started to clean it up; as I ran into the room to help he cutely said, "Please shoes!"

One evening, she stole sunflower seeds from my room without asking, and I told her not to. She scowled, and ran away, still eating them. Then I hear my iPhone alarm going off, and as I went to turn it off, the funniest thing happened... the alarm started moving. I followed it out to the living room, where I found it in Ana's hand, as she was about to hide it inside an umbrella bin where I never would have found it if it had stopped making noise. At this point I spoke a lot louder than before and told her to not ever take my $360 iPhone again.

We didn't talk for two days after that.

But then... my door was open one night and she came in, thought for a minute, walked back out, closed it — and knocked.

"...come in?" I said.

"Tienes pipas?" she asked.

And I gave her some sunflower seeds, and she said "thank you." And I smiled.

Of course, the next day I saw her with more — meaning that she went to where she saw my hiding spot was and got herself more.

And to this I say: Jaime is here to remind me what angels children can be... and Ana is what Spanish wine is for.

When the cold comes, yearning billows out

2009-11-28T18:53:00.009-07:00

Without memory, he thought,
man would be invincible.

— Simon Van Booy

A Thanksgiving tale for stateside friends

2009-11-25T05:10:00.007-07:00

The Spanish family I'm living with in Madrid has had the abuela, the grandmother (of the father), in town for the past two weeks, and I absolutely adore her. Her name is Lola, she speaks no English, and she likes to try to teach me Spanish by repeating a phrase six times, even if I've already used it in the same conversation a few minutes ago. This makes having a discussion with her slow but endearing, and I feel warm and fuzzy when she calls me cariño and cielo.

Today we left the house at the same time and in the elevator she told me she was going out to buy a conejo, a bunny rabbit. Since it is her last day in Madrid and she won't be around for the holidays, I figured she was buying the pet as an early Christmas present for the kids. How cute!

After my morning run, I came into the kitchen to get some water and saw lots of red meat on the counter. The grandmother pointed at it and said, "Conejo!"

Down to the earth I fell with dripping wings

2009-11-23T09:32:00.035-07:00

"Hube de sustituir el principio de necesidad
por el principio de posibilidad."
— Lorenzo Silva

I left Colorado for Spain three weeks ago, and have been letting it soak into my skin before squeezing out my reflections. I am constantly learning, exploring, discovering. I get lonely and frustrated, but I am determined, caffeinated, invigorated — and mostly, happy. Happy I chose this path for myself, for the time being.

I live with a Spanish family of four — a mother, a father, and two children — in Madrid. I teach English to the children, Ana (6) and Jaime (7), for three hours every weekday in the evenings, and I have the rest of the time to explore the city, the country, myself. I can eat whatever I want of their food and I stay here for free, but I am not paid. I am living purely off the money I saved in Boulder.

I feel somewhere in between a visitor and a resident. I am living here, I am working here, but only for a short time. I don't visit tourist sites, and when people ask me where things are, I can direct them. But while already there are bars I have been to several times, where people know my name and graciously offer me wine and tapas on the house — everything is still new to me. And I'm finding that it's the smallest things that make my days amazing.

Like, when I understand a Spanish phrase or two more than I did the day before. When I go to the Retiro Park for a run and take photos, turning inward to a focused and calm inner space, marveling at nature — an appreciation that Colorado gave me. When new English-speaking girl friends and I are between bars, and I ask them, out of nowhere, what the imperfect tense of tener is — and they answer without thinking me odd, because they are constantly wondering the same things.

I love the history in Madrid. I love the taverns that have been around for 80 years, their ceilings stained with cigarette smoke. I love looking at the dust on bottles of sherry at one of my favorite bars, La Venencia, taken straight from their casks long ago. I had a night out with a worldly woman who told me they haven't dusted those bottles in 14 years. She knew the owners when they had hair on their heads. This is beautiful to me.

Last week, in a Madrilenian tavern from the 19th century, I had croquetas, café cortados and conversation with Andrés Ruiz Tarazona, a writer and art critic for El País and other Spanish newspapers. When I went up to pay, the camarero told me that Andrés had already paid for me — the bartender knew him by name, because he's been coming there for years.

I have a favorite cafe, Pepe Botella, where I like reading El País and its Sunday magazine amidst espresso and the incense of cigarette smoke, hearing Russian and French and English and German, and Spanish — God, Spanish. I know I have spoken this in another lifetime.

I am trying to be light, because heavy things don't fly.

The comforts of staying

2009-10-20T12:50:00.023-06:00

I bought some hot apple cider this afternoon and took a walk around Boulder, fogging up my sunglasses with cinnamon-nutmeg steam.

I forget how much I love autumn. I wrote a short story last year about "the season of turmeric and spices, of osmanthus and scarf-worn longing." Today there was a scarf — a red one, my favorite, that my friend Christian bought for me in India — but there was no longing. Just appreciation, a kind of breath-driven inner peace, the kind you feel after a deep stretch.

I love knowing a city so well. I know that when I walk past a certain cafe that my best friend's boyfriend will be in there, working away on his next book. I know that the bathroom code to the local bookstore changes every week, and I always remember it until it no longer works. I know which intersections are always okay to cross even when the lights are green, because they're hardly ever used.

I know it will take me 12.5 minutes to walk from my work to my favorite local gourmet deli, where I harass them for their wild Alaskan house-cured salmon. I love learning through Facebook that a favorite cafe — where Christian and I would discuss our impending plans to travel the world over mochas and scones — is now serving hot apple cider, made from locally-grown apples; I love that I can walk there from my job, which is less than .5 miles away, because everything is less than .5 miles away.

I love that last night, as I was eating a delicious squash risotto with my close girl friend at my favorite restaurant, the bar manager — also my ex and friend — pointed at a table of diners and said, "They grew that squash you're eating."

I love feeling like I'm the only one who knows where a beautiful tea house is right downtown, because there's hardly anyone there. I love having places to retreat outside of my home, and not having every inch of my city crowded with people.

I love knowing that at least one out of five of my closest friends will likely be at the local "herban" bar at any given point on a late afternoon, working on art, illustration, writing, or just drinking jun.

I like growing, and discovering that when I really want to live in a place — the settle-down kind of live — it will probably be a smaller city, because I just like knowing. My life is filled with going and staying, but I am gaining so much in the process.

And when it comes to Boulder — I'm so glad I stayed.

Perfumed chaos and the lack of middles

2009-10-19T16:31:00.007-06:00

I am a wreck.

I am so on top of things for my leaving-the-country move that it is driving me insane. I tried to pay a parking ticket too early, before the city of Denver even put the citation number into their database. Then I tried to pay it again, and again, for a total of three times, and it is still not there.

The problem with this is that there is no middle ground for me. I am either on top of things, or I am not. I can either pay this ticket now, or when I come back from Spain I will owe the city of Denver enough money to build some new high-tech infrastructure.

I was talking to my sister Kristi about this when I went to Hawaii for her wedding a few weeks ago. There are people who are good at beginnings (starting projects, maybe not so good at follow-through) and those who are good at endings (final pushes, the procrastinators who do their best work at midnight before deadline). And everything in between, every combination therein. Some are good at all (Obama? maybe?).

I am a beginning and ending person. I've seen this in myself in all aspects of life, even in chess games. I am really great at opening and end-game, but in the middle I become so confused and lose my queen.

And now I am acting like I am moving out tomorrow. There are a lot of things going on for me — loneliness, anxiety, fear of the unknown, appetite issues, mild depression, fear of nighttime — but I don't want to sit with my emotions right now because they are too pointy. I am trying to outrun them by remaining chaotically busy.

What I do know is that when I come back to the states, all of my best clothes are going to smell like Glad Forceflex perfumed garbage bags (the label said "odor eliminating," not "odor infusing"), for better or worse. And in two weeks — I won't be thinking about this at all until I return, whenever that may be.

I just need to breathe some Spanish air. Now.

Hello, I'm moving to Spain

2009-09-30T14:41:00.019-06:00

Probar is a Spanish word I have a love affair with. It was not taught to me, or one that I sought out. It's a word that soaked into me on creamy, orange-scented streets in Barcelona.

On a Sunday morning in October 2007 I was trying to remember how to ask to try something—that something was Spanish wine at an open air market.

I started to get nervous, and when I get nervous I forget things, and forgetting things makes me nervous. I took a breath and stopped. I listened.

"¿Puedo probarlo?" "¿Puedo probar el vino?"

Probar. Yes! I lovingly borrowed it from the Spaniards around me and used it for myself—and had a remarkably full conversation with the merchant. I sipped red wine in the late October sunshine before continuing to wake up with a café cortado and cruasán de chocolate at an outdoor café. Classic, and perfect.

And two years later, on Nov. 3, 2009, I will be moving to Spain.

I haven't used the word "moving" yet. I've been telling people that I'm "going," or "traveling to." But there isn't a definite time period I'm going for. It's reliant upon money, I suppose, and isn't moving to any city the same way, if you're going there without a job?

Besides. "Moving" sounds so, so good. It feels right to me.

People in the U.S. generally use the word "moving" when they've been guaranteed a job at their new location. Or they have specific housing set up. I don't. I don't even know for sure if I'll be traveling around the country on my own or if I'll be staying in one place for three months teaching, then traveling, or doing both at the same time. I have no idea. And I love that, too.

I don't need to move "into" anywhere, or "for" something. I'm moving my self, my body, my spirit. I'm letting go of my apartment that I've been in love with since the day I serendipitously found it. I'm moving to jolt my soul, because it enjoys the invigoration. And it doesn't hurt to gather more experience, good or bad, for my writing life.

I am and always have been in love with everything Spanish: Spanish language, Spanish culture, Spanish food, the Spanish accent, Spanish dance... everything. I'm not sure why. It's not something I cultivated. It's just always been dancing around inside myself, and I need to bring it out and let it flutter around for a while.

For a "moving" kind of while.

Images: #1, Barcelona, Amy Segreti; #2, Malaga, Flickr user -N-Root-

This Life is For Exhaling

2009-09-24T12:15:00.003-06:00

He was asking her if she thought she would stay here forever.

"I think sometimes that I want to get out of New York," he was saying, the way people do when traveling, "but I don't know if I want to leave in a way where I don't have access to it anymore."

I was sitting in the booth behind this pair at a Nepalese restaurant in the small mountain town of Nederland, the sweet potato masala melting along my tongue like hot marshmellows.

"I'm not sure if I'll stay here forever," the woman replied. I couldn't see her face, but her voice sounded like it came from a deeper place, wooded with experience. "I just know that I wake up every morning and I feel so..." She paused. "Sane."

I watched her titter her head from side to side in laughter—her white hair not a rigid nest but filled with movement, a puffed dandelion globe allowing light to flow through it. Her neck moved with a lengthy suppleness, like she'd spent her life looking in many different directions.

He was younger, and I could see him perfectly. Maybe a son, a nephew of hers. He looked displaced. His face looked planned, like it was created from a blueprint, and in the background there were city lights and purpose-driven stares. He had the east coast etched into him, much like I did. Or maybe didn't anymore.

I like to carry around pendants, talismans from the east—shiny Bebe purses, determined facial expressions, a defensive, city strut. To people here, I am an east coaster; to friends from home, I am a mountain hippie. My friend who works on Capitol Hill in Washington tells me that Boulder has made me soft, that living here has clouded my rational mind. But maybe it needed some clouding, some wetness gently raining from it, watercoloring my edges.

I needed to know what it felt like to be in the mountains, to feel overtaken by a ridiculous variety of natural forces, all coexisting at once. I needed to be consumed by these rugged cliffs, clawed into by the edges of the sky. It has been beautiful; I have heard the crack of my soul opening here. It is worth becoming soft for this.

I stopped being able to hear the couple, except for the woman saying, "I can keep such a low profile here." I wondered if she was someone famous, an author, an artist, or someone who just wanted to be alone. I wondered when I would get to an age where I could live in a town like Nederland, just 15 miles west of Boulder but uncountable degrees more solitary, with almost no cell phone service and a village-size town center.

I will, someday, when I have collected enough experiences to bloat the walls of my small mountain house. They will funnel through me onto paper and I will not need to go anywhere else, because accessing cities will be as easy as turning a page. And my life will exist in an exhale.

Images: #1, "Keep me company," Flickr user Trcybrr; #2, CO landscape, Amy Segreti

The Secret Lives of Raindrops

2009-09-22T13:24:00.016-06:00

When I was little, I would study raindrops with a scientific intensity as they crawled down my mother's car window. I would play games with myself, guessing which ones would come together and barrel furiously to the end of their lives at the bottom of the window, fueled by their union. My mother would holler, and I would be quiet and watch them, wondering about the few that didn't find partners along the glass, who rolled softly and wearily to their ends. It was a way for me to turn inward while looking outward.

There are so many different ways to write. I am constantly amazed.

I picked up this book of short fiction today, "The Secret Lives of People in Love." I'd seen it before; I was originally turned off by the title, although I have several secret lives.

But I opened it up today at the Boulder Bookstore and read one of Simon Van Booy's three-page short-shorts, "The Reappearance of Strawberries." It was unbelievable. A dying man is staring out the window at the rain, requesting only strawberries on his final days, and he has a memory of a girl he should have been with.

He observed how each raindrop united with its closest other and then, split open by its own weight, ran down the glass in one even corridor. Even after her family was killed, he did nothing—not one thing.

Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible.

And this—how incredibly short and powerful it is, how it stirs a hot meringue of admiration and envy within me—is why I write.

Here is the back of his book. Martin Page's review is one that would cause me to die happily if I were to receive it.

Indian Peaks photo post

2009-08-20T13:21:00.016-06:00

Since I was made to choose one day a week to take off work (and chose Wednesday), I've been doing my best to make the most of them — and succeeding wildly.

Yesterday I ventured up into Indian Peaks Wilderness (part of Arapaho National Forest) and did a three-hour hike between Mitchell Lake and Blue Lake in an open valley at around 11,000 feet... and it was the most breathtakingly beautiful hike I've done here. I went by myself, because that's how I roll.

Mind you, all of these photos were taken with a 2-megapixel camera on an old iPhone with no zoom function.

The colors on these rocks were absolutely jaw-dropping.

Needing to capture myself in the moment, of course, with pretty flowers.

This picture has everything you can expect from Colorado: mountains, snow, greenery, flowing water — and a brewing afternoon thunderstorm.

Such an amazing trail. I am so lucky that I happen to live here.

Rolling home solo in the mountains, Camelbak in the passenger seat — just the way I like it.

Newsweek: a great example of what journalism needs

2009-08-15T15:38:00.038-06:00

I have been thinking this for a while now, and it's time I come out and say it: Newsweek—I am so, so proud of you.

I remember seeing piles and piles of the old you lying around my mother's house in New Jersey, sandwiched between the Asbury Park Press and old paper napkins scented with her gin and tonics. My mother had a fairly ambivalent attitude toward you, and I took that on as I grew up, even as I became a journalist. I didn't understand the point of you, and I don't think my mother did either. I adored the Washington Post, especially their Sunday magazine, but something about you... I just didn't get what you and TIME contributed to the conversation.

But now, things have changed.

“There’s a phrase in the culture: ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham in a New York Times article. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

I could feel that doggedness in the magazine even when I was younger, that sense of obligation that made the publication seem more like an informed citizen's duty to read rather than a pleasure, rather than something that could provide enlightenment and spawn fresh discussion.

With Newsweek's redesign starting with their May 18, 2009 issue, the magazine overhauled the format they had going for 76 years and replaced it with something perfectly packaged for today's ever-changing journalistic landscape.

Think about it. How are most newspapers and magazines trying to stay in the game? They're starting Twitter accounts and begrudgingly keeping up with them, or finding an intern who's only requirement is to be under the age of 21 to do it.

But Newsweek rethought their entire publication and executed it not in small doses, but all at once—which made the entire thing that more stunning.

They had an entire issue where political satirist Stephen Colbert was their guest editor. He inserted his humor into bits of the magazine (which were clearly pointed out as his work), such as: "Recycling magazines, catalogs and newspapers is one of the easiest ways for liberals to feel good about themselves." And in his editorial piece where he discusses the topic of this week's issue, he writes: "Americans have many lingering questions about Iraq. (For example: where is Iraq?) I wanted to find the answers."

Publicity stunt? Maybe, but it worked, it was damn hilarious, and the issue still had wonderful content. For those of us who respect high-quality journalism—but can also enjoy the humor of publications like the Onion—this was absolutely perfect.

The magazine is now divided into four clear sections: "short newsy items, essays and commentary, longer features and cultural coverage. It is printed on higher-quality paper, which instantly will make it feel better in your hand. I think the new design is sophisticated and airy, and makes the stories we work so hard on seem more inviting," said Assistant Managing Editor Kathleen Deveny in the "Reinventing Newsweek" column.

But it's more than the content. Newsweek has finally figured out that design can make or break a publication.

The new magazine is loaded with style. The palettes are softer and more elegant. New fonts are used in the magazine, including Archer, a signature font of the most un-Newsweek of all magazines: Martha Stewart Living. Cerebral and direct, unsnarky and anti-ironic, with cool hues and fonts to match.

“It’s so beautiful and open and a very modern serif font,” said Bonnie Siegler, the founder of Number 17, the design firm Mr. Meacham hired to redesign the magazine, speaking about the use of Archer in the magazine.

— from an article in the New York Observer

And these things, like font choices, do matter and it takes a great editorial team to really get that. Writers tend to want to believe their writing will rise above the need to have stunning photographs and compelling design. Unfortunately, in today's world—it does not. It just won't be noticed as much.

What's more—Newsweek does use Twitter, and they do it right. Before their issue on July 13, 2009 on books came out, they held a roundtable with six authors and live-tweeted the discussion. The quotes were incredible, things like Elizabeth Stout's reason for writing: "It's just a compulsion. It's absolute madness in a way, I think. The few times that I contemplate not doing it, it's almost like there's a flavor that leaves ordinary life." Now that is something you'd want to see on your Twitter home page.

Most importantly—they're bringing a necessary lightheartedness into journalism, which has gotten way too serious in this seemingly desolate landscape. In the Colbert issue, he writes: "I sent Newsweek's reporters to find out whatever happened to Iraq. Unfortunately, this meant cutting the cover story they had planned: 'Hey, Have You Heard About This Thing Called Twitter?"

Wend Wednesdays

2009-08-12T18:53:00.017-06:00

Wend (wěnd) v. To go one's way; to proceed on or along

I am in a tea house, writing fervently and padding barefoot upon the wood floors, letting the day flow by, smooth and unruffled like a long, silk skirt. I am a low tide, calmed by the sounds of the beautiful rock, plant and water sculpture beside me, sipping green tea, the taste of it dry and grassy, as though I am tonguing the earth.

I have felt things changing lately. I am likely leaving the country in two months. I am only working four days a week now due to company finances; Wednesday will be my day off. I am getting in touch with the feminine sides of life in more ways than I ever have; I even prefer the company of women to men, whereas in the first 20-something years of my life it was quite the opposite. I am reading books to learn more about my sex.

Woman the bowl, the urn, the cave, the musky jungle. We are the dark mysterium! We are hidden folds and primal wisdom and always, always the womb, bearing life, releasing life, and then sucking it back in again, into those moist, chthonic plaits.
— "Woman: An Intimate Geography," Natalie Anger

I have gone twice to see a man in the mountains that my girl friends and I call "the Oracle," or Boulder’s version of a therapist. The first time, I genuinely wanted to know about every aspect of my future, past and present, and allowed him to do his job and contact my spirit guides.

The second time, I went to see him more as a distressed patient, due to a painful and unexpected personal interaction. I listen to the recording of this session and hardly recognize myself. My emotions were a pendulum caught in a tornado, wild and with many strong, opposing answers. I felt alternately faint and boiling, flickering between a thunderstorm and a generator defeated by one.

Through breath work, visualization and encouragement to communicate (and perhaps not in the way I originally intended, which I scrapped, as it was peppered with insults and nothing but negativity), I released it. It worked, it all worked. I became sea-worthy again, in the way that I always have. There is no slow build up with me, but a ferociousness followed by the quickest calm you will ever see. It is because of my mother, and I thank her for it, and I don’t at the same time.

I asked the Oracle if I should take an east coast road trip to see friends before I leave for Spain in November. Going to Spain is my only plan right now, and one that can only be halted by a salaried journalism/writing job. Although he told me quite strongly that Spain was the right choice (and that I had three past lives there, however you want to take that), he told me not to do the road trip.

"If you have things to say to people from your past, call or write them. But you do not need to go backwards," he said. "Save your money for Spain or go somewhere else for that time, but keep moving forward. Your soul is excited by travel, but it does not like to go in reverse."

I was okay with this, although there still were some people I felt I wanted to see in person.

Less than two weeks later, I unexpectedly got sent on a business trip to Washington D.C., where I got a chance to be with those people. Even someone from the North Carolina portion of my life drove up to see me. Things happen this way.

And now all I hope for is that in Spain, I am able to write consistently. That I will have access to post my writing so that others may read it, so that I may be able to funnel my energies and intentions and, basically, remain sane.

I feel like my writing is a laser inside of myself, and my daily life can make me cloudy. But when I’m in the right place, and I touch that laser, the only thing I can do is follow it to its end, and it is a path I am more sure of than anything else in my life. It is carved, it is set, I just need to follow it. Sandy, smooth, fiery or calm — whatever I need to be to do so.

Ray Bradbury writes in his essay, "The Joy of Writing," about doing what he loves from the core of his being, with passion and pride, even if some editors didn’t adore his work:

"But a lot of readers did. I claim no victory. But there was blood on my gloves when I hung them up."

Blood on my gloves. In the spirit of Spain’s greatest (and most controversial) sport, bullfighting: olé to that.

Friend healing, Boulder style

2009-07-27T10:44:00.008-06:00

Last night my friends soothed me in a way I'd never experienced, and I'm so grateful for it.

I came to their house like a charged porcupine, my hairs on end, sharp and ready to strike. My vision was blurry with venom, from anger at two very different weekend interactions that triggered the roots of my emotions, that clawed at me and made me snake-like and smoking.

And then I stepped into this place where three of my female friends live. They are air, all Libras, and I needed them to settle me, to cool me. There was one man there, to whom I was initially opposed, but who quickly earned my trust.

After I got some poison off my chest through conversation, we sat around the hookah and lounged like Roman goddesses (plus one emperor). They all gave me a massage with coconut oil to free my tension, and reiki to heal me. Our man played us guitar, bluegrass was sung, and people intermittently got up to dance, to move their hips in wide, encompassing circles. Ridiculous puppet antics were caught on camera, and there was just so much love, love, love in that room.

I felt so incredibly blessed.

San Francisco sensations

2009-06-24T17:13:00.008-06:00

The following was something I wrote a while ago that I am intensely relating to today. When I wrote it, I was reading Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar and it was enticing me to stay up late with it, fingering the pages, writing and drinking coffee. I had flown to San Francisco to run a half-marathon, and was feeling a tingling energy at the tips of things, as if all my endeavors had nerves. If you've read the book, you can see the influence in my sentences.

I have been pining for San Francisco lately, the San Francisco I discovered when I flew there alone in July of 2005. The hot rays of sunlight that puncture the city fog some days, most days, rays like lasers on my stomach as I lay in the grass reading Lolita at a jazz festival, surrounded by people doing whatever they wanted with their Saturday afternoon. Sipping mojitos at a bar while reading about Mormon fundamentalists — and being able to tell a woman that and have her not think me strange and instead invite me to hang out with her group of friends. Riding on a motorcycle through the Castro, to bars as foggy as the city, getting lost in the tangled marriage of novelty and good conversation. Stepping on buses without the slightest clue where they'll take me, ending up at various parks in the Haight. Talking to people with no expectations, exchanging smiles to those walking around the city with bags from the running expo, as if we wore the same badge of ideas and actions, as if we had the same past, and we acknowledge it with eyelids up, down, up again and a curvature of the face saying, yes, we share this piece of the universe. The excitement of movement, running, legs like pistols, and breath, the air invigorating, like peppermint.

I went to San Francisco in March 2009, and finally, I felt that same connection again.

I wasn't meant to move there in June 2007, when I tried to go there with Ian. Maybe I needed to do some evolving first. And maybe... maybe I'm ready now.

The elements as awkward metaphors

2009-06-13T15:19:00.016-06:00

The rain here lately is constant. It is plump like grapes, fat with a tenderness that allows the sun to keep shining while the engorged droplets hit the ground. They smack themselves against the pavement, popping back up like childhood bouncing balls, too swollen to fit through the street sewers.

I am doing things I never thought I would.

Boulder is morphing for me, because I am forcing it to. Because I have lost the ability to live here peacefully without making a drastic change. Because my emotions are a completely unpredictable kind of weather.

I have squeezed so much writing about you out of myself and yet I am still soaked with it. There is still more, there is always more. You hardly have to do anything and there will always be more, because it is intense emotion that fuels me, and pain is one of the richest sponges.

I read a fiction piece in the New Yorker recently in which a woman says to her lover, "We are like mayflies. We live only for an afternoon."

To have you is to have the warmth of steam.

6 reasons my job rocks (even though it's not my intended career)

2009-06-01T15:21:00.011-06:00

The lease to my Boulder apartment expires in early September. This is no secret. I could decide to stay in Colorado for another year, or two or three, or I could move to another country. It's all up in the air; it's all possible. And the beauty of it is that I don't need to decide (i.e. give notice to my apartment complex) until early August.

But since I'm going to be at my current job for at least another three months, I have decided to make a list of reasons why my job absolutely rocks. Because I've been here for over a year, and if I don't make this list now — as I listen to the bird-chirp filled, almost-summer Boulder day carrying on outside without me, the Flatirons begging me scurry up them — I might go insane.

I work in downtown Boulder.

Not in some office park where my only lunch option is Quiznos. In fact, the problem I have most often (and have elucidated to others, to their disdain) is that there are so many wonderful, independent, local places to eat that I have no idea which one to choose.

I work a mile away from where I live.

One mile. Which means I can not only drive to work, but bike, walk, and if I wanted to, skip. Because it's really that close. (If distance is a good enough attribute for Penelope Trunk, it's good enough for me).

I get a free permit for a downtown parking lot.

This is so very useful when needing to carry large things home, when I need to go to the Denver airport (it's across from the Boulder bus station), and quite frankly whenever I'm wearing high heels. However, the most important aspect of this is the ability to say snobbishly to friends, "I never pay to park downtown."

I only work from 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.

If I were the sort of person to get up early, I could do quite a lot of things in the morning. I always leave work when it's light out, even in the dead of winter. Also, friends who don't wake up until 2 p.m. think that I never work and can just materialize money from nowhere.

I am actually enhancing my resume.

I manage and edit print projects for our company. I write the company blog. I grow and cultivate the online branding of our company image through social media networks (hi, Facebook and Twitter). This will all help me when I get back to the journalism industry.

And finally, I work with a small group of people who, if they found and read this post, would not really be insulted by it at all.

I believe they know me well enough that when I say that writing is my true passion, it does not come as any surprise. Really, I don't think I could make it any more obvious.

A quote I take solace in is this:

"You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer."
— Stephen Leigh

Exactly.

Are you working at a job that isn't your intended career but want to appreciate it anyway? Tell me why you love your job. I know you can think of something.

Cocoa the Bear and the smell of coffee

2009-05-23T18:13:00.015-06:00

I’ve been thinking about writing about this weekend and what it means to me all day, but it just isn’t ready yet. It’s still coagulating. And when I tried anyway – sitting down at my laptop in a café, finally able to breathe and get away from the throngs of visitors that have descended upon my town like some kind of spontaneously materialized sneaker-wearing species – I just freaked out.

I’m also distracted, because there is scattered energy in Boulder right now, as thousands are here for the Bolder Boulder and the Boulder Creek Festival, and there is a tilt-a-whirl and screaming neon lights in my work parking lot, and event booths with non-compostable cups, and a man in a suit using both a typewriter and an iPod in this coffee shop, and all of this… makes me unable to write what I want to right now.

So I’ve decided instead to just post a picture and, much like in a children’s book, to point out and explain an object in it.

I created this today. It is a love seat in the bay window of my apartment, for reading, writing – or eating green grapes and cherries, which is what I did this afternoon, trying to get used to the feeling of sitting inside of a floating box of glass, in front, in back, and to the right of me. Like a glass peninsula bubble.

For the past 17 months I’ve lived in my apartment, I’ve done essentially nothing with this particular space. See photo below of nothing:

Looks like it would be good for plants, right? I once put a basil plant in there, named her Priscilla, and promptly killed her in two weeks.

“Aren’t basil plants easy to take care of?” my friend Ashley asked when I told her of Priscilla’s untimely demise. Yes, they are. I am just very good at killing things, or else I like to think my plants can be as independent as I am and not need my attention for nine days straight. Regardless, Priscilla made it onto a few mozzarella and tomato sandwiches, and then she got brown, and we parted ways.

What I’d like to point out about this love seat area that I am so proud of, is Cocoa. The Car Accident Bear.

Cocoa was given to me by a hospital nurse in North Carolina, right before my ex, Ian, and I accidentally moved to Colorado. The tag is still on him; I have her name written in there, so I can remember her. (If you Google your name, Crystal Wainwright, and find this: hi.)

The nurse bought this for me from the hospital gift shop because I was waiting hours for an appointment I’d made much earlier. I really needed to know what was going on with me and I was being completely ignored. I thought I had an ectopic pregnancy, which is scary, and something Dr. Google was sure I might have, due to my very specific symptoms. I was also typing on my laptop writing an article for my newspaper section, since I was using work time to be at the hospital, and I was randomly bursting into tears worrying about myself.

I’m guessing that the frequent vacillation between hardened concentration and whimsical emotion probably made me look like I was in the wrong ward of the hospital.

The nurse who was overseeing the waiting room noticed my pain or insanity and gave me this bear. It turned out I didn’t have an ectopic pregnancy, I named the bear Cocoa, and got my article in on time.

I played with Cocoa so often the last week I was in Wilmington that I even started taking sentimental pictures of us on my old flip cell phone, long-arm-coming-out-of-side-of-the-photo style.

When Ian and I got into the accident, Cocoa was on my lap and I was sleeping. After the car stopped flipping around in the air and landed right side up, Cocoa had migrated to my feet, and he was covered in the cold coffee that had been sitting in the cup holder.

I’d like to say I took him with me to the hospital, but I honestly don’t think that I did. All I took was my cell phone, and when they put me on the hard board-like thing and loaded me into the AirLife helicopter, I managed to clasp onto it even as they cut my sundress open to put sticky electrodes on my body to monitor my heart. Even as they stuck needles in me, and moved me from board to moving thing to MRI machine to hospital bed.

The only reason I was able to remember my cell phone was because it was my link to Ian, who had been separated from me minutes after the accident and taken to a different hospital. It was the thing that would connect me to him – it was Ian as the only way I could take him with me – and I knew that even in my delirium, and I held onto it like it was the only thing that could bring me back to any place I recognized.

I retrieved Cocoa from the wreckage just like everything else that highway patrol had collected and taken to a facility operated by an impersonal man who charged us $300 to retrieve our own belongings. Cocoa was fine, except he smelled like coffee beans, which I like to re-phrase as "cocoa beans," for effect.

And so there he sits, the protector of my love seat area. I smelled him today, but he doesn’t smell like coffee anymore, like he did for about a year after the accident. But he was fine, and I was fine, and Ian was fine. We were all fine. And so, I really didn’t mind the smell. In fact, I liked it.

Musings on pride and bronchitis

2009-05-09T17:27:00.008-06:00

So, I have bronchitis, and this spurred me to buy a chick lit book.

I mean, there was nothing else I could really do. I watched three episodes of LOST. I slept for over 16 hours. I can't go to a movie theater because it's rude to go to a place where people expect silence and fill it with the sounds of you hacking up a lung.

I finally went to a coffee shop because I needed to get out of the house and I'd heard that coffee dilates the bronchial tubes. This guy kept staring at me. Usually I interpret that to mean he might find me attractive, however today I think he was concerned that I should perhaps be in a hospital and not sitting across from him appearing as though I might have The Swine Flu.

I'd read 314 pages of this book yesterday, and saved the last 60 for today, finishing it at the café. I am unable to share the title because it resonated with my life so much that if I were to name it, someone could easily research it and find out one of my secrets. Plus it's somewhat embarrassing to resonate with a book that has a picture of a charm bracelet, complete with lock and key, on the cover.

The thing is — I enjoyed it. The book made me think about the subject of pride. One of the things I've been struggling with recently is my intense, unperturbed Leo pride. I read once, "The Leo woman’s pride is always at stake, and no matter how loudly she roars, her ego is delicate and fragile."

I used to be a person who spouted her emotions at unsuspecting loved ones at any given opportunity. Sometimes I wonder if people back in Maryland and D.C. would even recognize me now. I recently visited a friend in New York who met me in my early college years, and he told me that I've changed so much — that he can tell just from the way I talk about things and myself now — and I took it as a huge compliment.

But in addition to the more positive aspects of my growth since coming to Boulder, I've turned completely around and instead of upchucking my frustrations at people I'm involved with in an annoying and theatrical emo manner, I now keep them hidden and pretend not to care if they hurt me. Especially if they really hurt me.

My ex, who was a long-term recipient of my emotional upchucking, called me today and said: "Amy, I know you're trying to 'hippy' the bronchitis out of you, but I think you should stop trying to scare it away with patchouli and go get some medicine."

I am lucky he still talks to me, let alone calls and makes me laugh, or rather, make noises similar to laughing but sound more like the last wheezes of a dying animal.

What's ended up happening is that I've exchanged putting fem-angst lyrics in public journal entries in a passive-aggressive attempt to equate them with my life, for hardened smiles, for "it's fine," for the idea that not letting someone see you cry is a victory. And I'm not sure it's much better.

Someone just wrote to me, "Pride is the mirror image of shame." Once I get over my initial proud defensiveness triggered by this statement, I interpret this to mean: I have feelings that I am ashamed of. And so I use my pride to mask them, as a defense mechanism. Because I can swallow them easier if they come in the form of pride.

What is the point of pride? What do you end up keeping at the sake of what you end up losing? Isn't pride just a squeezing in of yourself? And, how do you know when it becomes suffocating?

Lessons from the Rocky and journalism as a calling

2009-05-05T10:55:00.003-06:00

John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, has a blog.

And in it, he recently wrote this wonderful post for editors, and I have to link to it here, because I relate to the following quote on a soul level:

"Almost everybody in your newsroom got into this business with the hope of fulfilling some type of higher calling. You need to connect with that desire, feed and encourage it and show how new approaches to reporting the news can do just that."

Yes, yes, resounding yes.

From a similar standpoint, these are some words from Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver who spoke to journalists at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, quoted in a column published in the Daily Camera:

"Journalism is a vocation, not a job. Pursued properly, journalism should enjoy the same dignity as the law or medicine because the service that journalists perform is equally important to a healthy society. I really believe that. You form people. You form the way they think and the way they live their lives. So journalists have a duty to serve the truth and the common good."

I believe journalism is about informing, sharing, connecting, educating and helping. I believe it is a public service. And I believe it will never "die," because I know there are others who feel the same way. I believe that it is a calling, and callings have suffering, hard work and dedication threaded through them.

"The best journalism does not just fill the human mind with facts. It touches the heart. It roils your gut. It moistens your eye. It kicks you in the nuts. Objects can’t do that, only people." (Steve Buttry)

I believe that journalism, at its best, comes from the heart.

Denver Green Festival: Poo, Progressives and Class Distinction

2009-05-04T17:37:00.012-06:00

Note: This article was also published in elephant journal and can be found here. I did not, however, write the very first line ("Nothing like...") in the elephant's edited version. I am nevertheless grateful for their publication.

"Is this also made of poo?" I asked Dr. Karl Wald of his business card after he handed it to me.

I don't normally inquire if people's business cards are composed of excrement, but Wald had just told me about his business, Mr. Ellie Pooh, a green paper company in which all of the products are composed of 75% elephant dung and 25% post consumer paper.

The products include stationary, cards, scrapbooks and journals, which also showcase artisan packaging.

"This way, we can give more value to the poo," Wald said.

And yes, his business card is made of poo.

I encountered interesting, innovative and ecologically sound companies and ideas such as this all over the Denver Green Festival, which took place the weekend of May 2-3 at the Colorado Convention Center. The festival is organized in five cities around the country and strives to open people's minds to the various ways they can "go green" in their local community.

The Denver festival featured hundreds of speakers, educators, panels and exhibitors. All companies present were screened to ensure their business exemplified social justice and economic sustainability, said National Program Director Karri Winn.

Over 1,200 volunteers helped keep the convention running smoothly. There were even middle-school age volunteers at trash stations, pointing out what could be composted and recycled. 95-96% of discarded materials at the event will be recycled or composted, according to Winn.

Which is a figure I think is awesome. Just being at the festival was inspiring in and of itself, seeing how many companies are aware of their environmental impact and doing their part to lessen it.

I talked to an adorable woman named Kate Adams who owns the Denver-based Sweet Pea Pockets. Adams takes vintage coffee bean sacks and antique grain sacks, some with 100-year old seams, from France and Hungary and creates beautiful bags out of them. She sews handkerchiefs on the insides for artsy pockets, and layers fragments from her drawings, photos and old French letters to print on cotton twill fabric for the outsides, making each bag unique. They are truly impressive.

Sweet Pea Pockets design: an 1800s French letter layered over cyanotype print

Better World Books was also present, which supports book drives, collects used books and ships all their books out carbon neutral. And my absolute favorite California-based cracker company, Mary's Gone Crackers, Inc., was there giving out a generous amount of free samples. Their crackers organic and made in a gluten-free, wheat-free and nut-free facility, which makes this peanut-allergic writer very happy. Bryant Terry, exuberant author of Vegan Soul Kitchen, did two presentations, got me excited for vegan food and gave me some delicious cooked collards with raisins.

Festival attendees were just what you might expect they would be, and people-watching proved to be quite enjoyable. The Onion held a scavenger hunt in the exhibition hall, and the sights listed were easy to find: a granola bar, Obama campaign items, an aging hippy, someone texting while walking, an advocate for the vegan lifestyle. At the Stop Global Beer Warming booth, the "global" part of the company's name was purposely crossed out on the banner to signify the purpose of the product, spurring one man sporting a bandanna and beaded necklace to ask, "Does this suggest that you don't want to stop global warming?" to which the company's representative quickly responded that this was definitely not the case. And at a panel featuring investigative journalist Greg Palast, a video was shown in which George Bush appeared, a sight which caused the gray-haired woman in front of me wearing earrings resembling gigantic dangling peaches to shiver uncontrollably.

The discussions and panels boasted an impressive line-up, including Democracy Now! host and journalist Amy Goodman, sustainability educator and biodegradable-factory-builder Gunter Pauli, and actor/activist/writer Mike Farrell. Some speakers more than held my attention; some were predictable and I found myself guiltily wandering back to the exhibition hall halfway through their talks. But the discussions that I found to be the most interesting were the ones that explored the issue of race within the green movement.

It's an idea that might make you furrow your brow at first, but the panels "Thinkin' Green, Living Bling" and "Verde, Verdad: Keeping It Green, Keeping It Real," got into the subject in a no-holds-barred way. There were a lot of young people in these panels, and the energy in the rooms — particularly in the former panel — was enough to fire me up even as the festival was coming to a close.

Panelist and writer/artist/vegan Afya Ibomu helped to bring home the somewhat controversial idea that the "green movement" is too often thought of as a "white people movement."

"There's a problem with the government not teaching green to people living in the hood," she said. "And it's hard when you have McDonald's and Coke in schools in these areas, because how can you talk about green in a realistic way in that environment?"

Zakiya Harris, creator of the Bay-area Grind for the Green, emphasized that the green movement needs to be community-centric and culturally-relevant, and audience members brought up important points such as reframing the green movement to fit each community, whether it is rich or poor. Think about it: poverty-stricken people used to bring bottles and cans to recycling centers for 5 cents a pop. That is still "green," even though we may not think of it as such.

A picture I took of a bottle sculpture at Arlie Gardens in Wilmington, N.C.

The panels made me realize that rethinking green is an important part of eliminating class distinction within the green movement in order to further its expansion.

"'Organic' means rich white folks who go to Whole Foods," said panelist and founder of the Pan African Arts Society Ashara Ekundayo. "I might not be able to go to Whole Foods but I can go to King Soopers and buy the organic seeds and grow my own vegetables. It's just a matter of teaching people how to do it."

Denver Regional Programming Director Sarah Moss, who spent bonding time with the panelists in "Verde, Verdad," said that the best part of the festival to her was building relationships.

"It's — this is who I am, who are you? And let's figure out how we can work together," she said.

The bonding-for-change spirit evident in these two panels — even though organic cotton T-shirts and recycled grocery bags are grand — was the part of the festival that inspired me and represented the most energy, spirit and vision for change.

If you missed the festival — shame on you. But, you'll be able to catch discussions and panels live online at the Green Festival TV and radio portions of the website.

The green festival is affecting my eating behavior already. I followed my Saturday attendance with a trip to City O' City, a vegan-friendly cafe in Denver offering gluten-free pizzas. I started my Sunday with a vegan tofu scramble Sunflower brunch in Boulder and ended the weekend with a vegan dinner of brown-butter sage Andalusian pasta and coconut cream pie at Watercourse in the city.

I just won't be making my own poo business cards anytime soon.

Inner spring cleaning

2009-04-30T11:30:00.011-06:00

Sometimes, all it takes is connecting with a friend to help get you back on track.

This morning I talked to one of my best girl friends, Julia, who recently moved away from Boulder to Sedona, Ariz. She is an artist, a yoga teacher, a musician, and one of the strongest most beautiful women I know. She is an inspiration.

I'd been feeling displaced lately, leaving eraser rubbings of myself in uncomfortable places, and Julia, in her ever-expansive helpfulness, asked her crystal pendulum some yes/no questions for me. The results are answers I'm already aware of, but I believe it's helpful to have an outside source — even if the interpretation is really coming from yourself — to tell you things you already know you should be doing. Or, not doing.

As a result, I'm faced with some great changes. I need to step away from things that are stunting my growth and bringing me only temporary and fleeting benefits.

A Twitter friend of mine asked a question: What is your defining mission in life? I answered: "To connect, empower and help people through my writing." And I realized how wonderful it is to be able to answer that question without hesitation.

So, today I am taking things back that have spilled outside myself. Welcome home.

Plane writing: New York City

2009-04-23T21:19:00.008-06:00

I travel to explore myself more fully.

This morning, I missed the AB bus to the Denver airport. It was the first time I'd ever done that. When I realized I'd have to drive, I went to the Brewing Market for coffee where a box of soy milk exploded onto my newly-highlighted hair and the only sweater I am bringing to New York. I laughed because that's all you can do sometimes.

And on the plane, I am reading the New Yorker and finding in it a treasure trove of things that stir me up, that add new flavors to my inner soupy mixture. It is the April 20th issue. I am taking notes. I write:

- the idea of having "blood-knowledge"
- "Porter had a habit of inviting ruin into her home so that she could flee it."
- rephrased: "The funny thing about writing is that, in order to have anything to write about, one has to live — i.e. not be writing."
- page 112, third column — amazing piece on "negative liberty"

I looked up this "negative liberty" idea when I began to write this. The phrase comes from the following passage regarding the fear that comes from creating one's art (in this case, writing).

"Dyer's characters failed to write not because they were indifferent to writing but because they wanted too much to write. Negative liberty expresses a fear of completion; if you never start a work, then at least there is no chance of your having finished it. To complete something is in some ways to make it disappear; not starting it is a preemptive strike against loss, a way of elegizing what has not yet disappeared."

This idea deeply resonates with me. I love writing more than anything else in the world, and sometimes find it hard for me to sit down and do it. There is nothing I would rather do, there is nothing I would rather be than a writer — and the fear that I can't even do that sometimes, often times, when I would rather lose myself in some rap song, some simplistic magazine — that terrifies me.

I know a lot of artists who go through this. Who can sometimes do everything but their work on a day when all they really want to do is their work. But, to do that work is a purposeful want — it's a desire that is so close to our hearts that the fear of disappointing ourselves feels fatal. If we want to go to a museum and then fail to do so — when we arrive, we're just not in the mood anymore — it doesn't feel so bad. But if we want to create meaningful prose and then fail to do so, after we have already arrived with our laptops, our keys, our latte steaming the screen, our fingers, finding our thoughts drifting away from us — it can make one doubt the core of her being.

Back on the plane, I am so inspired by this magazine, by this particular issue. I am devouring it, I am eating a grilled vegan salad, I am warning the stewardess of my severe peanut allergy. I walk around the plane in socks. I turn off the personal television screen with snobbery guiding my finger. I have bursts of inspiration, necessitating pulling out a pen, a tiny notebook and writing frantically. I have four pens in my purse, two blue, two black, pain colors, but also catharsis colors.

I yearn to find someone else on this plane going to the live This American Life show, because, to me, listening to that radio show means something about a person. It indicates patience, imagination, pleasure in creating your own visuals. It shows an openness and acceptance of other people's emotions and how they can alter your insides. It proves that you believe, even if it's subconscious, that we are all connected, that we all have stories worth telling, and that through our experiences we can help others. It indicates an appreciation of words and the crafting, molding and artistic placement of them.

And all of that matters to me, because they are things I value in myself.

The only thing you need to know about tweeting

2009-04-20T10:15:00.010-06:00

I don't really like to write about social media; I like to use it to connect others to my writing and discover other interesting people.

But lately I'm noticing a lot of friends (mostly migrating from Facebook) signing up for Twitter accounts. Their Twitter trajectory goes like this: they follow a few friends, post one or two updates saying something like, "Am I supposed to write in third person?" and then not post anything for a while. For the longest time. To the point where you think they are never going to post anything again, at which point I stop specifically seeking out their updates and go back to pretending they were never on Twitter.

Because of this, I was going to write a post filled with several useful tips for people who are familiar with Facebook but are just getting started with Twitter.

But, I'm not.

You can find something like that here, or everywhere else on the internet.

I've decided instead that there is really only one thing you need to know about Twitter, or more specifically, about tweeting (which is what you put in your updates, i.e. the entirety of your presence on Twitter).

The advice comes directly from the mouth of Andy Ihnatko. I recently went to a panel at Boulder's Conference on World Affairs called, "Tweet Me, Blog Me, Poke Me," and when he spouted this gem I just had to take it down.

Because in the spirit of Twitter, the only thing you need to know about tweeting should be able to be said in 140 characters or less. It is:

Maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio.

What it means: People new to Twitter have the annoying tendency to ask questions like, "But, why would I want to know when my friend is taking a nap with his cat?" This is not what Twitter is about. I'm sure there are tons of people writing about taking naps with their cat, but I don't follow them, because those kinds of posts are what we call noise.

Noise on Twitter is created when you tell me how awesome your cheese steak tastes. How your grandmother just sent you a check in the mail. How you bought this lip gloss but it comes out darker than it looks from the outside and what is Sephora's return policy.

The thing is, noise is actually crucial to tweeting. Think about how boring it would be if everyone only posted links. It'd be way too much information to handle, and no one would really stand out because there would be no personal voice involved.

My noise tends to look like this:

Listening to classical music, drinking jasmine tea in front of a fire, reading "The Artist's Way." I'm not even trying to be pretentious.

I took a photo with a bunny on Easter weekend, but it was at a vegan festival where he was thanking people for not eating him. Still counts?

A comma is a pause with purpose, with intention. An ellipses is a pause that is standing there awkwardly, wondering what you'll make of him.

I love chatting online with my ex in iambic pentameter.

I try to make them somewhat interesting, so they give not a flat description of what I'm doing, but a picture of my personality or, at the very least, temporary disposition.

The genius of Twitter is that not only can your updates be about you, they can be about things that are of interest to other people. But it has to be both.

Which brings us to your other ingredient: signals. Signals are useful information. The definition of "useful" is always objective, but think about the kinds of things that you find humorous or thought-provoking. Links to news articles, real or fake, quotes people may find inspiring or relevant, links to local sandwich shops that offer awesome discounts. You can posts links to your work, either being careful not to overload people on self-promotion, or simply calling out the fact that you are shamelessly promoting yourself and letting it lie.

Granted, some of your timeline is going to be taken up by @replies. @replies are the way you publicly respond to someone on Twitter, kind of like the wall on Facebook, except on Twitter it annoyingly shows up on your feed instead of theirs, and they just get to check their @ box for it.

But in my opinion, you shouldn't exceed 25% of your tweets with @replies. Make the rest split between noise and signals.

And whatever you do, don't underestimate the value of having a limited number of characters. Being concise and clever is a challenge. Take for instance, this eerie phrase, taken from the Post Secret Twitter feed: "Did you stare at the ceiling fan too while my fiance made love to you? Sisters are so alike." It's only 94 characters, yet it says quite a lot. A lot more than the kind of cheese on your sandwich.

If you follow this advice — and also, use it as a guideline when choosing who you follow — you will enjoy and make the most of Twitter, I promise.

Note: on Fridays, you will see something called #followfriday. It just means you add that hashtag (#followfriday) to the end of your tweet and in it recommend someone you think others should follow by including their name followed by the @ sign (@AmySegreti). On Fridays, I give out "Smooth Transitioner" awards for new users who are immediately awesome at Twitter and don't spend 10 posts telling us how they're trying to "figure it out." Feel free to win.

Newspaper people: stop blaming Google and restructure from within

2009-04-19T13:48:00.008-06:00

This blog entry from the "Newsosaur," "Don't blame Google for newspaper woes," is right on.

In it, Alan D. Mutter (prior editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others, and on the adjunct faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley) responds to newspaper people blaming Google for their woes and emphasizes that Google isn’t responsible for saving the newspaper industry or journalism — publishers and editors are.

"For the record, newspapers actually had a head start over Google. But Google 'got' the web. And newspapers didn’t. That’s not Google’s fault... As Google and many other savvy online publishers learned how to capitalize on the openness and interactivity of the Internet, newspaper publishers stubbornly spent the last 1½ decades trying to sustain their once-enviable print business model in the face of overwhelming evidence that everything was changing: technology, consumer patterns and advertiser behavior."

As much positivity as I spew about journalism not dying and us needing to have faith in ourselves, this much I believe is true: we are the ones that need to dig ourselves out of this hole. And, we are.

I worked at a newspaper where we would never consider posting articles online before they were printed. Never. That's how it was.

Now? As soon as pieces are written, they are published online. The morning newspaper contains almost everything you've already read and maybe even blogged about the night before. And in the rush to be the first to publish a story online, newspapers helped to make themselves less important.

We will all miss newsprint on our hands but we need to embrace change to save the industry.

Creativity and something rooted

2009-04-17T13:50:00.013-06:00

One of the most amazing TED videos I've ever seen is Elizabeth Gilbert's recent talk on nurturing creativity. In it, she talks about the societal pressures that a writer, artist or any creative being has to deal with and muses on the idea that maybe we could relieve some of those pressures if we viewed our "genius" and our selves as separate entities. That maybe, our inspiration is outside of ourselves and it is all we can do to capture it and bring it to life so that we can share it, in the form that we know and have been put on this earth to create, with the rest of the world.

She uses as an example the American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s. When Ruth was working in rural Virginia, she said that sometimes she would feel a poem coming at her like a "thunderous train of air" across the landscape. It would shake the earth, and when she felt this inspiration coming, Ruth would "run like hell" to her house, so that when the poem barreled through her, she could collect it. If she didn't make it in time to her pen, the poem would continue on looking for another poet. The times when she almost missed it, Ruth would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing and "the poem would come up on the page, perfect and intact, but backwards from the last word to the first."

That is one of the most interesting things I've ever heard about creative inspiration and expression. Take 20 minutes of your day to watch this video if you find passion or love in creating anything at all; you will appreciate it.

And, in honor of April being National Poetry Month, I am posting one of my favorite modern poems. When I first read it, I unfurled myself at its feet. It is composed of three parts; the second part is always at my side, and the third was, for a long time. And I'm sure it will be again.

Suddenly, I Need One Thing Constant
by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie

Poets should just
bring poetry
blank books and pens
passports and visas
and something rooted
something rooted
for the lives we will
eventually want
not the imitations
of our mentors' stumblings
the ancient lovers never loved
upheaval following us
like stubborn ghosts
poets should bring something rooted

II.

Wherever I go
I drag my mistakes
and my memory of the mistakes
of others. Wherever I go
I have to tell my stories
of crashings and rantings
and passion and laughing
of praying of living
and forgetting how to breathe

wherever I go
I start again:
a woman hates me
a man loves me
I meet people
I write
then I wonder, what is that far off sound
that call from another side of the ocean
what’s the name of that place
what language do they speak
how much does it cost to get there
and then I’m gone
leaving behind everything I wished for
making another list

III.

Stay with me.
Wherever I go
I want you
with me, among
the pens and blank
pages, yes, but
in the bed and bathroom
in the restaurants
with food we can’t pronounce
your hand smoothing the tired map,
mine tracing our route

stay/go/come
with me
as much as writing
as much as wandering
I know I need to start my days
folded in your scent

On being an emotional journalist

2009-04-07T16:08:00.008-06:00

"Writers have the schizophrenic ability to both participate in their lives and, at the same time, observe themselves participating in their lives."
— Edward Albee

This is what a girl who's crying looks like when running up the stairs: like she's vertically jogging, with swift, ballerina-rabbit hops, quickly alternating between high knees and feet that barely brush the steps. There is usually a sagging purse, indifferent hair, a nice outfit. She leaves behind wafts of perfumed electricity. You never see her face.

Last night I became that girl running up the stairs. Dethroned. Jagged, yet pulpy, at the same time.

I can get emotionally attached to my writing. Not to my writing per say, but to the subjects I'm writing about and the forum in which I write. I was meticulous about my 10-12 page print section as an editor, and now I feel similarly about my blog. It comes from the same place that tells me that if my apartment is messy then something negative must be going on in my personal life. I need to control my spaces so pieces of myself, my energy, can flow freely inside them.

And so, I thrive on using the research I've gathered to reply to someone's mildly negative comment, but then become a sobbing mess when my best male friend implies that I waste my time with social media that has in fact connected me to some of the very sources that inspire me. I am human. But I am so human sometimes.

I used to think I was too emotional to be a journalist. Then I realized I could use that passion and imbue it on others. Not only that, but it could work the other way around. When I worked at The Globe I would naturally, effortlessly, fall in love with the things that my subjects were passionate about. I would fall in love with them, too: with the woman who wanted to enhance elderly people's lives with her astonishingly well-trained dogs who could use their paws to call 9-11. With the Staff Sergeant's disabled daughter and her Sweet 16 wish to give all her presents to charity. All this, I fell in love with.

There is danger in that but there is wonder in it too, and I wouldn't trade it for a mild life, not for a second.

But now, I am a writer who is edited as opposed to an editor who writes and edits other people's writing. That is hard for me. It is extremely difficult to find yourself on a different path and then fall in love with it (i.e., car accident → Boulder), and come back to your original path only to notice that the seasons have changed and oh, not only that, but a bulldozer came by and tore up everything. The whole media landscape has changed. And I have my clips from, it feels like, 1973, and I'm like — here, look, this is a "goodbye" column I wrote which means something, because I had something to say goodbye to. I had people who asked me to write it and were touched by it and if you have people to say goodbye to then you must have made some kind of impact on that part of the world. Now, all I'm doing is trying to connect and "hello" everyone and it gets so frustrating sometimes.

But, this kind of thing has the effect of making me put myself out there even more. I just got a message from my best girl friend in Boulder, wondering if I felt "attacked" by my male friend last night. I don't know what I felt. I know I burst into tears later, but then from that, I generated this. And this writing to me is more valuable. It's how I work through things. It is a palette of my emotions, transferred into something useful. And it will always be mine.

Random musing on biscuits

2009-04-07T11:59:00.005-06:00

Some guy in Oregon commented about my blog saying that if I am also the lady in the profile photo (well, obviously), then I am quite a "biscuit."

I looked this up.

He either means I am a tore-up shoe, an attractive person, or a breakfast side dish.

All of these are acceptable.

Stop exaggerating: journalism is not dying. It's changing.

2009-04-06T10:22:00.015-06:00

I have some comments about a column written today, "As newspapers disappear, so does nation's link to real journalism," by DeWayne Wickham of Gannett. While I have the utmost respect for someone who has been working in the journalism industry for over 20 years, I would like to note two things about the piece that bother me.

It makes flimsy connections

Wickham notes that the Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Sun-Sentinel shut its office in Havana, "bringing home the only U.S. newspaper reporter based in Cuba's capital just as Congress seems poised to end the U.S. embargo of that communist country."

First of all — the Associated Press and CNN still have a presence on the island.

Second — Congress is not exactly poised to end the embargo. President Obama recently set into action a lifting of restrictions for family members traveling back and forth and sending remittances between the U.S. and Cuba. But he has also said that he would not lift the travel embargo until Cuba's government becomes more like a democracy. Obama intends to maintain the embargo as an inducement for democratic change on the island. Which makes complete sense.

Yes, the Treasury Department said it would ease licensing requirements for trade-related travel by U.S. citizens — but this does not mean the embargo will end any time soon and that we will be lying under a palm tree in Havana this summer. It's certainly a hope that I carry that the embargo between the U.S. and Cuba will be completely removed, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. And let's especially not imply that the removal of a reporter will have any affect on whether Obama lifts the embargo or will significantly affect our coverage of it. Let other people imply this, but now is not the time to mitigate our own abilities. To me, this is a loose, exaggerated connection that implies we as journalists are unable to keep time with this story as it unfolds. Have more faith; we have to, so people can have faith in us.

The "death of journalism" is an irritating phrase

Death is a strong word, Mr. Wickham; I disagree. As Michael Kinsley points out in his latest op-ed for the Washington Post: "If General Motors goes under, there will still be cars. And if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news."

I completely agree with Wickham regarding the lack of resources newspapers are experiencing right now. And resources continue to decline: three major newspapers have gone under, which means less reporters on the ground, which means less eyes and ears open. And although the Seattle P-I is all online now, there will likely be more aggregated content and less hard, investigative journalism.

But I don't believe journalism itself will die if there is less news printed on paper. It will find a way to live on, because people like you, Mr. Wickham, and myself — even though I'm hardly at your status — have passion and dedication to the field. Please have more faith; no, Twitter is not journalism as we know it, but the Internet can become a great outlet for it once we figure out how to do it right, and we can use networking sites like Twitter to connect other people to that information.

The business model for journalism is changing, and it's going to change whether we like it or not. We need to accept it and embrace new ways of thinking about gathering and reporting information. And, I have faith that we will.

Books and shivers

2009-04-04T11:43:00.008-06:00

I have been looking at old books of mine. Favorites. High tides. Ones that rose the sun for me, framed the moon.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Happenstance. Self-Help. Pieces of Hopscotch, of Written on the Body.

Not reading them. Just, holding them, inhaling them. Leafing through pages like they were dried flowers. Delicately, with respect.

Because they were alive once.

As the pen gets heavier

2009-04-01T11:53:00.006-06:00

On the work of print journalists affecting people who don't read or care about print journalism:

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

— Clay Shirky's, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

Something to think about.

My two cents on not having two cents

2009-03-21T15:55:00.013-06:00

I find it humorous that this recession has created a new breed of people, a new socioeconomic crowd. One that looks pretty well-off, but is really struggling. A business woman on her way to the soup kitchen, or something.

I have yet to think of a name for this class, but I can tell you that I realized I was one of them today. I was at the farmer's market in the ferry building in San Francisco and had just bought myself a $16 raw vegan lunch of lasagna, nut/seed crackers and butternut squash hummus. Well, it was actually only $14, because as I was paying I realized that was all the cash I had left.

The raw vegan lady gave me my food anyway, but this made me remember a few things... like for instance, that I'd checked my bank account the other day and realized there was only $50 in it, all of which I had spent in the last two days. I remembered seeing this and initially being intelligent and cooking dinner with employees at the hostel I was staying at so that I could eat for free, making me feel both productive and smugly creative.

But the next night, when I met up with my aunt and took her to a flamenco show where I knew the guitarist (free), and then had a glass of Catalonian cava while chatting with a kind older gentleman guitarist (so, free again), I began to forget about my cheap side and indulged in my sophisticated airs. Therefore, the $14 raw vegan mistake.

After eating my lunch, I realized I still needed $1.50 to catch the bus to Caffe Trieste, where I was meeting someone for a new-friend date. I put my purse and laptop on the ground as I searched for bus fare. 50 cents. 75 cents. 77, 78... come on. Yes! Another quarter, $1.03. I continued digging as people grumbled at my crouched form on the ground in the way of their local organic cheese shopping. I came up with $1.48. I kid you not.

And so today I found myself walking a mile uphill in one of those annoyingly light rains – where the tiny drops flick at your eyelids but they refuse to actually come down, teasing you as to whether or not it will actually start pouring in five seconds – lugging a $1,300 Macbook and carrying an iPhone I paid $400 for, and a $200 check that I cannot deposit into my Colorado bank account from here, and therefore is a useless piece of paper with a pretty number on it.

I realized that this economic downward spiral has created a new class of people that are sort of between classes, and sitting there stuck, wondering when they will climb back up or slide on downward. It consists of people who were previously living fairly well, and who now cannot find two cents for the bus. Suits with briefcases still giving high-brow glances while stiffing the bartender his dollar tip, because they really do need it.

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? I'd be curious. And if you've got a name for this crowd... let me know. In the meantime, I'll be hiking up Lombard.

Café writing and the absence of time

2009-03-14T19:37:00.033-06:00

The problem for me of trying to write on a schedule is that I write best when I have no idea what time it is. When I have no idea what time I started writing and no idea when I stopped. When I have no concept of time, when a gigantic zucchini could walk by and wave at me and I would have no idea because I'm so entranced by the flow of energy and thoughts from my head to my fingers to my keyboard – that is when I write my best.

I have a 35-hour a week job, and I don't really want to do my writing in the office. I tried once, but the environment is off. I need a hot beverage, the wing-like flutter of laptop keys and conversation, ideas taking flight around me. I need the feeling of euphoric release when I write a sentence like that, something that depicts exactly what's inside of me. I can't succumb to that in my work office.

So, I have after-work hours. All right. But I have some very close female friends and I want to make time for them too, so there goes 2-3 evenings. Otherwise, I have gym time, which is also very important to me, so that I don't spiral into a lumpy depression resulting from excess weight and a lack of strength. Then, I have Amy Time, which I require and take regularly. I know that the phrase might be foreign to people in more bustling parts of this country – well, not the phrase "me time" per say, but making a point to take it might not come as easily. I read somewhere that the pace of the city you live in dictates your internal pace, the speed at which your internal clock operates, which makes sense to me, but I wish I could remember the exact phrasing and research involved.

I'm lucky to have a job now, even if it is outside of the journalism industry. This recession is, to put it briefly, scary. I feel the anger in people, even in Boulder. Cautiousness coming out as defensiveness. A manager at my gym recently attacked me for giving my girl friend a free pass – when they are the ones handing out free passes to attract more members – asking me hurriedly, "Is she going to join? She never returns my calls and emails! Is she going to join or not?" People are terrified, and if we're not, we can feel it in the air and it suffocates our own sense of calm.

Something that saddened me greatly was watching the folding of the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado. After 150 years, the oldest newspaper in Colorado published its final issue on Feb. 27.

"We're an odd bunch in this business. A collection of people who collect: data and facts and anecdotes and people and jokes and sketches. We are consumed by that collecting, by the act of organization and the way in which the random assembles and reassembles itself, revealing something new every time, an unturned corner, an unopened door, a story waiting."

Consumed. Yes. It is consuming, in the best way.

The above quote is from Tina Griego's goodbye column, "This is what has called my heart." Staffers commented that writing articles for the final issue was like getting to choose the music played at your own funeral. I understand that; I felt that way when writing my own goodbye column in The Globe in North Carolina, and it was I who chose to leave it. And it's still being published. For now.

When working at The Globe, it was suggested to me to write a story on fossil hunting on Onslow Beach on the Marine base I worked on. I did some research and found a 55-year-old local woman who had an amazing, Smithsonian-worthy collection of fossils from that beach – from various ice ages. Fossil hunting became her passion, it was what she did in her free time, when her Marine husband was sent to war, and all of these relics made up a significant part of her life, and in a way they were her life. She was so protective of them. I remember taking photos of her fossils for my article and she was concerned the camera flash might hurt them, so I didn't use it, and compromised by taking them outside and using natural light to capture their beauty.

I spent most of an entire week doing research for this article, talking to fossil club presidents and curators of paleontology at museums, but it was that woman who drew me in. If someone is passionate about something and I'm writing about what they love, I feel that fire and use it as fuel for my writing, and it comes so naturally to me.

Now, I constantly look at books on writing at the Boulder Bookstore, and I am amazed at how so many of them talk about searching for the urge to write, about "becoming" a writer, about being consistent and dedicated to improving your writing, as if it were something to work on, as if it were a creaky chain to lube, a long-term errand to finally check off. The authors' advice makes sense to me but, writing runs so much more deeply for me. It's not so... man-made.

I know my friend Julia would understand; she is a painter, and it's something she does for a living, but she also lives and breathes it. It isn't that she went to school to learn to paint and decided that's what she would do for money and that was all; it runs in her blood. For me, there is nothing else. Well, there is everything else, but it is all filtered through writing. This is why I consider being a writer to be the best of all possible professions, because you can be interested in anything and you get to learn about it and write about it and tell others about it and get paid for it. How could a life consist of anything better than doing that, every single day?

Now that I don't have a dedicated 40 hours a week to write and get paid for it, I make necessary adjustments. It's not about finding a specific time block in which to write; for me, it's about being able to ask myself, will I need to be conscious and alert and ready to respond to people later on tonight? Or will it be all right if, at around 7 p.m. on a Saturday, I take myself to a café and allow myself to disappear for an unspecified block of time? I can come to a café and just let myself feel whatever is buzzing in and around me, and then I float back into reality. And I'm so lucky that I get to keep what I've created.

The meaning of my blog title

2009-03-09T15:05:00.007-06:00

I was listening to an episode of This American Life the other day, and something said in it had the eerie effect of making me feel hollowed out. I related to it in a visceral way.

The episode is #374: Somewhere Out There, and the theme is about the odds of finding another person in this world of 6.5 billion people – a friend, a lover, a pseudo-parent – who is a true match for you, and what happens when you find that person.

One of the acts tells the story of an American man, Eric Hayot (who speaks no Chinese), who falls for a Chinese woman, Yuanyuan Di (who speaks no English), loses contact with her and then tracks her down years later by searching the whole of China with only her name and her previous place of employment to go by. Eric says:

“That desperation of needing to find the person… just this sense that you have to find this person, it’s kind of overwhelming. I’m teaching Proust this week and so there’s this moment in Proust where Swann is falling in love with this woman and the way that he realizes he’s falling in love with her is he goes to this party that he’s supposed to meet her at, and she’s already gone. And then he drives his carriage through Paris and is going in and out of all of these restaurants and stuff, and you know, it’s all about how the act of looking for her causes him, in some sense, not only to recognize that he’s in love with her, but also actually to kind of really fall in love with her.” (16:30 into the podcast; listen to him say it, with the background music. Beautiful.)

I heard that and immediately thought about the car accident that changed my life.

-----

The title of this blog is Light on Broken Glass for two reasons. It refers most directly to a quote about writing:

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
– Anton Chekhov

It's about showing, not telling.

In a journal entry I once wrote about the end of a 2.5 year relationship, I never mentioned once how I was feeling. I never said, "I felt sad," or something cliché like, "My heart is breaking." In fact, I may have even gone too far, because I didn't mention the break-up at all, only the way I tried to piece myself back together by acquiring my first piece of art for my new solitary living space.

An older man at the store on Pearl St. helped me pick out a frame. I had never had anything framed before in my life, and at first he kept asking, "Which would you prefer?" and I tried to appear like I knew what I was doing, but my mind can't access its files on complementary colors right now and eventually I looked at him and said, "Well... what would you pick?" and it came out in this overflowing sort of way, and we were kneeling on the floor together and my eyes poured, "please" and he understood and we understood and he picked something beautiful, black with speckled gold to match the burgundy colors in the painting, and my studio will be beautiful and this is what I need. I need this beauty.

Three sentences. I wrote them in this way, following this rhythm, for a reason. At the time, it was all I could do to just keep flowing with things, to get through and around them, and I wanted to reflect that in my writing. This often comes naturally to me, thank goodness, and I'm happy to have been influenced by some amazing teachers and writers.

The other reason my blog is entitled as such is due to the car accident.

-----

Ian – the man I later needed to replace with a painting – and I were driving on I-70W just after midnight on June 15, 2007, headed for what we thought would soon be our new home, San Francisco. He was going about 90mph (the speed limit was 75mph), hoping to get to a hostel in Boulder where we could rest up before continuing our drive. I was in the passenger seat sleeping. He glanced at a map and began to veer toward the median – he hit a reflector pole in the middle of the road, and as a reaction to the impact, over-corrected the steering wheel to the right and slammed on the brakes. This caused my car to spin around in circles on the highway and flip over three times before coming to a stop, thankfully right-side up. I woke up mid-flip, screaming.

A UPS man pulled over, called 911 for us and told me not to move because I was having severe neck pain. While waiting for the police, he reminded us to choose UPS over FedEx (I'm not even joking), then the firemen came and put me on some sort of wooden board (it's a little fuzzy, it could have been something else) and carried me onto a helicopter, where they stuck me with an IV and sticker things to monitor my vitals, and flew me to an ER in Aurora. We had crashed in Limon, which is an incredibly small rural town in Colorado, and so they wanted me at a better-equipped hospital. Ian was driven to a hospital in the area we crashed in, as he had a minor cut on his arm – his hospital was equivalent in size to a living room.

They did MRI's, cat scans, X-rays, I have no idea, I was in shock. My legs wouldn't stop shaking. They asked me if I was cold. I don't think I understood the question. What I do remember is that they did this thing called a "contrast study" in which they told me that they were going to inject a fluid in me that would make my body warm, then they went away. I thought that sounded very nice, until it happened and the MRI machine started whirring and it felt like someone had lit my entire body on fire from the inside. It was the only time I cried.

Ian, being 85 miles away at a different hospital, hitchhiked with a guy driving a tractor trailer at around 4 a.m., then caught a cab from a gas station in the middle of nowhere to my hospital. After being separated immediately after a fairly traumatic accident, seeing him walking down the hospital hallway in my woozy and terrified state made him appear to me as my knight in shining armor – or, twisted metal, as it were. The idea of being torn apart, of wanting to be together, of searching and reuniting, made us recognize our love again and kept us together for the next 10 months.

Luckily, I had nothing more than severe neck strain, sprain and contusions (just bruises and some under-the-skin bleeding) on my back and shoulder and neck, mostly on the right side. It took three weeks for it to heal 95%, and it still hurt for a few months afterward, when I turned my head at a certain angle or attempted certain yoga poses.

Ian and I decided to stay in Colorado for a few weeks in Fort Collins, resting, healing and indulging in espresso ice cream and margaritas. We had a great ability to enjoy ourselves in any location, in any situation. Ian and I visited Boulder one day and decided to move in to a one-month sublet there with eight college students. Boulder was supposed to be temporary.

I began to fall slowly in love with the town, as I spent my days appreciating how my body could still move by hiking, tubing down the Boulder Creek, lying in the grass at the farmers' market and riding my new mountain bike.

I found my current apartment in an auspicious way. I had just finished interviewing for a front desk position at a legal firm just east of downtown. I was about ride my bike back to our sublet, but I noticed studio apartments two buildings away. I meandered around the apartment complex, just to see what it was like, and noticed an open door. Thinking it might be the front office and I could see if there were apartments available, I stepped inside and found myself standing inside a beautiful sunny studio with hard-wood floors, granite counter tops, a bay window and aesthetically pleasing mirror placement – and standing in front of a pleasant yet surprised shirtless guy playing the flute. His name was Dan, and I asked him where the front office was; he said it was somewhere off site, but let me look around his place. I fell for it, hard. I took Ian to see the apartments, and the woman showing us around took us somewhere else first – someplace smaller, in a basement, with carpet, but in the same complex.

"No!" I said. "You have to see the one I saw." And so Dan and I met again, for the second time that day. Again, he was shirtless and mildly embarrassed, but that is what you get for leaving your door open all the time. As I expected, Ian loved it as well.

Dan happened to be moving out in early September. And so Ian and I signed a lease – for that very same apartment, for I would have no other – a week or so later. I still live here, and although some people have wondered how I could have stayed, living with the ghosts of my relationship with Ian – they don't understand. There are no ghosts. It is filled with my energy, my spirit; this was always my place. I know Ian would agree.

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Since that summer, I've gradually gotten Boulder under my skin, from my initial infatuation to a deeply-felt connection. I've made friends, strengthened relationships, gained paintings, lost lovers, and changed, massively, from the person I was just two years ago. I feel more connected to nature, to my body, and I'm putting into action the self-awareness that had been dormant for much of my early twenties. It's amazing; I wouldn't change how I got where I am today, not for a second.

The only thing I could say was missing from my life as of a few weeks ago was writing. Maybe I felt that if I incorporated that element, I would have too much of a perfect existence, and that thought can be rather terrifying. It's full of risk. It's vulnerable.

But some of the best things can come out of those cave-like places. There can be light anywhere.

Compost bin replaces considerate boyfriend

2009-03-02T11:30:00.003-07:00

I went into my office building’s bathroom today and noticed some beautiful flowers in the compost bin. Props to whoever chose to compost them instead of throw them in the trash, but they were still good. Perhaps I say that because my definition of “good” also includes the cool way in which the petals of flowers fall off and surround my dying bouquets like a colorful moat. Then, I save them and use them to decorate the top of my toilet. Essentially, flowers are always “good” to me in some way.

Well. I didn’t understand why perfectly good flowers should just go to waste, so I picked out the best ones from the compost bin, cut them anew, placed them in fresh water and put them on my office desk.

My beauties:

What I love the most is that since I live in such an eco-friendly town (even our farmer's market, which starts up again April 3, is 100% zero-waste), I can just attribute this to sound environmental decision-making.

We could also call this situation, “Amy gets her flowers from the trash." But, let's not.

Four tips for getting back into writing

2009-02-28T13:42:00.006-07:00

When I was an editor for a weekly newspaper in North Carolina, I worked 40-50 hours a week writing, editing, taking photographs and graphic designing my own features and community news section. I’d start with 8-10 pages of white space, put in the obligatory ad boxes and the rest of the space was all mine. Every week, it was my blank canvas, my work in progress, my masterpiece.

And somehow – and this is still a mystery to me – I also found the time to freelance on the side. I managed to write for four additional newspapers and magazines, one of which was in Washington D.C., where I used to live, and paid me $1 / word to write about a bathroom poet – a disarming and intriguing woman who posted poetry on bathroom walls of cafes and restaurants, poems short enough to be enjoyed in a single, ahem, sitting. (Yes I used the “ahem” in my article for effect).

Now, I live in Boulder, Colorado – and wouldn’t have it any other way – but I don’t work in the print journalism industry. I don’t work in editing, writing, publishing, design, or photography. I work in the fitness industry. I only work 35 hours a week. I have great co-workers. I work downtown (i.e., I can eat lunch at dozens of wonderful local places). But writing has not been a part of my life for almost a year, save for a dozen or so emotionally-charged blog entries and passionate declarations for the city I live in.

And now, with this blog post, I re-enter the world of writing. I’ve been away for almost a year, and, my sweet love, it’s been too long. There have been various reasons for my departure – one involving a 90-mph car accident that I will get to in another entry – but I’m back, and I’ve got some tips. Now all I have to do is take my own advice.

Frame your pre-existing passions

Lately, I’ve been into raw food. I know better than to advocate a completely, 100% raw vegan diet – I wouldn’t even do that in Boulder, and I’ve realized through various responses to my Facebook status updates that most people are instantly turned off by this “new age-y” concept. But I’ve met local raw chefs, read raw vegan books, and experimented with adding more raw food to my diet – and I feel phenomenal when I do so. I could make a sweet, creamy raw pecan nut milk that would blow your mind. I can "cook" a zucchini and carrot pasta with an avocado "cream" sauce that would make you want to marry me. It took me about a month of researching and being really into this topic to realize that I could take this and turn it into a magazine query.

Nothing I eat right now has any ingredient I don’t understand. Everything I eat is an ingredient – it’s a vegetable, a fruit, a nut. Of course, sometimes the ingredients are grapes and sulfites but… I don’t claim to be perfect.

What are you into right now? It can be anything. Are you training for a half-marathon? Do you have a best friend who is an amazing painter? Do you just really love wine? If you’re already doing the research… take it a few steps further and frame it for a print outlet.

Train your mind

I remember when I was in the perfect writer mindset – for a while, everything I saw that was interesting to me or could possibly be interesting to other people, I’d think, “story idea,” and jot it down. Only half of those ideas came to fruition, but I had trained myself to look for things with articles in mind.

Last May, I had an interview at a small newspaper that I believe might not exist now, and I was doing a great job until the editor’s last question. She asked me to think of three possible stories I had seen on my drive over to the office. I blanked. I should have been prepared for this. I don’t remember what I said in response, but I know it was half-hearted, and I’m sure it was perceived that way. I didn’t get the job. Don’t let this happen to you.

Write out your accomplishments

Yes, something else to write. Since writers use technology for nearly everything now, try keeping a writing journal just for a change of pace. Over the past year I have somehow developed the bad habit of only being able to concentrate on one thing for the same length of time it takes to say, chew a bite of food. It’s not really that bad, but it’s something that takes dedicated focus to overcome.

When you go to a café or sit down at your computer with the intention of writing, also jot down your accomplishments as you complete them. This can be as simple as sending an email to an old editor, getting back in touch with someone you wrote about to see if they’re up to anything new, or even writing a blog entry about writing down your accomplishments. Check.

Don’t be too hard on yourself

It can be frustrating to discover that you can no longer write with the same ease or stream of creativity that you had when you wrote regularly. I remember being able to knock out a 450-word news piece in about 15 minutes. And it was good. And it was almost as easy as exhaling. I’d probably have to work pretty hard to do that now.

It’s all about habit. It will come back, I promise. When you feel your chest tightening with frustration, take a deep breath and keep writing. No one has to see it but you, and know that no matter what it is you’re writing, you’re re-training yourself to have those creative juices ready. Remember that writing is what you want to do – and have fun with it.