Bright & Dark

Dude. I so need this. Seriously.

There’s been radio silence around here for the last couple of weeks — busy, busy with life. A round of updatery is in order.

Mmmm, mmmm, good.

A couple of days after the U2 concert, we had the annual Bosses Day bake-a-thon. My rowmate at work and I treated our attorneys and legal assistants to a smorgasbord of breakfast tacos with homemade salsa, peanut butter cookies, banana bread with chocolate chips and crystallized ginger, and more.

I had fun baking the bread even with my entire lack of sleep. For the curious, the recipe is here. The ginger really gives the bread some wow factor.

There has also been a spur-of-the-moment trip to the store for pumpkin makings, because the season downright demands it. So Sunday night I baked pumpkin custard (aka, pie filling sans crust — didn’t want to deal with the gluten-free crust on a Sunday night). Between that and the cold front that has swept in, it feels like fall around here.

Write On!

Slow and steady wins the race. Or at least it will.

This book looks to be the longest I’ve had the pleasure of writing, which is not to say that it’s ungodly long, just that my novels usually top out at about 350 pages and this one looks like it will go around 450. It’s a bigger book — big world, big worldbuilding, high concept, dual-moving-into-triple POV. It’s still a blast to write and I’m still writing it one 800-1,500 word scene at a time, focusing on the emotion. I can’t wait to see how it comes out.

Meanwhile, it’s fascinating to me that any intention on my part to power through large sections of this book just ain’t working. I can’t pull several hours on a Saturday or Sunday at this point. I don’t know whether it’s me rebelling because I want to be sure to have a life or whether it’s the book rebelling because the story definitely wants to told at its own pace. Either way, as long as there’s steady progress, that’s all right.

Hey — are you gonna read that?

Just finished up my friend Christy Evans’s debut cozy mystery, Sink Trap. So much fun! I can’t wait to read the next one when it’s released. I need to see what Georgiana Neverall has up her plumber apprentice’s sleeve.

Since life’s too short not to have a good story to dive into, I’ve started Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Very interesting so far. It hasn’t moved as quickly as I would normally like, but something about it holds me and it’s getting a might more interesting. Looking forward to seeing what’s in store.

How many miles can a writer run?

Still not many as it turns out. I’m getting some treadmill and/or Nia time in every day and not only do I look better, I feel like a million bucks. A well-oiled machine, even. That’s pretty cool.

The Weight Watchering is going very well, too. Down 11 pounds so far since I’ve started. This is a huge milestone for me on account of how I’ve tried and tried to make this happen and haven’t hit on the right formula — physical, mental, etc. — until now. So, down 11. Only 20 more pounds or so to go with an interim goal of 11 more because a girl’s got to have manageable goals, doesn’t she?

***
There’s more, but that’s enough for now. I’ve got lots to do around here, a bunch of writing, a phone call with a friend later, and after that I’ll settle in for my weekly episode of Sons of Anarchy. Who’d'a thunk I’d fall so hard for that one?

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

The Cliff Notes version: awesome like the moon and sun and all the stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way made an appearance, although not in its most-often noticed form; despite the roof on Reliant Stadium having been opened, too many clouds blocked out the stars there. No, the Milky Way in question was created by an entire stadium of lit cellphone screens. Another way for technology to be beautiful.

Muse opened the show around 7:30 and played for 45 minutes. I hadn’t heard their stuff before and I felt pleasantly surprised by how much I liked them. Also, would you please lower the decibels? If the sound is so loud that it’s muddy, it’s not doing you any favors. kthanks, now I can go buy your tunes.

Shortly after 9:00, strains of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” filled the stadium and U2 took the stage for a 2 hour and 20 minute wild ride. The sound? Excellent, even in Section 508 (one section shy of nosebleed). The sight? Amazing. Their 360 “claw” stage allowed everyone have great seats, even the folks in back of the stage, and they played to everyone, roaming moving bridges and a second circular strip of stage placed out in the middle of the crowd.

I could talk about the set list — and I’ll post it below for the interested — but I want to try to talk about something I’ve had a hard time explaining to people who’ve never seen U2 live. There is a difference between experiencing a song on CD and experiencing one live with lots of bands. With U2, that difference is vast.

I wrote somewhere else about the vibe of a U2 show that makes me want to dance dance dance and that it has nothing to do with Bono’s charisma, or that Bono’s charisma doesn’t affect that dancing vibe. That’s actually not true. The guy has enormous charisma, and it’s very effective. He also runs his energy like a priest.

When I look at him at a live show, I see that his column of roots/energy is both extremely concentrated and three times Bono-size. He’s blasting it through at light-speed. With his voice, yes, and also with the rest of him. That sort of thing is probably true of all sorts of other front men or other musicians. What captivates me about what Bono does in particular is that he channels this energy with and through spirit, love, and hope, and the way energy that connects with those qualities in the audience. Edge, Adam, and Larry are all doing this, too, in a way that weaves seamlessly with Bono’s effort. Great amounts of energy, moved in the spirit of expansion and an honoring of our common humanity. Last night was that, complete with the raising of a stadium-sized blast to lift up Aung San Suu Kyi.

(By which mention, if you assumed that there were politics discussed at the show, there were. It’s U2.)

I’ve been to plenty of live shows and have never felt anything quite like what they do. I love their songs, sure. *And* this feeling of their live shows is what made me really fall in love. It’s a religious experience. It’s church, when church is both immanent and transcendent.

I spent nearly the entire concert dancing with the vibe and the music. I laughed. I cried. (Yeah, I’m like that.)

If that’s your sort of thing, give some thought to catching them live.

Set List:

Breathe
Get on Your Boots
Magnificent
Mysterious Ways
Beautiful Day/Here Comes the Sun
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For/Stand By Me
Stuck In A Moment
No Line on the Horizon
Elevation
Your Blue Room
Until The End of the World
The Unforgettable Fire
City of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight (as a house mix)
Sunday Bloody Sunday
MLK
Walk On
One
Amazing Grace/Where The Streets Have No Name
Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
With or Without You
Moment of Surrender

Special thanks goes out to the friends with whom I attended the show. Y’all rock.

Special where-are-the-toothpicks-to-hold-open-my-eyelids thanks goes to our seemingly brilliant transportation plan. We took the train to the show. Couldn’t have been better. On the other hand, a thousand other people had that same idea and the lines for the train after the concert were just plain unbearable. We ended up walking a mile to the next train stop and waiting for half an hour for a train with room for more people.

Out of the arena: 11:45 PM. Home: 2 AM. Bed: 2:45 AM. Up: Once at 4:30 and again for good at 6:30 AM.

I’m exhausted and it was worth every cup of tea I’m having to drink today.

As in, The Emotions (woah, woah, you’ve got the best of my love) or “Emotion” (It’s just emotion/taking me over). Or any descriptive passage that could be properly begun with the words “I feel.” It’s been on my mind lately.

A few days ago, my BFF and I drove to Austin to attend Starr’s memorial. Such a different animal than the sorts of memorials and funerals I’ve attended before. There was genuine mourning, sure. And there was also much celebration of Starr’s life. Who she was, the lessons she lived and taught so well by example to all of us, distilled in the messages of her music and in the hearts of everyone present.

It had been a long, long time — in some cases, years — since I’d seen some of the people I reconnected with there. Every hug, every moment spent standing in front of the fire with our arms around each other brought home that this was the way to honor Starr. With love. With community. Always connected, no matter how far we may drift from each other in these individual lives we’re living.

I exchanged many a sad glance. I laughed. I sang out loud when her band, The Lovers, played their set after many, many stories told by family and friends. And I cried, though not as much as I had cried already. It felt important to remember everything and everyone. What is remembered lives on in us. Or, for short, what is remembered lives.

In the religion of my birth, remembering is important. Remembering to keep the holy days, lighting a Yarzheit candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s passing, holding close the essence of thoughts and deeds and love given and received. In this way is memory made to be a blessing to all who live.

All of this remembering — or, better yet — re-membering, as if the whole world and everyone in it were shattered and longed to be whole once more — is not mere rote. It would be nothing without feeling, without emotion.

Over the lunch hour today, I finished reading Melissa Marr’s Fragile Eternity. Warning: Vague spoiler alert. I felt more captivated by the last third of the book than any of its other parts, which is not to say those weren’t good but that the last third touched me in special way because of an unexpected weaving of emotion into the steady, unchanging threads of order. End warning.

What does it mean to bring emotion into the warp and weft of order? How does a person who prides him- or herself on equanimity deal with the ebb and flow of the heart? What is the right balance between logic and feeling? How does it shift and change? Slowly, steadily? So quickly that we give ourselves whiplash? Somewhere in between?

There is a time for more and for less, a time for sharp and bright and dark and explosive. There’s a place for gentleness, for gratitude. There’s magic in all of it — the kind of awe and wonder that goes along with being present, right now, in all of our humanity — however it feels.

The point is to feel.