The sky was like velvet, blacker than I’ve ever seen, completely unspoiled by city, with stars so bright and big and real that it felt like we could reach up from our house on this mountain and pull them down, one by one.
August 2011
For the past three months, off and on, I’ve been reading a beautiful cloth-bound, hardcover copy of Jane Eyre. I’ve only recently recommitted myself to reading every day; when I was working in a 9-to-5, the drudgery of words on a screen, the teasing blink of a cursor, and the dizzying lines of black serif-tailed text on a white-paper background made the idea of writing for myself or opening a book completely unattractive.
No more words.
But now I spend days bathed in natural light, dimmed by coffee shop blinds or filtered through the trees beyond my living-room windows. And even on those rarest of days where I can discipline myself to work a full eight hours — it’s happened once since I lost my job, by the way — I can take breaks to rest my eyes.
So it seemed silly to me that the stacks of books in my apartment staring me, spines in tact, down should keep collecting dust. I read every night now, before bed, which reminds me of being 12 and reading in my childhood bed with dusty-mauve sheets so old and loved that they were actually wearing in the spots where my body spent so many nights.
I adore Jane Eyre; I’d attempted it before but was always tripped up by the cumbersome language. Now, if anything, it’s just the punctuation that gets at me; single quotes are where we use double quotes in modern language, and vice versa, and there are so many colons nested throughout a single sentence that takes up three lines that it can be hard to keep up with exactly what the original thought was.
But I love how Mr. Rochester called Jane “Janet” in his most ardent moments, and the way that made me think anachronistically of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I love Jane’s impudence and careless way with words, love the way the characters talk to one another, love Jane’s I have trouble visualizing it as a movie; in my mind, the characters are more a collection of words and ideas, sometimes taking the shape of humans but mostly just swirls in my head, than they are actual people.
And I have trouble understanding where the story could possibly go now that she’s left Thornfield. I still have 75 pages before the end, and while my heart hopes for the 1990s-romantic-comedy happy ending of a reunion between Jane and Rochester, I can’t say whether that’s plausible or would even really be satisfying.
But I’ll have to wait until I’m back from Portland to find out.
The 600-page beast of a book was a weight and bulk my carry-on couldn’t accommodate, so I opted for paperbacks as I packed last night for my trip to Portland. I’m always filled with dread when choosing a new book to read — my reluctance to start Jane Eyre again after I finished The Ha-Ha was almost physical. I ended up choosing two: I Was Told There’d Be Cake, a book of essays by Sloane Crosby, who I aspire to be; and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a book of essays by David Foster Wallace, who terrifies me.
I had an ambitious bout of book buying sometime earlier this year, where I tracked down copies of The Anatomy of Criticism and this David Foster Wallace book, thinking owning them might somehow make me smarter by osmosis. Anatomy of Criticism sits in my top bedside-table drawer like an anxious brick in the pit of my stomach; I haven’t even opened it. The pages are tissue-thin and the words impossibly small, and it’s still two inches thick. The terror.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, however, sat staring at me from the top of my little desk, stacked among my AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style, a paper dictionary and thesaurus, and a dog-eared copy of Olive Kitteridge on loan from my grandmother. This particular copy was published in 1998, a full 10 years before Foster Wallace killed himself; the short biography says he lives (present tense) in Bloomington, Illinois, accompanied by a photo of a strong, confident man in a black shirt with long hair tied back.
I am not terribly literary. I do not follow authors’ careers or celebrate entire collections of their writing. I should, as a writer myself — I should have role models and geniuses of the written word whose styles I hold up as an influence, and be able to quote passages or favorite characters from famous works — but I don’t.
All I know of David Foster Wallace, in fact, is that he killed himself. That and the fact that he wrote Infinite Jest, a book I will never read. (It’s right up there with Ulysses. Just forget it.)
But I started A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again this morning on the plane, slightly fearful of cracking the spine but somehow just shy of smug in a cabin full of pocket-size mass-market paperbacks, and I loved David Foster Wallace.
There is heart and humanity in his words that I didn’t expect. The first essay, 23 pages long, is about math and tennis, but somehow comes around to discussing his “initiation into true adult sadness,” around 13 or 14 years old, in the midst of talk of angles and wind shears and how his Zen-like acquiescence to the harsh elements of central Illinois made him a superior junior player.
Halfway through that first essay, I wanted to get a notepad out to take down the words and terms I didn’t understand. Instead, I kept reading; the words are important but not as much as the feeling behind them. I want to get to know him through his writing. If that’s even possible — did he hold back? I don’t know why he killed himself; I don’t know whether there was a suicide note that beautifully explained it all. Looking back at his work, do people know David Foster Wallace was doomed?
After 23 pages, I understand already what a tragedy it is that he’ll never write another word now. But I’ll celebrate him for the next 330 pages and absorb whatever I can.
This morning, I got my first “mission” e-mail from It Starts With Us, a group I signed up with after its founder, Nate St. Pierre, spoke to a small, weepy group of us at the 20SB Summit. (If you’ve never heard of it…well, go read about it. And sign up. Five minutes a week to change someone’s life? I was on board instantly.)
The mission: Say something nice. This video was included in the message.
I’m still thinking of a way to do something more than complimenting someone’s pretty blue parasol, but I wanted to share the video.
Goosebumps.
Listening to Sunday’s keynote speaker at the 20-Something Bloggers Summit, Jenny Blake, I got goosebumps as she started to read the Parable of the Trapeze.
But every once in a while as I’m merrily (or even not-so-merrily) swinging along, I look out ahead of me into the distance and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me. It’s empty and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new trapeze bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness coming to get me. In my heart of hearts I know that, for me to grow, I must release my grip on this present, well-known bar and move to the new one.
Each time it happens to me I hope (no, I pray) that I won’t have to let go of my old bar completely before I grab the new one. But in my knowing place, I know that I must totally release my grasp on my old bar and, for some moment in time, I must hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar.
Sound familiar? It did to me.
I was wearing my bracelet on Sunday, as I do every day. And I felt…not quite smug, but warmly satisfied that this story was nothing new to me. I’d already heard it in a much more intimate setting, from someone who took a leap for me that no one had ever taken before.
Sometimes, when I lose sight of why I’m doing all this — though this time, I suppose I have less of a choice — or just need a pick me up, I read back through the comments on that blog post I wrote on Aug. 9, 2010. I look at them, and the timestamp now says “1 year ago.”
Today I saw that and thought, Good lord. That was a year ago?
I rarely think about it. But my, how time flies. Sitting in my living room, there are papers strewn around me like that horrifying scene from A Beautiful Mind, and the windows are wide open to let in the cool breeze and the soft white noise from the street below. The light in the sky is changing already as September approaches, softer and more golden to usher in fall.
Autumn.
Soup and fresh-baked bread. Leaves crunching, the color of fire and butternut squash. Fiddles: Mumford & Sons, Nick Drake and the Dixie Chicks. Sweaters and tights and boots.
The clang of my radiators and the warm prospect of a cozy winter working in my beautiful apartment, of tea in a ceramic mug and my sweet black kitten. A cozy excuse to give Tess of the d’Urbervilles another read.
A different sort of silence.
I think I’ve lived another lifetime since I wrote that post a year ago. I feel like a different person today, in all the best ways, except for the way my pants don’t fit. I’m settling into myself again, pushing away my fear of being by myself, welcoming those financially lean months as lessons to be learned.
Being at that blogger conference over the weekend gave me so much to think about, reflections on myself, my writing, my career. Everything. Not about how to change, but how to be better.
Friday, I leave for a 10-day trip to Portland with one of my best girlfriends. For no real reason but to be away. We’ll work during the day and explore the city at night, and I’m so thrilled to pull up my roots, see how they’ve grown and come home — home, said with blazing certainty — with new perspective.
“Be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” Jenny Blake told her audience. “Uncertainty is the one certain thing in life.”
She’s by no means the first person to say that, but I didn’t roll my eyes at the cliché as I’d so often be inclined to do. Instead, I quietly held my tongue and simply closed my eyes, and hoped against hope that everyone else would just take it to heart.
…or there wouldn’t have been, if not for three of my new favorite people.
I killed my site yesterday.
With my WordPress account with GoDaddy set to expire on Aug. 21, I was in the midst of a last-minute domain and hosting transfer to Bluehost, getting a little cocky that I was about to be rid of my evil, evil provider.
With the ill-advised click of one button — CANCEL HOSTING ACCOUNT — my entire site, a year’s worth of writing and a halfhearted attempt at “artful design,” whose database had never once been backed up…GONE.
Never backed up.
And gone.
The harsh hilarity of accidentally deleting my website while at a conference for bloggers…has not escaped me. I’ve only had one panic attack in my life, but I’m pretty sure I was close to a second yesterday.
I called my first hero of the day, my friend Sean — who, in reality, is sort of my always hero of every day — who was just sitting down to lunch. We talked for a few minutes until I felt tears springin to my eyes and had to hang up.
Sweet and empathetic, possibly to a fault, Sean quickly lost his appetite and headed home to help me troubleshoot. Between his efforts and those of my hetero life partner, Marcy, a skeleton framework of my site was back up and running within the hour, and content from the past year quickly being recovered from RSS feeds and Google caches.
Tweets were flying, Marcy and Sean reaching out to their respective communities of developers, nerds and general good samaritans, and I was juuuuuuust…kind of sitting there. Feeling like a damn moron.
By the way, I hadn’t backed up my site. Did I mention that?
Sitting there, feeling like a damn moron, and cursing GoDaddy. Because I had called them, too, before the near panic attack set in. And they told me, of course we can restore your site. If you sign up for another hosting contract and pay us $150 to dig your data back out.
…Sirs and madams. I’m stupid and broke. I cannot and will not pay for this.
So it seemed all hope was lost.
“Thanks for nothing, @GoDaddy,” I tweeted. “What’s customer service?”
An hour later: “Sorry to hear about your troubles. I will have someone reach out to you shortly to discuss some options. ^J”
An hour after that, “^J”, my third new favorite person, called my cell phone. His name is Jordan, and he works in GoDaddy’s President’s Office. Also known as the “respond to people who are pissy on Twitter” office. It was 6 p.m. on a Saturday night, and for half an hour, he listened to me talk about what had happened, laughed at my self-deprecating jokes, put me on hold then told me that GoDaddy could give me back my database for $11.98.
Eleven. Ninety. Eight. For someone who wasn’t even their customer anymore.
Best $12 I ever spent.
By 8 p.m., my site was back up and running, like nothing had ever happened, my faith restored in customer service and humanity in general. And feeling…so loved and taken care of.
Lessons learned:
- “How hard could it be?” are some of the most famous last words for a reason.
- Don’t jump the gun and get all clicky on websites you don’t understand.
- If you do something stupid, be humble about it — not defensive.
- If you need help, ask for it.
- If it’s offered to you, accept it.
- If you’re dissatisfied with a business, tweet about it. (Well, don’t do it if you’re expecting something out of it…I really just wanted to scream out into the ether.)
- I have the best friends ever. And not just because they’re better at WordPress than me.
And for God’s sake, back up your site.
Yes, Paige Worthy is my real name. And yes, I’m a writer.
A blend of East Coast sass and Midwest sweet, I was blogging before everyone was doing it, eating obsessively before “foodie” was a thing, and overanalyzing life and love long before Carrie Bradshaw made it sexy. (By the way, it’s not sexy when I do it.)
