HoMe SweeT HoMe!

I downloaded this photo of my living room onto my blogger account like two weeks ago, and a last minute decision to come to Los Angeles for the SCBWI conference this weekend has me looking nostalgically at my living room-and I've only been away twenty-four hours! Yes, I am definitely a homebody! But its wonderful to be in Los Angeles, seeing all my family, and definitely sort of seals my decision to move back, as much as I cherish Portland and living near my two best friends. Sometimes Los Angeles feels so stuffed with people, as if they are so packed in you couldn't floss the space between them, but it is where I was born and feels good to be here, like stepping into a comfy, delighted old skin.
So!, tomorrow morning, the conference begins. There are so many great workshops to choose from I don't know how I will decide, but probably will lean towards those that I think most relate to where I reach impasses in my own writing. For anyone who likes to write children's books and can't attend, I'll definitely be taking lots of notes from the daily keynote speakers and workshops and am happy to pass along notes if you would like. (Just shoot me an email or leave a comment.)
Have a wonderful day whereever you are!

Uh-Oh!

Uh-Oh! I'm spending more time again dreaming instead of writing! Its hard not to be too excited though as next weekend is the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) Conference! I bought a very sweet little pink, orange, and brown polka dotted spiral notebook to scribble notes in from all the speakers and workshops that will fill up the four days. The writing has been going very, very badly the last few weeks, on both projects I am working on, and it is mighty discouraging to have written quite a considerable amount and not feel I can use any of it, but the hand will keep moving because giving up, of course, feels much worse.

In other news, if you have been reading Laini's blog then you know she is holding one of my beloved possessions hostage just to ensure that I meet her at 6am every morning at the gym, which I am happy to say I have been doing! Getting up at 5 some mornings is so hard but I have to say that feeling of accomplishment as I leave the gym afterwards, before seven a.m. no less!!!, is a really invigorating, joyous feeling, it truly is. Cultivating new, nurturing habits, prying apart who we are becoming in the ways that don't truly serve us from who we can and are meant to be is so vital. Theres a slow and insidious slide towards lazier ways I have noticed as I grow older that I feel very increasingly compelled to fend off. My life was out of alignment, spiritually and physically, for too long so now step by step I'm snapping it back into place.

I love this image attached to this post. I can't help but wonder what she evokes in others. For me, it resonates with the wanderlust within, and I wonder, as she looks outwards, is her current life too small for her? Theres a wonderful line at the end of David Whyte's poem, Sweet Darkness, that reads, "Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you." In my women's group I use to facilitate, I once brought that poem and asked them to journal after reading it about what brings them alive. Their lists varied widely. The next step was getting honest about how many things they'd written are actually a part of their days. As you can imagine, for most of them, as for many of us, too little. After I post this, I think I am going to go answer these questions anew.

And how about you? How are you doing? What brings you most alive?

MiNd yOuR MaNNeRs! (& you just might get some free stuff!)

My mother was/is very, very, VERY big on manners. I was horror of all horrors for her growing up, running around all amok with runny fistfuls of lasagna masquerading as red pirate beards plastered across my face and dripping everywhere I ran, pouring sodapop down chimneys, changing due dates for the books checked out from the library I ran out of my bedroom, and elbows placed squarely in front of me on the dinner table. As my dear sweet Mamatush use to say, "Alexandra, ladies don't enjoy having their elbows on tables!" Her other favorite was, "Manners are a consideration for other people." There were strict guidelines about writing thank you notes to anyone who gave me a gift or did something super nice on my behalf. "If someone can take the time to buy you a gift," she would remind my siblings and I, "then you can take the next ten minutes to sit down and write them a thank you note!" Of course she was right and I continue to write them as necessary, which is exactly what I did when I came home from the gym at a quarter before seven last Thursday morning.

As I was leaving the gym, feeling sleepy and sluggish from my treadmill trauma, I decided to buy an energy bar- a PROMAX energy bar, to be exact. If you've ever had an energy bar, then you probably know what I am saying when I say that they taste like manilla envelopes-that is, except for the one and only dynamo, out of control, packed with excrutiatingly tasty taste, PROMAX bars. So, I did what I have been bred and trained to do...I wrote them a thank you note! To inspire you to reach out and thank others, I will copy and paste the correspondence from what I consider to be the most extraordinary culinary feat of our time-the Cookies 'n Cream PROMAX bar. Now, after you read this, go forth into the world and pick one of these six inch miracles right up!

So, it started with this email below I sent to the Promax website listed on the wrapper:

Subject: Unbelievable! Out of Control Tastiness!

To: customerservice@promaxbar.com


Dear ProMax Geniuses,

I just tried one of your ProMax bars for the first
time today and it was sooooooooo delicious! How did
you do it? I have tried many, many protein bars and
honestly, they all were bad, and then this morning
after having staved them off and given up, I was too
hungry not to try one as I left the gym. I can
only afford to get one or two a week max due to the
piddly state of my measly finances, but I am so glad
to have discovered them and wanted to thank you. I
will tell all I know about them!!!

Sincerely,
Alexandra G.

Just fifteen minutes later, I received this email:

Alexandra,

Thank you for the note. We always share notes like the one you sent
with
the rest of the office. We would like to send you out a box of bars on
behalf of us and your enthusiasm for our product.

People are currently placing bets to what flavor you tried. Currently
Cookie's and Cream is a 2/1 favorite. So whatever flavor you would like
please respond back and we will get it out to you.

Thank you for your note.

All the Best!

BG
Brandon F. Garcelon
Western Regional &
Organized Sports Executive
Promax Nutrition Corp.

And then today, guess what was waiting for me on my doorstep? A huge box of PROMAX bars!

HuMan SuperHerOes

After waking up at five am yet again and going for a long, strenuous early, early morning hike with Laini at Eagle Creek, a beautiful hike in the Columbia River Gorge with scenery that reminds me of the Romanian landscape beautifully filmed in Cold Mountain and ends at a little waterfall where you can dip your feet that want to kill you for putting them through the trek, I came home and felt like doing absolutely zero. I"m totally wiped out from this aerobics extravaganza of the past week. I feel like a 114 year old babushka. All I could do was watch movies today on my sofa.

I just watched a really moving, Palestinian film called Paradise Now. Has anyone reading this seen it? It was up for an Academy Award last year for best foreign film, and as I watched it, I sort of felt silly for recent opinions I've had on the subject, such unbendingly bold, arrogant, know it all opinions when the reality is none of us truly know what its like to walk in another's shoes day in and out. The film follows two Palestinian men through the twenty-four hours leading up to the time they are supposed to commit suicide attacks in Israel. Its a really thought provoking, moving film, even if it is extremely one sided and doesn't care to explore at all what they too have done to perpetuate the suffering they experience and instead placing all the blame erroneously at the feet of the Israelis, which certainly isn't fair.

What keeps us from truly failing to see the humanity in one another? I'm the first to admit that as an American Jew who has lived in Israel and still has family there, its hard not to "take sides," and to see only Israel as the victim, but a movie like Paradise Now is a brutal and necessary reminder that my opinions are just that, and that like most American Jews, I know very little, if anything, about what it really is like to be Palestinian, and to totally disregard their perspectives is to try and erase and degrade their experience, to totally invalidate it. I support Israel, but that doesn't mean that there is a lot it could do better. What we need are truly brave, engaged, visionaries to rescue the peace process out of the hands of fundamentalists on all sides.

I have known quite a few American Jews, and a few American Muslims, who walk a good walk and see themselves as truly good, moral people, and yet, they make no overtures to get to know anyone from the other side. If its Muslims, then reaching way out to get to know an Israeli firsthand, and if its an American Jew, actually making efforts while in Israel to connect with Palestinians, even one, to hear with truly open ears the circumstances from their eyes. How many American Jews have I known who have gone to Israel, donate generously to Israeli causes, and yet have never contributed a penny or a second of their time to see the full picture, to take one afternoon out of a trip and see with their own eyes what its really like to live in Gaza or the West Bank? I don't think peace is going to come from their leaders. I think its going to come from ordinary citizens on all sides who want to be true pioneers in the process, look within at what they are doing on an individual level to contribute to the problem no matter how tiny it may be, who don't care any longer about being right, and decide they want to "be the change" they are waiting for, followed by a willingness to try something new rather than let only fears and history dictate their next step.

I'm reminded of the Fulbright exchange scholar, Amy Biehl, who was working in South Africa to develop voter registration programs for South African blacks and women to be able to vote in the nation's first ever all-race elections in 1994. Despite the pleas of her South African friends who were with her, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, dragged out of her car and pelted to death with stones by local black youth who were members of a militant Pan Africanist group. As they killed her, they chanted "One settler (white person), one bullet!" What I find most remarkable about the story is how her parents chose to respond. Rather than vengeance, which I could easily have understood had they chosen that path, instead they chose to found the Amy Biehl Foundation which provides prisoner rehabiliation services, literacy programs, and job skills instruction to South Africans in the community where Amy had worked. I think its simply amazing and inspiring that rather than choose to wallow in anger and bitterness that they chose instead to better the lives of the very people who had taken the life of their daughter. I'd like to think the rest of us can take a page from their way of thinking, even though it is really hard and goes against our conditioned way of thinking and acting in the world.

"God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse."
-Carl Jung

UpDaTe: Gym Day 2 & BlAcKBeRRy BliSS

When my alarm goes off at 5am and I'm twisting and writhing through that first hour, getting dressed, putting my hair into an "exercise bun." I'm feeling very, very cranky! As I'm driving to the gym, I'm considering going to Starbucks instead and reading the morning paper, but then I remember that Laini (and sometimes Jim) will clobber me if I don't show up and that they are driving there this very moment as well. No way out! Once I'm on the treadmill, with Laini running at 6.0 next to me, I am just barely hanging on at a 3.9 or 4.0 walk and jog. But then! right around the 27th minute, I circle the dial on my Ipod until I find the Superman theme, and then its as if all my muscles have little tiny men under them, and when they hear Superman come on, I get a second wind and I can go for another six minutes before completely caving in again!

Wouldn't it be great if we all had detachable limbs that could be sent out to exercise without us, sort of the way we drop off stuff at the dry cleaners and then you come back later in the day and its all clean, starched, and pressed? What it would mean is that while you are out meeting friends for a cupcake lunch, your legs and arms could be at Gold's Gym working out without you, running for one, two, three hours. We'd have two sets of body parts the way we have two sets of bed sheets! Today, I'd wear my Cindy Crawford legs. Saturday, my 10 foot legs so I could see eye to eye with the giraffe at the Portland Zoo. Can somebody please get to work on that?

In other news, I was kicking myself for not planting some dahlias in my yard this year because everywhere I go in Portland, I see them in full bloom now. But then a couple weeks ago I saw that I did have a dahlia bush in my backyard and so I write this very moment beside an emerald green vase filled with bright red dahlias. The wonderful thing about them is the more I cut them, the more they grow, like cyclops. Any flower could have been growing back there but it turned out to be my very, very favorite. I take that as a sign that I, we, are being taken care of even when we least expect it. Theres been lots of little surprises in the yard that I didn't know about when the house was bought- cherry blossoms, daffodils, a Japanese maple tree, and most recently, blackberries!

SuNdAy ScRiBBLiNgS -TwO PeAs In a pOd

When I think of two peas in a pod, I think of best friends all squished and snuggly sort of like in Anne Geddes baby cards where she squishes them inside all sorts of vegetables, flowers, and such. I stupidly use to think those were somehow real before I knew what Photoshop was and I would ask myself, "How on God's green earth did she find pea pods so huge? and pumpkins so gigantic to stuff triplets inside? and roses that could hold a whole infant's bottom?"

Anyway, Laini has been my best friend for many years and yet I don't think we are like two peas in a pod. Often, we can be cranky and sometimes disagreeable and impatient with each other even. Definitely not two peas in a pod, but if we were, I don't think I'd experience the angst and pressure and evernudgy support she gives me to leap after my own creative dreams, to keep growing, to not give up which can be something I struggle with at times, to not settle and compromise on what I hold most dear. To hang out with Laini isn't always comfortable. It is always a wake-up call, amazingly inspiring, invigorating, real, honest, funny, fun often, and always, always challenging, nurturing, and nourishing. To have a best friend who tries her best to stay empathetic with those parts of me that make it hard to have me for a best friend, of which there are definitely a few!, who knows me well enough to know that I needed to choose a small surface this past Saturday night for our mosaic glass art project because I always reach a point where I am "done" no matter where I am in the project and then its just a race to finish, so taking this into account, can gently suggest when I mention that I will pick up a table at a used store, "Hmmm, are you sure you don't want to start with something more smallish for your first time?" (I did end up choosing a round plant stool when we went to Michael's and that turned out to be just right!) A best friend that comes to visit you all the way in Bulgaria when you are nearing the end of your homesickness rope, who you can argue with from time to time but remember whats most important is the precious gift of friendship, who encourages you and tells you what you need to hear,who leaves you a sweet card at your front door to discover after your first day at a new job, who develops important new rules like every time a train is late she has to buy an ice-cream cone, who sends you homemade banana bread in the mail, this is the stuff of us lucky peas who may not be able to live peacefully tucked into a tiny pod together but who would want to anyway? Thats hopefully what boyfriends and husbands are for! Best friends are for pushing you into your own full bloom.

So, really, I am glad that I can't describe my best friendship as one that feels cozy as being two peas in a pod. Its being out in the light, sometimes harsh, brightness of day without too many hiding places that forces us to stretch and grow. When I was little, I loved building forts out of cardboard boxes and "living" underneath my tall bed with books, Chips Ahoy, and my secret-swapping best friend at my side, but those days are long gone! Who can sleep under their bed now any way these days? Theres too many monsters under there!

(For many more Sunday Scribblings from bloggers all round the globe, go to www.sundayscribblings.blogspot.com for more links!)