These are two of my favorite poems. I like to post them to the internet every three years or so, because that’s the nice thing about poems. If you want to share a book with a friend, it’s so awkward. You can loan it to them, sure, or buy them a copy. But it’s obnoxious to ask after it, so you have to wait for them to bring it up. Poems only take a few seconds, and you don’t feel so bad about asking someone to spare those moments.

This first poem I liked to pull out in the middle of a break-up to console myself. This poem, Bright Eyes, The Dismemberment Plan’s “Following Through,” and copious amounts of whiskey were my main self-healing tools in my 20s.

Bay Poem from Berkeley
by Sandra Cisneros

Mornings I still
reach for you before
opening my eyes.

An antique habit from
last summer when we pulled
each other into the heat of groin
and belly, slept with an arm
around the other.

The Texas sun was like that.
Like a body asleep beside you.

But when I open my eyes
to the flannel and down,
mist at the window and blue
light from the bay, I remember
where I am.

This weight
on the other side of the bed
is only books, not you. What
I said I loved more than you.
True.

Though these mornings
I wish books loved back.

This second poem is one that Matthew sent me when we were still pretending that we were just friends and we weren’t falling in love with each other. This was right around the time when we called each other every night and he would read me to sleep:

The Quiet World
by Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

I read this poem aloud to a friend after Matthew sent it to me and she said, “Jeffrey McDaniel! I love Jeffrey McDaniel!” and she shared with me a poem of his that she had memorized, which contained the line: “Your bed is a big, soft calculator where my problems multiply,” and I whispered that line over and over to myself that night. I was drinking whiskey then, too, but that night it was because I didn’t think it was possible that I’d ever get to spend time with this person that I liked so much, who lived all the way across the country.

Over at my etsy store, I’m raffling off (signed & dedicated) copies of Yellow Rose Recipes. I’m only allowing 10 entries per raffle, so if you enter, you have a 10% chance of winning the cookbook. Not shabby! Or you can enter multiple times to increase your chances, and—more importantly—increase your charitable donation.

All proceeds will be going to Haiti via Concern Worldwide. I’ll be creating these raffles through the end of January, which is why I’m not linking directly to the raffle; once this current raffle ends, I’ll create another.

In my frustration yesterday, I pulled a classic Joanna, which is to say that I oversimplified what I know to be a complicated and layered problem.

I do know why I tweet about LOST and post Facebook status updates about the books that I’m reading rather than about our financial woes: It’s because that is what I am thinking about at the moment, what I do want to discuss with others. I’m not walking around in a permanent state of depression. Most of the time, I am downright cheerful, because I don’t want to dwell on the negative aspects in my life right now, and I’m sure that you don’t, either. We all started doing online stuff as a form of entertainment and escapism, so it’s not really fair for me to expect that when you get 10 or 20 minutes in your busy schedule to hop online, you spend that time pouring out your heart about everything that is going on with you. No, of course you choose to keep it light-hearted instead. I understand.

Over the summer, I read MFK Fisher’s STAY ME, OH COMFORT ME, which is a selection of her journal entries from 1933-41. Like me, you’re probably more familiar with her food writing—How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, The Art of Eating—but these journal entries were written at the height of the Depression, several years before she started a professional writing career. At the beginning of the collection, she and her husband are living in California with her family, trying to find some work, doing odd jobs for family and friends of family to make a few extra dollars, and then having small dinner parties with friends, stretching every dollar, splurging occasionally on a nice bottle of liquor. But although every journal entry mentions a new plan for how she or her husband can make some money, the bulk of the writing is about enjoying simple pleasures and making fanciful plans for her future. I loved reading it and related to it so deeply.

I’m sorry if anything I wrote yesterday made anyone feel defensive, or like I was accusing anyone of not being his or herself. That wasn’t my intention. Keep fighting the good fight! You’re awesome.

This morning, I can’t stop thinking about the disconnect between the online and real world. Could this be because I’m currently reading World Leader Pretend (by local Portland author James Bernard Frost), which is about characters escaping their disappointing lives and choosing to spend all of their free time in World of Warcraft-esque online worlds instead, where they have a much higher chance of being successful? Yeah, okay, that is part of it. I would like to believe that I don’t relate to that plot very much, but I work from home and 99% of my interaction with my friends is through Facebook and Twitter status updates, blog posts, and occasional emails. And 1/4 of those friends are people I’ve never met in person. I’d much rather be meeting up with all of my pals at a local restaurant, or flying my family down to Texas a couple of  times a year, but I can’t afford that right now. I can barely afford groceries.

So it’s a real problem in my life that my friends and I continue to maintain pleasant, downright chirpy online personas while many of us are going through hardships in our personal lives, since I am depending on that form of communication to know what’s going on with them. Why am I tweeting about LOST when I don’t know how I’ll make the next mortgage payment? Do I need everything to look the same to the outside viewer to maintain my sanity as I struggle through one of the hardest times I’ve ever faced, or would it be so much better if I could just commiserate with people? We are all going through this. If you still have the job that you had two years ago, bully to you, but statistics tell me that most of you don’t. So why aren’t we talking about it online?

I am the queen of the quick tidy-up. I have to be, because my default nature is to be sloppy. When I am cooking or doing a craft or DIY project, I create disaster zones. In my 20s, I was likely to leave it that way and just work around the mess for days afterward until I was finally forced to clean up after myself, but now that I’m in my 30s, I’ve identified that my state of mind is strongly tied to how tidy my surroundings are, so I’ve taught myself how to do quick pick-ups.

Milo's room

So here you have it, the 10 Minute Tidy Up:

1. Very quickly pick up everything that isn’t where it should be and put it on the bed.
2. Divide what is on the bed into logical categories. One category should always be “Doesn’t belong in this room.” (If I’m tidying Milo’s room, the categories would be: “Dirty laundry,” “Clean clothes,” “Costumes,” “Toys,” “Trash,” “Doesn’t belong in this room.”)
3. Put away the easy stuff first. (Dirty laundry goes in hamper, clean clothes go in closet or drawers, toys go in toy chest, trash goes in trashcan.)
4. For the pile of things that doesn’t belong in the room, ask yourself if it often ends up here, and so would it thus make sense to have it live there permanently. Think about making a home for it there so that it can still be put away rather than just sitting on the floor. Likewise, if the dirty laundry ends up in the same spot, consider moving a hamper closer to that spot. In the meantime, take that stuff out of the room you’re tidying.
5. Vacuum or sweep. It’s a simple step that makes any room look a thousand times cleaner.

The end!

I know a mom who has five kids and every night right before she goes to bed, she walks around the house and puts all the clutter into a big box and then puts the box in a closet in the guest room. That way, if her kids want to know where their stuff ended up, they don’t need to ask her, they just check the box. If they don’t want their stuff ending up in the box, they can clean up after themselves better. I think that is a genius solution and might use it myself when Milo is older. Right now, he thinks that cleaning and tidying is a novelty, and really loves to help. He evens pick up after me and his dad: if my water bottle isn’t where it usually is, he’ll bring it to me saying: “Back, back,” meaning, “Put it back, mom.” I love this phase, but I know it won’t last forever.

Every time that I paint a room, I am surprised all over again how drastically it changes how the room looks and thus how I feel about my living space.

This past week, I set out to paint our kitchen and breakfast nook. I’ve had the paint in our shed since August, but never got around to actually slap it up on the walls. I wish that I hadn’t waited so long!

Our kitchen before (when we bought the house):

kitchen from living room before

sink and counter before

Our kitchen now:

kitchen from living room today

kitchen from breakfast nook

I’m going to tell myself that you find it endearingly charming that I didn’t bother to stage or style these photographs. Or even clean up at all. That’s charming, right? Not just extremely lazy?

handmade curtains over the sink

These handmade curtains (made from Heather Bailey fabric) set the color palette for the entire kitchen. I am head over heels in love with that fabric. Matthew and I are considering painting our pantry tomato red.

print from The Black Apple

Here is a close-up of that Black Apple print. This is much simpler than most of the work that’s in Emily’s store now, but that’s what I like about it: a girl in an apron, some mugs, a black kitten. What more do you need?

Jen Oaks calendar!

My Jen Oaks calendar up on the wall! We love it, Jen. It fits in here perfectly and makes me grin every time that I pass it on the way to the bedroom.

prints from Abby Try Again

I love these prints from local photographer Abby. I have a few more of her photographs; I’m just looking for the right place for them.

2009 was just pretty much the worst, am I right? I don’t remember discussing this while it was actually happening, but that now seems to be the general consensus among my friends and acquaintances. We’re glad it’s over, and even though nothing changed between December 31st and January 1st, it just feels better to be in a new year. It just seems like we can put all of that behind us now. Right?

I am not really one for resolutions, but I do enjoy goals, so here are a few goals which I have for the coming year or so:

Get more fit. I don’t really mean “lose weight” here, although that would be nice, I mean increase my overall fitness. This is a goal I’ve been working on for over a year now, and have made tiny little micro-steps. Right now, I walk 3 miles on the treadmill 4-5 times a week. Ideally I would like to get to the point where I can walk/jog a 5K without burning out. I have toyed with the idea of signing up for one in late Spring/early Summer just to give myself a goal. Are there any Portlanders who might want to jog a 5K with me in a few months?

Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal

Learn Spanish. I just want to understand what’s being said to me, and maybe squeak out a few sentences in reply. I don’t want to become fluent. Lately I’ve been thinking that I should read childrens’ books in Spanish, specifically the Harry Potter series, and plod through them slowly. I ran this by my fluent-in-multiple-languages, Romance-Languages-degree bestest pal and she said that she thought it might work! It’s worth a shot at least. I don’t live in Texas anymore, where being conversational in Spanish would have actually been handy, but I’ve wanted to learn Spanish for a long time, and can’t afford the cost or time of a class or tutor.

our backyard

Work on the garden & landscaping of the house. The current landscaping of our house is: there is none. None at all. Our house has nothing in the way of curb appeal, and the backyard is sizable but completely vacant. At least we have a clean slate rather than having to undo another person’s gardening decisions.

the morning after Matthew proposed

Finally figure out the wedding stuff. Matthew and I have now been engaged for two years, and we’re no closer to having a wedding planned than we were when we got engaged. The thing is, we are in a really tight spot. We want to pay for the wedding ourselves, but we are broke. We want the wedding to be intimate, but we want our family and friends to all be there, and our combined immediate families alone total over 30 people. We want the wedding to be in Portland, because this is our home, but 85% of our guests would be coming in from out-of-state, so we have to give them plenty of time to order tickets and make arrangements. And finally, we face the ultimate tough point: we want a wedding that reflects who we really are and who we are is…not very wedding-y. Even the weddings on the indie/offbeat bride websites make me cringe—but only when I picture myself in them! I appreciate that they’re the perfect weddings for the people involved, but so far I haven’t seen one and thought, “Oh, that would be totally right for us.” For all of these reasons and more, we have put off and put off making any real decisions. Now we very much need to get married for the tax and insurance benefits, and we have no idea how to resolve any of these issues.

So those are my goals, or at least the ones I feel comfortable writing about on the internet. Tell me what you’re working on!

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Five years ago today, long-time pen pals Matthew and Joanna met for the first time in person in Nashville, TN.

Things have been pretty awesome ever since.

Happy fifth anniversary to the best partner and dad I know.