Today I Appreciate Reviving Old Traditions

After our freshman year in college, my group of friends and I couldn't bear the thought of a summer apart. We had enjoyed almost every meal together and late night conversations and even the prospect of not being within walking-distance was unfathomably weird. So, we decided to start an online journal to update each other and keep each other in touch.

As with all great projects (notice a trend here with me and journals?), our flow of writing in the summer journal slowly petered out and eventually we all just sopped writing in it. There was really no good reason why we didn't keep it up. We just didn't.

Now that we've all graduated, though, we obviously won't be in contact in the same way. It's funny how friendships morph and evolve with time and distance, but one of my friends suggested that we revive the blog again. Before posting my own entry, I browsed through the archives, reading about our past travails. Initially, I was embarrassed by my reflections and the self-consciousness of my writing, but something was also refreshing about seeing how I've changed (even if it's only ever so slightly) and being able to chart my progress.

I like how our journal serves as a kind of time capsule of our time together, a way to preserve who we were and who we will become.

Today I Appreciate Blogs

O.K., it probably seems silly that I've started and re-started this blog a million times with the same lackluster apologies for laziness in writing, but after reading a few of my friends' blogs and generally procrastinating from the task that is graduate school research and GRE studying, I felt inspired to sit down and write something myself. So, here I am sitting and writing in this old project of a blog that emerged after a year of feeling generally down about life.

A lot changes in a year. Duh, right? But Fourth of July came and went this weekend and it made me weepy and nostalgic and reflective. I think all holidays have the power to do this to me, to make me look back on the year I just experienced and think about what has changed and what I could have done differently and what I wished I would have done to improve my life and who I am. Blogs, really, are a funny format in which to do that. The most successful blogs are kind of a combination of snippy writing, multimedia clips, and a sense of the breezy, a conveyance of ideas that are serious but not TOO serious. Too serious would mean significant reflection and time, not the kind of ADD flitting from tab-to-tab and page-to-page that so characterizes the way I spend my Internet time (and I assume most people's Internet time, right? Right?).

Blogs are funny, too, for their inherent narcissism. Before I became absorbed in the world of nonfiction writing, I always found memoir and life-writing in general to be sort of a cop-out from fiction writing. I have a distinct memory of sitting down to write fiction at a summer program in Iowa and the fiction gradually turning into something that more closely resembled my own life. I remember thinking then, "Gosh, Jenae, can you really not get away from your own boring life? Can you really not escape from this experience of ME, ME, ME?"

This weekend, too, I spent time at my boyfriend's family's house and my boyfriend's father came into the room sharing that the newest piece of fiction in "The New Yorker" is based on the elementary/middle school that my boyfriend and his sister attended. Amazingly, I happened to have the newest "New Yorker" in my purse (I tend to carry some reading material with me everywhere) and so he (my boyfriend's father, that is) read the story out loud. Throughout the story, my boyfriend's family members were totally amazed (e.g. "This IS our school!" "Who do you think that's supposed to be in the story?" "This is barely fiction!").

I think, in a way, they were all sort of miffed out how close this story was to reality. Indeed, it seemed bizarre to imagine fictional characters in a place that was so tangibly real, that was so ingrained in their memories and such an integral part of their past. But it was their reflections upon how close this story was to real life that made me realize and reflect again upon the power of our own experiences to inform our fiction. The latest "New Yorker" story just showed me that yes, true life can be a cop-out in that we remain in our narcissistic shells of a universe, but that true life can also create the most colorful, enhancing, and enticing background to themes and ideas that could not be conveyed otherwise.

Besides, this life is what we've got, so we should just get over ourselves and deal with it, right?

So, back to the blogs. They inspire me. They're not Henry James, but the era of the novel as ground-breaking art is really... over. In a way. Not that the power of fiction will ever completely deteriorate, but SO MANY interesting things are being done with nonfiction (like blogs! like media convergence! like good ol' plain writing in print publications!), it's hard not to be drawn into seeing how this... genre in a way keeps evolving. O.K., I've probably been reading too much Reality Hunger , and like author David Shields, I'm thinking that the "era of nonfiction" is upon us (not to mention my complete and utter absorption in everything CNF for... over a year now, I think?). I think what inspires me most is knowing that as we are trapped in our narcissistic bubbles of existence, at least we can see that everyone else is similarly trapped in those worlds.

However, through sharing these kinds of reflections, THAT's when we escape the sense of narcissism. THAT's when we come to see that that which seems so individual and so isolated is actually something shared. Hence, when we recognize ourselves in others' writing, in others' art (if you will and if that big "A" word doesn't get you too nervous), THAT's when we know that writing is effective.

Anyway, no promises on keeping this up, but I'm now a college graduate and I'm finding myself (already) desperate for critical thought again and inspiring books and people to sustain me. Wish me luck, and thanks to those of you who already write and keep me inspired with your online writing and otherwise. You make me realize that in spite of all of my uncertainty about my future, about what my post-college life will mean (whether that's grad school or something else), I know that out there, there is someone who inevitably feels almost the same way.

Today I Appreciate the Assignment to Write About My Face

I look for zits, I look for blotches, and I look for rogue eyebrow hairs, but I never look for much else on my face. It's a funny thing; before this assignment, where I must write a 500-word description of my face, I've never really thought about what makes my face distinctly mine. Sure, I've looked for my parents' qualities in my face (e.g. I have my dad's lips, I have my mom's eyes, etc.), but what is it about my face that makes me my own person and not just an amalgam of genes?

I suppose the answer to that question is that, well, I am simply an amalgam of genes, but my jowls really stick out in kind of a funny, impish way and half my face really is just eyes. I stared at my face in the mirror a long time before I began to write and it became something that wasn't mine; simply slopes and lines and figures and details that all added up to something I couldn't even piece together anymore. It was almost as if I created this disjunctive, floating mental grid of my face, where I tried to maintain a manageable quadrant of features, but they simply kept falling out of place or not piecing together any longer.

Rater than disconcerting, this separation of my face from my persona felt refreshing. At a place like UCLA where a large population of beautiful girls effortlessly glide across campus with grace and style and a kind of fashion panache I will never possess, I feel a constant sense of slight insecurity, of slight concern that I'm not quite admired or appreciated enough for how I look. Yet breaking my face down, seeing it for the features that exist - and not attaching any kind of subjective label to these features - leads me to believe that there is a type of beauty in my wide jowls, in my unruly eyebrows, and in the bump at the top of my nose. It may sound very India.Arie of me (remember? "I'm not the average girl from your video / and I ain't built like a supermodel / but I've learned to love myself unconditionally..." Too much female empowerment), but our features, our differing shapes make us into fascinating creatures, creatures worth noticing and studying and - maybe, but not necessarily - admiring a little bit. Even in the strangest combination of features one can find something interesting even if it's not necessarily "beautiful." After all, the aesthetics of the human face are some of the most interesting pieces of art that exist. The inherent intrigue of the face is, after all, why places like the National Portrait Gallery in London exist. There is nothing more masterfully shaped than the face.

The way one looks is integral to who one is; if I did not have my jowls, my eyes, my eyebrows, I simply wouldn't be this creature known as "Jenae."

Today I Appreciate the Self-Righteous, Eclectic Coffee Shop

Eek, I've missed two days of posting! It's been a crazy, busy week first week of school, but I took some notes on the past few days, so this will be an extra-special THR (look how an acronym enhances the cool factor of this blog) post with a few days' worth of appreciations in one.

Let me also preface this post by thanking everyone for thoughtful comments on the first few posts. The encouragement really helps keep me going, so thank you. :)

So, today, I felt a little claustrophobic in Westwood and decided to get coffee in Santa Monica. This tends to happen on Friday afternoons when I have no other class obligations or meetings or work. Keeping Fridays free is one of the greatest things I've ever done for myself; I can work all day on Saturday and Sunday if I'd like, but there's something psychologically pleasant and rewarding about having a FREE (read: "I-get-to-do-whatever-I-want-so-there") Friday. This is not to say I keep my Fridays homework-less necessarily, but I get to do it at my own pace and as a student, where obligations run one's life, that's probably the most marvelous feeling in the world.

Because of the nature of the column I write for "The Daily Bruin" (unofficially called "Exploring L.A.," offically called nothing), I tend to read NFT (Not For Tourists) and Losanjealous pretty regularly and discovered in NFT a coffee shop in East Santa Monica that makes coffee from a siphon.

What's a siphon? It's this: a tube running from the liquid in a vessel to a lower level outside the vessel so that atmospheric pressure forces the liquid through the tube (definition from wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn). Yes, coffee comes out of those liquid pressure tube things. Neat, huh?

Hence, I undertook a question to find this siphon coffee place after class, toting a heavy backpack and directions scrawled on to a tiny notepad. Let me say that I have a terrible, terrible sense of direction, so I wrote down very specific instructions (including, "if you hit this street, you've gone the wrong way. If you hit THIS street, you're going the right way! Hooray!").

Walking off the bus past Wilshire Boulevard, I walked through a neighborhood of palm-tree lined streets and low-rise pastel-colored apartments with small balconies and little, square garages right near the street. It was the sort of charming West L.A. neighborhood that helps you realize that in spite of all of L.A.'s general lack of charming, refreshing pockets of humanity and character exist. It really elevates one's spirits to know that there are people living in peaceful alcoves of a city that inherently cannot be described as "peaceful."

Cafe Balcony is part of a strip mall and the sign outside merely reads "CAFE" in giant block lettering. It could just have easily read "BAIL BONDS" or "LIQUOR" as it was an inconspicuous strip mall shop facing loud, urban Santa Monica Boulevard. Yet upon stepping inside, the place engendered all of the warmth, character, and soul that the outside lacked. I was the first one in the shop (as I had arrived there on bus an hour before it opened, so I just read outside for an hour. Woops.) and I ordered an iced Americano and sat for two hours, doing homework, reading, and writing. The cafe's red walls, mismatched wooden chairs, and wacky music selection (ranging from electro-pop to alternative folk rock to smooth jazz to - get this - opera) felt like a cozy place to settle in for the day.

With each breath I took, the smell of coffee warmed me all the way through my body. Sitting there is what I imagine going to a cafe in Paris would be like (as cliche as that sounds): no one rushes you, everyone is reading their own great books and simply enjoying time to reflect, focus, and rejuvenate. I appreciate coffee shops that don't rush you out, that don't tell you when to leave, and don't encourage you to act "artsy" if you don't want to. There are a lot of pretentions around sitting in a coffee shop and "being an artist," but when it comes down to it, when you have a place like Cafe Balcony that is simply pleasant and encourages time to just sit and reflect and be, that's enough for me to not worry about what anyone else may think of me. That must ultimately be the most freeing experience and I appreciate it after a week of feeling like I had to live up to academic/social expectations.

As far as my other past few days go, I'm simply going to state what I appreciated: Wednesday I appreciated my USIE classmates (that is, other students teaching undergraduate seminars at UCLA in the spring like me) and Thursday I appreciated dancing with my co-workers to Depeche Mode (what a freeing experience that was, too!).

What a peaceful, lovely day thus far.

Today I Appreciate You

Yearly, I planned to keep some sort of journal. Fancy notebooks with floral print covers and neat, lined pages remain the only partially-filled testaments to my attempts at “practicing” writing and attempting to be a “good writer.” Every “how to be a writer” book I read told me that the best writers keep journals, so that’s what I tried to do: keep a journal.

I sparingly wrote in those journals, however, because I lacked meaningful purpose for writing in them. I only occasionally wrote because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do if you had any love of language. Alas, the entries fell into the trap of “I hate mom,” “I hate dad,” and “I hate mom AND dad” and, thus, became my platform for complaining rather than for observation. That’s not to say that complaining doesn’t have its place in literature, but it shouldn’t be the predominant emotion driving one’s work.

As Robert Root writes in The Nonfictionist’s Guide, a writer needs “a sense of commitment to the subject matter, a sense of involvement that is not simply a desire to communicate something but is instead – or in addition – a willingness to discover and accommodate whatever emerges from the writing” (26). Basically, if you have a goal in mind and you want to communicate, go and do it, but expect to learn something from the process, too.

So, this project is really twofold: I expect to not only learn a little about my life experiences by reflecting upon them in an optimistic way, but also to discover something about what it means to be appreciate what you have and through this appreciation, to become a happier, fuller, healthier person.

Today, then, I appreciate you, whoever you are, reading this beginning. You are probably among only a few who have either a.) been referred here by me, b.) stumbled upon this by accident or c.) are my family (who fall under the subcategory of a., but whatever). Happiness can only be achieved with the help of others. It’s impossible to be a complete lonely misanthrope, sulking through life incapable of finding love and appreciation from others. After all, many write to be immortal; words transcend life and being.

So, why do you need to be involved in this? Well, writing for me is a wholly beneficial process and I could easily keep this tucked away in a hidden folder, but I’m only compelled – really compelled – to write this if I know someone out there cares or is affected by anything here. That’s cliché (and, boy, do I hate that it’s cliché), but clichés exist because they are so firmly based in truth. I write this, these observations, these thoughts, these desires to share, because I wish to stir something in you. It doesn’t really matter what.

After all, it’s impossible to communicate until you discover something you need to communicate. For me, I need to communicate what brings me levity, what brings me hope, and what brings me inspiration because, without that reflection and without that understanding, it’s impossible to really appreciate and love what’s open and available in the world.