Pink of Perfection

Source: traceysthoughts.tumblr.com via Sarah on Pinterest

We’re in the final flurry before a holiday weekend. Early yesterday morning I tried to put together a post a on a Thanksgiving-appropriate salad, but I ran out of time. And this morning, as we’re down to the wire, and there are bags to be packed, trains to be caught, and work to be buttoned-up before a long weekend, I thought: the salad can wait. What can’t wait before I get caught up in today’s rush and then tomorrow’s where are the cranberries? how many place settings? is taking just a few moments to be grateful. And so, at this very moment in time, I’m so grateful for:

1. The beautifully sunny fall we’ve had.
2. The orange tulips on the dining room table.
3. After each stressful day, climbing in bed with a novel. Right now: Right Ho, Jeeves.
4. A pair of jeans I really like. (OK, they’re jeggings. But they are so comfortable.)
5. The cheerful sound of the ukulele in the pitch-black evenings.
6. A new sense of lightheartedness that’s filled my days.
7. Pinterest. (If you’d like an invite, just say so in the comments!)
8. Health, home, food on the table––all of the daily necessities that I every day take for granted.
9. The time, space, and desire to live wholeheartedly and create days that are meaningful, balanced, and super delightful.
10. That you care about the very same things. Thank you so much for being a part of this community.

Best wishes to you and yours for a joyous, generous, bountiful, rich-in-love, delicious holiday!

Image: Thank you card by Dutch Door

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Photo by joystclaire

Let’s think back to January of 2006. Where were you?

I was living in a basement apartment with my boyfriend who, one day as we were walking around the reservoir in Central Park, proposed the idea for a video blog. I was feeling very lost at the time, very uncertain of my future and what to do with it. There is something extraordinarily generous when someone close to you puts the reminder before your eyes: you love cooking and creativity and hosting dinner parties. So he built this blog; it was the greatest gifts he’s ever given me.

First, I roasted a chicken. It was the way my mom taught me how to do it when I moved off campus during college. I can still remember standing at her counter with a box of Bell’s seasoning getting a crash course on stuffing. That was Pink of Perfection’s jumping off point, and though I was extremely nervous about being being on camera, my cameraman boyfriend and I tossed back liquid courage in that basement apartment and, as I recall, had a tremendous amount of fun.

In 2007 months used to pass with two posts from me. What was going on? Why wasn’t I checking in here every moment that I could to bring a semblance of meaning to the life of photocopying and collating I had at the time? I can’t remember, but it might have had something to do with the idea that I thought every post had to be better than the last. I got over that.

Then we went to Paris, and my boyfriend became my fiancé. I got a better job and a raise and started making things like tuna steaks and lamb chops and smoked duck breast. I got over that, too.

I was always trying to get into life’s marrow through cooking and little DIY projects, but in 2008, I wrote one of my first posts just about figuring out how to make a life. And it’s good that I started thinking about that, because that year my job was a casualty of the recession. Like a lot of huge, unexpected change, it ended up being a blessing in disguise.

For all of 2009, I pretended that Pink of Perfection was my full-time job which resulted in some of my very favorite posts of all time: the best hot chocolate, overnight cinnamon rolls, an amazing chicken liver paté, a post about friendship and lunch, being hit by one sudden, happy moment. And then the fiancé became my husband.

Which brings us to 2010, so recent we almost don’t even need to go into it. I got a job finally, and talked about being a homebody, ate a lot of curried chicken salad, and struggled with accepting the idea that there is enough.

I want to tell you guys what it’s meant to have this site, to have a place to come write and then to have you respond. But it’s like trying to talk about what it feels like to have eyes––they are so much a part of you and your life that it’s hard to pull apart exactly what it means see or to have developed that mannerism where you’re always brushing your bangs out of them. This blog is a part of my everyday, but it is also so much bigger than that.

I can’t even begin to tell you how lonely I was when we started Pink of Perfection. I had, like, one friend. Now, that feeling and that time feel so far away. This place is where I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a life of equal parts meaning and delight. And there is something profound about being heard, about hearing you say in response, “Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Here’s how it is for me.” And then you lay it out there, too. It is, I hope, a symbiotic relationship in which we both end up feeling inspired and empowered to keep going and making meaning out of what often seems like a giant mess. To say thank you is such a tiny little phrase, but it will just have to do.

Which brings us to today: I’ve spiffed up the joint with the continued help of the amazing Cre8d. The categories now reflect what it is that we really get into here: cooking, of course, the delight of living––a great vintage dress, a beautiful, inspiring print––and flourishing––the hows and whys and holy shits of navigating our way through, sometimes with clarity, sometimes even with grace.

At the risk of repeating myself: thank you so much for five years. And to many, many more, with whatever chaos and moments of tiny beauty they may bring.

Image: Folk heart card available from Dutch Door on Etsy

Mine started in first grade with the sentence, “May funny boy way who?” and embarked on a nonsensical meditation on a boy in my class named Clinton, with whom I was in love. I wrote a cast of characters on the inside cover (“Mom–my mom”) so that one day, when this tome was discovered among my papers, the reader wouldn’t be hopelessly lost. This diary was pastel blue with a lock, a schmaltzy quote about dreams, and a castle in the clouds on the cover: typical––though tragic––little girl stuff.

I’ve never been able to stop, and I credit journals for keeping me going through middle school, my teens, a melancholy, lovesick stay in Italy, post-college confusion, and whatever you’d call this period of post-post college confusion. (PoPoCoCo?)

At my first real office job, my boss was a wonderfully chic, astonishingly smart woman of the old school New York variety (rumor had it she had taught herself Russian in order to read Anna Karenina “in its purest form.”) You could set a clock by her workday routines––the morning pot of tea, her toaster oven lunch, an afternoon seltzer––but one unpredictability that enlivened our days together were her visits to my cubicle for a chat. It’s hard being an assistant, especially when you have just been puffed up for four years with the idea that your thoughts are illuminating to an unprecedented degree, the importance of your mind’s work irrefutably unassailable. It’s a long way to fall to mass mailings and spreadsheets, and my boss understood this. So she dropped by my desk to ask what I was reading (“You’re too young to really appreciate Madame Bovary; it’ll mean more when you’re older.”), and to ask about my personal life. In my three years as an assistant, we got to know each other pretty well, I think, and this all relates to journal writing for the pearl of wisdom she tossed out one day: “journal-writing is therapy for the poor.”

Some might have called her a bit of a snob, but I found her hilarious and likable in a scathing Dorothy Parker-kind-of-way.

She had been poor, at least in gentile way of an art history doctorate student scrimping by in New York at the time when sitting in the nosebleed seats at the ballet cost as much as going to the movies. She would write for pages and pages, she said, and sort things out for the cost of a notebook.

I don’t think writing in a journal is quite the same as therapy, and I do think the one-two punch of journal writing plus therapy can really get you places fast. But we’re not talking about sitting on the couch today; we’re talking about carrying around a little notebook. Some might argue that their blogs have replaced their personal writing, but I think they’re so different. After the idea wore off that my first grade crushes (and eighth grade depression and high school malaise) would be of any interest to anyone but me, the writing changes. You’re not writing for art or for laughs–you’re just writing to sort your own stuff out, to make sense of what’s happening in your life and in your head. Perhaps most helpful (and most amusing) is the record of it: you can see patterns, recognize triggers for certain behaviors and mood, and suddenly be reminded of the perfect brunch you ate with your beloved nine years ago that certainly would have fallen through the holes of memory.

And there is nothing more exciting, more like turning the page on a new chapter of your life when you begin a new notebook. I am deeply in love with this cheerful, colorful one, purchased at Target for the nice price of $3.99 (I’d link, but sadly, you can’t buy them online). Do you still write in a journal? Do you think it can help you make sense of the chaos of life? Do you think this sounds like juvenile stuff? Or did you fall back into journal-writing with something you tried as an adult, like Morning Pages?

In our house, we keep time capsules. It’s our way of dealing with life’s most excruciating moments. So, whenever things get really bad and unbearable, we sit down and right about three things: 1) what we’re unhappy about now, 2) what we’re grateful for in spite of the bad stuff and 3) what we hope for in the next twelve months. Then we seal the envelope and write on the outside in big cautionary letters, “Not to be opened before [the date 12 months hence].”

We’ve been writing time capsules since December of 2004, a cold winter when we felt desperate: I had just moved to New York. I was achingly lonely, afraid of my boss, so terrified of screwing up at work that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I missed my friends from college, I had $40 a week to spend on things other than groceries, and my boyfriend lived far away in New Jersey, his car having just sputtered to its final death, steam pouring out of its hood on a dark country road.

That first time capsule always makes us laugh when we read it now. The center of our disappointed world was that broken-down Bronco. But Sebastian would soon move 10 blocks south of me in Brooklyn, and I would grow to deeply admire my boss and even make a friend or two. I sound so very young and unsure of myself, and reading it makes me grateful for the aging process, despite these new fine lines I’ve noticed at the corner of my eyes. The time capsule is like a snapshot of exactly where you are in a moment in time, like those treasured old photographs of your parents, picnicking by a river and still so in love.

We recently split the seal on a time capsule from this time last year, and the picture was grim: I didn’t know where my next paycheck was coming from, I sounded untethered and uninspired. What struck me most of all was the sad, mournful timbre to the time capsule: I sounded lonely.

I got an email from a new-ish friend a few weeks ago. For the past year we’ve been getting to know each other over oysters and Monday morning emails. She was counting her blessings, she said, and thanking me for my part in hers. I’m embarrassed to say that her thank you reminded me of just how many people have played a part in my being in a much happier, hopeful place this year. I’ve got a lot of thanking to do.

What I needed in 2004 and this time last year was a community. I needed a circle of women to talk my head off with, who would help me see things from a different perspective, introduce me to new writers and new ideas, friends who would listen to my tales of woe and then make me laugh about them. But these things take time to develop, especially if you’ve got sky-high expectations for what community and friendship should feel like. Six years after moving to New York and starting my grown-up life, that community is clicking into place in a way that makes me feel so different about my life.

We forget to tell our friends how much they mean to us. It feels cheesy and florid and overwrought. So we wait until we’ve had too much to drink or someone’s getting married to let it all pour out in an urgent outpouring. The people in my life don’t need scented soaps and gift certificates: they need to be thanked. You’re first.

I love this space, not because I hold forth and blab about cookies and cocktails, but because of the community here. It’s like––to speak in television terms––the Peach Pit or the Double R Diner. I always know someone’s going to be sitting at the counter, ready to bust out with something pithy, wise, or funny. It’s really the best, and something I thank my lucky stars for.

Here’s wishing you all a relaxed, love-and-eggnog-filled holiday, with lots of pajamas, good food, winter walks, and so much laughing your belly aches.

And thank you.

To people who are very actively involved in helping people who have less year round, the sudden holiday emphasis on reaching out to those in need is, I bet, obnoxious. I’m sorry to say I’m not one of the year-round do-gooders, and I’d wager that I’m not the only one who wishes she had a giving tradition that was a regular part of her life. But I’ve felt overwhelmed by the options. Sometimes, it’s hard to know who to help.

I assisted a yoga class at a middle school for autistic kids for awhile. I went through the application and background check to be a Girl Scout volunteer and then they never called me. (If it were appropriate to put a frowny face emoticon here, I would.) Should we sign up to help at a soup kitchen, become a Big Sister, drop in sporadically at a senior center, walk dogs at a shelter? What form of volunteering will best fit into our schedules and feel like the best use of our time and talents? The answer is probably that we should just do something, anything. But I think many of us are so eager to feel that we are making a difference––in a way that resonates with us with meaning––that we’re hesitant to just sign up for anything. If we’re going to make a commitment to something, we want it to be the right thing.

I’ve bopped from this to that, food pantries and animal shelters, but in the past year I realized the best way for me to give back would be continuing the biggest help I ever got. In those tender pre-adolescent and teenage years, there was a lot of tumult in my life, a lot of change, a lot of unpredictability. But there were also a lot of teachers and babysitters and one particularly awesome Big Sister along the way who taught me, without being cheesy or overt about it, that who I was was awesome, that I could be and do anything I imagined, that there was a wide world out there for me to adventure in.

I talked earlier about my word for 2011 being full. Articulate what you want, and man, it has a way of just flooding in. I’ve been working harder, writing more, cooking more, seeing my friends in ways that feels so good. All that is great, perfect even, but there’s one more thing that needs to fall into place for my sense of fullness in the new year: the right tradition of giving.

How do you guys give back in your lives, in ways both organized and unstructured? What has it brought into your life or changed about your perspective? And do any of you share that feeling of wanting to give, but not knowing what’s the best thing for you?

Photo: Longfellow quote letterpress card by Etsy seller letterary press

My second grade teacher, Mrs. Shoemaker (yes, her real name, and she lived in an ivy-covered Tudor cottage across the street from the elementary school), kept an advent calendar near her reading chair. There, we sat on the floor in a circle around her feet to hear our daily installment of Charlotte’s Web and count down the days to Christmas, one piece of sweet milk chocolate at a time. As the cardboard windows popped open and emptied, we got closer to that morning when I’d find Care Bears in front of the fireplace and spend days playing behind the Christmas tree with my My Little Ponies.

Even though it was totally inappropriate for her to talk about Bible stories in public school and call on the one girl who didn’t have her hand raised (me) when she asked who the Angel Gabriel was (I’m still mad about that), I loved that advent calendar in the back of the room. Since then, unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to mark the days leading up to the holiday. Meaning that the entire wind-up––cheerful and bright though it is––bleeds together. Is it December 13 or 21? Who knows?

So when a friend suggested I join the 12 Days of Mindfulness group on Facebook, I was pretty excited. I’d like to mark the days, holiday or no, not with high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened drugstore chocolate, but with a little more attention. The countdown begins today with a call to simply notice where you are: to take a moment to be mindful of the sights, smells, and details around you.

Let me tell you: I’m listening to the jazzy sounds of Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. I’ve got a plaid blanket wrapped around my shoulders and an indefatigable sore throat. There’s a mason jar filled with holly branches on the table and some sadly neglected, on-their-deathbed plants on the floor that I just brought in from the fire escape last night.  The Christmas tree lights are on, and there’s a someone-recently-cooked-with-garlic smell hanging in the air. It is a cozy late morning in December, I am 28, and I have a cold. I’m so grateful for all of it.

Well, maybe not the nearly-dead plants and the sniffles, but still. I hope we all find time in the days ahead to slow down and pay attention to the details in our lives. Good or bad, they’re ours, and there’s something awfully nice about that.

Photo: advent calendar available on Etsy