Mirror/lines

I've begun noticing in earnest the lines around my eyes. Before, spotting them was a sign: of fatigue, of dehydration, of too many martinis, too much dancing. After a power nap, a Gatorade, they dissolved. Now they're permanent; part of the angles of my face. They out me as a 30-something. They, more than any other part of my body, remind me that time moves quickly. That time is running out. I have fallen in love with them.

In the mornings I take baby girl around the apartment to say hello to each room. Hello, kitchen. Hello, living room. Hello, office. Hello, daddy's books, and mommy's, and hello to g-mom, my baby's late great grandmother, her laughing face in a frame on a shelf. Our final stop is always the hallway mirror, where we say hello to the pretty baby and her mommy.

Looking in a mirror while I hold my baby is when I feel most like a parent, when it hits me that I have done this Thing that cannot be undone. I have built a person. We look back at ourselves and smile. The weight of her sits in the crook of my neck, in my elbow, while we make silly faces and nuzzle each other like horses, like puppies, her body still warm from sleep.

In that mirror where I stick my tongue out at my baby I spot those lines around my eyes and wait for that sinking feeling, the one where I feel bad about getting older, about not using enough eye cream, about being a feminist who cares whether I have lines.

Today that feeling didn't come. Instead, I smiled at my lines. Like my baby, they're mine. I built those, too.

On Instagram, later, I scrolled past a photo of a celebrity, an actress my age. She has those lines and she is radiant, with her white hair and red lips and floundering career. So what. She has lines, and so do I, and you probably do too, and lines means we're living. Lines mean we've laughed more often than not.

The privilege of reading

Last night we put our baby in her crib for the first time. She cried for five minutes and then dropped right off to sleep. We thought we got off easy, but then she woke up an hour later, cried for 38 minutes* (yes, we counted), and then seemed to look directly at the monitor to give us a Look. After a few minutes, she closed her eyes and slept. She slept from 9pm to 5:45am straight, which means--if this trend continues--my husband and I have been given the gift of time.

With all that glorious time, I started thinking about what I should do with it. Not surprisingly, one of the first things that I had to set aside when I had a baby was reading. I knew it was a temporary break, but it was a break nonetheless. (I keep joking that I'm mostly excited about going back to work in February because I'll have an hour of commute time...think of all I can read during that hour!) And I miss those worlds I used to visit. I miss the artfully arranged words, the universal truths, the racing action.

We all know books are a privilege, of course, and entire organizations are dedicated to helping underserved kids snatch some scraps of that privilege. (Like First Book, and Reach Out and Read, and Reading is Fundamental, in case you've got out your checkbook for end-of-year donations). But I started thinking about how reading itself is a privilege. Because, for most people, being able to read for pleasure means you have leisure time. It means you're not working a second or third job during your off hours; it means you're not taking care of someone or something. There might be chores to do or errands to run, but if you're reading, chances are they're not urgent.

I'm staying in this New Year's Eve. My husband and I will put our gorgeous baby to bed and then have a crab cake feast, shipped from Maryland, and finally open that mead we bought on our honeymoon. My sister will be stopping by on her way to a party to lend me her ereader, which is shored up with books she's assured me I'll love. And while I don't know when or if I'll ever get to all of them, I know I will have some time in 2015 to read some things for pleasure. And for that I am so, so grateful.

Happy New Year--I hope it's filled with things you're grateful for too, whether it's books or time or perfect babies or something else entirely.

* We practiced a version of sleep training recommended by our pediatrician. 

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My year in books (2014)

Ah, books. I remember those...I think. So I began logging the books I've read last year and, amazingly, stuck with it this year, too. That's the good news! The bad news is, since having a baby in October, I have read exactly one book (and, cough, I haven't even finished it yet). So when I began tallying this year's booklist I expected it to be much shorter than last year's, which clocked in at 34. But surprise! I hit 33 books this year!

Another interesting thing about this year was the Amazon issue. I mostly read on a Kindle and stopped purchasing ebooks from Amazon in the spring due to their shady activities with publishers. That changed my reading plans quite a bit! So I got a library card and made do, but there are definitely books on this list that might not have otherwise been on it had the Amazon shenanigans not happened.

Anyway, here's the breakdown: 11 Adult titles, 13 Young Adult titles, 5 Middle Grade titles, and 3 nonfiction titles. Here's the full list:

After the Red Rain, Barry Lyga, Peter Facinelli, and Rob DeFranco

Shug, Jenny Han

Counting by 7s, Holly Goldberg Sloan

A Snicker of Magic, Natalie Lloyd

Gutbliss, Dr. Robynne Chutkan

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

We Were Liars, E. Lockhart

Expecting Better, Emily Oster

Blythewood, Carol Goodman

The Last Summer of the Camperdowns, Elizabeth Kelly

Second Chance Summer, Morgan Matson

Likeable Business, Dave Kerpen, Theresa Braun, Valerie Pritchard

Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham

Seating Arrangements, Maggie Shipstead

Family Tree series, #2 & #3, Ann M. Martin

Astonish Me, Maggie Shipstead

To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Jenny Han

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E Lockhart

Dramarama, E. Lockhart

Confessions of a Not It Girl, Melissa Kantor

Witches of East End sequel, Melissa de la Cruz

[a lot of false starts with library books, which I'm not counting]

The Fever, Megan Abbot

The Vacationers, Emma Straub

Going Bovine, Libba Bray

I Hunt Killers 3: Blood of my Blood, Barry Lyga

Reconstructing Amelia, Kimberly McCreight

Friendship, Emily Gould

The Secret Life of Addison Stone, Adele Griffin

All the Summer Girls, Meg Donohue

Some standouts of the year: The Poisonwood Bible, Astonish Me (I read it twice, back to back, I loved it so much!), The Last Summer of the Camperdowns, and We Were Liars. I was also in love with the Family Tree series (I love Ann M. Martin so hard) and really enjoyed the Veronica Mars book, too. And, a big shout out to Expecting Better by Emily Oster for helping me survive pregnancy.

Anyway. I miss reading. Someday, I'll do it again!

On being thankful

A month ago I had a baby*. It's hard to get out of the house with a newborn, but when we do, the world feels more vibrant, brighter than I remember it being before the baby's arrival. The first time I left, I was shocked by what I saw -- there were people, and they were doing things, and there were coffee shops and drugstores and cars and I couldn't believe the world hadn't stopped for us. Anyway, there are lots of stories I could tell about the past month, but I'm inspired by Libba Bray's post on kindness today.

Real talk: the first week after giving birth is brutal. In retrospect, I feel like I was in shock, in the medical sense. I was in physical pain, which also doesn't help, and I hadn't had a proper night's sleep in four days (since two nights before going into labor), so I was exhausted and terrifyingly resigned to the fact that I would be more exhausted as the days went on. Hormones were (are) crashing into every part of me, leaving me feeling like an alien in my own body. I am only just now beginning to feel like parts of myself have returned, commingling with all the new parts.

And of course, most pressingly, there was this...creature I had to take care of. This beautiful, fragile stranger that needed things from me. And I had no idea how to provide most of those things.

And this is where kindness matters. Because so many people have been so kind that many days, my tears are tears of gratitude. There are too many acts of kindness to list here, but most of them were simple, easy things that made all the difference. An old friend from childhood, for example, sent me an email that, quite frankly, saved my sanity. It was out of the blue (we don't email much) but it came at the perfect time and was exactly what I needed to hear. Other friends dropped off baby things they no longer needed; almost daily, gifts arrived. People texted and messaged with offers of help and words of advice, and people visited for just the right amount of time.

Next week is Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday, but also, how is it Thanksgiving already?) and as I raise my glass at a gorgeous meal, I'll be acknowledging the kindness of family and friends (and, sometimes, perfect strangers) who have helped me. Among many other things, the first few weeks of having a newborn are a lesson in accepting and asking for support, and finding grace somewhere in the messy whirlwind of the day.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

* Baby's online code name is Leia. As in Princess. (My husband is a Star Wars fan. I've seen it once, at his urging.) If I reference Leia in future posts, I'm talking about my daughter. 

Boo

When October comes I think about witches. Okay, really, I think about witches all the time, practically. But October feels like the only appropriate month to talk about them out loud, to hang their likenesses in our living rooms, to show off the warts on the ends of our own noses. I spend the month reading witchy stories (currently: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane; on deck: The Penguin Book of Witches) and Netflixing witchy movies and thinking about that witch tattoo I've been wanting for years.

Maybe what I love most about witches is the fact that, this time of year, they're everywhere, despite people's efforts to stamp them out for so many centuries now.

In my neighborhood, signs of Halloween are just beginning to peep forth the way flowers bud in the spring: first you spot one, then two, then you blink and the whole ground is covered with them. It started with a single brownstone stretching out fake spiderwebs across its front stoop; now, every third house has its own spiderwebs, and the fresh fruit stands at the bodegas have been replaced with pumpkins and gourds, and we all just seem to be waiting for the ghosts, the monsters, the magic to appear.

I'm waiting for lots of things these days--namely, my labor to begin. As much as I love Halloween, I don't want a Halloween baby, and as I wind down at work this week I find myself Googling "how to induce labor." Apparently there's a restaurant nearby that's famous for its baked ziti, said to be just the key for women past their due dates. (Let's hope it doesn't have meat in it, because I plan on trying it next week!)

I know this is all silly: the baby will come when she comes, no matter how much delicious Italian food I consume; the shining, brief focus on witches won't spur many people to consider their history, their tragedy.

But I'll still scour Google while watching Practical Magic.

Summer reading, or not

Beach reading is the best. I usually plan my beach reading weeks -- months! -- in advance, curating what I hope will be the perfect books to complement my summer days. This summer, though, I didn't. Partly that's due to Amazon. Because of their business practices (read more here), I stopped purchasing from Amazon sometime in the early spring. And considering I was exclusively reading from my Kindle, that means my book habits have changed significantly.

Basically, I find it difficult to actually access the books I want to read now. (The New York Public Library has been helpful for older e-titles, and I've been reading more print books than I have in years. Also, lots of magazines!) So when I went to the beach for a week in July, I didn't bring any books with me and decided instead that I would read whatever I could get my hands on -- leftover books found at the rental house, borrowed titles from my friends, etc.

I wrote about my week without books here on Medium.

August is restless

These days I lack the long-term focus to watch movies. An hour-long drama pushes my limits; halfway through I think "What was I just doing?" which turns into "Is it me, or is this show not terribly interesting?" It's me. Right now, it's always me.

Even reading books takes up more concentration than I can sometimes handle; on the F train I catch myself re-reading the same page again and again, forcing myself to process the words, feeling them, recognizing them, but somehow not understanding them, until finally I arrive at my stop and join the crowd going up the often-broken escalator.

August is restless for me but it's also cool, transformative, unlike any other month I've experienced. This year, August mornings are autumnal. I walk down Lafayette Street and notice the shadows are longer. The sun is always moving but somehow we never really see it until August is almost over, when it's too late to remember to do anything about it.

So August moves on and with it the summer and the world and the news. Too much news. Back in the early aughts when the Iraq war first began I had a coworker who would come into the office bleary-eyed and late, behind on deadlines. "I just can't stop watching war coverage," she would say. That's how I feel this week. I check the #ferguson stream constantly; I stew, I cry, I seethe. I can't focus on much, but I can focus on that hashtag, I guess.

There is nothing for me to do but breathe through it all: the restlessness, the anger, the fear, the fatigue. The time passing. The future. I take so many deep breaths, so many sighs, that people ask me if I'm okay, what's wrong, why are you sighing. But it's just the way I try to recenter myself. It's just me, getting through the month and the world the only way I know how.

At the beach

On Tuesday it stormed, bursts of rain landing on the dirty carpets, so strong we had to close the windows. We watched "Sweet Home Alabama" and made cocktails (mocktails for me) and squeezed onto the L-shaped couch, the perfect size for the six of us. This year's house liked to sway in the wind, even when there was very little of it--it's on stilts, it's normal, we're told--and as we rocked I was surprised at how many lines from the film I could quote from memory. I didn't think I'd seen it that often.

On our last full day I lay in bed a while, listening. There was a sharp breeze coming in the window next to me, a perfect beach wind, the kind you don't get on the mainland. Everyone else was up but they left me alone in my room and I felt that wind and thought about how the island is in my bones and blood, my genealogy. It's in my skin, too. Literally. On my first day of vacation I got two splinters in my palm from the deck chair; one so tiny I left it, hoping it'd work its way out. Ten days later it's still here, a beauty mark reminder of my vacation. A freckle, embedded.

One night after dinner my friends went to the local bar, an old favorite, but at six months pregnant I knew the bar stools would hurt so I visited my grandmother on her front porch; the house I grew up in, watching that special kind of island darkness fall over us. New York is never dark. I drink it in. Dark is important sometimes.

We rocked in our chairs and just watched. Earlier this summer we unearthed boxes of old photos in the attic and went through them, Instagramming the best ones, finding a sense of unexpected pride in my grandmother in her bathing suit, tan long legs, hair perfectly waved over her eyebrow. My family; the faces I'll never know but that kind of look like me. For every sepia woman we didn't recognize my grandmother would say, "Oh, that was probably one of my brother's girlfriends. He had a lot of them." And we would laugh and I would secretly be glad, because that's like my own brother, a guy who is never without a serious relationship; the antithesis of me before slipping into a marriage I now can't imagine my life without.

Later, when my friends were still at the bar but it was time for me to go, my mom drove me back to my rental. We took a detour to the south end of the island, looking through the knotty pines at the abandoned train station, dark and obviously haunted, and at her new favorite house on the bay, the one that seems too big for its lot. The streets there are wide, empty. Quiet.

This is what I always forget about when I'm not here: the space. There's so much of it for the taking.

Riding trains while pregnant

I decided once I popped and became visibly pregnant to keep a log about how often people offered me a seat on the subway, and what their demographics were. It's been interesting from a sociological perspective -- mostly women do it, but there are many who don't, and there have been some very kind men, too. But last night I had the most awkward train experience, the kind that made me flush purple, tears springing to my eyes.

It was crowded and there were no seats, so I grabbed a handle and opened my book. The thing about being visibly pregnant on a train is that it's blindingly obvious when people see your bump but pretend they didn't. It happens every day. The three folks seated in front of me very much saw my bump. In response, the young woman put on her sunglasses; the cute hipster wearing headphones rested his head back and closed his eyes, and the weird guy directly in front of me returned to staring off into nothingness.

No big. I rode six stops standing until the weird guy got off and I was able to snag his seat.

As soon as I sat down, though, a woman my age who had been standing next to me leaned over me.

"Did anyone offer you a seat?" She said. I told her no, and she was off and running, talking about how rude people are. I concurred but also shrugged and told her most people don't offer seats (based on my experience, about 1/3 of the time people do, although some weeks it's more). She continued, getting really worked up, and I started to flush. Pregnancy does weird things and lately I've been flushing when any attention is on me, and this felt like a spotlight shining down. See, the train had emptied quite a bit by this point, and people were listening.

Another woman jumped in. She'd apparently been keeping track too, and showed us her phone as proof, where she was penning a text to a friend about how she was watching a train full of people ignore the pregnant woman. She didn't want to say anything, she explained, because once when she was hugely pregnant and no one offered her a seat, a stranger began yelling at everyone on her behalf (unprompted) and nearly caused a fight.

I felt my flush travel and thicken, a snake wrapping around my neck.

They were super nice women and I'd like to get a drink with them, post-baby. But it was also awkward. I was sandwiched between two of the people we were all accusing of being rude. And I was pretty sure they were listening.

And then they confirmed it. A few minutes later, when the women had found their own seats across the way, the hipster with the headphones took them off and said lowly to me, in his British accent, "I'm really sorry. I didn't realize that's what I was supposed to do."

Which, first of all, I'm going to call a little BS on that one. But secondly, while that was very nice of him to acknowledge that, it put me in an uncomfortable position. (And I am already uncomfortable enough, thanks.) Because now I had to accept his apology and pretend it was no big deal, which felt almost like a manipulation, even though I am sure he was being sincere. What he did (or didn't do) isn't a big deal on a micro level, but it is kind of a big deal on a macro level.

People should offer seats to pregnant women. This is not groundbreaking. And yet when I googled this looking for news stories (like this one about the experiment on the London tube) I read a lot of comments from people saying they shouldn't have to give up their seats because, and I quote from a recent news article out of a San Francisco newspaper, "those ladies got themselves pregnant and they should live with their choices." (Oh, America! Never Please change.)

About four months into my pregnancy I passed out on the subway. I was on my way to a yoga class and stood at the pole (there were no seats, and I wasn't really visibly pregnant yet, unless you squinted) and next thing I knew I was keeled over, with people holding my arms and pushing water at me. I was so dazed that my first words when I came to (after "what happened?") were "Oh, I'm pregnant." The people who were helping me tsked. "You should have asked for a seat!" they said.

I guess I just feel like we shouldn't have to ask.

I know we are all tired and we've all had long days and there are very valid yet invisible reasons why some people can't and won't offer their seat. I don't know their lives. Maybe the guy whose seat I eventually got last night had been working on his feet for 12 hours straight and had the flu and really needed to rest. Maybe the girl with the sunglasses who wasn't even doing anything to keep herself occupied (I mean, if you have a seat, at least make use of it, for crying out loud) had her reasons.

But it would be nice if we all, collectively, opened our eyes and really saw what was in front of us now and then, and took action to make it better. When my husband had a broken foot and was on crutches, he still had to pointedly ask people if he could take their seat. Earlier this week I watched an elderly lady stand shakily in the middle of the train car and hold on for dear life. No one offered her their seat. Not even me, because I too didn't have one.

So, I don't know. Maybe I'm just being selfish because it's exhausting standing on a subway car when there's a tiny person kicking at you from the inside and your feet are swollen. But it's more likely that most of us are just so out of tune with the people and environment around us. Or, at worst, that most of us just don't care. But it would be nice if everyone, just once, reached out to someone pregnant, or elderly, or someone who's in a foot cast or with a crying kid or who looks more exhausted than we feel, and offered them something we have that we don't necessarily need. Like a seat.

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The hypocritcal writer explains

A gorgeous friend of mine, an incredibly talented writer, just texted me to ask for advice on how to write what she really wants to write. "Should I pretend I'm writing a letter to my niece?" she asked, "What should be my homework? Can you direct me?" This time it's a book about living life while in tremendous pain. I have no doubts that whatever she writes will be lyrical, intense, soul-searching, important. But this is a common occurrence: people ask me for advice on writing. They want to know the tricks, the secret formula. I wish I knew it, if one exists. Perhaps it's something like one part grit, two parts free time (ha), one part outline, 17 parts passion.

I texted her back: "Remember there is no secret formula. Put your ass in a chair and write."

The thing is, I am such a hypocrite.

These past few weeks and months have been hectic; we just moved into a new place, and with it came the requisite stressors, compounded by my being in my fifth month of pregnancy, finishing up two semesters of adjuncting while also working my full-time day job...the list goes on. (Yes, we all suffer from busy syndrome. Sorry.)

I was in Florida in March to visit family, a lovely uncle who is now paralyzed after a stroke and massive heart attack, and while there had my first real writing inspiration in months. I started something new on my Notes app in my hotel room at 5am; I thought I'd come home, invigorated, and burst out a chapter book in a month. Ha, I say again. Instead I scribbled some notes in a blank Scrivener page a couple of times, and then took to the couch, napping before and after work and twice on weekends, bone-tired in a way I didn't realize pregnancy could cause. Grading papers for class took all my strength. Answering simple emails became my Everest. With pregnancy, everything takes twice as much energy, which would be okay if not for the feeling that I had only about half the energy per day that I used to. (I'm no mathematician, but that means I was doing a lot less than I used to.)

So now it's June, and I haven't looked at my work-in-progress in literally nearly two months. And my dear friend is asking me for writing advice, and I'm giving it, like I am some kind of expert.

My lesson here, a tough one, is that taking a break is okay. I am allowed to form a fortress of pillows around my body and lay down for hours at a time when I come home from work; it's okay for me to turn down invitations for Saturday nights because I can't imagine putting on clothes that aren't yoga pants. It's okay, even, to stop writing for a while, to be worried that all my creative energy is now circulating elsewhere and then to let go of that worry, because there is literally nothing I can do about it. This is who I am right now: someone who is tired, who is just trying to get through my days, who is excited and terrified and emotional and snappy and only occasionally able to see through the fog that has fallen over me like a dark curtain.

I've only just now forgiven myself for that.

Someone else I know just wrote about paring back her commitments for the summer to give herself a break; I was doing the same, subconsciously, but now I'm embracing it. Like Ross said: writing and I, WE WERE ON A BREAK. This is a time of transition, of self-care. I'm going to embrace it--or at least, not be angry at myself for it.

And I'm going to get back to writing. I will. It just might not happen this month.

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The house of...something

Last spring an unexpected offer had me teaching two classes this past semester, both for graduate students at NYU. It's something I never thought I'd do -- teach -- especially when I work full-time, sometimes more than full-time, at a job that keeps me engaged and checking my social platforms at midnight. (And especially considering I don't have, and don't want, a graduate degree.) I may have danced around with glee after I turned in my grades this week, but there's lots I'll miss about teaching. But oh, how nice it feels to have free weekends and Wednesday nights again. Just in time, too; next week we move into our new place, which means right now our apartment is part mess, part chaos, with boxes blocking the TV and random scraps of paper littering our floors. No one likes moving, of course, but we Cancers despise it most; my home is important to me, and a sense of unease has overtaken me when I walk in. It's temporary, but it's there.

All my books are packed (thanks, mom) and I have put myself on an ebook-buying hold, which means I'm currently reading a tattered old copy of The House of Mirth, a favorite. Or at least, I thought it was a favorite; I'm finding it tough to get through, but that's partly because the state of my mind these days is less than focused. It feels like a harkening back, though, like a visit to a memory; a piece of the familiar when everything else is changing. I'll take it.

Dancing shoes

I'm reading a book set partly in the ballet world (Astonish Me, Maggie Shipshead) and eavesdropping on three young men, dancers too, on the A train tonight, talking about how their new choreographer actually respects them, how this dance is different from the others before it. How this choreographer saved them from walking out that day, from quitting dance altogether. Dancing is a commitment. If you ask me I'll tell you I was a dancer as a kid, but as an adult it's pretty clear that what I did back then wasn't dance, it was mime. Routines, memorized. Sometimes when the lights were just right, bouncing off the sequins dangling from our headbands, it was more than that, maybe, but only sometimes. At my tiny dancing school in New Jersey in the 1980s, dance was a jazz warm-up set to Janet Jackson; a series of back walkovers set to (still inexplicably) an old, slow, sad song called "Send in the Clowns." Dance was French braids backstage, blue eyeshadow, long rides in our minivan, clouds of hairspray. Dance was missing out on school field trips to Ellis Island because there was an important dance competition in rural Pennsylvania, and we needed the day for travel.

I was a dancer until one day I decided I wasn't, and that was that. Preteen me realized I was never going to be a professional dancer, so why continue? High school me realized I was never going to cheer in college,  so why continue? I suppose that's just who I am; I wake up sometimes and realize something that had been a part of me has broken away in the night. What did dance bring me, I wonder. Besides great memories and a flair for being onstage, what did all those years do for me? So what that I still perform tap routines when no one's looking? Was it worth it?

I've still never been to Ellis Island, even though I've lived in New York for years, and the answer is still yes, will always be yes.

A Willa Cather winter

It's been a long winter, says everyone in the US. Me too. Despite my insisting for years that winter is my favorite season, that I crave the cold and dark, I'm leaving it behind this time. No more winter love from me. This winter has been a season of mismanaged expectations. Things I thought would happen never did; things I thought would take longer happened right away. A few times I gave up on things I'd long counted on, only to have them snap open by themselves in the middle of the night like haunted books.

It feels like a Willa Cather winter. If you read My Antonia, you know what I'm talking about: a season you might not survive. Some nights I pick up her Selected Letters, heaving that brick of a book onto my stomach; it's so uncomfortable to hold when you're used to a tiny Kindle. (How did I manage textbooks back in the day? Are my wrists out of shape?)  Still, I read on, enthralled. I'm struck by her challenges, her gifts; Willa the person, not the author. How her dimples shine through her old photos, how through her old letters I start to think of her as a friend.

I didn't keep any letters from my childhood. These days I don't even save emails; I'm purging things wherever I go, trying to make space for something new. I wonder, what kinds of nonfiction collections will be published in the next hundred years, since no one writes letters anymore? How will our future descendants get to know us? How will they know what our winters were like?

Teenage fandom

I just saw a selfie some fans took at the "Divergent" premiere and got a serious pang of jealousy. I have never read Divergent and don't plan on seeing the film, so this is not about Divergent, but it's about fandom, and more specifically, teenage fandom. Here's where I'm going with this: a lot of people read and loved Divergent. And just like with Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and Twilight, they get to see every part of its journey, from being something a friend told them about in geometry to being a household name that people get tattooed on themselves. From being a cool book you and your friends read to being a real brand, with actual merchandise.

I wish I had had that as a kid. I'm trying to imagine what it must be like, at that formative age, to have something you love become so...big. When it's already all-consuming in your head and then it turns an all-consuming love of the larger world around you, I just can't even picture it. It must be like what my first Tori Amos concerts felt like, magnified by a billion.I would have passed out if something I love(d) as much as Tori was mainstream the way young adult literature is these days. Do you all even know how cool that is? How new? How lucky you are? *now get off my lawn*

Sometimes I worry I picked the wrong time to be a teenager. Teens in the eighties had malls (and I am sorry/not sorry to see their mall culture eroding), and teens in the aughts had/have the Internet, but what did we nineties teens have, apart from some flannel and Spice Girls? Was there even a defining book of my teenage generation?

Since there's not, I'm thinking of the ones I wish could be it. Like the Sunset Island series. No, wait! It would be the entire Christopher Pike oeuvre. In fact, here it is; I'm declaring it now. Dear fellow peers who are couched on the border between Generations X and Y, Christopher Pike was our Divergent, our Hunger Games. (It wasn't our Harry, because let's be real, nothing can compare to the Harry phenomenon.)

Now. Where's my movie premiere? (I'll settle for a tee shirt.)

(Also, I had no idea Christopher Pike was a pseudonym!)

Mirror

The first Sylvia Plath poem I ever read was Mirror, and I read it out loud in English class my senior year of high school, sometime during those long days between winter and spring. I don't think I ever stopped reading it. I was dying to get out of high school then. I'd long since quit being captain of the cheerleading team; the vice principal had called me and my sister into his office to make sure we weren't heading down a wrong path -- since obviously quitting something as important as cheerleading is a blazing red flag, a sign that we were about to go out big, burning everything in our path -- and everyone was annoying me, with their fake nostalgia for childhood. Like they weren't desperate to escape our tiny town, too; like they weren't equally terrified the way I was.

So I found Plath, thanks to a teacher who passed away last year. She's the same teacher who introduced me to the New Yorker. She was a gem, that lady.

The year of Plath is also the year I became close with a friend who, despite our drifts, despite the bad turns our friendship occasionally took, is still someone I think of often. She, like Plath, marked me in concrete ways. The two are oddly intertwined in my mind; today, the day of Plath's suicide, is my old friend's birthday. It's like some kind of fate.

I think of Plath as a rite of passage; a book of collected poems, a bell jar, handed down between generations of college women. Maybe my friend is, too -- someone you love even though you've both done wrong, even though you communicate by text only once a year or so. They're both treasures in their own way.

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Maiden, mother, crone

"But look at old women and bear in mind we are another country."  (The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver) This morning I finished reading The Poisonwood Bible (here's the story behind that). It is stunning; the kind of book that changes you. The kind of book that makes you roar with injustice, with hope. It murmurs sentences like the one above, lines that made me cry, on nearly every page.

It should be required reading. Forget Catcher in the Rye; forget my love for The Great Gatsby, for the Whartons of the world. (Sorry, Edith. Love you always.) Make this the title all seniors in high school have to read before graduating.

It's also the kind of book that makes a writer go, well, fudge. I didn't write that. And how can we all go on breathing when there are people writing things like this among us, and we are not revering them as gods?

I've been on a writing break since I finished revisions to a manuscript and sent them off in December. Now I am waiting. The trick to this long, neverending game is knowing that the waiting will creep in and settle down into your pores if you're not careful, turning you into a bottle of impatience, ready to pop.

The trick, also, is wondering if maybe I will be an old woman, my own country, too, before this, this big goal, happens for me. And maybe that's just the train I'm on, carrying a ticket I can't remember buying, but resigning myself to the ride. And maybe I just have to be okay with that, and keep taking day trips to other cities in the meantime.

Mornings

When I wake up in the dark an innate, ancestral rage roars from my bones. It disappears, yes, eventually, and I feel guilty after the roar. I am an adult and should be able to wake up on demand.

This first reaction, a gut one, means that when my alarm went off at 5 this morning I got angry. It's so stupid -- I was angry at the alarm, which is my phone, which despite Siri's responses to my questions doesn't actually have feelings or agency. It must be an evolutionary holdover. Our cave ancestors feared the dark and when they woke up without the sun it was theoretically because of an approaching bear or enemy, maybe an antelope. And so they got angry. And so here we are.

Anyway, at 34 I've learned the trick: hang on until the first light. Fight off the nausea until a hint of dawn breaks through and you're rendered speechless by the possibility of mornings. A whole day lies ahead; a whole life.

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Slow Sundays

My problem with baking is that baking is a science, requiring precision I've always lacked. (I was the girl in advanced Chem who had to ask for extra credit assignments because my labs always exploded.) I've tried baking on -- like sweaters, like formal dresses -- and just as quickly I've flung it over the dressing room door, screaming about it being too tight, too scratchy. I never had any shoes to go with it. And then there is this: I have always been doubtful of anything that turns its nose at my adding an extra pinch of salt.

Slow cookers, though - they let me add anything.

My Sundays lately have been reserved just for this: shopping for carrots, chopping onions as that space behind my eyeballs screams at me (I inevitably end up the opposite of Sylvia Plath, sticking my head in the freezer to clear the tears), tossing raw chicken into slow cookers and topping all of it with spices. So many ingredients that used to be foreign to me, cumin and nutmeg, fresh parsley and cilantro; there's one soup I make that calls for salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder, oregano, and bay leaf, and together they make a gorgeous, muted rainbow that makes me feel like a real chef.

You can make fun of food pics on Instagram, but I like them. I see the pride in between the leaves of lettuce. I'm not a builder of anything physical; my hands are soft and well-lotioned. So I like to look at something I've cooked, something I've created, even if it's only a stew and a crock pot did most of the work, and see a success. Something accomplished on a Sunday.

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My year in books

I once met a girl in high school who kept track of all the books she'd read in a tiny, fat spiral-bound notebook, and I've never forgotten her. (That's a lie, of course; I have no idea her name or how I met her.) Since then, each December I've caught myself remembering some vague promise to keep track of the books I'd read that year. "Oh, that?" I'd think. "Yeah, I was supposed to do that. Oh well."

Oh well indeed. Because guess what, folks? I finally did it. Take that, past self! In January I started a spreadsheet and dutifully tracked every book I read, with two exceptions.*

Pre-2013, I made an effort to read more adult novels this year (for many reasons, none of which anyone else cares about); and I think it shows, especially compared to last year. In total, I read 20 children's books (Young Adult and Middle Grade) and 14 adult, for a grand total of 34 books (again, see exceptions below). I'm pretty proud of that number.

I always like to know what other people read, so if you're interested, here's my list (it's even in order!).

The Princesses of Iowa, M. Molly Backes

Ask the Passengers, AS King

Beautiful Creatures, Margaret Stohl & Kami Garcia

I Hunt Killers (re-read), Barry Lyga

Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple

Stay with Me, Paul Griffin

A Corner of White, Jaclyn Moriarty

Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg

17 & Gone, Nova Ren Suma

Going Vintage, Lindsay Leavitt

Gallagher Girls series, #1-4, Ally Carter

Someday, Someday Maybe, Lauren Graham

September Girls Bennett Madison

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, Matthew Quick

Family Tree #1, Ann Martin

Game, Barry Lyga

The Middlesteins, Jami Attenberg

Sisterland, Curtis Sittenfeld

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Anton DiSclafani

The Engagements, J Courtney Sullivan

A Hundred Summers, Beatriz Williams

The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer

The Cracks in the Kingdom, Jaclyn Moriarty

Austenland, Shannon Hale

Night Film, Marisha Pessl

The Silent Wife, ASA Harrison

Debutante Hill, Lois Duncan

Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers, Lynn Weingarten

And because we are a world of rankings, here are mine:

• My favorite adult reads of the year: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls; A Hundred Summers; The Goldfinch; Where'd You Go, Bernadette.
• My favorite YA: A Corner of White; Eleanor & Park; Game; Stay With Me.
• My favorite MG: Ann M. Martin, whose new series, Family Tree, is just darling.

I'm in the middle of a couple of books already, but they'll count for the 2014 list. (Including another non-fiction title!! It's like I don't even know myself anymore.) I'll definitely keep going with this list -- it made book recommending this year so much easier, and it's super interesting to look back and remember what I've read.

If you've got any recommendations for me, please do leave them here!

*I didn't list all The Baby-sitters Club books I read. This is because a. that's embarrassing and b. they're so short I don't really count them. The other exception is various works-in-progress from my husband and my writing group. (One of which is a massive, thousand-page tome, so please note that if this list looks sparse, it's because I spent all of June immersed in that.)

**In general, please remember I work in children's publishing, but these opinions are my own.

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Solstice

I am taking this all in to hoard for later -- the lights, the songs, the frantic rush, and too the mess of it all, the cold, the long receipts that curl up at the bottom of my purse. I love Christmas time, a love that's so intense it's a little scary, and odder still because I'm not even Christian. But then again I like the pagan parts of it, the way most of what we do today is based in ancient myths, like setting up trees in living rooms as a way of warding off darkness and evil, a remembrance of summer months. (I like this plea to "spare a thought for the Blackheads," a brotherhood of German merchants, who sort of reinvented the burning of spruces at this time of year in the mid-16th century.) (I like too the reminder that everything we do comes from somewhere else, morphed and re-mythologized; it's the closest to honoring tradition I get.) A two-and-a-half hour winter solstice yoga workshop yesterday was like a burning of its own kind. A new start. Fire in our bellies, in our thighs, in our shoulders as we hovered in planks for longer than I'd like. We hung out in goddess pose, we moved, we chanted. I understand finally how ritual can be a binding, can be a call to ancestors. After class our instructor asked us to drop yellow roses into the Hudson, and we did, and the sun was putting on a show, and the Empire State Building saluted back.

I took the long way home after the workshop, after sharing a Witch's Brew beer with my sister, more images of burning; fire everywhere, always. The sun had set and I had nowhere to be, and I got off at my old subway stop and walked through my favorite streets, streets I hadn't visited in a while. More lights; festivity everywhere. When is the last time I didn't have someplace to be? My walk felt like its own rebirth, its own solstice gift, its own stocking stuffer.

December always moves too fast for me, blurry and spinning. I am trying to hold on to it, to remember it, before so many things change. But it has its own mission -- to get us to a new year -- and it's slipping through my hands too quickly, a wave of red and green sparkles in its wake.

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