What being in Texas for Hurricane Sandy has taught me about life

The first thing I did this morning after pulling back the blinds to find not warm ways of sunshine streaming through the window, but light and chill, was check my flight status. It's a silly little game, because those can and do change at any time, but it's what I do, to try to get information, to try to figure out if I'll get home after what's become a two-week Texas trip. Anything I think about being here is tempered by the knowledge that so many have died, crushed or drowned, are without power, soon without gas. I have people who've told me their neighborhood looks like nothing happened, others frantically charging their phones anywhere they can, my pregnant friend without power and not able to contact me too often.

The next site I checked is the MTA, where there aren't so many ominous "Suspended" lines, but the ones I will need to get to my boyfriend are not running. He warned me not to come visit, that I wouldn't like the cold and dark. Surely not, but I don't care. What I've learned this week is that all the stuff that's littering my home, that I think I care about, is pointless. I can live out of a suitcase. I can earn a living from my laptop.

I've had some amazing discussions about just that, about this living I'm earning, or not earning, about whether I undervalue myself, don't truly believe I'm worth it. We've talked about Manisha Thakor and Money Zen and next on my to read list is Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want. I've found a new cafe, one with free coffee refills and delicious frittatas and friendly customers and staff to park myself at to work, but I've been forcing myself to ask some deeper questions: why do this at all? What's the next level? Why do I talk myself out of so many goals? It's National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo (want inspiration instead of my doom and gloom? Multiple NaNo winner Marianne Kirby has it in spades!) and every time I contemplate it, it's like fear thickens in my blood, tells me stop, you won't make it, you suck, you failed once so of course you'll fail again. It tells me so many things, so loudly, so repeatedly, I have trouble hearing any other voices, but the peace and quiet and warmth here in Texas have helped with that. On the opposite end of my crazybrain, I have 2 novel ideas and 1 novella idea, plus an actual contract for a short story collection I should be making my number one most urgent priority.

Yesterday I worked, hard. Instead of waiting for Very Cool Travel Site to get back to me, I submitted the piece to Huffington Post. I got almost done with an anthology that I've been almost done with for a while. I wrote a short story. I cupcake blogged. I learned that my bank has a kickass app for depositing checks from your phone. I brainstormed. I read Grace Coddington's amazing memoir, making me feel better about lugging the giant galley in my suitcases. I surrendered any semblance of control and any travel savvy I ever thought I had. I learned not to travel broke, and it's made me ask myself some hard but necessary questions as I go forward, as I embrace what is possible, as I figure out whether this is all just a hobby or something I can sustain. It's not something I can answer in a day or a week, but I am grateful to have been safe and warm and cared about this week, to have been given the chance to ask myself those questions, and plenty of other ones, and know that I have so much more growing up to do, no matter what my age is.

How to open a book, Jackie Under My Skin edition

There's a chapter called "How to Open" in Priscilla Long's excellent (and that is an understatement of a word, it's a must-read) The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. I'm in high observation mode, in part because I'm determined to succeed at NaNoWriMo, but more because I'm determined to succeed at life and meet many goals that are as yet unrealized. So I couldn't help but be awed by this first paragraph, and page, quoted below, of Wayne Koestenbaum's Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon, from the chapter "Jackie's Death."

I'm still pondering "tranced apostrophe," and while I don't know precisely what it means, the words are beautiful to me, and the reverence for Jackie, the tension between the woman and the myth, is something I’m fascinated by. This is probably my third time picking up this book, which happens often with the amount of books I own and the rate at which I acquire them. I'm trying to be more studious and learn from what I'm reading, and savor the time to read at will (and push myself with my writing too). (Thanks to Veerublog for the block quote help for this tech simpleton.)

I began to write about the allure of icon Jackie in May 1993, while the real Jacqueline Onassis was alive and well. I addressed my sentences toward her, in tranced apostrophe: Dear Jackie, for a long time I have wanted to tell you about your frequent appearances in my dreams. I had a mad notion that she would read my book and understand my desire; that she would acknowledge the legitimacy of public curiosity; that we might become friends. It was a hopeless quest, doomed to fail. Brashly, I wanted to effect a truce between Jacqueline Onassis and icon Jackie. I wanted to find—to liberate—my "inner Jackie"; somewhere in my body was trapped a mimic Jackie O, and I wanted to afford her some room to breathe. But my plans to scale Mount Jackie—to give voice to Jackie's charisma—were foiled. Her cancer was announced; with sad suddenness, she died. I can't address Jacqueline Onassis anymore. But icon Jackie remains, a baffling array of images still requiring interpretation—not because interpretation is a panacea for loss, but because Jackie darkly captivates, and captivation fumbles for a foothold in speech. Dare I find words for why Jackie mesmerizes? Even while Jacqueline Onassis was alive, icon Jackie had a life of her own, obeying comic-book laws; we could no more explain the icon than we could avert war, bewitch our neighbors, or reverse time.

More on Jackie Under My Skin:

The New York Times review:

Initially, the results are amusing: Mr. Koestenbaum possesses a sharp and nimble wit, and his first few chapters seem like both a playful exercise in cultural commentary and a campy, tongue-in-cheek send-up of deconstructive pedantry. As the book progresses, however, the reader begins to suspect that Mr. Koestenbaum is actually completely serious about his undertaking, that he really believes he can decipher the hidden meaning of Jackie changing hairdos and clothes. In fact, by the end of the book, he has effectively turned her into a blank slate for his own theorizing, an approach that allows him to completely ignore the facts of her existence. It's this approach that enables him to write such ludicrous sentences as "Doom came to her, in Dallas, and it may have seemed retribution for hubris." Or to ask the reader to think of her father "in the dark night" and "imagine Jackie's love for him, and wonder if he pushed that love too far."

Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum