write me well

  • 2019. For Now, Anyway.

    Eighteen days into 2019 and I’m just now sitting down to write for the first time in what feels like an absolute age – that, my friends, is what a retail Christmas will do to you.  

    This is the first time I’ve parked at Foyles with a pot of tea, post-perusal of the English Middle Ages history section of the store, satisfactorily plonking out several overdue email responses since the ensuing chaos of December’s end. Retail Christmas is always a busy time, but this particular one was full of firsts that only added to the controlled burn: First time managing a flagship store through peak? Check. First time spending Christmas on my own? Check. First time launching end of season sale on Christmas day and then running inventory less than two weeks after NYD? Check and fuck-that-noise check (I mean, not really – I’ve got a dream team that got me through it, and you can only ever learn and improve). 

    Sitting here, though, five days following that last check mark, listening to Hozier and deciding his vibes are my 2019 vibes (has anybody else seen and fallen in love with that oatmeal-based Twitter exchange he had?), I wouldn’t change it. Every box you check off brings you that much closer to what you want your endgame to look like.  

    It does not hurt that I have a pretty clear idea of what the next few months will look like, and the forecast is most excellent. February includes my first trip home since moving here back in March! I’ll get to see several of the lights of my life that give me the brightest and best faith in the world and I won’t have to plug my brain in for fourteen straight days. May will see my first trip to Croatia with a fabulous friend, a week of beaches and books and delightfully one-pieced swimsuits. Dotted in-between, ideally with a bit more planning than last year but cherished regardless, more day trips around the whole of England, maybe even with a few weekend trips thrown in because nothing says living on the edge like a solo mini-break to a village most people would struggle to point out on a map, but damn yo, those castles!  

    It’ll also be the first few months of the UEA Women’s Alumni Network, something I’ve been helping put together for the past eight or so months and launched with a chic and lovely bang this past Tuesday at my store. You don’t realize how deeply energizing and empowering it is spending time with and relating to other women until you have an evening filled to the brim with chats and questions and anecdotes. Plus, as a rather pleasant side effect, it reminded me of just how much I enjoy public speaking. It’s not something I have the occasion to do very often but I genuinely enjoy the thrill of it – even if it was only about a minute and a half. I mean, I realize it’s easy to feel good at anything that only needs to be sustained for a minute and a half, but I’m also not too big to admit I like easy and good.  

    Resolutions on the whole are a bit bullshit – we as a society know that – but can you even call it January if you don’t resolutely overreach and then hate yourself a bit for it less than halfway through the month? Suzy has encouraged me towards the philosophy that the only true resolution is to listen to your body and believe in moderation, and nearly-thirty-year-old-me is quite inclined to agree with her (she writes, feeling smooth, sophisticated, and balanced, two cups of tea and six songs into her Hozier playlist). Yes, I have chosen to test myself in my annual fashion by cutting out my favorite beige foods, but it’s more an exercise in will power than anything else. One of my great glories in life is that I am very happy with who I am, where I am, and that I’m lucky enough to get to present myself to the world, both physically and mentally, in a way that is incredibly satisfying. If there’s anything I’ve truly resolved to do, it’s to be more present and supportive to those that don’t have that luxury. So there that is, 2019. Less new year, new me; more new year, old me with significantly improved friendship, mentorship, and partnership performance. Next year I will focus on trying to make myself sound less like an emotional Volvo.  

    Other things I’m looking forward to: making my new place feel like a home, bookshelf by bookshelf and wall art by wall art; diving head-first into longsword fighting or boxing (…emphasis on the metaphor, ain’t nobody got time for decapitation); making myself a better manager and leader; wearing more mock-necked everything; embracing facial moisturizers and a committed skincare routine; continuing my mission to simplify my wardrobe and only commit to classic, clean, investment pieces; helping motivate and develop those around me; eating more green things; devouring more medieval history than has been healthy since the seventeenth century; and, finally, let’s be honest…probably another tattoo. 

    I’m not so special as to see my writing as any kind of forum, but if you’ve been looking for the place to jot down 2019’s positivities and potential proclivities, and unlike me don’t have roughly thirty-seven blank notebooks to choose from and then immediately regret doing so because handwriting is the WORST whenever you need it not to be, here’s a safe space for them.

    2019’s gonna be a good one.

    (Or, at least, please oh please better than the last trip around the sun, right?)

     

     

     

     

  • History

    Last night Drunk Me did Future Me a favor and spontaneously booked an overdue trip to Oxford for the following morning. (There are worse drunk decisions to make, I’m sure.) The forecast said light rain from 10am through the evening; the reality was a luminous fall day that alternated between broken clouds, bright sunlight, and scattered downpours. In short, your ideal wandering-through-a-thousand-year-old-city fall weather.

    Oxford formed the completion of, shall we call it, the Empress Matilda list. The Empress Matilda list started to form when I first visited the Tower of London back in April and the reality of how close I was to the history I’ve admired from afar for years truly sank in.

    Arundel was the first stop, where Matilda took up the invitation of her friend Adeliza, her step-mother and the former Queen Consort of England, to “come visit” (read: to kick off her bid for the throne in a period of English history that would come to be known as the Anarchy). It was a drizzly, wet spring day, and I narrowly avoided a solid soaking on my way back to the train station that evening. Standing in Arundel Castle was my first experience of sharing steps with one of my historical idols. It dun fucked me up and I LOVED IT. So the Empress Matilda list grew, and Wallingford was next.

    Wallingford Castle was the stronghold of Brian Fitz Count, one of Matilda’s most fast supporters, who ruined himself for no apparent reason other than his passion for her cause (insert courtly romance projections here). Wallingford oversaw the whole of the Thames Valley, bolstered by its vital river crossing, and throughout the Anarchy it remained, through Brian’s zeal, a pro-Empress battlefront. All that’s left today (I’m looking at you, Civil War) is a few scraps of wall and the rolling earthworks upon which the Norman castle originally sat. When I visited Wallingford, it was a high summer day – zero clouds, a thousand rays of sun, and market stalls and ice cream trucks spread from the town square to the riverfront. I stood on a small bridge between the castle meadows and the remnants of the motte and took a 360-degree video, sweating in my shorts and t-shirt and surrounded by the buzz of summer fauna, wondering at the sensation of breathing in the same space as Matilda, as Brian.

    Winchester was next.

    Matilda came close – SO close – to being England’s first ruling queen. Winchester was her moment. It was before she made it to London and the mob chased her out – and it was after her cousin Stephen, the king, had been captured at the epic Battle of Lincoln. Welcomed by Stephen’s own brother, the exceptionally oily Bishop Henry of Winchester, she processed down Winchester Cathedral and was named Lady of the English. She didn’t know that within six months Stephen would be back on the throne and the war would have returned to a bloody stalemate, so I imagine it felt like the first step in finally winning. At least, that’s what I imagined when I was sitting in the same cathedral.

    After Matilda was driven from London, Winchester became the scene of one of her many narrow escapes. Surrounded by the enemy (Bishop Henry’s men – see, oily!), her half-brother Robert of Gloucester held off attack and was captured so she could escape alone with none other than Brian of Wallingford, alone on horseback, riding astride like a man to the point of exhaustion until they reached the safety of Devizes Castle. And after seeing what she had escaped in Winchester, I had to see what she escaped in Oxford.

    That brings us to today – or, last night, when I decided I’d left off the last trip in my journey of major Matilda destinations for long enough. So I caught a train from Marylebone Station at 9:00am this morning and made my way to Oxford Castle. I arrived just in time for the 10:30am castle tour and walked up the same stairs Matilda did, while under siege, wondering how she could possibly escape what seemed in every way to be a full-proof trap. Most people would have given up, surrounded by an enemy army with no hope of reprieve (Stephen had famously let Matilda leave Arundel Castle unmolested back in 1139 under the excuse that she was simply going to go visit her brother Robert, a decision that historians still wonder at and I’m sure Stephen himself largely regretted for the rest of his life). But not Matilda. A freezing night in December, three months into the siege, she and three of her knights wore white cloaks and were lowered out of the castle onto the frozen Thames with knotted bed sheets, where they escaped by walking directly through Stephen’s encamped army under cover of snow, darkness, and luck.

    All of these adventures, all of these moments, are true stories taken from the exceptional life of an exceptional woman – and they are only a handful in the grand scheme of what she endured. Prior to the Anarchy she had already been sent to Germany to marry the Holy Roman Emperor – twenty years her senior – where she then traveled much of Europe with her husband and was by all accounts an appropriately involved and loved imperial consort. When her husband died she was pulled back to Normandy and forced to remarry, only this time to a cocky little shit (the fourteen year old son of an Angevin count) who, upon their marriage, hated her as avidly as she hated him. Their tumultuous marriage eventually produced the first Plantagenet King, Henry II, but not before she attempted to leave Geoffrey and her father forced a reconciliation while she hid in Rouen for over a year.

    Matilda should have been remembered as England’s first ruling queen, but instead she’s unknown to most, and in the ultimate irony, was honored even in death by an epitaph that couched her importance entirely in her relationship with men: “Here lies the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry. Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring.”

    So if you’ve ever wondered why I wax poetic about this woman, or why I’m so fascinated by her story, or why I got an enormous portrait tattoo of her, that is why. Every person that asks me is one more person that gets to find out she was so much more than a daughter, wife, and mother. She was a passionate woman desperate to be accorded the respect that men and kings had purely by virtue of their sex. And I can’t get over the fact that not only are women still facing those problems 900 years later, but that her story is so little known to them.

    The struggle isn’t new – but we can sure as hell be inspired by those who fought it before us. Matilda was certainly one of them.

  • Elixirs

    I can’t sleep.

    I can’t sleep because MY BEST FRIEND WILL BE HERE IN LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS.

    As I type this, she’s probably somewhere over Wyoming, or possibly far-north-Canada because flight paths boggle the mind and almost always curve way more than I expect them to. So, instead of watching Season 1 of Sons of Anarchy for the fiftieth time (this week’s background show, I love you Opie Winston), I’ve thrown on Something Corporate like I’m fifteen and am getting PUMPED for the next six days and spending every minute with one of the most fantastic, comfortable, FLAWLESS humans on this planet.

    (I could not be more thrilled that Linds’ trip (LONDON BABY) landed when it did. We’re gonna grab some well-earned relaxation, hit up the TOWER OF LONDON FOOD FESTIVAL, celebrate my recent promotion, and have first-time-Dublin experiences together. It’s going to be a killer six days. Real talk: even if we sat on the couch the entire time, it’d still be killer. See Kathy’s 2015 Seattle trip for reference.)

    My latest writing project has been collecting stories from the seven years after graduating from college and turning it into something like a collection of essays. Right now it’s pretty structure-less and my commitment to it will likely wane in perfect opposition to the upcoming peak retail season, but for most of the summer I was fairly on-fire creating decent, funny content for the first time in years. I’ll pick it back up any minute here (I have lots of funny content…somewhere, stored away between my childlike boundless enthusiasm and certainty that life IS A MOVIE and every decision should be made as if you’re driving the plot, obviously), but in the mean time I’ve been admiring some of the keener observations these mid-what-the-fuck-years have inspired. And one of those resoundingly true blurbs is an in-the-works story about friendship.

    I won’t poach on the territory my future collection of stories will cover, but the gist of what I realized while writing about friendship is that there’s a very real reason that adult friendships are hard. You can argue it has everything to do with not having time, with not wanting to put yourself out there, with meeting decent funny relatable humans of any gender being equally impossible whether you’re trying to befriend them or (be-?)date them. But I posit that what makes it the most impossible is that the older I get, the less interested I am in spending copious amounts of time downloading all of the necessary life details that are required to understand (and appropriately criticize/commentate/rapidly agree with vim and verve) my reaction to a thirty second conversation I’ve had with my sister. Or other friend. Or coffee lady that I get coffee from every day. Just, who has the time for that? Who has the energy? This is why there is a deeply satisfying level of comfort with old friends. You’ve been through a ton of shit, sure, but sometimes it is just real nice sitting with a person that’s lived through fifteen years of your vibes. Having that common bond isn’t irreplaceable, but dear god the thought of even attempting to replicate it is EXHAUSTING.

    So. This brings me to the level of skin-thrumming excitement inspired by the thought that LINDSAY will be here this time tomorrow. We’ll only have six days together, and we will both be the first to admit that by the end of that six days it’s probably for the best that we part ways because I love that woman but long-term co-living, our souls were not meant for. But those six days will be a laugh-filled elixir of magic best-friendiness, and I need me some of that. Life’s no fun if you don’t get to share it with someone, and as a semi-permanent single person I’m in the camp (roasting s’mores and) insisting that we all spend way too much time acting like that someone has to be the love of our life. I’ve got my bestie. My pallo. And I’m a pretty happy clam.

    Other contributing factors to Happy Clam Status: that promotion I snuck in a few paragraphs ago. When I got the good news last week, I did what used to be the cool thing and I made a Facebook post to commemorate the occasion. I can’t even call it a #humblebrag because it made no bones about my belief that the STARS ALIGNED to make this happen. And even if it was a #humblebrag, sorry for the post I am not, because do you know what it did? It reminded me of how many stunning humans I’ve gotten the chance to work with over the course of the last seven years. Even people that I haven’t spoken with since 2013 and managed in my first leadership position were happy to congratulate me and internet-celebrate how far I’ve come. It was just such a visceral (the internet is not visceral I know but metaphor okay?) way to be reminded of how much I love humans and peoples and teams. Being a manager has afforded me so many opportunities to be silly with people, to work kick-ass hard during a murderous peak day, to share potlock food with, to pick fantastic playlists and badly belt out tunes with. Nothing about the last seven years has been simple, or direct, or easy. And I know the coming months will have their own challenges. But so many amazing humans made the experience worth while.

    And dude – do you know how many amazing people I yet again find myself working with? This world is full of them, guys. If you’re not at a job where you like the people you see every day, you’re not living your best life. (Yes. I know. Best Lives don’t generally include work. But tbh? Mine does. I’d be bored as a Bored Thing without it.)

    In summary: I still can’t sleep. Linds is probably somewhere over Lake Ontario now. Life’s pretty amazing right now.

    AND MY BEST FRIEND WILL BE HERE IN LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS.

  • Driving Forces

    (Aside: Up until about twenty minutes ago I had developed a new love for the simplicity of using Notepad to write with. I was 90% done with this blog post when my computer decided to die before I’d hit save.

    So, suffice it to say, one serious rage session later, I’ve ditched simplicity and am now back on Word. WHERE THEY HAVE DOCUMENT RECOVERY.)

    Summer has a tendency to inspire promise: impending adventures, previously unfulfilled personal sojourns imminently poised to become life’s Next Big Thing. Every year it’s like hearing Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten for the first time all over again and I always feel like I can take over the world. This year, I settled for kicking June off with my first trip to Spain.

    Three days in Madrid saw me reunited with Jaime and Edu, who along with helping me begin a life-long obsession with jamón, showed me first-hand all of the corners of the city that made them fall in love with Spain in the first place. I even snagged a true local Madrid experience when Edu’s family was gracious enough to host me for the duration of my stay. (In fact, if I can avoid hotels for the majority of my European adventures, all the better. Nothing beats a local neighborhood experience.) The Luchena Ruizs put on a stunning spread of Spanish food all three nights I stayed there, we ventured into the city and drank cheap delicious wine and ate free fabulous tapas late into the warm Spanish evenings, and I spoke a lot of terrible, terrible Spanish (I exaggerate. Mostly I just said “gracias” very poorly). What more can you ask of an early summer Spanish vacation?

    If you said “see the Mediterranean Sea for the first time” then you are SPOT on, my friends. So after saying farewell to the Luchena Ruiz clan, I hopped onto a train to the beautiful seaside city of Valencia, and it did not disappoint.

    My friend Suzy met me in there, and after spending our first evening exploring downtown and enjoying the tapas and wine (and gelato and bats) there included, the following three days were filled with sunshine-y, sunscreen-y bliss, parked on the beach watching utterly comfortable Spaniards lazing around La Malvarosa and diving into the Mediterranean.

    I had a moment back when I visited Arundel and stood in the same rooms as Empress Matilda, a moment of that sort of knowing and feeling that Natasha Bedingfield so shamelessly inspires. I had another one when I visited the Tower of London and stood in the same rooms where Stephen, Henry, Eleanor, and Richard had, in turn, stood.

    Standing waist-deep in the Mediterranean was another one of those moments.

    This was the same sea that the Ancient Greeks sailed. That the Normans sailed. That Empress Matilda looked out over before she ever returned to England. That Eleanor of Aquitaine covered when she joined her husband on crusade.

    I like to think that all ancient places and landscapes have their own energy, invariably thrumming at their own frequency. The Pacific Ocean is somehow fiery; it’s confident, endless, and always crashing. This sea was calm. It lacked the kinetic, impressive, white-capped waves that crashed along the entire breadth of the California coastline, the kind of waves I’d grown up with my entire life. And this water’s energy was different, less obvious, and buried deep. It was huge and capable of much but burned itself out over thousands of years, happy now, for the most part, to sit and be admired until it saw otherwise necessary.

    While swimming in that calm, feeling that thrum, I had the moment. I knew that my next adventure had to be in Italy.

    About a week ago, I was doing some casual online research on the Normans. (Any time spent substantiating my strange Norman obsession is time well spent. Obviously.) Now, most people have heard of the Norman Conquest of England. William the Conqueror was fairly effective and kind of changed the entire course of English history so, I mean, it makes sense. But something that’s less talked about (she writes, as if you generally run into people discussing the Norman Conquest whenever you’re grabbing coffee at Starbucks) is the Norman conquest of southern Italy, and the eventual Kingdom of Sicily that they then ruled for a decent chunk of medieval history.

    If you grab a map and take a look at the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, you’d see that it included all of Calabria. Also known as the region of Italy from which my great grandfather immigrated in 1912, from whom I, one hundred years later, claimed my dual citizenship so I could move back here. When I saw that, I thought to myself, “I’m not going to jump to any conclusions here, but MAYBE, SOMEWHERE, way back in my Italian ancestry, I MIGHT BE NORMAN!”

    And I am fully aware that that is useless, irrelevant, ridiculous information that changes absolutely nothing about who I am as a person and in no way effects the present. But the romantic half of me – which wields a hefty amount of power these days – can’t get past it. It’s that part of me that walked into the Mediterranean, looked out across the ancient water and thought, “Y’know what? Italy, you’re next.”

    History is just so astounding.

    There’s one more uniquely Kathy moment that happened in Valencia, and I’m quite sure I’ll have this one in my list of all-time favorites for years to come.

    Suzy and I stayed at an Airbnb in historic old town Valencia, in a 1930’s era apartment decorated by an exceptionally hipster pair of local Valencian guys that respectively moonlighted as a DJ and a photographer. One of the reasons I picked the place was that it had a tiny balcony that opened onto Carrer de Sant Vincent Martir (on which, I pictured, Suzy and I would drink black coffee and eat breakfast each morning before heading out to the beach. On which, unsurprisingly, we never did.)

    The last night we were in the city, Suzy fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow. I couldn’t sleep so I went out to the main room, threw the balcony shutters open, and listened to this late-night, outdoor concert that happened to be going on in the street below. It was a local high school band and after a few songs and a bit of nostalgia, I decided to pop in my headphones and watch an episode of Vikings until I got sleepy.

    My headphones were such that even with the open shutters, I couldn’t hear the concert over Ivar the Boneless being obnoxious and horrifying.. That was, until, during a quiet moment of the show, when I thought I heard something familiar coming from the street below.

    I threw down my head phones, ran outside, and sure enough, the band was playing a song I hadn’t heard in years. But the years hadn’t changed how blood-stirring it was, nor how impossibly strong the memories attached to it were. It was the opening overture from the (notoriously hammy and complete classic) 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And it immediately took me back to being a kid, watching it with my sisters, seeing the camera pan across the Bayeux Tapestry, having never heard of the Bayeux Tapestry or having any concept of what the Norman Conquest was.

    It was a moment of pure magic. Nearly midnight, in the balmy streets of Valencia, in the house of total strangers, twenty-nine years old and still a shamelessly believer in life-changing epiphanies, feeling my heart thrum when the French horns kicked in. There’s not a feeling like it.

    Usually coming home from vacation is a struggle, but I left Spain feeling almost impossibly fulfilled. Toss in some very exciting work things on the horizon – which I’ll share more about if and when they come to pass – and this June has been everything I’ve come to expect from summer.

    (Considering the season doesn’t really even start for two more days, I’m feeling pretty good about it.)

  • The Art of Settling

    The pattern I follow on my days off has varied little in the past seven years. It altered temporarily for a year and a half, when I was in a relationship, and then semi-permanently when I got Gilmore. But in between dog park visits or long walks in sunny outdoor shopping centers, I never stopped finding places to plop down for hours at a time to write.

    My first consistent writing project was my book, Crashing, Burning, & Other Pursuits, which I have accepted will never see the light of day (it’s not a great book) but will always be a pure blast of warm nostalgia for me. After that, my writing took a handful of different spins. A bit of high fantasy, a bit of chic-litty contemporary, some inconsistent journaling. But while aimless it may have been, writing remained a ceaselessly satisfying way to spend any day that I had to myself.

    January 2017 I was inspired for the first time since UEA to embark on a screenplay and that has been the driving-force creative project in my life ever since. I spent the greater part of 2017 pushing out about ninety pages, slow but steady, researching my way along with a large Moleskine notebook the well-worn index of the entire project. My life became very simple, and I always knew where three things were: my work keys, my phone, and that notebook.

    Then I did a thing – last September I casually (not casually) decided it was time to move back to England for real. From that moment until almost this one right now, that took up all of my focus. It was good timing because I had hit a bit of a block with the screenplay’s plot, and its character development, and the project in general.

    It wasn’t until around mid-February, having replaced my Peet’s writing sessions with Peet’s moving-job-hunting-expat-everything research sessions, that I suddenly realized I had not seen my precious Leyendecker notebook in an unknown amount of time. I didn’t panic for two reasons: one, I knew I wouldn’t be diving back in for a few more months, so there was no rush in finding it; and two, I was about to pack up everything I owned in order to move countries. It was going to have to turn up some time.

    Spoiler: it never did. I never found that notebook, and all of the research within its pages (and several drivel-y bits of journal that will hopefully amuse whoever finds it) has been lost. And as a result, every attempt I’ve made at trying to work on that screenplay since I moved has felt fruitless, lacking the anchor that was having that notebook splayed open companionably next to me. Sure, all those notes had led me to a decidedly uncompanionable phase of writer’s block, but it had gotten me that far, at least, hadn’t it?

    Turns out, losing that notebook was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Only knee-deep in a new direction of research, I can’t even recall how it was I got to those dead ends six months ago. Imagining where hours more will take this project and these characters is so exciting, I don’t have the words. It doesn’t hurt that the venue for this epiphany is an amazing café in Soho, recommended by an excellent writing friend and adjacent to an independent theater.

    (Hey, I’ve never said I wasn’t a cliché.)

    So it’s here, writing on my day off for the thousandth time, feeling a new anchor developing neatly beside me somewhere between a slice of chocolate cake and a pot of tea, that I’ve truly begun to feel like I’m settling in.