memorly dot com

i have noticed that i only get mad at traffic when i’m late.

it doesn’t really make sense to get angry at someone for failing to facilitate my getting to a place on time when I left my apartments 15 minutes later than i should have. this is what i’m working on currently: being calm, not making other people pay for my shortcomings. i don’t want to get mad at someone else when i’m the one to blame. i don’t want nixie to get less attention because i finished too late at work. i don’t want to get mad at my friends for complaining about trivial problems on my way home from a very serious doctor’s appointment. i have a long way to go on that last one, but i’m making some progress. we live in this culture obsessed with efficiency and maybe i’m the first one to say it, but fuck efficiency. i do enough stuff. i don’t want to do more stuff if it comes at the expense of something that actually matters.

this might explain why i haven’t written in this blog for a long time—it’s the first thing to go when life gets crazy. as it is, i get more emails and phone calls than i can really keep up with (more a testament to my social disorganization than my popularity), and i trust that the people in my life would rather i try to return their calls than post on this site. i’m doing what i can, as i can, but i have realized that memorly.com needs a change of direction.

i was starting to think that it was time for memorly.com to go the way of my last website—that i should just take it down overnight and move on with my life for a while. it’s hard these days for me to know what to write…my dad’s death is now far enough in the past that my feelings about it change slowly and writing about it with any sort of regularity seems super whiny. in the meantime, enough new concerns have surfaced that i want to share, but this time i want to be more honest with fewer people, and a blog is not a good forum for that sort of communication. i pondered laying this site to rest until this morning, when i had a change of heart.

repeat readers know all about the plumeria plants my dad and i were growing—they have become symbolic to me in several different ways. after blogging about my hope to find my dad’s plant flourishing and beautiful when i came home, i was more than a little distraught to hear that it had been discarded for appearing dead. there is no way for anyone to just know this, but that’s sort of how those plants are. even knowing this, i constantly worry that my own has died. it grows many beautiful leaves, drops them all, and just when you think that all is lost, the dismal looking stump suddenly grows and inch and comes back stronger and better than before. i know this, and still every time my plant does it, i lose faith and think that this is really it, it really will not come back. i had all but lost hope this time around when i woke up to find a proud little bud shooting out of the top of the stump.

i think i might be like that, and maybe everyone is like that. there will be many times when you wonder if all is lost before you grow an inch and come back as a stronger person. Although memorly.com cannot be the same as it’s been, i don’t think it needs to die. I’m just going to use it to document the new leaves.

New leaves…new friends, new opportunities, new season. It’s starting to cool down, and since fall is my favorite season, this makes me really happy. Work has really taken off, the 9-5 is stressing me out more than I’d like but other projects are going well. my (sister-)cousin Anne Marie just got married, i got to see Tim, David had a birthday, and I got to see the Ben Folds Five reunion concert. I feel like I’ve gotten to really bond with some new friends and a few old ones. I redecorated my apartment, frosted the bottom half of all my windows, and cleaned out my closet. I’ve been trying to get to bed earlier. I’ve been spending more time with Nixie. I’m cooking more. I disassembled my desktop computer because I don’t need more instruments of work or distraction in my life. And just when I feel like I could use a little direction, all sorts of older, wiser, more badass people have come out of the woodwork to give me some really great perspective. in general, i’m happy with where my life is going.

less generally, i’ve been dealing with some stuff. but you know, that’s ok with me. I told my mom earlier this week that in my life, I have never wished for happiness. Happiness is a pretty impractical thing to wish for because it simultaneously implies two opposite conditions. happiness as the absence of sadness or happiness as the inverse of sadness. the straight line or the sine wave.

i prefer to be more specific because I can be: i don’t want to be content. it seems that a day comes for most people when they cash in their chips for stability and comfort, but i hope to live all the highs and lows that i can endure before it’s my time for that. if i have the luxury of being old enough to look back on my life, i want some stories. and so instead of happiness, i have always wished for stamina. stamina to stay at the table as long as possible, to love and be hurt and die for a little while before i grow and inch and come back stronger. thinking about this makes me feel more optimistic about my life, that the bad things are just exercises in being a stronger person. i’m trying to keep my focus on that.

so i am going to try to write about the concrete things for a little while. maybe i’ll show you pictures of my windows. i will definitely pimp out a web application David wrote that is rocking my world (though I’ll let him debut it first) and maybe introduce you to one of mine. For now, i came here to get caught up on some projects so I’ll get back to that. you stay classy, Internet.