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Brief Dispatch

Hello, Blog. We meet again.

Yes, I have decided to eventually convert to an email newsletter format, doddering old 28-year-old that I am, but only after things cool down a bit. Life has been much too busy of late. In the interim, I'll still post here now and again, I'll dabble. Oh Blog, you are reliable and long-suffering.  If my Blog and I had been in a relationship, we'd now be at the point of intermittent, non-committal late-night text messages. My Blog would be like, "...You up? ..............?"

At the moment, my freelance grab-bag overfloweth. I have social media work, and technical editing work, and journalism work, and proofing work, and too much of it. And too little time to write my fictions. Right now, my fictions are commiserating with Blog. Probably talking mad trash about me.

Thanks to my handy boyfriend, I've been beamed up into the low-stress and relatively lucrative world of advertising agency proofing. Last fall I went camping on an illegal pot farm, there were guns and there was a giant rainstorm and I was somewhat terrified the hillside I was sleeping on would slough away (wouldn't have been the first pot-farming induced mudslide). I made a thousand dollars on that story. Last week I sat in a cubicle, read the Internet, and intermittently inserted commas into PowerPoints. I made more than a thousand dollars. It's been a revelation. 

Not really. Obviously, there are multitudinous ways to make money that are easier than journalism. I'm happy I've found one that will (hopefully) continue to take me on an intermittent basis so I can keep doing my own thing the rest of the time.

It was weird to be back in a cubicle. Actually, I don't think I've ever had a cubicle before. The newsrooms I worked in were all open-plan. In Shanghai we worked in an old lane house. But I haven't worked in any office setting since the end of 2012(!). Good for me. I hadn't thought of it before, but just now that feels like an accomplishment.

Actually being in office was sort of anthropologically interesting. Here are some stray observations:

One day I couldn't go out for lunch because we were waiting on documents so I went to the lunch wagon and paid $9 for what I thought would be a pulled pork wrap. The "pulled pork" was saitan - which is a weird tofu thing. It was sweet and horrible. There were probably chemicals in it to keep the workers from revolting.

This week I proofread a 50-page stack of resumes for a job proposal (so, now you know the pot farm was way more entertaining). Lots of found poetry in those pages. Here's one: "executional silos of skills." So beautiful, but what does it mean?! 

I'm sure anthropologists have actually studied this, but there seems to be pride taken in how difficult it is to explain one's job. I think most jobs can be simplified down to an explanation that would suit your average 9-year-old. Unless you're an astrophysicist, I should be able to understand what you do within 30 seconds. And even if you are an astrophysicist, that Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty dang good at elucidating the mysteries of the universe!

Once I got hungry and bought Doritos at the vending machine. I ate them at my desk. Very loud. Will not repeat.

Had to work until 3am one night, so they sent me home with, no, not a taxi, but "car service." A black sedan with leather seats picked me up in midtown and delivered me straight home to Brooklyn. I didn't have to pay and I pretty much felt like the Wolf of Wall Street. Except, you know, not cheating, just cleaning up the grammar in PowerPoints.

I missed sunlight. The office is huge and the proofing corner doesn't have windows. It made me appreciate my very sunny apartment, usually I don't have to turn the lights on at home until after 4pm.

If your stomach is crazy grumbling - can the person in the adjacent cubicle hear it? Not an observation, real question.

Requisite Monthly Blog

Hello, dear reader. February is always the coldest, darkest month. Maybe not scientifically, or whatever. But I remember even growing up in Alaska, it always seemed like the worst of winter. Same is true in Brooklyn.

February has been extremely busy. I have too much work at the moment, which I have to remind myself is a good problem to have. On a not-out-of-the-ordinary day I might spend the morning chatting with someone who makes organic marijuana-infused jam, then I'll spend an hour or so tweeting about fancy home products, and then I'll spend the afternoon on some dull writing about multinational insurance companies. Ageh. The hope is that this situation will distill into one or two reliable long-term projects, and that I will free up my time to write fun stuff. I also had a couple pieces published this month. You can read them here and here. 

Last week a friend visited from Taiwan, so I got to play tourist four a few days. Over the weekend, the three of us visited Niagara Falls (pictures to come). On Thursday we stood outside for 90 minutes waiting for the ceremonial new year's fireworks in Chinatown. Before this week, my friend had never even seen snow, so I was thoroughly impressed with her stamina.

I'm thinking about retiring this blog. Although the idea makes me really sad for some reason. Alas - blogs are a dated format in this present era of digital communication (social media, ftw!). If I decide to do so, I'll keep the domain and it will keep existing, it just wont be updated. I like it as a record of my wayward youth, erm, travels.

If I did so, I wouldn't stop writing about myself, but I'm thinking of perhaps switching to a family e-newsletter (and a few friends) format. I think this blog was probably most entertaining when I was in Taiwan. Partially, it was all new back then. And blogs were an energetic platform. Also, I mainly write here for family (and a few friends), i.e. the people who are at least mildly interested in the quotidian moi. A more private mode of communication feels more appropriate at this juncture. 

Some of you are probably thinking newsletter???? Okay, grandma! But over the last year I've noticed that Twitter/Facebook/et. al. feels like a fire hose of information shooting past my head every day and sometimes I catch something funny and interesting, and sometimes I miss the important stuff. It all feels too impersonal. I like the idea of writing for a small group. 

If you've got a strong opinion either way, shoot me an email or a Facebook message. 

"Blizzard"

We bought flashlights, candles, beer, and ramen packets. We filled the bathtub with water. And then...we got, like, 4 inches.

Nevertheless, the subway was shut down and all non-emergency vehicles were ordered off the streets by 11p.m. Monday night. Last night someone told me people were playing beer pong in the street in the East Village. That sounds fun.

Still, fun to go out Tuesday morning when there was no traffic and the streets were blanketed. Here's my neighborhood post-"storm."

Nothing the Golf can't handle

Doing Dartmouth

Last weekend we drove to New Hampshire to see my cousin who seems to have landed the best of both worlds: a research job at an Ivy located in an adorable New England town. Not a lot of fancy jobs in small towns these days, we're happy/proud of him.

Here we're walking around Brook's big old backyard of his centuries-old farmhouse. This was my first time driving north of New York City. On the drive over, I added three more states to the tally of ones I've been to (Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts). As a West Coaster, I'm not sure the novelty of being able to drive in five states in one day will ever wear off.

The small towns here are so different from the ones I know in the West. They all have pretty, steepled churches, central greens, and all kinds of lovely old houses. As we drove through the States, we also drove through accents. Those too are much more concentrated here. 

On Sunday, we walked all around the Dartmouth area, which made me want to be an undergrad again, carrying around a bunch of books and coffee, studying the weekend away. 

In the afternoon we stopped by a bar for beer and a scotch egg, and admired all the post-church bar goers in their sport coats and knit sweaters. Definitely preppier Sunday attire than how we do in Oregon.

We went out to Mexican food in the evening and caught the end of the Seahawks-Packers game from the fourth quarter onwards, easily the most exciting football I've ever seen. And it was nice to be three Northwesterners celebrating in Patriots territory...

Also on Sunday, we toured this old Shaker house (compound?) in Enfield, New Hampshire. Before last weekend, I mostly only knew Shakers as celibate makers of nice furniture. (There are only three of them left now). 

The docent told us how industrious they once were and what a boon to the local economy all the Shaker activity was. Shakers were also exceptionally progressive about gender roles, design, and adopting new technology - not things I expected to hear about a strict religious sect.

From what the guide said, their numbers started to wane around the Industrial Revolution, when new technology meant there was less to be gained from communal living. 

More of Brook's backyard

James photobombing my nature shot.

It was a fun trip. We're excited to get out see more of this part of the country.

Holidays, Revisited

This weekend we are headed to New Hampshire to see my cousin, ye olde Dartmouth professor. And I suspect I will have more photos to post from that excursion, and can thus no longer delay my Christmas/New Year recap. See below, you can probably deduce what's Oregon and what's Alaska:

It was good to be back in Anchorage for the first time in 6 years. I don't have many friends left there, but the ones who are still around have pretty cool jobs. One is a bush pilot. One is a petroleum engineer; she gets to travel a lot. 

While waiting for my flight up in Portland, I looked around the gate and realized how un-Alaskan I look these days with my peacoat and ankle boots. Alaskans are casual in the extreme. Driving around Anchorage, I was reminded of a thing I saw in Alaska as a kid and still exists today -- which is middle-aged women in sweats or jeans and loose t-shirts, no coat, who do their errands in apparel the rest of the country would only deem appropriate for warmer climes. 

I felt even more like a tourist once I was on the ground and had the urge to do all the tourist things: Look through art galleries for native art (none of which I could afford); we drove out to Girdwood one day and I made James pull over several times to take photos (but they turned out okay, right?!).

But I'm not a tourist. In fact, one evening James' family and I all went over to someone else's house for a big multi-family dinner. A woman who'd married into the family looked so familiar, but I couldn't place her. Finally I worked up the courage to ask her for the run down (who are your siblings? where'd you go to school?) Turns out, we'd gone to elementary school together. In fact, we were in the same class for a whole year and I attended her birthday sleepover. I could remember all sorts of strange facts about her, once I knew her maiden name - like that during sixth grade her family had vacationed to Fiji. Anchorage is still a small town.

2014 Reviewed

Hoo boy, it's almost the middle of January. Here I go:

Austin: 8 months

New York: 2.5 months

Florence, Oregon: 4 weeks

Humboldt County, Calif.: 2 weeks

Marfa: 1 weekend

San Antonio: 1 night

New Orleans: 3 days

Alaska: 3 weeks in summer, 4 days in winter

Tennessee: 1 night

Georgia: 1 night

Virginia: 1 night

Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey: driving time

Mexico: shore time on 4-day cruise from Texas

I am possibly forgetting one state from our big moving drive.

Things that happened:

Freelanced for a full year

Went sailing in southeast Alaska

Camped on a pot farm

Published in print for the first time since 2012

Ate a lot of breakfast tacos

Took improv classes

Saw a lot of music and comedy

Went floating in San Marcos

Did a fair amount of yoga

Read Middlemarch

Moved to New York

Joined writing group(s)

Went back to Anchorage for the first time in 6 years

Finished a draft of a novel

Rolled the dice one more time on grad school 

Crashed a small group lecture by Salman Rushdie

Randomly sat next to someone on the New York subway, complimented her on her Feiyue sneakers, realized we knew each other from Shanghai

Sometimes freelancing was stressful and hard. I'm still not comfortable about the stability of my situation, but it's a world better than where I was a year ago. And freelancing allowed me to travel a ton this past year, something I hadn't expected, but was awesome. 

After my piece in California Sunday Magazine, a couple people reached out to me about working with me. Up until this point, it's been a whooole lotta cold pitching. Although I am now 28, my first year back in the US felt sort of like being fresh out of college again since I came back with no network, an unknown quantity. I am still always telling everyone I may need to get a day job, but I am also more optimistic about freelancing evolving into a long-term thing. 

2014 was my first full year back in the US. I had a lot of fun being a tourist in my own country, I feel more engaged with what's going on here now, and I'm excited to be living in New York. I saw friends from high school I haven't seen in many years. My best friend is getting married this year, and I'm happy I'll be around to celebrate. 

2014 Resolutions Revisited

1. Eat right and exercise (I did fine? I guess? Barring serious health problems, I'm less interested in seeing this as something to "work on" (damn you, pervasive culture of women's magazines!) I exercise sometimes and I like vegetables, some people would probably say I drink too much coffee, but whatever.)

2. Curate what I read better. (I read about a dozen books last year and a ton of short stories. I still probably waste too much time online, but I spend less time reading stuff on Facebook now because I find it so overwhelming. I realized this year that even friends I keep in close contact with miss my infrequent Facebook updates, so it doesn't even seem like a very good platform for keeping up with people.)

3. Finish the novel (I finished a draft? I think I was operating under the delusion I would be done with it. Maybe this year.) 

4. Write diligently (I could've been better. But I did a lot.)

2015 Resolutions

1. Make more money: I would love to believe I'm exiting the bumbling beginning phase of freelancing. I hope this year to get to a point where I'm doing money like an adult, i.e. saving some of it.

2. Writer better things: Fiction and Non-fiction.

3. Get better at cooking Chinese food, so I don't have to drop $50 every time I want a proper Sichuan dinner.

4. Pick up the scrapbooking habit I dropped in high school. I've traveled so much, but it's no fun revisiting pictures on the computer. 

5. Explore the Northeast. We're going to see my cousin in New Hampshire this weekend. We want to go to Maine and Niagara Falls, we hear the train ride up to Montreal is beautiful in autumn. There's a lot to see. 

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leslie-writes.com