when i'm sixty-five

I have sixty-five pages written, and I'm super happy with all of them. (I would have a lot more if I included those I'm not happy with.) I'm especially happy because Dan read the whole document and gave me some sincerely positive feedback, along with a few suggestions that made it way better. YAY. I'm getting excited. It might actually get finished and it might actually not suck.

Today we ate lunch at Jenxie's, a vegan restaurant in the basement of a methodist church downtown.

Dan likes this picture.

This weekend: Chicago!!!!

cease-whine / rocky ripple

Okay, I'm done whining about all our work. I've written twenty pages of the novel in the last three days. And they're good! (I think).

Dan, though, has had an irritated throat and a slightly hoarse voice ever since he took a sip of one of those 5 Hour Energy drinks somewhere just east of Seattle. (There is absolutely no convincing him that this month-long ailment is not solely to blame on the 5 Hour Energy drink.) It's very slight and apparently not painful, but it's making it hard for him to sing, and therefore hard to complete songs, and he's understandably pretty cranky about it. Anybody have any miracle cures for persistent throat irritation? Brian?

Yesterday we went to a "festival" in Rocky Ripple. Rocky Ripple is a small neighborhood of houses clustered along a canal in the dead center of Indianapolis, just a five minute drive from my grandmother's house. But Rocky Ripple is pretty secluded, despite being inside the city; it's incorporated as a township and they even have their own mayor. It has a legacy of settlers from Appalachia and Kentucky, and is also described as "bohemian," and I've always been curious to visit. Turns out, Rocky Ripple is weird and kind of creepy and fairly awesome.

There were missing teeth and teenagers with babies, like we were a hundred miles outside of the city. Octogenarians hobbled about everywhere, a good 25% of the population in attendance, some of them wearing obviously homemade clothes. Others wore shirts made for the occasion that said, "I'm not lost, I live here. ROCKY RIPPLE." A group of old men cooked corn in the husks in a cast-iron oven. The ex-mayor sold magnets and had Weird Al hair to match his Weird Al face. A woodworker sold rolling pins. A blacksmith sold chainmails. Twentysomething dudes played southern rock on a gazebo and sounded like they were in their sixties. This is an exaggerated comparison but I swear it reminded me of that scene in I'm Not There when Billy the Kid is hiding in that weird town and Jim James sings "Goin to Acapulco" and everyone is dressed for Halloween.



Anyway. It was one of the many moments on this trip when I've turned to Dan and said, "Don't you feel like we're in America?" and Dan has answered with a slow, awestruck nod.

blergh + breaks

My workload has subsided somewhat, having finished the monster report, but Dan's has increased. We're both struggling to find creative time in each day.

However: I changed the storyline/structure of my novel and now it's suddenly way more fun to write. I'm actually dying every day for that delicious hour or two when I can put away the paying gig and crank out a page. Yay. I wish I'd felt this way when we first arrived in Hope, when I had entire days free to write, but it feels good anyway.

Of course, we take some breaks. Catan (Tim shown here workin' on a Longest Road):


Pool (the most contact my skin has sustained with the sun since I was a teenager):


Sunset in Broad Ripple:


In other news, my friend Janet from grad school just published her book, The Creepy Girl (the title was my suggestion, she tells me, though I have no recollection of this), and it's getting amazing reviews. Buy it, if you wanna be creeped! And Rachel says John's finished his book too! More inspiration to crank.

blergh.

Okay actually this kind of sucks. I'm working 15-hour days writing this research report, seriously from waking to sleeping minus tiny breaks for eating and and one Deadwood at midnight. Plus I'm getting more writing offers. A chunk of October is already blocked off for a project, and even a bit of November. I've turned down a couple small jobs but I don't have the guts to turn them all down; it's just not in my constitution. (What if they stop coming?)

Anyway, um, you might want to stop expecting a completed novel from me when I come home. It's looking unlikely. *giant sigh* What a privileged problem to have, I know I know, boohoo. I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I'm miserable now.

You can keep expecting tons from Dan, though! Tee hee.

in defense of indy

When we told people the main destination of our trip would be Indianapolis, we got some intensely blank stares. It was even deemed, during one reaction, "the randomest place possible." This is fair enough, especially given that neither of us are from here in any sense; my grandparents moved out here with their youngest sons in the early 70s, after my dad had married my mom and moved from SF to Canada. In response, I would explain that my Grandma is amazing and lives in a big house by herself, and my uncles are loads of fun, and it's actually a really pretty city -- but the stares persisted. Here are some pictures so you can at least know we're not living with pro-lifers in the shade of a Wal-Mart.

The house:


Our bedroom overlooks a sundrenched backyard and is the most peaceful place to wake up.


As a kid I'd wear soft-bottom slippers and my uncle Pat would pull me around this marble entryway. Nothing since has ever been quite as fun.


Here's my workstation (Dan's is in a previous post). The best part about this room is that the wi-fi doesn't reach! Very good for concentration, even when all I'm writing are market research reports.


This painting announces the entry to my work-room. (My grandma is an artist). Portrait of the Market Researcher As a Young Girl.


When I do need internet, or just feel like slouchin', I hunker down on the livingroom couch with this nifty Levenger lap-desk that Dan got me for my birthday (excellent present for nerds, btw). (And yeah I pretty much wear this outfit every day).


As for the city itself, I don't have any pictures, but it's really pretty and laid-back. The sprawl is hard to get used to (stripmallstripmallstripmall) but the thing about sprawl is it allows people to have really huge lawns. Lawns are nice. Rachel sent us this article in the NY Times about how you can buy a 4-bedroom house in Indianapolis for $250K, and I bet it'd have a huge-ass lawn.

Despite the sprawl it's still, really, a city. There's a downtown with galleries and old brick buildings and lots of bars with graffiti'd bathrooms. Broad Ripple is the hip neighborhood (although naturally it gets kinda North Beachy by night), filled with vegan restaurants and vintage clothing stores and businesses run out of homes. Dan explored it while I was away on business and now he's the Broad Ripple expert. Sometimes we take our laptops to the Monon Coffee Shop, where all the juices are freshly made in a Vita-Mix and the baristas are all these very likeable people who've probably outgrown an extreme allegiance to some subculture (straightedge, I'm guessing, and the dapper variety of scenester goths) and now throw parties for their kittens. (Honest eavesdrop). There are hipsters everywhere, and my lord they're young, but we still can't figure out where the good danceparties are. All we've found is some flyers advertising "hipsterhouse" which is the most depressing compound I've ever heard in my life. The good dancing must be happening in a secret network of BOTH-style houses (RIP BOTH!).

In leiu of dancing we've been having fun seeing Tim play his wide variety of working-musician gigs. Last night he played a solo acoustic set downtown with a numbered setlist, so the audience could shout out the number of the song they wanted (a trick he stole from the Bobcats of Vancouver), and they were seriously hollering those requests. I had to yell "Fifty-eight" nearly fifty-eight times at the top of my lungs before he played me Man Out of Time. Here he is on Friday night, singing If I Only Had a Brain with a jazz trio at a restaurant.


So, you see, it really is a nice place to be for awhile. We really miss everybody, though; the homesickness is starting to hit. Lots of love and hugs and such.

reality i accept you

My week has been all work. I'm preparing the analysis of the research I did in NY/SF, plus I have another freelance copywriting assignment. Dan too has had some requests from the home office, although he's still finding time for music, whereas it's been over a week since I've opened the looming "MY BOOK" folder on my desktop (named to distinguish it from the $$ folders, as in BARB'S BOOK and BARTENDER'S BOOK). It sucks, sure; this isn't what I came here to do. But at the same time, the role of reality in our vacation is part of what makes the whole plan so great. It's not just a fantasy. Money is necessary, obvs, and the fact that we're still making it even with all this flexibility gives us hope that this lifestyle can possibly be, to some degree anyway, sustainable.

Dan's not in the same omg zone I described last week -- he seems to have good days and so-so days -- but on the whole he seems upbeat about what he's creating. And he's eating so well! We're cooking vegan meals and doing yoga and just generally being retardedly Californian. But Dan, as is his style, is taking it all the way. He's entering his third week of hardcore Fuhrman eating, and DAYUMN he looks good. As for me, well, Pat just ordered two cases of It's-Its from San Francisco, which arrived in a rather dramatic presentation of smoking dry ice, so my diet has been vegan + It's-Its. I recommend it!

labor day

Back in 'Nap. Spent yesterday playing Catan with the fam, followed by a lovers vs. brothers game of bocce ball. I'm staring down a heavy barrel of Actual Work but it was nice to relax after all the work-travel. (Although my trip did include a brief spell in SF, which was mostly hectic but also allowed for some QT with parents, wine at the Masonic Manse, and breakfast with Kelli and Matthew. It felt great to see them all, like getting a fierce shot of home in the arm).

Today is Labor Day, and the tractor is learnin' the cityboy.


"That kid was born to cut," said my Uncle Tim, nodding appreciatively.

senda salami to your boy in the army

After two full days in my New York hotel, it came to my attention that Bridget and Giovanni were also in New York. Uh what? I had an unexpected morning off, and the three of us wandered around the EV and LES, strategizing ways to achieve bi-coastal living while eating candy and getting tomato-faced from the sun. Our wanderings included a typical new-New York coffee shop (an Adam C haunt) but then lots of Mad Men era (ok Peggy-specific) spots like Katz's Deli and Economy Candy:





Then I had just enough time to meet Angela for lunch. Ange and I were roommates at Berkeley and came to New York for the summer of 2001 to be interns, which was everything you'd expect: sharing the world's tiniest room, scrounging pennies from our laundry pile, finding grand importance in every moment simply because we were in New York, etc. She's doing amazingly well, btw! She excaped the NY magazine industry just before it imploded and now works at Macy's as a copywriter, while also writing screenplays and becoming a media mogul (video journalism site coming soon). Forgot to take pics but she looks exactly the same.

I really love New York. Trying to remind myself not to glamorize it too much and remember why I left, but it's hard when everything is so damn timeless and inspiring and urgent and the people are all so abruptly nice and even the weather is perfect. I just want to live everywhere all at once.