X = Me

Solving for x is astonishingly easy, as it happens. If I am the x factor, then the x factor is me.

Simple, right? Almost brutally so.

What's particularly brutal is that I've known this for years. My brain understood. People told me, books told me, my reasoning skills parsed it out. But just because you understand something doesn't mean you know it. Just because you know something is true doesn't mean your heart or your emotions have any idea what that big gray lump in your skull is prattling on about.

I am the x factor. Not because I'm the reason dating hasn't worked, but because I need to focus my attention on me.

If I am the x factor, that means I get to put all of my time and attention into things that make me happy, instead of going out on first date after first date in a time-consuming attempt to play the numbers and manipulate the system into giving me what I want. I get to put my energy into what feeds me on a deep level, rather than spending my time trying to create some safe, loving space for someone else because I thought that if I make them feel loved, they'll make me feel loved.

Pro tip: That doesn't work.

Trying to force people to feel something - even if it's something we all want to give and experience - is a really bad bet. Good intentions, poor execution. People can feel it when you're coming from a place of need, rather than a place of "here, I have so much that I would like to share it with you." I can't name that place because I haven't found it on the map yet. I'm still looking.

In my efforts to find me in this new map, I have claimed this month. All of it. All of it is mine, henceforth to be known as Be Nice To Amber month. You don't have to be nice to me, but I have to be nice to me. Being nice to me means no dating. No online suitors, no constant checking of the apps, no wondering when he's going to respond. Unless some epic romantic comedy kismet slams into me at the grocery store, I will go on not one single date. Instead, I will focus on what makes me happy, rather than on what someone else is thinking or feeling. A month of fixing up the hobbit hole and going to yoga and reading Harry Potter in the fairy garden that was recently discovered near my house. A month of less caffeine and no self-recrimination. A month of things I rarely allow myself, like manicures and chocolate bars* and afternoons at the beach.

* Lies. I always allow myself chocolate bars.

My month began on June 11 and will end on July 11, my 36th birthday. Everything feels better already. Lighter, clearer, like I'm more me than I have been in a long time.

Maybe the best way to date is not to date at all.

My Hobbit Hole

I've become the Goldilocks of trashcans. Two weeks ago, I moved into my new home. It's a little cottage in Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. After years of being in and out of cities and in and out of storage units, finally settling down means everything must be perfect, including the garbage cans. It's strangely hard to find just the right trash receptacle - you want it to do its job and fit in its corner. But I don't want to buy something just to fill the space. I'm willing to wait for the right one. The right garbage can is important, you know.

When I first signed the lease and posted a picture on Facebook, Zach said, "I didn't know they were still selling real estate in heaven." Tracking down your own spot of heaven is a bit of a holy calling for most of us. My heaven apparently comes with skunks plotting on the deck and squirrels tap-dancing on the roof. The floor tilts a bit to the left. Spiders fall from the ceiling. Sun lights the deck in the afternoon. When I open the sliding glass doors, I can hear water rushing past rocks in the creek bed. My storage space rests under a treehouse. It's like camping, but with my own mattress and internet access. It doesn't have everything I was looking for - there's no laundry or bath tub - but I'm learning to accept gifts as they come, without being too persnickety about checking off every box I concocted while dreaming of what I want next. So far, I've learned that I own too many books and that it is possible to coexist peacefully with many-legged insects. I see animals loving my home as much as I do as a good sign, even as I lose any and all remorse over killing ants.*

* All god's creatures, my ass. Get out of my sink, ants.

I've always treated my apartments like way stations between me and whatever was next. For the first time, I want to build a home. A home with a trashcan that suits me perfectly, yellow rugs and mugs, a home with the few pieces of furniture I've collected and the books I love. I don't know what my future looks like. Any wisdom I've gained over the years falls smack into the "give up on knowing what's coming because life will surprise the hell out of you" category. I don't know if I'll be here for five months or five years. I do want to get married and have kids and, since I'm turning 36 in a few months, it would be nice if that was sooner rather than later. But I want to build my home as though I'll be here for years - choosing things carefully, creating a space for myself, the kind of space that nurtures who I am and who I want to be, and looks pretty doing it. If I do up and move again soon, it will still be time well spent. Because this is a way of taking care of myself, of reminding myself that I'm worth the effort, even if it is just me. Especially if it's just me.

Maybe this will be the last time I can create a home that's all my own. If you have a family, apparently you sometimes have to let them choose things and, I don't know, take their needs into account on occasion. So maybe this is the last time I get to enjoy being psycho perfectionist about trashcans and having everything precisely the way I want it. Maybe this is practice for building a beautiful, useful space for me and my family. Maybe this is creating the space that will nurture and support me for years to come. I just don't know. So I will build it and trust that things will work out exactly as they should.

For now, home is a hobbit hole surrounded by redwoods and tucked into the curve of a babbling creek. Maybe it will be mine for mere months, maybe for years. But now is all we ever know for sure. So I will love it and care for it until it's time to love and care for something else.

Talking To The Universe Like a Crazy Person

I really don't know how to talk about this in a way that doesn't sound insane. Or California fruity to the nth degree. Maybe it's that East Coast education, but I generally try to keep my severe Church of Hippie leanings under wraps. That said, there's this thing I do. I really don't know how to explain it, but if I'm going to write a blog post about it, I guess I have to try. When I have a question or more emotions than I know how to manage, I'll sit down at my computer. Sometimes my questions are profound, sometimes they have to do with my to-do list. Then I'll just start typing. When I read it back, it doesn't quite sound like it came from me. It's smarter and wiser and kinder, but has worse grammar and often misspells things. It feels like whatever this is has a better sense of the truth, a better understanding, more love, more wisdom, just more than I could possibly have with my limited senses and smallish, underused cerebellum. I remove myself and my brain from the process and just allow the information to flow through my fingers. Some of my favorite things have been written this way. I'm learning to tap into that and the more I practice, the easier it comes.

Sometimes when I start typing, this flow of information causes an emotional or physical reaction. There's an energy to it. My nose will tingle or tears will start running down my face. It's like all my senses get involved and something shifts energetically. It's not even so much about the words, it's more about the feeling.

When this happens, it really starts to feel like it's coming from somewhere other than me. I know how that sounds. Because, what - am I channeling spirits? Aliens? The universe? If you google this type of writing, it sounds desperately flaky at best and charlatan-infested at worst. The cited wikipedia example is a woman who translates Martian messages into French. Which, let's be real, would be amazing and I definitely want to see that.

But I'm learning to guide my life by what feels good - because we're all just making it up as we go, so why not go toward what feels good? I've tried following the things that make me feel bad and I never end up in a place I want to be. And this feels good. It feels powerful, it feels energetic, it feels useful, and it feels loving. So I ask my questions. Because sometimes that's all you can do: ask and trust that the answer that boomerangs back to you is the right one.

Recently, I started doing this writing for friends. Doing this on a bigger scale feels a little scary, a little vulnerable. But that's what I'm trying to play with right now. Opening up to who I really am and trusting that the people who need this and who think it makes some sort of sense will find it and everyone else will just click away to the next thing on this infinite internet of ours.

But still, I think I'd rather take my clothes off in public than say I type messages from the universe. SEE? THAT'S WEIRD.

Calling All Guinea Pigs

Want to help me find out if this is really a thing?

If you're game to be a guinea pig, email me with a question. (Click the "Send me a pandagram" box in the sidebar.) Or leave it in the comments. I would love to do this for you. I honestly don't know what I need or what works. So far I've done it just with people's names, but these are friends and I have some background knowledge of them. You can try sending me any burning questions you have. Or your first name and a little about your life and where you want some clarity. I'll sit down with whatever I get and see what comes. Obviously, I have zero training and am not a coach or a doctor or anyone with any respectable letters after her name. All I know is that what I've written has been useful for me and seems to be useful for the people I've done it for.

If you're willing to let me publish your question and answer here, let me know. (If you'd rather keep it private, that's okay too.)I'd love to do this once a week on the blog for awhile, just to see how it lands. Maybe I'll even give it a snappy name, although I am admittedly terrible at coming up with snappy names.

Have a question? Need some clarity? Let me know and I'll apply my weird voodoo to it and see what I come up with for you. It may or may not give you any answers, but it will probably make you feel better.

Fork in the Road

My dad’s sister got a reading from a psychic in San Francisco a few months after he died. Because that’s what we do in my family.

Dad showed up, as a spirit or a ghost or whatever you get to be after you're dead, and the psychic said he was wearing jogging shorts. As far as I know, my father never owned a pair of jogging shorts in his life. He was fond of joking that running was the worst way to be healthy. “Sure you live longer,” he’d say, “but you have to spend all that extra time jogging.” Now that I spend a lot of time circling trails, I wonder how much longer he would have lived, and how much more peaceful he would have felt, if he had been a runner.

As she told me this, writing off dad's curious post-death jogging shorts as psychic dissonance, I remembered a thought I had months before he passed away. Dad lived in Swall Meadows, right next to Inyo National Park. After spending the day in the care center with him, I would run in the shadows of the sunset-tipped mountains. This thought came to me in the middle of one of my afternoon runs, feeling weirdly like a vision - an idea I’m really not comfortable with, minus Peyote and a Native American chieftain or two. So I wrote it off as the product of mild heat stroke and my new and strange obsession with running. At the time, Dad had already started to talk about dying, but we wouldn’t accept it for months yet. But as I was running through the desert, I saw two paths for my father.

One, the widest and bleakest, the path he eventually chose, was of him spiralling down into the worst the human experience can offer - a broken body and a mind that can’t heal because both are so separated from their own processes and emotions that they can’t find their way back.

The second path, much fainter, showed my father running. Conquering what ailed him until he was healthy enough to become one of those sun-leathered old dudes pounding the pavement in running shoes with wet bandanas tied around their grizzled heads.

Knowing now how badly off he was by the time he fell, I don’t know if that was possible. Maybe what I was seeing was a path that had forked off many years previous and was no longer an option. Maybe it was a path he could have chosen. I don’t know. But I saw him running. I saw him healthy. I saw him beating back the demons with sweat and salt and endless miles of asphalt.

---

I'm writing a book about my father's death. I'll be sharing pieces of the Dead Dad Book as I work on it, because writing here and on Twitter led me to this book in the first place.

Adventure Project #30: Busting Through Self-Spackled Walls

I started doing these videos and then I stopped doing them and then I started again and that's mostly the process of doing something new and intimidating. You start, you ride the high, the high drops to a plateau, the plateau feels flat because that's how plateaus work, and you wander off in search of higher ground. Or you invent drama to give yourself an excuse to wander off, which is what I did. Boy drama, specifically, because that's my favorite kind. You can excuse yourself for a lot of things when boy drama is happening. But you know what doesn't help the drama? Excusing yourself. Because that makes you less you. Because doing the things you love keeps your engagement with life at a steady burn and being engaged with life makes everything better, especially drama you invented because you wanted to give yourself some faux high ground. Or maybe you invent drama because you hit your upper limit of excitement and feel a subconscious yearning to drag yourself back down to a more understandable level.

When I find a foolproof formula for raising the excitement ceiling and squishing the drama, I'll let you know. For now, it seems to boil down to "do your shit and let yourself feel as good as you can as much of the time as possible."

So here I am, back to talking with my face about my process of doing scary things like becoming the person and the writer I want to be and, yes, that is scary. I'm also putting them here now, because that's a bit more commitment than just throwing them up on youtube and hoping nobody notices.

Sometimes I doubt the value of the writing I do here under the juggling panda and the face talking I do on youtube. Because my external notion of what's "valuable" doesn't always match up with what my insides tell me is worthwhile.

But I do believe there's value in sharing experiences. Because if you share, you and whoever's feeling reflected in that experience both get to feel less alone. Because emotions and the wrangling thereof aren't discussed nearly enough in our culture. Because if I feel it, someone else out there feels it too. Maybe that someone is you. I am not nearly the special feelings snowflake I thought I was. If I feel scared and lonely and joyful and overwhelmed and stuffed with love for things, you probably do as well. And the more we talk about who we want to be and what we love, the more connected we are. In the end, that's all any of us want: to feel love, to feel connected, to just plain feel.

 

Making Space For All The Feelings

You only have so much room in your brain and your heart and your body. When your body gets clogged with emotion like fear and anger, it seeps into your heart and your head, leaving less space for things you actually want. I spend a lot of my time clearing space. I cry at least three times a week. I do that free write thing where you sit down for ten or twenty minutes and keep your fingers typing constantly, so that whatever is choking your brain can be laid out on paper for you to delete or burn. If something is pressing on my throat or my chest, I determine what it is and what it's trying to tell me.

In my younger days, the manic pixie dust of the mantra made me scoff, but I'm learning how deeply valuable a good mantra can be for reframing situations and popping my brain out of its habitual negativity. Like when I catch myself worrying about some new relationship possibility and why he hasn't called, I've trained my brain to call up what I want instead, using a phrase that reminds me that he doesn't need to call, that's not where we are now, and all I need to do is hold a light, curious space for both of us to discover what this is. Usually, when I dissolve whatever is knotting up in my chest, he calls. Or I call and he picks right up and says he was just thinking about me.

Using whatever causes pain - often a thought your brain is convinced is the most deeply true thing in the universe but has no real truth in anyone's world but your own - as a trigger for investigation rather than a trigger to shut down can change your life.

Investigation allows you to instill new habits. New habits can shift the Pavlovian response of your brain so it tips toward positive thoughts rather than negative. In the end, your brain just isn't that smart. It's a tape recorder that only knows what has gone before. In order to expand and create and experience new things, you need to move out of your brain and into your body. Because your body registers emotion in a very physical way and that emotion is where change happens. When you dive into an emotion and feel it until it shifts and dissolves, space opens. When you track a negative thought and reprogram your brain to shift toward how you want to think about a situation rather than how you've thought about it in the past, space opens.

When you create that space, you get to decide how to fill it. Love and joy and progress need room. You can't try to paste good stuff on top of bad and hope it all works out okay. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the good stuff dissolves the bad. But keeping it good requires cleaning. Your emotional life needs just as much attention as your career and your relationships and your home. At first, this pissed me off - the last thing anyone needs is one more place to tend. But when you tend your emotions, everything else gets exponentially easier.

The more space I create, the less cynical and more creative I become. When I'm not so bogged down in fear, there's more room for wonder and awe. When I'm not constantly dodging how I feel, I have the space to notice that it truly is an amazing world, full of tilting giraffes and ballet dancers and people who strap wooden boards to their legs and go spinning off cliffs. Humans flying through the air on wings made by hands. Music that can touch the emotion you didn't know you had. Words strung together in just the right way. Actors who reflect feelings you recognize and offer them up from a different place, a place of story, so that maybe you can understand yourself in a new way.

Our favorite things - movies, music, books - often evoke our own emotion. Because they're a safe space where our feelings can be reflected back to us and maybe begin to heal.

---

This post came from watching this video. My favorite part is at minute six where everyone starts dancing. My least favorite part is where the dude at 6:41 punches a stuffed giraffe. 

Anger's Pure Burn

For most of my life, whenever I was confronted with extreme emotion - especially the loud, yelling kind - I would shiver like a chihuahua and search desperately for the nearest exit. Not this time. There were some opinions this weekend about how I live my life and they were vehement. Maybe I shouldn't be proud of standing up, shouting straight in someone's face. But I am proud. I gave as good as I got and I didn't sit there and take what was thrown at me - something I did in different situations for a reasonable portion of my twenties. Taking someone else's story as fact, especially someone else's story about you, can be poisonous and that poison can eat away at your soul. I know, because I had to spend the first half of my thirties collecting pieces of myself from where I'd abandoned them, chewed up and forgotten. Obviously, someone else's opinions and stories won't bother you unless you see a nugget of truth in them. That's when other people's opinions - as infuriating as they can be - are valuable. They can shine a light on a part of you that needs attention and love.

What needs attention and love right now is me.

You can't ignore a child and expect them to flourish, you can't ignore your career and expect it to expand, you can't ignore a houseplant and expect it to be all perky and green. You can't ignore yourself - your real self, whatever that means to you - and expect to thrive.

I need to surrender my habit of allowing my worth to be determined by outside factors. I need to surrender the fear that makes that possible - the fear of not being enough, the fear of not doing enough, the fear of not doing it right. Because when I judge my value by based on what I've written, the zeros in my bank balance, how my family thinks of me, how men think of me, it detracts from me.

When I get caught in a loop like this, it's like I float out of my body. I go about my life. I look before I cross the street, I answer email, I do the dishes. But I'm not conscious of any of it. My brain is so far lost in what has happened or what might happen that I have no idea what is happening.

That's why I'm proud of myself for being angry. It took me a long time to learn how to be that present with my emotions or that willing to share them. I dropped right into what was happening and anger is was what I found. It felt pure, somehow. It was a pure emotion that burned through me and I allowed the fire to the surface, instead of letting it blacken my internal organs. Without even trying, I fought fair. I was mad, but I didn't hurl accusations or character denigrations. I just let how I was feeling in that moment fly.

Now when I think about how to let go of identifying myself through other people's stories, I start to worry. Worry about how I can change that, how I can do it right, how I can be right so I can get what I want. Doing exactly what I'm trying to move away from.

But if I drop into the present moment, things start to feel clear. It's a crisp, sunny day in San Francisco. I'm sitting in a cafe with a latte and a bagel. I can see the sun shine on dark blue and bright green and warm orange. I can take a deep breath, my fingers can type, I have legs that can run, and a brain that can think - and then accept when it's time to stop thinking. I have plenty of money for the moment and ideas on how to extend that moment into the more socially acceptable future. I have a home today, I'll have a different home on Saturday, and I have several good options for homes in the future. I have friends who love me and things to look forward to. I have so much and, when I focus on that, it's hard to remember why I was worried in the first place.


What Lies In the Beyond

In December, I was dating someone I really liked. The night we met, there was a ring around the moon. We gazed up at it, the water behind us, and it felt like that might mean something, something good. And it did. But not the way we thought it might. Instead of marking the beginning of an us, that ring marked the beginning of a me. A me who can walk away for the right reasons, something I'd never done before. I would swallow what I wanted in order to not be alone. Or give him what he wanted and push aside what was best for me because I thought that's what love meant. But the more you give yourself you, the less you can give up for another. So on New Year's Day, I walked away. As I drove home, it didn't necessarily feel good, but it felt right.

That ring around the moon did mark something special - but for me rather than for us. I want the us, but I won't take the us without it being right for the me.

Walking away is scary, because you don't know what lies beyond. So far, what I've found in the beyond has been better. But it doesn't matter, really. Because whatever I get - whether it's a me or it's an us - will be exactly what I need.

Choosing Flight

When I was a kid, I was immortal. I could barrel down snowy hills with sticks strapped to my feet and feel no fear. I could go streaking down grassy hills slippery with dew, without even recognizing the possibility of a broken femur. Even when I broke my left arm in third grade, it didn't slow me down because I didn't feel a thing.

Remember that? Diving head first into whatever caught your whim because you didn't know what a broken femur felt like? Or a shattered heart? It's easy to barrel down a snowy hill when you don't understand the cost of failure. But everyone eventually learns what it feels like to fall.

September 11, 2001 was the first day I truly felt my own mortality. It's become an epic cliche, but I think we all gained a fresh sense of fragility the day the towers fell. I was 22 that year, after graduating from college the year before and leaving Manhattan for San Francisco. But I knew people who worked in the buildings or near them. When I managed to catch one of those friends on the phone that night, she told me how she had to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge, limping in her high heels as thousands of people crossed the water in shattered silence.

That was the first time it occurred to me that one day I would die. That I - and my friends and family - can be broken. I was lucky to make it to my twenties before truly feeling that. So many kids aren't that lucky. Being sheltered can be good - all children deserve the opportunity to spread their tiny wings without fear.

But eventually we all learn that we're breakable. We can and will shatter and we'll have to put ourselves back together again. But wrapping yourself in cotton batting and protecting yourself from the world is more dangerous. Too much joy and too many opportunities missed. As a champion cocooner, I know I've lost out. So I'm learning to be fearless because hiding is no longer a viable option.

I went to the Salton Sea this weekend, to visit the ocean that lives in the middle of the desert. It's beautiful, but the salt in the water is death to anything that lives there. But if you brave the stench and the flies and a shore littered with fish corpses, you can stand and gaze out at something beautiful that shouldn't exist but does.

Last year, I went zip-lining over the jungles of Costa Rica. I went with a friend and, as I was strapping on my harness, he called me fearless. Something I'd never really considered myself. But after the first terrifying line where plummeting to my death seemed a not so much a probability as an inevitability, I learned to enjoy soaring over the jungle. Soon, I was twisting and turning and flipping upside down to zoom toward the horizon with my stomach to the sky.

You can teach yourself to fear less. Especially when doing so means you get to fly.

Shifting Years

Last year, I traveled thousands of miles to realize that it doesn't really matter where you are - your capacity for happiness doesn't change, whether you're on a beach in Central America or in the house where you grew up. I watched the wind of my first hurricane whip past the second floor of my friend's house on Staten Island, bending towering trees in half, like they were genuflecting to the eye of the storm. I had my first panic attack in the parking lot of a hospital. I handed out thousands of dollars in cash. I went soaring over the jungles of Costa Rica. I got kissed on a bridge in Amsterdam. I watched both my parents become incapacitated and unable to communicate. One recovered, one didn't. I learned that seven almonds buy you a lot of attention from a squirrel. I lay by the side of the highway next to the Intensive Care Unit, tears running from the corners of my eyes and into the grass.

Driving away.

"Driving away."

Driving away from the hospital after saying goodbye.

Last year, I watched New York marathon runners jogging from the Staten Island ferry to Rockaway beach with supplies on their backs. I learned that when the power is out for a week, it's not the electricity you miss, it's the heat. I roamed the streets of Manhattan the way I did in college, music pouring through my headphones to create a soundtrack to a city that seemed to expand and contract around me, as my own feelings ebbed and flowed. It was hard to be so far away from my family during that month as my dad was failing and my mom had a concussion from hitting her head on the kitchen floor, but it patched over the gaping hole I felt had been kicked in my chest. Taking that time allowed me be who I needed to be during the last week we spent with my dad. There's still some guilt there, but I'm learning to trust in my own instincts, to know that I can balance my own needs with those of my loved ones.

At the same moment.

"At the same moment."

On the Staten Island ferry.

Last year, the furrow between my brows - the one that appears when I'm confused or in pain - became permanent. The ridges smooth out when I relax, but they're always visible now, something that would have horrified my younger self and occasionally still does. That furrow is the physical legacy of my 35th year and my father's death.

Other things are less visible.

Last year, I learned to sit on my hands when what I really want to do is yell and scream and react. I learned to be kinder to people who lash out, because it stems from their own pain and they're only really hurting themselves. You're allowed to feel your feelings, but when you use them as a whiplash to sting others in a desperate bid to make yourself feel better 1) it doesn't work and 2) now everyone's mad at you. I learned that being kind to yourself means making healthy choices and other people don't have to like those choices. I learned that the journey toward death - even when it's painful and hard and you begin to think that no hell devised by even the fiercest of religions could be as bad as this - can be full of grace. Even joy. Certainly love.

If I could grow wings, I would.

"If I could grow wings, I would."

The world is a beautiful place, and I saw more of it. Autumn leaves on Staten Island, canals in Holland, fireflies in Central America. I met and reconnected with amazing people. It was a year of adventure and stuck-ness and great change. It was a year where I further cemented my faith in myself and in the world around me. It was a year where the roots in my heart grew and extended down through my legs and my feet and into the center of the world. I feel like you can't face death with a loved one without your roots both growing deeper and also disconnecting you from what you previously knew. But where you feel untethered, there are always people to catch you, to be the rubber bumper as your heavy ball hurtles toward the pins. People - friends, hospital workers, folks on Twitter - helped guide my family and me as we picked and spun our way down the lane from my father's accident to his death.

The second half of 2012 was tough for me. But there was a lot of grace and magic in it too. I'm learning not to be frightened by the tough stuff. Because it opens the door to so many good things. Love. Relief. Growth. Change. Pattern busting. Sinking fully into each good moment - the ones with bikes and color and grace - because they're worth so much more when what surrounds them is hard. Parties glow with brighter light, tea with friends takes on new weight, and the words that flow through your headphones and into your brain assume fresh meaning. But I got what I needed from 2012. I think the best you can hope for from a year is to love yourself and the world better than you did when it started.

Sidewalk in front of my old apartment in San Francisco.

"Sidewalk in front of my old apartment in San Francisco."

I couldn't have possibly imagined what 2012 held for me back in January. So I'm letting go of the need to know what this coming year will hold. I want to find an easier forward motion because I tend to go full-throttle and then slam the brakes on myself, which makes for a rather lurching existence. I want more stability and creation and giving. I want to be a better person, a better friend, a better daughter and sister.

Beyond that, who knows? Some things will be good, some bad, some painful, some joyful. But whatever it holds, there will be love and there will be grace and there will be discovery. Before my father died, my brother grabbed his shoulder and said, “I’m excited for you, dad. You’re about to go on an adventure.”

I think that's what 2013 holds for all of us. So I'm excited. We're about to go on an adventure.

Dear Amsterdam

I'll miss plowing through you on my bike like I'm on a mission to careen past every idly pedaling Dutch person on a cell phone which, let's be real, I totally am. I'll miss your bridges strung with lights and your soft, flaky croissants that make your American counterparts curl up in mortification. I'll miss your medieval castles and taking trains the wrong way through Holland and getting away with having the wrong ticket because everyone in your country, from policemen to train ticket collectors to grocery clerks, is just really really nice. I'll miss riding home late at night, when your streets are dark and empty of people but still full of sedate brick buildings that have been standing watch over nighttime pedestrians for the last three hundred years. I'll miss drinking coffee in the sun by a canal. I'll miss eating lunch on the balcony and wandering through stores marveling at the intersection between foreign and familiar. I'll miss your black licorice and the three story windmill that pointed my way home. I'll miss the friends I made, the people I met, and the cats I yelled at for sticking their fuzzy snouts in the butter.

I'll even miss the Red Light District, which totally skeeved me out until I started wondering about the underwear-clad girls posing in those red lit windows. What are their lives like? Why are they there? I wanted to ask them about their stories, what kind of love they have in their lives, and what they think about all this. But I didn't, because how do you ask something like that?

Living in Costa Rica and Amsterdam for the summer taught me that when I travel, I want to have a specific creative project. Specific to the place and specific to my interests - something to frame my time there and give it more of a purpose. To come home from wherever I was for a month and be able to hold or watch or read this thing I made. A creative souvenir that takes the feelings I had and amazing things I saw and molds them into something I can share.

I wish I figured this out three months ago, but that's why you live, right? To figure out the things you wish you could apply retroactively to the rest of your life. But you can't, so you just keep trekking out into the world and hope to whatever sky-dwelling deity you prefer that you remember what you figured out for next time.

At Least Now I Know The Dutch Word For Chicken

Figuring out which soup is chicken in a Dutch supermarket when you're feverish is a daunting task. I could have asked someone, but simply forcing one foot to step in front of the other in a vaguely normal fashion felt like summiting Kilimanjaro without a sherpa or even a water bottle. Conquering my squeamish belief that it's rude to walk up to someone in a foreign country and assume they speak my language was really too much to ask on the day that the insides of my stomach made an abrupt and brutal reappearance. I insist on being a pansy about this, even though everyone in Amsterdam does speak my language - even the yoga classes are conducted half in Dutch, half in English. I should probably just get over myself. But conquering deeply entrenched beliefs and getting over oneself are definitely too much to ask when the only thing between you and what feels like death is a mug of chicken soup. All of this to say, would a convincing graphic of a plump and obvious chicken be too much to ask, Dutch soup makers?

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NMmF_iEtBd

Panda by Brian Andreas. Because he does things like that.

Traveling by yourself to random countries for months at a time can get lonely. I'm pretty good at being alone. I'm even reasonably good at being lonely. But at some point, being good at something stops being a good reason to do it. So you start dating instead.

There was the Italian man who wore his hat through dinner. There was the man who somehow found me on a random bridge after I'd manage to miss the very obvious landmark at which we were supposed to meet. Two days in a row. I missed it twice. Despite having been there many times before. My brain is missing the GPS component that comes standard in most models.

But the true winner in my own personal Dating Olympics was the guy who went to the police station with me instead of to the museum. Because my purse had been stolen on my way to meet him. HI. I JUST MET YOU. HELP ME FIGURE OUT ALL MY SHIT.

When we got to the police station - after I almost started crying into the iPad he very nicely let me use to skype the credit card companies, credit card companies that really really do not want to send replacement cards to the Netherlands - we learned that the efficient and genial Dutch cops had already nabbed the guy. They returned a very strange selection of items - my credit cards and my makeup and my umbrella. But not my purse or my sweater or the keys to my bike lock. But they were very apologetic about making us wait a whole fifteen minutes and told us about how they found the thief sitting in bushes (really) and so the cops crept around the building and hopped out from behind it to wave a cheery five fingered hello before tackling the guy.

If you have to sit in a police station and give a police report, you may as well do it in Amsterdam. Thanks for getting my debit card and my lip gloss back, guys.

On our second date, we did that whole nice dinner, night stroll along the Amsterdam canals thing. This would have been the best date in the world, were I not starting to feel queasy. I thought I was just low energy, maybe an adrenaline let-down from the whole purse thing. It wasn't until I was pedaling home like a 93-year-old grandmother instead of zipping around as many Dutch people on cell phones as possible that I realized I'd contracted the flu. Stopping on the side of the road and reintroducing myself to my lamb entree confirmed it.

First date, purse gone. Second date, flu. Third date...accidental arson? Horsemen of the apocalypse? Dinner theater?

Life Seen From a Bicycle

July in Amsterdam is remarkably similar to July in San Francisco. Gray and drizzly for a week and then the sun comes out one afternoon and everyone goes insane. Parks are clogged and any chair sitting on a sidewalk or along a canal is occupied by someone lifting their face to the sky and looking pleased with life. My apartment for the month comes equipped with a balcony, naughty felines (ask me how many times I've walked into the kitchen to discover a certain cat licking the butter) (TOO MANY TIMES IS HOW MANY), and a bicycle. The bicycle is tall and black and slightly rusty - it looks like something from the Sears Roebuck catalog, circa 1954 - and when I climb on, my posture is forced into corseted Edwardian perfection. When I ride it, I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West in her Kansas incarnation. This pleases me.

Since the sun was out yesterday and I feel slightly more sure of my ability to find the apartment again after I leave it, I cycled into the center of the city to sit along a canal and eat fries. Being a total cliche also pleases me.

My first time on a bike in Amsterdam was petrifying. I was compelled to climb on it after a week of procrastination because I was meeting someone in the center of the city and my bus card was out of money and the only place to refill it was closed on Sunday. Already late, I gamely hopped on. After pedaling an entire two blocks without dying, I started to enjoy myself. Not just because everything was all Dutch and sunny and picturesque, but because I was paying attention to all that bright, pretty Dutchness.

How often do you really pay attention in your every day life? It's so easy to go on automatic when you know where you're going and what you're going to do when you get there and understand all the rules of the system in which you're operating.

I had no idea what I was doing on a bike in Amsterdam. Yes, I know how to ride a bike and I had a city map in my bag, but I didn't know the streets or the road rules or the language, something that might prove handy if someone needed to yell, say, "WATCH OUT FOR THE BUS!" at me. So I went into hyper focus mode. And realized that a lot of life passes me by when I'm not truly paying attention to what's right in front of me.

Cycling past Centraal Station on my way home was oddly calming. My brain is usually concentrated on seventeen different things and at least thirteen of them are worries. Six consistent worries, four variable worries, and three new worries I've invented just for the occasion. But as I pedaled past the train station in the great salmon stream of Dutch cyclists, dodging taxis and tourists and the occasional rogue fish, all my worries and thoughts disappeared into a soundless tunnel and my brain filled instead with "Oh shit, oh shit, oh god, here we go, I'm going to die, we're all going to die, MOTHER OF GOD, WHO DECIDED THIS WAS LEGAL?"

Then I passed the station, filled my lungs with air, and concentrated on finding the giant windmill that points my way home. No, that wasn't a lazy Dutch metaphor. There really is a giant windmill in my neighborhood. The windmill serves beer.

I'd like to say that I'm going to take my first Dutch cycling experience and use it to stop regularly tuning out the world by sticking my headphones in my ears and watching the pictures in my head rather than the road in front of me, but that's absolutely not going to happen. Instead, I'll simply try to notice when my attention is focused entirely on what I'm doing. Because that is peace - and even grace. Something I never thought I'd find on a bike in Amsterdam. Certainly not when I misjudged an angle and almost barreled over an elderly man from Bristol. Sorry, dude. Enjoy your stay.

photo (54)
photo (54)

Given my totally justified fear of bicycle-related death, taking this picture was probably a dumb idea.

How I Accidentally Ended Up in Amsterdam

If you're wondering about the likelihood of ending up in Amsterdam by accident, let me say that if it was possible to take a wrong turn somewhere in Northern California and end up in the Netherlands, I would've done it. I wasn't planning to go to Amsterdam. Yet here I am. Because life enjoys veering seven degrees to the left and often the thing you didn't plan turns out much better than anything you would've planned and that's saying something because you consider yourself a rather impeccable planner, even though it sounds suspiciously like boasting when typed out like this. YES, I'M A TOTAL BRAGGART. IT'S FINE.

Before I left for Costa Rica, I mentioned Amsterdam in a post. Because it was the first city that occurred to me when I needed a random location to end a sentence. Ten minutes later, I got an email from Nicolien saying that she had an apartment in Amsterdam and she was going to Serbia for a month and would I like to come to Holland and watch her cats while she was gone? WHY, YES. YES, I WOULD LIKE TO LIVE IN YOUR AMSTERDAM APARTMENT WITH YOUR CATS.

If you've ever wondered if a blog can wield some serious juju, let me assure you that it can. Make a joke about Amsterdam, end up living there for a month. I think we should all try to maximize whatever wordpress magic lives here. Ahem.

I WOULD LIKE AN APARTMENT IN NEW YORK THIS FALL, TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS, AND A STUFFED PANDA. I MEAN, A REAL PANDA WOULD BE AWESOME BUT I BET THOSE THINGS EAT A LOT AND FEEDING BAMBOO TO A GIANT BEAR EVERY DAY SOUNDS LIKE A HASSLE.

Now it's your turn! What would you like the blog genie to bring you? Leave it in the comments. May I suggest using the caps lock key? Everything works better in caps lock.

(I'll keep you posted on whether or not the universe coughs up any pandas or New York apartments.)

So I'm in Amsterdam for a month, staying in a lovely little apartment with two cats.

photo (50)
photo (50)

Amstercat

My first full day here, Nicolien and her husband took me around the city. We walked past canals and wolfed down a huge pot of cheese fondue and I drank more beer in a day than I've had in the past year. It's a beautiful city, especially in the rare July sun. Every so often, we'd pass a building that pitched forward, as if it was straining to catch up with time. But they never fall, the houses just hover a few feet in front of their neighbors, like they can't wait to find out what's next. I know how they feel.

Green Insects and Great Expectations

Hey, guess what! Traveling does not, in fact, turn you into a completely different person. If I thought I was going to go to Costa Rica and do anything but talk about bugs on Twitter, I was fooling myself. Isn't it a rule that you're not allowed to go to a foreign country for a month without something momentous happening? A life-changing event? An epiphany? A bestseller? A nice summer fling? Instead, I've spent most of my time becoming that much more cemented in who I already am.

Who I am really likes quesadillas and will always choose a nap over a fling.

None of this should surprise me even a little bit. And yet it does. Women are a mystery! Even to themselves! DON'T FEEL BAD, MEN. WE DON'T UNDERSTAND US EITHER.

I've had some feelings about my expectations, because I have feelings about everything and because expectations are a specific brand of human folly that really enjoys poking our tender bits with the sharpened tines of its cantankerous little folly fork. Ouch. Stop that, folly fork.

But your life is going to do what it does, no matter how many trips you go on, dates you set up, projects you do. Your life will always just be what it is, regardless of your expectations.

So I'm finally starting to shift out of poking range so I have space to enjoy the small things. Because the small bits are always the best part. And goodness, there's a wealth of happy-making in Costa Rica.

Ceasing Cyclical Self-Reflection In Favor of Small Bits of Awesome.

Or, Things I Really Like Here.

Walking down to the beach just to watch red and purple crabs scuttle frantically away from my clomping feet.

Sitting on the roof with the surfers and egging on prodigious thunder storms.

Swatting at my hair like it's developing a sentient personality, one that quivers eagerly at the thought of hastening my demise. I'm not convinced this is just my imagination. The humidity has not been kind.

Walking down dirt roads through the jungle to take a yoga class or buy more mangos.

Walking home in the hot sun and being offered a lift on what looks like a go-cart on steroids. I sit on the front and cling for dear life as we jolt down hills.

Propping my feet on the deck railing as I work on my laptop. If I lift my eyes four inches above the screen, I can see the ocean.

This Guy

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IMG_3764

Et tu, Jiminy Cricket? 

He dropped unceremoniously into my lap one day and then spent a reasonable portion of the night hanging out on my laptop. The next evening, I had a one-night stand with a lightning bug. The night after that, I learned to shut my door as soon as it got dark.

The Coffee and Where I Get To Drink the Coffee

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IMG_3775
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IMG_3766

Dogs That Show Up While I'm Drinking Coffee, and Wander From Table to Table In Search of Hands to Pet Them. Their Success Rate is Impressive.

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IMG_3779

Especially this one. I MEAN, LOOK AT HIM. 

I was tempted to take him home with me - he didn't have a collar and his ribs were alarmingly prominent - but then I remembered that not all dogs have collars around here and sometimes people carry machetes and I don't want to end up on the wrong end of a scythe because I blithely kidnapped some dude's adorable dog. And customs would probably have a fit.

Black Sand Beaches and White Sand Beaches and Yes, I Got Called Racist By Two Different People The Last Time I Mentioned What I Still Insist Are Racially Inconclusive Beaches

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IMG_3721

I went running today - at noon which, by the way, is a really stupid time to run in Costa Rica - and as my feet hit the sand on what must be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, I realized that maybe my life doesn't need to change. Maybe I don't need any major epiphanies. Maybe I'm fine just the way I am.

Which is its own sort of epiphany, I guess. So never mind.

Life on the Mountain Top

My mom likes to tell the story* of how she forgot to latch the front door one day when I was a baby. She got in the shower and I made my break for freedom. When she got out, the door was wide open and I was nowhere to be found. She raced out of the house, towel flapping, to find me half a block away, waddling straight down the middle of the street in my diaper, trailed by a nice lady in a car who wanted to make sure I got back where I belonged. Thanks, nice lady. BUT I BELONG ON THE ROAD, YO.

* I like to say this is proof of my adventurous spirit, but it's probably just proof that people should lock their doors around me.

My adventures of the past few years have been of the smaller, more internal variety. I won't say I've forgotten how, but I will say that I got thrown for a loop my first week in Costa Rica. There were a lot of emotions and most of them were confusing. I'm-never-going-home-again giddiness! Send-me-back-to-my-friends-right-now loneliness! Quesadillas-for-breakfast glee! Where-the-effing-hell-are-all-the-vegetables discontent! Why-am-I-having-any-negative-emotions-at-all-because-I'm-in-Costa-Rica self hatred! OH-MY-GOD-LOOK-AT-THE-VIEW-THAT-COMES-WITH-MY-BACON mania! Many of these emotions happened within a few minutes of each other and, goodness, that gets exhausting.

But emotions don't get left at the airport and insomnia will happen when you drink six cups of coffee a day because surprise! COFFEE IN COSTA RICA IS REALLY, REALLY GOOD.

Also, There's This

beach
beach

I like it when the sand reflects the sky. It does that really well here. Good job, beach.

Even if I have to be glued to my laptop, even if I have more emotions than I prefer, even if I'm not exploring as much as I'd like, I'm still here. And that's what counts.

Sticking Out Like a Sore Turkey Vulture

I should be able to speak Spanish. At least enough to ask for avocado and use basic, if improperly conjugated, verbs. But all five years of Spanish yielded was the ability to translate what people are saying twenty minutes after they've said it. When I was lost the other day,  a lovely lady on a motorbike rode up and said "Quieres cambiar?" I smiled uncertainly until she drove away. Three minutes after she left, the slowly-churning cogs clicked into place. "WAIT, YES! I DO WANT A RIDE! SI! SI! Shit." I trudged on and cursed my youthful self for sleeping peacefully through fifth period.

At customs, I greeted the official looking dude behind the counter with a cheery "Hola!" He looked surprised and said, "You speak Spanish!" With an exclamation point, as though my hello was so fluent-sounding that he just assumed, and was excited by the prospect. I felt like I was betraying his punctuation when I admitted "Nope. That's all I've got." After changing a few dollars into colones, I tried to thank the guy behind the counter in Italian, French, and English. Basically, every language I have any familiarity with except Spanish.

Linguistic and navigational mishaps aside, I love it here. My office is a balcony that overlooks the ocean and a jungle full of howler monkeys. I eat mangos for breakfast and make coffee with the Costa Rican equivalent of the french press, which is basically a sock hanging from a mini wooden scaffold. You pour hot water into the sock and it drips coffee into your mug. The beaches are full of perfect shells and it's so humid the bananas sweat, which is gross, but not as gross as the "Don't put it in the toilet unless you've eaten it first" rule. Don't ask.

I love the details of new countries, details you only really become familiar with if you stop moving long enough to see them. Or if you're someone other than me, someone who lives in a place for eight months and when asked if you ever use the hot tub in the backyard doesn't say, "There's a hot tub?"

All The Minutiae That Has Entertained Me Thusfar

Blonde hair is unusual here. People straight up stare. It's not unpleasant, they just gaze at me in gentle confusion, the way you might look at a penguin waddling down Madison Avenue.

Last night I saw my first firefly. I was charmed. Less charming are the seven billion other insects, each of which has personally welcomed me to the country. They find my legs quite tasty and thank me for bringing them along.

A team of abandoned monkeys lives on the hillside where I'm staying. They used to serve as guard animals with a ferocious pitbull until their owner decided that was a stupid idea. They attack the sweet Husky that lives here by barking at it and throwing sticks. If you've never seen a monkey bark at a dog before, I highly recommend it.

mangos
mangos

Mango peels go here. I've been advised not to throw them near the house, lest the howler monkeys come say hello at 4 a.m. 

Fresh vegetables are hard to come by. Beans and cheese and rice and tortillas are not. If you eat in a restaurant, the salad options are green, chicken, and fish.

Very few people have washers and dryers. Most clean their clothes by hand on one of those ridged boards you see in pioneer movies. I now know my answer to the "Would you rather pay fifteen dollars to do one load of laundry or spend most of your time being grungy?" question.

Dogs are everywhere and none of them are on leashes. They're all friendly and come running up if you so much as glance their way. If you pet them and tell them what a nice dog they are, they'll walk along the beach with you for awhile before wandering off to sniff an abandoned surf board.

Strange birds populate the trees by the beach. They're black and rather formidable, like a cross between a turkey and a vulture. I'm all proud of my description, but they're probably called turkey vultures. Of the genus younotascleverasyouthinkus. 

turkey vultures
turkey vultures

My knowledge of ornithology is limited to peacocks and chicken sandwiches at Popeye's.

Why Pandas Shouldn't Be Allowed To Drive. In Costa Rica Or Anywhere Else.

The first thing I did in Costa Rica was almost kill a local. This isn't the kind of thing you put on your itinerary. Red-eye from San Francisco to Miami. Drink ridiculous amounts of coffee. Fly from Miami to San Jose. Wave driver's license and credit card and get handed a car. Almost kill someone. Drive through the jungle like Indiana Jones. Eat burrito.

When you're on the wrong end of a 24 hour journey, the first thing you should do when you step off the plane and into a foreign country is drive across half of it. Sure, you don't understand the signs or the rules or the etiquette or the traffic patterns. Sure, the stick shift bears only the slightest resemblance to your stick shift at home. Sure, you're trying to avoid mowing down the family that appears to be walking in the center of the road while also listening to what the tiny voice in the GPS is telling you.

All this to say, I don't know exactly what happened as I tried to merge onto the highway in Central America, I just know there was a lot of honking.

Sometimes you have to barrel forward even though you know you're doing it wrong. Doing it wrong is better than sitting there paralyzed. So barrel forward I did.

Driving in Costa Rica is like playing a video game, something I could say with more authority if I'd ever actually played a video game. You never know what's coming next: Dogs darting out in front of you, chickens pecking at intersections, entire families strolling down the center of the road, mountain paths so bumpy you feel like your teeth are going to fly out of your head.

I was in the car a solid hour before I saw my first traffic light. I'm not saying there weren't any traffic lights, I'm just saying I didn't see them. Fires were burning on the side of the road and the rooster to person ratio seemed heavily in favor of the roosters. Signs made no sense so I just gripped the wheel and hoped everyone would emerge unscathed.

The one sign I did understand was Fiesta de Pollo. I figured it out even before seeing the juicy birds turning on their spits, an accomplishment of which I am very proud. If I didn't have to drive all the way across Costa Rica before dark, I absolutely would have stopped for a chicken party.

Occasional gripping terror aside, driving from San Jose through...wherever it was and toward...wherever I was going (getting GPS was a good move for me) was well worth it. The road curved through mountain ranges under a deep blue sky and I forgot to roll up the windows before getting on the highway, so my hair was blowing cinematically in the wind. Until two minutes later, when it went from cinematic to rat's nest. But it was a spectacular two minutes.

Then the GPS started merrily chirping about falling rocks and dangerous bridges. Really? Is this something I should actually worry about or is it more an FYI? BE MORE SPECIFIC, TINY WOMAN IN MY GPS. Turns out, the falling rocks weren't my problem.

June is the rainy season in Costa Rica and torrential downpours start about 2 p.m. and keep a nice, cheerful pace throughout the afternoon. As I was parading through one of the villages, a kid right in front of me hit a wet patch and his motorbike slid out from under him.

This isn't something I'm proud of, but I probably shouldn't have been driving. I was exhausted. I was nodding off. I had to pull over a few times and rest just so I could keep going. I probably should've given up and found an alternative to a six hour drive at the end of a 24 hour travel day, but I was so tired I couldn't think to do anything but stay on my previously plotted course. So when I saw that kid go down, I thanked whatever power helps me out when shit gets bad that I was awake at that moment.

I slammed on my brakes and realized in a weirdly calm manner that the brakes on the car I was driving weren't nearly as responsive as the brakes I'm used to. He was on the ground and his bike was on the ground and I was almost on top of him and I still wasn't stopping, so I angled the car to head into a ditch. The brakes finally did their job as I skidded perpendicular to his head. Not to mention way closer than either of us enjoyed.

When I jumped out to see if he was hurt, he just stared at me in confusion.

It took me a few seconds to realize I'd spoken to him in English. I might have managed, "Are you okay?" in Spanish if I wasn't so exhausted and had, like, twenty minutes to prepare. Unfortunately, the nature of accidents is that you don't have twenty minutes to prepare. But he got to his feet - he had tied plastic bags to his shoes to keep them from getting wet - and walked his bike to the side of the road where people without cars and with local language skills were waiting.

Once my heart stopped racing, I followed the GPS through valleys and over jungle dense mountain tops where I finally found Nosara, a town that is - apparently - known for making tourists want to cry. I did not cry. I did curse the sky a few times and perform a lot of three-point turns and gingerly feel my molars for cracks after jolting down the bumpiest roads my skull had ever encountered.

When I finally found the place, I face planted on the bed and woke up ten hours later to find howler monkeys, mangos, and a view of the ocean.

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Ocean. Bonus: Zero death. 

Colorblind Clown Flies to Central America

I'm sitting in the Miami airport wearing the most ridiculous outfit. Every time I catch sight of myself in a reflective surface - of which airports have a regrettable number - I have to shake my head and wonder who decided it would be a good idea to let me dress myself. Pink cartoon shirt, pink sandals, fluffy yellow skirt, and obnoxious rainbow disco ball ring that I bought for Vegas and now refuse to take off. All of which lends credence to my brother's unflattering but entirely accurate assertion that I dress like a colorblind clown. After my brother and his girlfriend dropped me off at the airport, my fluffy yellow skirt and I discovered the flight was delayed. So I did a little work and entertained myself on g-chat with a friend who rode his motorcycle through South America a few years back. He told me what to order for breakfast in Costa Rica and I dutifully made notes on my phone as autocorrect inquired whether I really meant Sally Lizard instead of salsa lizano. No, iPhone. But I appreciate both your understanding of my character and your disinclination to learn Spanish.

Maybe I'm easily impressed but it still amazes me that you can sit in an airport and talk to a friend - and know that when you get where you're going, thousands of miles away, you can talk to the same friend the same way.

Nicole and I recently marveled at how you can just show up at the airport with your little bag and someone will take you to Paris. Or Turkey. Or Antarctica. Yes, you need money, but it's literally that easy. Show up, get maneuvered thousands of miles across the world and end up in the exact location you want. No more do we have to acquire a covered wagon and oxen and scale cliffs and ford rushing streams and hope to god nobody gets lost or dies along the way.

I am truly, astonishingly grateful. Not just to live in a time where all this is possible, but also that I'm able to take advantage if it, albeit in my limping so-where-exactly-is-money-coming-from-next-month kind of way. Money always appears, even when I don't yet know exactly how it will happen. If I want this life, this is part of it. For now. Soon, maybe even very soon, that will change.

This morning, we drank orange juice and flew straight into a sunrise. It made any momentary worry worth it. Because if that's not a miracle, I don't know what is.