Humming "I Am The Warrior" and Reading the Fine Print

I'm in a feisty mood this week. I'm not often feisty. I'm nice. I'm obliging. I'm sweet. I don't want to put anyone out. But if you want to make my eyes narrow and my cunning bash my obliging over its milksop skull, tell me that my landlord wants to kick me out. Or tell me that a dog may not fall in love with me on sight. Yesterday, I met a friend's new pup, a tiny chihuahua mix named Peaches. Watching a 6'3" dude nuzzle a miniature hound who could get lost in his beard is an experience everyone should have, even if he claims that she doesn't like people and warned me not to be offended if she didn't take to me. Given that this is Amber's Week o' Feist, I thought, "WE'LL SEE."

As for the landlords, I live a ten minute walk from this:

My genius is getting things I want for a price I can afford, a genius it's good to cultivate if you decide you want to write things all day instead of going to business school. But now the landlords want me out. I want to stay. At least until I'm ready to leave. Which may be in three months, it may be in six. I am courting the idea of going nomadic again, putting my stuff in storage and taking that road trip through the south in September, hitting New York, and maybe dusting off my passport again. But last time I went nomadic, my life went up in a ball of flame. Not sure I'm ready for that again and I'm certainly not going to dive back in simply because my landlord decides he wants to muscle me out of my lease.

Usually, my need to oblige everyone and everything wins. But sometimes two rarely seen Amber traits get activated: Stubborn and Pissed Off. It's a fun ride for everyone. But once the stubborn and angry burns off, what's left is a solid sense of power, power backed by my image of myself standing feet planted on a cliff and hands fisted on hips, purple superhero cape fluttering in the wind. And my name in black ink on a lease agreement.

I'm the scrappy American in homespun breeks and a rusty flintlock rifle going up against rows of British soldiers in perfectly-pressed red coats and heavy artillery - and I'll win because I'm defending my home and they just want a paycheck. It's a melodramatic metaphor, but you take my point.

Often when I take a hit like this, I go down. Because what happens when something rocks my foundation - a blow to my security, a blow to my ego - it stirs up all the other feelings that have been congealing, sad and ignored, in my spleen for days and months and years until everything explodes in a shower of horrible.

Here is the benefit of spending a lot of time and energy learning how to dredge my feelings out of my spleen and give them some attention: Suddenly I can handle real life. Real life where sometimes people ignore the number one human tenet of Don't Be a Dick and sometimes dogs don't immediately take to you. Sure, I made a few venting phone calls and sent a few WARNING: LANDLORD BITCHING IS IMMINENT AND HUGS ARE REQUIRED texts, but it hasn't sent me into a spiral that ended on a fainting couch with smelling salts rather than at the Legal Aid office. This is progress.

As for the dog? She totally caved. There were a few setbacks - denying a dog a slice of pepperoni pizza will never endear you, no matter how many rides down the coast with the top down you offer -  but I won in the end. Consider yourself warned, landlords.

The Wheels On The Bus

The problem with not listening to yourself is that if you don't listen to yourself for long enough, your self will eventually force you to listen and you may not much like the way this happens. Because you may find yourself staring at the back of your car in the parking lot of a Starbucks wondering how the hell you managed to lock your keys in the trunk. Especially when one of your unchecked to-do list items is to renew your Triple A membership. Here's a fun fact about LA: You may be a mere five miles from home, but driving that five miles could take you half an hour. Taking a bus that same five miles? An hour. Probably more like an hour and a half. Okay, fine. Two hours and fifteen minutes, once you factor in waiting at the wrong bus stop, watching the bus you want pull away as you fume on the wrong side of a light and six lanes of traffic, getting on the right bus going the wrong direction, realizing transfers only work once and you wasted yours going the wrong direction and now you have to find more cash before you can get on the second/third bus you need to actually get home so you can get your spare car key and do the whole damn thing all over again.

As I was stomping down the street after bus number two, still fuming, I started to wonder how my peaceful evening turned into an epic urban adventure across five miles of rage-encrusted concrete. As I was scrunching up my face to glare at whatever happened to be in front of me - trees, liquor stores, old ladies with shopping bags - it occurred to me that this much disaster couldn't possibly be fruitless. It had all the hallmarks of the Smarter Me rapping Dumber Me on the side of my stubborn skull. So I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, "FINE. WHAT DO YOU WANT."

The answer? "It's not what I want, it's what you want. You want dinner. Because fuming burns a lot of calories and you're about two seconds away from passing out on the sidewalk. See? Your hands are shaking. Luckily, you stopped right in front of an El Pollo Loco and they have chicken burritos. Stop bitching and buy something with protein."

So I did.

After replacing the brain cells my rage devoured with avocado and grilled chicken, I realized life wasn't actually out to get me. Life happens for you not to you. You just have to let your brain see it. So I let my brain see that the bus I needed was right across the street. I could sit in the sun and digest my burrito while I waited. I could climb onto a deserted bus and have my own row and peace and quiet to realize that I needed to slow the hell down and take a break.

I tend to fall into the trap of thinking I need to be productive all the time. This doesn't mean I'm productive all the time. No. That would make sense. What this really means is that when I'm not productive I'm feeling guilty about not being productive. This makes me a slave to my to-do list and also kind of annoying. The more I'm ruled by my to-do list, the more I bow to what's urgent rather than to what's important. Sitting on that lumbering bus with absolutely nothing to do for hours but rearrange my priorities helped me realize that I need to be better about doing what's quiet and important rather than what's scream-y and trying to set things on fire for attention. I need to write instead of fret. I need to plan my big projects instead of micromanaging small ones. (I need to renew my stupid Triple A membership.)

If I'd given myself the space to figure this out sooner, I probably wouldn't have locked my keys in my car. But Smarter Me realized that giving Dumber Me just enough rope to hang myself was the best thing that could happen to me on a Wednesday night. Because I would have nothing to do but sit on an endless succession of buses until I remembered what was important.

Spending three hours zigzagging across LA on a bus was my soul's way of telling my brain to shut the fuck up and listen. Because sometimes all you need to hear is the swish of tires on asphalt.

Desert of Improbable Things

If you need further evidence that life is strange, allow me to suggest a trip to the California desert. An ocean in the middle of the desert? Weird. Magically appearing chicken sandwiches? Weirder. Building a hot air balloon to fly your message of god through the skies and then spending decades building a Dr. Seuss-like monument in 100 degree heat after your balloon strands you in the desert? Weirdest.

Visiting the Salton Sea and Salvation Mountain is like a fairytale in day trip form. In the space of only a few hours, we faced love, death, decay, joy, tangled hair, and many improbable things. We got rained on, baked in the sun, handed inexplicable chicken sandwiches, and waved at passing trains while playing music at obnoxious decibels.

But what I really came away with was the somewhat disquieting fact that I identify with this dude more than I care to admit.

I'm not huge on the god terminology - everything I've heard about god from mainstream religion makes him sound like a melodramatic Santa Claus - but a guy spending his life doing odd things in the desert to promote love? Sure. I'm down. If he was still alive, I'd give him one hell of an enthusiastic fist bump.

After walking the yellow brick road up a mountain made of cement and straw, we stood in the shade of a cartoon forest and talked about the idea of dedicating your entire life to one idea, one belief. If any of us could relate to the compulsion to spend your entire life in the heat of the desert building a tacky yet somehow lovely mountain dedicated to what you hold most sacred.

I didn't say anything at the time because I was about thirty seconds away from passing out (bringing extra water to the desert apparently doesn't occur to me), but I felt like I could relate. Not to building a gaudy mountain in the sand - I'm a delicate peony who only uses her hands to type things. But I do believe you can devote your life to one idea and one method of sharing that idea. You just have to really believe in both.

Writing is the only thing I've ever considered doing with my life. There was never a plan B. Someone once told me, "You have your medium, but not your message." Turns out the medium was the path to the message. Through my writing, I found the idea I would happily dedicate my entire life to. Figures that it would closely resemble an idea propagated by someone who looks flat-out insane in the right light.

Sometimes genius looks like insanity. Sometimes a hot road looks like water. Sometimes you find a sea in the desert. Sometimes you don't know what to think about something you see, you just know you feel a kinship with it.

What I do know is that the more love there is in the world, the more the world will heal. I believe that whatever you do with your life, whatever the details are, you should devote it to love, whatever that means to you. Loving yourself, loving your people, loving what you do. The more we all do that, the more it fans out around us and the more the world changes.

We're all building something in our own personal desert. We just have to find it. Maybe it's where you're going. Maybe it's where you've fallen and can't get up. Or maybe it's just exactly where you are now.

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.

Cosmic Kick in the Ass

Sitting on your couch and trying to determine what you have to offer the world is one hell of an exercise in fear. Fear that you've got nothing. Fear that what you have isn't enough. Fear that you once had something but you misplaced it. Fear that you missed your shot. Fear that you'll decide this question is too taxing and click over to Hulu. Fear that you made the wrong turn your sophomore year in college and missed your fate, Sliding Doors-style. Luckily, we all have something to offer, what we have is always enough, if you misplaced something you'll find it the next time you drop the remote down the couch cushions, there are always more shots, a little Hulu never hurt anyone, and you can fix any Sliding Doors mishaps by getting a hair cut.

What I'm saying is, I'm rethinking the entire direction of my writing career.

I always wanted to write what I deeply believe to be true. I always wanted to go on random adventures and document what I learned and where in them I felt sad, scared, vulnerable, loved. I always wanted to write what's stuck deep down in my spleen, so deep I didn't even realize it was hiding there.

Instead, I wrote for other people. Because that's how you make money and money is something that pays the rent and the bills and paying the rent and bills is what responsible humans do. I always wrote about things I was interested in, and told myself that I loved translating other people's passions into words. And I did. But it was never what I really wanted. Telling myself I did was my brain's cunning way of keeping me safe. But we can only ever tell our own story, and planting my boots in that brand of fear-driven safety eventually proved to be inherently unstable.

Even when I recognized the gap, I was hesitant to make the leap. It seemed insurmountable and there was always more pressing work to be done. But in the past two weeks, a landslide of events have pushed me firmly toward that leap, so firmly that it's less a leap and more a cosmic boot in the ass that pitches me over the cliff.

If last year taught me anything, it's how to stay calm in free fall. To trust the timing. To know that everything will work out, even if I don't yet know how.

In the past, I've always hustled and scrambled and found more client work. But I've never stepped back, taken a breath, and centered in my own voice and my own creativity. This time, I've chosen to trust that what I've learned and can share will be enough to see me through. That what I'm good at and bring to the table will be useful and valuable, so that I can do the work I feel I'm meant to do and live the life I want to live. For the first time in my working life, I'm trusting myself.

What do I have to offer? We'll see.