beach body

i am an Aquarius. and even though that's an earth sign (i know! i was shocked to hear it, too) i sometimes think swampy lake sludge or overly-chlorinated pool water is running through my veins. because i love the water. i can't get enough of it.

one of my can't sleep at night, go-to-a-happy-place memories is floating on my back in the ocean right off San Juan, Puerto Rico. life doesn't get better than this, i remember thinking, and purposely tried to store the feeling of the warm water, gentle waves and salt in my eyes for later memoric use.

suffice to say, invite me to the beach, i'm at your door a day early, caked in sunscreen, ready to eat and drink all your beach snacks. clearly, i am very fun to take places. perhaps unawares of all these factors, yesterday i received an invite to spend the day waterside. my first of the year.

friends and i went to Jones Beach:

for the record. i did not take the above photo. and this was not my experience of Jones Beach (but hellooo man in the orange shirt). my experience was a few surfers and empty sand and water as far as my eyes could see. it was a damn good day. sun baked and sand flea bitten, as we drove back to Brooklyn i felt at peace and rested the way that only being near water makes me feel.

did it matter that i had to trek through beach scrub to get back to the car and my favorite loungey time pants were coated in ticks only seconds after i said "I hate walking through scrubby brush like this I'm always afraid I'm going to be covered in ticks."

heck no! i was by water.

did it matter that as soon as we got 5 minutes away from the beach we met a wall of traffic more impervious than 100 block sunscreen? heck no, i was water-induced relaxed. (and wasn't the one stuck driving it in).

and did it matter that i forgot to properly sunscreen my derriere so that now there is a perfect outline around my rump of where my swimsuit wasn't (unnecessarily and poorly illustrated below - and for the record, black parts denote sunburn, not fur)?

surely not! this is what makes every beach experience unique and i hope it's the first of many many more yet to come. except hopefully without all those ticks.

blech.

reading list

browsing at Barnes and Nobel can be a dangerous thing.

having finally finished the new Murakami book, 1Q84 and The Book Thief (it's a slow start, but it gets good and it's begun the book exchangers route), i killed time before work the other day by wandering the B&N shelves. like i said, dangerous. not that i bought too much, but my library queue is now absurdly full.

i am a sucker for book recommendations. and what is the first floor of my Barnes and Nobel except one giant shelf of staff picks, reader picks, most popular, teen favorites, omg you haven't read this yet, you loser? picks.

without a working phone or a pen with which to right down all these book i simply-had-to-read-simultaneously-right-then i commited as many titles as i could to memory, and after work ran home and pulled up the Brooklyn Public Library page. Search. Click. Request. Yes! Search. Click. Request. Yes!

this means, in about a week, ten equally tempting books will be on my nightstand. at the moment, only two have come in, so before jumping into The Tiger's Wife (did you know that author is only 26?excuse me while i go kick something) and before all the haven't read/must read YA and awesome non-fiction (helloooo Moby-duck) gets to me, i'm starting with a book that is fun by it's very definition:



yep. Bossypants.

i've been curious about it for awhile, but more so since i've started watching 30 Rock and admiring how Tina Fey's mind works. (i know, i know, they have a stable of writers, but still, some of the things that come out of the actors mouths are just so bent, and it's her show, no? so she gets the credit). plus i knew she'd have a say on that whole "women aren't funny" thing, and i do love me a good strong heroine, so.... 

Bossypants.

imagine having lunch with a good friend who became a famous actress, and the whole time she's jumping from one thought to another, throwing out famous names, giving good life lessons, and being seriously upfront about aging and beauty. both lunch and this book will only take you about an hour to get through. and with chapter titles like: I Don't Dare If You Like It (One in a series of love letters to Amy Poehler) you leave the meal feeling entirely satiated.

me being me, my favorite parts are the empowering ones. (i should just hang framed motivational kitten posters around my apartment and be done with it already.) so here's a little Monday morning Tina Fey for you. if you lived closer, i'd let you borrow the whole book, 'cause i'm almost done and about to get SLAMMED with Requested Materials.

*sighs happily*

ain't life grand?

"The Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly Fat*

The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “freeze I have a gun!” and you say, “The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!” then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.

Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.

As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar. “ What kind of way is that to live?

The second rule of improvisation is not only say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you just say, “Yeah…” we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “What did you expect? We’re in hell.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here, and you say, “Yes, this can’t be good for the wax figures.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here, and you say, “I told you we shouldn’t have crawled into this dog’s mouth,” now we’re getting somewhere.

To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.

The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the time.” if we’re in a scene and I say, “Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What’s in that box?” I’m putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers.

In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person. That person is a drag. It’s usually the same person around the office who says things like “There’s no calories in it if you eat it standing up!” and “I felt menaced when Terry raised her voice.”

MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements with your actions and your voice.

Instead of saying “Where are we?” make a statement like “Here we are in Spain, Dracula.” Okay, “Here we are in Spain, Dracula” may seem like a terrible start to a scene, but this leads to the best rule:

THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, only opportunities. If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up being a police hamster who’s been put on “hamster wheel” duty because I’m “too much of a loose cannon” in the field. In improve there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.

* Improv will not reduce belly fat."

a picture's worth... and other musings on death

so i had this conversation last night that began upon my return from a ladies room. i told my cohort: "so i want to do a photo series of two things. the first, is of the signs that restaurants and bars post in their bathrooms telling employees to wash their hands." it's such a good indicator of a creativity (or lack there of). and every time i go into a bathroom (hi tiny bladder) i look forward to seeing their sign.

cohort then said, i'd like to do a photo series of hands. which was surprising because i didn't know that wanting to do photo series was a thing, but also, hands?

"wouldn't it be cool to take a picture of people's hands and then, like, have a little pull off bubble that said the story behind the cuts and marks on them? like imagine the hands of the guy who made the brooklyn bridge."

ok. sure. hands of really old people.

i looked around the restaurant and i couldn't help being more intrigued by the hands of those people. not people who had built historic bridges, because i'm sure Ken Burns has already unearthed the stories behind those hands, but that chic's hands over there. the regular every day - i got bit by a cat in the fifth grade and I sliced my finger open polishing a dessert wine glass at work - stories.

those were the stories that no one would ever know. those were the stories that would be lost with time.

at this point, the cohort asked, "Do you spend a lot of time thinking about death?" shortly thereafter, we got the check and split.

what are the secrets that your hands say about you? at the moment, other than my cut by glass scar, mine are shouting: take off that chipped gold nail polish already because contrary to what you'd like to believe, chipped nail polish does not look cool, just lazy.

bathroom signs. hands. cohorts. overall, i like my second photo series idea better: dogs waiting for their owners outside of stores.

these pictures are the story. no further explanation require.

finding a little color in the grey

when i walked into work on tuesday i was met with this guy:

it's soft shell crab season! or en espanol: la temporada de cangrejos.

con-grey-hos. it's my new spanish word of the week. all tuesday night, every time i walked into the kitchen, the dishwasher would ask: como se llama, mami? and even though the first time, i said "Corrie!" and the kitchen exploded with laughter, (i thought he was asking how you called me, not how you called the crab) i got it right after that.

for the right person, nothing would turn you vegetarian faster than working in a restaurant. i said "hello" to the above crab and then watched as, a second later, first his eyes and brain and then his butt were cut off with a pair of scissors. (no, i don't know why the butt). boom. dead.

granted, none of this stopped me from eating his brethren a few hours later after they were dredged in egg and cornmeal, pan-fried and served with a delicious garlic lemon sauce.

however, i did make sure to say: "thanks congrejos, i hope you get to come back as something with two legs."

it also made me think about how quickly any life can end, by a pair of scissors or something more human-inflicting.

it was a rainy, cloudy week in Brooklyn. one of those weeks that are perfect for writing. unless you wrote your heart out last week and need to think about your plot twists for a minute. then it's just rainy and cloudy. which is what it was for me.  knowing my mindset could mirror the weather at any second, i planned to keep busy and go to something called The Interview Show. it sounded interesting - people from all walks of life being interviewed. i looked it up on youtube only to discover that John Green was the very first guest the show ever had.

i didn't go out last night. the rain convinced me otherwise. but i did watch all the interviews with John Green. the first was in 2008, above is 2009. they did another in 2011 when there's no denying John is pretty damn successful. the interviewer asks if fame made everything better. and John's (Mr. Green's?) response is along the lines of, well, i thought it would, but i feel as equally annoyed and unsettled as i did before.

this line is mimicked in just about every author interview i've ever read. and, well, if a giant pair of scissors is following us around, and achieving what we always wanted does nothing to lesson the intensity of that feeling, then i guess we need to get a little more creative about how and where we look for satisfaction in this life.

yes, clearly, grey week = deep thoughts.

it's right around this time, that the words of the most amazing man i ever met on an airplane come back to me. "everything happens in the exact season it's supposed to." what's planted is planted and if it hasn't bloomed yet, it only means it's not the right season.

kinda like the above peony. there's no doubt it'll be a beautiful flower. we know that, but i couldn't help wondering if it knew that. or is it poised on the bush being all: "geez, i feel so pent up, like i haven't reached my potential, like i could be more at this." while the big, bushy flower behind it just laughs.

um yeah. so life, flower, and soft-shell crab metaphors on the blog today. that's why i like grey weeks. it's good to be reminded that we're all standing in the middle of this:

and every now and then we need to LOOK UP, DAMNIT!

on a side note, tonight i'm having a girls night and going salsa dancing. because while it's interesting and kinda fun to have a grey week, it's even better to kick your heels up that it's over.