Footsteps on Concrete

It's about feeling myself firmly on the ground. After a week of head-spinning, cough-rattling, bleary-eyed head cold, all I want is that feeling of my two feet pushing on the sidewalk. I walked a lot this week. Before the cold set in, but also during, and tonight I can almost say, 'after,' because I think it will be mostly gone tomorrow.

I owe a lot to the people around me. My family is far away right now, too far to look any of my relatives in the eye and tell them how I feel. Though I never considered myself especially a family-type, I miss that closeness. Without the unexpected warmth of the friends I have made here, I would not know how to begin to express that feeling. What is your family but the people you invite to share your life with? I have a family growing out around me now, from the people I live with to the travelers who sleep on my couch for one night and I may never see again.

I believe you can learn something from everyone, especially the people who you find it hard to even bear being around. And when you start feeling squeamish in someone's company, it can often be a sign of insecurity on your part. Sometimes people mirror our worst side back at us, and it makes us cringe. But it's not really the mirror's problem if you're having a bad hair day...

If I duck around trying to avoid all the mirrors, my life becomes a maze of frantic evasion. I find myself coming home and avoiding meeting anyone, just going as quickly as possible to the shower, to my room, or back out into the world where I am anonymous. I guess it's clear that all that is a sign of not being ready to face things in myself. I am running away from the possibility of seeing my flaws, or what I imagine to be my flaws.

This week I tried to sit still in front of those mirrors and see what they actually show. It was so uncomfortable. I even wound up with this cold, which coincided neatly with my admittance that something has to change in the way I am living my life (not the things i do, the way I do them)-it wouldn't be the first time someone's manifested physical symptoms for emotional tension. Yet despite the discomfort, the intensity of peering into other peoples' eyes and seeing myself, humbled and simpler than I like to think, I felt again that buzzing joy of life this evening. That feeling of savory vividness that's so tangible it could almost be another entity;

You now what I'm talking about?

It starts as a smile in the corner of my mouth, and then starts to yank a string connected to the bottom of my stomach as it curves up my cheek into a grin. There I stand with a smile and a belly full of butterflies, for no reason other than...fill in the blank-I felt the wind on my legs in the warm evening; I shared a smile with a stranger; I thought of a sentence that made me laugh out loud as i scribbled it into my notebook by the Rhine. That is all I want in life, to sometimes cross paths with that entity and embrace her.

Shifting Gears

I'd like to explain something: I started as a food blogger. Like many of us sometime-vegan, full-time celiac, lactose-free and (by virtue of having grown up in a norCal hippie clan) overly-aware-of-what-we-eat folks, I thought a recipe blog would be the best way to share my thoughts about food. It was fun, I enjoyed it, I still read recipe blogs form time to time, and maybe someday I will return to the world of foodie fun.

For now, I've got to admit that I just want to write. Recipes were a good excuse, but never juicy enough to satisfy the writer in me. As a shameless chaser of human connection, I already know that I like to share my thoughts with the world. My love of communication borders on unabashed, and maybe it's time to take the plunge and just *gulp* live it. I want to share my thoughts with you. I won't tell you everything, because a certain amount of magic comes from keeping your secrets secret. Let's just say, if not an open book, I'd like to be a lovingly dogeared book, which you can feel free to open once and a while to see what's going on inside.

Of course, as someone who loves to share ideas, it comes as a blow when I can't get an idea across. I am too easily frustrated by people who I can't connect with; or rather, too easily frustrated by myself. My art history professor is a woman I barely manage to maintain eye-contact with, and every time she pauses awkwardly at one of my (poorly formulated, grammatically incorrect, german) questions, my heart skips a beat. "Shit, am I incapable of being understood?"

What I start to realize is that this frustration comes from the self-doubt it casts on me-did i do something wrong? Am I uninteresting? The usual questions of self-worth when someone doesn't immediately confirm it for us with a smile. Thankfully, at the moment it is impossible to take any of that seriously. Spring fever, or a trick of the mind, or both, either way I am seriously optimistic and self-loving right now, to the greatest extent that optimism can ever be "serious". I laugh so easily at silly jokes. I even laugh at things that aren't jokes...In How I Met Your Mother, the one series I guiltily watch late at night with a cup of tea in hand, Robin calls Ted an "I love you slut" because he says I love you so easily. I am without a doubt a giggle slut-I'll give it up at the drop of a hat, and truth be told, there's a good chance I'll laugh even if it's not funny, because it feels that good. I can't stop smiling. I can't.

So here I am, smiling away at my keyboard as I look forward to a day of dance, acupuncture and yoga. Jeeze, that's just holistic as hell. Fear not, I'll balance it out with a little bit of How I Met Your Mother, just to make sure I don't float away to Candyland on my peace and love rainbow.