Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
1. As you heard, we lost Dr. Maya Angelou on Wednesday. I haven’t read her novels, just her poems, but I think I’ll put one on the list. Here’s a quote from her to think about:
“My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.”
2. And here’s a lobster holding a beer, because it’s the WEEKEND and we all survived the week:
In the middle of change and learning new ropes, this article from The Guardian last week was deeply reassuring: “Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.” The title says it all, but it’s a good reminder that other people are no different from you (me), and are probably also just making it up as they go along.
One of the biggest causes of misery is the way we chronically “compare our insides with other people’s outsides”. We’re all …energetically projecting an image of calm proficiency, while inside we’re improvising in a mad panic. Yet we forget…that everyone else is doing the same thing. The only difference is that they think it’s you who’s truly competent.
The calming manatees must have worked, because I made it through my first day back without too many moments like this:
Of course, I still haven’t tried to use the phone system or the billing system, so there’s still a chance.
I start my new job today. I’ll be thinking of some Calming Manatees to get me through all the new-ness:
Here’s a poem for it:
Grass
1. Apropos of getting a new job, here are some job rules from the new book #GIRLBOSS. I’m not sure how I feel about how they’re targeted, but they’re good to remember–especially the “Be nice to everyone” one.
2. Ahem:
Guys, I have some news I haven’t told you: This is my last day on the job as an “in house” copywriter for the craft company. Starting Tuesday, I’m headed back downtown and back to writing at an ad agency.
I hinted at it in January, but it’d been more difficult than I thought it would be to adjust to only writing for one “client” all the time. I also missed the city I’d worked in for nearly a decade–Salt Lake isn’t a major urban center, but it’s as urban as Utah gets and has some really wonderful alleys and restaurants and poems in public parks. Not being in it every day was hard for me.
The last 19 months in house taught me a lot–I did more consumer-facing stuff and I got to experience a retail product launch–but I think my heart is with the agency world. If only because then I can call Peggy Olson my spirit animal:
1:24 and 1:53 FOR THE WIN, Peggy.
Late spring and early summer here in the foothills is just lovely. The mountains are still green, with snow higher up, and the light is still clear–not the long gold light of July and August. The cloud shadows on the mountains always, always make me think of the opening of Out of Africa:
The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. […] The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigor to it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. […] Up in this high air, you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.
As I said yesterday, when it comes to this pergola, all I have to do is blog about what I want and then it happens. (Thanks, Dad!) In this case, it was adding curtains made of drop cloths (thanks, Pinterest!) to the main posts to give me some privacy and a bohemian-casbah-Raj-tent feel. It worked!
In the day time it looks light and proper and the canvas adds lovely depth and shade:
But at night you can draw the curtains and light your lanterns and feel like you’re in a J. Peterman catalog, “drinking gin and saying truly witty things.”
And if you’re still playing with the new Waterlogue app, you can make it actually LOOK like you’re in a J. Peterman catalog, too:
Many thanks to my dad for (yet again) making my blog posts into reality. I just write about what I’d like to have, but he has to put his engineering brain to work to think of ingenious solutions–and then do the prep work, drive everything to my place, climb on ladders, and make it happen. He’s the best.
