I am so done with winter.

Good thing, I'll be leaving for Georgia in 3 DAYS! The last few days I've been on this rant about all this snow. Yes, it was beautiful AND yes, the snow days was a wonderful respite from work. But now that the snow has settled, AND has turned into a funny color, AND has made my commute to work a living hell, I'm ready to pack and head south. And let me just add: Come on, Philly. Please, please, pleeeeease, just for once, can you just preemptively salt the road before a snow storm?! Ok, now I'm finish and will be turning my attention back to Best Coast. Ahh, gets me in the mood for Georgia. Bring on the sunshine!

Sigh, I am a hoarder...

Last night, I had this huge urge to organize my closet. What started out as a simple act of putting away clothes in my closet turned into me pulling out multiple boxes of clothing stowed away in random corners of my room. It's really embarrassing the amount of clothes I own. I mean, I have an extra box of shoes underneath my bed as if the shoe shelf that runs across my entire double closet isn't enough. There's a fine line between being resourceful and being flat out hoarding. And I am bordering on hoarding.

When I was younger, it made sense to save. "Why throw away a perfectly good sweater?," my mom, an immigrant, would ask. When my mom, my sisters, and I moved to the states, we literally packed one luggage for each of us. My sisters and I each carried one stuffed animal on the plane. Growing up, it made sense to hold on to the little things we had. I see a lot of this "holding on things" even in our emergency shelter where families are asked to pack one bag each for their stay. You're literally starting over with almost nothing and building a new life. Not that my immigrant experience compares to a family fleeing a violent home. For us, it wasn't a life or death situation; we chose our predicament and planned for it for years. Our move was actually an opportunity that billions of people would kill to have, so for that I'm grateful.

At 25, however, when I have more than enough of what I need, it gets increasingly difficult to argue the "being resourceful" argument. A part of it stems from a good side- the side that wants to go against consumerism. Why throw away something that is still in good shape? It's always easier to throw away things when something bigger and better comes along rather than see the value of what you have. But the reality is, I haven't worn some of these clothes in years and someone else could have benefited from them. At the end of the day, as much as I try to be "counter-cultural" by being an anti-consumerist, my hoarding just exemplifies selfishness more than anything.

So here goes my second new year's resolution. I will not buy clothes this year (except for a few necessities) and I will give up clothes that I don't use. Like last night demonstrated, this will be easier said than done.

You turn from me and said, 'The trapeze act was wonderful but never meant to last.'

Big surprise, I haven't crocheted, or baked, or even tackled any of the clothes that I need to alter. I think it's safe to say that I SUCK at being handy or creative. But in happier news, I've been listening to some great music by Iron & Wine. One in particular, "Trapeze Swinger", has been on heavy rotation which is interesting since (a) I've been putting my iTunes on shuffle and (b) I have every intention of fast forwarding to the next song if the first 10 seconds don't appeal to me.

Well, "Trapeze Swinger" is well over 9 minutes long. The first time you listen to it, the song appears to be pretty simple in it's arrangement: just someone telling a story with a fairly simple folky sound. It's pretty much Samuel Beam playing a guitar accompanied by another guitar at times and what sounds like people humming in the background, but given the heavy existential theme behind the song, one begins to appreciate how simple, yet perfectly orchestrated, the guitars are with the humming giving the song an ethereal feel to it. "Trapeze Swinger" is a story of a person reflecting on his life, but it's also undoubtedly a love song. There's an understanding that the singer is on his way to heaven or has just arrived. The person breaks down his life into various stages and he does so by asking a particular person to remember memories that he shares with her. There's a sense of natural progression in the way the singer recalls the memories. It starts off with memories of the singer as a child all the way to him in heaven. Naturally, each memory is accompanied by overwhelming emotions- a feeling of youthful innocence, misery, loss, and myriad of others that encompasses an intimate relationship and to a larger scale, the human experience. What's so poetic about the song is that, not only is Samuel Beam singing about the joys and trials of a love affair, but he also manages to interweave this comparison of life as a trapeze act. We're all essentially trapeze swingers, jumping from one stage (or "act") in life to another, with the understanding that the moments in between, relationships, and life eventually ends.

But Samuel Beam isn't really focus on the idea of endings as he is about what it means to exist. In fact, the singer is reflecting on all of this in the afterlife where he's very much alive through memories, both in his and in the person he leaves behind. To oversimplify this song to this paragraph would not do justice to how poetic this song is. It's best if you listen to it.

Please, remember me happily
By the rosebush laughing
With bruises on my chin, the time when
We counted every black car passing
Your house beneath the hill
And up until someone caught us in the kitchen
With maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention

***

So please, remember me finally
And all my uphill clawing
My dear, but if I make the pearly gates
I'll do my best to make a drawing
Of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl
An angel kissing on a sinner
A monkey and a man, a marching band
All around a frightened trapeze swinger

-Iron & Wine, Trapeze Swinger

Happy Sunday!

Thoughts on new year's resolutions (and a new blog!)

Since it's a new year (and a new decade), I thought that it was only fair to start a whole new blog. Well that, and I've been thinking about New Year's resolutions.

To be honest, I think they're kind of fun, even though, statistically speaking, very few people actually follow through with their resolutions. But here's the thing about New Year's resolutions: I think people often make one that's somewhat definitive and limiting, like losing a certain amount of weight, or not doing a particular habit, or cutting back on something. These are all great but thinking about resolutions in this way tends to set most people up to fail. What if people were to reframe the way they think about resolutions: rather than looking at a resolution from a deficit perspective, i.e. what we're lacking, which we tend to make very specific lists of since we're hard on ourselves, maybe we can focus on what we have or could have which tends to have less absolute answers. Like for example, rather than saying, "I need to lose 5 pounds", maybe think of it as, "How can I make my life healthier?" Yes, people still might not follow through, but the lasting effects aren't as shameful or guilt inducing. You just kind of get bummed that you didn't do something, rather than feeling that you failed at something. Plus, people might see their difficulty to follow through with something, not so much as a failure, thus being a deterrent to try again, but rather as a natural part of a process. Or as Miley Cyrus (ahem, Nicole) says, as I paraphrase, "Ain't about what's waiting on the other side. It's the climb."

As I'm thinking of New Year's resolutions, I decided that I didn't want to pigeonhole myself into making lists that I know I'll have a hard time accomplishing. Instead, I decided to make something of the year...literally, in the sense that I wanted to use my hands for something more than just eating. I'm not a very artistic person, and in fact, whatever I make, more often than not, tends to look like shit, but there's something about investing yourself in a project and being able to share it with others. I feel like the process of creating makes people a bit more reflective on who they are and on how they want to express their understanding of their selves to others. And for someone like me, who has a very short attention span, it feels great to finish something. So there you have it, my 2010 new year's resolution.

Peace,
Olivia

P.S. That's my very first honey wheat loaf of bread, courtesy of my new bread maker. It's a pretty lazy way to make bread, but it sure was delicious!