Fashion Sense and Sensibility

I got back from a leadership institute today and as usual, I’d over-packed–three too many t-shirts, a bathing suit I never used, and a few extra pairs of shorts. I learned on my trip to Belize the importance of rolling, not folding, clothes to preserve suitcase space, so the unpacking process now includes refolding my laundry. I picked up a pair of shorts I hadn’t worn, and all the week’s lessons converged on a few threads of white cotton crisscrossed in a barbed wire pattern.

Integrity, intent, and fashion sense. That’s leadership.

This is not a post about leadership–but leadership is merely an incarnation of the lessons we learned. A recurring thing was the saying “Own your stuff,” and I feel some ownership is at last in order.

Random Encounters

Feeling that I would otherwise regret my entire life if I didn’t go, I decided this afternoon I would hit up the gym’s group fitness courses for one last time. I got dressed in my workout gear, placed a song on my tongue, and set out for AbSolution, an intense, 15-minute abdominal workout that feels like an hour. And feeling in a rather torturous mood, I decided to follow it up with 75 minutes of yoga. Delightful, but I was subsequently drenched in my own sweat.

The good thing is, this story? It’s not about that. But if I hadn’t gone out when I had, if I hadn’t bought some tea and read on my Kindle for as long as I had, if I hadn’t decided to get food in the face of a post-workout lack of appetite, I’d have missed out on not one, not two, but three random encounters.

Count the Leaves

It’s been a long time since I’ve said this and an even longer time since I’ve sincerely believed it, but today I feel happy. Genuinely happy. And for the life of me, I can’t even say what’s changed.

It feels like, for so long, dark clouds have held their hands around me, ethereal and tornadic fingers twisting around me, tumultuous chaos attacking me from every angle. Today the wind awoke over the world and while I was crossing the Brickyard–an open courtyard that is truly at the heart of our campus–I felt the wind whipping around me, awaken the wind inside me, and in a burst of ecstasy I spun around and watched as the world itself twisted beneath me….

Looking for Angels

It was my third year doing NaNoWriMo and I wanted new music to help me set the scene for my story. Gothic. Dark and stormy. Evil. So I searched up on different forums for suggestions, and when I went to a nearby used music store, I came home with H.I.M. and Skillet and maybe a couple others. I quickly realized, for setting or not, Skillet was an awesome group–and I’d loved their music on the radio years before without even knowing it was theirs.

After two or three, maybe four listens through the CD, I stopped hearing the lyrics and only heard the sounds: the beat, the tempo, the edge I wanted in my story. And as the words faded into the back of mind, I would sing them mindlessly… “So many nations with so many hungry people,” I’d say, my hands typing away, “So many homeless scrounging around for dirty needles; On the rise, teen suicide…”

Then today, walking home from work, I had my iPod on shuffle and it threw their sound to my ears once more. I wasn’t singing this time (it draws looks), but I was listening–and I realized, for all these years I’ve been singing their songs, I hadn’t heard a word they had said.

When Our Names Expire

There’s a man in my writing class who is perhaps one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met at N.C. State. He’s a little scruffy, has an adorable smile, and says some pretty cool things sometimes. For our second round of short stories, his protagonist was gay, and it made me think, here’s my chance to see where things could go.

So after class, I told him again how believable the character’s voice was (because honestly, it was) and then I asked, “Are you gay?”

Midnight Music Affairs

Imagine the darkest feeling you’ve ever felt.

It’s a good place to begin.

Expressions of Freedom

I like to think all things begin with chaos. It is order of the most profound nature. Order so precise, the slightest variation at the start can lead to endings worlds apart. I like to think, the further from this primordial chaos we become, the more distilled is the order around us. We begin to detect patterns. We begin to feel the rhythms of the world, the rise and fall of our breathing, the beating of our hearts. We gain the order upon which we can build our lives, upon which we can foster freedom for ourselves, moving forward toward the future.

Other times we get lost in that chaos. We lose ourselves.

This is not a story about that. Instead it’s a story about much more.