Currently: June 2015

Celebrating lots of time with old friends. This past month, I visited college friends in New York City and had a dinner party with a bigger group of my high school friends than we've been able to gather for years. Which has meant a lot of time eating, drinking, and laughing hysterically at jokes old and new. No complaints here.

Planting my garden. It took me until late June, but I've now got seedlings in the ground! When I plan to hit the garden after work, I always find myself extra eager for the clock to hit 5:30 so I can get outside and get dirty. On the flip side, I forgot how much I worry about my plants when I'm not at the garden - either that they're getting fried by the sun or battered by the derecho-like storms we've been having in DC.

Drinking lots of tea in the evenings. Not seasonal at all - maybe it's the air conditioning that makes me want it? - but it's nice to have something to sip on.

Playing Sims for iPhone - the newest obsession to liven up my short commute. It's funny - when I played Sims in middle school, I spend most of my energy creating perfect families (albeit with the occasional pool accident, as you do). Now, my Sim is mostly interested in barging into people's houses and doing sexy dances for them. It's rather poorly received.

Adding books to my library cart. It is seriously addicting - it's all the fun of shopping and getting new stuff with none of the cost. I'm on the waiting list for All the Light We Cannot See and Station Eleven and I check my library account almost daily to see how I'm progressing. Currently my eyes are bigger than my stomach and I have a growing stack of library books, so hopefully I will have a summer full of reading.

Planning our travel for this summer and hoping to squeeze in a couple trips. When you're a kid, summers feel totally endless - but nowadays I am all too aware that there are a finite number of weekends to make it all happen. I can't believe it's July already - I'll blame it on the fact that I was gone for most of May, so I missed that gearing-up period and got plopped back in the country in full-on summer.

Feeling a sort of balance. Life is full and fun and good, as the summer should be. This time last year, when I was traveling most weekends, I felt like my life was out of control if I hadn't packed myself a lunch or done laundry. (And that would worry me even more, because let's face it, I currently have as little responsibility as I will ever have until my kids are grown up and I have retired.) This year, it's like "sweet, let's get Chipotle." I don't know exactly what the difference is, but I'm glad that I'm learning to let it go and roll with it.

The daily card, week 24

As the cards hint at - there were some big emotions this week! (The funny thing is, I actually would have mostly forgotten that if I hadn't made these. I love that this project means I get an accurate sample size, so to speak, of a year in my life - the big stuff and the daily grind and everything in between.) I met Justice Sonia Sotomayor, worked up the courage to start a nervewracking but productive conversation, and reunited in New York with friends I hadn't seen since college.

Nothing too groundbreaking here technique-wise. Just like summer makes me want easy dinners and light reads, it is making me want to make simple cards. Like I said last week, I'm rolling with it.

The toy soldier card a line from a Rilo Kiley song that I got stuck in my head last week. As a kid, I would imagine grown-up Anna and how cool and glamorous and successful she would be. And I remember realizing, at some point, that who I was then and who I was going to be when I grew up were not two separate people. I wouldn't get to fast-forward to the future and suddenly be my cool grown-up self who has magically figured it all out. Instead, there was a string of days that connected me to future me, each of which I would shape myself, one day at a time. This lyric sums that up like nothing I've ever come across.

As a creative challenge, I am decorating a playing card every day in 2015. More context on this project is here and you can see all past card posts here.

Back to the garden

Confession time: I almost didn't renew my community garden membership this year.

Because let's be real - it's a lot of work. Gardening right in the ground, instead of in planter boxes or pots or containers, means breaking up soil that has turned into grasslands over the winter, digging trenches for drainage, spreading compost, and putting down woodchips and straw. And that's to say nothing about the part where you actually plant things. It is a process, to say the least, and I am getting a late start this summer, so I was dragging my feet about jumping back in.

But I had very mixed feelings about quitting too. In the two years that I've been gardening, it's become a big part of my identity, right up there with feminist and little-d democrat and world traveler. My friends (who are awesome about humoring me) ask me all summer long how the garden is going. So quitting the garden would have felt like losing a piece of my identity.

But then again, it's unrealistic to think that I am going to keep gardening forever in this particular community plot. After all, I can't just keep picking up hobbies and activities and never quitting anything and eventually driving myself crazy. And I am becoming more and more conscious that saying "yes!" to some things means saying no to others - there just aren't enough hours for everything I'm interested in.

But how do you know when to quit? There's no longer a graduation date beyond which it would be weird to keep showing up to Model UN. And I am not, apparently, a quitter. After all, I've known my best friend for 18 years and my boyfriend for seven. 

Those are some big questions, but the framework to answer them is simple enough. I just need to make sure to check in with myself about whether I'm still genuinely interested in something, or whether I'm doing it because I've enjoyed it in the past and invested some of my identity in it and am too stubborn to admit it's no longer working for me.

So after some soul-searching and with some hesitation, I sent my check in the mail and showed up in the garden in early June after getting back from Central America. And when I got out there and stuck the garden fork in the soil and got the dirt under my fingernails, there was this tremendous feeling of "ahhhh, yes." It is my happy place. It will always be closely bound up in my experience of living in DC.

A couple weeks ago, the homily at Unitarian church was about joy. Specifically - how we should be chasing joy instead of chasing pleasure. The garden is always going to be more work, and less immediate pleasure, than Netflix. But it reminds me again and again that the things that require at least a little bit of effort end up bringing me the most joy.