"Stop sucking and live a life of abundance"

That quote used to be the tagline for a blog that is now taglined "Personal Development for Polymaths." I'm not sure what a polymath is or why they need to develop personally, but I liked the original tagline as quoted in The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.

As a good and true nerdfighter, I try to do my part to decrease world suck. I mean, that's a big part of what this blog is all about -- keep working on love isn't just a neat quote from a book with pretty pictures of birds; it's like some crucial piece of advice on making my way in the world that happened to fall into my head at the exact right moment in time.

Are there moments/days/longer stretches of time when I still completely and utterly forget to be awesome? Yes. Mountains and moons and universes of YES. But I try. I try to be awesome, to make the world suck a little less, to keep working on love.

Some days, it even works.

Like today.

Operation Flowers was not my idea. My co-worker's husband suggested they spend Valentine's Day delivering flowers at a nursing home, rather than going the more traditional dinner-out route. When she told me about it, I got really excited...despite the fact that I often say I hate old people. (Really, I kind of do. Not totally. Fine, I'm admitting it publicly: I don't totally hate old people.)

So, my cubemate invited me to come along and share in this Valentine adventure and I couldn't say no, even though one of the big reasons I kind of hate old people is that they kind of scare me. (All the old people in your family completely and utterly losing their minds will do that to you.)

Coincidentally, the red dress I bought myself in the spirit of The Traveling Red Dress Project arrived yesterday, and since it was appropriately colored for the so-called holiday (did I mention I hate Valentine's Day? Like, really, really hate it. Not like how I kindasortaalmostmaybe hate old people), I decided to wear it.

This morning, I got up an hour early. I straightened my hair (which is no small accomplishment). I put on my pretty new red dress. I left work an hour early (hence the getting up early), drove out to Lewiston (which I am still somewhat convinced is charged in the opposite magnetic polarity as me), and I delivered roses and handmade valentines to nursing home residents with my cubemate, her husband, and another co-worker.

It was sad in so many ways -- people who could barely speak, who didn't necessarily have any idea what was going on, people who were so pale and skinny and reminded me SO MUCH of my mom in those last weeks of her life, people with the same vacant look my grandpa had in the last weeks of HIS life. But it was beautiful in so many ways, too -- the people who had all these amazing pictures up in their rooms, from old black and whites to brand new Christmas card family pictures; the people who had so many flowers already in their rooms that our single roses could have easily gotten lost in the shuffle; people who laughed and smiled and thanked us and seemed genuinely moved by our small gesture.

I usually avoid talking to strangers. I have a hard time relating to people I don't know, knowing what to say to them, how to carry on a regular conversation. I prefer to sit in silence in a corner by myself and read most of the time.

Even tonight, I didn't say much. I didn't go out of my way to ask these people their names, tell them mine, do anything more than say, "Happy Valentine's Day!" in an especially giddy voice (my voice tends to be a bit giddy anyway, unless I'm in a mood). I said a little more to one lady, because she had all these pictures and decorations hanging around her side of her room -- had her walker decorated with random toys and fun things. She seemed like my kinda lady.

It took us less than an hour to make the world suck a little less by wandering two floors of a nursing home delivering flowers and handmade cards. I can't say it made me a different or better person, but maybe it'll make me pause before the next time I announce how much I hate old people....

"The words that matter always stay."

- David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility

I’d sent this email to my writing partner Em earlier this week:

I'm reading Bite Me: A Love Story, the final book in Christopher Moore's vamp trilogy. In his books, vampires can turn to mist and Tommy, an aspiring writer, has just learned to turn to mist after being reduced to animal instincts:

...As a human, with grammar hardwired into his brain, he put a word to everything, and as a writer, if he couldn't put a word to an experience it had no value for him. But to become mist, you simply had to BE. Words got in the way. They separated you from the condition.

And I'm wondering what you think of this. I'm wondering what I think of it. 

On the one hand, I often feel like an experience isn't real for me until I write about it IN SOME WAY. It's how I process things. But then this idea of words getting in the way, "separating you from the condition" is kind of intriguing. I've always thought of words bringing me closer to things, rather than distancing me. But, in a way, I get that, too. 

I think I tend to use words as a shield to keep people at bay a little (people really freak me out -- particularly new people [as in strangers, not as in babies...although babies kinda freak me out, too. way too jiggly and breakable AT THE SAME TIME, which seems like it should violate some law of physics or something]). And then I have this image in my head of me sitting in a corner reading (um, because that's what I do rather than interact with new people) and it's almost like I am LITERALLY using words as a shield (not my own words, but still). 

And, I dunno, reading that, it felt like I had two pieces of a three-piece puzzle and it definitely made an impression and got me thinking, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

Her response was poetic and eloquent and it resonated with me, but I still felt like a piece was missing from my puzzle, so I copied and pasted that babbly mess above and emailed it to my other writing partner and another writer I know. 

I hadn't yet received their responses when I found the puzzle piece on my own.

I'd just finished Bite Me, and I was lying in bed thinking. It wasn't like one light bulb suddenly went off, it was like a whole series of them flashed on in my head. There were so many thoughts all at once, I couldn't get out of bed fast enough to write them down.

I was thinking about how a friend had asked me a few months ago what I got out of the misadventures with the Box o'Ma. It was an uncomfortable question, because he'd already asked me why I did them and I'd said, "It's just something I need to do. They help me." I didn't want to go trolling around for more words in the deep, dark, gooey places inside me. I didn't want to risk undoing the magic.

But, the thing was, the question stayed with me. FOR MONTHS. And then I put together this video, using pictures and videos from the last 2+ years of misadventures, and I wrote myself a little narrative to go along with it in the Vlogbrothers' Thoughts from Places style. It was my Thoughts on Misadventuring. And those were the words I couldn't grasp in that Indian restaurant so many months earlier.

What dawned on me last night as I was thinking about all of that -- the missing piece of my puzzle -- was that the words are always there.

Sometimes, the right words are very close.

A lot more of the time, though, they aren't. So I have to scramble and stumble through the close by ones (which is why I'm so rambly and babbly and why I over contextualize and over explain - I'm making my way through those nearby words). But I might struggle to reach the right words. I may have to seek them out in hidden places and crevices and deep pockets and locked boxes with forgotten keys.

"The words that matter always stay." I think that, for me, there are words for everything. But I can't always find them right away. And sometimes they scare me. And sometimes they overwhelm me. And sometimes they confound me. But I always keep looking.