"Burning the Old Year" by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,   

lists of vegetables, partial poems.   

Orange swirling flame of days,   

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   

only the things I didn’t do   

crackle after the blazing dies.

Rx bottle

Sometimes when you are hiking barefoot you need to put on a pair of shoes. This is one of the things I have learned so far during these nearly two weeks in Los Angeles.

I am so homesick, so much more painfully than I anticipated. I thought I would luxuriate in having a quiet room and a bed to myself for 12 nights, but instead I sleep barely at all and anxiety has taken up permanent residence in my throat.

I turn on the TV and mute it just for the sense that the silent people on the screen in the corner of my right eye are here with me too.

I think partly I am scared of being evaluated after so many years of being (to an extent) the sole arbiter of my success

I think partly I am overwhelmed by the pressure to live up to the standard established by my former student self: unmitigated perfection

Of course I am not perfect now and I wasn't then, not in any way other than grades on paper, and today I'm a wiser and more conscious and more self-aware person and I can breathe into that and feel my feet on the ground and remember who I am and provide my own validation

Also I am stressed about time--about getting it all done when I am feeling in many respects so utterly burnt out

Probably more than anything else it's that I want this so badly, and I did it. I'm here. And because happiness or "getting" what I have for so long wanted, for lack of a more articulate way to say it at the end of this long and sleep-deprived day, feels so foreign to me that whenever I do feel it I quickly begin feeling the anticipatory pain of losing it

Maybe I don't need to assume that everything good that happens to me will soon be gone

Maybe I should keep my focus on the reality of my situation at this moment, which is that I am endlessly lucky and enormously grateful

Crash

Because I crashed for the first time on downhill skis I now know that I can crash while downhill skiing and that the act of crashing, inherently, does not spell disaster. What's more, I can now be certain that the woman who serviced my skis did so according to my DIN specifications, meaning that my skis will eject me from their grasp in the event that I crash and an ejection proves necessary. This is why I ejected from my left ski when I crashed, but not my right: Because my right leg remained perpendicularly oriented toward my ski at the time of the crash, while my left leg smashed into the snowy bank at an odd angle and thus required ejection from its ski in order to avoid twisting my leg into ghastly proportions. Because my left ski did eject me, this gives me comfort that my skis are likely to function properly and helpfully in the event of future crashes. While I still hope to avoid crashing whenever possible, the experience of having crashed leads me to believe that I am likely to be okay in the rare event that I crash again in the future. This has proven a great comfort to me, as prior to crashing for the first time on downhill skis I had been greatly resistant to the possibility of a crash.

Walk-a-thon

The people whose lives are affected by Alzheimer's, whether because they themselves are slowly losing the mind and personality and memories they've long held to be their own or because they love someone who is thus affected, don purple shirts, grip the strings of purple helium balloons, and set off together on a mile-long walk along paved neighborhood walking paths. In the months prior to outfitting themselves with purple shirts and purple balloons, the people who are now walking have asked, or maybe even implored, their friends, colleagues, and families to support their efforts by donating maybe $10 or $25 or even $50 toward their cause. They have set what feel like ambitious fundraising goals: $150 or $250 or, more rarely, 1,000 dollars. They hope their months of effort and ingratiation and, in the cases of people who are otherwise not accustomed to walking one mile at a time, physical preparation will aid the people and organizations that study Alzheimer's and perhaps expedite research into possible and effective treatments for the disease that is gradually or, in some cases, swiftly stealing their lives or the life of a person or several persons whom they love.

The paths on which the purple-appareled people are walking wind their way along a quick-moving creek that is fed by snowmelt from the mountains above before meandering through a local neighborhood. The neighborhood is filled with multimillion-dollar mansions situated on plots of lands that alone cost sometimes a quarter or half a million dollars. The mansions are inhabited for perhaps two weeks or two months or, in exceptionally rare cases, six months out of each year. During the months in which the mansions are not inhabited, the buildings' owners reside instead in their multimillion-dollar mansions elsewhere in the country. They fly between their two homes on private jets that are given special takeoff and landing privileges, even if it means inconveniencing the hundreds of passengers who sit waiting aboard the commercial aircraft that depart occasionally from the valley floor.

Apologies

Prove it, I said. Act like a partner who is sorry to have treated his wife that way over, and over, and over.

Kinds of protein

Yesterday after leaving the house at 7:30 am and skiing for so many hours at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level and clomping back to the car with skis and poles in my hands, a snowboard in his, and no food in our stomachs, we stopped at the Qdoba by the exit to eat a late lunch on the car ride home. I requested the taco salad, at which point the Qdoba employee gritted his teeth, shook his head balefully, and asked me if I had seen the notices posted on the doors and on the glass case between us, which stated that Qdoba was not currently serving romaine lettuce because the CDC had cautioned against it. I informed him that I had seen the signs, but that I would like a taco salad anyway, albeit without the lettuce. I intended to create a lunch from the ingredients still on offer that day. After wiping down the silver-sheened counter the Qdoba employee asked me which kind of rice I would like, to which I replied brown. Then he asked if I would like black or pinto beans, and I requested black. Next he asked me what kind of protein I wanted, meaning did I want chicken or steak or perhaps the other meat that I was unable to identify from behind the glass, to which I replied, trying to sound cheerful and not judgmental at all, lest the Qdoba employee think I was being in any way judgmental, Actually, I'll just have the beans.

Doing my eyebrows

For several decades I have neither felt nor expressed the desire to do my makeup, including the desire to learn how to do my makeup in the first place. Yet this week I found myself watching YouTube tutorials about doing your eyebrows, and a couple days after that I had added two eyebrow-related makeup products to an online cart and proceeded to purchase them. One of the products is an eyebrow pencil, and according to the tutorials I am meant to draw the shape of an eyebrow -- any eyebrow shape I want, though I'm advised to create a particular shape if I want to complement the shape of my face, which, according to a chart I found, is either square, round, long, oval, or heart-shaped, and it is further advised that determining the right eyebrow aesthetic for my face shape and my particular brows is based on a rather complex series of measurements from the inside of my eyebrow to the outside of my nostril and from the outside of my nostril diagonally across my eye to wherever that line abuts my eyebrow -- around my existing eyebrow, and then use a special tool to smudge the eyebrow pencil into my actual eyebrow hairs so it looks my newly shaped eyebrows are filled with hairs even though it they partially filled with eyebrow pencil. According to a Buzzfeed article entitled "10 Tips for Beginners That'll Make Your Eyebrows Fleeker Than Fleek," I am supposed to use a special tool to comb my eyebrow hairs upward before lining them in eyebrow pencil, but because I am new to all this and the YouTube tutorials that I watched prior to purchasing eyebrow-related makeup products didn't stipulate that this tool was a necessity for doing one's eyebrows, I have not purchased an eyebrow brush, and I'm not sure if I will, because I am not yet sure whether I intend to continue doing my eyebrows. The second makeup product that I purchased is meant to be used immediately after lining my eyebrows with eyebrow pencil. Depending on the source you consult, this product is simply called eyebrow gel, or, possibly, a spoolie. When I consulted the Buzzfeed article after purchasing my eyebrow-related makeup products, I was at first dismayed to read that a spoolie is an essential piece of equipment in anyone's toolkit of eyebrow starter essentials, because I had purchased an eyebrow pencil and eyebrow gel, but, to my knowledge, I had failed to purchase a spoolie. Imagine my relief when I did some more research and discovered that eyebrow gel and a spoolie seem to be two terms for the same product: a sort of tiny mascara brush for the brows. Twice now I have attempted to use my new eyebrow pencil and eyebrow gel, the first "actual" makeup that I've ever attempted aside from some eye shadow at high school dances and the eighth grade formal, with mixed results. On the first instance I neglected to conduct the series of measurements recommended before applying eyebrow products for the first time, and I swiped the eyebrow pencil and gel too far down along the outside of my eye, creating a kind of upside down "U" shape from the inner edge of my brows to the far outer corner of my eye. I did not repeat this mistake a second time, making sure to finish lining my eyebrows and using my spoolie before reaching the section of my brows that curves downward from the bony arch of my eye socket. The results, I think, were more successful, at least according to the standards established by the YouTube tutorials and the Buzzfeed article. Even my husband, who to my knowledge is not generally a fan of a made up aesthetic, or who, at least, has never referenced pejoratively the fact that I have never been inclined to wear makeup, remarked on the fact that my eyebrows looked "good," though it's not exactly clear what that means. Nevertheless, I found myself feeling unsure about the results, though it is unclear whether that is because the results failed to create a positive effect, or because I am unaccustomed to seeing myself in makeup and thus find any application of makeup, and my concomitant reflection in the bathroom mirror, to be irregular and maybe even slightly disorienting.