the best birthday EVAAAAAAAHH
(Read this while keeping in mind that of course it would have been better if all of you had been there too, OK? OK.)

There was a restorative yoga workshop. For my birthday. In my house. Seven of us and our unbelievably awesome yoga teacher lying on the dining room floor. There aren't really words to describe how perfect and hilarious and perfect and awesome and perfect it was, so you'll have to trust me, but it was great. Visiting friends and long Metro rides and fun brunch, etc.: great. All of it: great. I still am on a fun-weekend high. Best. Birthday. Ever.

the coffee cup, I think about you
See, I don't blog for like a zillion years and then I have all these random things to talk about... so instead of forcing some kind of arbitrary connection, I will make a list without any paragraph hooks.

1. I saw "Follies" at *phrata Saturday night. When we did this in high school, I was sitting behind a lot of scenery (while juggling an oboe, an English horn and a baritone saxophone so I wasn't in a position to pay attention to the words anyway), and this was the first time I had ever actually *seen* the show. And it was good, but wow, is that show ever psychotic. Who knew all that crazy stuff at the end meant the four main characters were having nervous breakdowns? I don't know what I used to think all the wacky music was about. Probably I didn't think about it at all, because I was too busy trying to remember to switch reeds or something.

And -- with apologies to Hefk, who heard this train of thought yesterday -- thinking back on what we did makes me realize that having 16-, 17- and 18-year-old high school students perform that play really adds a layer of meaning to it, like the Langley Schools Music Project kids singing "Desperado." What having young people playing older people watching their younger selves imply? Inevitability, sure, and another serious layer of hopelessness on top of that. Whew. I remember a bunch of adults getting upset about the appropriateness of students doing that show, but I always thought it was just about the language or the "sexual themes" or whatever.

Also, there was an awful lot of H*mpfield-ity to this production, seriously. (Warning: a lot of google-proof vowel-asteriks coming up.) S**n *'D*nn*ll's mom was in it. Mrs. K**tt*r was in it and choreographed it, and it definitely looked it. Kr*st*n P*ntz got tossed around by C*dy Sm*th (who is tall!). J*sh D*b*rd is still cute. The woman playing the character originally played by Hefk had, like, the exact same fringy red dress on for the end as she wore. They all danced Dance-Theater-tastically. The show was good, but kind of eerie -- like imagining people you know really well totally naked, and realizing that for all of this time they've been naked underneath their clothes. That's not a perfect metaphor, but you know. Eerie.

2. This is how I totally feel about fall. I like gourds, too, and it is so beautiful outside that I want to scream. I went apple-picking last weekend and am still reaping the applicious bounty via applesauce, apple crisp, apple pie, apple bread pudding, apple-strawberry jam and apple butter. No exaggeration. Also, I basically have a completely new wardrobe this year, and that is expensive as hell but it's fantastic. I feel good in my skin.

3. Thank you for all the birthday wishes. Yay birthday! My parents' surprise party went off without a hitch, although I do think the gigantic leftover MEAT TRAY I was forced to take home afterward might count as a hitch. Ew. God. You all know how I feel about meat, but "you have roommates, someone there will eat it!" It's like 20 lbs. of roast beef and turkey. Each. Ew.

4. There are about 400 other things, but they'll have to wait because work is unbelievably busy right now. OK. Hope all is well in your respective worlds.

alissa is smart
It IS time for Storypeople:

How many people can you love before it's too much? she said & I said I didn't think there was any real limit as long as you didn't care if they loved you back.

debriefing
So the GBC was fun, eh? A little too much challenge in the challenge. Some of us did fall apart a bit at the end. But it was still content-ful and good, and next time we'll take the Big C's suggestion and do one topic a week for a month or something like that. We rule, though, basically. I like us and I like our writing.

Unfortunately I can't set up comments on that page because I'd need a new YACCS account, and they're not accepting new people, and commenting systems in general are a huge pain. So the central commenting location suggested by Hefk will have to be an idea for another day. Until then, you can keep your ideas for the next one snug in your giant brains. Let me know when it's time for GBC II: The GENTLE Blogging Challenge.

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Five: Something Worth Publishing
In the hopes that it will be inspired by its inclusion under the title "Something Worth Publishing," I'm going to talk about the book I'm writing now. It's something I never talk about with people I know -- or, if I do, only with sort of a hemming, hawing, aw-shucks kind of attitude. So I'm going to talk about it.

It's about a guy. A guy who leaves his life and moves to a farm that's populated with a host of characters. And, uh, things happen to them.

See, this is why I can't really talk about it. I don't know what to say. I'd much rather that you read it for yourselves, but I don't want people to read it because it isn't finished. And although I love feedback and hearing comments about the work-in-progress, I'd really rather have people read it finished. So it's not that I'm being secretive -- it's that I'm being selfish.

Now all I need is a really long stretch of not doing anything but writing. That's what I want most in the world, and also something I'm really scared of. I've been working on this thing for almost a year and a half; it's two-thirds done. It's no coincidence that its very best parts were written during long stretches of being able to work on it for several consecutive days while I was on vacation or something similar. Do I need to do nothing but work on it? No. Would I like to, and would the book be better for it? Yeah.

There's the rub. I wish I had something enlightening to say about it, but I don't. Maybe twenty-years-from-now Gwen can look back on this problem and laugh and laugh and laugh while she thumbs through her fifth published novel.

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Four: A Movie That Taught Me A Life Lesson
Dead Poets Society. Oh yes. If there's any way in the world that any of you have missed it, it's the story of a bunch of overprivileged white boys in the stuffy 1950s who go to a private school. Robin Williams is their English teacher and he inspires them out of their dull daily drudgery and makes them love literature and rebel against the constricted society in which they live. To demonstrate their rebellion, they get to dance around in the woods with bongos, quit the yearbook, build forbidden radios, star in plays, kill themselves in heartwrenching ways involving hats made of sticks, read poetry to pretty blond cheerleaders and stand atop desks to sound their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world.

The now-cliched "inspirational" parts of this movie really did inspire me deeply. When Professor Keating stands in a hallway in front of all the pictures of past students and tells Our Young Heroes about how they're all worm food, and has the kid read, "that same flower that smiles today/ tomorrow will be dying," and hisses "Carpe diem, boys, seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary" in their ears, it really, really did it for me.

And although the specific situation of the movie has lost some resonance over the years, the general message still works. Back then it confirmed something I had suspected about literature and now it reminds me of it when I forget: that books and words are a gateway to something larger than yourself, and that they can connect and inspire people in ways that few other things can. Also that Robert Sean Leonard looks wonderful without a shirt on.

Day Three: Games
OK, I pretty much blew this one -- I was going to be all creative and write my own Mad Lib, but I didn't have time yesterday and so I waited, and now I don't have time today. Also I just burned my fingers on a really hot popcorn kernel and it hurts to type. Shut up. Anyway, some genius put Mad Libs online! Go here. I'm sorry. To anticipate the next topic, in the immortal words of John Bender from the Breakfast Club: "Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place."

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Two: Earliest Memories

There are a couple. The one that I think is the very very earliest is from nursery school, and it's really just a picture of an object more than anything else. Is it weird that my first memory is mostly of an object that has no consequence in my life? Hm. Anyway. It was a green plastic inchworm with wheels that you could ride. It had a brown saddle on the middle part, the top of its inching body. Everyone coveted the inchworm, and I can see it absolutely perfectly, frozen in my mind. I don't remember riding it, or even the feeling of wanting to ride it -- just the feeling of looking at it, on the cement patio in the back of the church, in front of two glass sliding doors. Can see it like it's in front of me now.

My first real memory was when I was a little older than that, I think, probably about 4. I was in a shoe store -- Irving Shoes in Prk. City Mall, to be specific -- with my mom, and she was trying on shoes, and I got bored and decided to go to the toy store next door. So I did. By myself. I went to the back where the books were (some things never change, I guess) and sat down on the blue carpeted floor and started reading. And my mom found me eventually, but not before she called security and all that good stuff. But that's not part of my memory, because I wasn't there -- I just remember going in and then getting spanked afterward, which I think only happened two times total in my entire childhood and, in retrospect, was entirely justified. I remember looking at the yellow case of Smurfs on the checkout counter while I was getting dragged out of the store, and not really understanding what I had done wrong. Presumably I understood post-spanking.

And then there's another random one, which I really can't place age-wise, but it involved sitting in the black fuzzy recliner with my dad and Lambie, who was really one of a series of identical stuffed lambs that I loved to their early deaths. I would freak out when Lambie would get lost or forgotten, and I wouldn't stop until he was found or retrieved. He was awesome. No one messed with Lambie.

Day One: My Fictitious Weekend
This weekend, the Magic Money Fairy came to my house and threw 17 giant bags of money in the window.

This weekend, at age 90, I gave birth to a son. I was kind of jealous of my husband Abraham's concubine, who also gave birth to a son, so I had her and the baby banished, thus beginning 3,000 years of strife between two major world religions. Actually, thus creating the separate religions in the first place, which, when you get down to it, are the real problem.

This weekend, I grew a second head to act as a back-up hard drive for my brain, which is already coming in very handy, because I managed to remember how to get somewhere difficult this morning.

This weekend, I decided that Arnold would actually make an excellent president governor.

This weekend, I learned to leap tall buildings in a single bound. My cape is coming in the mail tomorrow.

This weekend, I finished "Seabiscuit." (Ha. That one is even more fictitious than the others.)

Pre-GBC: Anticipation
From "Poetics," by A.R. Ammons

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self

I think it's a mixed blessing, anticipation. Sometimes it's better than the thing that's being anticipated; other times, it's more like cold dread. I read a statistic a long time ago about how people spend 93 percent of their lives waiting, and I always wondered how that was measured, because, really, you spend 100 percent of your life waiting for SOMETHING. Currently anticipating: the phone ringing, 2 p.m., the good news and the bad news, Rosh Hashanah food with my family, someone getting here someday, my 26th year, the leaves changing and the air getting cold.

get set
Actually, get set here: GBC homepage. (My sincere apologies about the very basic, very unlovely HTML, but I was in a hurry.) I will leave this link at the top of my page so that you can get to the topics every day, even when I begin writing about them. Which will happen tomorrow.

on your mark
Get your warmup suit (warmup typing mittens) on, 'cause it's time for the Great Blogging Challenge.

Here are the rules:

1. You do not talk about-- OK, that's completely played out.
2. Go ahead and talk about the GBC. Tell all your friends. Talk about it all day long.
3. A list of all GBC participants will be posted on this site for your click-through convenience. If for some reason you are participating but do not want your name included, please let me know.
4. All the topics will be posted now to facilitate advance planning, but try to do each topic during the 24 hours of the day assigned.
5. Or don't, whatever.
6. But let's not start until Monday.
7. But, in the spirit of contradicting myself as much as possible, there is a pre-GBC topic to be undertaken from now until midnight Sunday just to get us warmed up.

Here are the topics:

Pre-GBC (Wednesday-Sunday): Anticipation. They say hindsight is 20/20, but what about foresight?

Monday: My Fictitious Weekend. What could have happened to you this weekend, but didn't?

Tuesday: Earliest memories. Pretty self-explanatory. Visit Lauren's Sept. 12 entry for inspiration.

Wednesday: Games. Make up a quiz (per Angie), write an original Mad Libs thing that people can fill out, just generally ruminate upon the idea of games and the many forms they take. Interactivity preferred.

Thursday: Movie(s) that Taught You a Life Lesson. Must include a short description of said movie(s) in case people haven't seen it/them. This is mostly for Alissa's benefit, because somehow she still hasn't seen "Sixteen Candles," and honestly I can't fathom how she's made it this far.

Friday: Something Worth Publishing. Loosely suggested by Kelly, we will finish the week with a free-form entry. Write something of worth -- however you choose to define that -- that you'd want to see on your webpage in 20 years. Could be letter to your older self, poetic ode to shoelaces, personal manifesto, larger commentary on the world, favorite recipe for squash soup, whatever.

And that's all, folks. List of contributors will be posted posthaste.

hurried-cane
OK, that title doesn't even make sense. Whatever. Sometimes I'm not up for clever.

So the hurricane sort of sucked. I wish someone would have canceled it. Our power went off for about 12 hours, just long enough for it to be decently amusing to be in the dark -- we played backgammon by candlelight and debated the merits of opening the freezer for long enough to eat all the ice cream, and then the power came back on with a whoooooosh in the middle of the night. I woke up when everything whirred back to life around 4:30 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep because the eerie green glow of the sky and the branches slapping against the side of the house. The office didn't have full power Friday, so I went to a friend's house to use his DSL and worked like a maniac, and then the weekend just kind of slipped away from me in a blur of shopping and gymming and I don't even know what else. Overall, the hurricane was just disruptive enough to inconvenience a lot of people, and not disruptive enough to be fun for anyone who doesn't work for the federal government. I give it a D. D minus, even. It sucked.

In other news, who's up for a blogging challenge? Too bad blink tags don't work any more. That would have been a good candidate. But anyway, blogging challenge, hm? Blogging challenge? What if we all blogged something every single day for a week, and enlightened each other with our wisdom? I'm tired of how I never write anything interesting, or even not interesting, any more. We need to liven these here pages UP. We could even have themes or something. Yeah, themes. What if we thought of a theme every day and then we all, uh, wrote something about it? Is that too much work? Any other ideas? Who's with me?

last night I had the strangest
I dreamt I was starting another semester abroad in Israel, and I was in an apartment that looked nothing like the one I actually lived in but I knew was the same. There were a lot of hallways and some kind of courtyard, and my old roommate Kim was running toward me through one of the halls. I can't remember much more except that I was so excited to be there -- unlike the first time, when at the beginning I was too freaked out to be excited about much of anything.

I know this happens to many of us every fall, but I have that old give-me-something-new feeling. I want to go to art school. I want to move to England. I want to disappear somewhere so I can finish the book.

I look at people (one person in particular) who have sort of forsaken "regular life" to embrace unscheduled possibility, who have taken really big scary leaps to start doing something they love stop doing something they didn't love and welcome fluidity and uncertainty into their lives. I don't know how to do that, mainly because I don't know if I would really be happier if I decided to quit everything. Too much of what I do love is wrapped into my average day. I am happy to get out of bed in the morning. I like my life.

<Sex in the City voiceover>But, in the fall, you can't help but wonder: What if different would be better?</voiceover>

brown eyes blue
It's like the sky suddenly remembered what color it's supposed to be. Oh yeah, blue. I'm blue. I'm not gray or tan, or weirdly yellow. Rain, although preferable to previous summers' alarming droughts, does not have to come out of me ALL the time. Your pollution has done your best to make me a vile, choking, muddy smudge -- but I will prevail. I will not be vanquished. I am blue! And beautiful.

Know what else is cool about the sky? Mars. Mars is really cool. 600,000 years -- we're smack in between the Neanderthals and the spacepeople of 2287, yo.

what seems to be the trouble
is that I have consumed a huge cup of coffee that was really about 4 cups of coffee and then chased it with a 20 oz. Diet Coke, and honestly I am already sort of unusually tense these days, and I really might just have to go home early from work because I can't form a coherent thought, but I did finally update the links on the side and the books page, because apparently the kind of stimulus I need to do both those things can only be found in caffeinated form.

next up: Weasley Brothers for President
Think J. K. Rowling deserves a Nobel Prize? So does he, and I am actually beginning to think this is a damn good idea. I scoffed when someone told me about this a couple days ago, but the more I look at this guy's site and his reasons why, the more I like his idea. A lot. Enough that I might write a column about it, but definitely enough that I'm going to send a letter to Sweden.

Because when you really think about it, there are some pretty diverse reasons that are listed for past winners. There is no reason why that relatively broad range couldn't include something like, say, "for her vivid, imaginative storytelling and her unmatched contributions to the literary lives of millions of readers worldwide." As much as I love the books, I don't think that Rowling will win any prizes based on the sheer skill of her writing. But most of the others aren't honored for the sheer skill of their writing either, and Rowling has contributed a LOT more to literature this year than anyone else that comes to mind -- she's probably contributed more than anyone in the last 10 or 20 years. I definitely think her accomplishments rank on the level of, say, 1956's Nobel winner, Halldor Kiljan Laxness, "for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland."

Also, I love this kind of grassroots internet stuff. I think it's the only kind of activism I believe in these days, and it's fun to see its potential power when people start paying attention. Let's do it. No slight to Halldor intended, seriously, but I think Jo should stand a chance.

as Fair and Balanced as your butt
I like this way to combat the idiocy that knows no end. I read somewhere else -- somewhere that I am sure is Fair and Balanced -- that Al Franken's book went from 500 to 4 in its Amazon sales ranking after this whole thing started. I don't know much about "Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them" except that I like the title, but good for him.

I want to write some huge post to end all posts about this weekend, but I don't even know where to begin. It was incredible. I don't think I've ever had so much fun in my life. Maybe I'll do something unprecedented and post some photos of it when they're done -- Fair and Balanced photos that Rupert Murdoch would approve of, to be sure.

fortuitous futures
Several times in the last few days, I have gotten "you will be invited to a karaoke party," and -- true to the pixels' eerie predictions -- I have it on good authority that karaoke might well be in our futures Saturday night.

Leaving for a few days for the joining in holy matrimony of H and K (doesn't is seem like the letters "I" and "J" should be involved in that?). I'm awfully excited, to tell the truth. This is some kind o' wonderful. :)

destiny's child
The all-knowing Scotto just posted something that starts with the Dar line, "sometimes life sends us blessings sent in ridiculous packaging," and it's been playing around in my head all day. Last night's "Sex and the City" episode was about destiny, too, about meant-to-be relationships, and if things happen for a reason, and if life teaches lessons in any kind of meaningful pattern.

I have long held a negative position on this stuff. I don't think things happen for a reason. I think that humans invented these explanations because we can't abide the cold thought that our lives really are ruled by chance: the near-miss, the lucky guess, the coincidence, the accident. I don't really think that life is sending us blessings at all, ridiculous packaging or not... I think things happen or they don't, and that's that.

But.

I'm also really superstitious. REALLY superstitious. Not in a black cat, broken mirror kind of way -- although if I was really being honest with myself I probably believe in that stuff, too -- but in a terrified-of-jinxing-myself way that doesn't jive with this whole no-such-thing-as-destiny outlook. Somehow I've taken the most negative elements from both sides and formed them into one. I'm starting to wonder if there can't be some middle ground.

praise the lord and pass the toothpaste
Thank you, thank you, THANK you to the wonderful, wonderful, WONDERful women who bought me a Sonicare, the best toothbrush in the whole entire universe. Today, for the first time since I've graduated from college, I have had a dentist appointment that involved x-rays and did NOT involve me having cavities. I am cavity-free! Cavity-free, I say!

Seriously, this feels like a major, major accomplishment. The most major accomplishment since... um, I can't really think of anything. Since ever, apparently. Woo, I say! Woo!