What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected
for words to do more than barely sketch the
outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

David Foster Wallace, Oblivion

I woke up this morning to fat, swirling snowflakes outside my window turning Astoria into a snow globe and started my morning in one of the best ways I know: curled up with tea and a book in hand. This morning’s choice is Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living: The Classic Bestseller that Introduced Millions to the Noble Art of Leaving Things Undone. One of the sections in this book is called “On Tea and Friendship.” He lumps the two together. I knew I liked this guy.

Yutang describes Ch’asu as an “excellent treatise on tea;” it definitely put a smile on my face this morning, as arguable as some of them are. Enjoy.

Proper moments for drinking tea:
When one’s heart and hands are idle.
Tired after reading poetry.
When one’s thoughts are disturbed.
Listening to songs and ditties.
When a song is completed.
Shut up at one’s home on a holiday.
Playing the ch’in and looking over paintings.
Engaged in conversation deep at night.
Before a bright window and a clean desk.
With charming friends and slender concubines.
Returning from a visit with friends.
When the day is clear and the breeze is mild.
On a day of light showers.
In a painted boat near a small wooden bridge.
In a forest with tall bamboos.
In a pavilion overlooking lotus flowers on a summer day.
Having lighted incense in a small studio.
After a feast is over and the guests are gone.
When children are at school.
In a quiet, secluded temple.
Near famous springs and quaint rocks.

Moments when one should stop drinking tea:
At work.
Watching a play.
Opening letters.
During big rain and snow.
At a long wine feast with a big party.
Going through documents.
On busy days.
Generally conditions contrary to those enumerated in the above section.

Things to be avoided:
Bad water.
Bad utensils.
Brass spoons.
Brass kettles.
Wooden pails (for water).
Wood for fuel (on account of smoke).
Soft charcoal.
Coarse servant.
Bad-tempered maid.
Unclean towels.
All varieties of incense and medicine.

Things and places to be kept away from:
Damp rooms.
Kitchens.
Noisy streets.
Crying infants.
Hotheaded persons.
Quarreling servants.
Hot rooms.

I find it so easy to forget this sometimes. Particularly in the perpetually harried bustle that is
New York City.

But here it is, a reminder to myself — to check in with love instead of assuming the worst, the unideal, and the disappointing in others as truth: 

Really. Truly. As soon as you can. Of this I am absolutely sure: Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth. I know too many people who didn’t do those things. They all end up mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.

It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely and your bandmates will have a fit and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.

But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful, Solo. It will open up your life.

Dave Appleby

And I will share soon as I take a minute or ten to wrap my head around the magic.

Sad soul and brilliant writer Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules on how to write a good short story. I’m thinking these eight nuggets can be grafted to life at large, not just to writing. Enjoy.

Vonnegut in TIME Magazine.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Let’s just say there’s a reason it’s called falling in love. And that reason is here.

Well — three days away.

But, IT’S HERE.

mmmmmornings.

lego art by Nathan Sawaya

Seeking validation from others often gets a bad rap.

A couple of nights ago, I chatted via Skype with a dear friend who I hadn’t spoken with in over two years. As catching up goes, we ended up laughing and talking for two hours about anything and everything. At some point, the idea of seeking validation from others for crazy-sounding, “personality crisis”-esque ideas came up and got me thinking.

We’ve all heard the advice, the words we wish we could internalize but rarely do: seeking affirmation from others kills freedom. Worrying what others will think of your ideas, your work, and your decisions is deleterious to making any progress. Soliciting approval from others is the rush-hour traffic bottleneck slowing your roll, the invisible yardstick that will always seem taller than you no matter how skyward you grow. Instead, many say, trust in the big cosmic thumbs-up you feel when you are doing what makes you happy, and throw others’ opinions to the skies.

But here’s the thing. Maybe a little validation from others is exactly what you need. As long as it’s not your primary motivation for doing what you do and being what you choose to be, because I think that’s when it gets tricky and dangerous… But if your compass falls out of calibration, finding receptivity to your madness from others every now and then can push your needle back to due North.

Many caution against reliance upon the vehicle – validation – but the destination it drives you to can be exactly where you want and need to go. And we’re all a little guilty of hitching a ride on the validation bus.

It’s why we get excited to see that red notification bubble at the top of our screens or little orange heart and number at the bottom of it, is it not? When a shot in a dark networking with someone on LinkedIn results in a connection, a validation from another human being, saying, yes, you are in my network. I include you in my universe, that feels undeniably good. When we talk things out with a sister, a friend, a boyfriend, a parent, a stranger that we fear no judgment from and can therefore open ourselves completely to…. what we seek from them is an affirmation that we are tenable, credible, and “okay.” That we are not, in fact, insane or alone — or both. And even if the validation sought is that it’s okay not to care what others think of you at ALL — we still portray ourselves a certain way to achieve that, whether we intend to or not. But I don’t think it’s something to beat ourselves up about.

Validation can be… the bumpers at the bowling alley. Sure, we might look like novices and be subjected to mild embarrassment, but if it keeps us from the gutter and steers us to roll on toward a strike, who’s to complain?

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.”
-Walt Whitman

CHANGE. Just because you don’t see or feel it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. I mean, the first time I realized that I’ve changed since my cake-peering days (above) was… probably last Thursday.

But then when you stop and take stock of all the millions of ways, it blindsides you at the busy four-way intersection of your 4:30 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon.

Over and over these past few weeks, I’ve caught myself shouldering a wooly mammoth of a mindset: that some infinite, nonexistent, melty thing is MISSING and I’m stuck/stagnant because I can’t find it.

But here’s really what it is like.

Your Google Maps tells you to turn down Avenue C, and you turn down Avenue X instead. Google Maps is not happy. Google Maps shouts “RECALCULATING….” And the anxiety of a botched turn, a miscalculated step, of having to navigate an awkward, uncharted, potentially thorny and dangerously unpredictable substitute makes you freeze from the inside out, marrow to hair follicles. A stalactite of nerves, you don’t even notice the alternate equally-or-more-awesome path in front of you.

That is what I was doing. I was stuck on RECALCULATING and thus failing to see the new, shiny, recalculated, fabulously unknown path. I was driving so hard to go from Point A to Point Z that I didn’t realize the serendipity and potential magic in the detour of exploring Point C-Y just because I couldn’t U-turn back onto B. (HOW’S THAT FOR SOME ALPHABET SOUP?)

Ignoring growth furthers recession into ourselves; acknowledging growth helps the onward blooming. Cubs turn into kings and queens of the jungle. People see themselves as people, not good people or bad people. Hearts heal. Someone lets oxygen into the vacuum. So much rejigging worth digging.

HOW HAVE YOU CHANGED?