In Tea We Trust

Radvent 3 - Fascination

(This post is courtesy of the Radvent writing prompt series over at Princess Lasertron’s blog.  I do them every year.  Maybe you’d like to do them, too?)

Are you fascinating?

My first reaction to this is to laugh and say, no, not at all.  My second reaction is to think, well, at least no more than anyone else I know.  Remember, this has been a year of scaling back and learning to love the quiet, ordinary routines of an ordinary life.   For me, that has been a fascinating process, and I am often baffled because I feel like the only person who is into learning to let go of ambitions, but I don’t think it makes me fascinating.

But I guess if you zoom out a little and take in the whole picture, I’ve done some pretty interesting things, like the time I moved to Spain with four days notice, mostly on a whim, and with about $100 USD in my pocket.  It was for a job which (predictably, in hindsight) turned out to be a huge disaster, but the people I met there made it very much worth my while.  Hilariously, to take this disastrous job, I had actually turned down the community manager job at YouTube, which was a teeny tiny baby website at the time.  Can you imagine that?  I sat in a coffee shop with their founder, back when he was just a normal, struggling startup kid, and we laughed about how he had recently written a filter to show their most popular videos on the front page, and then immediately had to take it down because it basically just posted porn.. but it took them 24 hours to get it fixed!  Isn’t it refreshing to know everyone has growing pains?

I’ve done some cool musical things.  I sang opera in college and still do, in the shower.  (A lot of Mozart lately, from the Marriage of Figaro.)  I was asked to play piano in a small symphony orchestra in Chicago once.  I got really into creative commons music when I lived in Spain (job hazard - it was a remixing website) and some people and I sang and played a song recording together without ever meeting up in person, and it got picked up and played on a syndicted NPR show in the states.  That was pretty rad.  (Remember when people were still fascinated by the ability to do things like that?  How much has changed in just five short years!)  I had a beautiful night once in North Carolina where a bunch strangers played blues music in a tiny kitchen until our feet stomping in time started to knock the pictures off the wall.  I get bored at a lame work conference in Ohio once and went out and ended up singing with the house band at a local bar instead.  I’ve gotten to meet a lot of my personal heroes.  I managed to find the love of my life, even though he lived on the other side of the planet and we only crossed paths in a Flickr group we moderated together.

There has always been a lot of odd serendipity in my life.  I wonder a lot of the time if I’m just lucky, or if I’m just more open to letting it seep in.

Sometimes, though, it feels like a lot of those things happened to another person, in some other life, on some other planet, and I am the person who came afterwards.  I am the person who bakes when it’s rainy (and it’s always rainy) and spoils her dog and spends hours yelling at Adobe Illustrator tutorials on YouTube in frustration. It feels like something more interesting is going to happen, though, just around the corner.  Maybe it’s like Joni Mitchell’s song Richard, where she says, “It’s only a dark cocoon, before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away.”