My Live Journal

Kelle wrote a book. She wrote a book! It's going to hit the shelves April 3, 2012, and judging from the enormous (think TV appearances and millions of hits) popularity of her blog Enjoying the Small Things, I predict this book will make the national best seller list fairly quickly.

Kelle is a professional photographer raising two girls in Naples, Florida. Her Blog has all the rich, soothing qualities of a perfectly made cappuccino. The writing is energizing, it's fun, and it's capped by these deep, velvety images of a very colorful, very pretty everyday life. Just like coffee, it's best to enjoy it first thing in the morning, then for a few hours afterward you walk around with this feeling like, Okay, another day, this could be alright, let's give it a go. 

Which is way better than those days when you wake up around 11am and go What? It's no longer night time? No. No I don't want to.

Anyway, I cannot wait to stand in the aisle of Barnes and Noble, hold the book over my head and announce to all the other mid-day shoppers, "This is my Friend. This is my friend Kelle and I know her. No big deal but she wrote this book." It will be the literary equivalent of me watching kayak films while bouncing up and down on a friend's couch saying "I know that guy! I know that guy! I know that guy too!" Which is something I never do.

Something spectacular about Kelle: she responds to emails. That sounds like a little thing but it's not. I write her these pestering messages that are like How do you do this? How do you do that? Even as I write them I can picture the words reaching out of the screen and tugging at her pant leg. But she always writes back. For someone raising two kids, writing a blog full time and also writing a book, this is an extremely generous gesture. The image thumbnails on the left bar of this blog are thanks to Kelle, who walked me through them step by step. When I found out she'd written a book I sent her a particularly pesky email with a lot of questions. She responded with a very thorough run-down of the whole process, from writing the thing to finding an agent (in her case, choosing an agent) to the publishers auction.

And here's the most important thing she wrote:

"YOUR BLOG IS SO IMPORTANT.  You never know who's reading it, and tomorrow you could have a book deal.  Yes, it's your space and you treat it like that, and you do what you love and have to not think about what people think or who's reading it.  But, at the same time, you have this dream and you know what you want, so your blog is your place to display what you do."

Your Blog is So Important. I want to make a poster of that and hang it right over my desk. Because sometimes I get really down on the whole thing.

Blogging is weird. I hate the word blog. I really do. Louis CK does a whole stand up bit about terrible words and I really think blog should have been included. It is the low man on the already low-standing totem pole of freelance writing. Blogging has evolved since its humble livejournal routes, it's so evolved, but that doesn't seem to matter. It's still associated with nineteen year old college students writing enormous essays with no paragraph breaks discussing their opinions on breakfast, Moammar Gadhafi, and surfing. 

I've tried to reclaim the word the way Eve Ensler tried to reclaim the word Cunt but, like Eve, I just haven't been successful. When someone asks me what I write, I still rock back and forth on my feet, look down at the ground and say, "Well I write a um...a blog?"

Yeah, I do that. I say it like a question. A blog? Will you please validate me? And bear in mind, I'm the same girl who makes this face during sports:

I used to teach high school English at a boarding school, and whenever my girls spoke with that upwards inflection I'd smack them across the face and say "WOMAN UP! WHY YOU SPEAK IN QUESTIONS!"

Probably why I'm no longer a high school teacher.

Granted, these issues are mostly self generated. I'm lucky to live within a very supportive, well insulated little world. I have two parents who are proud of me. I have friends who text me just to say that they laughed out loud while reading a post.  Just yesterday I ran into two guys at a cafe, and they both congratulated me very sincerely on the recent success of The Wilder Coast.

What exactly they were referring to, I don't know. I haven't won any awards or had any major breaks recently. But they both said it, totally independently of one another. Both of those dudes work about 80 hours a week and still read my blog. (How exactly do they do that? I work considerably less than 80 hours a week and I still can't get my laundry from the washer into the dryer in less than 48 hours.)

However, even inside this supportive world there will always be the people who, to put it bluntly, suck at being nice. The ones who look me right in the eye and say, "Well that sounds like a total waste of time." And I'm so stupidly agreeable I find myself nodding along with them. "Yeah...you know....it....really is....." Coming from me! The girl capable of making this face while doing a fun activity:

Then there is the other group of people, probably well meaning individuals, who go right for the kisser.  "A blog? Cool. Do you make money on it?" Blamo! First question!  Cue the feet rocking. Eyes to the ground. "Yeah..?" I say/ask, "...A little?" "Enough to pay the bills?" "Well...No?" "Well what do you do for money then?"

So let me get this straight. You'd rather hear about the janitorial duties and billing policies at a local bouldering gym than three years worth of stories and effort on my weblog? I totally get not giving a shit about what I do or what I write. You're in the vast majority, and that's fine. But you're standing here asking me questions, you are giving me your time, and you're more interested in what I have to do to afford Internet at my house than what I love to do, and plan to do with my entire life?

I could go on about the tremendous importance of building a portfolio, visible platforms, and how online publishing is like the printing press in the way it's revolutionizing the craft. But somehow I feel like that would be lost on these people.

Enough about them. This week I'm honoring the start of my 4th year as a blogger by recognizing the supportive people in my life. People like Kelle Hampton. Kelle, thank you for being an example of what a tangible and important thing a blog can be. I appreciate your guidance, I'm grateful for your generosity, and I applaud your success.  I'll see you in the headlines, sister.

(And speaking of Visible Platforms, check out The Wilder Coast Facebook Page and give it a like. Sometimes I tell tiny, two sentence stories that are really magnificent and sadly true.)

The Wilder Coast Turns Three

The Wilder Coast is three years old today! I'm leaving now to celebrate by scrubbing walls at a climbing gym- sort of like the Emmys or the Oscars but with a bigger emphasis on hard labor. Check back tomorrow when we begin a whole week of special programming. Happy third birthday to you for reading!*

* I wonder how many of my friends will email me thinking that last sentence is a typo. It's not.

The Arts and Crafts Hour

Hello again. I recently wrote a little piece for Trailsedge called The Arts and Crafts Hour. My editor changed the title to Arts and Crafts for the Outdoor Enthusiast to make it sound more appealing.

I'm pretty sure this piece is doomed. It's not going anywhere. Not because it's not funny but because it's too funny. It's totally lost on the outdoor world. 

But you might enjoy it. I know I sure did. Please head on over and take a look at my soon to be critically acclaimed little darling formerly known as The Arts and Crafts Hour. Oh and before you go, here's a fun fact: that absolutely unbelievable torso is real, and it belongs to Pangal Cristobal Andrade Astorga, the number one Chilean reality TV star. 

Click on me, I'm such a lovely little sketch piece

Winners

With the comedy classes I've been taking, I've started thinking about a stand up routine. It's a ways off, but in terms of material I keep going back to the same little piece of my life. Which leads me to admit something I've been keeping from you. I've had an online dating profile for about a year now on Okcupid. What can I say. It's free. My friend Colleen talked me into it.

Online dating is great. Everyone who browses me thinks I look like this:

I've only met a few guys in person. They're pleasant enough. That's where I found my friend Allen. But I've found that the real magic tends to happens online, during the initial messaging period.

I'd like to share a conversation I'm particularly fond of. I call this vignette "Well Proportioned."

The following conversation occurred as emails over a three day period.

Boy_man: Hi! You are gorgeous and your writing is hilarious. Height is important to me - what ya got? :)

Melina: 4 feet two inches. I'm technically a midget but I prefer little person.

Boy_man: Wow, you are incredibly well proportioned, I figured you were 5'4".

Melina: I am actually 5 3. I was just kidding about being a midget.

Boy_man: Still think you're well proportioned, but I'm still into taller girls. Why don't you list your height? Makes me think there's something fishy going on, such as midget hood.

Melina: Understood. I liked your profile too, but I was a little concerned that you didn't list your penis size? What's going on there?

*****

It was a colorful and spirited interaction, but neither Boy_man nor I felt the need to meet in person.  And that concludes my first story about online dating.

The Yellow Breakdown Product

Wikipedia defines Bilirubin as such: Bilirubin (formerly referred to as hematoidin) is the yellow breakdown product of normal heme catabolism. Heme is found in hemoglobin, a principal component of red blood cells. Bilirubin is excreted in bile and urine, and elevated levels may indicate certain diseases. It is responsible for the yellow color of bruises, the yellow color of urine (via its reduced breakdown product, urobilin), the brown color of faeces (via its conversion to stercobilin), and the yellow discoloration in jaundice.

Yeah. The yellow stuff in bile, pee, illness, bruises, feces, jaundiced infants and, oh that's right- my eyeballs.

In other words, I'm healing nicely.

Cool news, my agent found me a gig! I'm going to be the face of a new fragrance launching February 2012 called "Raw." Some like it hot. Some like it...Raw.

Based on market research, this target demographic is going to really love it:

A Promising Start

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011. Henceforth referred to as The Night I Cried With The Homeless. I was crying because I could not find my improv class, and if that is not the most pathetic sentence ever written then I don't want to know what is.

I wasn't supposed to be taking improv 200 on a Tuesday night. I was supposed to be taking a Sketch Comedy Writing course on Saturday afternoons. I found the class through Unexpected Productions (UP) and happily forked over 200 dollars to get my name on the roster, figuring it'd be a quick jump from there to a boardroom at 30 Rockefeller Place where Lorne Michaels would be sliding a contract towards me across a big wooden table.

Signing away Saturday afternoons for the next eight weeks would mean sacrificing half a season of weekend climbing trips. My friends would be out in the mountains in the beautiful fall weather bonding and getting really fit, while I'd be stuck in the basement of some 2nd rate theater writing political sketches about alien piglets. I was happy with this idea because I wanted to sacrifice for my career. I wanted to give it my all.

Since Saturdays were shot, I decided to schedule my "day job" for the remaining hours of the weekends. (If you want to be a successful artist you have to refer to all other work as your "day job" even if it's mostly at night, like mine). Last Saturday I went into work with a fresh notebook and a special fountain pen I'd bought as a you-go-girl gift for myself. At the end of the shift, I went into the changing room to preen. I put on the "artsy" outfit  I'd chosen that morning: dark skinny jeans from the Gap with foot stirrups and a sweater. Then I headed across town all a twitter, only to have a guy named Derick call me to say the class had been cancelled. "Low turnout."

I slumped over the steering wheel. I had already sunk 200 bones and two months' worth of weekends into this class.

Then I had a great idea. I asked to be put in Improv 200 instead. From my thorough background searches on all the SNL writers and performers, I've learned that most of them come from "a background in improv." I had missed one class already, but there were still seven left and then a live performance in a real theater. The only problem was that the class was held on Tuesday nights, and I was scheduled to work on Tuesday nights.

That afternoon, fiercely determined and high on Dayquil, liquid courage and cough relief, I began a "Shock and Awe" email campaign on my co-workers. I typed out a small essay about the recent events and my feelings regarding them. I wrote poignantly about the debilitating disappointment I felt about the writing class cancellation, and how earlier that day my parents learned that the puppy they were scheduled to pick up had kennel cough and had to be kept in isolation for three weeks. Combined, it was just too much, and the only thing that would make life bearable again was this improv class.

Not surprisingly, nobody was biting at the heals to take my four-to-midnight shifts. I upped the ante. I offered to cover the undesirables: wall scrubbing shifts, birthday parties, 6am openings. I promised to bake something really special for whoever came to my aid.  Days passed. I added another incentive: an inconveniently timed airport pick up, good for any time in the next year.

That did it. In Seattle, land of terrible mass transit, airport pickups trump banana bread any day. I had my schedule covered.  This past Tuesday evening I triumphantly drove to Seattle Center to start my new life. I too would one day be an SNL writer with "a background in improv."

If you've never been to Seattle Center, it's one wacky place. Some forward-thinking city planner decided to crush the Space Needle, science museum, Experience Music Project, ballet halls, theaters, and concert venues onto one campus and scatter a handful of rides, fountains and a weird carnival themed food court into the mix. "Let's give the alternative crowd these seventy four acres," was the thinking behind it. "And the computer nerds can have the entire rest of the city."  Then someone realized this wasn't fair, so they built a brand new city across the water and gave that to the computer nerds as well.

Here is Wikipedia's image of Seattle Center, and I promise you it's forged. At least on a Tuesday evening in mid September, it is not nearly so lit up and festive.  Those mountains are real though.

Seattle Center is a fun place during the day, if fun to you means screaming gobs of elementary school field trips. But after nightfall it becomes weird. It's dark and vacant and the rides only go when someone feels like working them. There is no schedule for the rides. I learned this during one extremely sad evening when I was in college. After 6pm, the "Center House" with the food court is populated by homeless people and their shopping carts. I think it might be open 24/7. The whole place is a Sherman Alexi short story come to life.

The UP website said class would be held at the Puget Sound Theater (PST) classrooms on the 4th floor of the Center House, with fine print recommending I call and double check because classroom locations are subject to change. The guy on the phone told that indeed they had changed, and I should go to the Intamin Playhouse instead. From there someone would direct me where to go. "Really?" I asked. "There will be someone at the theater standing there telling intermediate improv students where to go?" He said yes and hung up very quickly.

There wasn't. I know! Who could have guessed! When I found the Intamin, every single door was locked. I was already late because I had a hard time finding the place to begin with. There are no less than seven theaters at Seattle Center, each in a different quadrant of the park. Finally I found a glass door through which I could see some sort of acting class going on. I pounded on the glass shamelessly. It was Improv 100; so close. The teacher was very nice and apologetic. He explained that the whole schedule had been "entirely fucked" by their director. He recommended I check the Black Box theater in the basement of the Center House.

I found nothing in the basement except a locked children's museum, incidentally the lamest children's museum in the nation. I used to go there when I was a nanny. There's an "African School Hut" with a chalkboard and a video of African people playing the drums inside of it, and in the corner there's usually some toddler chewing on an electric chord. That's about it.

Back upstairs, a flamboyantly gay man suggested the TSA classrooms on the fourth floor and pointed me towards an elevator. Feeling hopeful, I got in and saw that this particular elevator only went to floor three. Floor three was dark and silent. By now it was forty five minutes into the class. I don't know if you are familiar with theater people but I am. As a high schooler I was deeply involved in the Yoh Theater Players and, as you can see from this picture, a very cool and important person.

Here's how it works. After a sub-group is formed within the community, for example a performing troupe or the cast of a play, group members bond and immediately dislike and distrust all outsiders. This was already the second week of Improv, minutes were ticking away, I was completely lost and I had awful, red rodent eyes. The situation was grim.

At this point I did what anyone would do. I went back to the shut down food court, took a seat between two catatonic homeless men, and wept.  Then I took the expensive, nearly full smoothie I was drinking, marched over to the trash can, and slammed it in. The homeless men blinked. And after that I felt somewhat better.

My adventure continued when I found a sneaky back stairwell that lead to the elusive fourth floor. There I found a redhead named Kevin who was scratching at the wall for a hidden panel that might lead to our class.  It was like being in 28 Days Later and finding another uninfected human: the game had changed. We were now a team. Emboldened by this fortuitous turn, I whammed on a door behind which I could hear laughter. An irritated lady opened it and explained that yes, this was an improv class but it was advanced improv. Behind her I could hear someone dramatically reciting John Mayer's "Your body is Wonderland" and just for a second the thought "This is what I'm fighting for?" flashed through my head.

Annoyed Lady Teacher told us to look for a small theater on the first floor. Kevin knew the place a little better and after about fifteen minutes, we found it. It turned out that our class was held in a room directly behind the stage where a live performance of The Pirates of Penzance was being performed to an audience of children. Another thing about theater people: they don't like to be disturbed during Show Time. They're always running, always frantic, always looking for a missing prop and they do not! Have time! For you! Lucky for me I have terrifying eyes and I look either like the Anti-Christ or like a person who is severely Ill, depending on your political views. When I stare at a person and ask for something, they become very subdued and very compliant.  Kevin and I were led to the door of our classroom.

When you reach the conclusion of a long, trying journey, everything is forgiven. You realize that the whole thing was just one great, big, Three's-Company-esqu mix up. After all, what worthwhile thing in life comes easily, without a wasted smoothie and a good cry and some screaming episodes inside a demented elevator? Feeling immediately more relaxed, it suddenly dawned on me that I had thrown away half a smoothie while in the company of hungry people. But I brightened up immediately when I entered the room and saw my fellow improv folk standing in a circle, passing around invisible objects. I bonded with them immediately, and I now dislike and distrust everybody else. It was my first, exciting step forward in a pathway forged by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Ol' demon eyes had arrived.

Moving Right Along

I'm really excited that so many people read and enjoyed my article about barfing till my eyes exploded. But now it's time for me, and everybody else, to move on. I want to direct you now to my most successful piece so far this year, a tiny article I wrote called "How to Drop Your Outdoorsiness into Any Conversation." In it I mapped out four sample conversations that could easily be twisted so that the focus turns to you and your overall superiority. They are: Coffee Break, Back Yard BBQ, Boat Rental, and a general "Out with Friends." This thing got hundreds and hundreds of Facebook Likes, which is like money to a writer. Money that you can't actually spend or look at, but still important. So here is a handsome man, recently injured during a mountaineering expedition, beckoning you to follow him to a dreamworld of wit.

Click me! I'm an enjoyable one.

Every Mistake Ever Made

 At the beginning of the month, I moved into a new house in a neighborhood across town. The new place has everything I wanted and then some: a stunning view of the Olympics, a bakery down the block that only sells pie, track lighting, a back yard. My bedroom is spacious, with large windows, wood floors, and my own bathroom.

When I signed the lease, my only concern was the bathroom. It's got a new-age flat sink and a beautiful claw foot tub, but no fan. I repeat: Bathroom. No fan. Practically in my room. Also worth noting, the bathroom door is missing a doorknob. Instead there is a little hole cut into the door where the knob should be, and if you're lying on the bed and you turn your head just right you could look through it and see stuff.

Being a healthy, rational adult, I was a bit perplexed by this one persistent hypothetical: What if there's a boy over and one of us has to do something embarrassing in the bathroom? And by something embarrassing I mean anything other than a hand wash or a pee of normal duration and magnitude. Should I have looked at more places? What if I've made a huge mistake?

Girls have been avoiding using the bathroom around boys since the beginning of time. We're quite good at finding ways to go somewhere else, like the bathroom in the lobby or the Port-a-potty at the construction site across the street. It's something you just get good at even though you know it's wrong, like texting and driving or Ultimate Frisbee. "I'm just going to grab something from the kitchen," you say, carelessly pulling on a pair of sweat pants. Then, as soon as you're out of the room, you bolt downstairs or across the lawn and you do your business as fast as humanly possible. A real expert will remember to bring something back from the kitchen, so as to stick with the original story. "Here's a bowl of grapes from the fridge," you say nonchalantly. "Didn't you say you wanted some grapes?"

I had to give myself a pep talk. All this anxiety over a bathroom! Cool it, hot rod. I thought. You're putting the cart before the horse. Here I was worrying about this beautiful new house before I'd even spent one night there. And to tell the truth, I just don't have boys over all that often (or ever, if you're reading this and you are my mom.)

Unfortunately, this was one of those times where my fears were entirely correct. My very first night in my new place, I did have a boy over, and we both contracted food poisoning from undercooked hamburgers. And all the fans and doorknobs and downstairs bathrooms in the world could not have saved us for the retching, reeling horror that is Escherichia coli in all its miserable glory.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Gosh Melina, why does this sort of things happen to you so often?! Actually, I have two theories. One is that I did something very, very bad in a past life. I committed unspeakable crimes against humanity and for that I am now paying dearly. The other theory is that I am going to end up a very successful television writer with lots of money and famous friends, and all this life experience is just material for future skits I'll co-write with Andy Samberg. We'll just have to wait and see.
 
Here is what makes this particular bit of life experience not as hideous as it sounds: it wasn't just any boy who was staying over. One, he wasn't a romantic interest, and two, it was Andrew. Andrew Wehner, who I knew when I was a skinny fifteen year old and he was a skinny thirteen year old and we were both attending the Academy at Adventure Quest. The last time we spent a night together was eleven years ago, and we spent it freezing to death on a mountain. Yes, that's right, it was Andy, the co-star of my Lost in the Mountains adventure. (In case you haven't read about that yet, go read it now and come back when you're done.)

Welcome back. So as you can see, we've shared some real heavy stuff.  Together we crawled up a mountain on our hands and knees, chewed on orange peels to stay alive, slept frozen and entangled in a single bivvy sac. We co-hallucinated the angel of death- that right there is more epic than any 27 hour road trip to Bonaroo you did with your college buddies.  It's been eleven years since that night, and during that time we completely lost contact. Then he comes out to a Navy town near Seattle for work, the first time I've seen him in a decade, and we end up on the bathroom floor, and I'm puking into the bath tub because he made it to the toilet first.

Andy is the skinny kid on the left. I'm the girl.

I could write about how bizarrely wonderful it was to see Andy again, how quickly we reconnected and how our friendship is so special because of what we survived together as kids. Alternatively, I could tell you in some detail about how hard we vommed after we got sick. Here, I'll put it up for a vote: Friendship? Barfing? Keep your hands up, please. Okay, barfing wins. But one last thing about Andy: he's a good kid, and I love him a lot.

So, the barfing: I met Andy at the ferry terminal downtown, and we spent about an hour bussing back to my hill top neighborhood. I spent the most of that hour gushing about this newly opened restaurant that's a block away from my new house. "It's perfect! It's got a little bar by the window where I can write, and they sell espresso in the morning! I'll go there all the time!" I think I at one point I was actually squealing. Andy was very hungry, it was four in the afternoon and we hadn't had lunch, but I was dragging him to this one restaurant because I was so very excited.

So we went to the place and we both had hamburgers and split an expensive bottle of wine. I felt like an adult. Halfway employed fake adults drink a glass of wine at dinner if they manage to pay rent that month. Adults drink whole bottles of wine over lunch whenever they want. Right? At some point through our meal, (which was full of stories and catching up and gossiping about our classmates- the ones who are still living)  Andy said, "Boy, this sure is a juicy burger!" I too noticed how very pink and rare the meat was, but I didn't think to do anything about it. Real adults don't send back their fancy bacon blue cheese burgers because they're scared. In fact they prefer their beef medium rare. Right? 

Later that night, after visiting with my sister and walking around the neighborhood, Andy and I went to a pub down the street and had a few glasses of beer. Nothing crazy. No hard alcohol, no shots of anything, no late night chicken wings or manic 7-11 stops. By the time we got home, I wasn't drunk, just tired and feeling the beginnings of a cold coming on.  But when I lay down in bed to go to sleep, I started to feel weird.

Really weird. I had a migraine in my throat, which was new, and my whole body hurt. It really hurt. Things got worse as the night progressed. I developed a fever and terrible chills. I was burning hot under the covers but freezing cold on top of them. I assumed Andy was asleep, down on the hard floor in a sleeping bag, so I tried to stay very quiet. Hours ticked by. Finally, unable to cope, I whispered "Andy, you have got to help me with this head ache." And when I heard his feeble response rise up from below, I knew we were both screwed.  "I'm feeling sick to my stomach," he said. "I....I think I'm going to yak."

Next thing I know Andy was in the bathroom, yakking. And yeah, you know, a fan and its sound-neutralizing hum would have gone a long way at this point. But then he staggered out of the bathroom and that's when I realized I had to ralf too, so I hustled outside and start throwing up all over the lawn. It was 6am and the sun was rising all pink and delicate over the Olympics. I stayed down on my hands and knees, just hurling away. 

At this point I was thinking that I must have had too much to drink, which didn't make any sense. I've had a lot more than a few beers before and been fine. Besides which, this felt different. This felt way more painful.  Now, I'm not an expert in throwing up alcohol. I've only ever done it once, in my friend Kyle's minivan on the way to paddle the Skykomish river. It came up as a big watery slosh and was followed by tremendous and immediate relief. I did two enthusiastic laps on the river that day. But when I crawled off the lawn back into bed after that first episode, I didn't feel any better at all.

It got ugly. The fever and chills cranked up and so did the barfing. At one point I realized that if I stayed lying on my bed any longer I would die. So I decided to take a bath. I was so fucking cold that my skin was burning. I sat in the claw foot tub and ran the water up to my chin. But then my stomach twisted again and I started heaving right into the bath. I was too weak at that point to get out. I threw up five more times before I decided to let the water out. (Wow, look how many things I'm telling you! We sure are getting to know each other, aren't we, internet friends.) 

Just like when we got frostbite, I was worse off than Andy. Later in the morning he mentioned leaving the house and getting something to eat. "Maybe some muffins," he said. At the word muffins I jumped out of bed, hopped across the living room and threw up off the porch. Andy gamely took off walking up the hill but I heard him twenty seconds later throwing up in my new neighbor's driveway.

By this point, there was nothing left in my stomach. I threw up bile, water, and nothing. There were tears running down my cheeks, snot coming from my nose, and I kept changing outfits because I'd sweat through everything. Now I know what you're thinking: this sounds just like a middle school dance! But it was even worse than that, I promise you. When Andy returned, he found me sitting in the chair that's outside the house. I live on a street that's too steep for cars, so the city closed it off and turned it into a community garden.  It's a beautiful, leafy, secluded spot, and now a good portion of it has been sprayed with my stomach acid.

Andy sat down next to me. The morning was hazy and colorful. Almost peaceful.  It was very much like the time we sat side by side in the Emergency Room, slouched in wheelchairs, quietly absorbing saline solution into our veins. We were going to live, perhaps, but the aftermath was not going to be pleasant.

I touched his shoulder and somehow found the strength to speak. "You must go, Andy. You must save yourself. You are recovering, and I am not." This was my dramatic and polite way of saying "You'd better get your ass on a metro bus because I'm not driving you downtown."

After Andy left I would have felt very sad if I was still capable of human emotions. I crawled back into bed, curled into the fetal position and rocked myself into sleep. When I woke up, it was a few hours later and the light coming through the blinds had changed. My mouth was so dry that I felt instant panic. I went to the bathroom to drink water from the faucet. When I felt like I could breathe again, I looked up at face in the mirror. And that's when things got real. Like being a kid at Disney World and seeing the Blue Princess coming back in from her break brushing cigarette ashes off her gown. Mom? Dad? What's happening?

My eye balls had exploded. I still had pupils and retinas, but the white parts were bright red with blood. I do not mean that they were blood-shot, I mean that my eyes were actually hemorrhaging blood because of all that award-winning puking.

Now, I'm no stranger to puking. I've had renal failure. I once combined one pound of gummy bears with a Venti Starbucks Chai and then ran a marathon. I threw up all over a boy I was trying to kiss in the Grand Canyon. I had the Norwalk virus at Christmastime. I think a third of the posts on this blog are about me barfing (hyperbole). The point is, I know a thing or two about throwing up and its many unattractive attributes. But I have never, ever experienced anything close to this. I looked like Satan's daughter.

****

If you want to become very close friends with someone and you don't have much time, I recommend sharing some contaminated food. Or freezing do death in a remote mountain range as a teenager. Turns out, I'm full of ideas for fast-tracking friendship, especially when they involve Andy. What's next for us? Maybe I'll invite him to my next medical exam. Maybe we'll be the only survivors of a plane wreck, or we'll watch the film "Human Centipede" together. Andy, when I'm the head writer for SNL, I guarantee a back stage pass and a meet a greet with your celebrity host of choice. I promise that to you, and to anyone else who I've thrown up on, anyone I've inadvertently humiliated on this blog, or anyone who has lent me a book that I then dropped in the bath tub.

If it turns out I do not end up writing for TV and I'm just paying the price for my former life as a murderous dictator, then what can I say. I'm sorry. Honestly, nobody is more sorry than me.

The terrific humiliation of my life is made more bearable by Ariat Rodeobaby Boots.

Woof

Human kind, beware. You are one bad hamburger away from this:

This Thing I Wrote about Coffee (and Rudy)

Well my sister moved away, I'm in the middle of unpacking, my eyeballs are bleeding and I've misplaced my keys. I could sure use some coffee right now, couldn't you? Sadly for me, I can't have any coffee because I tore my insides up by contracting E. Coli from a hamburger. Yes, you read it here first! But anyhow, I bring you this little article that deals with the complex elements of addiction, Facebook breakups, caffeine, my ex-boyfriend Rudy (the alpinist) and the best gosh darn drink on the mother fucking planet. I wrote it. It packs a punch, and I hope you enjoy.

Ah come on, Click me! It's bite-sized!

The happiest place in the world is this blog

Hey guys. It's come to my attention that my blog has been a major bummer lately. I'm sorry, it's just that, I don't know- oh yeah, my hometown got washed away. But anyway, in response I put together a list of ten things that make me super happy. These are the brightest, spunkiest, most positive, funnest and best things I could think of.  These ten things are the reason I crawl out of bed each early afternoon. And so, without further ado, I present to you my list of What's Hot September 2011! One more thing, I'm kind of going through a big Jorma Taccone phase. 

Our Town

This is my hometown! That woman shouting that it's not over yet is Dr. Halle, my 9th grade English teacher, the woman offering showers is Elissa's mom, that man- okay, I could go on, because I'm from a quintessential small town where everyone knows everyone, but you get the point. I'm in love with my home. I wish I was there right now. Check out why on this NBC newsclip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Over-Brewed Bro

This article is dedicated to the all the men in my life. For your weird comments, impossible triumphs, ridiculous adventures, your blissful simplicity and stunning complexity, for your awkward encounters, your bizarre advances and your equally incomprehensible rejections, I give a big, hearty thank you. Thank you for giving me so much shit to write about. Without you, I'd have to be a fiction writer. Gross. I owe you guys a whole lot. It is my sincerest hope that in ten years, we will all still be very close Facebook friends. Bros, this little piece is for you:

Click me, I'll take you there!

NYC Writers Conference

 In late October, I'm going to New York City.

I'm attending the BlogHer & Penguin Publishing House Writers Conference. For two days I'll live inside the Hilton Hotel, going to seminars and talks and meeting with writers, literary agents, editors, and publishers. For the next few days after that I'll be walking the streets, wondering if this is where I'm supposed to be one day.

This is me, going for it.

I love my website. I love magazines. I owe my world to the people who publish my articles in any capacity. But I want to write a book; it's been my dream since I was in kindergarten. I want to write sketches, screenplays, I want to write for television, I want to write essays, fiction, digital shorts. I want to write everything. 

So I have to get to New York.

Between now and then, I'll be working as hard as humanly possible to pull together my book outline. It's also vital that I grow my "platform." These days, agents won't look twice at you unless you have an impressive visible platform. They look at your readership, all your analytic and page stats, followers, fans, etc.

And you can help! In fact, you're the only one who can help! Become a "Follower" of this blog by clicking the link on the left, and join the Wilder Coast Facebook Page by clicking here and pressing the "like" button on the page:

If you would like to donate to my trip to New York (plane ticket and registration fee), I'm thinking up cool ways to show my huge, genuine gratitude. If you donate, I will send you a hand written thank you letter on a Wilder Coast photo card, and a large 5 x 7 print of any photo from this blog. I'll sign it and write a thank you, so you can stick it on your fridge and let the world (or at least your dinner guests) know that you support hard working writers. Become a supporter by clicking here:

I'm working on putting together a Picassa Album of the my best photos so you can scroll through with ease. Until then, shuffle around the blog and see if any shot catches your interest. Donators will be kept in the loop about the conference, the book, the City, and the road to publication. Because after all, you've made it possible.

Alright. Hold on tight- here we go! 

It's Only Water

It's only water. They used to tell me when I was a new kayaker. Hey, stop being scared, it's only water. I never understood that, not then and not now. Water is the most powerful, awesome, destructive force on the planet. It takes people in a quiet heartbeat, washes them away without a word, closes over them like the lid of a coffin. It roars and flashes, smashes and screams and destroys. It took Stephen this summer, and then Allen Satcher on Cherry Creek, then Boyce Greer on the North Fork Payette, again.  And now it's taken Vermont.

I knew about the hurricane and its enormous, swirling eye hovering directly above my hometown on the weather radar. My parents had stocked the house with food and water and as many candles and flashlights as they could find in the empty isles of cleaned out grocery stores. They told my sister and I not to worry, as electricity and cell phone towers were sure to go out for a long time. I didn't worry about them, or my house high up on its hill, the epitome of safety, miles away from the rest of the world. Instead I wondered vaguely about New York City, Boston, coastal land and all the people in those areas having to evacuate.    

I went out to Index, Washington this weekend on a climbing trip. There was perfect weather, a riverside camp ground, friends I haven't seen in too long- but when my cell phone died on Sunday night I packed up and headed home, a day or two earlier than I'd planned. With everything going on back East and my family braced for impact, I didn't want to be out of communication. I got back to the city a little before midnight, and was moving around my room putting things away when my sister came to the door. She sat down on my bed and said that mom and dad were okay, but Vermont had been devastated.

All of Vermont is underwater, but the Southern region was hit the hardest. Our region. Our town. All of these pictures are the of places where I grew up, where I go every single day when I'm home.

Vermonters like myself who now live in other places- the Vermont diaspora, as we call ourselves- are left staring at the news and Facebook with disbelief, heartbroken, stunned. Wanting so much to go home. Here's a link to all the posts and photos on The Wilder Coast about Vermont and New England. It's such a small, quiet, safe state- a rural refuge, peaceful and green and isolated.  Nothing ever happens there. We always thought that nothing could ever happen there.

Was it worth it then

Stephen's body was found the day of the funeral, more than seven miles downriver of where he was last seen. That night I drove home to Vermont, and the next morning went back to New Hampshire to meet up with the Liz and the girls. A few days later our trip was over and I took a two week vacation, where all I did was read and  cook. That's all I remember, anyway. I went kayaking once and expected it to mess me up a little, but it didn't.

I returned home to Seattle on a late night flight, got in all disoriented and sore. Even though it was just the beginning of August, the weather was about as bland as an in-flight movie and I started to look for work, so I considered the summer to be over.

The story of Stephen doesn't end, of course, but this is where I stop telling it.

Trust and Devotion

 You're not supposed to go to a funeral looking like shit, but that's what I did. I had been working in the woods for a month and living out of a backpack, blah blah, Atlantic, sunburn, sea water, sweat, all that. My clothes, as you can imagine, were so filthy that I shoved them in a trash bag and stopped at a Walmart in some down and out town in Massachusetts. I bought black shoes and a new black dress and underwear, the cheap kind off the rack designed by some celebrity tween. There were little rhinestones in the shape of a guitar on the ass. Then I went into the bathroom and put the clothes on and tried to scrub the dirt off of my face and shoulders.

That was a joke. I had used this cheap spray on sunscreen a few days before which had gone on like glue, and all the dirt had adhered to where I'd sprayed the stuff like some kind of skin graft. It wouldn't come off in the Walmart bathroom, it wouldn't come off in the rest area bathroom, or the Burger King bathroom, not even with industrial strength soap or stacks of hard, bleached white paper towels.  Every where I stopped on that eight hour drive to Connecticut, I'd grip the porcelain sink and lean forward, studying my face in the mirror, hoping that somewhere along the highway I'd gotten cleaner or prettier or become a different person entirely.

It's okay, I reasoned with myself. It's alright.  You go to a funeral to show support to the family. No one will notice you and no one will notice that you look like hell.

In fact, this was about the only thing they noticed. My friends, anyway. When I got to the house and first saw the boys I'd worked with at New River through the kitchen window, I felt a stab of love and relief and my face got wet with tears and sweat. I wanted it to be just us. I did. Like I wanted to go to the basement and sit on the futon between them and talk about Stephen and our days in South America and how we were doing with this and what it meant and all that. I wanted them to put an arm around me and push my face against their chest and say shhh we're in this together.

But our reunion did not play out exactly how it had been in my head. Which is fine, it never does. 

But actually it was really far from what I'd been hoping for. They looked at me and said You are so fucking dirty. 
I know, I said.
Them: What did you do, sleep in a bed of shit?
Me: ha ha. Stop that. I've been in the woods for the last month. My job.
(Silence)
Me: I literally left the trail-head this morning and drove all day to get here.
I realized, They really don't give a fuck about any of this.
Them: Couldn't you have taken a shower?
Me: Where would I have done that.
Them: I would have figured something out.

This was not teasing, exactly. Or even approximately. This was something hard and residual between us, something broken, or even worse, evidence that nothing had ever been there at all. This was I am no longer an interesting person to them. But in terms of reunion and solidarity and comfort this is pretty much what I got. So I took it.

I made my way to the family room and I sat there and watched a photo montage of Stephen play on a loop on the TV, wearing my black shoes and my new Rocker underwear. I cried in the snot nosed swollen eyed way that nobody wanted to be around. I made strangled sounds. At one point I got up and took a shower and washed my hair but the dirt stayed glued on me. I actually had this layer of scum on me, and I could peel strips of it off with my fingernail. Back on the couch, I started to get really angry at myself.  Maybe if I hadn't used that cheap ass sunscreen I wouldn't look like this and the boys wouldn't be such dicks to me. Then I started getting furious at the boys for being such assholes even though I knew in my head people deal with grief in different ways blah di blah.

Suddenly I was blazing hot with anger at everyone. Everyone- all of the people out there telling stories about kayaking and charging and nobody having the balls or the brains to say Yeah but really, if little Steve had known he was going to drown on that rapid he probably would have walked, and don't you think him being dead at 19 is a fucking waste. 

Three girls wandered into the living room. They were young Virgina Tech girls, very pretty. Straight hair and mascara. A photo of Stephen and I came on the TV, taken outside the house in West Virginia. His arm around my shoulders, both of us grinning. The girls leaned in behind curtains of hair and whispered to each other.

Excuse me, said one. Was he your brother?
No. I say. His little sister is Elizabeth. She's out there in the kitchen. She looks like him, they could be twins.

Later on, one of those girls reappeared in the doorway. She looked at me and said in a confiding manner,
I know you aren't Stephen's sister. I looked at you on Facebook a few days ago.

Eventually I picked up a beer and went into the back yard, where the 19 year old gunners from the Ottawa river were sitting around a gas flame and talking about kayaking. I drank a lot of beer and let the bottles pile at my feet. I used to sort of belong to this world, I could tell a few stories of my own if I wanted to:

Hey let me tell you about the kayak school that I went to when I was in high school. The guy who started the place was a child molester who bribed the kids with sponsorships and races. Those kids died, too. Or let's talk about my ex-boyfriend churning beneath a waterfall in Chile and shoring up blue and unconscious at the feet of the students. Or my other ex boyfriend running away from me (can you blame him?) and living on the North Fork of the Payette. How prescient, since that river is why we're all here right now.

Yeah I never was a little young gun like you guys but I had a few close calls. Once I dropped into this canyon in Chile, everyone swore up and down it was safe even though no one knew a thing about it. Stephen was there with me. In fact Stephen was wearing my broken, way too small dry top and I was wearing his. It was alright down there, cold and tight, but then we ran into a terminal rapid, hey, whatdaya know, we hadn't known about that rapid! Now we're stuck at the bottom of this canyon trying not to go over the thing.  Lucky for us there was a tiny eddy and we could crawl out of our boats and balance on the rock edge wondering now what do we do.  We managed to rescue ourselves and it took a long, long time and a lot of sketchy ass maneuvering but all the kids thought it was a big exciting adventure. Which it always is, isn't it, until your luck runs out.

Don't worry though, I didn't say any of this stuff. I'm not a total bitch. I tuned out. I played a song in my head over and over. It was a Zero 7 and DJ Danger Mouse song I'd played for Stephen at school and he'd said yeah, best hip hop song I've ever heard in my life, Melina, and it was a nice moment of connection for us because Stephen was a moody kid and I had my own problems and we didn't always get along:

She wondered would it hurt again a scary new setting/ a Mary Lou Renton perfect ten /was it worth it then/Aah -- the stench of first love/ The quench of the thirst made it worse/ truly the burst of upward-thrust motion/ trust, devotion/ lust is like the sand where the beach meets the ocean/ soaking, felt joy in the whirwind/never ever did he mention boyfriend girlfriend/demanded her respect/then ran and did a handspring almost landed on her neck-

Acadia

Look here we are, lucky dogs spending a couple of days at Otter Cliffs in Acadia.

Perfect days for climbing. Ocean and rock. Simple as that.

 

 

The funeral date was set for the following Saturday and I knew I'd have to get down to Connecticut somehow. But for now, there was just this:

Sea-smashed sandstone, salt and rope. And the certainty that comes with knowing you're not wasting your time anymore.

Everything Matters

For the girls on Owles

Liz gave me a book to read called Everything Matters. It's about a boy who knows from birth that a comet is going to destroy the earth when he is 32 years old. His whole life is a struggle to attach himself to a world that he knows is doomed and fleeting. After the many twists and curves of the novel, he eventually arrives at the conclusion that Everything Matters.

Everything.

After the rigorous, rain soaked, blistering trip through the mountains came the warm, peaceful days on the water. We struggled with our gear-laden boats through the sucking, knee deep mud of the salt flats and started paddling up the current, towards Mascongus Bay. We spent four days like that, gliding through the bright, ramshackle harbors of fishing villages and riding the swell of the open ocean. We charted the tides and the currents and the light in the sky, and at the end of the day spread our gear on the grey, pebbled beach of our own islands. Storms hit the bay and we watched them roll in; lighting bit into the skyline and rain the size of pearls pocked the surface of the ocean.  

Nights were full of sudden, hard rain showers and fat blue flies that chewed through clothing and burst into blood when slapped. Liz and I fixed my broken tent pole using a SAM splint and a bandana, mended the vinyl with a roll of duct tape. I slept inside its very crooked walls, thankful to be dry and itching with salt. The girls slept poorly, their painfully sunburned bodies turning uncomfortably on foam mats. They winced every morning as damp bikini strings bit into their shoulders. They loved to comb the water for curious things, gnarled driftwood and long streams of glossy seaweed. They hoisted these things onto their boats and arranged them to dry on the bow or drag behind them like sea dragons. Around us, sleek heads of seals poked out like little dogs and then disappeared.

One night on an island, a group of boys paddle up to our shore. They were young boys from a Maine camp. We invited them to our fire and the leaders took great pleasure in forcing them to play those camp games that mostly involve pretending to be animals. The head leader of the boys was the most enthusiastic person I'd ever met in my life, one of those guys who says Howdy! to everyone he sees. We watched the kids melt into the shadows of the fire, sitting very close and quiet as Liz told them a long, drawn out ghost story about being chased by a coffin. She swore up and down that it was true, and the best thing was that they all believed her, right until the very end.

One day, we pulled up onto a beach for a swim but found ourselves stuck at an impasse between the broiling sun and the stunningly cold sea. Finally the girls decided to brave it together, they waded out into the water screaming until the water was up to their waists. There they stood, holding hands in a ring and waiting to go down. They called and called my name as I stood on the sand and swore they wouldn't go under until I joined them, but they wouldn't come back to shore either. They'd stand out there and go numb and die if I didn't swim with them. So off I went and took their hands and we counted to three and went under. The water was a jarring, salt shock as it closed over our heads.

Everything matters. This is how I think about Stephen dead and the girls living. Everything matters.

Everything.

Into White

I sat on the grass by the side of the road, alone. I had one bar of service, if I held the phone just right, and I used it to call the boys I'd worked with at New River Academy. I don't know what I expected, but to hear those big, handsome boys breaking down and sobbing was horrible. In real life, they're callous and caustic and funny. I remember there were black flies circling me and I waved one hand around my face and used the other to hold the phone against my ear. Matt's voice on the other end was deep and cracking as he told me the details of the drowning.

Drowning is an absolute nightmare. 

That night I told the girls about Stephen. They looked very serious and then asked if they could play with my hair. Naya went around and sat behind me and started pulling my hair almost aggressively into a braid. I held my breath and the parade of bad images in my head came to a halt.

There was a girl at New River, Taylor, this tiny girl, an unbelievable kayaker with no fear. She could always tell when I had a migraine at school and would come stand behind me and play with my hair. It sounds like a small thing, but it's more than that. It's an instinct, an instinct to reach out and touch someone who is in pain, and very soon after those teenage years that instinct seems to go away.

The next day we went into the Whites, a mountain range that never fails to administer an ass kicking like none other. Last year Liz and I hung on a rock face and watched helplessly as her backpack -with the food and the tent and all her gear- went bouncing over the cliff and into the densely forested oblivion. Eleven years ago in the deep winter, I nearly froze to death there, lost overnight in the Pemigewasset wilderness, and was sentenced to a wheel chair for six weeks with burnt, black feet. 

I watched every step those girls took. Lightning, rain, rocks, creeks, whatever, I bared my teeth at anything I thought could cause harm. On the second day we went through the Mahoosick Notch, the most difficult mile of the Appalachian trail. It took us five hours to get through that one single mile. It's a very narrow pass littered with boulders the size of swimming pools that you have to crawl under, squeeze through and scramble up. By the time it got dark we were still fighting through it.

That night, our tents set precariously between trees on the side of the trail. There were cuts to clean and sprained knees to fix and half of them got bloody noses, which meant they were more than a little anxious.
 

I fell hard asleep that night and fluttered into one of the darkest dreams of my life. I was standing on the banks of the Payette with Will and we had found Stephen's body. I was insisting that I go to it and take him out of the water but Will wouldn't let me. He kept saying, "It won't look like Stephen." But I ran down anyway and pulled the body into my lap and said "It's him. You see? I can recognize his teeth." I was thrashing in my sleep and I broke my tent. I woke up halfway when the poles cracked and the nylon split down the middle. In the morning, they found me like this:

That next day it rained and rained. We were up on the ridge above treeline, walking up and down and up and down over mountain tops as it poured down. Liz and I pushed food on the girls and forced them to unpack and put on every layer they'd brought. We fought off Hypothermia with sticks.

Again we got into camp past dark. It was Liz's birthday and the girls tried to make brownies in a pan on the stove. The brownies were inedible. You could roll them into a ball inside your hand and bounce them on the tent platform. The next morning, someone knocked a pot of boiling water onto Lydia. Lydia made no noise as she stood there, glassy eyed, the boiling water soaking into her socks and boots. Liz jumped up and tore them off of her and poured cold water onto her skin. I dug through the dwindling med kit for the gel packs and burn ointments. I bent over Lydia and watched as blisters sprang up clear and yellow around her ankle. "Hey Liz," I said, "Let's get out of here." 

 

We hiked out that day, the fourth day, and I hitched a ride from a truck full of old people back to where we'd left the van. The old people had tattoos and big, wobbling arms and were out for a joyride. They pulled over when they saw me loping down the dirt road and a woman leaned out and said, "Come on it. It's okay honey, there are ladies in here."

On the way back to town, I kept looking back at the girls in the rear view mirror. Sun-beaten, dirty, worn out. "You girls have a good time?" I asked, and they all screamed at once that yes they had. That hike was the coolest- the hardest- they were interrupting each other- never thought I could do it- can't wait to tell my friends about it- don't want to do it again but so happy-

In the middle of it I got a message on my phone. It said that Stephen's parents had flown out to Idaho but his body still hadn't been found. I found it sad to think that he was still under water.