this makes me happy forever.

i am a mac.

After seven years of PC-ing, I have done it. I've switched to a Mac, specifically a MacBook Pro which I'm sure a computer geek could describe in loving, exact detail. But I'll just say it's really shiny. And it makes swooshing noises. And it's speedy. And there's this thing called Garage Band which I'm fairly sure I can take guitar lessons on, which whoa, just whoa. I've had this new toy for about four hours and already my mind is just blown by the awesomeness.

Also I will be back to my regular posting schedule now. Not having a computer for the last couple of weeks has made the whole blogging thing difficult. But now all I want to do is play on my new computer. I would bequeath my first born child to this computer if it was legally allowed. Hell if humans and computers could get married, I may have proposed by now. I am now officially in the cult of Apple. And the Kool Aid tastes FANTASTIC.

a year ago.

This month it's really hard not to play the "last year" game. You know, this time last year I was in this place, doing this thing.

October 2009 was a really great month. I mean extraordinarily, once in a lifetime, beyond my wildest expectations great. Exactly a month ago to this day I was in Ko Phi Phi, Thailand-a place so beautiful sometimes I can't convince myself it really existed, that it wasn't just some vivid, colorful mirage invented out of thin air, a place that I could search for years to find and never locate. When Friday rolls around, I can say that a year ago I was in Malaysia, in Little India maybe, where in moments a bustling market turned into the stillest, most serene silence as men and women all around us knelt down on the street to pray. It's hard not to play this game, and it's equally hard not to get bummed out playing it, because well, life was pretty, unequivocally beautiful a year ago.

But then I was thinking, I had a lot a year ago. I had the world and it seemed that I could close my eyes, make a wish to go somewhere, and there I would be. I had life piled on life, swimming and rock climbing and snorkeling with Nemo fish. But there were things then I didn't have that I have now, today, this October of 2010.

A year ago I didn't know my niece. It seems crazy to think that; someone who today I love with every ounce of my soul didn't even exist a year ago. A year ago she was just an idea, the possibility of a person. And today she's introduced me to a way of loving someone I didn't understand before, loving someone not just for who they are but for who they will and can be.

A year ago Haiti was only a place name, a vague picture in my head. A year ago I hadn't looked into an orphan's eyes in a small, cramped room, and seen not devastation or misery, but trust. I hadn't worked side by side with people who had every reason to never get up again, but who day after day got up, faced difficulty beyond anything I can imagine, and lived.

A year ago I thought life after college was fairly simple. Pick a job, apply for said job, and the rest would fall into place. I thought my life was more or less decided. A year ago I had no idea that I would come home and face a solid ten months of rejection after rejection, rejection by phone, rejection by email, rejection by carrier pigeon, skywriting. More importantly a year ago I would never have known that after rejection and failure so complete and total that it would leave me numb and broken, I would have the ability to stand up and start all over again.

A year ago life was pretty wonderful. And of course I wish I could go back to those places, see those clear waters and green, terraced fields again. But if the only way I could go back there was to give up this past year, a year that was without question the hardest in my life, I know I would never do it.

daily inspiration

"I want to write something new — something extraordinary and beautiful and simple."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, shortly before he wrote "The Great Gatsby"

geek heaven!

So if you're an enormous nerd like me, go ahead and finish reading through the above image. Then go to the source of the image, NYmag.com, where they have put together several of these, including FB pages for Ron and Hermione and a magical world Twitter feed. Here's the URL: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/09/hogwarts_gets_the_internet.html?imw=Y&f=most-viewed-24h5

I'll wait.

These pretty much made my life. First of all whoever got to put these together has the BEST JOB ON THE PLANET. Second, he or she clearly loves the world of Harry Potter and knows that world deeply and truly, the way any HP fan does. Because that's what these books do. They don't just entertain or tell a story. They create this enormous, lovely, weird, beautiful, fanciful world and they let you become a part of it. The details of these internet mock-ups are so painstaking, so almost tender in their adherence to JK Rowling's world, and reading through these I was just reminded again of how much these books mean to me.

I've watched the previews for the upcoming HP movie and will go see it, as I have all the other ones. But it will break my heart. Because these books without question changed my life. I remember so clearly the fall afternoon I walked into a little hole in the wall bookstore in Richmond with my mom. She wanted to get a book for our upcoming beach trip, and I tagged along, probably sulking and being a general pain in the ass. I was in seventh grade, and I was an absolutely shit. I mean really. The only thing I cared about was being popular. I was as big of a dork then as I am now of course, but I wouldn't accept that. I wanted to be one of the cool kids, and so I literally made it my mission. And my silly little middle school brain thought the key to popularity was to ditch everything that made me unique and geeky and well, me. I started purposefully not doing as well in school. I treated some really good friends really badly. And I denied that at my core I was a reader and a writer. I only read for school. I stopped writing stories on my electronic typewriter (yes I really had one of these, I think that means I'm 90). And when I heard about this Harry Potter series and the hype around it, I rolled my eyes and acted above it all.

But for some reason on that October afternoon, in the aisles of a dark and dusty store crammed with used and new books, I picked up the first Harry Potter book. Maybe because I was with my mom, maybe because I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about, maybe because despite how hard I was trying to stifle my inner dork, it was just screaming to get out. But I picked up the first Harry Potter (there were only three out at the time then), and asked my mom to buy it for me. I finished it in one weekend, and a lifelong love was born. Now it would be simplifying things to say that this changed me overnight. I still had a few more years of acting like a brat and trying to climb the so called high school social ladder (suffice it to say I never got above the first rung, like I said, enormous dork, all the popular kids could always see what I couldn't, and also suffice it to say that on that first rung I found my real friends and my real self and movie of the week, super special episode blah blah blah, you know the rest).

But my point is that Harry Potter was like that first movement back toward me. I fell in love with the story of a boy with a scar living in a cupboard under the stairs. I was taken into the warmth of this colorful, odd, wonderful world. And I realized that no matter how hard I tried to deny it, stories (whether being read or wrote) were not just a way to pass the time for me, but a fundamental part of who I was, who I am, who I always will be.

And so I guess my very long winded point is that Harry Potter will never just be a book to me. And judging from the above internet mock ups which are just so perfect and spot on that they could only have been written by someone who has fully lived in the world of these books, I'm not the only one.