Neen's Notes

Every year in February, I write a post about gratefulness. February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, and it is a time during which I reflect on the past and how it has shaped the present. It is also a way of reminding myself to be thankful for simply having good people in my life. You can find Grateful I and How to Not be Grumpy on Valentine’s Day in the archives if you’d like to read the others in this series of posts.

During February, please take time to talk to the teens in your life about cultivating healthy relationships, and how to recognize the signs of abuse. Nearly 1.5 million high school students nationwide experience physical abuse from a dating partner in a single year. It’s time to break the cycle.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
–Henry David Thoreau

There are a lot of individuals and groups of people who have had a strong impact on my life. My entire family who gave me the foundation and understanding of what it means to love and care for one another, my husband who reminds me every day that I am a person of value and that I am loved, my two best work friends who always seem to know how to bring a smile to my face. To feel as though one matters in the world is a beautiful thing that we often take for granted until someone or something knocks us into the pit. That’s when we need a careful hand to help us up, and is often when we are most grateful for who is fearless enough to lend it.

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
–Aristotle

Sometimes though, it’s people who I haven’t seen for years that I feel the most grateful to have known. Maybe I couldn’t understand what kind of an affect the person had on me until we were far removed from one another, and that is what came into my head last week. People who quite literally changed my life and don’t even know it. And that makes me think of high school.

Never shall I forget the days I spent with you. Continue to be my friend,
as you will always find me yours.
–Ludwig van Beethoven

I felt lonely as a teenager. This is not to say that I was ever alone. It seems odd when I look back on all of the pictures of me smiling with my friends and being completely silly. I’ve got brightly colored hair, rainbow jewelry, shoes with bright orange flames on them, and am grinning so hard most of the time that my dimples are in full view. Everything outward is vibrant and screams “Look at me, I’m happy!” If there was ever a person ‘trying too hard,’ it was me. Inside I felt gray. It was no one’s fault; that’s just where I was at that moment in my life. And I can accept that now as a part of my evolution, but I couldn’t see it that way at the time. All I could see was the light that was out of reach from where I stood in the pit.

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

But there were people that always dragged me out of that pit. I am in awe of the maturity it showed to be a friend to someone dealing with depression at that age. For a teenager none of that really makes sense, so to be able to shrug at it and say, “Doesn’t matter. I love you anyway,” was an act of selflessness. That gesture made happiness seem possible and within reach. It helped me understand the true meaning of friendship. I will always carry that with me and hope that I can be the kind of friend that these men were to me. So this year, I will share those particular individuals with you because I think it is important to take time to acknowledge those who brought positivity back into my life when I couldn’t do it on my own. During the month of February, I set my intention during yoga practice as one of being thankful for them, and all of the friends who have shown me love along the way.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
–C . S. Lewis

Nate: My friend Zoe introduced me to him at one of our voice class’ concerts when I was in the eighth grade. I hounded Zoe for weeks to give me his phone number and soon we were talking on the phone nearly every day. He and I couldn’t get together very often as we didn’t live close to one another, but where there is friendship there are solutions. On multiple occasions, we synchronized our VCRs (Oh, I’m dating myself here…) so that we could watch the same movie while talking (usually making fun of said movie) on the phone. He stuck with me through thick and thin. He was on the phone with me the night that I ended the most awful, abusive relationship of my life, reassuring me that no, I wasn’t crazy to have done so. Nate was not simply loyal and wonderful in every way, but reminded me that “you don’t need to be fixed, because you’re not broken.”

Nate and I at a Shaler v. Central Catholic football game. The rain-sleet was going sideways, but *who cares* when you have a friend?

Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.”
–Muhammad Ali

Jake: My rock. My absolute, total rock. I’ve rewritten this paragraph more times than I can count because I can’t adequately describe how valued I felt whenever we were together. At one point in high school, I didn’t speak to him for almost three months (due to aforementioned terrifying relationship). One night I worked up the courage to call him purely to apologize for my absence, and remember how ashamed I felt for having been such a negligent friend. Three days later he was with me playing pool in my basement like nothing about our friendship had ever changed. He always accepted me without reservation. There was nothing I looked forward to more than seeing him at our weekly youth group meetings. He was, and I have no doubt still is, an incredibly talented artist. I have kept for years a pen drawing he did in one of my notebooks. Under the psychedelic design his phone number is written with the words “call if you ever need anything” beneath it. When I see pictures of him now happily married and with a beautiful little son, it makes me feel so joyful for him and his family.

Hanging out with Jake at a St. Mo’s youth group meeting.

“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”
–Ray Bradbury

Joe W.: A hero to me in the most honest sense of the word. Joe brought me back to the land of the living when I tried to isolate myself from everyone and everything. We spent many Friday afternoons wandering the streets of Oakland, and regularly spiffed ourselves up to go to the theatre together. We’d grab a pair of balcony seats to whatever musical was playing at the Benedum and then spend hours afterward critiquing it. He encouraged me to go to speech and debate meets, pushed me to be a better musician, got me to dance, and fed my creative spirit more than any friend I have known since. He is the reason that I came to know and love so many different shows. To this day, I cannot see a performance of Les Miserables without thinking of us seeing it together and getting chills at the chorus’ rendition of “One Day More.” His encouragement and kindness lifted me up in a way that was truly special. I thought of him nearly every time the NSO warmed up before Choral Arts performances last year, sure deep down that he could outplay their oboist…just because of the kind of determination he has in his heart.

“Why did you do all this for me?” he asked. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.”
You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
–E.B. White

Scott: If you could take joy and fill a person to the brim with it that would describe Scott. He radiated joy. From the day I met him I was smitten with him. His capacity for love and forgiveness is something that I have striven to achieve ever since. I met Scott during my junior year of high school, and we were dance partners for part of our school’s performance of “Anything Goes.” When I was having a particularly bad day once, I remember him standing in the wings on the other side of the stage making silly faces at me until I laughed. Sometimes he’d just grab my hand and yank me into a dance number without a word. When I felt lost and confused, he was the person who helped me make sense of things. On numerous occasions we were out somewhere with our other friend Pat and he would make me laugh so hard that I’d be afraid to sip whatever I was drinking for fear of it spewing out of my nose. One of my favorite memories of all time is thinking of the blast we had wandering around downtown Pittsburgh and enjoying the revelry one New Year’s Eve. Every once in awhile, one of our silly inside jokes pops into my head out of nowhere and I cannot help but smile. That in and of itself is a really wonderful thing, and the warm happiness that follows is worth more than gold.

Scott and I celebrating at a cast party after “Anything Goes.” Now those are some happy, happy faces.

Writing this has been a very peaceful, reflective exercise, and I have and will always carry the lessons and values that these people taught me. I will forever be in awe over the fortune of having known them.

And I will never stop being grateful.

www.teendvmonth.org

www.breakthecycle.org

www.loveisrespect.org

www.loveisnotabuse.com

www.pcar.org

www.nsvrc.org

“…how lucky you are.”

Ignore the fact that I’m quoting from Seussical the musical and meditate on that statement for a second. Now that Thanksgiving has passed us by and we’re rolling on toward December, most of the people I know have entered the frantic “oh-god-what-do-i-buy-people-where-did-this-year-go” phase. The thought hit me this time around, but it didn’t really stick. The emotional roller coaster that we’ve been on this year has made me feel significantly more appreciative of what is already in my life and admittedly a little bit selective about how I choose to spend my time. I’ve written here before about how thankful I feel to have my family, my ability to cook things that make people happy, and a safe, wonderful home. But I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded of a few other things during November…

I’ve put off writing any kind of long fiction for almost my entire life. The vast majority of the writing I do is journaling, essays or poetry. I love science fiction literature, but the idea of sitting down and writing a book always seemed so daunting. I’d try, then make it a third of the way through and get lost. It would languish for so long that by the time I went back it I wanted to scrap the entire thing. On a whim and looking for a distraction the week after my mother-in-law died, I decided to try my hand at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). If you enjoy writing in any sense and haven’t given the challenge a shot, I highly encourage you to do so. It forced me to sit down and just write every day in November. It didn’t matter if what I put down was a complete wreck or created a massive plot hole, the challenge made me think creatively and problem solve every day until I hit that 50,000 word mark. I never thought I’d actually finish it and there’s a massive amount of editing to do to make it anything I’d want to share, but I wrote a manuscript for a novel in a month. It’s honest and it’s mine. Aside from the nice feeling of accomplishment, there was also something very cathartic about the experience. I’ve always seen writing as therapeutic, but I didn’t think that fiction would have quite the same feel to it. Interestingly enough, the idea that I could write anything or create a character as wonderful, horrific, or just plain crazy as I felt like was liberating. In a way it made me work through my own daily thoughts and feelings in a constructive way. I appreciate writing for the positive way it has enriched my life and made me a more creative thinker.

November also brought with it a strong compulsion to purge the house. I don’t know why, but I’m really glad it did. It made me get around to going through the old computer equipment, files, random junk, kitchen toys, clothes, and general nonsense that accumulates when you are too busy and tired to care about it. We were able to recycle or give away a lot of things and the process reminded me to be grateful to have so much and to see cleaning out the house not as a chore, but as a way to share. I appreciate cleaning for making me remember to be a mindful citizen of the planet socially and environmentally.

Along with said compulsion to act as a tornado around the house came finding all sorts of hidden treasures! Among the items I found was a single, lonely CD labeled only as “Back up 9/04.” Buried in a storage tub full of my old journals and some paper files, It was scratched to death and I was sure that there was no way my laptop would read it. When I put it in the drive, the loud buzzing as it began to spin was less than encouraging. But the Auto Play dialog box popped up and I clicked the button to open the files. Before me was my entire freshman year of college on one, sole disc. Between five moves and several computers I thought I’d lost those files (I have since become more diligent about having redundant back-up copies). There was a folder full of poetry, one of school work, and one of music compositions. But it was the last folder on the disc that caught my eye the most: It was just labeled “hub” and I knew exactly what was in it.

My freshman year of college was chock full of luck. I was a depressed mess of an individual when I left Pittsburgh and somehow ended up in a small dorm where we were practically a family and in a major where I don’t think there was anyone that didn’t like each other (even though we were almost always competing with one another for stage roles). Then there was The Hub. A few of the computer science majors ran a file sharing hub that was open to anyone with an on campus IP. It also had a chat room and that is where I started talking to a bunch of people in entirely different majors (I’d later marry one of them!) and “met” many of my very best friends. We’d spend a few hours, usually obscenely late at night, just typing to each other and making silly, sarcastic jokes.

It should have been the most awkward thing in the world when we all finally decided to meet in person, but it wasn’t, aside from the fact that none of us knew each others’ names at first. And after that one night meeting up and walking to the only open place we could knew of—a pizza joint called Little Steve’s—at 3 in the morning, we were a regular Island of Misfit Toys in the very best sense. So when I found that folder a few nights ago, full of pictures from our weekly dinners and chat logs from our funniest conversations, I was reminded of how much that group of people completely changed my perspective on what it meant to be a friend. There are only a few of them that I keep in touch with, but they will always be with me. They changed my entire life for the better. They brought me joy when I didn’t believe that I deserved it, and put me on their shoulders while I found self-confidence. Even at my saddest moments, I think of them and think “Bring joy.” If I can find at least one moment each day when I make someone smile or laugh, then that day is a success. I appreciate the whole hub (especially three Joes, two Ians, Kris, Johnna, Anthony, Evan, Talia, Brandon, Mike, Colin, Mark, Ed, and Kevin) for teaching me how to just let go and LAUGH.

These two pictures from that old, scratched up CD basically say everything. Always smiling. And in case you’re curious, it’s powdered sugar on the lens of my camera in the first one. It was a good night:

No, she didn’t maim him. She’s probably the one person in our dorm I trusted with a chef’s knife.

While this post might not contain delicious food (aside from that table full of Kris’ baking magic), it is one of the most satisfying things I’ve made recently. But just so you don’t feel neglected: Our office’s annual recycled arts and crafts show and reception is coming up and I am the chef de cuisine for the evening. Which means an incoming Recipe Megapost! Look out for it late next week. For now, I leave you with this: If the holiday shopping is already driving you toward the bourbon-laced eggnog and spiked mulled cider, remember that what you carry with you in the spiritual sense is the one thing that you’ll always have. So let it be joy.

Ciao for now,

Neen