User Profile

Little Miss Meg: champion bullfighter, stunning supermodel, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, renowned pastry chef, harpist, puppeteer, beguiling wastrel and gadabout, Mensa card-holder, and mother of albino triplets, I spend my free time running a tandem skydiving operation in the Galapagos and speaking nine languages fluently.

I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.

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Okay, that first bit might be embellished. But really:

Born: Minneapolis, MN USA
Grew up: Apple Valley, MN USA
School: Menomonie, WI USA; Eau Claire, WI USA; Toulon, France; La Rochelle, France
Lived: New York, NY USA; Auckland, New Zealand; Christchurch, New Zealand; Nagasaki, Japan; Alamos, Mexico; Saigon, Vietnam; Bogotá, Colombia
Traveled to: A fair few places
Currently living in: Haiku, Maui, Hawaii

I keep this journal because:

:it helps me remember my life more fully and completely than photos.
:it illustrates quite effectively that everything--the good and the bad--gets buried under new days. Life is constantly changing.
:things once articulated often feel more manageable.
:I like to exercise my writing daily, and hope that it's improving.
:I like having access to a network of friends who lead various and exciting lives--I like peeking in on them, offering help when I have it to give, and asking questions when I need them answered.
:I live as an expat, and move around quite a bit, so it allows my close friends and family to check in on me.

I write public, friends-only, and private entries. I find that when I use creative pseudonyms I forget, three years later, who I was talking about. So for that reason my pseudonyms are pretty obvious. I have been keeping this journal since April 2003 (and keeping paper journals more or less all my life), but since losing a job because of it I've decided to keep only a month or two public at a time. That is why I friends-lock every public entry after it's no longer recent.

101 Things to do in 1001 Days




All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love!
--Hafiz


What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows...It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing. I tell you and it evaporates. I don't care--how could I care? I tell you how many people I have slept with (thirty-two) or how my parents left this world, and what have I really given you? Nothing. I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is that? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, two seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet . . . what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter's boyfriend, but . . . then what? We will die and we will have protected . . . what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please. We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it's just the opposite, more is more is more--more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skins shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where it molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it's of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.
--Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

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"Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present time is the time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life."

-Thich Nhat Nanh, paraphrasing Tolstoy