Toooo Meeeee!

Our wonderfully talented and witty friend and fellow blogger JennyMac shares my love of birthdays and all of the celebration and reflection that comes with making another trip around the sun.  Inspired by her touchingly hilarious birthday post, I am writing a letter to my much younger self on the almost-eve of my 28th birthday.

Dear little Leah,

You are a strange bird and that won’t ever change, but you will always have people in your life who appreciate your quirks, your perspective, and your enthusiasm.  It is perfectly fine to spend a great deal of your young years with books and trees and imaginary friends – you will have plenty of human friends, and will enjoy their company, but the time you spend alone is never dull – you are constantly learning, exploring, creating, and this will serve you well in years to come.

You are, and always will be, a pacifist by nature.  But remember in 5th grade when your friend tried to teach you the art of the quick comeback? You should pay more attention to her advice, and practice.  Because in middle school there will be some Mean Girls, and they will taunt you on the school bus and even go so far as to put gum in your hair.  (Feel that shock and outrage?  Use it to speak up!) You know you are way more awesome than those girls, so while their insults do not deeply affect you, just think of the satisfaction you could have from putting those girls in their place by speaking a piece of your mind.

And you have quite the intelligent and probing mind, which will sometimes frustrate your parents, as you ruthlessly question their every response – especially those of the “no” and “because I said so” variety.  Give them a little break once in a while – I know you think you are the most awesome Miss Smartypants ever, and can talk circles around anyone who dares to prevent you from getting your way, but they actually do know a thing or two that you haven’t figured out yet, and you won’t realize this until around age 25.  At which point you will start to feel bad for some of the grief you have caused them.

Although, speaking of grief, that time they ground you for an entire month for getting home late from the Alanis concert, even though you called to tell them that James had locked his keys in the car, and even though James’ mom called to verify the verity of the situation, and even though you REALLY WERE locked out of the car, and it totally sucked, and you were stuck in a sketchy parking lot downtown, and even though your parents still, to this day, don’t believe you were locked out of the car and scared of the drunk partiers and homeless men and crackheads and AAA never showed up and finally a policeman got the car unlocked with a little jimmy device, even in spite of all of that, the concert was still totally worth it and you should still go!  Oh, and telling your folks that you have play rehearsal every Saturday that month you’re grounded is a spectacular idea, because they will never find out that really you were hanging out with your friends all day, and you will only feel a little bit bad for lying to them.

In retrospect, you make some choices (especially during your last year of high school and first year of college) which could easily have become Very Bad Situations… but they don’t, you lucky gal!  So while you don’t have any regrets, and actually had quite a lot of fun, you sometimes wonder how you would feel if your own children were to make those choices.  And you don’t think you would like that very much.  But we still have some time to work through that, as kiddos are in the future for both of us.

Oh, and deciding at the last minute to go to China, Tibet, India, and Nepal for your year abroad instead of Senegal is a truly great decision on your part!  Way to be impulsive and listen to your heart! (You’re pretty good at that, even if you sometimes second-guess yourself.)  While you’ll never know what might have happened if you had gone to Senegal, you will learn that the university there shut down for a full semester due to a teacher strike, so that would have interfered with your early graduation plans.   And besides, you have an amazing, transformative time in Asia and develop a deep love for the Chinese, Tibetan, Indian, and Nepalese cultures.  And you will meet lots of awesome people and you will even learn to speak Mandarin fairly well, which becomes your favorite party trick.

Your love life will be a little complicated for a few years in your early 20s, but there will be lots of special times, and just a few hard ones, and you’ll learn a lot about yourself, what you want, and how much you are willing to compromise (not much, missy!) .    And you will completely surprise yourself by going on Match.com and finding a cute guy who you quickly fall head over heels for, although you will spend the first year and a half insisting this is just a short-term relationship, even after you guys move in together. (Seriously, Leah, who do you think you’re fooling?  Only yourself.)  Eventually you’ll come to your senses and surrender to the notion that maybe you found yourself someone you really do want to spend the rest of your life with.  Although I’m sure Mark would appreciate it if you could admit that a little bit sooner.  Or a lot bit sooner.  It’s okay to fall in love more than once, and it’s also okay to change your plans in life.  You don’t have to stick to what you said you wanted to do when you were 5 or 15 or 22, and some things you want won’t change.  Lucky for you, you found yourself a partner who wants a lot of those same things – and goes after them!  You are like the coolest dream team ever. Goooo LeahandMark.com!

And after 28 years of mostly ups and some downs, you are more excited than ever for what’s to come.  You aren’t sure exactly what’s coming, but it will be full of awesomeness because each year you get better and better at finding amazing opportunities and expanding your joy.  And you’ll learn that being your best means being happy more than anything else.  So don’t worry about being smart or amusing or helpful – you already are!  Make choices that make you happy and things will fall into place.

Go shine your light and blow out some candles.

Love,

Leah, age 28

When I was 7 years old I became a big sister.  I didn’t get a huge heads up, no 9-month warning or anything… I think I found out a week or so in advance that Kyle would be joining our family.  I never cared much for baby dolls or Barbie dolls.  I liked dolls that DID stuff, that walked or talked or drew pictures.  So I was thrilled to get a real, live BABY to play with.  It took a little longer to realize this adorable, giggling creature was my brother.  At first, it was more like, “Woah!  You move and make noises and eat and pee and I have to be careful not to drop you cuz Mom and Dad would really freak out.”

But after a while, it began to sink in that Kyle was more than just a real-life baby doll.  He was my brother, and that made me a sister.  When he would talk to other people, he would refer to me as, “my Leah,” similar to “my Mom” or “my Dad.”  It was too cute.  Since he was so much younger, he had to put up with me dressing him up, dragging him around, putting him in the dryer, and being the butt of my many practical jokes.  Fortunately, I don’t think any of it screwed him up too much.  He was always incredibly tolerant and to this day he’s a pretty chill dude.  Laid back.  A good balance to my hyperactivity.  Once in a while I’ll get a stern look, but then he gives in to my silliness.

We weren’t ever teenagers at the same time, which is probably a huge relief to our parents.  By the time he turned 13, I was already 20 and in my second year of college.  But now we get to be in our twenties together, for a few years at least.  And then our 30s.  And 40s.  Craziness.

Happy 20th Birthday, Kyle!  I love you bunches.

(365 days til 21!)

]]> http://leahandmark.com/2009/02/24/happy-birthday-lil-bro/feed/ 2 http://leahandmark.com/2009/01/22/sitting-on-trains/ http://leahandmark.com/2009/01/22/sitting-on-trains/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:07:35 +0000 mark http://leahandmark.com/?p=444

Okay. I’m going to be considerably productive today. Honest. Really. I must. I want. Well. I just have a lot to get through – in the coming months – on top of everything else we’ve already planned – on top of washing the dishes.

And our plans keep changing – so we’ve generally stopped writing about them – even the vague ones – because every five posts would be something different and in a new direction, even if only slightly skewed from the original plan. The main problem is the timeline – fitting everything we wanted to do, on top of everything we keep adding – and doing it all… well, not waiting 5 years to get through what we’ve already lined up. You don’t want to keep pushing things back too far, but you also don’t want to make the choice of not doing other things. 

Oh yeah. If you haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire – you should see it – it’s everything they say AND entertaining – plus, it shows that hardworking poverty that is so widespread in India – including the brutality of the whole mess – and with hardly any contrived remorse or adding that sickening layer of glossed morality that you would get from a Spielberg film. 

Still – our plans – I guess they don’t exactly change, but it’s like we’re moving down a hallway that bends and warps as we keep moving forward. Still. 

And while I find myself locked in my head a lot of times these days – I enjoy that – because I remember years and years where I didn’t feel like I was learning anything – or even trying to learn new things – so I’m probably attempting to catch up and more. And while I’d like to think that the dam will someday burst and everything we’re doing will just… payoff – it doesn’t really ever work like that for me – and instead of reaching the top of the staircase – I just keep seeing more steps. Thankfully, it’s rarely steep, but always a gradual incline upwards. 

The logistics of our life is… well… we have big eyes and appetites (for life!) – so fulfilling those wants takes a lot of work. But I suppose it’s always like that when you’re choosing where you’re going rather than just going along.

LeahAndMark.com – Feels Like Home from LeahAndMark.com

No video today – and even less photos. But clearly I’m not done. Up above is an Animoto slideshow video of… well, obviously more photos – since we upload them to flickr.com but it’s sometimes too cumbersome to go thru everything – even I rarely go through other people’s flickr’s (except for those rare few.)

I got some good news today. Hopefully I can tell you all about it on Friday. And that would mean that FRIDAY IS POSSIBLY GOING TO ROCK! Even Still. I’ve been thinking and churning some thoughts in my head about how the next few years are going to be and exactly how we’re going to do whatever it takes to make it some form of reality. Mostly – eventually moving over to Asia, but then also – visiting again at least once if not twice before we move. Nepal/Northern India are next on the list, followed with… well, there’s so much that to make a concrete list would be… almost pointless since so many factors can change everything. We must still make it up to Tibet though. That’ll be awesome.

Pulled together these kind of feel like the Death Cab for Cutie Video: I will possess your heart. Oh look – here it is posted below. The weekend is coming fast and I look forward to all of it. I’ve had a bit of a break from studying/other things since Leah’s been in Phoenix – but mostly because I’ve come back down and decided to relax a little. I was pushing things and while there’s that margin between letting things happen and then what’s beyond a healthy measure of force – I was getting run down. So. I let go a little this week and wouldn’t you know – halfway good news today. We’ll see what Friday brings. Watch the slideshow up above, and watch this video below if you haven’t seen it – this is the long intro version though.

I think you’ll see where I stole some of my ideas on how I edited our music videos on the VideoLife page.

I’ve started pulling all of the video that we took in China off of our camcorder. And now watching it all – we didn’t really film too much. Well, relatively speaking. At least not enough for what I want! I would’ve recorded the whole month that we were there if I could. But I guess I’ll have to settle for 8 hours of video. (It’s really only around 4 hours.)

As I may have mentioned earlier – this week is China week on the Travel Channel (obviously since the Beijing Olympics are just around the corner) – and tonight they showed Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations episode which begins in Shanghai, then moves east and north thru Lijiang and up to Shangri-La.

At the beginning of this episode Anthony makes a statement along the lines of ’saying you’ve been to China is like saying you’ve been to the planet Earth – it’s that big’. Looking back at our trip – it’s hard not to think that we missed a lot, that there was so much more to see. I wish that I hadn’t been so tired on some of those days and that we would’ve continued to keep moving instead of getting what I’m sure was much needed rest. Even with the 4,000 photos and hours of video – it feels like there was so much more to see, more to eat, and more people to befriend.

We’ve been so busy since we got back that only every now and then do we remember how great our trip was.

But let’s get to today’s show! I love Leah and I honestly would never have gone on this trip if I hadn’t ever met her. This is arguably my first real ‘video’ that I’ve put together, so I hope you like it – oh. It just finished processing on YouTube and wow – the quality is really low compared to how it plays on my computer… but still. It plays like you’re watching a montage real from what could be Leah’s Travel Show. The video starts in Shangri-La and some of the temples there, then goes a little thru TIger Leaping Gorge, then down to Guilin/Yangshuo area where you can see the farms and Karst peaks, Leah hawking wares at the Beijing Dirt market, and then finishes up with us at the Great Wall of China. Oh, and that’s actual Yak Butter Tea that the gentleman is preparing for us in the Zhongdian market.

*Edit – I originally had this uploaded to YouTube but the quality was worse than… worse. So Now it’s uploaded from Fliggo.com – MUCH better + I added some color adjustment.

We finally built our bed yesterday. Sure, it sounds easy – but it wasn’t one of those unfold-snap-together metal bed frames that just hold up the box spring and mattress. This Ikea bed had the bazillion screws/bolts/pegs and the awesome instructions with Swedish drawings of clunky builder men. After putting several sections together backwards and then disassembling and flipping them over – we eventually finished! Still. It’s a much nicer bed frame than we could have gotten most other places for the same price.

Break:

We missed the first episode of No Reservations (with Anthony Bourdain) this season, but we saw Columbia and Laos. The episodes so far this season more than make up for nearly all of last season. For some reason, we just weren’t as interested in the places he went to last year. The episodes weren’t as good as they were during the previous years. Whereas last year I thought the show ‘jumped the shark’ – this year, it’s right on track and back to going to places unfamiliar and with less of the contrived and set up shows that they produced last year. But that may just be us – because we like it when he goes to far off locations and meets up with villagers and eats with them on their bare floors – embodying a sort of ‘traveler’ lifestyle where you are invited into people’s homes – and not just showing us the places that tourists will inevitably flock to after seeing it on the show.

We went to China with the intention of getting reasonably lost enough to find things that we wouldn’t have found otherwise – this show was a big inspiration and motivation. Heck, we even decided to take a road trip down to Charleston after seeing it on No Reservations – and although we did eat at two of the restaurants shown on the show – there was no shame since they really were as good as advertised. (Jestine’s & Hominy Grill)

20 minutes after we arrived into town, we found ourselves at the farmer’s market, eating shrimp & grits. Seriously, what other type of first meal would you ask for after a 4 hour drive to Charleston?

And while this entry has gone wildly off track – what I realize now – and as Leah has mentioned to me lately – we need to go on another road trip. Someplace just beyond reach, and someplace different. When we lived in Arizona, we would drive to one corner and keep on going. At one point, we even came across some wild horses. THAT was pretty awesome. Hidden lakes, rarely driven roads, and wide open spaces and sky.

And now I have the hint of an idea.

Have a great night. Here comes the week.

I went to an all-women’s college in MA. I was only on campus for my first two years, but in that time I met some awesome people… namely, Chi and Arianna. Arianna is from Atlanta, but hasn’t lived here since she went up to Mt. Holyoke. She’s currently in San Francisco, but she’s moving back here at the end of the month. So that’s super awesome and we’ll have crazy adventures together soon.

Chi is from Hawaii, and that’s where she is now. Hawaii is far, far away. And it is kinda sorta expensive to go there. Which is sad for us, because this means that I haven’t seen Chi in over 4 years. And that’s a really long time not to see one of your bestest friends. But! I have pictures and I have a phone and I haz internets, so at least we can keep in touch that way.

See? We’re all cute on Halloween in 2001. Awww. Anywho. Chi was a DJ at our college radio station, and I was her very frequent radio guest, Mr. McFeely. Cuz I’d pop in all the time like Mr. McFeely from Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Which, by the way, is a creepy-ass name for a kid’s show character. But I digress.

I started this post cuz I was thinking about how I miss seeing Jennifer Nettles in concert. If you’re around my age and grew up in the Southeast, especially in/around/between Atlanta/Athens, GA, and if you also had great taste in music, you probably would have had the awesome experience of seeing Jennifer Nettles live. If you were REALLY cool, you saw her when she was with Soul Miner’s Daughter. And if you were a little less cool and slow to catch on, like I was, you finally jumped on the Jennifer Nettles bandwagon when she was starting Jennifer Nettles Band, after listening to Sacred and Profane 50,000 times on your friends’ borrowed CDs.

So, after spending my high school years going to concerts and falling totally in love with JNB, I was eager to share the music with my new college friends. Well… imagine my surprise when I walked out the door of my dorm room with Chi one day and heard Jennifer Nettles singing. Yeah… she was like…right there on the lawn in front of my dorm. In a tiny little town in rural western Massachusetts.

Really.

Well, Jennifer Nettles Band is, sadly, no more. Jennifer is now a country singin’ SuperStar with Sugarland and she’s made it to the Big Time, which she absolutely deserves. But, the selfish part of me definitely misses going to Variety Playhouse or Eddie’s Attic to hear her belt out her bluesy/folky amazingness that defined Musical Genius in my book. It is nice to see her new website, in which she offers a tribute to her old fans and her past. Not all artists do that. And maybe, just maybe, one day she’ll head back to Atlanta, sneak into Eddie’s Attic, and do a show. That only myself and 30 other folks will know about. That would be awesome. Almost as awesome as stumbling out of my dorm room and into her band.

So. A while back – as in like over a year ago, I signed up on 43things.com – and could only muster a short list of about 11 things. It’s grown to 23things now – and I’ve even completed a few of the ‘goals’ that I put down. However, getting up to 43things and making it not a list of stuff like, read more, watch less, etc. is getting to be difficult. I mean. For me 23things is a lot. Especially when they’re sort of measurable goals. But I think I’ll put camping down. I want to go camping again sometime before winter – we attempted last year, but that was… not as successful as we would have hoped.

Basically, we arrived up there in Northern Georgia on a Friday afternoon and all of the spaces were taken up – half of them were taken by people who actually LIVE up there anyways. So that sucks. Instead of driving home though, we asked a large group if we could just take up residence for the night just off their own ‘official’ campsite. (and yes, we drove to several campsites and trust me, they were ALL full) So we had a good first night… and only night because the next morning the park ranger came by and told us to get out of there – but in a nice way so it’s not like we were all offended. However, it still sucked to have to leave after only one night when we were planning on two.  These photos are from a camping trip Leah and I took in Sedona, Arizona. It was quite awesome and beautiful and we had a really great time. She even learned to skip rocks!

So. Put Camping down on the list. Along with…some others in there for fun.

1. Graduate with my Finance Degree
2. Run a half marathon
3. Learn to play guitar
4. Lose 20 lbs
5. Take up Capoeira
6. Complete a Triathlon
7. Watch Six Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns
8. Learn Mandarin Chinese
9. Really learn photography
10. Make a short film and enter it into contests/festivals
11. Learn to sing (again)
12. Go to Nepal
13. Go to India
14. Go to Thailand
15. Take a picture everyday for a year
16. Practice Yoga for at least 30 days straight
17. Go vegetarian for 6 months
18. Quit Drinking Coffee – (hmmmm… maybe I should be realistic)
19. Hang out with my cats more (Shut up! My cats are COOL.)
20. Go to the Phillipines with my mom (where we’re from and haven’t been since we left.)
21. Go to Turkey!
22. Be more friendly
23. Inspire SOMEONE

I suppose we should make a list of things together… BUT. The titles of these books in the photos should definitely be on the list.

Oh yes. And Taking Over The World!

I’ve been very fortunate these past few years. Things have just been speeding up faster and faster – and in the best kind of ways. There is so much to do these next few years and after that. While I can’t see far into the future – even the close future is jam packed with life. Whereas previously, I generally had no idea real concept about what was going to happen next or even what direction I was going in. But now, I have the major milestones planned – and even then everything’s always open up to the next big thing to side swipe us and blow us completely away. Such life altering events aren’t something to fear or worry about – life altering events come at you with a ferocity and power that you generally should not fight – but instead embrace and use as the stimulus to go. GO.

Granted there are things to be said about your own personal will and power, but I think more often than not, we’re too stubborn to just see where it all takes us – but we’ll complain about our present situation the entire time without figuring out how to go live. And so I’ll stop while I’m on this kick and find something to do. However, in the mean time, just one more video/slideshow okay? This one I got turned into an actual video so it plays a little different. But it’s older photos, mostly from Phoenix, and the earliest photos are from around the time I met Leah and all of her nonprofit friends.

Leah is flying to Baltimore tomorrow morning so that leaves me here in Atlanta this weekend to do homework, hangout with ummm, Yelp people, and then she comes back Saturday evening – just in time for our busy Sunday. See you tomorrow.

At work, we’re gearing up for a kids’ talent show this summer to raise awareness and support for the agency and the children we serve. So, we’re busy e-mailing all the metro Atlanta schools to let them know about it so they can get the word out to the students and parents before school lets out for the year. Today I tackled Gwinnett County, and I stumbled across the website for my elementary school, Brookwood. And looking over the list of faculty, it was just so amazing to see SO many of the same teachers I grew up with still teaching at Brookwood. My third grade teacher is now the Assistant Principal, and the teacher that we would partner up with to watch Reading Rainbow and go on field trips with is now the Principal. A lot of the parapros (teacher’s aides) are now teachers, too.

I fired off an email to the principal and assistant principal… I’m sure they’ll remember me, especially considering that my mom taught at Brookwood for…hmm, at least 15 or 20 years. The teachers there are some of her best friends…they’ve known my mom almost as long as I have, and they are just such nice people. Truly wonderful, really the epitome of what an elementary school teacher should be. The enthusiasm, the gentleness, the ability to make learning fun. Looking back, I feel so lucky to have had such a great start to the world of education…I felt supported, allowed to explore, and most of all, I felt cared about. And not just cuz my mommy was a teacher…the other teachers genuinely cared about their students. We were their kids, too. They spent 5 days a week with us, and even more than the classroom lessons, I remember learning about how to be a good person.

I lucked out and had some awesome teachers that took the time to go over the intricacies of human dynamics. We learned how to work together, how to overlook our friends’ faults, how to respect everyone’s differences. These lessons were an active part of the daily classroom experience. We were encouraged to help each other, to “play nice”…when issues came up with kids being teased or feeling left out, they were addressed and made right.

I just hope my own kids get an experience as great as I did at school. There are SO many horror stories about apathetic or unethical teachers, extreme bullying, etc. these days. But…looking at the list of teachers at Brookwood and seeing so many of the teachers I came to know and love still spreading their special magic through the classrooms… I have some hope that there are still some great schools out there.