lin-manuel miranda

A Mini Writing Retreat

Standard

Never make plans. They never work out. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I planned a mini-retreat for this week. Take some time for myself to get my head on straight and my spirit centered before the kids are home for the summer. I planned for the part of the week after Memorial Day since there was only one appointment on my calendar and no school obligations after everyone went back to school and work after the Memorial Day holiday. Our house has been pretty clutter-free for the past couple of weeks, so I enjoy being there again. I mentioned to my husband last week while I was sitting in my corner office that I didn’t want to leave the house. I really liked being there. But let’s be real, if I stay home to write, I’d end up watching Supernatural or The Walking Dead reruns on Netflix. I have the rest of the month for that.

I started thinking about what I wanted to do this week and separately what I wanted to accomplish. I’d attend Mass on Tuesday and Wednesday. I’ve been missing the daily masses both by not attending and also missing them deeply. I’d start my day with G-d, leaving the house at 8:30 and planning to return by 3 when the kids came home from school. It sounds like a good plan, doesn’t it?


Continue reading

Six Degrees of Social Media

Standard

I have come to the social media phenomenon slowly, kicking and screaming the whole way, but go I do. My first social media was Live Journal before I really knew what social media was. The only one I didn’t question was Tumblr, I think. I don’t know. Maybe it was something else. I can’t remember. I’ve always followed my friend, Andy and as the months went by and turned into years – is it really eight years since I’ve joined the online revolution?! – I’ve refined what I do with my social media. I’ve gotten rid of some, and increased my usage of others. I’ve connected some and I love Instagram more than I think I should.

While my Facebook is primarily for family and personal things, I do follow pages and in follwoing certain pages, I’ve been exposed and introduced to others and so on.

And that is how I come to you to recommend seeing the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. It’s not typically my thing. I never read the comic  books, watched the animated shows or any of the other movies.

I followed Jared Padalecki because he’s on the CW’s Supernatural and he’s an all around good guy with a smile that is warm and inviting. I love his whole family. Whenever I’d see him or Gen or the boys on social media or in photos of conventions, it would make me smile. It would uplift my mood. I can’t explain why. It just is. All of the Supernatural cast & crew are very much like a family, and I love that and am drawn to that.

Well, he’s friends with Stephen Amell who is on Arrow, also on the CW. So I followed Stephen Amell. He spoke his mind and this got him into trouble sometimes. He’d apologize, sometimes, and this down-to-earthiness of his personality was what kept me following his Facebook.

I listened to his live chats and I loved seeing him with his daughter.

He posted the trailer to TMNT, a movie I have no interest in seeing. I watched the trailer to support Stephen’s Facebook.

I liked it.

It made me interested in something because I watched the trailer.

I watched the trailer because I follow Stephen Amell. I follow Stephen Amell because I follow Jared Padalecki. And now I actually want to see this movie.

This is how social media works.

At least how it’s supposed to.

My Top 5 Social Media Personalities
In addition to Jared and Stephen:
1. Misha Collins
2. William Shatner
3. Wil Wheaton
4. John Barrowman
5. George Takei

My Top 5 Political Pundits
1. Ezra Klein (Vox)
2. Connie Schultz
3. Chris Cilizza
4. Planned Parenthood Action
5. Chuck Todd

My Top 5 Writers
In addition to any on the other lists above:
1. Lin-Manuel Miranda
2. Danai Gurira
3. Adam Glass
4. Robert Behrens
5. Neil Gaiman

Others that I Love
1. Norman Reedus
2. Greg Nicotero
3. Kim Rhodes & Briana Buckmaster
4. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
5. Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Choices

Standard

As Lin-Manuel [Miranda] said in his commencement address at UPenn this past weekend, “we choose the stories we tell.” That is wholly true, but those stories are shaped by what we choose to do in our lives.

I will tell you about my life this week. It is a ridiculously busy week. Even the calendar is cluttered.  I made a list of everything on my calendar from Sunday the 15th until Saturday the 21st.  Assuming I wrote everything down, that’s twenty-five things. Although I forgot to  include the Target run for household goods and grocery shopping plus two trips this week to The Fresh Market for their specials that are only available on certain days. I also didn’t include my son’s girlfriend visiting us this weekend for the first time. Oh crap! What are we going to make for dinner?!

All but one of the television shows on that list are for the entire family’s viewing. It’s season finales for many of them this week and next. Not listed are writing group assignments, three greeting cards that need to be written out and sent and my journal submission for one class. I also need to clean my house.

So I guess that makes it thirty-four in actuality.

As of this writing, I’ve accomplished the first nine, skipped three and will complete two more tonight plus start another one. I’ve crossed five out as conflicts with more important things that either need to be done or that I would rather do. [Watch my son get a scholarship award at his college and meet a friend of my husband’s visiting from Amsterdam for instance. My daughter also has a concert with her school’s chorus.] All on Thursday.

We will postpone Thursday’s TV until Friday, on demand, or on the CW app.

We will be late to my daughter’s concert and I kind of invited my son’s girlfriend over this weekend without telling anyone, thinking that my son would postpone it until next week. As I said earlier, it’s happening this week.

The Yartzeit for my Dad was a day late, and I didn’t go to mass this morning.

Did I forget to list that I need a couple (or more) of showers on that list?

So, we choose.

And we choose and we adjust our lives and whether through facebook or writing class or the stories we tell our friends, we are constantly making choices.

To pick the best one; the funniest one, the one with the lesson learned or the embarrassing one that we finally find funny.

Whichever one we choose they are our stories; your stories.

Choose them well.

Congratulations!

Standard

Mondays have been increasingly more difficult for me. They come too quickly and our Sundays tend to run late with the Walking and Talking Dead series. I will try to be better prepared to have something to share on Mondays, but in the meantime, today happened to be a pretty great day for the cast and crew of Hamilton and for Lin-Manuel Miranda in particular.

In addition to the well-deserved accolades, awards and upcoming expectations of Tony Award acknowledgment, today it was announced that Lin-Manuel Miranda was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Hamilton.

Three cheers for him. Well done, sir! Well done!

image

Write (Non-Stop)

Standard

How do you write
like you’re Running out of time?
Write day and night
like you’re Running out of time?

…

How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write ev’ry second you’re alive?
Ev’ry second you’re alive?
Ev’ry second you’re alive?

– Lin-Manuel Miranda
From the Broadway musical, Hamilton

Diversity, Tolerance, Acceptance

Standard

What do those words mean? In early childhood, it was friendship and fairness. Elementary grades it was fairness and equality. Middle school showed us right and wrong, common sense, and equality. High school and higher was comparative culture and religion; it was discerning prejudices and overcoming them. Now, it is also recognizing privilege, whatever it is: white, male, Christian, straight, non-disabled/abled. It is thinking in a new and different way, but it is also a common sense to think this way.

In the 70s and 80s, it was tolerance.

Now, it is (and should be) acceptance. Acceptance is not approval. Don’t say that to anyone though. It’s condescending. It’s different for a religious pastor to accept, in the case of lgbt+, but not to approve in the context of dogma or doctrine, but it shouldn’t be that much different if we are all the same on the inside.

We divide where we should be bringing together.

We are stronger together.

We fear the unknown.

So get to know some of those things that scare you.

Diversity has to be more than adding a person of color to your favorite television show. Representation is incredibly important, and it matters, but it can’t be the only thing. It has to be more than Black History month in February or Women’s in March; Native American History in November and LGBT+ in October. It should be every day in every classroom. Diversity is inclusion. It’s about American history including these marginalized groups from the outset, not as a sidebar or a footnote.

It’s the food and the fabric and appreciation; the stories and music and taking chances. It’s the phenomenon that is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton on Broadway.

It’s my church music director including an African American spiritual (Wade in the Water) to our Mass of the Lord’s Baptism despite most of the congregation never hearing it before.

It’s Laverne Cox and Jamie Clayton.

It’s David Bowie using his privilege and calling out MTV on its very white lineup in 1983. 1983!

It’s my daughter calling a classmate her brown friend because she has brown hair and not seeing the difference between herself and her two best friends – one Scandinavian blonde and one African American all wearing their own braids, the two friends’ done by their moms in the morning and hers done on her own because I couldn’t do a proper braid without witchcraft involved.

It’s listening to the people who live this everyday and not talking over them. It’s eliminating the word and the thoughts of tolerance from our vocabulary. We, who are the privileged shouldn’t “tolerate” other people. We accept them for who they are and learn from what they can teach us, and stop saying ‘they’ and ‘them’ but instead ‘we’ and ‘us’.

Diversity is inspiration and acknowledgment and looking ahead at better things.