grace is there to push you along

things keep moving. grace comes and gently pushes you forward, even though you long to linger in the sad memories.

this easter was our first holiday together, in our apartment. we entertained and ate lots of good food. new, happy memories.

we make them to remember during the sad times.

tonight in jungleland

it's bee a rough couple of weeks.

my grandma passed away on March 4th and i am still trying to process it. i wrote a few blog drafts but never felt quite right. there was all this commotion leading up to it, during the funeral and then even after.

jared moved to nj and it's going really well with the exception of his mean cat. i am so lucky to have someone who loves me so much that he'll move to another time zone to be with me.

then... yesterday i found out that my friend, steve king, was killed when he was struck on his motorcyle after a guy ran a stop sign in LA.

i guess this is life... really tough stuff and then really great stuff mixed in. either way, i feel really sort of numb. it's like sensory overload. i want to crawl back in bed and cry but then again i am not sure i actually would.

alpha found his obit online here - and yes, alpha, it doesn't do him justice.

it's not quite how i would explain steve.
there was never a dull conversation.
never a dull moment.
there was something restless and yet embracing about his spirit. all my memories of him are intense; that's just how he was.

last night on my way home i listened to Born to run. it was an album i think i introduced him to when i first met him three years ago on my birthday. we were in the car on the way down to AC. it's like i could see it change him. we listened to it on vinyl when we got back to montclair. the album always meant a lot to me since i remember listening to it with my dad... but now it just makes me think of him.

this song in particular....

The rangers had a homecoming in harlem late last night
And the magic rat drove his sleek machine over the jersey state line
Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a dodge
Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain
The rat pulls into town rolls up his pants
Together they take a stab at romance and disappear down flamingo lane

Well the maximum lawman run down flamingo chasing the rat and the barefoot
Girl
And the kids round here look just like shadows always quiet, holding hands
From the churches to the jails tonight all is silence in the world
As we take our stand down in jungleland

The midnight gangs assembled and picked a rendezvous for the night
Theyll meet `neath that giant exxon sign that brings this fair city light
Man theres an opera out on the turnpike
Theres a ballet being fought out in the alley
Until the local cops, cherry tops, rips this holy night
The streets alive as secret debts are paid
Contacts made, they vanished unseen
Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades hustling for the record machine
The hungry and the hunted explode into rocknroll bands
That face off against each other out in the street down in jungleland

In the parking lot the visionaries dress in the latest rage
Inside the backstreet girls are dancing to the records that the d.j. plays
Lonely-hearted lovers struggle in dark corners
Desperate as the night moves on, just a look and a whisper, and theyre gone

Beneath the city two hearts beat
Soul engines running through a night so tender in a bedroom locked
In whispers of soft refusal and then surrender in the tunnels uptown
The rats own dream guns him down as shots echo down them hallways in the
Night
No one watches when the ambulance pulls away
Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light

Outside the streets on fire in a real death waltz
Between flesh and whats fantasy and the poets down here
Dont write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in jungleland

let me bring you up to speed.

jared was here for valentine's day - our first as an engaged couple (i know, barf-city). he took my yoga class and totally kicked butt (there's a pic of us to the right just before he took class). then we went to the awesome table 8 in monty-clair for a romantic dinner. i seriously can't wait for him to be living in nj already.

so getting engaged was like a total whirlwind. all i know is that since my trip to florida for the holidays, life has blown by. there are some things i have noticed as a newly engaged person that are both pleasing and totally irritating.

ok...first off, i love the way people react when they hear i am engaged. i mean, i guess i knew they would react like this before. when i was single people would get upset for me that i didn't have a special someone...but the usual reaction is something along the lines of, 'you deserve all the happiness', or a sort of welling up congratulatory hysteria. it's awesome. and yes, jared and i are really excited. i am also realizing how many wonderful people are in my life that i get to share this happiness with from friend and family to coworkers and students it's a great experience to share.

the most exciting thing is that jared is moving here like in less than 2 weeks!! so that in itself has been a lot of work. i found us a new apartment (so long ann frank room) -- and it's awesome. i am so happy to have a real oven and a real kitchen for the first time if forever. i have already been cooking and baking more. moreover, the new place has a big bedroom, lots of windows, a dining room and an outdoor deck. plus it's right in downtown montclair. i really scored on this one. to the left is a picture of a blueberry pear pie i baked. it's gluten free - the crust is actually store bought, but i promise to make it from scratch next time. the pie filling was made with organic blueberries and agave nectar and topped with pears in the shape of a lotus flower, it was simply scrumptuous! i will definitely be experimenting with my baking expertise and other gluten, dairy and sugar free goodies! i can't wait until jared arrives with a dining room table so my entertaining can move from cushions on the floor to a proper table.

i am a 'person of action' as jared's grandpa says. all the while we have been trying to figure out the details of this whole wedding process. the day after we got engaged, we went to the book store and got a planner and it was really helpful to go over all the expectations that each of us had for a wedding before actually starting the planning. initially, we wanted a fall wedding but since my sister is getting hitched this summer, we are pushing the date out to spring 2010. that gives us lots of time to come up with fun and unique things for our big day. btw, our big day will be april 24, 2010.

that answers part of the burning question on everyone's mind. that's one of the things that kills me. seriously, can't people be engaged for like a month or two without having every possible detail planned (esp if your fiancee lives in another time zone??)?? now, the other part -- the location. we knew we didn't want a wedding at a big hall or as well call them, wedding factories. i do see the ease to doing this, since there is a lot of things to plan that a place like that covers. i wanted to have something more intimate and unique. we went through a list of places that could possibly work from wineries, to museums to whatever else anyone reccommended. our final choice was a women's club. they seem to be pretty popular out in these parts. i never really heard of them until i was planning a wedding. we looked at three: maplewood, montclair and glenridge. we decided on the glenridge women's club because it is just lovely and full of light.

so there's a lot of change in the air. i turn 31 tomorrow. i just realized that 21 was 10 years ago!! wow, time flies. 31 is decidedly better than 21. along with that comes a whole new phase to life which is at once scary and exciting. i'll keep you posted. xoxox

a very merry christmas

jared and i got engaged on 12/20/08!!!!

he got all romantic and asked me on the beach in fort myers, florida. we are really happy and excited and also possibly a little bit overwhelmed by all the crazy things you need to think about when planning a wedding.

this pic was taken just after he asked me on the beach. and yes, he got down on one knee and prior to asking me he went and asked my dad's permission!! to answer the burning question that i keep getting asked, we'd like to have a fall wedding in '09. not sure if that's possible but we are going to try!!

the engagement story:
i arrived on the 20th ready to make holiday cookies with jared and his mom, which we did. i was antsy to get to the beach since when i left nj earlier that day it was 20 degrees and snowing. so we went off to fort myers beach, which is a bit like the jersey shore. we had some pina colada's and chatted up with the other snow birds. then we walked on the beach to catch some rays. after goofing around on the sand and watching a family make a crazy sand castle (you can see the castle behind us in the pic), i jumped up to pack up the towels and get back to the car since we didn't put much change in the meter. when i turned around, jared was still kneeling on his towel. then he reached over to his shoe and said he had to ask me something and, 'you can't say, shut up don't say that' - which is what i affectionately said after he first told me he loved me. he opened up a box and asked me to be his wife. *gush* luckily i didn't say anything stupid (like shut up don't say that) and instead yelled, 'yes!!!' then i started shaking and eventually crying which happened in succession for the days that proceeded.

here's a pic of my gorgeous engagement ring that jared picked out himself!!! i'm one lucky girl!!

and a note to the girls and guys that think love is bs. it totally isn't just hang in there. i had to date a whole lot of jerkimo's before i found a guy that is totally awesome.

any suggestions for a non-traditional super cool wedding site in new jersey/nyc are greatly appreciated!!

xoxo

I went to see Santa at Bloomingdales....

And he was on break, I mean 'feeding the reindeer'.

the wisdom to know the difference

Repost from two thanksgivings ago.

November 30, 2006 - Thursday

the wisdom to know the difference. my dad celebrated 17 years of sobriety last night. it's always a touchy subject. he seems to embody this total dicotomy like no other, maybe it's just a dad thing but he balances this tough-guy badass motorcycle man with a super-softy and sappy underbelly. i know them both well. but he is still an enigma to me. i guess that is the way it is. i mean, as he stood up in front of this room of fellow alcoholics, all of whom had kind words to say about him, he was at once a total stranger and dear friend. there is so much i don't know about him, about his life, about his addictions. but as i heard him talk i realized that in the same way that he doesn't know everything about me and my life and travels, it is ok that i don't know it all about him. i guess it's a defense mechanism of sorts, but you really have to be discriminate about how much you divluge to people, especially those you love. interesting enough, i don't usually assess the impact of my parents sobriety on my life. they have both been sober for the last 17-odd years and so my life has peppered with a myriad of 'celebrations', 'steps','traditions', 'sponsers', al-a-teen and al-a-non. i have gone to a whole hell of a lot of AA meetings as a result, not for my own benefit though they do serve as a reality check for the times when drinking seems to be an escape rather than an enjoyment. but i guess i have to say that i am really lucky that they took care of their shit early on. i was reminded of this just a couple days ago. i was at starbucks the other day and ran into a friend who was cornered by a drunk/prostitute (yes, at the upper montclair starbucks of all places). i decided that since i was there killing time and knitting i would go over and sit by my friend to save her from the torment of this lonely woman. the woman mentioned that she had just turned 50 and it struck a note in me since my mom is turing 50 next week. i studied this woman and as crazy as she was she gave me a good idea of what my mom, and even my dad for that matter, would be like if she had not gotten sober. this woman was hanging at starbucks with her low cut shirt, reeking of smoke and booze, staggering and rambling. her face has sores on it and her hair was dirty and matted. but there was something so sad about her beyond her appearance. she was still a person, longing for something, maybe to feel something, but she was just so broken...talking about her 'husbands drinking problem'. i am reading this book called the gift of pain that explores the idea of how our culture views pain and the extent that we go to to not feel it. it uses examples of people that have leprosy and how the mechanism for the sensation of pain is what they lack. here in america (land of the free, home of the brave) we are filled with different ideas of pain and control. we take anitdepressants so we don't have to feel the pain. and when it comes time to get off them we are too afraid to feel. beyond that there is the whole drug industry that seeks to eliminate pain completely. i am not saying that we should all live with pain, but maybe there is a reason that it is there in the first place. an example from the book showed a man with leprosy who would pick yams out of burning coals who later lost his fingers. if he could feel, he would obviously not have done that and in turn not lost his fingers. the problem is that it's hard to deal with the pain, it involves us taking responsibility for our emotions and actions....and the pain is way beyond physical. but the more we numb ourselves, i think, the further we get from being happy and whole. at the end of my dad's little talk up front he said that 'the program' took away his pain. i think he got that backwards. there was a lot of pain, i remember i lived through it. i felt it too. but the difference was that he was in an environment that fostered facing that pain and reacting to it in a way that didn't just numb it like the drugs an alcohol did before. i am grateful for this, in this time of gratitute and thanksgiving. each day we are faced with decisions to feel or to numb. choose wisely.

obama!!!!

it's totally a historic night. barack obama is president. he's giving his speech right now. when they announced that he was going to be the president i just stood there and shed a tear. i remembered a point during 911 when my friend, chris, took me up to our rooftop to watch buildings smolder and smoke. he looked and me and said very clearly, ' everything in the world just changed, nicole.' i felt that feeling again tonight. but this time it was filled with so much hope. everything did just change. and god, i hope it means that the change will really bring things together.

back in the (knitting) saddle

My trip to DC was a quick one and it totally re-started my knitting. I was on a bit of a hiatus, I guess, from knitting in general (basically, I suck at knitting socks and it totally broke my knitting stride). What was nice about this trip was that the knitting made it go by really fast and calmed my nerves for the meeting that we were about to attend.

I grabbed this great olive/gold yarn from my stash. It was a chunky adrienne vittadini skein that I got from WEBS when we visited Sage and Brian over the summer. I got two hanks (there is something cooler about the word hank than skein) for two bucks each -- quite the deal! I adapted a pattern for a luxe neck warmer from Knit-2-Together, and I think it came out pretty nice. 54 stitches on size 10 needles -- the pattern was an alternation of feather and fan which looks so pretty and is relatively easy for even the most basic of knitters. The entire thing was done on the ride down from Newark Airport to Silver Spring, Maryland! The pic doesn't do it justice, especially the color; I will have to get a pic of me wearing it. It will serve as a proto-type for my christmas presents this year. I already started on one in Noro Silk Garden this morning when I sat next to a fellow knitter on the train -- gotta love a stitch-n-bitch commute.

Road trip: DC with my boss in the snow!

We're off to meet with the FDA tomorrow. I can't believe that it's
snowing or that we are actually listening to the Village People
singing along.

Luckily I brought my knitting and a book. Maybe I should have brought
some music. We are actually listening I why whole album. Yikes!!

Up the Mountain

There's nothing like a fall day, an outside party up the mountain
and a bonfire. Jared and I are just hanging out trying to stay warm and live it up mountain-style. We're up at Jamie's parents house celebrating she and Steve's engagement. There are lots of activities besides wine drinking and eating. Earlier, we ran down to the lake (UGL!) and hung out on the docks throwing rocks to our hearts content! Then there was the whole bonfire and knife throwing (yes, I am serious. I threw the knife over the fence -- oops).

Congrats to Jamie and Steve on your engagement!