That’s where I first heard the news.

We got back to Grant’s place and I immediately turned his computer on.  My mom had emailed me the first article from our hometown Herald.  I went back to facebook.  I turned to Google.  I found whatever I could find, which was not much.

All I know is that my 7th grade math teacher, a woman well-known, well-loved in our small community, just disappeared Saturday morning.

Just disappeared.

The community has pulled together, of course.  Over a thousand people have volunteered to search.  The police department is looking.  The National Guard is looking.  Border patrol is looking.  Surrounding counties have sent help in the form of extra officers and dog teams.  Civilian owned planes are in the air.  Some people are amazed.  I expected nothing less.

And that’s why I hold out hope, though even in the nearly three day search, all they have yet to find is a single running shoe.  Because from what might as well be a million miles away, it’s all I can do. Hope.

And pray.  Will you pray too?

art on the wall at the local pizza place

I realized as I was about to add a new post last night that pretty much the only thing I ever blog about anymore is food.  Or my neighborhood.  Or food in my neighborhood.

I always knew I was meant to end up in  Nashville, that’s true.  I lived 40ish miles south of Nashville for my first few years in Tennessee and I thought my life could never get better.  But as I started looking for a place in the city, I found myself increasingly drawn to the east side.   There were quite a few reasons for that, but the biggest reason of all didn’t occur to me until today.

Every part of Nashville feels relatively homey.  The different neighborhoods aren’t terribly spread out… but most of them are very developed and overrun with tons of people.

The thing is, I absolutely love living in the city.  I love all there is to do and eat and all the people I’m so close to and I love that so many other people see my city as a travel destination… It’s beautiful.  But I grew up in small town USA and I have been made to be a somewhat awkward and uncomfortable city girl for the past 8 years of my life.

My neighborhood is 5 minutes from downtown Nashville, yes.  But it feels like my tiny home town.  The coffee shops are local, the pizza place is local, there’s one decent grocery store, there’s a little house of music, and everything is in biking distance (once I get a bike, that is).  Everybody here loves everybody else.  We know each other… even those of us who don’t really know each other.

This part of town feels manageable to me.  There’s already all of this stuff to do, and I feel like if I ever found anything might be missing, someone little like me could still make it happen.  Big business and industry don’t have much of a place over here… this is musician, artist, creative friendly.

Some things are meant to be, and this neighborhood and me are stuck like glue. 

It’s going to be a long rest-of-the-week at work – and I’m not one to complain.  I mostly like my job and the people I work with are amazing – but realistically, it’s just a rough week all around.

I don’t get too many comments which means I can’t talk to you and I want to! I do!  So leave me one here, with a link or an email address or something, and tell me how you get through long work weeks or what your most embarrassing work story is or if you don’t work (lucky you!) how you deal with a cloudy day now and then.  Even if you don’t usually comment or have never ever commented at all.  Ever.  Say hello.

That’s all I want today.

Ready? Go.

I know this isn’t news to ANYONE but Instagr.am is AWESOME.

I finally upgraded to iPhone at the end of my vacation – I wish I had upgraded before but you know, time constraints, blah blah blah.

I’m now using my iPhone exclusively as my digital camera because the camera I have is old anyway and the iPhone takes better pictures AND there is INSTGR.AM.

The more and more I use it, and honestly, the more I look at other people’s photos, the more I realize there’s even more awesome ways to use it.

Above is an awesome self-portrait.  I’m an Apple.  Obviously.

So is Snow White.

Are you on Instagr.am?

I had been blogging since before I knew what blogging was, had relatively recently found 20SB, and he was, at the time, one of the few dudes registered and blogging.  A guy?  With a blog?  Yeah, of course I was reading that.

It wasn’t long before I realized his verbal fluidity and eloquence made him more than just a guy with a blog.

This is all a story I’ve told before, but I’ll say it again for this point’s sake – I moved to Tennessee from Minnesota and after some flirting via twitter, I emailed him one day, asking if I could sleep on his couch, in Chicago, on the way.

And he said yes.

I had a mild crush on him then.  Meeting him in person solidified my fascinations.  Leaving him that next morning ignited rocket fuel in my imagination.

Did I have feelings for Derek?  Oh, yes.  But I would say 20% of them were genuine I’m-interested-in-getting-to-know-you-and-find-you-incredible feelings, and the other 80% were emotional survival.

Being in a new place, knowing almost no one, and knowing deep down the very definition of who I’d always considered myself to be was about to be drastically altered forever and having no idea how to handle that coming revelation… it was terrifying.  People told me I was brave and looking back on it, I know I was… but I didn’t feel that way then and clung to the one piece of my childhood and adolescence that was safe and comfortable, if not a little heartbreaking – unrequited love.

It was a beautiful distraction, and I held on to it for dear life.

I went back to Chicago a few months later and my feelings were painfully obvious to everyone.  The problem with holding on to one comfortable thing from your childhood is that it then causes you to act like the child you used to be.  I was not a woman, not in that sense, and should have never expected him to see me like one.  I don’t think I did expect it.  But I certainly hoped.

In the end, no actual words were exchanged to this effect, but it wasn’t more than a week or two after I’d returned home to my frustrating, insignificant existence that I had to write to him and make my thoughts known.

And he very obligingly and gently told me he was not interested.

And that was it.  A few weeks later I met Brandon.  A few weeks after that faded out I met Andrew.  And the night I had decided to give up on Andrew for good, the infamous Ryan entered my life.

Derek set the bar high.  So high.  Derek ran a business, Derek understood literature and music and went to one of the best schools and excelled at everything he’d done from soccer to human connection.

But Derek wasn’t real.

When Ryan came along, he was all the things I knew I wanted because I’d wanted Derek, with all of the right things just slightly differentiated.  Ryan was HERE, mostly, and with me, everything else was just… right.

To put Derek and Ryan next to each other and call them similar… well… you wouldn’t believe me if I did.  But they are.

So moving past Ryan should be just as easy as moving past Derek was… but it’s not.  Because Ryan was here.  Ryan was real.  And I don’t know if Ryan ever raised the bar beyond where Derek set it, but he certainly rose to it.

I had a funny thought just a bit ago… the reason I started to write all of this down.

If anyone could ever save me from Ryan… of all the men I know and have ever known, only one comes to mind I’m absolutely sure could succeed.  Derek.

But there will never be an emotional savior again.  No distractions.  I’m not a child anymore.
I need the real thing.

Obviously I am not going to grow up to be someone other than myself… but in recent years, she really has become a role model for the way I’d like my career and my life and the way they intertwine to happen.

She’s married.  She has kids.  She lives in Massachusetts.  She plays guitar and she writes songs that never fail to ball me up into a fit of one emotion or another.

She never played publicly until she was 27.  She played in her town, she made friends, and it just so turned out that the right person believed in her and in turn convinced the other right people to believe in her.

She writes and she records and she travels and she has a husband with a “normal” job and five normal kids.

Yeah, I want to be this woman so bad it hurts.

I mean, I don’t really think I ever want five whole children to be responsible for for keeps… but you get the point, I think.

I used to dream of stages and lights and bands and glitter and smashing guitars… but I struggled with the reality of that dream meshed with a life I knew a true-hearted small town girl could really be comfortable with.  I admire girls like Taylor Swift, who was out pounding the Nashville pavement at twelve, fearlessly going after what she knew she wanted.  But now, she and Jake G. can’t have a casual dinner down the street from her own house without speculation of whether or not they’re rekindling some silly little romance.

I know she brought much of that on herself… but even if she weren’t so forthcoming, the cameras would still be around and people would still be asking those questions.

Lori’s making money.  She’s writing.  She’s sitting on a stool playing her guitar for modest crowds, probably full of polite grown-ups sipping on glasses of wine, rather than stadiums full of screaming teenagers.  And when she’s done, she goes home to her husband, what’s-his-name, and her five kids, what’s-their-names, and she lives an acknowledged but comparably quiet life.

And if you forget all of that for even just this moment and you just listen to the songs she writes…

You’d never have to know a single thing again.  She’s got a gift and she knows how to use it…

And I just hope that someday, I can write as meaningfully and honestly and clearly as she does.

I’m recording an album… have I mentioned that?  I’ve got some ideas floating around in my head re: promotional strategies.  If you’re willing to help me out with your blog and facebook account and other social media avenues, you should let me know.  I’ll have options.

I was also in this I Don’t Know What My Hair Is Supposed To Be Netherworld.  It’s a fun Netherworld to inhabit from time to time.

I showed up to the retail job one day in a decent outfit, and I’d straightened my hair and my bangs were pretty grown out so I’d sort of braided them back and pinned them to the side of my head.  I was working behind the register and somebody commented on the ‘do, asking, “Is that a braid?”

I smiled and nodded.

She shook her head, looked at her friend, and sighed.  “Oh, man.  The pretty ones.”

Weird, and slightly uncomfortable, but flattering.

(this video is also weird and slightly uncomfortable, however, it was filmed on the day in question and displays the ‘do nicely.)

I don’t really know what made me think of that moment other than… I don’t really know.

BUT THE POINT IS — maybe, according to the random girl shopping at Guess, I was (or am) a pretty one, but my friend Erin is a TALENTED one.

And it’s kind of fitting that I bring up this moment and find this video because in the video I’m all, “I’M MOVING TO TENNESSEE. “  And if I hadn’t moved to Tennessee (hello WHOA I’ve been here forever now) I wouldn’t know Erin and wouldn’t be doing all this fun stuff that is SO Tennessee like, um, letting her take pretty pictures of me and eating pancakes afterwards.

SNEAK PEAK.

That’s all.

I love her.  She is a talented one.  AND a pretty one.

Hop over and check it out, because lord knows you never get any real writing from me over here anymore.

Not sure how much I’ll use it.  Probably mostly for music.  Follow me and I’ll follow you back.

The truth is, I would have posted this at the same time as everybody else, but I was kind of on the outside of the loop and didn’t find out it was for sure going to post until about 45 minutes before it did.  I’d already scheduled a post for that morning, which had already published, and I didn’t have time to add another before I had to leave the house.  I decided then and there that I did want to devote a piece of my blog to this cause, but that perhaps the use of space may be a bit more effective if I waited until the major push had been executed.  I hope I’m right.

(I’m the one with the ukulele. duh.)(for a full list of participating bloggers, visit here.)

The second part of the truth is, I don’t know Brandy all that well.  And I know that here on the internets we all use the word “know” a little loosely, but while I do click over to her blog every now and then when someone brings attention to something specific that she’s written, I’m not even subscribed to her.  That’s not a reflection on her or her writing or my feelings on her at all.  It’s a reflection on me and how I’m always slow to the party and by the time I realized she was wonderful, my subscription list was already bursting at its seams.  I knew I could afford to leave her off because I knew the internet would never let me forget her name.  On this point, I have never been more correct.

The thing is, though, that even though I don’t know her well and Lord only knows if she knows me at all, when it all comes down, she is One Of Us.  And being a big part of a community that has given me friendships and hope and a million other things I couldn’t begin to list, I knew I had to give back to somebody who really needed it.  And she did.  She does.

LoveHarder.org has been set up for fundraising on Brandy’s and her Hot Awesome Dude’s behalf.  While 250% of the goal was raised in one day (no, that was not a typo), the fact is that no amount will be enough until a cure is found.  This doesn’t just affect these two people.  Think about it.  It could some day affect you.

If you are at all like me, you had absolutely no way of making a donation on Wednesday when the rest of the community was rallying its support around one of its favorite bloggers.  So, just in case you just got paid, or found a twenty in your jeans pocket, or spent all weekend fishing coins out of your couch for the cause, I just thought I’d remind you.  This problem didn’t begin and end within a 24-hour period.  It is on-going.  If you wanted to donate then and couldn’t, do so today.  Or next week.  Or next month.  Whatever.  Love Harder.  And Love Longer.

Every little bit counts.

(i wrote this post and then scheduled it.  since doing so, the effort has reached $3,000, the goal has been raised from the original $1,000 to a more fitting and terribly attainable $5,000, loveharder is now on twitter, and an online store has been opened (the coffee mug is soooo being added to the things-i-need list).  there are so many ways to support this amazing cause. anything you can do is appreciated.)