All you need is love (a project in living out loud)

Let's play a game. I'm going to give you all a writing assignment. You have the next few weeks to work on it and then we can all compare. I'll list all your entries as links along with my own entry and I'll pick one to be the "winner". I'll even come up with a real prize! The theme for this first Living Out Loud Project is an Open Love Letter. All the Christmas goodies have been packed away and the stores are full of teddy bears, other more salacious teddies, jewelry and commercialized crap. How often do we take the time to write a letter (electronic or otherwise) to someone who has touched our lives?

The first year my parents were married, Daddy was in Vietnam. They wrote letters to each other every single day. My mother mailed Smithfield ham in wax paper to Vietnam along with even just a few lines to tell him she loved him. My father carried his most precious items, including those letters, in a Tupperware container to keep the red Vietnamese clay from getting into everything. Those letters are the only way they communicated for an entire year.

But when he came back stateside, they were back in the day to day of raising my oldest brother and adding two more kids to the mix. I'm not sure my parents wrote another letter to each other after that.

Love letters almost by their very definition are private matters. There's a cedar chest full of those letters between my parents but I'm not sure I'll ever read them while Mom and Dad are both still alive. I'm not sure I'd want to. Is it possible to express all the same intensity of love for someone - a spouse, a lover, a child, a parent - and still keep it in a format we would feel comfortable sharing with the world? Let's find out!

Write your open love letter and share it with us. The letter doesn't have to be to your current true love, but it does have to be from you. You can revise as many times as you'd like before the deadline of February 1st. If you don't have a blog or web site to publish your submission, feel free to email it directly to me. Any email entries I receive, I will publish (with credit to you) on my site so everyone can read them.

Once you have written your letter, link to it in the comments section of this entry (or leave a note that you emailed it to me). Remember that if you are using LiveJournal and normally lock your entries, please make this one entry public.

I hope you'll participate with me. I think it will be fun to see how each of us expresses our love for someone who may or may not have ever heard the words directly and in a format that others get to see. Open your hearts and practice living out loud with me for a bit.

Yes, I got Rich a porn machine*

Scene opens with me reading blogs in bed on the laptop while Rich rolls over towards me. Rich: "Maybe I should get a pretty blog too."

Me: "You never write in yours anyways. I just figured you hated blogging."

Rich: (rolling over in a huff) "Fine. I'm sure it's something more for private school kids like you."

Me: (rolling over to console him) "No! We can get you your very own domain name. You can be puckeater.com"

Rich: "No ... it's probably already taken."

Me: "We could get you betweenthepipes.com"

Rich: "No ... it's probably porn."

Since it was available, I purchased puckeater.com as of this morning (from the laptop, from bed) and we'll get him a space of his own.

* Title comes from that episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Ray gets a DVD player for Christmas.

Book People - a bibliophile's dream

This week we had another whirlwind tour of southern Texas, starting out in Houston, then College Station and finally finishing out the week in Austin. Austin is quickly becoming one my favorite towns to visit. In particular, I could spend two weeks on the corner of Lamar and 6th Street downtown. On that one intersection there is the Book People bookstore, a huge REI store and the original Whole Foods market. I could just pitch a tent (conveniently purchased from REI) right there in the garden of the Whole Foods parking lot and vacation there for a week. If I lived there permanently, I would be well-fed, well-read, protected from the outdoor elements and very very poor.

The Book People in particular is a glue trap of an establishment. I keep going there with co-workers after our meetings and am never sure just how long they want to spend in a store like that at the end of the day. I rush in and try to go to all my favorite sections of the store first (stationery, journals, kids toys, gift books) before I branch out to the other areas that I hope I'll have time to peruse. That burst of energy and all the sensory input in the store combined with helpful tattooed staff make my chest hurt with excitement.

This is no Barnes & Noble. It's a patchouli infused smorgasbord of culture I can't get at home. I found an entire shelf of books about Type 1 diabetes next to books on running and physical therapy. Around the corner were childrens' books I had never heard of with recommendation cards from the staff, all spread out next to classic literature instead of crammed into a neon corner of the store. They have Acme pens and business card holders in a glass case. They have acorn and oak leaf themed ceramics on shelves. They have kitschy holiday toys littering the stairs. They have little Buddha statues in the religion section. They sell bags and kitchen gadgets next to their cookbooks. There's a line of magazines for hobbies I didn't even know existed. It really is a bit overwhelming. I pondered getting a latte while I was in there but feared the espresso would push me over the edge and I might fall over from shock.

My latest haul from there included mostly journals I can't find anywhere else, a running book that was on sale, tiny colored pencils in a travel kit and a stationery set to write letters to kids. I left the oinking LED pig-shaped keychain behind at the register but it was hard to do.

I think the next time I go to Texas, I'm going to have to bring a larger suitcase. (And yes, Fred, I will call you and we can have beer and Mexican food. I promise.)