I am pretty much smitten with Beginnings. Ash is one of the most appealing, all-around likable and caring characters I've encountered in a novel in ages. It's easy to see why Lou adores her, though Lou herself, with her bursts of anger and fits of jealousy as an adult, tries my patience at times.

As with her other tales, L.T. Smith captures the pain and awkwardness of insecurity like no one else does. Meshing such intense self-doubt with such a pure love that seems destined from the day the two young girls meet makes all that insecurity much more believable...after all, those of us who question our worth the most are bound to feel we don't deserve the very love we most crave.

Perhaps because there is a lot of pain in here I can relate to I didn't laugh as much as I did when I read L.T. Smith's absolutely amazing See Right Through Me. There are definitely moments where you laugh, but your heart ends up aching more than your stomach does.

Even so, Beginnings is breathtaking when it comes to emotions. The reader is there with Lou as she struggles through childhood, her teens and then life as an adult. She may not always be the most composed or even mature, but she is very real. This line, for instance, is all too familiar:

"I flirt, I am a flirt, but the kind that is shocked when flirting actually works. The kind that when a woman smiles at me in an empty room, I still look over my shoulder just to make sure she’s smiling at me, then look back over it a second time."

Oddly enough (or maybe not, if you have ever been in Lou's shoes) it's the first half of the novel that has most lingered with me. Young Lou is someone your heart just breaks for as she agonizes over her own appeal, what it's like to be in love with someone you shouldn't (or think you shouldn't) and how on earth she's going to move on after losing the best friend she has ever known.

Another constant for Lou (that helps me sympathize with her even when she's a bit maddening) is how she battles her own emotions and longs to master them in certain situations, especially when it comes to Ash, whom she is convinced would "freak" if she knew about her love.

"There was no way I could have done that. I just had to tighten the reins on my feelings, be more careful with what I let show. I would have to learn how to do that. And quickly. But I know for definite—in that split second she held my gaze, she must have seen everything I had tried so hard to keep hidden."

I absolutely love how Beginnings comes full circle, the pop culture references that you might remember from your own childhood, the writing itself and how you can just fall into this story as if it is actually real life. As always when I finish anything by L.T. Smith, I hope there's more around the corner soon! :)

art by Kevin Nowlan

 

"A woman's most powerful weapon, she discovers then, is the state of emotional independence. And if she is far from possessing this emotional independence, then she must make a pretense of having it."-Tereska Torres, By Cecile

 

 

 

Yesterday was not one of my finer moments. As soon as I got to where I was going, I tried (I swear I tried) to get into “I can cope seeing her” mode, battling silly butterflies and wondering why I can't just be normal around people I like...really, people in general, for that matter.

 

Ironically, (don’t ask me why…there’s no rationality to it) I panicked (only on the inside) when I didn’t see her. I pictured the bad weather affecting her commute. I worried about her, another inappropriate reaction, since we're not friends.

Then, when I did see her, I panicked again and retreated into my version of Spock, which apparently comes across more as “forlorn and confused." I just can’t pull off sophisticated and detached, I just can’t.

Maybe this makes me a very bad person, but, sometimes, it is near impossible for me to be around someone I like a lot and hold it all in. I just want to find a nice balance (not just in this area, but in any emotional situation) between composed and kind, without letting everything I feel fall all over the place.

 

All I want, all I can ever hope for, is to find a way to be able to live with myself in peace and get past this and the other things that challenge me. And since I’m certainly never going to be living with anyone else in a cohabitating, mutually loving way I also have to accept that and I have to stop hating myself so much on the days I fail.

 

I need to be my own heroine, my own rescuer from loneliness and pain and overwhelming emotions. They say you need to fake it until you make it. I don't take that to mean to lie or be false...just to find the appropriate feelings you're striving and pretend to feel it, until you really do.

 

That's good advice most of the time, but according to Inc. magazine it actually might not be:

 

 

The maxim "fake it until you make it" makes sense on some levels. Most people occasionally struggle with feeling overwhelmed or unconfident, so the idea of pushing through those negative emotions seems logical.
But sustaining a false front for the long term isn't in your best interest. Here are a few reasons why.

You'll repel people.

Show me someone who pretends to have it all together, and you'll find me walking the other direction. Though authenticity is hard to define, you probably know its opposite when you see it.

Magnetic and likable people are not afraid to share things about themselves that might even make them look bad. In doing so, they convey a sense of humility, honesty, and vulnerability that work to lower people's defenses.

Faking it is stressful.

If you've purchased something from Walgreens lately, the cashier may have used the branded salutation "be well," which the drugstore chain thinks makes customers happier.

But according to LinkedIn influencer Annie Murphy Paul, the people it doesn’t please are the employees who have to say it regardless of their feelings about the customers they're mandated to bless.

She says organizational experts define this kind of behavior as "surface acting," which is essentially faking cheerfulness--and in Walgreens's case, concern--all day long while interacting with customers.

"This kind of faking is hard work--sociologists call it 'emotional labor'--and research shows that it's often experienced as stressful," Paul writes. "It's psychologically and even physically draining; it can lead to lowered motivation and engagement with work and ultimately to job burnout."

For the rest of the article go here:

http://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/why-fake-it-til-you-make-it-bad-advice.html

"Stand down, feelings, stand down."-from Bob's Burgers

Trying to go through old magazines and put some in recycling, I can't bear to let go of a 2011 copy of 501 Lost Songs, put out as a collaboration between NME and UNCUT magazines.

There is still a link online to all of the info, plus various other "best of" type lists:

http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/NME_LostSongs.htm

When I saw both of the songs mentioned below I grabbed my a-ha and Fifth Dimension cds off the shelf and popped them in. Cleaning is always better if you have music playing. :)

those sad eyes...

Maybe it's because I'm coming off a bad headache (which always leaves me emotionally weird before, during and afterward) and the sadness of a very lonely stranger who called into where I work today plus worries about my mother, but I am really feeling this article that showed up in my email today.

Edgar Allan Poe has always interested me, more as a person than a writer, though I do like his poetry and some of his short stories. His eyes always seem to be telling their own tale, his desperation so intense it seemed like a separate entity.

He is so the exact opposite of the stodgy-looking Henry James whom I've read much more of over the years. James once said of Poe: “An enthusiasm for him is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”  I'm not so sure that is true, but then each man came from completely different worlds and I'm super-tired so my thinking cap may be a bit off right now.

This part of the New York Review of Books article struck me hard:

The writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson said Poe had “the look of over-sensitiveness which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing than coarseness.” And he does seem to have been overwhelmed by himself, intolerably sensitive and proud and intolerably brilliant, his drinking and bitterness abetting his discomfitures and humiliations. That said, his strange little household of aunt/mother and cousin/wife, through it all and while it lasted, was always reported to be warm and sweet. He was a strong, athletic man who, through the whole of his career, bore up under his weaknesses and afflictions well enough to be very productive, most notably in the unique inventiveness, the odd purity, of his fiction.

The rest of the it can be read here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/feb/05/edgar-allan-poe/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR+Poe+the+police+van+Gogh&utm_content=NYR+Poe+the+police+van+Gogh+CID_4edd3542cc7ea2efa47d8fd7b4a20fb2&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=On%20Edgar%20Allan%20Poe

And the TBR titles grow...

The February 2015 issue of Elle has lots of intriguing books reviewed or highlighted that sound great! These are just some of them: