The diagnosis

Read Xeni Jardin’s moving and personal account of the day her life changed.

A small bit of it:

The gravity in this place is different. I’ve spoken to others who’ve traveled out here, too, and returned home safely. When you become one of them, you learn quickly that you share a language others can’t understand.

The trick, these fellow travelers tell me, is to accept the not knowing and find your equilibrium in that new gravity. Calm the mind. Find your balance out on the cold planet, whether or not you know the next step, or the date of the next appointment, or what good or bad news the Technetium-99 isotopes floating around in your blood during the last scan reveal.

Learning to draw…the 50 states

I’m kind of hot for teacher.

Kenny O’Brien teaches online drawing classes on Mahalo. He’s a little bit dorky in a Mr. Rodgers kind of way, but mostly he’s kind and funny and extremely good at teaching. The first thing that hooked me with these courses was the way he made drawing the NW states look easy. This is the easiest chunk of the country to draw, but I found it pretty hard - the sketch above took over an hour.

I’ve started watching Kenny’s lessons on my computer and following along using my iPad as a tablet. I highly recommend investing $15 in a stylus if you are going to try this. It works a lot better than drawing on the screen with your finger. Mahalo also has a drawing course iPad app hosted by Kenny that is worth the nominal fee.

Kenny also encourages students to email him sketches and questions and seems like a total sweetheart. I am taking this from the very beginning now and learning how to hold a pencil properly. Kenny promises that I’ll be drawing SpongeBob in no time!

in praise of Powell’s Books

Powell’s Books in Portland is the best book shop on the planet. The gigantic main store (Powell’s City of Books) is full of great book reading mojo and proud, intelligent employees. They have an app that provides turn-by-turn directions to find books within their store. 

I often lurk on their website learning about new books to read. But what I do most of all is lust after their Indiespensable offerings. Subscribe to Indiespensable and you get a semi-monthly shipment featuring a gorgeous, limited-edition printing of a recommended book and some other goodies that the Powell’s staff chooses. Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus came with (among other things) salted caramel corn. Anne Patchett’s State of Wonder came with an advance copy of the new Miriam Toews novel and the first edition of McSweeneys/David Chang’s food magazine Lucky Peach. The packages are always clever and full of well-curated items. It’s book porn, I tell you.

An Indiespensable subscription is $39.99 for each shipment, and while I think it’s worth every penny, I’m having trouble pulling the trigger on buying it. I spend at least that much on books every month and really want to support such a fantastic indie bookseller, but I’m hesitant to start steady flow of physical stuff coming into the house. I wish Powell’s had a way to sell me books for my Kindle - I’d love to give them money that way. I’d totally subscribe to a monthly e-book deal.