I've just made a contribution of $700 to Girls Write Now to match yours. Thank you.
The lovely Mariana commented on my original post (which inspired the brilliant Tayari to start a meme!), saying, "so, i've been admiring this photo for a few days now and it's made me all the most curious about the teenage you."
It's no exaggeration to say that I am a publicist by trade because I prefer to talk about other people. My teenage years, like everyone's, were challenging and complicated, and as both my parents read Lux Lotus from time to time, I'll refrain from discussing anything about them at length. The simple truth is that you love people and their decisions hurt you and vice versa, and when you're young this is an intractable concept that can only be viewed in binary terms. And then you realize that everyone avoids pain and seeks pleasure and simply tries to survive, and thousands of years of poetry have captured the ache of the human condition and yet still it captivates us endlessly, for good reason (here's the first poem I ever memorized, at age twenty). To me, the experience of becoming an adult, as I was discussing with one of my dear siblings recently, is to take responsibility for things, not only the ones that are your fault, but for any in this world that you can improve by a measure.
So I won't talk too much more about my early years. They shaped the person I am today and I'm cool with that. Of course, I'd never leave a Lux Lotus reader hanging... here's another photo of me, at age sixteen, en route to a holiday party.
A week or so before I graduated early from high school and moved to New York for a few months at age seventeen -- before heading to New Orleans, Upstate New York, New Mexico, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., before returning to New York at twenty three -- I made a list of "(100) Things I Would Like to Do/Experience Before I Die." Here are ten I've accomplished in the dozen years since, and five I'd like to do in 2009:
1. Grow my hair long (#5).
2. Go to Paris (#10; also, anywhere in the Caribbean, #17; Japan, #25; New Orleans, #40; London, #46).
3. Stop dreaming and start acting on my desires (#15).
4. Hear good jazz live (#52).
5. Walk through the rain barefoot (#57).
6. Fly first-class (#69).
7. Teach (#79).
8. Never accept "It's not humanly possible" as a reason to quit something (#82).
9. Engage in an intensely passionate love affair, if only for a short while (#84).
10. Celebrate an occasion with Champagne (#94).
1. Take a road trip across the country (#20).
2. Spend the night in a hotel that costs more than $300 per night (#49).
3. Go to Venice (#51).
4. Own something by Chanel (#68).
5. Work hard, make a lot of money, and then relax (#86).
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