:: The most important thing you can do is figure out who the important people in your life are, and take care of those people the best way you know how.
I was in New York last week for a double-whammy of a trip that turned into a triple-whammy. I was visiting a good friend and fellow freelancer who shall remain nameless. She and I worked on writing stuff and business stuff. Hanging out with her was invigorating and left me wanting to work and create new stuff and work some more.
I call visits like that “hanging out with my discourse community.”
Then another friend who lives far away and whom I never get to see ended up in town right when I was, and it turned out he had a party to go to. A private party. At the Met. In the Temple of Dendur. Since I’m a rube, I’ve never been in the Temple of Dendur. Certainly not at night. For a private party.
It was a bit of a shock:
Then, once that phase of my trip was over, I traveled down 120 streets and across 8 avenues to stay in the Tall Poppy Townhouse. My writing collective, the Tall Poppy Writers, got together for a couple of nights to spend some time together in person. Here we are together—the ones who could make it—and the rest of us are there in spirit but you can’t see them because we weren’t using spirit photography.
In case you were wondering, I’m the giantess in the middle. (However I’m not the tallest Tall Poppy, that would be Marin.) Ann Garvin, the founder of the Tall Poppies, is the one in the front-middle with the red poppy flower on her shirt. I met her a million (4) years ago at a writer’s conference, and she wrote on my hand with a sharpie and changed my life.
What I learned from this trip: The most important thing you can do is figure out who the important people in your life are, and take care of those people the best way you know how. And also, that doing that taking care is sometimes hard.
