What's this blog all about - "The Weekly Three"

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This blog was born out of a desire to hold myself accountable week to week. Knowing that I easily become caught up in life, I designed this blog as a space to reflect on and record my thoughts and projects with others and find new ways of being creative. 

Each Thursday, I will post the “Weekly Three”

1. The question of the week. What have I been contemplating both internally and in discussions with people?
2. What impacted me this week?  
3. What did I create this week? And what new skills can I teach myself along the way? 

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Week 17: Reflection

Tonight, I walked through a silent city. 

For once, in the past month, my mind shut up. Finally, I could revel in the quiet and let the streets of San Francisco envelop my soundless footsteps. I peeked in on families having dinner together. Large turkeys sat as center piece's, framed by elaborate glass windows as twinkling lights guided my meandering path. 

For the first time in my life, I was alone on Christmas. 

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Week 16: Adaptability

Last week, I left my home to move to a foreign city, for a job I didn’t know much about. I drove out of Colorado at 5am, on clear Tuesday morning. The road was silent and empty besides my loyal Toyota Corolla, Charlie, packed with my life, a sleepy boyfriend and a rubber chicken with a rosary, that had crossed the Atlantic, around its neck. 

I was as prepared as I would ever be. 

Earl, the chicken, is somewhat of a family heirloom. If you know anything about the Van Wormer/Wogan clan, it’s that we take our rubber chickens seriously. They are our good luck charms, guardians, and silent companions along the alluring road of adventure. The have witnessed it all. 

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Week 14: Home

I sat amidst my childhood yesterday. 

There were piles of books, a box full of letters and birthday cards, a bulletin board filled with snapshots of my life, old markers, half completed journals, paintings, clothing, recipe books, the odd glow-in-the-dark star, photography and maps of places I have been. It was chaos. 

Oddly, I felt no emotion. No sadness as I tossed now-unnecessary objects in the trash. No regret as once nostalgic objects joined others in the giveaway bag.

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Week 13: Realization

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Twenty-one years later, I understood I wasn’t born to be a line-chef.

The realization hit me on an unusually busy Monday night. Tickets printed, I began to sweat. The salad I just sent out looked sad, the arugula far from perky. I prayed for the night to just be over.

It was then, in the midst of fryer grease and shredded carrots, I discovered I hated something, I thought my whole life, I was bound to become. 

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Week 12: Fear

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I am scared often. It is one of my best motivators.

Fear is my challenge to myself. Will I overcome it? Or will I let it overcome me? That is the decision. There is no third way. There is no truce in this game. Fear lurks in places I didn’t even know it would: at the corners of commitment, within a salmon ready to be broken down, and in the moment before I send an email. It’s an unexpected visitor and a persistent one at that. 

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Week 11: Connection

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Phone dead. Communication cut off, I was left with one option: engage in the world around me. The airport was quiet and clean. A Kiwi couple across from me disrupting the otherwise calm nature of my surroundings. I glimpsed a familiar book cover peeking out of their oversized backpack, the type only a true adventurer lugs around. 

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Week Ten: Normality

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If you allow it, life is a conveyor belt. Your parents place you on it, lunch packed, and it carries you along, through kindergarten to elementary school. You allow what your teachers say to be categorized as truth, although, most of what you learn when you are young you find out it is incorrect by high school. You understand that you are good in certain areas and bad at others; limitations are set in place by these realizations. 

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Week Nine: Responsibility

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At some point in my growth, from a wee thing to a much larger one, I realized that I was not the only blame-shifter in this world. In fact, it is practically bursting with people who will go out of their way to escape the burden of responsibility. It’s a natural response to want to avoid the consequences of your actions but it’s this response that makes cowards of us all. 

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Week Eight: Pause

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I’m learning how to drive a stick shift. It’s been, a humbling experience. Last night, after realizing the car was in 3rd gear (not 1st), the culprit of my continuous stalling, in utter distress I yelled, “I just hate being bad at things!”. After which I sheepishly, with many fits and starts, drove us home. I have this inherent, silly and deep-rooted fear of looking stupid. No one wants to look like an idiot, but my disdain can be rather paralyzing.

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Week Seven: My Story

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Books were habitually scattered about, small mountains of knowledge and realities I would step into, only to reluctantly leave later. Before allowing myself to dive into these various creations, I had to stealthily open the cover and examine the first line. Many will disagree, but the first line is the most important. It dictates if the book goes to the top or bottom of the stack. An exceptional sentence will pull you in like the aroma of comfort that wafts from a bakery; it hints at the delicious tale to come. But now, in this story of my life, I am left without a first line, so we will begin, quite eloquently, like this: I will never ask permission to go to the bathroom. 

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Week Four: Knowledge

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In my year and a half as a sushi chef, I have chopped legions of cucumbers. When I tried to calculate the number, it was somewhere in the several thousands. This fact unsettles me because I ponder what numerous other skills could I have acquired if not for these damn vegetables? This precise concern is telling of both myself, and my generation. We are a group of learners and, in many of our humble opinions, masters of just about anything and everything we decide to watch a youtube tutorial of. 

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Week Three: Gratification

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This question came about over breakfast; as I believe many great questions do. As we listened to Oldies, my boyfriend and I started discussing the loss of slow love, of courtships, hand written letters, and time spent waiting. I have romanticized these ideas to an extent but there seems to be something decidedly hurried with the way my generation enters into, develops and ends relationships. A frivolous process in which many skip from one insubstantial connection to the next. 

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Week Two: Loneliness

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The concept of spending 24 hours alone, in the woods, at age 11, with nothing but my tent, water, clothing and a journal, never crossed my mind as odd. Then again, I was homeschooled and, thankfully, unaware of what was socially “acceptable” at the time. I am exaggerating slightly when I say alone, but as J.R.R. Tolkien writes “Good stories deserve a little embellishment”. There were several other young women scattered throughout the forest as well as mentors to keep an eye on us. But, in my young mind, it was the loneliest I had ever been. 

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Week One: Success

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To begin, I found the Merriam Webster definition for success, to get myself oriented and start to unravel this term: favorable or desired outcome; also: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence. 

The other evening, I was having a discussion with a friend about the need to go to college, he being pro-college and me, being more than skeptical. As the argument became more heated and the wine drained from my glass, it struck me that our fundamental principles differed. At the core of this conversation was an erroneous assumption that we had the same definition of success.

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