Images found here and here.

In the fray of my weekend adventures, I was remiss in capturing the photographic experience of it all. But when I saw this image, and I thought: Yes. That was my weekend. My time in NYC was quick and flurried, not just for the shear number of activities but mostly for the tempest of rain and wind that descended upon that great metropolis. Of course, I did not dress appropriately, a fact that resulted in two things: 1) my oft straightened hair descended into a mess o’ curls and 2) my Chuck Taylors, so long looking new and crisp, now seem as though they have been through a great battle (that gives me more street cred, right?). I was wet, chilled, disheveled. And you might think: she must have been miserable. But no, friends. On that day of the floods (aka Saturday), every New Yorker I passed was almost in the same predicament of being utterly rain-soaked and wind-blown. Many, myself included, looked quite unlike our normal, put-together selves. We were unraveling.

As I walked (or rather, slushed) through streets and subway stations, I developed a deep kinship with the faces I saw. The intensity of the rain and the brutal winds brought out a fierceness in the city, and in me. And I liked it. I felt alive. I felt like I was in the thick of it.

Now I’m a generally peaceful person, but I think our humanity creates the need to go through a battle, and come out the other side. We want to rise from some sort of struggle a stronger, more resilient creature. This proves we are indeed alive. Not meaning to be hyper-dramatic about the weekend storm, I merely think that my momentary NYC experience served as a taste of how struggle and beauty can intersect in a moment of utter humanity.

Image found here (via hyerimages).

To this day, one of my favorite books is Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan (as well as its sequels, Skylark, Caleb’s Story, and More Perfect Than the Moon). Jacob Whiting, a Kansas farmer and a widower with two children, places an advertisement in the paper for a “good, kind woman to share a life with a widower and his two children. To make a difference” Sarah Wheaton, a single woman living in Maine, answers the notice and travels to Kansas to see if she can make that difference. I always thought it was so romantic and courageous for Sarah to travel to a new land to marry a man she had never met.

Sarah’s character is strong-willed, intelligent, independent – almost as though she didn’t need to marry but wanted a change in her life so she chose to embark on this journey of her own accord. MacLachlan’s writing is beautiful on the page in its honest simplicity. Across the series, a family forms and the bond between Sarah and Jacob is particularly compelling as is the relationship develops into an incredible love. Though it’s a children’s book, I highly recommend it to those who haven’t read it. It’s a reminder of simpler, sweeter times.

Though the book certainly conveys the struggles Sarah, Jacob, and his two children, Anna and Caleb (my favorite boy’s name), have as they get to know each other, it really romanticizes the whole mail-order bride experience. I realized the other day how incredibly scary it must have been for a single woman to travel to a strange land to live with a man she has never met.

Mail-order brides have been glorified and parodied on the page and on the screen for decades. In The Harvey Girls (1946), Judy Garland’s character arrives in Sandrock, New Mexico, to meet the “man of her dreams,” with whom she found in a newspaper advertisement and began corresponding with letters. In the film, the “man of her dreams” actually turns out to be a dud, so she joins the Harvey Girls, a troupe of women who traveled out west to work for a chain of restaurants owned by the Fred Harvey Company in the late nineteenth century.

As much as I love both of these stories, they are romantic versions of a business that, while lucrative, can sometimes extremely scary (not to detract from these wonderful stories). In the 1800s and early 1900s, mail-order brides were often women who left highly developed areas to marry men in underdeveloped areas such as those pioneers forging a new life on the western frontier of the United States.

Today, the reverse is true. Women from underdeveloped countries are traveling to the developed world to marry established, successful men. In particular, mail-order bride companies from the Ukraine and Russia have seen a booming business exporting willing ladies to the West, including the United States and parts of Europe. While the majority of the mail-order brides enter legitimate, prosperous marriages, but there have been a number of human trafficking cases, instances of marital abuse, and situations where the women are brought to marry a man under false pretenses like Nika, who traveled to Canada from the Philippines to marry a man only to discover that she would be his fifth wife and would be beaten and severely abused.

In this case, Canada’s marriage laws relating to immigrants are much less stringent and there is little regulation of these overseas marriage agencies. The US has a better record of regulation around mail-order bride abuses, but it still remains a questionable practice and means of relocation for women in underprivileged situations. But sometimes it may be a woman’s only option. We think we have come so far with women’s rights (although it has been only 90 years since we’ve earned the right to vote in the US, a fact that still shocks me). Then we realize that the majority of the world’s women still suffer in cultures who have either removed their rights or limit them so much that they are forced to marry men who may do more harm to them than good.

Images found here, here, and here.

Sure he’s small and has a squeaky falsetto. But this mouse is not cute. No, this mouse is a pox upon my daily living. It all started last summer when I came home from a weekend away to find mouse droppings all over my apartment bedroom, including my bed! I discovered a large hole behind my radiator, which seemed to be the source of the problem. So. I had a meltdown.

I can do bugs and snakes, but if there’s mice…it’s all over. I did eventually straighten myself out and proceeded to clean the place and stuff the hole with steel wool. I also set a box trap and some glue traps around my room, just in case. A few weeks later I noticed more droppings. Great. I then scoured my room for additional holes, stopping up the ones I could find and even going so far as to line the bottom of my door with steel wool.

Quieter times ensued until one October morning at 3:45 am, I awoke to a rustling by the radiator in my room. Bleary-eyed, I turned on the light to find the smallest mouse you ever saw stuck and struggling on a glue trap by the radiator. Making visual contact with the creature who had turned my room into a place I now regarded as squalid (perhaps dramatic but how I felt) incited vindictive feelings within me. However, seeing how small the mouse really was I began to feel a slight pang of compassion for it. The combination of these two emotions resulted in angry tears. I rose from my bed, talking to the wee mouse, “Ooo, I really hate you. I’m so sorry to do this but you are making my room a mess and I can’t have you here.”

It was almost four in the morning. And I was all on my own. Somehow, I managed to get the mouse and trap combo into a paper bag and I ran the package of demon goods down to the dumpster with great speed and many sleepy tears. Then, relief set in and I felt like I could put this chapter behind me.

However, where there is one…there are usually more.

A few weeks ago, I noticed some dark specks on the floor by a corner my bedroom. Looking closer, one of my worst fears came to the surface: mouse droppings. An experienced catcher of all things mice and having greater menace towards these creatures than ever, I walked right over to the hardware store and picked up some snap traps. This was war.

I put big globs of peanut butter on the traps and set them in the places where I found the droppings. The next morning I awoke to a rustling but found no trapped mouse. The peanut butter appeared to have been partially licked off and the trap had been tilted to accommodate the dining pleasures of this devious scum of the earth. About to get out of bed, I saw a small black shape fly across the floor to the radiator (further investigation revealed a previously undiscovered hole that I quickly stuffed with steel wool). Okay. You wanna play rough, mouse? Let’s dance, pretty boy.

I realized that the traps I bought weren’t working, so I went in search of traps with a more powerful SNAP! I then taped the traps to the floor (with a way to easily remove them when they catch my prey) and placed the tiniest smidgen of peanut butter (any taste could be fatal).

Last night, tension and discomfort built about whether the traps would work. I barely slept (okay, maybe that was because I listened to This American Life all night and kept the light on…who knows). Anyways, still no mouse, but I am hoping this will work because I am tired of feeling so gross in my own room. I like to keep my room clean and comfortable – my place of personal solitude. I am a creature acutely influenced by her surroundings and the presence of these vermin has proved to be a great test of my character. Trying to find the silver linings wherever I can!

Image found here (a DIY human mouse catching post that just sounds like crazy talk).

I’ve been acidic for way too long. It’s time to go alkaline. If you don’t know what I am talking about, let me say that our bodies have a pH on a scale of 1-14 (1-6.9 are acids and 7.1 -14 are alkaline or base, while 7 is neutral). I am pretty sure my pH has been tending towards the acidic side based on my diet and recent health changes, which is why I have basically eaten like an alkaline fiend lately. For the past two days, I have enjoyed delicious avocado rolls for lunch (avocado slices, carrots, cucumbers, red cabbage, and lettuce in a rice paper roll) and this evening, I will be whipping up my favorite steamed red cabbage with grapefruit for dessert!

As Chen, my friend and brilliant med student, tells me, citrus fruits such as grapefruits and lemons are considered alkaline foods because your body neutralizes the citric acid from the fruits as it processes them! So cool!

Here’s a list of alkaline foods if you are interested!

Image found here, here, and here.

Enter Madame March. That feisty, transitional month where my favorite season – Spring – comes alive. Winter makes its retreat into the abyss – good riddance, you cold-hearted fiend! We have little hints of warm air – that delightful current that soothes your skin, wind-chapped and brittle from the cold. I must say that March is certainly rearing its lioness mane with strong, biting winds and chilling downpours over the past few days.

The week’s forecast predicts a dreary lot. A very British weather pattern, you might say. Reminds me of when I hiked in Dover, England on a blustery March day. Standing on a mossy precipice, I surveyed the lush green land, soaked from countless days of rain, the winds whipping my brown locks with such ferocity that I have not yet known existed. I felt as though I was at the center of something – not the universe, but some kind of natural occurrence, where I was a mere pawn to the whims of Mother Nature. I miss feeling such humility.

I traveled to Maine last weekend to feel loved and to recharge my spirit in a fresh, clean place. Home in a country village is one of best gifts I have been given. When life becomes serious and menacing, it is such a relief to have a refuge where you can know love and goodness, forces that heal your wounds or at least temper the pain and fortify your will to believe in life’s many beauties. For they are surely there.

Image found here (via Sabino).

I love to be called Emily or “Em” or “Emi,” any of the small number of derivations will suffice. Somewhere in college (where I encountered and friended A LOT of Emilys), people started calling me “Bowen,” “Bow,” “Bowie,” “Bowdoggy.” One of my college crushes always called me this last one which made my heart sink because it meant he just liked me as a pal. Nicknames are fun but there comes a point where it’s too much. And I would bet more than half of people don’t actually enjoy their nicknames, but put up with them to appease their family and friends.

All of this digression is meant to say that I love my name and I want people to use it. When you write a note, you should say the name of the person in the greeting so that they know you mean these words for them and only them.

Names originate in the neatest places too: a favorite poet (I was named after Emily Dickinson, my mother’s favorite), a grandparent or other relative, a character in the novel, or even the name of the person who delivered you. Using your name pays respect to its history and to the people who gave it to you.

So, friends, I am curious about your names: what’s their origin? Is there anything special in their meaning that you feel connects to your personality? I would love to hear about the history of your name!

Image found here.

It seems that when we do really grown-up things we feel most like children. Today reminded me of when I left to study abroad in England – my big dream – for a year. I remember feeling like a small little kitten who just wanted to be curled up on a rug at home instead of saying a teary goodbye to my family and friends at the airport. SO dramatic. I wish I was better at these transitions. My day improved as I learned more about what my writing duties would be – knowledge that energized me. I still feel this slight sense of unease and upheaval – signs, I think, of my humanity and an exercise in my power of will, things that have lain dormant for quite some time.

Image found via Sabino.