About Amanda
I’m a disgruntled LIRR commuter by morning, real estate journalist by day, insomniac by night, and cancer butt-kicker for life.
Where To Find Me
The Scandalous Note
Published January 17, 2012 | A Writer’s Book of Days (01/17) – Write About A Time You Found Out About Something You Weren’t Supposed To Know
I’ve been an avid reader, ever since I was a child. I’d read anything I could get my hands on, and the wall-to-ceiling bookshelf in our old living room was a gold mine – my particular favorites were a National Geographic anthology and the Lexicon Universal Encyclopedia set. Strange kid, I know.
One day, when I was eight, I pulled out an illustrated herbal encyclopedia. As I flipped through the pages, a white piece of notepaper fell out. I read the decidedly adult cursive, which described a man my mother was to meet at the airport. He was tall, had a mustache, was a romantic, and would bring flowers. He had a very basic name, like Paul or Allen. Oh, it was scandalous. My parents were divorced and my father had remarried, but I didn’t know there was such a fellow in my mother’s life.
I couldn’t breathe a word of this – I didn’t want to get in trouble for snooping. Nor was I going to tell my little sister, who would likely use it as ammunition against me later. I had no one to tell this secret. I tucked the note back into the book – it was between the marjoram and marshmallow root pages. I made sure to put it back in the exact place I found it.
As far as I knew, there was never such a man. Once in a while, I’d take the book out and look at the note again. Then we moved, and the book was long forgotten, stored in a box with cookbooks somewhere in the basement.
But when I was in my early 20s, a renovated kitchen meant there was more room for the books. Mom brought the box up from the basement and took the books out one by one, piling them on the table. At the top of one pile was the herbal dictionary and I quickly grabbed it, shaking out the pages. No note fell out. I thumbed through to the marshmallow root page. Nothing.
Mom asked what I was doing. So more than 12 years late, I confessed my knowledge of the mysterious stranger. She looked baffled. Apparently, she didn’t remember the note, nor had she ever met such a man. I described what I read, and she laughed. She said it sounded like a dream a friend had and wrote down for her or something an astrologer might have told her. I believed her – there would be no reason why she’d not let me in on a romance so many years after the fact.
It was certainly the longest time I’ve ever had to keep a secret. And when you’re eight, that seems like an eternity.
An Accidental Trip
Published January 14, 2012 | A Writer’s Book of Days (01/14) – Write About The Horizon
“Wait a second, are we supposed to be going over a bridge?” Mom asked as the J train rumbles into daylight.
Crap. I forgot that Essex Street and Delancey Street were the same station and missed the stop.
In a few months, I was moving to the Bronx for college and was still learning the intricacies of New York City’s subway system. We certainly weren’t supposed to be going over a bridge. Nor did I know that the next stop, Marcy Avenue, wasn’t in the greatest neighborhood.
We got off the train at Marcy Avenue and waited for the next uptown train. There were some interesting characters loitering around the station, and I knew Mom was a bit nervous. She hadn’t ridden the subway in decades, and this wasn’t exactly a mistake that would calm someones reservations.
Finally, an M train pulls into the station and we hop on, taking a bench seat by one of the windows. It starts moving back toward Manhattan.
“Look at what God painted tonight,” Mom whispered, pointing to the sun setting over Manhattan’s horizon. The sky towards the front of the train was filled with brushstrokes of orange, red, gold, pink, and purple. It was one of the more spectacular sunsets I’d seen.
Flickr: bondidwhat
“Look!” she said more loudly, pointing towards the east. Not only we were witnessing a beautiful sunset, but a rare moon rising over Brooklyn’s horizon.
Sometimes missing your stop isn’t such a bad thing after all.
The Road Less Traveled
Published January 11, 2012 | A Writer’s Book of Days (01/11) – You Are In A Motel Room
Mom, my sister Alyse, and I watched from the window as a freight train rumbled on in the distance. Ten, 25, 50, 80 cars – we lost count after 100. The motel we stayed in was in the Mohonk Valley of upstate New York. My friend Erin was having her Sweet Sixteen party at her new home in Edmeston, a town that falls in the middle of the Schenectady-Syracuse-Binghamton triangle. We decided to take a road trip up from Long Island.
It’s hard to believe that this was the same New York we live in. We saw green valleys for miles and miles from the hotel room. We’d gone horseback riding, explored Howe Caverns, ate lunch in a town with only one traffic light, tried sulfuric spring water in Saratoga, and passed many, many cows. It was a far cry from the ocean beaches, Long Island Railroad, and miles and miles of strip malls I was used to.
That road trip wasn’t as glitzy as many of the vacations my friends had taken – weeks at Martha’s Vineyard, transcontinental flights to California, resort stays in Mexico. We didn’t have that kind of money.
But I didn’t know that. Mom always made sure our trips – this was our first multiple-day jaunt since I’d gone to Disney World at five – were full of fun, unique, and memorable experiences, even if they didn’t cost a lot of money.
Even though our money situation has improved drastically since then, we still don’t go for the glitz. Vacations are spent meandering and exploring, sometimes throwing the map to the wind. Luckily, my fiance Lexcie shares the same traveling philosophy. Our house is full of treasures from those trips – rocks, seashells, little trinkets picked up at a small town gift store.
It’s finding a stone with the words “THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES” painted on while horseback riding in the Mohonk Valley. Eating stinky tofu in a little mining town in Taiwan. Finding a free pair of roller blades on the side of the road while taking a different route than originally planned. Buying the most comfortable hammocks ever from a seaside shack on Prince Edward Island. Visiting Islip, England just because it has the same name of your hometown.
You never know what you’ll find along the road less traveled.
A Bad Dream Turned Reality
Published January 8, 2012 | A Writer’s Book of Days (01/08) – What I Do In The Middle Of The Night
The middle of the night is slightly more unusual for me than it is for most people. I get something called sleep paralysis. In a nutshell, my conscious awakes, but my body is still in a sleeping state. Many people experience it at least once in their lifetime – you feel like you’re awake, but you’re frozen and can’t breathe (even though you’re really still breathing). Sometimes it comes with hallucinations, perhaps feeling a presence in the room with you (which partly explains incubus and succubus folklore), and often times a feeling of flying or body detachment.
I first started getting sleep paralysis when I was 12. I was home sick with a fever, napping on the living room couch. Suddenly, it felt like there was a vise on my head. I couldn’t breath or move. I struggled to scream out, but nothing was coming out of my mouth. Suddenly, I awoke. Grandma and Mom were in the room with me, but not reacting to what just happened to me. They couldn’t see from the outside what I had been feeling in the inside and dismissed it as a bad dream.
It would then happen once in a while – sometimes I’d feel like someone was in the room with me, but I couldn’t scream out to anyone to come and help me. When I finally snapped out of the state, it was obvious that no one had been in my room. As my teenage years progressed, they began happening on a more usual basis – sometimes as much as every other day. It worried Mom to the point I was shuffled to a neurologist. He suggested an MRI and sleep study since he couldn’t immediately pinpoint what I was feeling.
It was 1999, and we had finally just got our first computer and a subscription to America Online. So I started to Google (which wasn’t called Googling back then) to see if this new-fangled Internet had anything to say. Continue reading
The Best Rejection Letter
Published January 2, 2012 | A Writer’s Book of Days (01/02): Write About A Time Someone Said No
The best rejection I received was from my first choice for college – I was wait-listed at Villanova University. At that point, I was applying for scholarships and couldn’t hold on to the hope that I’d get in at a later date. Instead, I semi-reluctantly sent in my acceptance letter for my second choice, Fordham University. I grew much warmer to the school as August came closer, but there was still a nagging “what-if.” I’d really loved Villanova.
A week after I started classes at Fordham, a plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center and the world turned upside down in an instant. But unlike many of my new friends, I lived closed to home – something that turned out to be very important to me during that tumultuous first year of college. Many weekends were spent back on Long Island as I dealt with the stress of 9/11, a horrible roommate, and the worst two semesters of my entire educational life. This is something I wouldn’t have been able to do had I been anchored to the Philadelphia area.
I sometimes wonder if I would have stuck it out at Fordham if I didn’t have that escape. I soon found my place there by joining the school newspaper, The Ram, where I started as a news writer and quickly rose to the ranks of editor and eventually editor in chief. The latter position secured me quite a few interviews post-graduation, and I quickly settled into the world of business journalism.
I wonder where I’d be today had it not been for Villanova’s rejection. Would I have lived in New York? Would I be a journalist? Would I have had all the great experiences of the past 10 years? Would I have traveled to as many places? Would I have such a diverse, wonderful group of friends?
I wouldn’t trade what I have today for all the Villanova acceptance letters in the world.