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Want to write with us?

March 10, 2011 By Paige Worthy Leave a Comment

Ever wondered, “Do I have what it takes to be on Smartly?”

bowl of cherriesLet’s see…
You’re brilliant.
You write things.
You want people to see those things.

Yes, you have what it takes!
There’s this little link just over there — see? at the right? — that says, “Join Smartly”! And if you click that, it’ll take you to a form where you can apply to be a Smartly writer.

The application process is not rigorous. Promise. Just a few short questions and some information about your writing thus far.

Already blogging on your own site?
Great. Use Smartly to showcase your favorite pieces and get a little extra exposure!

Don’t have a blog now?
Totally fine…let Smartly be the home for your sparkling wit and all those little pearls of wisdom.

Whatever your situation, there could be a nice, warm, happy place for you here.
Apply today, Awesome!

E-mail our managing editor, Paige Worthy, at paige@thesmartly.com if you have questions.

Filed Under: Entertainment, Motivate

In like a lion.

March 1, 2011 By Paige Worthy 1 Comment

I have a lot of friends who are very important.
They run their own companies and travel all over the place. They do speaking engagements and have high-profile clients they do brilliant work for.
Since I left my full-time job about six months ago, some might say I own my own business, but really, I’m just trying to scrape together enough work to pay my bills. I spend the rest of my time just trying to prove I’m not a total waste of oxygen.
Oh, and get dates. (Which is another discussion for another time, but here’s a preview: No, it’s not going well.)

Even on my busiest days, I still find plenty of time to read people’s blogs, write idiotic tweets about the fact that I’m going to see Justin Bieber: Never Say Never and take pictures of my new kitten.
But trust me when I say that screwing around on the Internet is not the same as taking time out of the day to live. Relax.
Shrug off the feelings of creeping isolation and feel like I’m actually part of the world.

When I was still working in the suburbs, hating my life, I would spiral into this soul-crippling rage as I steered the Shining Camry back to the city. Because I’d spent the whole day living out my slow, painful death in Arlington Heights.
And, inevitably, the traffic would jam up around Park Ridge. (Oh, how I do not miss that life.) Instead of pulling over and stabbing a pedestrian — not that there would have been many to choose from — I turned the radio to the classic station and just…breathed it in. Instead of sending irate texts at stoplights, I closed my eyes for a few seconds and remembered that there was more to life than my horrific commute.
Little things like that made all the difference. They always have.

Fast-forward to the present: The past few weeks were kind of awful. Really awful, actually. Related in equal parts to the above statements about the creeping isolation of freelance life and date-getting.
And for a most of that time, I wallowed. Until I realized that’s not the kind of person I want to be: the kind who stays in bed until 11 a.m., the kind who eats her feelings in the form of four meals a day (plus snacks), the kind who writes hundreds of thinly veiled tweets a day about her problems.
So one ordinary day, I got out of bed and took my life back in tiny increments.
I made a to-do list and attacked it.
I ate a nice lunch and played with my kitten — just to play with her, not to take pictures I could tweet later.
I rode my bike to the Gap and browsed the sale rack, tried on jeans and found a pair that actually fit. I bought socks covered in tiny flowers.
I called my mother as my laptop booted up. I had a few extra minutes, because my computer is a piece of crap.
Inside the café, one of three little girls who had been running around for half an hour marched right up to me, twirled her cup proudly in her hands said, “This has coffee in it!”
By the time I was halfway through my iced tea, I was in love with the world again.
Then again, it doesn’t take a lot for me. But it’s not so much the effort it takes as it is remembering how wonderful it feels when I make it.

March begins today, and spring is on its way. In like a lion, right?
And that lion’s roaring that there’s always time to fall in love with the world.

Filed Under: Humor, Spirituality Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

The same horizon.

February 14, 2011 By Paige Worthy 2 Comments

My flight left from O’Hare’s F terminal, a neglected wing made up of intricately lettered and numbered gates. Outside, it was uniformly grey, from the sky to the tarmac, the jetways to the trucks carrying black suitcases and colorless in-flight meals. Grey, grey, grey. Oprah shouted, muted, on a TV across the way; she has a sister now. Like bingo hosts, gate agents shouted letters and numbers at random: gate changes, flight delays and estimated arrival times.
When my flight’s number was up, I shuffled to the gate, pinged my ticket and ducked through the entrance to the tiny Embraer puddle jumper, the Barbie fun jet, that would take me to Louisville for the week.

The force of take-off pulled me back against my seat; I closed my eyes to fend off the dizziness and pressure. It didn’t occur to me that the sky would look any different as we sailed above the cloud cover; these aren’t the sorts of things I think about when I fly. I’m not sure what I think about when I fly.
But tonight, when I opened my eyes, my tiny plane had become an ocean liner, sailing a sea of snowy-white winter clouds tinged with dark blue, rippling through the thick, industrial-plastic windows with every move of my head.
The horizon was a glowing mimosa, a soft yellow with streaks of brilliant pink and purple, crowned by a searing red orb so bright it hurt to look at. I did it anyway.
The setting sun cast a roving glow over the inside of the plane, little boxes of orange light setting passengers’ faces on fire against the opposite wall.
An older man in the aisle seat next to me had a salt-and-pepper mustache and pockmarked skin; I’d place him in a generation that still fervently believes in getting up every morning and dressing in a blazer and dress pants, putting in a full day’s work, finding satisfaction in a job well done. He scrawled boldface comments in neat, straight lines across the back page of a paper about critically ill patients; I wondered what could be so captivating about his article that he didn’t even notice that sky was magic.
And it never stops. The sky never stops; the magic never stops. We don’t live in a snow globe or a terrarium. Infinity is up there. Out there. Pure nothingness. Or everything-ness. Forever and ever, amen.
Does the man in the aisle seat ever even consider that? Or did he stop imagining what was beyond him with the startling realization he’d find out for himself, for sure, sooner or later?
Back on the ground, the lukewarm orange of fluorescent streetlights snaked out from the center of some nameless Rorschach of a city. They’d had sun today. I wonder how it looked to them as it set, all the way down there.

It’s funny to think their horizon was the same as mine.

Filed Under: Motivate, Spirituality

Scenes from a coffee shop.

February 2, 2011 By Paige Worthy 10 Comments

My usual seat in the front corner of Intelligentsia on Randolph was taken. I retreated to a tiny table in the back of the café, under a barrel light fixture with vintage bulbs. The glowing filaments gave off a deceptive warmth.

Behind the bar, the fashionably bored baristas I’ve come to recognize (one I lovingly refer to as “hipster Jesus”) spend five minutes making one cup of coffee and carve out intricate designs in the foam of the lattes. I order plain coffee, take it without milk or sugar, in large part because I can’t imagine disturbing their art by taking that first sip.

People get lost on their way to the bathroom. This is not a big café, but it’s easy to be intimidated here. If it’s possible for a space to be aloof…
I appointed myself to the post of bathroom-key director: They’re next to the pastry case, attached to the ends of wooden spoons.

The view on the world from that corner was simply wonderful:
Hipsters in shabby clothes I can only assume they bought to offset the cost of their iPhones and MacBook Pros. Tourists lugging their carry-on suitcases and bags full of purchases from a day on Michigan Avenue. Business people gossiping under the guise of a quick meeting outside the office. Ambitious Columbia students getting a jump on the semester, studying hastily scrawled note cards and jotting thoughts into spiral-bound notebooks.

A little girl in a full-length, cotton candy–pink jacket and matching earmuffs, preened her younger brother, retying his scarf and smoothing his hood, while their mother ordered her latte.

Two employees, one buffalo plaid–clad and another Sinead O’Connor–buzzed, interviewed a barista hopeful at the bar along the wall. Coffee dreamer was describing the most recent coffees he’d tasted: like biting into a blueberry; creamy and juicy like peaches.

A man bundled in a long wool coat and purple scarf, fresh out of the office for the day, walked in with a homeless-looking woman. If she wasn’t homeless, she was at least from a far different walk of life than his. He bought her a latte, chatted as they waited. He walked out with her, like they’d become friends during their short time together. It’s not the sort of thing you see happen here.
There are panhandlers lining the sidewalks that border Macy’s on State Street, knowing they’ll collect at least a bit of change from the wide-eyed tourists clamoring to see the holiday windows and famous Marshall Field’s clock.
But there’s rarely any interaction.
Refreshing.

Two music students living on opposite ends of town — Jonathan’s at Northwestern and John David’s at St. Xavier — met in the middle. They were comparing latte art, conspiring over YouTube videos on a tiny iPhone screen, talking about trumpet fanfares and composing new works.
“I’d take Berlioz over Wagner any day.”
I butted in on their conversation; Jonathan used the word “sanguine” in casual conversation.
We’re Facebook friends now.
As I packed up my computer to leave the shop for the day, they were talking about movies from childhood: Rockadoodle and The Brave Little Toaster.

The coffee wasn’t good today, though it was made with love: It was bitter; it tasted nothing like biting into a blueberry and had none of the toothsome, sexual qualities of a peach.
And I got none of the work done I’d intended to do; my wandering eyes and curious ears got the best of me this time.
But I got my three dollars’ worth in caffeine jitters and people watching. Work can wait until I’m alone in my apartment, now a bare-walled maze of heavy moving boxes; today wasn’t a day to let the world pass me by.

Read more from Paige at paigeworthy.com.

Filed Under: Entertainment, Humor, Motivate

Helter-skelter.

December 1, 2010 By Paige Worthy 2 Comments

Café Maude is Kellee’s Friday lunch spot. Everyone knows her there. They laugh when she pulls in at 10:58 a.m. and waits for them to open two minutes later, orders her first glass of wine and sets up shop for the afternoon. They take good care of her.

It was only Thursday, but Kellee wanted me to experience Café Maude. So we pulled ourselves together and piled into a MINI Cooper named Moxie, bound for Café Maude. It was nice to be the passenger after my seven-hour drive into the Twin Cities the day before.

Minnehaha Parkway — I dare you to say it and not feel a twinge of glee — becomes 50th Street after a certain point, connecting bike trails and a few of those 10,000 lakes and winding through residential areas dotted with sweet little bungalows and beautiful vintage stucco homes.

Moxie handled Minnehaha’s curves like a racer, and Kellee knew those roads like the back of her hand. We whipped over the rivers and through the woods, the previous weekend’s foot of snow melting into mere inches, mostly grey slush, but still enough to delight me.

As we crossed Nicollet Avenue, an old woman in a red sedan with not a care in the world — including what color her light was — blew through the intersection, straight toward us.
Kellee saw the other car first; I didn’t even get the customary string of curse words out before we’d made impact. She braked hard, swerved and hit the back end of the sedan with the front corner of the MINI, sending the sedan careening, spinning, across the intersection until it came to a stop, 180 degrees later, facing the right way in the wrong lane.
Kellee and I were both strangely calm; she flipped on the emergency flashers and got out immediately to assess the situation. The other woman, who must have been at least 80, stayed in her car, barely rolling down the driver’s side window when Kellee approached to ask if she was all right.

No one was hurt.

But the other woman didn’t even know she’d been speeding toward a red. Thought we were in the wrong; thought we’d hit her.
The police came a few minutes later and set her straight; they decided not to ticket her for the signal violation, but they found her at fault for the accident and ordered a physical to determine whether she’s still fit to drive at all.

Talk about a wake-up call.

All told, things that day could have been much worse. Moxie got towed to a body shop later that day, after we picked up my rental car and took to the mean streets once again. We finally made it to Maude and drank much-needed glasses of wine, and ate warm soup and fries with creamy truffle sauce.

But in the course of conversation, I realized that if we’d hit that intersection half a second later, that old woman would have plowed straight into the passenger-side door, and I’d have ended up in the hospital with broken bones, a concussion or worse.

Or worse.

A fact that didn’t shake me up as much as it did shake a little sense into me. They say near-death experiences will do that to you. But they also say these things happen in slow motion. In my case, they — whoever they are — would be wrong.

I’m not sure slow motion even exists for me, though. In large part, life runs helter-skelter at me and I rush right back at it. Two linebackers at the line of scrimmage. If anything it’s elastic, accelerated to dizzying Hadron Collider rates then stretched like Silly Putty until I’m dangling precariously, spread too thin, barely holding together.

I’m not sure where this leaves me but grateful that I did live to drink celebratory wine at Café Maude, help cobble together information for insurance agents and body-shop employees, bask in the lovely pre-winter glow of a charming new city and rush headlong into another ordinary day.

Filed Under: Misc

On joy.

August 25, 2010 By Paige Worthy 2 Comments

Change overpowers me lately. My life has consisted of two major components in the past couple of weeks: networking and drinking.
Or, more often, a combination of the two.
I’m not proud that drinking has again become a favorite pastime, but when in Rome, do as the Romans do: Get drunk.
(Right?)

Sleep has not been a priority.
Nor has eating healthy meals. Or eating much at all, really, except when I binge on party food. Like the soggy sushi and subpar Chicago-style pizza I inhaled last night, desperate for familiar flavors and a little satisfaction of the culinary sort.
As for exercise…well, I don’t even know what that is anymore. How I managed to do all my drinking and networking a couple of years ago and still kept in shape is beyond me. Absolutely beyond.

I keep telling myself that once this transition is over, I’ll continue in pursuit of those healthy habits, sleeping and eating and exercising. Things my therapist calls “self care.” I’ll be that work-from-home badass who gets it all done and makes it look goooooooooooooood. Yep. A girl can dream.

In truth, these things are never as easy to accomplish as it seems. Becoming a badass of the sane assortment will take more dedication and presence of mind than I’m capable of now.

But there’s one sanity I have left, one I’m unwilling to let go of in my haste to hurtle myself into this new professional realm of self-employment. And that is joy.
Joy in the smallest increments, in moments so tiny they’re imperceptible to anyone but me.

Alone in my little apartment with NPR in the morning; familiar voices as I step into the shower. The first of the day’s business news at 6:50 a.m. as I finish breakfast, switch off the A/C, slip into my shoes and lock up the apartment.
Knowing that won’t be the case for much longer.

Peering over the shoulder of a fellow Metra rider, conservatively clad in a blue polo and khaki pants, and noticing that he’s on his laptop updating his Adult Friend Finder profile. I wanted so badly to ask him about it. But he was jumpy, nearly got off at the wrong stop.
Your secret’s safe with me. Kind of.

Howling fighter jets over Lake Michigan, the oohs and ahhs of onlookers packed like sardines along the shore. Dragonflies hovered in droves over the searingly hot flat rocks near the water; darting in and out of one another’s flight paths, they blended seamlessly with the Blue Angels as the Air & Water Show screamed to a glorious finish.
Squealing with glee, not caring one bit that the show is barely disguised military propaganda. Where do I sign?

A penthouse apartment that stares out at the John Hancock building, the lake sparkling beyond it. Little white sailboats casting tiny shadows on the water as the sky turns orange, then pink, then violet and deepens to nighttime navy. The first chill in the air as fall stages a coup.

Buying vegetables for the first time in a week at a downtown grocery store, nearly colliding with a chef desperately seeking as many jars of marshmallow Fluff as he can gather. The restaurant is running low on supplies needed for Nutella crepes.
Suggesting aisle 5 and hearing a breathless thank-you behind me as I bagged my broccoli crowns and he rushed toward the registers with 15 white jars. He cleaned them out.

A small crowd of strangers perched on countertops and blue plastic coolers, red cups in hand. Nick Drake on vinyl at 2 a.m. An old velvet sofa in a foreign apartment in Lincoln Square. Girlish goosebumps as hands trace lines alone my neck and shoulders, genuine affection for the first time since, well. Since then.
Not knowing if I’m ready but easing out all the same.

Big, wet kisses from an oversized golden retriever puppy on a walk with his owner. Well worth the 30-second setback during my commute to stand there on the corner, stroking his soft yellow fur, feeling loved before the morning dew had even evaporated.
Retributions for the previous day’s frustrations, when all I wanted was “flowers and puppy kisses.”
Someone was listening.

The solid eight hours of rest, the balanced diet, the morning jogs and weekend yoga. They’re a ways off. But the joy won’t stop. It rushes at me, overwhelms me more than the stacks of business cards that litter my apartment, is more dizzying than the nights of free drinks and the next-day vertigo.
Change overpowers me. But somehow, this flood of joy keeps me grounded.

Previously posted on Paige’s personal site, where you can read even more of her writing, here.

Filed Under: Misc, Motivate, Spirituality

Tread lightly.

August 4, 2010 By Paige Worthy 24 Comments

I once shared an apartment with my boyfriend in a spotless, posh neighborhood populated mostly with Maclaren-pushing, NPR-listening, boutique puppy–petting young parents. That was the life I wanted, not too far down the road. A beautiful, bouncing baby, a French bulldog, enough money to dine out often and vacation once in a while.

We were making plans. We signed the lease to prove it. We bought a queen-size bed.

Then I realized the plans we were making just…weren’t the plans I wanted to make for myself. So I made the hardest decision of my life thus far.

The situation was complicated; a baby or bulldog wouldn’t have fixed it. Quite the opposite, probably. But the solution was simple: In late June, I made the then-unthinkable decision to move out of that airy, sunny apartment. Our love nest. I left the shared bed — that whole shared life — behind, determined to learn to sleep — and live — on my own again.

As the move wound down, I stepped outside with yet another armload of belongings, my shoulders tight and head held high as I could muster — to salvage my dignity, to keep the tears from rolling down in a cascade of mascara and makeup — and felt a crunch under my feet. I looked down and saw a baggie full of animal crackers, discarded from a stroller en route to a nearby park.

Physically crushing all those dreams we had. Maybe. I kicked it aside and walked to the car, loaded the trunk and drove away.

Watch your step. Tread lightly.

The neighborhood I moved to is densely packed with hipsters, the kind who smoke American Spirits and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and listen to Animal Collective and have tattoos that they’ll regret when they’re older. They’re everything I’ve ever rolled my eyes at, in person form. And somehow, I’m still convinced they’re generally cooler than me. Much cooler. It was never the life I wanted. But somehow, I found myself signing a lease on a tiny one-bedroom in a four-unit building. My neighbors are artists.

And…actually? They’re not any cooler than me.

I have a bit more time to myself lately. Introspection is a given. Going through the content from the past year and a half of the blog that bears my name, there are long moments where I can linger, look back fondly on. There are parts of me that will never change. But I am not that girl anymore. I’m not — for now — that baby-bundle hopeful with puppy-dog eyes. Nor am I the drunken cyclone who, in summer 2008, tore through the Chicago singles scene. This time around, I will temper the tempest. I foresee no path of destruction in my wake as I move cautiously forward.

I will tread lightly as I make my way down this road.

But shortly after making that promise to myself, I looked behind me on the sidewalk and saw an adhesive felt mustache — a symbol of the drunk-on-a-school-night, photobooth-snapshot lifestyle of so many neighborhood hipsters — crushed under my spike heel as I walked to work this morning.

That’s the way the animal cracker crumbles, I guess. I’ll tread lightly, but there’s no way I won’t leave my footprint.

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Filed Under: Misc, Motivate