Category Archives: General

“A family must never be a topic of conversation.” ~ The Dowager Countess, ‘Downton Abbey’

A more fitting quote could not have been conjured as I sit here on a Sunday night watching the Season Premiere of ‘Downton Abbey’. Following a day – well, a month – of family issues, I was on the verge of purging all that’s been going on, and writing it all out here, but they aren’t my issues at stake, and not my place to speak of them. Sometimes it’s good to have a reminder from a Dowager. Sometimes I’m too blunt, too coarse, for my own good. For the good of others too… perhaps more-so.

And so I find relief and escape in the fading aristocracy of a family, and world, very much removed from my own. A soap opera with British manners, and Dame Maggie Smith – I’ve missed this. It’s so much nicer when the intrigue and the drama is made-up – even if what goes on there mirrors what is happening here. Properties come under peril, histories come under scrutiny – the language of a family is rife with particular dialects, subtle nuances, tricky traps, emotional minefields, and hidden pockets of hurt. You can change almost everything about your life today – your friends, your lovers, your husbands, your wives – but you cannot change your family. A lot may have shifted in the world since the time of ‘Downtown Abbey’, but that much remains the same.

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of www.ALANILAGAN.com, we have posted my last five Projects on ‘The Projects‘ page. Way back in the beginning, when I started all of my sinning, ‘The Projects‘ were the impetus for getting online – a repository of written and photographic work that the world could peruse. A decade later, they are still the main outlet for my creative passions, the works where all my energy, anger, desire, joy, and sorrow find release. If you’re lucky, you can find redemption in expression, and salvation in sharing. Like so much of the world, we recall most recent events first, and so the order of The Projects begins with the last project I did:

I invite you – nay, implore you – to take your time with these Projects. Bookmark them and come back if you can’t do it right at this moment – as they are the heart and soul of this website, and they are the work of which I am proudest, the work into which I poured everything I had. Some artists want money. Some artists want acclaim. Some artists want applause. All I ask is that you look, that you read, and that you take a little piece of me with you when you go.

Ten years ago my body looked like that.

And ten years ago I started www.ALANILAGAN.com.

Obviously, a lot has changed for both.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of this website. Back in January of 2003, we first opened the portal into my unruly patch of the internet – two months prior to its scheduled opening (thank you, Pat Troy) – and since then I’ve never looked back. At the time, it was nothing like it is today. There was no daily blog, there was but a scant collection of Photographs, and my Projects were in-flux and too ponderous to properly post in full. All I wanted back then was a repository for some of my work, a place to which I could point whenever someone asked me what I did and ‘Keyboard Specialist 1’ failed to encompass it properly.

Ten years later, an eternity for a personal website, I am taking a moment to give myself, and those who have helped out so graciously throughout the years, a little pat on the back. Look at The Projects. Check out The Pictures. Read The Writings. We’ve come a long way. I now post an average of three posts a day, occasionally less, and often more (catch us on a day like Super Bowl Sunday and you’re likely to see multiple posts on cocktails, jockstraps, Madonna, shirtless football players, and guys in their underwear – all in honor of America’s favorite game.) That goes seven days a week, 365 days a year. You know those other sites that take weekends and vacations off? I don’t. When I’m out of town, I have posts programmed. When I go out to a party on Friday night, knowing it will be a rough Saturday, I make sure to have something set up before I sip my first cocktail. It takes a lot of work to make it look easy. Why do I bother? Because I know what it’s like to visit your favorite website and not have an update in days, weeks, months, and I would never want to do that to someone who is good enough to stop by and give me a moment of their time.

I don’t get paid for this. I’ve never received one dollar for doing what I do here, and I never bothered to seriously look into that because it’s always been a labor of love, a creative outlet worth ten times the amount in therapy. There may come a time when ads start popping up (and if any advertiser wants in and can figure out how to get it all set up, shoot me a message) but even that won’t change the commitment and promise I’ve made to you. You’ve seen me through some of the most difficult, and some of the most happy, moments of my life. In ways, you’ve seen me through more things than my closest friends and family have, simply by being here more than any of them have, and that’s a strange and wonderful thing.

I’d like to thank the ongoing cast of characters that wanders in and among my online world here, including my  husband Andy, my parents, my brother, my niece and nephew, and the friends who have become like family – Suzie, Chris, JoAnn, Kira – as well as the webmasters who have kept this site going when I thought HTML stood for something, well, decidedly different than what it does – Pat Troy, who started it all, and Skip Montross, who made it into what it now is. I couldn’t have done any of this without all those people, and more. You would be part of that more – yes, you, who are reading this now and wondering if I mean you – I do. It always falls short when all I can muster is a ‘Thank you’, but it’s a heartfelt one, because as much as I want to believe I could do this alone, I couldn’t. Nor would I ever want to – this journey we’re on is meant to be shared.

With that, I invite you to relax, pull up a chair and a favorite cocktail, and settle in for another year of www.ALANILAGAN.com.

It is at this point where we take a brief pause and prepare for the tenth anniversary of this website. Work has been completed on retooling things for just such an occasion, and we are ready to begin the celebration just as soon as some minor housekeeping is finished. For the moment I need a little break. Hence the shirtless pics and the buying of some time while I sleep in and greet the day when I’m good and ready. Trust me, the wait will be worth it. Get ready for ten…

Matchy-matchy is rarely a good thing, as seen in this coat/hat combo.

They aren’t the biggest fruit in the Winter bowl, but they carried just enough color to catch my eye, especially when highlighted by the white of the snow and set against the pale blue of the sky. If my memory of spring blossoms is true, these are cherries. Not the kind you eat (and even the birds seem to have left these largely alone), but the ornamental sort grown for their blooms and foliage.

You have to look a little harder to find such color in the Winter months, and by March these will no longer be half as bright, but for now they’re up, dangling in the wintry sky, daring the wind to take them away.

Dashing and daring, courageous and caring,

Faithful and friendly with stories to share

All through the forest, they sing out in chorus

Marching along as their song fills the air…

Sitting on my parents’ family room couch, my brother brings up the above clip on his phone. It is Alica Keys on Jimmy Fallon, singing a theme that is both familiar and foreign. A vague Saturday-morning recollection of cartoons and chaos strikes my mind. Ahh, yes, the Gummi Bear theme – one of the greatest opening cartoon themes ever written. Side by side in the exact spot where we spent many a Saturday morning, my brother and I listened to the Gummi Bears theme, greeting a New Year in our childhood home.

Magic and mystery are part of their history,

Along with the secret of gummi-berry juice

Their legend is growing, they take pride in knowing

They’ll fight for what’s right in whatever they do…

And for extra-old-school authenticity, here’s the original version.

Let’s begin without a lot of fanfare. Let’s begin without any pomposity. Let’s begin where it all began, with a few snapshots – rough and imperfect and rudimentarily raw. Let’s return to the very basic tenets of sharing and exploring and creating. Back then it was the simple notion of telling a story.

It was the way we went around our childhood classrooms, each student giving a brief synopsis of their summer vacation. Some of us listened, some of us merely waited for the chance to speak (so sure that ours was the story of greatest excitement), and some of us did a little of both, leaning in to those who mattered most, politely ignoring those who dismissed us in the past. We each had a part in the play at hand, and it was how we learned to communicate and connect.

This is a far cry from kindergarten, (what I would give for nap time at any point during the day), but many of those lessons remain relevant. It’s not enough to share. It’s not enough to speak. It’s not enough to pretend that the world is only there to hear what your summer story is. Everyone has a summer story. Some are better than others, and sometimes it’s the way in which they’re told that matters most, but all of them matter – to at least one person in the world. That is enough. That is all.

We don’t have to be perfect. We certainly didn’t start off that way. We won’t end that way. And what’s in-between is as far from perfection as we can humanly get. It will be okay to make mistakes, to blink when the shutter goes off, to miss the proper punctuation, to run off with a sentence here and there.

The greatest thing is that we’re all in it together. Like that elementary school circle, when we first faced one another as children – whispering about Halloween costumes, making paper angels dusted with glittery snow, exchanging Valentines, and fidgeting until it was time for kickball – we are still the same in so many ways. There is more that we share than we don’t.

New Year’s Day was never one of my favorite holidays. It meant the end of Christmas vacation. It meant the return to the Winter doldrums. It meant a bunch of family had to be endured (and enjoyed, truth be told). And all because of the change of the calendar year. At the very least they could have spaced it out a few months, instead of coming right on the heels of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Yet here it is – another baby to coddle and coo over, hoping that this time, this year, we can make it all right, make it all okay, send this one off into the world prepared and perfect, even when history, and every other year, tells us differently. We are resilient creatures, if a bit foolish, but it’s all we know, and we still do the best we can do. When I look back at the year that’s gone, and the year to come, it makes me glad that we are still trying, that we still care. The world can and may crumble around us, but we won’t give up. In a place where cynicism so often gets heard above all else, I offer this quiet whisper of hope to start us off. I’ll do my best to keep you entertained, if you’ll do your part to keep me safely grounded.

Happy New Year.

Having finally had this year’s very-late first proper snowfall, it’s time to explore the wonders of the white stuff. Almost every kid loves the snow, as much for its fun aspects as its power to close school. For me, it was, and remains, the enchanting blanket that transformed forests and streets, houses and hills, the ugly and the dead, into something magical, something beautiful, something pristine and perfect. It was, far quicker than time, the great equalizer. It stilled and silenced, and hushed the world with one fell swoop.

When I was little, I used to traipse out into the forest behind our house, bundled up in a snowsuit so heavy and thick I could barely walk, in moon boots and mittens so clumsy it’s a wonder I didn’t simply roll about like some tottering weeble. Somehow I made it into the woods, where I would spend hours sliding down banks, making snow forts, hiding beneath the snowdrifts beside drooping evergreens, and imagining worlds of solitude and wonder. I wandered alone in the beauty, content with what was suddenly sublime. Trails of squirrels and rabbits were ghostly reminders that others were around, somewhere, and it was enough just to know. The quiet back then was not eerie, the stillness not worrisome, and when it snows now I go back to that peace, and I remember.