The chromosome divides. Multiply and thrive. And the strong survive. And the strong survive.

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"Jesus reinvents Judaism. Duffy reinvents catchy naivete. ~~ Injections of Juvaderm reinvent the aging face. Thom Browne reinvents the male suit, and therby, male calves. The beverage industry reinvents the movie theatre as a high-fructose-corn-syrup dump site. Deaf, Beethoven reinvents the sonata. ~~ Carmel Snow reinvents Harper's Bazaar. The roulette wheel spins. John Cage reinvents silence. Talkative Isaac Mizrahi reinvents Target, and Target returns the favor. Biogenetics reinvents chicken. Mark Spitz reinvents the bathing suit. Brooke Sheilds reinvents eyebrows; Richard Prine reinvents sleaze by appropriating a photo of 10-year-old Brooke, nude. The StairMaster reinvents the schlep. ~~ England reinvents tea. Tit for tat; Bollywood reinvents Hollywood. ~~ The word processor reinvents the typewriter. We're supposed to be thrilled. D.H. Lawrence reinvents the sexiness of soot. American Apparel reinvents men's briefs as penny candy. China reinvents capitalism. Alec baldwin, leaving a message for his daughter, reinvents the rant. Calm and collected, Marcel Duchamp's urinal reinvents the museum. ~~ George Duboeuf reinvents Beaujolais. Like a ripe grape on joy's tounge, James Dean reinvents sensitivity, anticipating Heath Ledger, who reinvents James Dean. Alice Waters reinvents nearby vegetables. Thomas Alva Edison reinvents kissing. ~~ Judy Garland reinvents herself by spawning Liza, and then Liza rejuvenates Judy: chain reaction. Jung fails to reinvent Freud; psychotropics reinvent melancholy. The Buddha reinvents sitting and breathing. ~~ Colette -- the fashion boutique, not the writer -- reinvents replenishment by serving 80 different waters at Le Water Bar. Jose Saramago, writing the novel "Blindness," reinvents apocalypse; on YouTube, which reinvents TV, he appears, watching the movie "Blindness," starring Julianne Moore, who reinvents Revlon. ~~ Nietzsche harped on Eternal Recurrance: dreck keeps happening. Freud understood the fine line between reiteration and transformation. Suffering a repetitive compulsion, we aspire to reinvent trauma by replaying it. We destroy the planet, we keep on destroying it. ~~ Michael Jackson reinvents childhood; scandal reciprocates, reinventing Michael. Eugene Atget reinvents fin de siecle Paris by photographing it before it dies. James Joyce does the same, in words, for Dublin. Much later, Zaha Hadid sees the possibility of squiggles, and turns them into buildings. ~~ Money-fueled, Dubai reinvents Vegas. The Supreme Court reinvents the Constitution. Antifacist, Pablo Casals reinvents the cello. ~~ The iPod reinvents the ear's interior. The cellphone reinvents rudeness and renames it "communication." Martin Luther King Jr. reinvents civil disobedience. Madonna names her 2004 world tour Re-Invention. Berlin reinvents itself after 1945. Rituals of expiation -- Yom Kippur, the confessional -- reinvent culpability. ~~ Why ruminate on "reinvention" now? Like Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie, we want to do good. We want to remedy crimes against humanity, to put a hex on torturers and environment wreckers. We want to stave off avian flu. DDT reinvents spring, said Rachel Carson, who evangelism deserves repeating. ~~ Western Europe reinvents socialism. The W.P.A. reinvents labor. Legal abortion reinvents liberty. Didn't J.F.K. once mention a torch? Let's get back to work."

-- Wayne Koestenbaum, NYT Magazine.




Reinvention. Reinvention is the sonic boom of change, the brother of growth. There is a time when the catalyst hits, and suddenly what was becomes what needs to change, and then existence stops, or reinvention happens.

In the past year, America began to reinvent politics and leadership -- in doing so we reinvented hope within ourselves. We went from being jaded -- from brushing the dust of repeated failure off our hands and walking away -- to genuinely believing in the worth of this country and the possibility of salvation. We let ourselves hope, a vulnerability that we had previously closed off. So by bestowing the responsbility we bestowed on one man, we also reinvented ourselves. Now the doors are opena and the gloves are off. The world is different.

That's not to say all reinvention is a success. Sometimes the reinvention is a step backward. Sometimes it fails. Sometimes we return to the way things were. It might happen. We began to push, to push and fight, to reinvent government and system and America itself (some people had been pushing and fighting for a while, already).

But a truly great fighter doesn't win one round and return to their corner. They win a round knowing its just the first push. A fighter who really wins... they don't win and then relax. They win and then they push and fight harder the second round. And then the third. And then the fourth...

Don't sit back. We just got started.

Reinvention.

I've been reinventing, too, in the past few months. What does home mean? What does happiness mean? What does this all mean? I defined. I redefined. I redefined again. And to redefine means to reinvent.

Where does joy lie? How do you tread the thin line between endless possibilites, and the great vacuum that is endless, undefined possibility? Thrilling and terrifying.

We define ourselves by our goals, by what we want and how we define the journey of our life -- when we achieve a goal, we must reinvent ourselves -- we have to reorient towards a new goal. But first we need to redefine what we want. It reminds me of Princess Bride, when Inigo Montoya finally kills the Prince. He says something like: "My whole life, I have dedicated to revenge. Now that the revenge part is over, what do I do?"

I've always been a reinventor. Constantly changing, constantly redefining, changing goals, changing what I wanted, changing myself in reaction to things that happened. Yet... I feel for the most part, those changes were surface, or just beneathe it. You can't really reinvent something still so undefined. Its the difference between erasing pencil lines, and erasing oil paint. Once there's really pigment, shadow, delineation really laid down, it gets messy to change the picture.
Now -- well, now the picture is really taking shape. There's a lot on there, solidly on there. And so to reinvent, to redefine... its much harder, and it goes much, much deeper. So much has been laid out on the past 6 months... don't worry, I'm not going to keep going with the painting metaphor.

Its surprising, the things that have changed. No, not surprising. Shocking. Things have happened that even though hoped for or against it, I really didn't believe it could really ever change. I doubted. And then it did. I didn't really believe Obama would win, I'll admit that. I hoped -- REALLY hoped -- but I didn't have faith.
Its hard to have faith when precedence has demonstrated continually disappointing results. One might call that "blind faith", in a way: to continue to hope, simply based on true belief, when everything has proved otherwise. Science would call you foolhardy. Medicine would call you a masochist.

I had really lost that ability, the ability to simply hope based on blind faith. To have faith based on blind hope.

In every facet of my life, and in every aspect, I didn't have it. I didn't believe Obama could win, I didn't believe this country could be saved (maybe it can't), I didn't believe that I could achieve certain things, get certain things, live a certain way...
Who can I blame? Really, only myself. I can attribute it to things or incidents... but the only person who can allow the loss of faith is yourself.

And so: I am trying to reinvent faith. To allow myself to believe. I find that place again, childishly optomistic or hopeful or sure... (a space inside yourself that holidays are supposed to revive, I've heard.) Its against my nature, which is often logical and scientific to a fault, to put all money down on a bet that I don't know the odds of. And to admit that maybe, there are factors in the equation I don't know about. This great big terrifying universe of possibility and reinvention. To throw it all in there. To reach down and reinvent from a deep, deep place. To change the actual structure of who I have become --to allow faith to be reinvented.