June 15, 2024

Bright and Beautiful Things

The summer before seventh grade, my parents moved to a new school district. I left all my friends I had known since kindergarten and went to a new, much smaller school, filled with kids who had known each other since they were in kindergarten at the elementary school that was within sight (two parking lots and a track away, to be precise) of our middle school. The tight bond of the kids in my new class was the first strike against me. Why bother to make a new friend when you’ve got your usual crowd?

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December 29, 2023

23…24…

I’ve been so busy working on year-end stuff, including getting Zoe ready for two weeks in South Africa, that I haven’t had time to sit down and reflect on the closing year, nor on what my goals might be for the coming year. 

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October 29, 2023

Out of the Shadows, Finally

When I was in grade school and middle school, I collected cats. Not the real ones, mind you, although I’d have been thrilled to collect those, too, had my parents allowed it. Cat figurines were my jam. I had dozens and dozens of them. So my dad, being the handy guy that he was, built me a shadowbox. It was all the rage in home decor at that time for people to use old letterpress printer’s drawers, those wooden racks that held the pieces of metal type printers would carefully arrange in a tray for the press to ink and print newspapers and flyers and bulletins. They were expensive, if I remember correctly, and somewhat hard to find due to being all the rage. Plus the slots were tiny and some of my cats weren’t. 

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June 25, 2023

Summer, summer, summertime

I haven’t been writing a lot lately, or rather, I haven’t been writing at all, really, but it’s ok. May is hell at work, absolute hell, for both me and my team and most everybody else who works at a school where children from ages four through 18 are cherished and celebrated. It’s all good stuff, but there’s an absolute fuckton of it and at the end, most of us are damn near comatose with exhaustion. By the time I left on vacation, I could hardly think straight and my motivation was subterranean. At the last moment, I remembered that I hadn’t fulfilled my goal of writing in a different library every month and I was nearly out of time. On the last day of May, I spent my lunch hour in the Upper School library, writing frantically for myself, which I hadn’t done all month. I had written so very much in May but it was all for work, which is fine, ‘tis the season and all that, but I was happy to squeak in that checkmark and not completely hose that particular 2023 goal in the fifth month.

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March 14, 2023

Dispatch From the Caribbean

I kind of wondered how I was going to meet my goal of writing in a new library every month this year, in March. It’s not great to feel as though I’m already teetering on the brink of goal collapse a mere three months in, but March is a bit crazy. I had a work trip to Kansas City that took a weekend, and a cruise in the Caribbean that is taking two. I don’t like waiting until the end of the month to try to reach a goal because then the odds are stacked against me to actually make it happen. I could get a flat tire on the way to the library. I could run into a friend in the grocery store and spend an hour catching up in the produce section, cutting into what would otherwise be writing time. No, I like to bang out that monthly goal early and then sit back in comfort knowing that I could at least check one thing off that 23 in 23 list.

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January 19, 2023

Climbing Back Out

I hit bottom, y’all. I sank down and settled into the muck and just stayed there. It was comfortable…for about five minutes. Then I got stuck.

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January 1, 2022

2022 Comes With…Teepees?

Happy New Year, friends! Kicking off 2022 with lots of good intentions for this next trip around the sun. My morning meditation told me I have to be open to new possibilities and to new people but my default position is to sit on my couch and not move so we’ll see how that goes. I did step way out of my comfort zone and sign up for a spring writers retreat in Cabo where I’ll stay in a teepee. Granted, it’s billed as a “luxury teepee” and comes with a king-size bed and a bathroom, so it’s closer to a conical hotel room than an actual teepee. It looks like a teepee on the outside, though, so let’s just stick with that.

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July 11, 2021

On Poeming

I have skimmed the vast galaxy of poetry on and off my entire literary life, but to be honest, I never felt like I truly understood it and I never developed what I’d call an appreciation for it, beyond the general idea that poets are mystical, magical creatures who bend words and ideas in ways the rest of us simply can’t. The extent of my own poetic efforts culminated in writing a series of snarky haikus with two colleagues during Poetry Month a few years ago. Enjoyable but not exactly worthy of sharing beyond our little trio.

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January 5, 2021

What I learned today: commonplace books

I learned something new today! I like to learn something new every day and this week that has included learning that there’s an animal common in North America called the pine marten, and learning that according to CDC guidelines there is a massive difference between two masked people standing right next to each other but not touching and two masked people standing right next to each other and touching. But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

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December 13, 2020

The Word of 2021

Finally found a word for the year. Let’s see if I can figure it out.

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