Creative vs. professional life

Now that I’ve finished most of my grad school coursework, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about What I Should Do With My Life. This is, and has always been, a fairly wrenching experience for me. My problem has generally been this: I don’t want to pick just one thing to do.
It’s not just [...]

Getting a Life

It’s been a while since I’ve actually written anything here about writing…a sad state of affairs, since writing is supposed to be the focus of this blog. My silence on the subject is completely attributable to two things:
1. While I am doing some freelance work, I am not writing creatively. I have been doing so [...]

seeking summer

We attended a wedding in Wine Country over the weekend. It was sunny and summer-warm. It’s hard not to enjoy a weekend full of good wine, beautiful scenery (the wedding was at a private estate tucked away on a hill overlooking a valley full of vineyards), and some time by the pool. The wedding was [...]

John McPhee

There’s a pleasant little review of John McPhee’s lastest book in the NY Times today by Adam Hochschild…The book is Uncommon Carriers, a collection of transportation-related portraits. By pleasant I mean that it’s probably hard to come up with criticisms of McPhee’s work, and this review is for the most part appropriately reverent. Hochschild has [...]

The Writer’s Block

When I was in Boston, I joined a gym that was much nicer than the gym I frequent in San Francisco (unfortunately with a matching nice price, but it was a block away from my apartment, the ideal gym location, so I had to do it). The gym, as part of its overall niceness, always [...]

Lots of balls in the air

One thing about school is that when classes are in session, that’s all you really worry about. You have school, and you have your personal life, which, when you are in school, generally includes drinking beer, watching movies and just generally hanging out.
I’m now in a weird school limbo —I’m still enrolled in school, and [...]

Sit down, you bum!

I’m a little behind on my posting here. I’m a little behind on a lot of things, actually: my thesis, the freelance work I have due soon, fashion, the eight ball, the curve, the times…well, you get the idea. So I thought, what better way to catch up than to waste — ahem — spend [...]

Growlier than a jaguar with no capybara to snack on

Wow, have I been in a bad mood. I was in such a funk that posting here would have frightened all five of my readers away. You’ll be relieved to know that I have snapped out of it. No more funk. Sometimes getting out of the house and doing something fun will do that for [...]

Sunny California

We went for a hike yesterday in Marin. It was the first time I’d been hiking in ages — since last summer! We woke to blazing sun and a shockingly fog-free sky, so we knew we had to go.
We planned to do a 5.5 mile loop that’s one of my favorites. But a little ways [...]

Shonen Knife

I was cruising on iTunes this evening, and I came across a band I used to love but had kind of forgotten about, Shonen Knife, the all-girl Japanese punk(?) band. I am a fan again. How can you resist a song called “Giant Kitty”? Especially with lyrics like this:
Big big big big cat!
Big big big [...]