my so-called adult life

Now doubt you (readers?) remember being dragged by your parents to some hardware or home-related store when you were a child. Maybe it was to pick out new light fixtures, or to find a replacement filter for a furnace, or to buy a new washing machine. The field trips for replacement filters, etc. always ended [...]

Let’s say I may have taken this metaphor too far.

Let’s say you were in the habit of running on a daily basis, or at least 4 or 5 times a week. You’d been doing it for a while, so your legs were in good enough shape and your lungs were strong enough to power through several miles or more easily.
Now let’s say that one [...]

Rushing something that shouldn’t be rushed.

I’ve been making my way through the Paris Review Interviews (Vol. 1) that I got for Christmas. I read an interview, I put it down and read a novel. Then I pick it up again and read another interview. Today I read the interview with novelist and memoirist Robert Stone.
The interview covers a [...]

I’m like a squirrel.*

For years now, I have been hiding my ideas. Squirreling them away.
I bury mini-inspirations in files on my hard drive. I jot down plans for books, essays and short stories in notebooks, in between lists of groceries I need to buy, or the phone number for my dentist, or calculations on what might be in [...]

Japantown stop

Yesterday after my acupuncture* appointment I couldn’t resist a stroll around Japantown.
It’s one of my favorite places to visit in San Francisco. It’s a small taste of Japan, but enough to fill me with nostalgia over the time I’ve spent there and the friends I have who live there.
It was a perfect spring day yesterday, [...]

getting reacquainted

I spent the afternoon sifting through dusty Word documents on my hard drive: my writing. Fiction and non-, old and new, in progress, done, and abandoned.
It’s been a while since I looked at any of it. When I cannot do something that I want to, I am the kind of person who tries to put [...]