Category: life
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a hundred days and counting
As of today, I’ve written a blog post every day for the last hundred days. I didn’t set out with the express intent of blogging every day. I’ll be honest: I hate blogging. I’ve never thought I was good at it. Here’s why I continue to do it: It’s practice…
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late night seeing
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I poured a drink, put on a record, and opened my notebook. This happens every so often–I sit straight up in bed and feel compelled to make art. A few years back, I’d make collages or write poems. Stranded in the Midwest though, drawing…
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the company I keep
When I started practicing Transcendental Meditation, the teacher would talk about how important it was to surround yourself with good people. “You are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with,” he would say. I’ve been pretty lucky to have had some good friends and…
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unplugged
Last fall, I watched the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, and immediately deleted all of my social media. What started as an emotional reaction to the implications of digitizing life quickly became a turning point. I deleted my Facebook and started calling my friends instead. I deleted my Instagram and…
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a nocturnal generation
In my early twenties, I took Kerouac a little too seriously. The case could be made I read On The Road at exactly the right moment, during the worst summer of my life, a time that would shape and change me in so many ways. As school resumed, I found…
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a call to action
I read an article on LinkedIn yesterday about throwing the world’s biggest party when we come out on the other side of the pandemic. “It will be a party for hugging our family and friends,” says writer Dennis K. Berman, “but also for acknowledging that the virus, in its twisted…
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letting go
I’ve never been great at letting go of things. But I’ve come to realize letting go might be the single most important lesson to be learned. The one constant in life is that everything changes. If we aren’t able to adapt to that change–to let go of the way things…
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when the well runs dry
Relax. Breathe. Be gentle with yourself. Amp up the input. Come back tomorrow.
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“make good choices”
Conflict is the engine of storytelling. Here’s the problem: I hate conflict. It takes a lot to make me angry and even more to make me yell. For years, I was a “people pleaser” who sought to make everyone happy, often as the cost of my own mental and emotional…
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confessions
In How Fiction Works, James Wood explores Dostoyevsky’s use of layered character: Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love…
joshua chamberlain 