Category: life
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my favorite coffee mug
A few years back, some friends and I shot a web series. It was about our lives at the theater company where we worked and no, it wasn’t very good. I wrote an episode about dealing with writer’s block. The opening shot featured my desktop, including my favorite coffee mug…
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why feel guilty?
There are a fair amount of things I enjoy that aren’t cool. They’re not culturally bulletproof, they’re cheesy, they’re sentimental. They’re not high art. These are the things we might call “guilty pleasures.” “The guilty pleasure is always the enjoyment of some form that is not high art,” says Fran…
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why i love musicians
I truly envy musicians. A friend of mine from college used to talk about hanging out in the studio while recording music and how it fostered collaboration. One time I expressed my jealousy. “But dude,” he said. “You’re a writer. The world is your studio time.” Fair point, but landing…
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“be patient”
A few years back, I went to see a Broadway play. Afterwards, I hung around outside the stage door and wound up talking to the director. “Be patient,” he said when I asked for advice. This is something at which I’ve never excelled. Be it waiting for a break, waiting…
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here and now
In the final episode of The Last Dance, Mark Vancil had this to say about Michael Jordan: Most people live in fear because we project the past into the future. Michael’s a mystic. He was never anywhere else. His gift was not that he could jump high, run fast, shoot…
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on bullshit
We all know the truth when we see it. And yet, so many refuse to look it in the eye. They kick, they scream, they cry injustice. Some deny, some obfuscate, some look the other way. It’s the true measure of a man to look the truth in the face…
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times like these
“These are times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, although it many ways, it feels as though these words could have been written yesterday. In times when it feels as though the whole world is ending, it helps me to remember history. I often think about the…
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hollow victories
While quarantined in the Midwest, I’ve been watching Cobra Kai on Netflix. As a writer, it’s tough for me to set down my analytic eye and simply watch something. This show is one of those rare exceptions. From start to finish, it’s just fun. Without giving anything away, it’s made…
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Austin Kleon on parenting
In times like these, I often wonder if the greatest service I can do my future children is preventing them from being born in the first place. (Yes, I’m aware that’s a dramatic way to say I’m sure about having kids.) Austin Kleon is someone to whom I’ve turned time…
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yesterday
From James Wood’s How Fiction Works: “On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the rive Ouse. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, was obsessively punctilious, and had kept a journal entry every day of his adult life, in which he recorded daily menus and car…
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