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Showing posts from February, 2018

First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Insert Reason Here

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This is the post I’ve been hovering over writing. Finishing, editing, returning to for days on end. The one I tell myself most needs to be said, the one I tell myself that I can’t say. A few month ago I was molested by the husband of a very close friend. I’m writing these posts for those of you that have been there. I’m writing for anyone who needs a safe space, who needs someone else to just come forward and say it first. I’m writing for the ones who still need to know that you can take something hideous and turn it into something productive, even something empowering. Some of these posts will be empowering. And some will simply be raw, vulnerable and not the least bit sugarcoated, because sometimes that’s the way that life is, too. I feel like when I tell people, kick to the knees, strike the eyes, we’re all picturing some variation of a ninja with a ski mask lurking in the alley. (The truth is, I did meet someone once who carried metal throwing stars in the lining of hi...
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We Are Legendary

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I’m adding Best Buy to that list of places I can never show my face again. In my (ever more common) sleep-deprived state, I was trying to make a really simple purchase.  (A CD maybe?  A charger for my phone?  Some candy?)  So it was time to pay, and it took about 10 minutes of digging through my wallet and unearthing the following: An ice-cream rewards card Some Romanian pocket change Hotel card keys from  Dallas ,  Budapest ,  Key Largo A metro fare card valid in  Chicago  (and expired) Another ice-cream card Etc. …before I finally dug up something resembling an unexpired credit card valid in this country.  By this time the cashier was sufficiently frustrated, my sister had long-since stopped pretending that she knows me, and I actually started wondering why I kept so much…STUFF… in my wallet to begin with.  Have all those months I spent living out of suitcases finally caught up with me?  Do I need to ...
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Rage Against Emoticon

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This is essentially a rant. People are forgetting how to interact with one another. The other day, I wrote a message to a friend on Facebook. I was hoping we could talk about it; her response was a thumbs-up sticker and a smiley face. Because that just says it all. Ever have dinner with your family only to look up and realize that, though everyone you care for is sitting at one table, they're all staring at their phones like zombies and talking (or texting, or IMing or tweeting, etc.) to someone else? And you know what? I bet that when they finally meet up with those other people, they'll spend the whole time staring at a message screen. I believe the capability for human emotion is seriously regressing, and this is scary. We are losing the ability to relate to one another, even to understand the depths of our own emotions. It's like we've become characters in a video game. Martha waves hello. You can either: A: Smile B: Frown Perhaps you're in a very soph...
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On New Year's Resolutions

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February 13, 2018 So how many of you still write “2017” on your papers?  Honest show of hands. So, dear world, what’s up?  We were counting down the days.  I saw you at that party that went on ‘til 3 am.  Times Square on television.  You had fireworks.  Southwest served us free c hampagne . And yet we can’t get it straight.  (It's already February?) So what exactly happened? The answer is, quite simply…nothing. New Years was a vacation.  But at the end of the day, or the year, we all revert back to our (monotonous?) jobs/classes/bills/taxes/hassles/lives.  And we expect it all to change just because the clock struck midnight. We’re the ones who have to change. Let’s start with New Years' Resolutions.  (Is this a sore topic for anyone else?)  The procrastinator/nonconformist in me chose to write about them two month past the deadline. So, did you change something drastic in the face of all this stifl...
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