I’m a Magpie
It’s 8:31, and Grandma should’ve been up about a half an hour ago (no reason, really. She just set her alarm for 8 AM last night when I was putting her to bed). About a minute ago, I heard her stirring upstairs, so I went up, glass of water in hand, to help her get [...]
My grandmother and my aunt Carol, hiding behind the rhubarb leaves
One thing I always do when visiting my grandparents is pore through all the family albums. It’s just a more elaborate kind of narcissism, I suppose, but I’ve always been somewhat soothed by looking at these sort of reflections out into the past.
It seems to [...]
I’m in Vancouver, visiting my grandmother, who’s in the hospital. It’s been making for strange, tiring days that I’m going to have to sit on for a bit before I try to write for public consumption. This is a piece about my grandma that I wrote for her birthday last year. I found it tonight [...]
The Men in My LifeIn no particular order, save, perhaps, order of appearance. Or maybe height. I don’t know.
1. 2. 3. 4.
When I was a kid, I used to love pulling my parents’ old paperbacks, the ones they’d had since college, off the shelves. I loved the smell of them, the aura of brick halls and turtleneck sweaters, young love, and bright, adolescent intellectual endeavor. I read The Bald Soprano, the Odyssey, tried to read Freud [...]
Brian and I are walking down the street. A man walks by in stylized safari getup, including combat boots with the pant legs tucked in, and a wide-brimmed hat.
Me: Do you think he’s a Man in the Yellow Hat fetishist?
B: What?
Me: That man (points exaggeratedly with eyes). Do you think he’s a Man in [...]
Ok, now that we’ve gone there, what was your childhood nickname? And what is this impulse to convert perfectly respoctable names, names chosen very carefully just months before, into schnuzzawuzza puddin muffins?
Hangin’ out in Brian’s studio this morning. Some folks are coming by to look at his art, and then we’re going to the zoo. While I’m here, though, how’s about some pictures from Brian’s open studio?
The weird thing about having my mother here is that, like, 90% of this blog’s readers are spending all day, every day with me (how large are mom and Brian that they make up 90%? How small must my other reader(s) be to make up 10%? Oh, this is impossible, and strangely discomfiting).
And yet! And [...]
I'm a freelance writer and perpetual graduate student living in San Francisco. Special skills include dog charming, brochure writing, slapdash cooking and long-winded nattering. I also enjoy watching the sunset reflected in the tall buildings downtown.
For a while there, I taught classes on Classical literature, philosophy, and the history of religion at New College of California. I have an MA and an MFA in Writing, and started library school in the fall of 2009.