This morning I survived an excursion to my local YMCA to run on a treadmill. The anomaly wasn’t running, it was doing it indoors at the Y. Snowy arctic blasts, blistering heat with monsoon like downpours, I’ve run through it all, and my previous treadmill experiences have been limited to sparsely populated hotel gyms or my parents rickety treadmill in the isolation of their basement...
While I have not read the book that inspired the title of this post, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, it’s more likely after this weekend that I might, or at least I might attest to the validity of its title. Yesterday I completed a task that for me was somewhat Herculean and required weeks of mental preparation. Perhaps inspired by the closing of the holiday season and the usual...
I like new beginnings; I like the sense of hope and renewal that we typically tend to invoke this time of year in the form of new year resolutions. These new starts for me have historically involved the creation of grand ideas involving skills I do not possess, and which must be learned mastered before I can even really begin to conceive of the the goal I’ve loftily put in place for myself...
Lately I’ve been on a bit of a quest for a creative outlet (said the lady with the blog), though this isn’t necessarily a new pursuit. I seem to hit bottlenecks of pent up creative energy and have frequently found myself in this quandary. The problem isn’t wanting to do something, it’s trying to figure out what in the hell do to, and, as it turns out, there’s a fine...
I’m zipping up my coat as I say goodbye and I laugh, I think, at something you say, throwing my head back, a dull whack against the door frame. It hurts, but the surprise stings worse. Much like a child who stumbles and cries belatedly at the realization of losing control, the tears form and start to roll, though mine are cathartic—perhaps more a desire to collapse than not. Your bewildered...
I’ve been in a reading slump for awhile now, though it’s hard to say why it persisted for so long. Earlier in the summer I embarked on a necessary professional transition, which is to say I wasn’t happy in my position and I did the thing where you update your written list of credentials, send them off for consideration, and then hope you get to talk to someone else about...
I’ve struggled with what to say/think in the wake of yet another horrific mass shooting, referring, of course, to the events that unfolded Sunday night in Las Vegas. I’m sure I’m not alone in my growing frustration with the vacuous choruses of “thoughts and prayers” that seem to ripple through social media. While it’s useful on some level to participate in the...
The following is a live stream of my thoughts in an attempt to document the torture that can be the last hour of the work day. Time tends to get inversely slow as the day progresses, and much like water heating to boil, tends to stall even further with each glance at the clock. This post is better than ingesting an irresponsible dose of caffeine. 3:59 PM I just found some gum in the back of my...
Five days a week I come to this physical place called work, where I do non-physical work that works out into a paycheck. The environment I work in is a typical office layout, though it is strikingly different from the set-up I was in previously. I have a cubicle, a fairly large space sectioned off with lovely fabric-covered, temporary walls. I have a large desk space which allows me to spread out...
The recommendation to read Laurie Frankel’s This Is How It Always Is came with a caveat: don’t ready anything about the book, not even the description on the book jacket, just start reading it. So, this is precisely how I proceeded, and having since gone back and read all these previously banned descriptions, I’m glad I avoided them. I don’t think they gave too much away...
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