Category Archives: Creative non-fiction

Be/wilder (With/standing)

Cooking, Creative non-fiction, Inspiration, Life and Other Existential Problems, Month in Review, Recommendations, Writing

January Month In Review

SHORT STUFF

  • I am keeping a list of the Top Ten Days of 2025. So far, January has failed. The only (weak) contender is January 26th, when we ate decent nachos. A tasty moment in an otherwise indifferent stretch of time.
  • “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky. What is the “something more”? Patience? Instinct? Juice? Is it juice? I don’t like juice.
  • Sleep is a flirt. I am a willing fool. I chase, I lose, I am tired. Who else belongs to the 4 AM Club?
  • December’s cozy hibernation exited stage left when January hit like a brick, and suddenly I’m expected to make responsible choices again. Terrible system. Do not recommend.
  • Seth Godin says slow down. I am listening. But also I am not. But also, I should be. This may be why I am in the 4 AM club.
  • My January 2025 had a soundtrack. It is, as my kids would never let me say, “a bop.” 

LONG STUFF

I cried at the dentist.

Not because of the scraping. Not even because of my idiotic need to be LITTLE MISS FUN PATIENT. (Let’s be clear, I am fun because I am hilarious.)

It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t fear.

Perhaps it was inevitable.

The night before, I forgot to season my vegetables (not a euphemism), which is not like me. I know how to cook and how to make things better. But I didn’t. And so we ate them, joyless.

When the body runs on fumes, you stop doing the things that make life taste like something.

Maybe it was inevitable because I haven’t listened to much music lately. This is also not like me. Normally, music is everywhere in my life. A soundtrack, a story, a signal. But now? Silence. Or just enough ambient music to fill the spaces, to keep the walls from pressing in.

Music is its own kind of story. And I cannot absorb another story right now. Certainly not while eating sad vegetables. Not while being Little Miss Fun Patient. Not while *everything else.*

Anyway, remember how I cried at the dentist because I just told you I did a few paragraphs back?

It happened when the next song came on. My dentist tries to calibrate the playlist to the patient — something generational, something soothing, something that says, “Pay no attention to the tiny metal hook scraping your bones.” Do I need Megadeth blaring while I’m power-washed in the mouth like a neglected patio? MAYBE. But probably not.

In the lonely space between cleaning and exam, a song came on.

And I cried.

Okay, yeah, it was “Chariots of Fire.” On the cornball scale of tear triggers this, ranks up there with a screensaver or a commercial about butter substitutes. Or “Bubbles” by the Free Design.

There are plenty of respectable reasons to cry, including being at the dentist, practically flipped upside down in the chair, mouth agape, and drowning in the indignity of it all.

Perhaps, though, it was not that.

The world these days is very “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”

On the other side of the mountain is Mount Doom.

After that, Mount Crumpit

And then the tiny sledding hill in my backyard where my kids, without fail, would somehow manage to steer directly into a tree even though the closet tree was about 20 yards away.

Climb one mountain, find another waiting. That’s how it works. So you throw the grappling hook and reach down to pull others up. (Am I a seasoned mountain climber? No. Do I like looking at mountains on Toblerone wrappers? Yes. Same energy.)

I also cried because my heart is with New Orleans, California, Las Vegas, and every neighbor who feels alone and helpless. My heart is not enough and tears unhelpful after a point, so we choose and we do. Because we see what we can see.

“Look for the helpers,” Mr. Rogers said.

Try to be one.

My background and expertise are scattered —  writing, education, social policy, the arts. A hodgepodge, but a purposeful one. A toolkit.

The goal now: Help fully. Help precisely.

Say “yes” carefully, but say it generously. 

Everyone’s capacity is stretched thin. I’m no exception, but am seeking and finding good community. Lord love a duck for that. (It is not a duck community, though perhaps it should be.)

Still posting my dumb little jokes (Are we connected on Bluesky?). Still writing the blog, working on the book, and seeking joy as we withstand and work.

A photo of Mel Brooks with his quote “Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.”

We can choose to be wild through actions and care, through public voice, through fiercely defending our peace, through a combination of those.

Also have some nachos if you like them. They help.

(Despite it all,) Here are some splashes of marvelous from January 2025

One of the stories in mass circulation today is a very old one, but it’s taken on a new vigor: women in general are out of control and feminism in particular is to blame… men are no longer in control, mothers are not what they used to be, and it’s the fault of Germaine Greer, Cosmopolitan, and headline stars.

  • An excerpt from Rumi’s “Where Everything is Music” Because sometimes you need Rumi.

Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

  • Sometimes my 70-pound screw-loose pitbull mix gets the zoomies. It is short-lived because he has zero stamina and the spatial awareness of a potato. But he tries. He is all heart and demolition. I will try to film it.
  • Need a corny cry break?

Until next time, here’s a combo I ask you to consider: books, pen, paper, us.

The B and Noble Men

Creative non-fiction, Life and Other Existential Problems, Parenting, Reading,
Title card with The B and Noble Men at the top, three cartoon lemons looking unhappy, and a small dragon.

The two men stood in the one spot conspicuously free of shelves. Open, unsacred, lifeless space, as far from books as it is possible to be in a bookstore. A no-man’s land of sorts, but there they stood in this patch of space meant for rearranging thoughts or deciding where to go next. At first glance, they seemed to be there to grab something quickly and leave, or perhaps to wait. In each other’s presence, a momentary reprieve from feeling out of place.

We, my daughter and I, were there to rearrange our thoughts, to mend our worn edges. Words might carry us someplace softer where we could escape into neatly bound pages where someone else’s problems — smaller or larger, didn’t matter — offered strange, familiar solace. The bookstore smelled of coffee and, in that section we were trying to pass through, cologne.

They were aggressively unremarkable, those men. Able to demand attention without effort, to compress the air around them into a self-satisfied density. Loud. Confident. Convinced. The kind of people who view their success as an inevitability, etched into marble, affixed in permanence rather than scribbled on the side of a red Solo cup.

Perhaps that was the cologne talking.

They stood in that bookless space, wearing athleisure wear of curated ease, possibly worn for the exertion of “watching the kids” for a bit.

Forgive me, sometimes I read too much into things. It was a bookstore, after all.

They were comfortable and loud, their presence as much volume as it was space, somehow sprawling across this nearly empty bookstore so close to closing. They were careless as they dismantled a woman one of them had encountered — socially, professionally, who knows? Didn’t matter.

“She had too much plastic surgery,” First Guy said. “Her face looked tight. Fake.” He sculpted the air with exaggerated movements. “She looked like a lemon,” he added, pleased with himself. “Which is fitting.”

Other Guy laughed. “Yeah. I totally get it.”

Encouraged, First Guy fumbled for more analogies, more ways to articulate how deeply unacceptable this woman was, what with her face and everything else about her. He pulled his features into grotesque imitations of whatever displeased him about her, which seemed to be quite a bit.

My face never keeps its mouth shut and must have betrayed me. It always does. A flicker of something, too small to name but enough to catch their attention. Disapproval, maybe. Or disgust. Some merciless and mirthless conveyance of this again?

I warranted enough attention for them to shift their bodies and pause their conversation, their gaze heavy.

What did they see? Stitches, scars, gravity, broken things, healed places of a full human?

Nah. Definitely another lemon. Or maybe a yuzu or a blood orange. I haven’t had work done on my body unless you count the pieces of bone, flesh, and pain-points removed, so they were left only the sour.

We considered each other. I’d guess they were thinking I was intruding without smiling. They would probably not guess I’d had another day of fighting tiny, bothersome dragons.

Their interest faded. Their laughter resumed, quieter now. Slick. Greasy.

I walked away to catch up with my daughter.

She stood in the Young Adult section trailing her fingers over the spines of books. She held herself carefully, her shoulders drawn inward in the way she does when she’s trying not to let disappointment show. Her fingers lingered on one book, then another. She’d had a hard day, the kind with sharp teeth and scales. The kind a mom can’t fix, except by standing between her and the world long enough to let her breathe.

We searched for books — anything, really — that offered comfort, distraction, or, failing that, instructions for building a trebuchet from empty bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters.

She didn’t notice the men. She didn’t register their voices lofting over the shelves. If she did, it was part of the din of the day.

I’d said nothing to them. Me. Lady Speak Your Mind.

Of course I didn’t. Because it wasn’t my place. Because the parking lot was dark. Because I’m not their mother. Because risk analysis. Because this is the way of things.

Strategy? Failure? Quiet calculus of motherhood?

If my daughter weren’t there. If it were daylight. If I were ferocious, less aware of what happens when certain men decide you’ve embarrassed them. Maybe I would have said something.

Probably not. But maybe.

But if I did, it would’ve been presented as a possible joke. Lemon Face clearly owes you an apology. How dare she. Big smile. Plausible deniability. Pointless.

But I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.

When we left, they were one shelf away from the self-help section. The Universe, perhaps also running on empty, only offered dad jokes.

We, my daughter and I, left without books and went home, a place where tiny, bothersome dragons give us passage and say, “We’ll catch you tomorrow.”

I Am Become Electric Blanket, Destroyer of Cheese

Books, Creative non-fiction, For the love of a dog, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Month in Review, Parenting, Writing, Year in Review

December 2024 Month In Review.

Hello. Hello again.

I was going to call this “Sick, Sick, Sick” and because wordplay! But nobody wants to end their year wading through thick puddles of my half-baked cleverness. So let’s just get on with it.

I am ready to ball December 2024 up like a fitted sheet and shove it in my linen closet. Because I’m not a heathen, I’ll toss a nice sachet in there so if I ever have to pull it out for guests, wrinkled and snarling (the month, not the guests, but maybe the guests also?) it will smell like lavender.

Electric blankets are more my thing, anyway. Wrap me up. Keep me warm. Make me the human equivalent of a Pop Tart.

So, do I need to wrap up the year?

No.

Will I though?

Also no.

But if you need closure, here’s 2024 in five syllables:

Howlers abounded

Moving on.

End of December. We rest. We winter (Katherine May knows what’s up). We stretch through this dead time between Christmas and New Year’s when no one knows what day it is and our diet is mainly appetizers.

The lead-up to this moment was, of course, chaos: finals, concerts, snow, mourning, trying to be in all the places we had to be, or maybe needed to be, and probably (definitely) didn’t want to be. Getting there prepared and on time on top of it all.

Which is to say: I’m tired.
Which is to say: I got very sick this month.

Because, in this urgency culture we glorify (seriously, stop doing that), guess who was so busy her flu vaccine fell through the cracks? STOP GUESSING, IT WAS ME. Enter: Influenza A. Cue misery and disruption. The flu invited a friend to crash the party. (Seriously, stop doing that).

New, terrifying eye floaters.

Google searches. Dreaded warning: CALL A DOCTOR OR GO TO THE ER. RETINAL DETACHMENT! OR MAYBE TINY COYOTES EATING YOUR EYE GOO LIKE PUDDING. ONE OF THOSE.

I called the eye doctor. He told me — using a lot more words than I needed after he told me he couldn’t help — to go directly to a retinal specialist, who tested me in part by shining bright lines into my dilated eyeballs. He then gave me another very wordy explanation for my ocular migraine.

The flu probably triggered the migraine.

Also triggered? My face eczema. Because clearly, what I needed during all this was to feel EVEN PRETTIER. Cue lotions, ointments, and salves. I felt like Neo emerging from the Matrix — only without Keanu Reeves or any cinematic allure whatsoever.

It passed.

(This isn’t the kind of story I want attached to my legacy, but we don’t always get to choose these things. To paraphrase someone wiser than me: I don’t want you to think I’m an idiot, but I keep giving you reasons to consider it.)

(Also, why are my eye doctors so verbose?)

Anyway, this now-healthy, slow, delicious time is a symphony of sugar and flour and fats and savory brown foods reminding us who we are when the world isn’t trying to set us on fire.

We turn NOW into NO and take the W.

Sorry. I just shoved you into a thick puddle of my half-baked cleverness. Grab my hand, I’ll get you out of there.

Wonderlands don’t need to cover acres. They don’t need castles or white rabbits or maps with riddles layered in mystery. They just need time to stop. Done. Wonderland achieved.

And while I’m here and not living in a panicky immediate, let’s take a second and talk 2025.

Goals:

  1. Let my inner weirdo become my outer weirdo.
  2. Find more wonderlands: Big cushions, warm chairs, fireplaces, and someone patting the seat next to them like, “Come. Sit. Stay a while.”
  3. Work the phrase “Everything went tits up” into more conversations.
  4. Be like my dog: Long walks, bursts of speed toward nothing, naps in the sun, and flappies (scientific term) to clear my head.
  5. Read more. Write more. Read better. Write better.
  6. I used to tell stories here. Real ones. Small ones. Messy, absurd ones. Somewhere along the way, I got stuck in broad magician-off-the-strip tellings. No more. Back to real ones with all tits-up moments.
  7. Schedule my damn flu shot. (No more tiny coyotes eating my eye goo.)
  8. Play. Please join in. And if you don’t feel like playing? That’s okay. There are lots of cozy seats ‘round these parts. Feel free to plop down and exhale. Save me a spot.

Here are some splashes of marvelous from December, 2024

  • Tylenol & Ibuprofen, my MVPs of December.
  • This makes me want to stomp around the living room like a goblin with excellent rhythm.
  • These things:
  • Conclave. Power struggles? Stanley Tucci in a Vatican drama? Twist ending? I say yes, yes, and yes again.
  • I am not timely nor do I care. Sometimes, you just need a high-functioning sociopath with a penchant for good deeds to remind you that bad guys can be outsmarted. Do your research!
  • Cross. If this doesn’t catapult Aldis Hodge, Samantha Walkes, and Isaiah Mustafa into super-DUPER-stardom, I will personally riot.
  • Once a year, we dress up fancy and go out for steak and gruyere scalloped potatoes, measuring time by how few leftovers we bring home. (This year, practically none.) We laughed, we ate, and we unraveled the mysteries of life — like why a bread basket feels like pure magic, whether the Bears will ever resemble even adulterated magic, and boring things like the stock market. The evening offered glimpses through the veil of time — tiny windows into the future and brilliant flashes of the past. I hope we do this forever. How lucky I am. 
  • “We’ll float between two worlds…until everyone we love is safe.”
  • Here’s some perfection for you. 
  • Grace Paley is an author I keep promising to revisit. Coming across this gem reminds me to get to it. Life is short. 
  • The Only Emperor is a grand poem if only because author David Shapiro speaks directly to me in the first line.
  • I appreciate the NYT giving me a head start on my “what do I read next” anxiety. These looked interesting. (Here’s a link for you to make your own list.)

Thank you for being here with me. I hope 2025 is the love story you need: warm, weird, and wonderfully uncatastrophic.