Choices
Thursday Morning As I take attendance, my voice rolls out just like my high school theatre teacher taught me. “Enunciate to the back row,” I can hear her booming in her high, clear voice. That voice still rattles around in my head, reminding me how to project and how to capture the attention of a room. Unfortunately, the buzzing in the classroom muffles the sound of students announcing their presence. Sounds do not carry well in this room. Some of the ceiling tiles are missing, and there are enough layers of paint on the windows to make opening them an Olympic feat–a feat I attempt every day to atone for the lack…
Giving and Taking
Giving. It’s what most women are trained to do pretty much since birth. Here’s this dolly, nurture it. Here’s this house, it’s your job to make sure it’s welcoming and clean. Don’t you want to learn to cook so you can find a husband someday? Give of yourself, it is your job to make others comfortable. Okay, maybe things have changed a little since I was a youngster (or at least I hope so), but women talk about guilt enough for it to be a pretty pervasive cultural condition. We feel guilty if our houses aren’t clean and well-decorated. We feel guilty sitting down to read, or watch TV, or paint our…
The Un-Recap BlogHer Recap
I arrived alone, and I left alone. In between I built on past relationships and set the foundation for new ones, but ultimately it was me. Alone. Like I am all day, every day. Just me. Instead of sharing a hotel room with another blogger like last year, I stayed with family members who happened to live five minutes away from the convention center. It was the only way I could afford to attend this year’s BlogHer, cutting corners and accepting hospitality. Ultimately, this fostered relationships with relatives I only get to see infrequently, so I didn’t mind in the slightest that I was away from the hub of excitement.…
My Writing Process: Finding a Room of My Own
You know that thing that’s going around the Internet? You know which one I’m talking about. No, not the one about the cat in the shark costume on the Roomba, that’s old news. I’m talking about the one where writers ask other writers about their writing process? Well, a friend of mine, Tyler Yoder, tapped me for this exercise, oh, a few weeks back, and I said, “sure, I think I can squeeze it in.” Only, I was lying about that. I didn’t realize how busy I was until I stopped having time for writing and my whole life became about three things: Selling our house/buying a new house Finding paid work Trying not to have…
Rocky Mountain High
Armed with my black pen and handmade journal, I am sitting out on the back deck, which overlooks the Rocky Mountains. The peaks are covered in snow – an unfamiliar element to these native Angeleña eyes –and I keep gazing out at them, hoping they’ll whisper their secrets to me. There are no secrets in Los Angeles. It’s too hot and bright and phony for mystery. Yet like it or not, it is my home, and at 31 I am growing resigned to the prospect of never living elsewhere. Now though. Now I am here, and I am more often trying to live in the Now. The mountains provide a snow-capped, otherworldly backdrop to my scribbles, and I am…
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For yeah write’s fourth birthday, I am reposting last year’s birthday post. For yeah write’s third birthday, I present to you “A Series of Embarrassing Admissions:” Erica is going to kill me for admitting this, but the first time I linked up with yeah write I didn’t really read the instructions. Breezing through the intro post, the prestige of this place impressed me. Unlike other sites, I could tell this one meant business; it was intelligent and cool with a side of quirky, just like me. Well, just like I was trying to be. I wrote what I felt was a funny/heartfelt story and linked it up. I won third…
Just Say No
This isn’t a real post, FYI. This is me coming up for air. Gulp. I once saw the biggest opportunity… When I first got laid off, my plan was to be open to possibilities. I am of a cautious nature, and don’t take a whole lot of risks. Burned before? Yes, many a time. I am an expert in the field of chances not paying off. It was sort of my major in college. But when I got laid off and started freelancing, I began saying yes. Why not do everything I’ve always wanted to do? I had time. Perhaps it would bolster my resume. It sure couldn’t hurt it.…
Wide Awake
I flop over onto my other side. Awakening wide-eyed at some vague time in the middle of the night, I spent the last hour (ten minutes? thirty seconds?) rolling around and adding to the pile of tissues on the nightstand. “This is total bullshit,” I state, to no one in particular. Mike is fast asleep, and the cat had long ago abandoned my lap for a more stable surface. I sneeze, grab another tissue, blow my nose. It is total bullshit, almost cruel. Being so tired, yet unable to sleep. I flip over to my other side, pull the comforter tighter against the chill. It’s almost as cruel as the…
Welcome to My Brain: Things I Am Thinking About This Week
Things I’m thinking about: I am a much more sane person when I take regular internet sabbaticals. I took one last week, and emerged a pleasanter creature. Clothes shopping is not nearly as fun when you don’t fit in the same kind of clothing you’re used to wearing: like, say, jeans. I’m doing better with the whole body image insecurity thing on a macro level, but sometimes it’s three steps forward, one step back. Dresses with tights and large sweaters, you will be my friends from now on. This whole Walmart vs. Ashton Kutcher thing. Basically, everything that is wrong with society today. I give this stuff way too much…
NaNoWriMo: Crawling Out of the Hole to Say Hello
For those of you who don’t know, November is NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month. What, you ask, in the holy hell is that? Well, it’s just as scary as it sounds — especially as I am a participant this year. NaNoWriMo was created by a group of sadomasochists ambitious people who knew, just knew that they could write a 50,000 word novel in a month if only they sacrificed every waking second toward this endeavor. Then, they spread the punishment idea around the internet, and gullible hacks overachievers like me thought to themselves, “Hey, I am already spending every waking hour writing copy and articles and looking for…
