Tag Archives: observations

Impossible meetups (a tanka series)

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Screen Shot 2019-04-16 at 3.01.42 PMEvery day I get an email from Meetup.com suggesting a new group I might want to join. Young Republicans. Future Farmers. Martial artists and stay-at-home moms and people considering becoming travel agents (is that even a thing any more?). None of them are my tribe. Meetup’s web-tracking technology clearly has room for improvement.

But the absurdity of the suggestions has inspired a tanka (a poetic form related to haiku) series. The titles are the actual meetup group names and first line or two of each tanka is taken from or inspired by that particular meetup’s description. Here’s the first installment:

WARRIORSAGE DOJO
WarriorSages
keep one foot planted in the
material world.
It’s a delicate balance:
meditate or masturbate. Continue reading →

WISH YOU WERE HERE

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After deleting 139 photos of my ex, my photo gallery looks like I’ve only ever vacationed by myself. I suppose that’s sort of true: Me leaning casually against Hadrian’s Wall; me at Edith Piaf’s grave; me, in an optical illusion, touching the top of the Temple of Kukulkan as if it’s miniature and I’m a giant.

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I can barely remember feeling hot that day, in Chichen Itza, or motion sick from the bus ride. I recall those details like an itinerary, like a packing list, like a fact that could also be a lie. Like a movie I once saw while sick with the flu that I later, inadvertently, adopted as a series of scenes from my own life. Memory is like that: Fallible, slippery. Continue reading →

On creativity, growth, and freshman orientation

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It’s the time of year when kids go back to school and people on the precipice of adulthood go off the college — some for the first time. This year it seems like everyone I know is the parent of a 17- or 18-year-old who is starting college, so my social media feeds are full of photos of Move In Day(s).

It’s a rite of passage — one of many that I, a person without children, have not been through.

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Move-In Day, 1948 , from University of Mary Washington

Two things: 1) I barely recall being dropped off at college for the first time. I know my mom took me. I remember she had a perm at the time. There’s a photo of us somewhere and I’m wearing cargo pants. She might have been sad to leave me, but that’s not how I remember it.

So the going-off-to-college initiation is likely more impactful for parents, because the teenager’s life up to that point has been nothing but change, nothing but new experiences. It’s been school and life lessons and body morphing. College is of all of that (on steroids) with different scenery and less adult supervision. Continue reading →

Observer in residence

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I was invited by online arts and culture magazine HOLLER to be an Observer in Residence for a week in January. It was an fun challenge to post a photo and up to 300 words describing what I was thinking about or inspired by that day.
Observer-5
This is a snippet from Day Five:

There are tiny altars everywhere. I’ve started to notice them, focus in on them. A Buddha in a tattoo studio, a crystal scattering light on a window sill, a bell calling us to the present moment, a murmuration of starlings swooping, in formation, in the deep blue of evening.

 

Find all of my posts here.

Find the entire Observer series here.