Prosaic Ponderings

The crackling sounds of Dean Martin's Silver Bells signals the start of another hauntological loop of Christmas. Five a.m. at the Seatac airport two days before Christmas and I take the caffeinated road more traveled after an hour of getting through security. An ever-growing queue of people form a bottleneck at the entrance to a row of empty self check-in kiosks. Bleary-eyed families side-step dog shit as frazzled airport employees scramble to place caution signs around the trail of poop while racing down the terminal to catch the dog owner. A cheerfully commanding Alaska Airlines employee who is ON this morning jumps in to direct the flow of traffic. I spend $34 on a breakfast burrito and a sandwich to go. The annual Christmas pilgrimage has begun. Christmas has an unstoppable momentum like a carousel that, once activated, must complete its cycle. Come November 29th, tree-topped cars adorned with antlers and red noses jam the highway, everything from candy canes to Tostitos is dy...

If I were to make a word cloud from people's social media posts around the 2024 election, grief would be one of the biggest words. So many people are sharing how they're feeling right now and a prevalent feeling across the generations seems to be grief. To which I say "Bless your hearts."  The mood going into election day in my social media bubble was anxious, near hysterical, even nihilistic.  The mood since the results were announced has been one of deep grief.  "...right now I feel only grief" The title of this email was "A Poem for these Times" I know the posts will die down soon but, all the same, I wish we could skip this part. I find it to be overly sentimental, precious and, ultimately, missing in any kind of power/class analysis that is sorely needed both inside of and outside of election cycles. Really, I'm not intending for this post to turn into a commentary on our political system; I mostly want to challenge folks to build communit...

Thousands of bloggers across the Northern Hemisphere are pressing a cup of coffee to their breast as they record their seasonal reflections and I am stepping up to join their illustrious ranks. October, flame spout of color and summer's glorious end, electrifies the senses. Summer had its light times as well as its dark but we are transitioning now to something else.  This is the time of year where man and beast alike root around the forest floor collecting their bounty and to go more than two weeks without being offered foraged mushrooms by a friend is highly irregular. In the Pacific Northwest, our unusually dry fall has come to a muddy end as we near Samhain. The blue, wind-whipped skies with jellyfish clouds slowly give way to a domineering grey, but the weather each day is still anyone's guess. The fierce weekend winds which blew the crisp brown leaves off the trees have died down to a gentle, persistent rain as I write this. Every weekend this month feels precious. I feel...

Visiting my aunt in her idyllic coastal community in Western Massachusetts in late summer is infinitely lovely. There's the early morning walks along country lanes lined with quintessential New England rock walls, the boat-dotted Westport River bordering the family property, where you can see approximately two hundred shades of blue reflected in a given day, falling asleep in the room upstairs watching the lights on the fishing boats as they go out at night, waking with the sun as it slices through the curtains and the feeling that you're in a sunny, salt-scented library with all of my aunt's dusty books and family heirlooms... in short, it's heaven. There's always the requisite cousin barbecue and family gathering while I'm there. My aunts like to say that I'm their favorite niece to which I like to reply, "I'm your only niece." It's endearing because they say it with a lot of pride. All of my cousins on my dad's side (the only side I ...

Caretaking is something I've been thinking about more and more these days, but have been reticent to write about. I have some hangups with imposter syndrome; I feel like I shouldn't write about something if I don't have much experience with it. Something writing has done for me is it's forced me to seek honesty with myself and will often help me arrive at insights I feel are worth sharing with people because I realize I do have something to say. Since my mom got Alzheimer's, I've done two significant caretaking stints with her to give my dad a break. A friend of mine, who incidentally does some caretaking for her partner, recently said that if a topic feels hard to write about then that means it probably needs to be written about. I want to spend time engaging with this topic more so that I can connect with my dad on some level in his mostly lonely and isolating journey as a full-time caretaker.  It's been deeply unsettling watching two different people'...

I recently watched the movie Turtles All the Way Down (2024). It’s the classic teenager with things that differentiate her from her peers trying to lead a normal life story. Unlike the supernatural movies and t.v. shows I usually watch, the nature of her uniqueness is not magical but very, very natural (and relatable): anxiety and OCD. I think it struck a chord with me because 1) I’m not-so-secretly a sucker for YA movies and 2) I deal with anxiety.  Anxiety is not exactly a rare affliction in this day and age, which is why I think this movie will resonate with a wide audience. I was amused by its directness, although of course plenty of other mainstream movies I've seen have made mental illness the subject matter (Girl Interrupted, Silver Linings Playbook, Melancholia…etc). Regardless, it was an interesting choice for a plane watch.  The day after watching this, I was listening to an interview on the podcast Talk Nerdy with the author of "The Age of Magical Overthinking: ...

 In death do we finally outlast time? It's hard to arrive at any concrete place with an abstract concept. We are reminded of Time when we measure the distance from here to there. Something I've been reflecting on since my last visit to a Zendo I started going to recently is just how much less anxiety seeps into my life when I try to cram fewer things into my schedule. Those who know me would agree that I've always had a rather antagonistic relationship with time, either willfully ignoring or being annoyed by its existence. Sometimes I think my seeming inability to keep track of it is a form of protest against a thing that rules so much of our lives.  Ever since the hecticness of grad school, it seems as though my main goal in life has been moving towards spaciousness. You can't create more hours of the day but you can develop a better relationship with time. Less is more, has become my mantra I tell myself anytime I get the itch to overschedule. There will always be sc...