Living Beautifully

A year ago, I was uncertainly stepping into a new job. After floundering and soul searching and asking the darkness big questions (and finding myself even more afraid of the answers), I set myself a task.  Over the course of several weeks, I paid attention. To what brought me joy, certainly, but also what brought … Continue reading

Travel Tuesdays: Revival

I recently came across my Travel Tuesday stories: a short-lived weekly ritual exploring places I had been as we waited (and waited and waited) for the uncertain future to transport us to America. I felt strangely jealous.  Delighted to revisit places I fondly remember, surprised and rather chuffed at being transported by words I don’t … Continue reading

Serendipity

A new year so often signifies a fresh start; a clean slate; a second chance.  But I find starting over easy, the promise of new adventures exhilarating. It’s the staying which can be hardest.  I opened so many new cans of worms last year it would be simplest (and shallowly gratifying) to throw them all … Continue reading

Things I Like — Virginia Woolf

If you told Dumas-loving-14-year-old me she’d ever be into the Hemmingway-Iceberg theory of modern novels and unspoken things she’d give you the squinty-two-eye. If you promised tightly-wound college me she’d indulge in meandering, obtuse sentences as long as the night which go nowhere at all (and that’s beautiful) she’d laugh derisively. If you tempted the … Continue reading

Things I Like — Crossing Out

Is there anything more satisfying than a To Do List item completed? The act of finishing a long-neglected and niggling task is a relief, to be sure. But physically obliterating the written effigy of such a chore is cleansing — Be gone, budget planning! Away with you, Comcast customer service! You are struck down — … Continue reading

Things I Like — Notes from Afar

Even though I love letters,  I am a terrible correspondent. Ofttimes my lack of consistency becomes a point of self-flagellation (and later, entirely giving up). A vicious cycle. Every blue moon I manage to shake off the Shoulds and the Regulars and just drop someone a digital line. Not big enough to cover the lost … Continue reading

Saying It

Sometimes the right words illuminate the ineffable, sharpening my deepest eyes. But sometimes words are blunt tools dulling the sky with clumsy half-formed shapes. Lately it’s the latter. So I haven’t been writing much. Sometimes life is too big for words I guess. I’m on a new, scary exciting path. It fills me with hope … Continue reading

Learning Life

Life, I think, is a Sisyphean feat of learning. How ever much knowledge and self awareness is gained, the universes inside and outside your skin are infinitely larger and more nuanced than can be truly understood. At times this is a great awe-inspiring comfort; the world is magnificent in its oldest senses. There is boundless, … Continue reading

What I Learned in 2014

This time of year (even more than most) the internet is full of lists. Lists of what to buy; lists of how to be a better host (or a better person in general); lists of best Thises and Thats. Lists of how you’re living all wrong. Lists of things to do differently next year. And … Continue reading

All the news that’s fit to click: News in the Age of the Internet

This morning as I buttered toast, my mind flitted to the Huffington Post. Or rather, the day it launched. I remember the day it launched in 2005. I remember writing about it for a now-defunct blog. I remember discussing it with my nerdy grad school friends who went on to become journalists and Google execs. … Continue reading