I was helping my daughter put together her pinewood derby car for Girl Scouts. We were laying on our stomachs lining up the nail to go through the tire at the exact right angle. As I was explaining why it was important to make sure the tire doesn’t rub the wood she surprise… Read more...
Crying, Adults & Kids
My daughter twisted her ankle walking up our steps. She’s 13 which means the agony of it shone on her face but no tears were allowed to come out.
I know her well. I could see the tears start to come and then I watched as she swallowed them up and reverted to other things … Read more...
The Machine Gun
When I’m excited about something, I make machine-gun noises with my mouth. If I’m really stoked, I’ll cup my hands to my mouth to make the noise louder, and then move my head from side to side in a sweeping motion as if I’m spraying the room with machine-g… Read more...
Looking Up On The Subway
It becomes so apparent when I’m traveling: we live alongside each other.
We occupy the same space, take the same bus, wait in the same room, stand on the same curb, but we’re a million miles away from one another. We don’t know our neighbors. We rarely break bre… Read more...
Searching for Villains
I’ve been yelling at the podium a lot lately.
It’s the school board. I scratched a little hole, looked through, and what I saw was too ugly to walk away from. The people around me, the community, a lot of them see it too and now we’re all standing in the mud, tea… Read more...
A Moth At My Window
A moth at my window tries desperately to get inside. He’s attracted to the glowing, white screen of my monitor, a sharp contrast to the blackness of 5am.
In haste, it scrambles into the stringy membranes of a spider web in the corner of the window. The spider wastes no time,… Read more...
Props from Chester Copperpot
In the movie Goonies, a group of subterranean adolescent adventurers revel in the fact that they made it farther than the legendary treasure hunter and riddle solver, Chester Copperpot.
They had less experience and less training than the Great Mr. Copperpot; afterall, they’r… Read more...
The Hug
I had some time so I decided to go to one of my favorite restaurants and get dinner and a drink while reading my book.
Approaching the restaurant, I could tell something was off. The door was open but the place was empty and the owner was yelling.
Walking through the door, I saw he… Read more...
The Cost of Being Special
Sometimes I feel lonely, not the loneliness that comes with accrued time in solitude but the deeper singularity of realizing that, mathematically speaking, there’s no one like me out there.
This is not meant to be sad.
With the complexity and randomness of genetics, combined … Read more...
Let Someone Else Store it for You
I have a tendency, particularly when in the hardware store, to buy up things just in case I’ll need them. More times than not, I do not need them.
I’ve tried to stop this behavior since my basement is getting full and my pockets are getting empty, with no real win at t… Read more...