Every Day a Love Letter

 I write, I read, I read about writing.  I think that books about writing are some of the strangest in the world. Also, yes, they can be extremely dry. I admit it! A writer can be witty and hilarious and profound, but ultimately a chapter about meter will follow a certain pattern, beat-for-beat (Yes, I feel clever for that). Luckily, I like meter very much. I bet that everybody likes  some  writing about writing. In an intro-level literature class, we all read an excerpt of Anne Lamott's book  Bird by Bird,  an essay called "Shitty First Drafts," and I can say with confidence that at least half of us genuinely enjoyed it, and another thirty percent valiantly pretended to. Half is not so bad for one assigned reading.  Mary Oliver understands my burning need for examples in her poetry handbook, and graciously provides me with one every other page. Richard Hugo is not afraid of a monologue in  Triggering Town,  and I like him so much that I don'...

 Summer means yard sale season. I love everything about it. I love the neon-green signs with sharpies and an arrow (time and address optional), I love when there's obnoxious music playing directly from someone's phone speaker, I love listening to people talk. I suspect that the most interesting conversations in the universe happen during yard-sales, something about sitting in fabric camping chairs and watching strangers rummage through your life that shakes stories loose.  This picture is from a yard-sale that a family of musicians were holding before they moved to Bali to form a jazz band. I admit, I eavesdrop.  At yard sales, I've seen skateboards, bunnies, entire dining room sets, a marionette puppet, and cumulatively enough graphic tee-shirts to clothe my high school's graduating class twice-over. And I don't even make a hobby of going to yard-sales, I just follow the arrows when I come across them.   I think that my favorite part about yard sales is the ele...

 On a day when classes were driving me and my friend crazy, we accidentally spent an entire day together. After doing a little homework, watching in inadvisable amount of TV, and going on a hike, we decided to hop on a bus and go to the fancy neighborhood. On the way, we called another friend and decided to all meet up later, to eat dinner and watch the next episode of X-Men '97.  I love adventures. This adventure was cozy and non-threatening, which is even better. The fancy neighborhood is a little downtown area in the historical district. We joked that we felt European, because the roads are cobblestone and street-lights were wrought-iron. Vines were climbing up buildings in a cute way, not a dilapidated one-- we were living it up!  Fancy neighborhood is also home to one of my favorite stores, a suitably fancy vinegar and oil store. I like going there and asking for lots of samples and not buying anything, so I convinced my friend to go with me. As we should have expect...

   Tonight we had our monthly board game night. My dad grilled the burgers that me and my mom made this afternoon, and we ended up chatting around the grill about role-playing games and podcasts and skunks.  Actually, I only learned how to grill a week or so ago. Now that it's stopped raining so much, we've been using it every chance we get. My dad taught me what temperature to cook at, that you should leave some spots warm but not hot, that sometimes all the grease dripping into the flame causes a big dramatic kick-up, plus all the special ways that  our grill in particular  is broken but still safe to use, promise. He said that the bonus to grilling at events is that nobody expects you to talk too much, because you're focusing. The other bonus is that you are the person in charge of all the good food and food smells, so people will kind of hang around and be near you. It's a solid middle-ground of socialization.   I was sous-chef with the burgers, di...

 I'm not even entirely certain that that's what it was. But, a few years ago, a very good story happened to me. I was sixteen years old in another country, I had no phone to contact my parents, and I tested positive for COVID-19. So, I isolated from my travel group in Aurelio's house, alone with a few books. Aurelio's wife very graciously cooked dinner for me on that first night, before another patient joined me and we drove each other insane instead of ourselves. She spoke almost no English and I didn't speak much more Spanish than that, enough to express gratitude and that was really all.  That first night, delirious with sick and scared, she made a thick green soup. She said what it was, and I forgot. It is still the best thing I have ever tasted in my life. I am determined to figure out what it was-- I've ruled out Brussels sprouts but spinach is still possible, though I'm leaning asparagus.  Other, more interesting things happened amidst that delirium. ...

 This morning I decided that I needed to write, and I can never write at home. I need to be around people who aren't paying attention to me, in a chair that's mostly comfortable but certainly un-slump-able, so I went to a caf é . This particular caf é had a special today, so I could get both a coffee and a chocolate croissant, and it's also got windows which let in the perfect amount of light on an overcast day like today.  I've been going on lots of errands instead of writing. Errands, if I'm honest, are not so bad. I enjoy going on everyday quests to accomplish the things that adults need to accomplish in their day: acquiring groceries, getting gas, yard work. The real problem is that most of these errands include shopping, and shopping more than two days in a row always upsets me. Part of this is the anxiety I have around spending money, but more than that, shopping overwhelms me with a staggeringly broad range of choices for me, the consumer.  Well, I'd much...