I write about beautiful things because I live in an ugly place in an ugly world. Where every corner I pass has the story of a black person’s murder written upon it and then erased, where men broke into my daughter’s school in ski masks just last week and she…
The way the crows fly in an angry circle over the hill near the hospital every evening around this time, 4:30pm — 4:45pm. They yell and scream, their cries echoing from the church and the Whole Foods. Soon enough, the entire circle moves westward, though they stay connected. The formation…
I went to a museum of smells the other day. It was precisely what you’d expect from a museum of smells: wild and weird, somewhat beautiful. It turned out to be less a museum of smells than a museum of perfumes and their essences, a history lesson of the particular…
Did you know that love is meant to be liberation? Yes, I forget that sometimes too. Did you know that love lives in the body? Yes, this I also forget. Did you know that love is beyond language, even though we are forever trying to find language for it? It…
My son is eighteen years old and has graduated from high school. With no current college underway, he is working at a restaurant, living at home and facing down an uncertain adult life in an uncertain time. He wants to be a creative professional, which I also happen to be…
And Maybe Success Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
At the end of my 30’s I was working at a shitty start-up. No offense to the start-up, but for me all start-ups are shitty start-ups, mostly for the way in which they require you to believe in what you’re doing in order to compensate for the sheer ludicrousness of…
We celebrated the rains when they first began. Finally, we said, isn’t it beautiful? We had been freed from the grasp of fire season, the stasis of suffocation, the threat of burning. We put out our plants and took videos of cute finches sheltering on our windowsills. We heard there…
Thoughts While Baking and Reading and Listening To Solange
Once it was raining and it was cold. I was sad. Maybe not sad, but grieving. I don’t know why, but then again you don’t have to give a reason for grieving, do you? Grief has nothing but reasons. Tears were sitting in my chest, the weight of the sky…
THIS IS US
How an eight-year-old kid with the exact hairstyle I wanted saved my entire day
I went roller skating yesterday for the first time since I was in like fourth grade and my partner said “You’re probably going to write a piece about this” before she skated off to chase her daughter around the rink. I was offended by the suggestion that I’m some kind…
When I was in college I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being partially because it was the favorite book of some girl I wanted to impress and partially because it seemed like the kind of book the person I was trying to make myself into — erudite, deep-thinking…
