May 2012
1 post
March 2012
4 posts
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“People who are more prone to high levels of empathy-based guilt may be likely to...”
– Wikipedia. Doing some research for an essay on growing up guilty Jewish female guilty.
I’m fascinated by guilt. It probably started 27 years ago when I was born to a mother whose first words to me might well have been, “No, it’s okay. I only spent 18 hours in labor with you,...
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"I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An...
“What makes dialogue good dialogue?” I ask students at the start of a playwriting class.
“It’s realistic.” This is almost always the first response.
“What makes it realistic?”
“I don’t know. It’s, like, not perfect, or whatever.”
“Go on.”
“Like, people say something, but they don’t say it right....
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“Pain keeps you in the present.”
– Part of a conversation tonight. I’d thought plenty about the opposite: one reason love feels so good is because it keeps you in the present. But this, too. Yeah. Hmmm.
February 2012
5 posts
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In defense of drugs
Another in a series of positive psychology posts. Let’s talk about feelings.
A more researched and comprehensive post on this topic should follow, but in the meantime, here’s an analogy that helps me explain what anti-depressants do.
There’s a trail cutting through a dense forest. You’re miles away from the trail, in a section of forest so dense there’s hardly any...
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Quit your crappy job and do those things lots of...
The first in a series of positive psychology posts.
Today I met with the author whom I’ll be assisting for the next few months, doing research and, presumably, various tedious things. (This actually isn’t the crappy job. I’ll get to that.) She asked me where I’ve worked before. I started listing. She stopped me when I got to the Jewish magazine where I worked for two...
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I don't know what to call this yet. For now, it's...
If there’s one thing I’m pretty knowledgeable about, it’s waging war on depression and all that comes with it. Which is why, even though advice is so off-putting, I’m going to put this out there.
It’s wonderful to hear about happiness from people who are happy, and who have been, for most of their lives, fairly positive. When I need insight, I go to one particular...
January 2012
3 posts
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NPR / Quiet, Please: Unleashing 'The Power Of... →
Quiet Quiz: Are You an Introvert or an Extrovert? Excerpted from: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
To find out where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, answer each question True or False, choosing the one that applies to you more often than not.
1. ______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.
2. ______ I often...
MLK Jr., oversharing, dog pee
Flo, my dear friend who was eaten by Texas recently, sent me one of those “post ten things about yourself and ask your friends to do the same” messages. As I’m waiting for my laundry to dry - and also, because I’ve already blown through every episode of How I Met Your Mother streaming on Netflix - I figured there were worse ways to spend my time.
1. I’m a...
December 2011
2 posts
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“How is he once he’s on the leash?
Oh, he’s totally fine having...”
– Gilmore Girls, re: sneaking a leash on a finnicky dog. Males will not watch this show (my guess? It’s got two female leads and “girls” in the title, which might be good if they weren’t mother and daughter) but the dialogue is consistently great.
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My Dad with Humans
My dad likes to talk about four things. Dogs, the Yankees, cars, and money—in order of their safety of mention. He and my mom run a dog rescue, which means in addition to the nine or so animals they own, there are five to ten foster dogs coming in and out at all times. Because of this, you can stay on that first topic for an exceptionally long time. Just don’t ask about Delilah’s hip surgery, or...
November 2011
5 posts
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October 2011
4 posts
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Ahhhhh!oooohhhmm: On therapy and yoga
This afternoon I wanted to tear, smack, bite, whack, kill something. Or, you know, just cry for an hour or two.
As a full-time student, I’m allowed nine free counseling sessions with an on-campus social worker. I haven’t been to therapy in six years. It might be the nine-session crunch that allows things to come out so quickly, but Jesus, these are the most fruitful sessions...
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Feelers
FYI, right before writing this (for an assignment) I listened to this beautiful song.
I remember how she used to kneel down by the still birds after they’d passed. “Finally you get a good look at the feathers,” she’d say. Then she’d carry them to the corners of the yard, away from me and her mom, and the neighbor’s dog, Guiseppe. There’d be dirt to her elbows.
One Thanksgiving when her mom was...
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Who arted?
TYLER
We met once before, actually.
JAMES
Oh? Cool.
TYLER
Yeah. At that barn that was converted into a movie theater.
JAMES
Yeah? Shit. Don’t remember it.
TYLER
It’s next to the old movie theater that was converted into horse stables.
JAMES
Oh, I know the place. I just didn’t remember meeting you before. I live right behind there. Can’t open my windows, unless I want my place to smell like shit...
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Playing dead
When I first moved to the city and walked home after dark, I could feel my limbs readying to run, or hurl themselves at testicles. The easy-to-remember “fight-or-flight” response to fear.
I hadn’t heard about the third option, freeze, until a few days ago. It makes sense. Say you’re a praire dog and in comes a coyote. You’d rather not die, so you flee, you fight...
September 2011
3 posts
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Why grandpa needs strongly-adhered stickers
The class I’m taking with Roger Rosenblatt is called “Imagining What You Know.” First assignment: fictionalize a family member. Here’s grandpa:
Hips like a belly-dancing Turkish gypsy, my grandfather didn’t just land on the shores of Normandy—he undulated, swayed. Killed twenty-six German soldiers that day and walked away nearly perfect, save a nick in his earlobe. There...
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“We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped...”
– The opening of We the Animals, by Justin Torres. I am his ideal reader: first person plural and stories about childhood are my crack and crystal meth, respectively.
August 2011
6 posts
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WatchThis Ted Talk is about a man whose severe depression withstood all treatments, including a long stay in a psychiatric hostipal, until finally, in a last-ditch attempt, he underwent electroshock therapy 20 times. Most people go for 6-8 sessions, but his went on, and on - he felt no change until the last few.
He explains that he decided to talk publicly about this for the first time, after 30...
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The secret-room dream
For years I’ve dreamed about versions of my days. Boring or anxious, and hardly involving flying.
There is an episode of Mad Men I watched yesterday where Sally, the daughter, around ten, loses her grandfather and falls asleep in her tutu in front of the television watching a man who burned himself in protest. In the following episodes, she needs a night light to fall asleep, wakes up...
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Old old writing
I’m looking through floppy disks for articles I wrote while I worked at Hunter College’s newspaper, and I found the first short story I ever wrote while in college. I was 20:
“I can’t quite put into words what I learned in his shack, from his words. I felt a sense of completion, of satisfaction. I felt happy. In that moment I felt like my body was filled with some sort of...
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Worries at a Panera on Monday, a workday day for...
It’s August first and I shook hands with my friend that starting today, it’s one hour of writing per day, uninterrupted. This blog post doesn’t count but there are so many things bouncing around in my head, and up until today I haven’t had the time or place to sit down and sort them out.
The road trip was wonderful but of course rootless, bumping around, sleeping in...
July 2011
5 posts
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Shortcomings
I’m taking a workshop for the first time in two months. While I’ve been journaling, I haven’t written any fiction since May and I sat down to write this morning, choking after a page, thinking about all the better ideas my classmates are going to have, etc. How fitting that it’s a story about a computer program that determines your shortcomings and figures out why people...
June 2011
3 posts
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“We know summer is the height of being alive. We don’t believe in God or...”
– Super Sad True Love Story.
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I have seen the future
It’s in the Mohave Desert. We will have our own flying cars in 20 years. Rather, rich people will. We will befriend rich people in the next 20 years and fly in their flying cars.
I’ve been staying in Tahachapi, CA, and from there we’ve ventured into Sequoia National Forest, the Mohave Desert, and Red Rock Canyon. I didn’t bring my computer on this trip so I’ll post...
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May 2011
3 posts
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Appreciating/stealing the work of my teenaged...
I’m in the Hamptons for Memorial Day weekend, but I live here year-round, so I’m sitting inside Starbucks commenting on student essays while beachgoers stop in for coffee. Off-season, Hampton Bays, where I’ve been living since February, is quaint and towny. It’s the least wealthy Hampton - or one of; I’m learning more about the east end of Long Island as I go, but I...
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I've been told I dance like a person doing an...
At the bar the other night, with a group of dude and lady friends, I noticed some things I hadn’t before. The males stand around drinking their drinks while the females make their way around the room. For the most part, it’s we who dance. A mating dance when none of us is actually looking for a mate - most are tied up already - but instead, attention. This isn’t a new thing, at...
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All I Want?
Sitting at a coffee shop really does make a difference in terms of how much work I get done. So I’m in a big brown chair, writing a press release about jewelry stamps, learning the Hebrew alphabet, making some analogy between a font and Scarlet O’Hara, and Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want” comes on - and I realized I haven’t posted in weeks. Love songs bring me here,...
April 2011
6 posts
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EFAYTh: Embarrassing fact about yourself Thursday
A) I watch Glee and B) I cried through 78% of the last episode.
For those of you who don’t watch, and I assume that’s a large number, it was about self-acceptance. Even in the cheesiest of packages, that topic’ll strike a nerve with pretty much anyone. And I’ve been thinking about cheesiness and packaging more than usual, since I’ve been working on this play....
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“I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female...”
– Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer. This passage prompted that last thing I posted.
The section that precedes this passage is beautiful. The whole book is:
[My aunt] appeared to locate the marriage bed as the true tropic of fever and disquiet.
So in many ways did Charlotte.
As it happens I...
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I'll be writing about that time I fell on my...
There is a thick raised reddish scar on the inside of my thigh. Ask me how I got it.
There are two answers.
One, I fell from an orange tree onto barbed wire. It was four o’clock, the clouds had come in and it was misty. I was planting seedlings in the nursery and got hungry. The mist had settled into the moss, and the surface of the bark was slick. I slipped.
I prefer two. After years of loving...
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Rigor mortis, Babe
I started this months ago and never finished or posted it.
My sister flew in from Boston to visit my grandfather, who may or may not have been on his last leg, in the hospital. Over dinner, my mother told my father that Sheri would be flying in. “Well, we’re not paying for the flight, are we?”
“No, of course not,” my mom said quickly. She had, actually, told my...
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