Baby's first picture! Last week I got a new car. At 23, in post-college autumn, I bought my first car just days after my birthday. I was moving to the Poconos for a job and a car was a necessity. I got a loan from my grandparents and bought a 2012 Ford Escape with 42,000 …
Top Books of 2024
I read 46 books in 2024---a little over 13,000 pages---and here are some of my favs, in no particular order. If God Was a Virus by Seema YasminThis was my favorite book of poetry I read this year. Dr. Yasmin is a medical doctor, professor, and journalist, and this book covers her experience dealing with …
Alpenglow: A Nepal Travel Diary
Annapurna right before sunrise. Before Here's what you need to know about my before: I studied abroad in India and the mountains wedged themselves somewhere between my fifth and eleventh vertebrae. I vowed to go back, to feel the Himalaya more deeply, to venture beyond the Garhwali range. I wanted to go for my 30th, …
welcome back
Another journey in the outdoors. Trying to get outside more, trying to write more. There & back again. For HCV 5725. For Terry Tempest Williams. Day 1 Day 1 is 15 hours of driving. It was supposed to be 12 hours of driving and spending the night in Salt Lake City, but instead it's three …
Pink Summer
This is the only picture I have that remotely involves either Barbie or Taylor. It is September. September is a month of muddled change, a month of sunsets and back-to-school and the idea of autumn, which doesn't exist in any profound way on the California coast. September definitively marks the end of summer and the …
For B.
Graveyard I used to run through all the time in the tiny PA town My first job out of college--minus a short stint at Dunkin--was at Highlights magazine. I was hired as an intern at their editorial offices based in Small Town, PA (why don't I want to say the name? Why does that seem …
it goes on without you
a church in Portugal because why not everything I miss / is a monument / I cannot see through ****** It is midterms and finals week at the school I taught at this past fall. Semester over. New block classes beginning in February, a strange freshness in an otherwise stagnant, gray month. My e-mail account …
the other side
Everything you know about Aspen is true. Everything and more. Calling it a small Colorado ski town is like calling a humvee a car---you're not wrong, but you're not really right either. Aspen is a town wedged into a northward-slicing valley, mountains cradling it like arms. Everything about it is pristine, from the level sidewalks, …
be your own 3AM
sk8r boi in a hospital vibes “I am not physically tired, just filled with a deep, vague, undefined sense of spiritual distress, as if I had a deep wound running inside me and it had to be stanched.” –Thomas Merton It's all about language these days. Still. Even with the lilacs in bloom and the …
it is spring, i guess
April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.--- T. S. Eliot What do you want to be when you grow up? It is ninth period on a Friday, and I am the only teacher in a classroom full of seventh graders. The question catches …
People in Parks 