You’ve seen this in a sitcom, or a movie, or both. Girl (usually the boy takes the backseat in the plot here) thinks she’s pregnant, but wasn’t planning it, and so now she’s forced to think through life with or without a kid. Often the connection (or lack of one) to the father is involved […]

Teenagers are like caffeine, alcohol, chocolate, cute little puppies, and the old prank of putting a bag of dog poop on someone’s front porch and lighting it on fire. It’s a joy and burden to spend my weeks among them. They are funny and inspiring, and they are also a sticky, smelly, inappropriate mess. If […]

The spork is similar to fruitcake. It’s a combination of things that are good, popular, well-liked, and yet the combination gets a bad rap.

Quality varies with sporks and fruitcakes. I like them both, primarily, as ideas.

Often we think of the bad examples first. For the spork, this means those flimsy ones wrapped in plastic […]

William Stafford once said that a poem was a serious joke, “a truth that has learned jujitsu.” And that when you’re stuck, you should lower your standards and keep going. And that he would trade all his poems for the next one. And that writing is a reckless encounter with whatever comes along. And that […]

In my world, jogging and blogging are similar. I don’t like the words. I don’t like the lingo. I don’t like watching people do it, or hear people talk about doing it. I also started doing both of them last year.

Both activities have always been things that I felt like I SHOULD do, things […]

I appreciate the blank canvas literally and figuratively. I put a canvas on an easel last month and spent a lot more time staring at it than I did putting paint on it. It does seem to stare, so bright, so full of potential, so easy to screw up. I have stared at many pieces […]

Stranger Than Fiction might be my favorite movie. It is so existentially satisfying to me. It’s funny, it’s profound, it’s inspiring. It contains jokes about dramatic irony and third person omniscient and lines like “I may already be dead, just not typed.” It’s about story and what makes a good one, and raises the question […]

Coffee, school, church, beer, library, George Saunders. Had a tough day at school. Very disheartening in deep and profound ways. Drove by my church to see if my friend was there. Decided against coffee, having had enough today. Decided against beer, it being a little too early for that. Ended up in the library. I […]