a good bug

Tonight I got to see Bug for the first time in two weeks. I’ve gotten to see her fairly consistently on Wednesdays as the autumn’s progressed, and I was especially happy to see her tonight. It seems like such a long time ago that we were all alone on Wednesdays and teaching was still [...]

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here’s lookin’ at you kid

At half past four, the west side was full. People stood shoulder to shoulder, elbowing their neighbors three people deep, unfurling blankets and shaking them repeatedly. It was like an army of toreadors awaiting a bullfight. The pristine sea of green sat beckoning, but the police stood with their thumbs looped through [...]

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the lost art of making it personal

There is an old man I know who has a hard time remembering but cares so much about knowing people’s names that he carries a sheet of photographs with him to his church with names printed underneath so that he can say hello to each of them personally. This is impressive since I just [...]

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temporal benchmarks

Each time I sign a new credit card, I wonder what my life will be like when it expires. Will my last name be the same? Will my address be the same? Will I be able to use a credit card where I’m living? Will my credit limit have quadrupled? [...]

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we’re home

I do nothing with my roommate except sleep simultaneously in our respective separate bedrooms. Socially speaking, I live alone. I have been very careful to avoid getting “live-alone” sydrome where you talk in great excess about nothing because you are so rarely given a chanage to have conversations. This weekend I have [...]

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private concerts

When I was in college, I went to many concerts in venues of various sizes with music of myriad genres. All of them have some special memory linked to them — the power outage, arriving by boat, or watching the back-up guitarist stare at the girl in the front row while the lead singer [...]

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jamaican me laugh

I had a two great mentors during my first year of teaching, a group of older staff members that I ate lunch with during the second, and an at-work boyfriend my third. My extra-professional time with teachers remained very limited. The number of my peers who were both teachers and my friends equaled [...]

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whose vocabulary are they using?

Tonight Jocelyn made a very important confession to me: she does not use predictive text when messaging on her phone. Neither do I, but I thought I was alone. I hoped that by entering my own text for several months that I could create predictive text that used my level of vocabulary or [...]

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a city of soul mates

Sometime around my fourth birthday, I met a girl named Amy. She lived down the street from me, and over the next five years we would share many wonderful childhood moments in suburban Maryland.
In the third grade, when I signed up for girl scouts, I met a girl named Katie who had [...]

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