Perforation Problems

At Panera there's a teenage boy and an older woman sitting in a half circle booth, a collection of coffee cups in front of them. The boy has curly, floppy brown hair extending in a cloud around his head, bangs hanging in his eyes. He's staring out absentmindedly into the crowd, not as if he's bored, but more sleepy and complacent. The older woman next to him might be his grandma—she has curly white hair in a more feminine, shorter style than the boy, and she's wearing a patterned snowflake shirt and a white puffer vest, holding a newspaper open as she reads. Something about them strikes me as interesting—not that they're together, but that they're so content and comfortable. You'd expect a teenage boy to be playing on his phone, to be wishing he was with his friends or his video games, to be resentful he has to spend time with his grandma on his Christmas break. But they both seem happy. I point them out to Sarah and she confirms my thoughts. "Th...

Sarah says I have to post this by 4pm, which gives me 65 minutes. This means I cannot procrastinate like I did with the last post I wrote, going back and forth between Facebook and my work email. I'm going to use that deadline as it was intended—an excuse to not worry about the sloppiness of my writing and just write. WRITING. HERE WE GO. We decided to write about Christmas gifting. Sometimes when we don't have topics we just start talking and come up with something, and I start pulling details out of the air that I totally could write about. It helps to have a writing partner. Three years ago or so Michael's family came to Indianapolis for Christmas for the first time. I was immediately awash in anxiety about hosting. Christmas at the cabin in New York is a different experience—great in many ways, but a little calmer than my family's chaos. I wanted them to feel at home, to make it as similar as I could to their own Christmas traditions. So the next thing I kno...

This weekend a friend sent me a book called Introvert Doodles , because she and I often bond over our hatred of phone calls, parties, and situations where we have to talk to people or do crazy things like leave the house. It got me started thinking about my own history of introversion. As a kid I built a hiding spot in my closet, a tiny rectangular space where I could close the doors and sit and read and nobody would bug me. I have a vague memory of hiding in there when I got in trouble for something having to do with eating cookie dough, too—but I might have made that up. When I was even younger than that I was playing in the backyard of our house in Columbus, Ohio when two figures appeared at the edge of the yard. I can see them in my head now, two young girls, mostly shadowy outlines to my memory, stepping around the electric pole and distinctly heading towards my house. I ran in the house crying to hide. Later my mom came to find me—"They just wanted to see if you ...

Writing seems so daunting sometimes. It's like in my head there's one perfect way to write something, one perfect version I'm supposed to construct or unearth that will most accurately convey the truth of what I want to say. But then what if I write it the wrong way? What if my final product isn't anything like what I want it to be? What if I don't do it right? It's easier to just turn on Netflix and eat some cheese and crackers. As Thanksgiving drew closer this year I felt more and more uneasy. In the past, I'd always felt giddy about the holidays, even up through college. I loved them. Time with my family. Vacation from school. Cookie-making. Decorating. Helping Grandma wrap presents and set up her creepy live action caroler dolls. Sitting surrounded by all the Black Friday ads, circling things we wanted and marking them with our initials. Waking up in my parents' house at dawn Christmas morning to my brother blasting the 1812 Overture and throwing t...

Losing someone is bad enough The immediate gap The empty places The missing words and hands and– Self I look around me and everything becomes Before or After This was when we were happy This was when we had no idea This was when things went wrong This was when things went on anyway But I think what's worse than the Missing is the Never again The total finality of it all The reminder that everything is leaving Everything is going away Even right now Everything is changing

Ryan Butts was my first boyfriend. Since we were third graders that didn't mean much. I don't think we even spent any time together beyond chasing each other around during recess. But I do remember my hurt feelings when he decided to be boyfriend and girlfriend with my friend Jennifer, instead. Standing atop the wooden castle parapet on the playground at Winterset Elementary School, I yelled down at him, "I don't care what you do, Ryan BUTTS." When we came inside I got a talking-to from my teacher, who told me it wasn't nice to make fun of people's names. Then in seventh grade I "dated" Andrew Thomas. I remember catching him looking at me in social studies and feeling a warm, pleasant anxiety in my stomach, like life suddenly held a whole bunch of possibilities, and I wasn't sure what to do with them. We passed notes back and forth with an intricate coding and folding system. We didn't use names – instead I was a turtle and he was a l...

I should be working this morning – I've got a long list of projects marked ASAP and URGENT with exclamation points – but I'm tired and sleepy and not really feeling much of anything. Also I know these projects are not really ASAP and URGENT. It's not like I'm helping get homeless people off the street or feed starving children. I'm revising copy for websites. So I thought I'd take a moment and try to write a bit. Feeling creative has been hard and writing hasn't come easily lately, even when I take time out to do it. My words don't seem to come out right at the moment. I guess the muscle is getting weak, which is all the more reason to fight my way through it. I spent last week in New York City and had a couple moments, as I usually do in new places, where my fingers itched for a pen. Sitting on the bus from LaGuardia I wanted to describe the man sitting next to me, in his pinstripe pants and wool blazer, a fedora perched on his head as he read John ...

It's raining today, the kind of rain that makes you understand why people use the word "downpour." I've got the back door open to the smells and sounds, even though water's starting to speckle the floor inside the screen and I know Michael would close it, if he were here. Sometimes it's nice to feel like you're in the middle of a rainstorm. When we were young my parents would take us out on the front porch to watch the rain, to count the seconds between lighting and thunder. I loved it, being surrounded by the storm and yet (mostly) safe under our house's roof. Clyde has disappeared – I finally find him at the top of the stairs, where it's quieter. I sit down next to him and he rolls over so I can pet his belly. He's kept close to me the last couple of days. We're not following our normal schedule. It puts him on edge. Last night he kept staring at me and wagging his tail. "What? You already had dinner." Ears perk up. Slap, ...

 Sometimes when I sit down to write I feel like my body is wound tight, like all the doorways that should be open to creative thought are sealed shut. My brain refuses to engage in the kind of thinking I need – the abstract, reflective, slow & ponderous, weighty, wonder-of-words contemplation that sucks you into each moment and holds you there so you can ignore everything else going on around you. Instead I'm flitting around spasmodically from thought to thought to thought, anxiety to anxiety to anxiety. I just can't. sit. still. Mentally. It seems like writing ideas always come to me when I'm in the middle of something else, when I couldn't possibly stop and write. Maybe that's because I'm not stressing out about writing at that moment – there's no pressure. My head is relaxed. Whatever. I think I maybe need to accept that I'm failing at writing. And it's entirely my own fault. Am I going to do something about it? Or am I going to give in, ...

She was beautiful – caramel skin, slender limbs, the kind of fashion sense that immediately made you feel dowdy and out-of-touch. With a golden stud nestled delicately in the dip of her nose, my coworker wore brown oxfords and tights in a way that somehow made her seem New-York-City-cool, not Little-Girl-Pretending. She also never wore a bra. At the time, I was near my largest weight, trying to figure out what to wear to work now that I wasn't a teacher and lacking any real awareness of what's fashionable. And I would never, ever, let my DD+ chest out in public without being properly restrained. So droopy! So floppy! So obscene! And yet. She was not small chested – she might have been nearly as big-in-the-boobs as me. But she didn't seem to care. And neither did anyone else. It was all just a part of her general aesthetic. I chalked it up to her being cooler than me and skinny. Skinny people can get away with a lot that fat people can't. Fast forward 7 years or so...

"I like how productive we are when we're together," Sarah says. "We decide we want to do something and we do it."  We're sitting at Lulu's Coffee + Bakehouse on the northside on a sunny Thursday afternoon, Sarah nursing a hangover and me trying to figure out what spices are on the spiced walnuts in my salad. They're delicious. It's the third new coffee shop we've visited this summer in our tour of new writing locations. So far we haven't written as much as we'd planned, but I've certainly had a lot of lattes.  We've just resolved to stop checking Facebook until Monday. It's the result of many a discussion about how addicted we are to the platform, how it encourages narcissism, how you can get lost in your Facebook feed and not notice an hour's gone by. I use Facebook just as much as any normal person in 2016, and I wish I didn't. I've got especially negative feelings towards it at the moment because an o...

"Michael and I are going to try clean eating." I drop it into the conversation casually as we're making strawberry jam from the strawberries we picked that morning. It's a yearly tradition. My mother looks at me sideways and makes a noise I'll describe as a scoff, though I'm not sure how intentional it is. "Clean eating?" I rush to downplay it. "Yeah, mostly just looking at labels and trying to avoid anything that's too processed. Just to try to eat healthier." "Does that mean no Dairy Queen blizzards?" She laughs. "Yeah, no Dairy Queen blizzards." I know why she brings up Dairy Queen blizzards. They're a staple of summer, a treat we get on the way home from my grandparents' lake house to make ourselves feel better about having to leave the lake and go back to real life. It's not that my mom is against eating healthy – she and my dad have been eating better over the last few years and she in gen...

If left to my own devices I stay up too late. I don't do the dishes, I don't put food away. I leave pairs of my shoes all over the house, in the middle of the hallway, next to the coffee table, by the back door. Why do I wear so many different pairs of shoes? On Tuesday night I tried to clean up, thinking it'd be a productive way to get my 10,000 steps for the day. But by Wednesday night it was messy again, so what's the point? I've gotten a lot done this week, both for clients and for myself (cleaning the printer heads on the O&C printer, picking up a card order, buying supplies for camping this weekend, laundry, going to yoga class, putting away all the clothes that were piled on the guest room bed, cleaning the guest bathroom for Clyde's dog sitter), but now on a Thursday afternoon it doesn't feel like enough. Productivity when you work for yourself is a tricky thing. When you go to an office, you end up feeling like you're doing your job just...

I used to do this thing when I was younger and feeling dramatic and emo in that way that only a teenager / early 20-something can – I'd sit at my computer, wanting to write but unable to, listening to music and feeling the immense weight of the world on my privileged, naive shoulders. I'd start typing the lyrics to the songs I was listening to in time with the music, as if it were a way to sing with written words, each letter shaping into existence on the screen like notes in the air. She put him out like the burning end of a midnight cigarette. That's one of my favorite images ever. It was a bit of a game – can I type the words fast enough to keep up with the music? Can I space them out visually on "paper" so they mimic what I hear? The life and times of a young English nerd! If only everyone could experience the joy I feel in typing out someone else's single, perfect phrase. Yeats or Bieber, it doesn't matter. I don't spend a lot of time l...

Sitting in a coffee shop, supposed to be writing. Two writing projects in my head – one of them a new one I was excited about a few hours ago. But I'm tired, and my head won't settle and focus. I have a headache, a dull throbbing in my sinuses that's been plaguing me all week. Weather changes fuck with my head. My stomach feels a little empty – what am I going to make for dinner? Should probably figure it out before Michael heads home from Cincinnati. It has to be something he won't mind eating but something that doesn't blow up my attempts to be healthy. What haven't we had in awhile? Do I have time to stop at the grocery after this? We have no milk. My mind skitters to a phone call I have early tomorrow morning, and the work that will come out of it. He's a doctor I'm interviewing about relationship counseling for a campaign for a client. If I don't get enough info out of him – or the right info – it's going to make the content harder to writ...

People who leave chicken bones on the sidewalk. There are trash cans everywhere! Use an effing trash can! Do you not care about ANYTHING?  My dog who insists on eating chicken bones left on the sidewalk and making me pry them out of his mouth.  Designers who change my copy just because they feel like it and never even let me know. Of course you know better than I do. It's not like I actually researched keywords or do this for a living.  People who send me an email and then immediately call me to let me know the contents of the email they sent. 

Everything's irritating me today. I woke up early to take Clyde to be groomed. They make you drop him off between 7 and 8:30, which really isn't very nice because that means he has to just sit there in a crate or wherever they put him, feeling anxious because he's Clyde and Clyde is always anxious unless he's sleeping, waiting for hours till it's his turn. He was really not feeling it today – the groomer had a hard time getting him to come back behind the gate. Before I dropped him off, though, I had to get a poop sample for them, which means I had to take him on a walk. Sargent Rd is not the most walker-friendly street, especially at the moment, because traffic from construction closures on two surrounding streets are sending a bunch of cars down our little, sidewalk-and-shoulder-less road. So that was stressful. And I got mud and rocks in my shoes. Then when he finally pooped, it was smelly and messy and gooey, because, duh, it's poop, and I had to scoop i...

I've been obsessed with yoga headstands and handstands since February. I'm not sure what my deal is, but I just want to be upside down. It started when Amanda and I began taking a yoga class at the gym. It wasn't a great yoga class – the teacher did a pretty crappy job of explaining moves and talking us through things. It mostly just made me nostalgic for the classes I took in Indy last year. BUT it was yoga once a week, and it got me to start doing some yoga on my own at home, too. It's a common reaction to panic when a teacher says it's time to work on inversions – they're scary. Your feet are above your head, you feel like you're going to hurt your neck, you could fall over and break your face...and the chances of queefing are high. No one had ever told me the correct way to do a headstand, so I mostly just flung my feet up against the wall and hoped for the best. But as I started getting back into regular yoga practice (ho ho, that phrase is so fancy...

Somewhere in my house, maybe in a box in the attic, is a tape recorder with an hour of my great grandma's voice. A few years before she died, I decided in the middle of one of my obsession-with-genealogy phases that I wanted to make a record of what she knew about our Irish ancestors, one of whom had stowed away on a ship during the potato famine to make his way to America. I remember putting the recording aside and thinking, "This is important – I'll want to keep this." Having a record of Grandma T's voice seemed precious even while she was still there. And yet somehow I've let it get stowed away in a box in the attic. It's depressing to think of how many stories get lost, either diluted by time and memory, forgotten, or made inaccessible once we're gone, locked in the shadows of our brains without any way out. My grandpa tells me stories all the time – he's an amazing storyteller, with the knack of making you see what he saw and hear the voices...

I've been a part-time city dweller for about 5 months now, and I gotta say, except for the driving back and forth, it's pretty much the best of both worlds. When I'm in Cincinnati I spend my days working in coffee shops, meeting my friend on the corner to walk to the gym, taking Clyde to the dog park, playing trivia at our regular weekly spot. It's easier to be social in Cincinnati, especially for our normally not-so-social selves. We have a group of friends there with whom there's no pressure to be polite or pleasant if you don't feel like it. Hanging out or getting dinner isn't a big deal because you can just walk a couple blocks from your apartment or stop by somewhere after work – it doesn't mean taking up your whole evening. And the city throws interesting things my way almost every time I step out on the streets – two little girls on Orchard Street screaming an unharmonious version of the "Doe, a deer" song from The Sound of Music, a home...

It's a little crazy how writing can be so satisfying and yet so tedious and wrenching at the same time. I'm sitting here in a cafe in OTR, drinking a latte and trying to ignore that there's a cold draft coming in from the window next to me. I know that – logically – there are moments during the winter months when I'm NOT freezing. It hasn't even been THAT cold this winter so far. I just can't remember that most of the time. The cold feels like a constant fog soaking in my fingertips, my shoulders – even my nose when I'm trying to sleep.  Today I tried to stop by a store I'd briefly talked to last summer about carrying Olive & Clyde cards – I'd gotten myself all psyched up, prepared what I was going to say, packaged cards to show the owner, even gotten some prepared for retail display in case she was up for taking cards now. But what happens once I walk downtown? The store isn't there anymore. So now I'm writing in a coffee shop instead...