Perforation Problems

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...