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 ...