Perforation Problems

When I was a baby, my mom used to hand me slices of Kraft American cheese to snack on in my high chair. Maybe that was the start of my love affair with cheese, a foundational piece (along with chicken nuggets) of my diet well through my twenties. Okay, let's not lie. Cheese is still a foundational piece of my diet, despite my newly-found acceptance of vegetables. I love cheese. Cheese fries, cheese dogs, Cheez-its, quesadillas, queso, nachos, cheese pizza, cheddar goldfish crackers, grilled cheese, mac n' cheese. Now that I'm slightly fancier, maybe I've upgraded a bit to cheese plates, camembert & apple sandwiches, four cheese ravioli, sausage and ricotta flatbread, etc, etc, but really if it's got cheese on it, I'll probably like it. There's no denying that cheese makes just about anything better. That doesn't mean all cheeses are equal—there can be bad cheese. Once my brother and I stopped at a gas station on the way to the lake because we ree...

I woke up motivated to be better. I do this every once in awhile—it usually results in me doing some push ups and deciding I'll just refrain from eating. The push ups peter out eventually and the starvation lasts about 4 hours, but the motivation is there, even if it's brief. Last night as I was trying to fall asleep, having spent the evening counting polybags and card sleeves and chipboard for Olive & Clyde's taxes, I decided I'd write a blog post today. I can't meet with Sarah because I have to be in Cincy for Losant's STEM girls workshop this weekend, but I'm determined to manage my own writing. The sensation the last couple months of needing to move forward keeps growing—I'm restless. One of the things I need to focus on is idea generation. I wrote a short story this week—just something silly, but I had an idea, I fleshed it out into a plot outline, and then I just wrote it. I need more practice at that so it becomes easier. None of this comi...

Calvin Fletcher's Coffee Company has a sort of run down, church basement, hipster DIY appeal—black sharpie letters on cardboard signs tell you where to put your dirty dishes, local art covers the walls (this week it's overly green landscapes—trees and lily pads and fields done in a bright, art-school-student style), bookshelves with gold stenciled triangles break the room into sitting nooks, advertisements for yoga and poetry readings and the League of Latte competition cover the sides of the counter, a magic marker sign details the drink of the moment (some white chocolate raspberry concoction with cinnamon-infused milk that sounds heavenly). The baristas, no matter who's working, immediately convey kindness and friendliness, and look exactly like you'd expect baristas in Indy's Fountain Square area to look: skinny jeans, flannel, cardigans, green hair, clothes either really too tight or really too loose for convention. It's easy to romanticize them as the kind...

In trying to come up with things to write about I started looking through old stuff and wanted to post this poem-whatever-thing I wrote when my Great-Grandpa T died, not long after Great-Grandma T. It's weird to read old stuff cause some of it makes me want to throw up a little but some of it I like. I like the beginning of this but not so much the middle and end, but here it is for posterity and so maybe someday I revise it a bit. Eight months later, the pallbearers are the same, though this time they carry their burden over frozen ground. With sudden formality in the set of their shoulders, these men I see every day become a little foreign, the tangible weight of family responsibility between them. I've never seen my brothers looking so much like men. He said, "You have to make sure she goes into the tomb feet first, so that when I go our heads are side-by-side. We need to be able to talk to each other." I can tell when I look at his hands, though, th...

I feel entirely uninspired right now. I don't want to write about anything. This week has been gray and rainy and I've felt like a sloth. I just want to sleep or watch Netflix or—strangely—run on the treadmill, because none of those things require thinking. I had a couple ideas for writing topics today. While I was emptying the dishwasher I mentally wrote an entire post about death changing your idea of what's important. Later I thought I might write about La La Land and how some movies leave you feeling like the world is just a little bit magical—like you could waltz through Meijer as you pick up milk and eggs, like you could spend your days painting flowers and cooking delicious, elaborate meals (I've been watching America's Test Kitchen.) But now that I'm sitting here at my designated writing time nothing sounds appealing and I have no thoughts or words or inclination to write anything. I turned on the La La Land soundtrack to try to inspire myself. Nothi...

It could be the fact that I let my Sudafed wear off, or that my cold/sinus infection was getting worse, but I think it was mostly the quartet of voices telling me I was really sick that had me feeling like I was dying. First Brinna, as we caught up on our holidays via gchat: "You're STILL sick?? Haley." Then Michael, who responded to my text saying I might go to the Minute Clinic if I didn't feel better by tomorrow with, "Maybe you should go today after you're done at work." Then my coworker, who gave me a tilted head, "you know better" Mom look when I told her antibiotics probably wouldn't help. But it was the last voice, Jessica the Nurse Practitioner at the CVS Minute Clinic who really gave me permission to abandon myself to my snot-filled miseries. "So you've had symptoms for a couple weeks?" "Well, since Halloween, so like...two months." "OH. Well, then." She moves from her computer a...

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...