I’ve been thinking a lot about an old English teacher, Faye Hardin, who passed away in 2019. She was a tough old bag. Some twenty years ago when I had her my senior year, there were students in my class whose parents and grandparents had her as a teacher. She pushed students harder than most–to […]
Tag: humanity
One Year, Alive.
I told myself after a year of “quarantine,” of “surviving” a pandemic, after documenting the months and months of it, that it was only fitting to make sure, one year on, that I would document that too. It’s like a rite of passage, is it not? All the loss and all of the loneliness and […]
Quarantine, Day 327, Or Cat Theology
Sometimes, when the house is particularly quiet, you can hear Freya’s paws pitter-patter across the hardwood floor, and having never had an indoor cat, there’s something special to me about the way she moves with this persistant grace that always brings me calm and gets me excited at the same time. She’s taken sometimes to […]
Quarantine, Day 281
It’s been two hundred eighty-one days now since I began quarantine, and while it’s probably not fair anymore to say I’m actively in quarantine, the pandemic has now consumed 75% of this year and is worse today than it ever was when it began. I’m writing for the first time in a while, having not […]
Quarantine, Day 27
My N-99 masks came–two of them with filters on the mask. They are black and make me look like Bane from the Batman series. To be honest, I’d feel guilty for having ordered them, knowing in hindsight they could’ve gone to someone in a hospital, except I ordered them back in February, before anyone was […]
Quarantine, Day 12
I woke up at 3:00 am choking and sweating and generally in a state of panic. I got out of bed and went straight to the bathroom feeling like I might vomit, repeatedly whispering to myself, “It’s just anxiety, it’s just anxiety, it’s just anxiety.“ The operative word, of course, is “just,” as if anxiety […]
Story Collecting from New Orleans to Denver and Beyond
I’ve been out in Denver for work. Before that I was in New Orleans. I work in fundraising, and my job mostly consists of meeting people and hearing their stories. I don’t think it was ever intentional, but these last several years collecting and cherishing the most heartfelt human stories from the people I’ve met […]
Sister
They say your brother or sister is generally the person you will know longer than any other human being. My sister and I started that off on the right foot. Four years apart, I’m pretty sure the first dozen or so of my life, all we did was bicker. There was the time she pushed […]
Ten Thousand Days.
A hard rain fell on New York City today. It was one of those more memorable rains where even if you’re not out in the thick of it, the way it’s just lapping at the windows in intermittent sheets has everyone staring outdoors like they’ve never seen rain before. Maybe, too, it’s the way the […]
Lead Us Not Into Penn Station
I’m not sure why, but lately, I’m hypersensitive to all the sounds that surround me. Maybe it’s because I’m used to a more rural environment that the sounds of the City are just that jarring to me. Maybe it’s because I’m living just next to the Garden State Parkway, which leaves in its wake a […]
