Category: Personal

What are our friends doing, when we don’t see them? What are our favorite short story writers doing in the long periods when they aren’t polishing the paragraphs we finally love so much? Or novelists when they aren’t hewing away at the massive structure of their newest Bildungsroman? Or actors when they aren’t getting deep…

The weather is beautiful, the past three days. Clear, sunny – not at all hot of course, it’s barely 70 or so, but ideal. For the locals they think this is hot – one said to me yesterday that it was tropical: I just rolled my eyes and said, no, this is not tropical. It’s…

Last night: sitting around with D., V.’s husband and H., V.’s best friend. They were relaxing after a day of doing lists – lists of people not to forget to invite to the service, lists of music, lists of this and that. They are both in rather better shape than they were. And, fortunately, we…

This is actually the hard part: people stopping me in the hall, being sympathetic, saying how awful it is that V. has died. I always have lots of trouble with this part – actual disasters don’t faze me that much, but talking about them afterward in any but the simplest terms makes me a bit…

Change, time, sudden breaks, new landscapes. Familiar to me; but this now is after a long time of relative stasis. V.’s death coincided with finishing several things I’ve been working on for several months, and of course my increasing well-being over the past three months from the new medications; and considering, with increasing definiteness, moving…

End of a year. Another year, I suppose I should say – but the phrase "end of another year" has a tired, endless quality to it that I don’t like. Given as I am to worrying over the past and over what I haven’t done, or have lost, this of course would typically bring up…

A slice of orange floating in the bath oils…. There is peace in my heart these days: or, to be less religious-sounding, there is a certain peacefulness in my heart lately. I almost hesitate to mention in it; not because I think that saying it will make it go away, but because I have claimed…

Was reading Storr’s Dynamics of Creation, where he analyzes creativity (as viewed through biographies of ‘great’ artistic figures) in psychological/psychoanalytic terms. It’s one of his earlier books, and a little clunkier than the later ones – Storr has made a career out of intelligent but popularly-oriented explorations of various experiences in psychological terms; one of…

My eldest sister is in the hospital for an operation… it unfortunately brings up some worry; she is always cool and offhand about serious things (she is, in fact, always the unflappably dependable one, the smart one, the one who raises no fuss – typical eldest child in that context). But of course the rest…