This past Thursday I had a very long day. I taught two extra dance classes than I normally do, so that meant my day began at 5:30am and I didn’t finish up at the dance studio until 9:15. The long day, coupled with the long week and my failure to fully acclimate to my full time job left me feeling punch drunk by the time I locked up the dance studio and shuffled to my car. Despite my fatigue, I…
I sat on my parent’s deck last week reading How Fiction Works by James Wood. My sister came out the back door, spotted the red slip of a book in my hand, and said “huh. Sounds interesting.” Registering the sarcasm in her voice, I looked up to assure her that it’s actually one of my favorite books – a tiny power house of literary dissection written by arguably the greatest book critic of our time. I turn to Wood often…
One of my favorite books is Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway. If you’ve never read a modernist novel, you are better off than those who were taught one poorly. Reading Woolf is no joke, and if you pick up one of her works unprepared for what you might encounter, you likely won’t make it past the first few pages. I know I wouldn’t have. Woolf famously experimented with stream of consciousness – a literary technique that allowed her to…
I went back to work on Friday, and I’m having a difficult time orienting myself in space and time. I’m sleeping poorly, kicking off my comforter as I toss and turn in the throws of bizarre, wandering dreams only to wake up in a panic scrambling for my phone to discover that I still have an hour and forty-two minutes left to sleep. When my alarm does go off, I’m disoriented and bleary-eyed. I stare into my closet where my…
If you are a loyal blog reader, you can guess where I’m sitting to compose this post, and you would be correct. Today is my last official day of summer, and I’m starting it off in my favorite place – the back patio of Letizia’s. The sun streams through the trees onto robust flower beds, the tiny finches creep closer and closer to the leftover crumbs of the cookie I didn’t need to eat, small children babble unintelligibly to their…
Over the past couple weeks, I feel like my life has been seventy percent saying “yes” to each amazing social opportunity that comes my way while squeezing every last gorgeous drop of awesome out of the summer, and thirty percent dozing in my bed or laying on my couch in ratty cotton shorts and a t-shirt, sipping non-alcoholic beverages out of a mason jar through a bendy straw whilst watching Disney movies. If there could be a theme song for…
Happy August y’all. So it’s 10:22 as I begin this blog post. I’m at my local coffee shop eating the most ridiculously decadent peanut butter cookie. I swear it has three times the requisite amount of butter, the outside is crisp, and the inside is perfectly undercooked. I’m also sipping a $5 caramel macchiato that I got for free. I come here far too often, and my, eighth coffee, no matter how expensive, is free. I usually get a small…
I have an eavesdropping problem. As a child, my unique sense of self and fashion meant I was often talked about, and not in the way that any little girl wants to be talked about. Quiet and bookish, I saved my saved my sass for my siblings and decided that if I was going to be talked about by my classmates and peers, at least I wanted to know what they were saying. I didn’t talk much, so it was…
Roughly a week and a half ago, I threw out my back in my sleep. I have since learned that this is a thing that people do – but it had never happened to me before. One moment I was sleeping soundly, and the next moment I was startled awake in the early morning hours, arching off the bed as my low back rippled with pain. The muscle spasms lasted only a few seconds, but the tender tightness lingered throughout…
Two posts in two days! I realized in my desire to write my way out of a funk, I missed out on sharing a couple remarkable stories from last week that involved actually talking to strangers instead of moving away from them at coffee shops. To start, the AP workshop I took was full of strangers, and I did my best to talk to as many of them as possible. A good number of them were from out of town,…