Equilibrium

Balance as survival.


In Defense of the Grossly Imperfect

This semester I’m teaching a writing course, the theme of which is Artificial Intelligence. If spending time daily contemplating the looming AI takeover isn’t enough to plunge you into existential dread, I don’t know what is. AI has become so sophisticated that it is already replacing our doctors, our service workers, our artists and writers, me. I have no skills AI cannot do more accurately and efficiently. I am thoroughly, humanly, excruciatingly fallible.

The $4,000 Cinch

So, with respect to Tom Hanks, life is less like a box of chocolates than it is a wobbly Jenga tower threatening to topple from one unidentifiable lynch pin …

Grievings

This grief is different. It took me awhile to figure out why. It is my first encounter with a loved one’s physical suffering from a violent death. Consequently, the shape and path of this grief is profoundly different than those I have experienced before. … This weekend our dog Shiloh was hit by a car.

Why My Body Is Smarter Than I Am

When I got an “I put pants on today” sticker for my computer, I thought it was a kind of funny metaphor for the small victory of just getting through the day. I never expected it would express a literal major achievement.

Hands Free

Picture this: a beaming, triumphant nine-year-old straddles the blanched, decaying carcass of a gargantuan, prehistoric organism. She smiles and waves from the perch she’s clambered to twelve feet above the forest floor. It’s perfect; it’s memorable; it’s eminently share-able. I reach for my phone to take a picture. It’s not in my pocket. Not in my backpack. My last memory of it is taking it out of my pocket to set it on top of the toilet paper dispenser in the (very) public restroom in the parking lot at the Tuolemne Grove trailhead in Yosemite National Park, an hour’s (very)…

Confessions of a Thrift Hound

One of the virtues of decreased resources is increased resourcefulness. When I hit college, my finances got a little dire, so I started poking around the local thrift stores. Part of the appeal was not only the student-friendly price-tags, but the stylistic idiosyncrasy, the library of oddball castoffs. I never knew what I would find, and I loved to buck the carbon-copy, middle-class GAP trends I’d grown up on. Vintage candy striper shirt? Must have! Homemade fuchsia bouclé maternity coat with plastic flower buttons? Can’t not! It didn’t hurt that I went to college in California’s Bay Area, where wacky…

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