Got a call from my doctor / surgeon yesterday. “Surgeon” is perhaps not the right word for him, because we do a pretty good job of not using the word “surgery” for the minor procedures I’ve had this year. Instead we call them “procedures.” A “surgery” is defined by Merriam Webster as medical treatment in which … Read more
Paul and I took a long-weekend road-trip this past weekend. We spent one day exploring Berkeley, CA, one day in San Francisco, and two days of driving. Paul and I get along well on drives, so the whole thing was pretty fun. We stayed in Berkeley with a retired faculty member from my job who recently retired … Read more
Yesterday, Paul and I embarked on a little road trip up to Berkeley and San Francisco. It officially started here: This is the restaurant’s owner: I thought his name might be Jack or Joe, but it was Mark. He explained that Jack was for “flap jacks” and Joe was like “cup of Joe”. He was … Read more
Someone I know from my place of work died recently. He’d had an interesting life: He’d served in the military then done well in academia. He married four times and had a number of children. As the person who processed his expense reports, I can say that in very recent years he spent months at … Read more
In my last post I mentioned my friend who is having issues with his health and posted on Facebook the status, “nothing seems fair anymore.” His post got an overwhelming response, because he has so many friends who love him, and also, i think because they are words that hit a cord with all of … Read more
SATURDAY: My mother-in-law, in town for the weekend, holds my arm as we stand at the L-shaped buffet at her friend’s new Thai noodle shop. She wears jeans, a floppy tee-shirt and tinted glasses with white rims studded with Swarovski crystals. Her friend, on the other side of the sneeze-guarded trays of food, has on … Read more
Ohhhh, headache. We had a party last night. For much of it, I think I was the picture of moderation in terms of eat and drink–but somehow when the time came to clean up, I lost all sense of proportion in the face of the prospect of incipient scarcity. As I scooped the chocolate from … Read more
As a rule, I often downplay naming people and things in my blog posts, thus the program where I take writing classes I tend to refer to, generically, as “the program where I take classes.” Today, however, I want to name it: It’s a graduate program at USC called the Master of Professional Writing. I’ve … Read more
Today I opened a storage room that hadn’t opened for a long time and found some boxes. I opened the boxes, that had not been opened for an even longer time and found some tapes an journals. I opened the journals, which might not have been opened since they were written in–and find I was … Read more
So there’s this thing I want to happen, that has a chance of happening, but that also has a chance of not happening. Dread of it not happening leaves a big anxious ball in my sternum. The moment that it does happen, if it does, the big anxious ball will remain because I also fear … Read more