All she wants for Christmas is a family owned pizzeria. One she can pass down to her children. They’ll work there after school, if they want to. She’ll only employ friends and family. She’ll give employee discounts.
Category: Prose
Trytopophobia

The edge of a hole is a dreadful angle.
Fill in the blanks darkly
Sometimes, I “fill in the blanks darkly.”
Bricks and mortar

To Karl.
Expand

A micro story.
Skipper, Barbie’s sister

Skipper counts as a Barbie.
Featuring 3 Gals’ Take on Rats

Enough said. I remain enamored of the word commensal, but rats are synanthropes. They are kleptoparasites. They are pests. They are vectors and direct zoonotic carriers.
Post Metric

Do metrics matter?
A post about rats to expand your vocabulary

A post about musophobia, from which I have, since, recovered.
Ten Minutes

In retrospect, we spoiled her.
Vignettes

I’m happy to say the nights haven’t felt too large in a long long time.
New shoes (100 word story)

It’s ok to need love.
Not to write

Let me see . . .
An unfinished letter helps

Beginning of some fiction.
A Space to Write

What turned out to be a premonition.

Starting some fiction.
A woman in an attic

Part one of some fiction.

Super Mario, Zelda, Star Fox + more
Because

The way the words are ordered are up to me. They don’t have to be in lanes. They don’t have to go forward.
Shift and Change

Something happened last year. I looked to give updates to the person in charge, but since it was me I didn’t give them. I looked out the window instead, except the blinds were drawn. Now, I can’t control the blinds. They control themselves. And, everyone can see into my office because the walls are glass. […]
A Sermon
An Abecedarian sequence (mostly) inspired by Emmet Fox and the prologue in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette.

When the Sopranos premiered, I was 20, not fist pumping in the dark media room of my large house in Greenwich. My gaze was deadlocked on this man of violence. I knew men of violence kinda secondhand kinda not. Genetics is weird. When my sister sees things she hears music. When I hear music I […]
Mash Up: Billy Joel & GGM

Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was released in the Fall of 1989. I was 10 years old and did not get it. It had to do with history. Teachers liked it. A couple decades later, on a nostalgic whim, I bought in on iTunes. It was so much better, musically, than I […]

I read something by Rumi once: “Don’t be satisfied with stories . . . How things have gone for others . . . Unfold your own.” Live life without an outside reference. In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes that she found God inside herself as herself. Aristotle says consciousness is the process […]

The Blacklight Candelabra says: There’s much in nature that the naked eye can’t perceive without assistance . . . It shows us the magnified eye of a fly, which looks nothing like you would think an eye would look and challenges us to: Use words to accomplish similar revelations through magnification. I chose as a […]
Alice’s Watch

I had a close encounter with a dolphin once. The dolphin was not happy, though I couldn’t tell you how I knew. Horses stomp their feet and neigh with irritation. Dogs bark and growl. This dolphin had its smiley face and was still but I could feel her angst as though it was an assault. […]
The Williamsburg Loop

The last millennial I interviewed wrote an essay in the Fall of 2013 as she was beginning her training for the NYC marathon. She describes the culture and structures along her favorite running route, the Williamsburg Loop. I love it and wanted to share. She agreed. Here it is. I’m training for the 2014 New […]
The Living

When I was a kid I was afraid of lava. I felt it was an imminent danger. At any minute I might encounter lava. Lava has recently come into my four year old son’s life, probably the same way it must have come into mine: school. Somehow he found out about lava and now when we cross […]
Beyond Enter Right, Exit Left

I heard once that thoughts are your mind breathing. I imagined my mind releasing thoughts like extra energy, so it could be well. This concept helped me come to an arrangement with thoughts that would come, unbidden, in meditation. I could watch them go by, like a car passing on the street in front of […]
Le Gourmet (The Greedy Child)

I feel tingly in my hands and toes to think of tiptoeing down the hallway, down the stairs, into the kitchen for the fridge. Rarely do I undertake such a thrilling journey, knowing there is the darkness and the creaking floors and perhaps I will happen upon mice meeting up in three’s. I wouldn’t want […]

I used to think that I was the mask I put on my face. I was not duplicitous (then) – I thought my mask was my face. Until the day I saw my mask. In one moment, I took it off and held it in my hands. I had imagined it to be just right. […]
Imaginary Things

I never had imaginary friends. I have imaginary enemies, instead. They are not quite as fun. It’s really no surprise since I tend to predict the worst possible outcome and love engaging with doubt. The imagined adversity I create creates a soundless cacophony only I can hear.
The Marathon

I would not call myself a runner and neither would most anybody. I’m not really built for running of any type, neither sprinting nor long distance. I ran a marathon once, though. I got the idea from an advertisement at Marvelous Market near my building. It said anyone could run a marathon.
Unequal Terms

I am a lawyer by trade, and not one who enjoys reading judicial opinions in the common law. I’m not a fancy lawyer, you understand. When it dawned on me my first year of law school that reading opinions was a whole lot of what law school was about, I thought I had made a […]
Sweeping motions

I protect my desire for organization. I never want to get too honest about it. But, life has a way. A couple of years ago, I saw something on Facebook to the effect of “a clean house is a sign of a wasted life.” “It just couldn’t be,” I thought. And, at the same time, […]

I am a working mom of two awesome kiddos – Gus (4) and Teddy (5 months). My husband and I chose to exclusively breastfeed. That sounds weird to say. The truth is more like, I wanted to breastfeed and my husband was very supportive.
Confessions of a metric-seeker

I have trouble imagining a vast and infinite world. Mark Aldrich asks in I, Toward a Metrics of Me: Am I my numbers? Am I my metrics of me? Everything in the world can be counted, and that number can be known and disclosed, but more often than not this one fact does not make […]
The truth serum

I could not wait to get home today to jump on the trampoline. I am not a circus performer or a child. We’ve had the trampoline since June; we bought it for our son on his 4th birthday. We didn’t put it together until a few weeks ago, as we needed to cut down a […]
Part V: My Soul Echoes

We lasted 9 months in the deep burbs before we decided to move back. It took 4 months to sell our house. We lived in a furnished apartment for 3 more months in our old neighborhood in Arlington before we bought the house we live in now. I was ecstatic to be back in the old ‘hood and my old yoga […]

I got pregnant. I wanted to more than anything, but I was shocked by it all the same. I stopped yoga and all physical exercise as soon as I found out and was on bed rest for two months as well. I went back to yoga when my son was 4 weeks old and practiced […]

What I did next was surprising, in retrospect, and wholly self propelled. I had mistaken my soul stretching into my body for and end in itself.
Part II: I see a flower

I stayed in the forest for 9 years. Indeed, I lost my way. Just when I had given up all hope, I happened upon the path again, as though no time had passed.

I should have been a philoligist, like Nietzsche. I always want to know the etymology of words thinking it will clear everything up, but it never really does.

I met Average Yogini in 2001 through mutual friends. I believe I was in attendance at her first or one of her first yoga classes at our mutual and beloved studio Edge Yoga! I feel proud, like I attended a birth of sorts. She was one of my inspirations for starting 1874, so I thought it would be […]
Dream Reader

I like reading dreams. In a past life, I would be an old crooked lady in the Iron Age, reading dreams, interpreting omens, cracking eggs on black cast iron plates and stirring them around with my gnarly fingernails.
Please, don’t feed the fears

I recently saw a picture on Facebook with red words on a white sign: “Please Do Not Feed the Fears” (like one you would see at a zoo). I used to feed my fears very well. My fears were fat, well-fed, let me tell you. I used to shop at Whole Foods for them, making sure […]
On cheese and diaries

Day 2 of Blogging 101: Why not just keep a diary, you say? I kept a diary when I was probably around 8. It looked kinda like this:
Who am I? Why am I here?

These are the existential questions that have kept me up at night since around the age of 5 . . . No, just kidding. I’m taking the Blogging 101 course and this is my first assignment!
My Jedi Light Saber

A couple of years ago, a friend suggested I take a daily written inventory – a grown up diary, if you will. At the time, I felt overwhelmed with my life and, come to see it now, I was not very happy from day to day even though I had everything I’d ever wanted. One […]