My father is incredibly good at taking care of things.

He maintains his home, clothing, musical instruments, vehicles, and personal effects to like-new condition. He never lets the lawn get out of control, and he repaints the house on a regular schedule.

I wish I had my father’s thoughtful fastidiousness and mise en place, but it is not my natural state. Whereas he has a daily routine of thorough vaccuuming and lovingly polishing the range with Bar Keepers Friend, my usual cycle is to spend days making giant messes and then hours cleaning them up.

Read More

I realized that I’ve been having a quiet, months-long temper tantrum.

The last time I tried to knit something, I couldn’t get my gauge to come out right. That means that my stitches were too big for the pattern I was knitting, so anything I tried to knit would end up being too big.

I went down a needle size to see if my stitches would be small enough; same problem. I went down another needle size, and another—same problem. A problem I hadn’t really encountered in two years of obsessive knitting. So I put the project away, and nine months later I still haven’t knit anything.

Read More

I deeply miss teaching school.

For years, I showed up every morning to The Little Middle School, just like a real job with a boss. In effect, I had hired myself to work directly with the students, instructing them in math and science and writing and history and laughing at their hijinks. It was challenging, rewarding, frustrating, interesting, and fun.

I didn’t quit because I didn’t love it. I quit because I had other things I wanted to do. Now, I’m a thousand miles away while school goes on without me. I have had to let go, and that’s been challenging and rewarding, too.

Read More

Being Gen X is funny. There are so few of us.

I grew up on Baby Boomer culture—the music, the TV ads, the general worldview—and now find my life dominated by the culture of Millennials (no thanks, Mark Zuckerberg, for Facebook) and Gen Z. The rules are changing fast, and my generation is not the one that is changing them.

It’s fascinating to watch top athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles (both Gen Z) decide to do what they want instead of what’s expected of them.

Read More

“I don’t really feel like I have much left to say.”

That’s what I said to myself in an audio journal about six weeks into my daily blogging experiment.

It might have actually been true at the time. I hadn’t yet trained my brain to come up with new ideas every day, so I was still documenting ideas I’d already thought of. I was working through a backlog of stuff I wanted to talk about, and I was, indeed, coming to the end of it.

Read More