When I started reading THERE THERE by Tommy Orange, I thought it was a collection of short stories. And then after about 50 pages, I realized it isn't a collection of shorts, it's one cohesive novel ... where seemingly unrelated stories and characters intersect, interrelate, inter-tangle. The older I get, the more I realize that everything is connected. I realize that a person from this interaction is related to a person from that interaction and that this word affects that word, and this treatment affects that treatment.  There is righteous rage in this book. The kind of rage I felt a...

I almost gave up on this book (FLORIDA by Lauren Groff)... a collection of eleven short stories. After the first 67 pages, I had downed the first three short stories and felt like I was in a senseless storm ... up, down, here, there, wind, dirt, sweat ... and for what? I said to myself: "My time is more precious than to use it up in a nonsensical storm." I put the book away and started another, which I rarely do. Without a clear explanation as to why, I put FLORIDA back into my hold and read the next short ... The Midnight...

I’ve been starting most days this year by writing letters to people. With a fountain pen and actual paper. (So old-fashioned that it feels refreshingly modern, right?!) This morning’s letter was to say thank you to my friend for making and giving me this lovely ID-bracelet-inspired bracelet that contains one of my roller skating personas on it: #clarityclause. It sparked a beautiful memory of a 1975 evening when my family had been in America for just a year. It was hot Friday night. It was spelling test night. My dad had made it a practice to give my brothers (Jim and Jinil)...

There's a passage in a book by Donna Tartt titled The Secret Society where a professor character references one of Aristotle's writings: Poetics. In it, Aristotle says that certain objects/subjects are painful (or unsettling) to view in themselves, but can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art. I think this explains how an actual photo of an actual woman without clothes needs to be censored with pixelation or a graphic line to cover nipples and other body parts, lest the photo become banished from social media ... but once that subject/body parts are referenced for a painting or a sketch, no...

I could tell you that the night is young and that we are still out on the town celebrating New Year's Eve as I take a quick bathroom break to post this photo. Or I could tell you that we WERE out earlier but that we've been back home for a while now, all cozy in sweats and watching movies. How could you tell which version of the story is true? After all, narrators have the ability to exaggerate, understate, obfuscate. Narrators are so very unreliable. That's one of the points of the movie that I just watched titled Life Itself. That narrators are unreliable....