life: in progress

Enter sadness.  There are some days when I just feel the heaviness of the world. I feel in my body and soul that things are not how they should be. It seems like violence, need, hunger, and longing overwhelm all of the good. A few weeks ago, after what seemed like day after day of bad news, I sat down to try to process in words what I was feeling. It started off, "I'm not even sure what words I need to write today. I just feel a heaviness about the world. So much political noise with the midterm elections and awful words on Twitter, another mass shooting, huge wildfires in California, senseless tragic deaths, sick kids, the man downstairs shouting." As my stream of consciousness developed, I moved into the questioning phase. How do people become so violent and mean? So lost or abandoned or lonely or hateful that they kill others? (As an aside: This question led me to google which other species kill their own kind, admittedly a somewhat depressing but worthwhile bit o...

  maybe your life will work. most likely it won't at first. but that will give you poetry.  // Yrsa Daley-Ward // I made it about 200 meters out of my parents driveway when my RAV4 stalled and cut out. I was planning to leave an hour later on a 4,000 mile journey from Maryland to Washington state, so you could say that the timing for a breakdown--of either my car or my mental state--was not ideal. I used my calm-but-panicked voice and called my dad for help. We got the car started and back in the driveway, and thankfully, the whole episode turned out to be a weird side effect of my disconnecting the battery the night before while attempting (unsuccessfully) to install a new radio. That's a story for another time but the lesson I learned is don't overreact and also just pay professionals to do the things you don't know how to do. When I finally got on the road a few hours later, it was just in time for DC rush hour combined with a steady summer rain and I could...