Have you ever opened a book and just known it was the one you need to read, right this very minute? That happened to me with three books this past week. I pulled them out of the living room bookcase in the house where I was cat-sitting for the week, and I got permission from the owner to take them with me when I returned home yesterday morning.

I had mixed feelings about living alone at first. I've never actually spent a whole day - much less four - with a house to myself, able to...

Because it's 3 a.m., and my homework is done, and I'm just waiting to fall asleep, I wrote the poem that sprouted in my head during my shower. Here it is, fresh off the press and unedited:


Still Life

Bigger people got there first,
Painting colors they liked best,
Splashing blobs from their own mess.

When I held my brush at last,
Several layers had been laid:
Yellow, green, and angry red.

Frantic, I despaired;...

"You need to cut yourself some slack." Flyngirl, your comment was more profound than you give yourself credit for. Over the last few days, I've been realizing the truth in your words.

I'm at a very strange place in my life. On the one hand, I feel like I'm making progress. I've had "flashes of insight," understanding truths and concepts I never had before. On the other hand, a lot of these insights involve areas of weakness on my part. The most vivid was an incident...

It's been a week and a day since I passed my kidney stone. My body is returning to normal, although there are still some differences I don't fully understand the cause of, and I don't know how long they might last. Not all bad ones either. But physical symptoms aside, during my time of incapacitation, I dug myself further into a psychological hole which I've just realized the need to work my way back out of.

On Thursday night, I found myself staring at the material for a five-minute...

Today, in a moment of self-consciousness (well, not just a moment, but a moment of more than usual - but that's not strictly true either... ) I checked the other 25 blogs on this forum and confirmed that I now have more entries than any of them. I could decide to be embarrassed by my excessive outpouring of thoughts and swear off blogging altogether, or at least limit my number of posts to once a month or something. But considering I've already broken the record, what's it going to hurt to break...