Thoughts and Readings on Being in a Healthy Relationship
It wasn’t supposed to play out this way. I stayed in last night so that I could go to bed early, wake up early, and be productive: read, write, run, a little bit of work, a little bit of job searching.
Then I looked her up.
They say when you don’t know where to begin, start with a clear and simple statement of fact. Of course…
Every once in a while, the fishhook of longing will catch me by surprise and yank me gasping towards the surface of some distant memory. The feeling is a little hard to describe. It’s a mix between envisioning some version of the future that I’d like to see come to pass and remembering some version…
Some days, I’m just grumpy, at odds with the world, and probably heading in the wrong direction. Wednesday was one of those days. I was fine earlier in the day, but then two things happened that sent my grump-ometer into the danger zone. First, I read an article in The Guardian about how single women…
At the corner of Fillmore and Pixley, just a few blocks from my apartment and along the route of my evening walks, is a building that was recently painted bright red with white lettering advertising a new dating app call Known. In the traditional click-bait style of tech-based hype and obfuscation, the building converted to…
Today is Valentine’s Day, again. My friends who work in the restaurant industry are working longer hours today – special dishes and menus, overbooked reservations, and covering shifts for people who want to celebrate. Yesterday, as I walked to the grocery store to get a bottle of wine to go with my solo dinner, I…
Monday morning. After a fitful night of sleep in which I dreamed about being given two abandoned, tamed, and not yet fully grown lions to care for and trying to get someone from animal control to help… a night in which I woke in a tangle of sheets and quilt, I had a quick breakfast…
Not long ago I had a falling out with a friend. The falling out had been a while in the making. I think it started in early August when a woman he might have, kinda, sorta liked asked me to walk her home. He felt snubbed and sent some drunk angry texts to me: “Fuck…
I have a lot of… regrets isn’t quite the word I’m looking for, but it’ll have to do… a lot of regrets about the fact that my last big relationship didn’t work out – which, jeez, was almost six years ago (or as one online calculator tells me 2,156 days, but who’s counting). It’s not…
Saturday It’s mid morning and I have little to show for it. Worse yet, I don’t have a plan for the day. Still tired from a late night (concert followed by the bar), I woke a little before 8am to the sound of the foghorn. After breakfast, I moved to the sofa where I’ve been…
It was while reading a poem that begins with drinking white wine from jade cups in Szechuan China that I tried to imagine different lives, more exotic lives, lives I haven’t lived, lives I may never live. I started to write my own version of it – late-night dinner parties with interesting friends; stars and…
On my Saturday walk home from the food pantry where I do some work, I made the spur of the moment decision to turn right off of Haight St. and climb the steep hill into Buena Vista Park. Despite having walked past the park dozens of times, I had never ventured in. Not surprisingly, with…
I started talking with Joe because I overheard him debating with the tr*mper sitting between us. When the tr*mper left, I leaned over and said, “you’re not wrong, this is some scary nazi shit that’s going on.” Joe seemed like a nice enough guy, and at least we agreed on politics. Joe is from Canada…