I find it much easier to write in the form of a personal journal than I do in a formal essay or fiction piece. In a journal, I am less concerned about being right, or saying things in the correct way, than I am with the simple act of describing my thoughts and experiences using… Continue reading

I am stumbling and destroying myself. I always have lived my life this way, but lately, with both my heart and my guts, I have reeled at the dizziness, disorientation, and nausea with sickening immediacy. I fear I am losing my mind to it. I saw, on a rainy day, the first tenuous blooms of… Continue reading

About 6 months ago, I finally read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I could write a series of separate essays analyzing its themes, but here I will focus on the motif I found most singularly resonant: the image of a cramped and squalid room. Raskolnikov spends much of the novel in his tiny apartment,… Continue reading

I hate it when it gets cold. I do not say this because I’m from Southern California, where cold weather is spoken about like a foreign war. I went to college in Utah and now live in Washington, and while I feel great nostalgia for the smokey scent of the chapparal and sagebrush in the… Continue reading