It’s Hard Work Being So Fabulous

It’s Hard Work Being So Fabulous

It’s hard work being so fabulous. No, I mean it. It’s exhausting. I know that’s a whopper of a first line, and while I am being somewhat tongue in cheek, I’m serious. I’m a hard working animal – I effort – I muscle into everything. I mean to be a good friend, a good teacher, worker, mother, writer, athlete – you name it – I want to be good at it. Actually, I want to be better than good; I want to be the best; phenomenal, extraordinary, outta sight, a hard act to follow. If this were a scratch and sniff you could smell the sweat, you could hear the grunt, and you’d definitely feel the exhaustion. You might even be able to sniff out the sadness – something I’m only starting to recognize. I come by all of this honestly. When I was a kid I learned how to function whether I was feeling functional or not. Our father woke us early on weekend mornings insisting that we get up and get something done. I had no idea what needed to be done at 10-years-old, but it was on us to figure it out – to get busy doing something, less we appeared to be slacking. “Get going,” he would instruct, as he poked his head into our room. I learned how to buck up, to get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other and heave the hell ho. A favorite word in our family was “hustle,” which was the way you got things done. You also didn’t want to be accused of being...
This is How it Starts

This is How it Starts

So while it took me 24 hours to physically get home from Bali – to fly from Denpasar International Airport to Hong Kong, and then on to San Francisco – it only took me about 10 minutes in the car the next day to become some wild eyed impatient bitch who was half an inch from leaning on her horn because some dude in front of her wouldn’t turn right at the red even though he COULD HAVE.

“Oh my god,” I thought, slowly pulling my hand back from the wheel, “so this is how it starts.”

For Want of Slow

For Want of Slow

For Want of Slow is a piece of writing my friend and Wild Writing student, Lori Saltzman wrote in class last week. I asked her if I could share it here.

 

What I need you to know is

I feel like a temporary survivor of a fatal epidemic

Like walking the set of a horror movie

One of those deadly plague films

where everyone acts as if everything is normal

Suddenly there’s a look in their eye, a subtle change in the tempo of speech

The Parting of the Veils

The Parting of the Veils

I keep wanting to text my younger brother Wally, who is recovering from surgery in Los Angeles. I keep wanting to ask him, “What’s it like now?” to find out if he’s still standing in the light that shone when the veils parted two weeks ago, when a football sized tumor…

The Doggy Dog Truth

The Doggy Dog Truth

Here’s the doggy dog truth. It’s Thursday night and for practically a whole week, when I haven’t been teaching – which I do every morning – or going to the gym for a run, I’ve been sitting in this chair in my living room trying to write a piece on family, which someone has asked me to write. I’ve come at it from every angle, trying to find a way in, a great first line or an anecdote. I thought I had it at one point, but two smart writer friends sent me back to the drawing board. It’s due in a couple of days and I can’t say that I’ve gotten any closer to moving into the heart of the piece