Tagged: puttingwordstogether

It’s been raining most of the day. On and off, harder and softer as if it can’t make up its mind or its intensity, but it doesn’t stop for long. In the street the raindrops make small white circles for a split second as they smack into the asphalt. It’s like watching an animation: vertical white streaks, then small sudden circles. The street is shiny and black except where the rain lands. Sometimes it rains so hard it bounces, even off the grass—the impact makes a mist rise and hover off the ground. On the back deck, which is slick...

A whole week goes by, not even in a flash, and I think about writing but I don’t. I read a book, and then another, and I nap, or play a computer game or clean or run errands. I cleaned the fish tank and bought fish. I picked up the kids from the swimming pool. I bought new late-summer flowers for the pots and dead-headed the baby roses. I even went for a couple of walks and I updated my books-to-buy list and my library inventory and I talked to my mom and wrote emails and went to sushi night,...

Do you think that what you have to say is less important because it’s on the Internet? Would it have more value, ring truer, be BETTER if it were between the covers of a book, printed on newspaper, glossy in a quarterly? Would it be more impressive, or more importantly, carry more weight? My words fly out into the ether here, roll around on the front page of this journal for a couple of days and then are scrolled under. Soon they’re a click away, then two clicks away, then three klicks and suddenly we’re talking the distance of kilometers—gone....

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”—Jessica Hische A type artist & graphic designer whose work I admire was featured on Humble Pied recently. It’s a website that highlights advice—one piece of advice—from one inspiring person every few days. What a neat idea! Sometimes out of all the blah blah blah that constantly passes through your receptors, it’s that one sudden striking of a clapper inside the bell of your brain that stands out and makes you sit up and pay attention. It arrests you, snaps...

What if we had never met? What would your life be like? Some of you might argue that, in fact, we never HAVE met, and some of you have only met me once or twice in person, but maybe the meeting of the minds that passes for frequent contact here is enough. Maybe it counts! For all the friends I’ve never met, and the ones I’ve only met a couple of times and all the ones that used to live nearby and whom I never now see, it must count for something, right? What if you’d never come to that...

Mia gave me a good dose of motivation the other day. She is trying to list three delights every day. This reminds me of the reason why the blog One Good Thing was baptized thusly. Even in the worst day, there is always at least one good thing. Most days, there are many. And too many days, we ignore them. Maybe we notice them, but we let the bad things take precedence. We push aside the things that matter for the things that also matter, and that often take priority. No matter what there will alway be both, so maybe...

Do you always remember a face? Even if you say you never remember names, I bet you remember faces. We have such an amazing ability to scan incredible amounts of faces and register them as known or unknown in the blink of a synapse. I read an interesting blog entry today by the artist James Gurney, written some time ago, that talked about this and it got me thinking. You get off a plane and as you come out into the arrivals hall, you are already scanning for the person who is meeting you. Your glance skims over dozens of...