Cameron said the other day that she’s feeling a little bit low on perspective right now. First of all: Me, too, Cameron. Me, too. Secondly: For perspective, I recommend the sky. It’s always there, there’s often something happening in it, and the thing that is happening almost never relates to an election. Here are some […]
There are a lot of things that are terrible about 2020, and if I try to think about all of them at once, or even to pick an important one to write about, my head will explode. So today I am picking the least important one: Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes have always loved me. I’m just one […]
On Saturday, I met up with two friends and made art. Now, in this era, “met up with” means “on Zoom.” But “made art” means “made art.” And it’s art that wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. The two friends are Joanna and Harshita, two of my oldest friends. We’ve known each other since we […]
It was an unusual scene, last Tuesday night in a suburb of Washington, D.C. My mom and I were in lawn chairs on the edge of a closed road. My dad was wandering around with his camera on a tripod. A friend sat 10 feet farther down the road in her lawn chair. Strangers came […]
To be fair, the blue jay did warn me. I was walking across a green space near my apartment building, bounded by streets and a transit station and criss-crossed by concrete paths and surrounded by roads. A recent mow–the first in months–had left it looking like a hay field. A hay field with a lot […]
A big black bird was perched up on the corner of a house, one of the nice, big old houses in my neighborhood. “Nice,” “big,” and “old” is about as precise as I can get on architecture. But I can nail down that bird. It was an American crow. It called, a single caw! Its […]
I’ve lived in my apartment for more than 12 years. In early April, I realized for the first time that there are wisteria in the back parking lot. I suppose this is because I only caught onto wisteria, as an event, in April of 2019. I was in Kumamoto Prefecture in southwestern Japan. A friend […]
From my apartment most of the view is a small parking lot, a few stories below me, lined by vines and a few weedy trees. The last few weeks, a mockingbird has been loudly claiming this as his territory. On and on and on, a few phrases of a song he’s learned, then to the […]