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Arriving in Zana, I was approaching full circle. The imaginary meeting at a place she had been, and still wore her sweatshirt from stopping at the coffee shop there while on a road trip, at approximately the time of my first coastal visit in my new state, more than a decade prior. Maybe we had…
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Sometimes a memory surfaces of an experience I had while backpacking through Europe, at age 19. I carried the same heavy Mountainsmith 65 liter backpack I’d used to climb Mt. Rainier and lead backpacking trips at a summer camp in the Colorado Rockies, and the same attitude of exploration and desire for new vistas, carrying…
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I recently had a disappointing experience where I got some disturbing clarity about a number of things. It’s painful to realize that others have used you and your private expression over a number of years in order to support their own psychodrama, casting you, baselessly, as a perpetual villain while they get to take turns…
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Some life points are more pivotal, more decisive than others. Things build over time, a culmination of moments, hours, days, weeks, months. Sometimes things can brew. Sometimes fragile things grow. Sometimes there are thin spots, where every moment feels intimate, fleeting, leaving one in gratitude. Moments that only happen because of a drooping openness, a…
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The first time I had ankle surgery, it was on accident. I had had no choice but to trust the medical personnel taking care of me, at a point when my trust in institutions and helping people in general was pretty low. I was really lucky to land in excellent, compassionate hands with my surgeon.…
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Last month, for the first time since February 2020, I boarded an airplane. The Delta variant had just started to kick up, but my backpacking friend and I took every possible precaution. We had booked campsites in advance as well as kayaking and boating expeditions. We used a rideshare app called Turo to book automobiles…
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Though I’m doing other things with my life, I still sometimes have the sensation that my academic career plows onwards, like a ghost ship raided and abandoned by pirates. It’s a disembodied feeling, sort of like there’s a whole part of my body still on that boat, spinning the wheel and hoisting a sail, that…
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Sometimes one rolls all the way back down the mountain in a snowball of old junk, into old realities which block out the new and sabotage hopes of renewed peace. What I’ve had to acknowledge is that through some of my experiences, my brain changed and I have to be continually mindful to manage it…
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The above image chronicles the last time I played chess with my dad. I was almost 9 the day that I beat him. He snapped a polaroid, bragged about it to others, and never played with me again. Eventually I found other people to play with, one friend who was a boy, and mostly boys…
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I’ve attended several virtual events this past year, and some have stuck with more more than others – those that have inspired me, or, alternatively, provoked me in uncomfortable ways that have continued to bother me or simply make me want to gag; as they say, if you see something, say something. So I am…
