Every once in a while, I get advice that amounts to: "Go deeper into your own weirdness." A lot of this came up when I was teaching. Teaching can be a highly ego-driven activity. The teacher is the center of attention and the center of power. The teacher is the person...

Who you are is what you do. Or it isn’t. I’ve wondered about this for a long time. I used to feel sadness about people I knew who had started out wanting to do one thing with their lives and ended up not doing it but doing something else. Were they different people?...

When someone dies, we tell a lot of stories. We tell stories about our encounters with the dead person, the jokes they told, the way they saw the world. These stories help us hold on to our memories and keep the person alive. We also tell stories about what they would...

My friend and former student Mark Chambers died on 4/20/15 at 4:20pm. He was 61 and had been living with ALS for three years. One summer day fourteen years ago, he photographed me as I shaved my head and got a henna tattoo. He also took one of the best portraits of my...

From 1993 to 2009, I taught English at community colleges in the Puget Sound region. Once in a while I run into or communicate with a former student, though I would really only say I made friends with one or two of them. Mark Chambers took my poetry workshop twice....

As a copywriter, I have as much a need as any online entrepreneur to create vivid, engaging language that communicates the value of what I do to a public eager to buy my services. As an expert, it can be difficult to ask for help from another writer. If I were a...

48 days in a row. Today makes it 49. Had I been on top of the calendar, I might have celebrated the halfway point. Or numbered each post. All I really have in mind is my start date (March 11) and my end date (June 8). What do I know now that I didn't know before? In...

If I'm going to be a drinker, I'm going to have to be a binge drinker, because I like to feel inebriated as well as take in delicious flavors and I'm trying to maintain my womanish figure despite the negative connotations to "womanish" you'll find in the dictionary....

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Captain Picard gets a headache, and though he pooh-poohs it — "It's just a headache" — Dr. Crusher points out what he should probably know, regardless of his lack of medical training: by this point in...

Pants are funny. Shirts are not funny. Noses are funny. So are ears. Mouths and eyes are not funny. Toes are funnier than fingers, as feet are funnier than hands. Smell is funny, taste can be funny, but sight, sound and touch are not funny. Falling is funny, throwing...