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Publishing and Catastrophizing
I was lying in bed the other night, doing the thing I do best when I should be sleeping: catastrophizing. Actually, I was getting a lecture from my inner critic. She’s tall, blonde, and attractive in that way that automatically qualifies someone to be a meteorologist on a morning show. She taps long, fake, blingy nails on a phone better than mine, guzzles Red Bull, calls kale smoothies “meals,” and has never had a thought she didn’t share. She wears jeans bedazzled with judgments too cruel to make it into a burn book, and the back pockets are stuffed with internalized misogyny. Worst of all, she can initiate a Zoom…
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Low Altitude Turbulence
Yesterday, I ran an errand on my lunch break. I walked out of a store in Sugarhouse (a neighborhood here in Salt Lake City) and stopped short. Right in front of the sliding glass doors of the Nordstrom Rack, the chassis of a Honda Pilot was balanced on a large boulder with three of the SUV’s wheels off the ground. I stared at it for a beat, trying to understand what I was looking at. I must have just missed the cool stunt, because I could hear the man in the driver’s seat (way up in the air!) talking to roadside assistance. Because, for real. No getting out of that…
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The Dryer Story
Two winters ago, I went on an overnight hot springs trip with a group of women I’ve known and loved for decades. We stayed in an Airbnb, played Cards Against Humanity, laughed until our stomachs hurt, and ate this amazing Kahlúa cake that one of those women is famous for. In the past, we would have been drinking wine, but since I quit drinking, these ladies don’t drink in front of me. I keep telling them they don’t have to do that anymore, but they do. It’s one of the many beautiful and kind ways they have shown up for me over my life. They did, however, eat some pot…
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Riding it Out
Last week was rough. By Thursday, 6pm, I was in a crisp white hotel bed eating nachos I ordered from the bar, trying to cry without actually crying. My eyes stung. My nerves had split ends. My heart was overwrought and had that hot and heavy feeling, like a partially burned baked potato with a knife in the middle and butter bleeding out. The nachos were amazing – the best I can remember – but did nothing to fill the void. I checked the clock. Fifteen more hours before my flight home. I reached for another cheesy chip with my thumb and index finger, which were caked in guac and…
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The Bittersweet Flights of Onkel Wackelflügel
Gail ‘Hal’ Halvorsen, born in Salt Lake City in 1920, grew up on small farms in rural Utah and Idaho. He worked hard, went to church, and dreamed of learning to fly. In 1941, he earned his private pilot’s license and joined the Civil Air Patrol. In December of that year, Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan and the U.S. declared war. In 1942, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces, received military flight training, and was sent to fly supply missions in the South Atlantic. In 1948, after the war, he was stationed in Germany, flying C-54 cargo planes into West Berlin as part of the U.S. effort to…
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Coming Back to the (Web)Page
I haven’t written here in months. Not because I ran out of things to say, but because I’ve lost my courage to share myself here. Someone close to me called my writing cowardly, self-serving, and indulgent. They accused me of plundering for attention, and of using others’ pain to feed my own self-importance. It stung so bitterly because it lanced something I already knew about myself. There’s a certain ego required to write about yourself and believe other people will find it worth reading. Is it indulgent? Is it a cry for attention? A ploy to collect the little dopamine hits that come in the form of likes and comments?…
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My Year in Projects
I think I may have writer’s block. I got discouraged by some unsolicited feedback over the summer, and I am really struggling to shrug it off. I know that is part of it. Being in grad school and writing papers that take a lot of time but don’t leave much scope for creativity doesn’t help, either. But it is bugging me that the comments I got about my writing are still bugging me, four + months later. I am 47 years old. Why do I still allow other people to control the way I see myself? When will I finally grow some tougher skin that can rebuff the shit that…
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Pots Fired!
Before I get to the pottery, I’ve got an unrelated but quick Murphy story. We were hiking in Canada a few weeks ago and Murph was having a blast. There weren’t any other people on the trail so I let him off leash to explore a bit. That actually slowed me down because I had him on my running leash which goes around my waist and he was pulling me up the trail. Also I stopped a few times to take photos of the wild flowers. I am an always trailing on hikes because I’m so much shorter than Matt and because Ethan has his 12-year-old energy driving him. This…
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Stepping
Last Sunday was Stepmother’s Day. Every year, Stepmother’s Day is the Sunday after Mother’s Day. I’m not sure if Hallmark knows this. If so, I haven’t seen much effort to capitalize on it through cards or similar merchandise. If that seems like an oversight, I’m not too worried about it. We don’t even have a Stepfather’s Day (though there is a National Stepfamily Day, which is September 16th). I think most people, if they have stepparents in their lives, are content to send multiple cards on the big parent day holidays, which makes perfect sense. In my little family, we have “Rachel Day” on some weekend around Mother’s Day. Ethan’s…
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Uneceptional
My husband, Matt, entrusted me with a deeply personal secret that I am now sharing on the internet. (Never marry a writer, my little possums. That’s my best advice.) I knew that when he was a kid, maybe through high school, he fantasized about being a professional athlete. He figured out by the end of senior year (especially once his best friend started getting courted by universities for their football teams – and he was not) that wasn’t very realistic and let it go. What I didn’t know was that he secretly dreamt of being a rock star in a band. When he went away to college, he got a…