They say artists spend their whole lives repeating themselves. Composers do. Painters do. Writers do. But I think in a sense we are all artists. We all see the world from a different vantage point, some from the eagle's nest, some from the top of the anthill, some riding the river on a log like an adventurous raccoon (or maybe even having the time of our lives digging through what someone else considers garbage). Each of us sees life from a different angle, and therefore we see a limited part of...

Have you ever opened a book and just known it was the one you need to read, right this very minute? That happened to me with three books this past week. I pulled them out of the living room bookcase in the house where I was cat-sitting for the week, and I got permission from the owner to take them with me when I returned home yesterday morning.

I had mixed feelings about living alone at first. I've never actually spent a whole day - much less four - with a house to myself, able to...

Because it's 3 a.m., and my homework is done, and I'm just waiting to fall asleep, I wrote the poem that sprouted in my head during my shower. Here it is, fresh off the press and unedited:


Still Life

Bigger people got there first,
Painting colors they liked best,
Splashing blobs from their own mess.

When I held my brush at last,
Several layers had been laid:
Yellow, green, and angry red.

Frantic, I despaired;...

We're having minor issues with the site - you may have experienced them - that come with upgrades to the servers and old code on our pages. I've made some corrections and fixed what broken code I've learned to recognize, but it's not done yet.

So this blog post can be ignored, since I'm using it for testing purposes. OK? Ok...

"You need to cut yourself some slack." Flyngirl, your comment was more profound than you give yourself credit for. Over the last few days, I've been realizing the truth in your words.

I'm at a very strange place in my life. On the one hand, I feel like I'm making progress. I've had "flashes of insight," understanding truths and concepts I never had before. On the other hand, a lot of these insights involve areas of weakness on my part. The most vivid was an incident...